With Maceo, 1972. All photographs courtesy of Fanny HoweFanny Howe was born in 1940 in Buffalo, New York, and grew up in a family of intellectuals in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the middle child of three girls. Her mother was the Irish playwright and novelist Mary Manning, who founded the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge and was a friend of Samuel Beckett and Edward Gorey; her father, Mark DeWolfe Howe, was a legal historian and Harvard professor descended from the Quincy family—an anchor of the Boston Brahmin class—who wrote the official biography of the Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and was an open critic of McCarthyism. In The Winter Sun, her 2009 work of autobiography, Howe describes a childhood torn between the force fields of her two parents. Her elder sister, Susan Howe, is another giant of American poetry. Her younger sister, Helen Howe Braider, is a sculptor and painter.
Howe’s immense body of work—twenty-five books of poetry, twelve novels, two pulp romances, three books of essays, two collections of short stories, one book of prose rearranged from books past, six works of young adult fiction, and six short film —is infused with an awareness of the underdog, and a sort of existential wildness. “Bewilderment,” she writes in The Wedding Dress (2003), is both “a poetics and a politics”: “I have developed this idea from living in the world and also through testing it out in my poems and through the characters in my fiction—women and children, and even the occasional man, who rushed backwards and forwards within an irreconcilable set of imperatives.” Unlike many of her contemporaries, she does not see herself as belonging to a movement or group, and perhaps has more in common with a lineage of mystical writers and theologians, including her recurring subjects of Simone Weil and the existentialist philosophers. She has written movingly about her conversion to Catholicism and her relationship to the faith in books of poems like Gone (2003) and Love and I (2019); God’s Fool, a play about Saint Francis conceived by Martha Clarke, was produced in 2022.
Howe’s first book of poems, Eggs, was published in 1970, when she was living in Boston with her second husband, the Black and Mexican writer and editor Carl Senna. Poem from a Single Pallet (1980) and Robeson Street (1985) were written in the aftermath of their separation, as she was raising their three children, Lucien, Danzy, and Maceo. “Because it was finished, I was able to write about it,” she told me. She has lived for most of her life in and around Boston, where she taught at colleges for many years before moving to San Diego in 1989, for a tenured position that kept her in California for a decade. For years, it was only smaller presses that would publish her experimental work, and she has often stuck with them even as her renown has grown. Her Selected Poems (2000), published by the University of California Press, was a touchstone in bringing her work to a wider public. In the past several years, she has garnered particular attention for the five novels collected by Nightboat in the volume Radical Love (2006, reissued 2020)—The Deep North (1988), Famous Questions (1989), Saving History (1993), Nod (1998), and Indivisible (2000)—a loose sequence set between Massachusetts, California, and Ireland that she has called the closest thing to her complete biography. “I was a mother writing them, though I was still a child,” Howe told me. “You can’t be one or the other. You’re both.”
Howe has a sparrowlike figure and a blue peregrine stare. We met for this interview every few weeks over the course of several months from fall to spring, as she was moving out of her garden-level apartment in Cambridge into an assisted living facility just down the road. I would arrive midmorning, bearing scones and coffee with extra sugar cubes wrapped in napkins, and we’d talk each time for an hour or so. Our conversations circled family, motherhood, failure, race, and faith. After we were done recording, we’d gossip about the poetry scene and the succession of Pope Francis.
INTERVIEWER
Can you identify a moment when you felt your poetics crystallize?
FANNY HOWE
I would say O’Clock (1995) was that. I wrote it in Ireland at a place called Annaghmakerrig, a great writers’ and artists’ retreat.
INTERVIEWER
Have residencies always been useful?
HOWE
Generally, I wouldn’t want to be trapped with other writers, ever. All that conversation around publishers and money and where they hope to get hired ruins everything. But at Annaghmakerrig I just sealed myself off except to walk to the pub with everyone in the evening. It was complete solitude, and an actual attempt to write, for the first time, with the environment.
At right, with Susan and her mother, ca. 1941.
INTERVIEWER
With the environment?
HOWE
Instead of sitting and looking out of the window, I just sank into the weather and the trees, dancing around in the environment of Ireland, which I know by its smell. If you dropped me there blind, I would know I was in Ireland. The fuchsia, all the things that grow of their own accord there, became my company, which has been more difficult in America. In a general sense, the American person feels solitary and broken off from the landscape—like in those wonderful paintings.
INTERVIEWER
Which ones?
HOWE
By the painters of the Hudson River School, where there’s a tiny little figure. Whereas in Ireland it just seems you are born in a landscape—not even in a landscape, in a piece of land that’s always with you. I felt much more at ease writing completely cliché kinds of poems, little sayings and epigrams, which I’d loved since I was young. I had that lightness that I always get when I’m there, writing these strange little recipes. I left behind all the critical theories that were roaming around in my mind and fell back on that style, almost like nursery rhymes.
INTERVIEWER
So it was both a discovery and a return?
HOWE
Yes. I think that style began in my fiction, in First Marriage (1974), which is embarrassingly childlike, and then it kept bobbing along like a bird on the water. But it tended to be put in motion by Ireland for some reason. My sister [Susan] has the same thing. We both had this kind of trauma—happy trauma—when we first went to Ireland as children, when I was six and she was ten. It was partly because it was the end of the war, and we hadn’t been able to see our grandparents or family over there before. The big shock was finding out that our mother had all these parts to her. I’m sure other children of immigrants have had this shock when they’ve discovered where their family came from and who their origins were.
