{"id":150230,"date":"2021-01-07T10:29:01","date_gmt":"2021-01-07T15:29:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=150230"},"modified":"2021-01-07T12:32:33","modified_gmt":"2021-01-07T17:32:33","slug":"re-covered-bette-howland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/01\/07\/re-covered-bette-howland\/","title":{"rendered":"Re-Covered: Bette Howland"},"content":{"rendered":"

In her column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn\u2019t be.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When I began writing this column two years ago, I initially restricted myself to discussing only titles that were out of print. But over the past year, as publishers continue to increase their efforts to resurrect lost classics, I\u2019ve begun including pieces about previously neglected books that have been rediscovered and repackaged for a new generation. There are many success stories: the unexpected triumph of the Vintage Classics edition of John Williams\u2019s Stoner<\/em>, a book that sold less than two thousand copies when it was first published in 1965 before falling swiftly out of print, but as a reprint went on to become the Waterstones Book of the Year in 2013; or Lucia Berlin\u2019s unforeseen posthumous literary stardom in 2015 after her selected short stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women <\/em>(edited by Stephen Emerson for Farrar, Straus and Giroux), became a New York Times <\/em>best seller. But there\u2019s no more interesting tale of neglect and rediscovery than that of Bette Howland.<\/p>\n

Howland was a working-class Jewish writer from Chicago who in a single prolific decade published three books\u2014a memoir, W-3 <\/em>(1974), and two short-story collections Blue in Chicago <\/em>(1978) and Things to Come and Go: Three Stories <\/em>(1983)\u2014and won both Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, then all but disappeared from view. She resurfaced briefly, sixteen years later, in 1999, with the publication of what would be her final work, the novella-length story \u201cCalm Sea and Prosperous Voyage\u201d in TriQuarterly<\/em>, but it garnered scant attention. If it hadn\u2019t been for an editor\u2019s fortuitous discovery in a secondhand bookshop shortly before Howland died in 2017, at the age of eighty, hardly anyone would have been familiar with her name, or her incredible work.<\/p>\n

In 2015, only two years before Howland\u2019s death, Brigid Hughes, the editor and publisher of A Public Space<\/em>, found a copy of W-3 <\/em>in the $1 cart at Manhattan\u2019s Housing Works Bookstore. Swiftly realizing that she\u2019d stumbled across a forgotten but major talent, Hughes got hold of secondhand copies of Howland\u2019s other books, and then set out to track down the woman herself. \u201cThirty years after Bette Howland received a MacArthur Fellowship, her books are out of print and her whereabouts unknown,\u201d Hughes wrote later that year, introducing a portfolio of Howland\u2019s writing that she\u2019d painstakingly put together for issue no. 23 of A Public Space<\/em>. \u201cA search for her name in the public records yields little. But it does lead to a son, who holds the key to a safe-deposit box in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Inside are unpublished stories, a lost essay, and a trove of letters from a dear friend named Saul.\u201d Included in this portfolio was an excerpt from W-3<\/em>; two stories, \u201cA Visit\u201d and \u201cBlue in Chicago\u201d; the aforementioned lost essay, \u201cThe American Heroine,\u201d on Edna Pontellier, the doomed heroine of Kate Chopin\u2019s The Awakening<\/em>; letters from a forty-year correspondence with Howland\u2019s friend Saul (as in Saul Bellow), whom Howland first met in 1961 at a writer\u2019s conference on Staten Island; and an essay by Howland\u2019s son, Jacob, which ends with the searing image of his mother as she was then, suffering from MS and dementia:<\/p>\n

The carpet around her easy chair is littered with unfinished manuscripts, words struck through in her shaky hand. I read aloud to her, often from her own writing. While we can no longer discuss the meaning of her stories, this activity pleases us both.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As astonishing as all this was, it was only the beginning of Hughes\u2019s commitment to restoring Howland\u2019s rightful place in the literary canon. In early 2019, A Public Space<\/em> launched their publishing imprint with Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage<\/em>\u2014a collection that brought together the work from Blue in Chicago<\/em> and the eponymous novella-length story. (This past summer, the volume was published by Picador in the UK under the title Blue in Chicago<\/em>.) This month they\u2019re republishing the book that both launched Howland\u2019s lauded career and first captured Hughes\u2019s attention, W-3<\/em>.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Originally published in 1974, when Howland was thirty-seven, W-3 <\/em>is one hell of a debut. It takes its title not from the IRS form, but rather from the psychiatric ward at the Chicago hospital where Howland was confined following a suicide attempt in 1968. She was a thirty-one-year-old single mother of two at the time, trying to write\u2014\u201cshe labored at her typewriter day and night\u201d is how Jacob remembers his mother\u2019s endeavors\u2014while also supporting herself and her sons by working part-time as a city librarian and as an editor for the University of Chicago Press. \u201cThe neighborhood we lived in then\u2014Hyde Park, long before gentrification\u2014was chaotic and dangerous,\u201d Jacob continues. \u201cI remember standing at the window one very cold winter\u2019s day, six floors up, looking west, over miles and miles of slums, and above the rooftops, as Saul Bellow puts it, \u2018the dragging smoke which rises with difficulty in zero weather.\u2019 The memory captures for me, and perhaps for my mother as well, the indescribable, metaphysical bleakness of life in Chicago.\u201d This bleakness was mounting in Howland\u2019s life, along with her ongoing struggle to make ends meet\u2014she often threw the bills she received directly into the trash, Jacob recalls\u2014and her frustration and despair about her unmet literary aspirations. So much so that one afternoon, while staying in Bellow\u2019s apartment (he was overseas at the time), she swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills.<\/p>\n

Howland woke up in intensive care, with, as she writes in W-3<\/em>, her mother whispering \u201cYou are reborn!\u201d into her ear. A few days later Howland was transferred to a different ward, where, still deemed a potential risk to herself, private nurses kept an eye on her round the clock: \u201cHere I sipped yellow chicken broth and peed warm yellow pee into chilly bedpans\u2014an improvement over being fed through needles and drained through tubes.\u201d From there, she was then transferred to W-3.<\/p>\n

Regular readers of this column might be reminded of one of the books I wrote about last month, Tove Ditlevsen\u2019s The Faces <\/em>(1968). It, too, began with the narrator\u2019s hospitalization following a suicide attempt by overdose. I found myself thinking about other titles from the same period that draw on the author\u2019s experience of being institutionalized: Ann Quin\u2019s unfinished novel, The Unmapped Country<\/em> (which she was working on at the time of her suicide in 1973) is set in a psychiatric institution where a woman named Sandra is being treated following a breakdown; Penelope Mortimer\u2019s daring Long Distance <\/em>(1974) is a fragmentary and hallucinatory account of an unnamed female protagonist\u2019s desperate journey through an unspecified establishment that\u2019s part Yaddo (where Mortimer wrote the book), part hospital. Ditlevsen, Quin, and Mortimer all prioritize the interior experiences of their fictional alter egos. As such, one comes away from each novel with the strong sense of a protagonist imprisoned more inside her own troubled mind than within an institution.<\/p>\n

Howland takes a different approach. She provides her readers with the necessary details of her situation, but she has little interest in using the book to excavate the trauma that led her to this point. She remains acutely aware that, regardless of the specifics, hers is not a singular story\u2014\u201cHistories like mine, of long debilitating illness, vague recurrent symptoms, hospitalizations, were common enough on W-3; these things go together.\u201d Or, as she writes early in the book: \u201c[I] hated giving any account of myself. I was sick to death of the facts of my life.\u201d Instead, W-3 <\/em>is a riveting portrait of a community, that of the ward and its inhabitants, and a startlingly clear-eyed one at that.<\/p>\n

In it, as in Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage<\/em>, Howland\u2019s lodestars are place and character. She\u2019s a writer interested in real life\u2014\u201cthe old continuous struggle, the day-to-day hand-to-mouth existence,\u201d as she describes it in \u201cTo the Country\u201d\u2014and real people. Whether she\u2019s describing a large family party, the whimsies of a bunch of vacationers, life in a branch of the public library, or the comings and goings of a Chicago courtroom, the best pieces in Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage <\/em>offer us evocative portraits of various urban communities. Howland was clear that she\u2019d gone to \u201ca hell of a lot of trouble\u2014no one will ever know how much\u2014to work with the facts,\u201d and thus didn\u2019t want her stories reviewed as fiction.<\/p>\n

The lonely, the old, the ill, and the suffering; these are the people Howland writes about. Take the \u201ccornered creature\u201d that is a bitter, angry woman in \u201cTo the Country\u201d: \u201cA husband dead, a son killed in the war, the children too much for her, the mother disappointed\u2014a life of constant self-reproach. She was beside herself, leading a manless, unconsoled existence. The fear, the loneliness, managing alone. And of course pride.\u201d The description cuts exceedingly close to the bone. \u201cNow I was a \u2018divorc\u00e9e\u2019 with two small children. I had good reason to appreciate what that lurid word really meant,\u201d Howland confesses in W-3<\/em>. \u201cI knew that benighted condition. A dingy flat, crummy job, constant money worries. Everything you earn goes to doctors and baby-sitters. Then the baby\u2019s got a runny nose, the sitter doesn\u2019t show, you can\u2019t go to work. A life full of reproaches, self-hatred; a woman supporting a manless (unconsoled) existence, beside herself with fear, worry, managing alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just as in her shorter work, in W-3<\/em> Howland hones in on the individuals around her, with a keen eye for the link between their physical bearing and the emotional turmoil beneath the surface. Take the perfect precision of her sketch of Trudy, one of the most memorable figures on the ward, who\u2019s supposed to be in isolation, but keeps appearing, like a \u201ccuckoo,\u201d in everyone else\u2019s room: \u201cShe perambulated down the corridors lashed to her intravenous stand\u2014bandages, pajama strings loosened and streaming\u2014looking like a sort of injured parade float.\u201d But in the end, Howland always pulls back for the panoramic shot. Just as in \u201cTwenty-Sixth and California,\u201d when she explains that the courtroom about which she\u2019s writing is an environment where there\u2019s \u201csomething more powerful than individual feeling,\u201d life on W-3 is all about the community as a whole.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

One quickly comes to understand that this is the only way Howland could have written about this particular experience. It\u2019s not that she refuses to share the more intimate details of her own suffering, it\u2019s that she lives in a world\u2014both within the hospital and outside its walls\u2014in which pain is prevalent enough to make it unremarkable. Her account of looking out the window, watching her two small sons, standing side by side and holding hands, on the sidewalk far below\u2014\u201cneater and cleaner than I was used to seeing them\u201d\u2014is heartbreaking. They\u2019re too young to be allowed to visit her, so seeing them like this is her only choice. Howland\u2019s mother is taking them back to Florida until Howland is well enough to look after them again. Howland shouts down at them, and in response, they crane their little heads up toward the sound of her voice, but the building has too many windows. \u201cI knew they\u2019d never seen me,\u201d Howland writes. \u201cThey must be wondering now if they ever would. It was a terrible thing I had done to them. And I felt like a ghost.\u201d This horrifying clarity, admitted wholly without self-pity, is the captivating tone that Howland takes throughout W-3<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This is not to say that her mind is not grievously unsettled\u2014she recalls the ward\u2019s television as a source of jarring, discordant images that must, she thinks, \u201chave been a reflection of my own mental condition\u201d\u2014but any such confusion is absent in her prose. She does not dwell on what led her to this point\u2014the suicidal thoughts that she \u201cdragged \u2026 around like a weight,\u201d the inevitable prescription of sleeping pills\u2014or the struggle that still lies ahead of her. We are given the occasional flash of insight, such as in her description of the uncomfortable kinship she felt with a fellow patient named Gerda, a woman with what Howland describes as a \u201cforcefield\u201d that both attracted and repulsed her. \u201cI had good reason to be repelled by Gerda,\u201d she finally explains, in what\u2019s almost an addendum at the end of the chapter, \u201cshe was <\/em>my depression, the bottom of it\u2014crossing the deeps, the rolling dark, that still lay ahead of me.\u201d This, however, is not the story Howland\u2019s telling here. She\u2019s smart enough to know the difference between her own story and the story of the hospital. When it comes to life on W-3, there\u2019s nothing intimate or private about it. \u201cWe spent all the rest of our time being a \u2018community,\u2019 talking about the \u2018community,\u2019 conceding its claims,\u201d Howland explains, one-to-one therapy sessions regularly being in short supply. \u201cWhen would we get a chance to talk about ourselves? To be ourselves? Whoever that might be?\u201d<\/p>\n

Much of the power and poignancy of W-3<\/em> lies in its contradictions. It offers us a portal to a particular time and place, yet the compassion and truthfulness that underlies the writing renders it timeless, as urgent a read now as when it was first written nearly half a century ago. It\u2019s all the more important a book because of what it meant to Howland herself. In this, it reminds me of Penelope Fitzgerald\u2019s wonderful Booker Prize\u2013winning novel, Offshore <\/em>(1979), about a bunch of bedraggled misfits living on houseboats on London\u2019s Battersea Reach in the sixties. The inspiration was Fitzgerald\u2019s own experience of living on an aging wooden barge named Grace<\/em>, during one of the very lowest points in a life full of trials and tribulations, a period that drew to a close when Grace <\/em>sank, leaving the already struggling Fitzgerald and her family homeless and bereft of their worldly possessions. Offshore<\/em>, as Fitzgerald\u2019s biographer Hermione Lee puts it, was \u201csalvaged from personal anguish.\u201d Fitzgerald turned an experience that would have been the breaking of most of us into one of the greatest artistic achievements of her life, and with W-3<\/em>, Howland does the same. As Hughes so movingly explains: \u201cThe book itself would be [Howland\u2019s] salvation: she wrote herself out of the grave.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read earlier installments of Re-Covered here<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Lucy Scholes is a critic who lives in London. She writes for the\u00a0<\/em>NYR Daily,<\/em>\u00a0the<\/em> Financial Times,<\/em>\u00a0The New York Times Book Review,\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>LitHub, among other publications.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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