INTERVIEWER
The poems in O’Clock are an antidote to cynicism, I think.
HOWE
Oh, that’s true. But that’s been my job.
INTERVIEWER
Tell me about that.
HOWE
If I could say I was assigned something at birth, it would be to keep the soul fresh and clean, and to not let anything bring it down. And that’s the spirit of childhood, usually. Once you know that that’s what you’re doing, even when you’re walking through a war field, you’re carrying something to keep it safe. It’s invisible but you know it’s there, and it’s a kind of vision and a weight.
INTERVIEWER
How do you find the balance in a poem between lightness and the weight of grief or pain?
HOWE
It’s just what you do. It’s almost like a religious action that everybody has, whether they like it or are terrified of it. There’s an impulse to preserve something original. It’s almost not possible to live without that. I didn’t know it, but when I looked back, around the age of sixty, I could see that was what I was after.
INTERVIEWER
Does poetry serve that purpose better than prose?
HOWE
Yes, except there is an ecstatic prose, too, that I love to hit. At the beginning, I would write a novel and then some poetry, but over time, it’s become more and more this strange mix of poetry and prose, which is where I am now. Nod, for instance, is, to me, more of a poem than a piece of fiction. The Deep North is a novel, but it’s very disjointed, like a poem. Finding that style also concurred with my giving up smoking, and so breaking time into little parts was easier than writing long sections, if you know what I mean. I was still telling stories when I started writing serial poems, like The Quietist (1992).
INTERVIEWER
In the author’s note to Radical Love, you write, “I hope this collection will contribute to a literary tradition that resists distinctions between poetry and fiction as one way to save history from the doom of duality.” What is it that you hope for in escaping duality?
HOWE
To avoid authority. Thinking of words as—yes, as little figures escaping big figures, running away from judgment. Duality to me is the sign of the master coming. I would love to have a life that didn’t have all that in it, that was just, A free spirit arrived and left. Someone who almost doesn’t have a footprint.
INTERVIEWER
That makes me think of the changeling in Nod. Or the girl in The Deep North, who’s trying to escape her family. Is family where judgment comes from?
HOWE
It’s there in my books, but how can I explain it in my life? I didn’t have an unhappy childhood. All families have their share of cruelty and competition, humiliation and failure, and mine wasn’t spectacular in those ways, but I was always afraid. It makes you wonder.
Did you ever read Susan’s interview in The Paris Review?
INTERVIEWER
I did.
HOWE
I was too weak to read it when it came out—I thought it would make me feel like shit, because she’s such a queen.
INTERVIEWER
I have a younger half sister, and I think I’m the queen in that way.
HOWE
Probably. Oh dear, it’s such an immutable relationship. Everyone who has that has the same problem. It’s sibling rivalry. Plain and simple. I knew she was a genius. She was the biggest influence on my life.
INTERVIEWER
Even with a playwright for a mother and a historian for a father?
HOWE
Well, them too. It was in the atmosphere. We were all incredibly moved by books and movies and plays, more than by real things. It was as if the afflictions of a character in a book were actually our afflictions. There was a lot of screeching about book discoveries, especially between Susan and my mother. And I loved going to my mother’s plays. I acted in them if they needed a child. She had come from years with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, so it would be Brecht, it would be Yeatsian kooky plays of fairies and screaming witches. She would bring her rehearsals into the living room—no closed doors. When she’d choose to play this role, I mean, it went on day and night. My poor father.
INTERVIEWER
Why poor him?
HOWE
The two of them were not well matched at all, personally. My father was a very naturally serious, secretive man, and these theater people were always coming into the house. I did feel that he shouldn’t have married my mother, probably. But he hadn’t wanted to marry a Boston woman—he was sort of repelled by that. The thing that bound them was that their families had read the same books in Ireland and in Boston, and so they had this shared vocabulary that made them laugh, mostly from literature. My father had this weakness—he loved the Marx Brothers and he loved jokes. And my mother could make anyone laugh.
INTERVIEWER
And was she beautiful?
HOWE
No, she wasn’t beautiful. She was quite plain. She was brilliant and great fun, but a drinker, which didn’t make it perfect at all. Even though I hated her when she was drunk, I admired her complete lack of inhibition. She was very entertaining, very witty and cruel.
INTERVIEWER
Was she cruel to her children?
HOWE
She could be. Like, she said to me, “Some people have a child with a brain, a very good brain, and others have a child who has to use other ways to get attention.” I knew what she meant. But at some point I was sort of lucky being neglected. Susan was more entangled with her. My mother’s feelings about me were more that she expected me to be a free spirit, and whatever happened happened. I think that she let me go too wild too soon, but at the time, of course, I loved it. I was always laughing, unable to study, only happy alone or outdoors, climbing trees and looking at bugs. There were big gardens and parks in Cambridge where I would roam around. The minute I saw any animal, I feared for its life in the world. And so I would tear around, trying to make sure all the animals were safe.
Cambridge, ca. 1954.
INTERVIEWER
You weren’t a big reader when you were young?
HOWE
I can only say this—here we go again—that my sister was the one who was reading all the time. She never had her face out of a book. Even today, books are everything to her. They weren’t to me. I was a bad student, and I only read books that had horses and dogs and mysteries. Beatrix Potter—her tiny little pictures of tiny little worlds. I’ve stayed with the beauty of what’s little a lot—seeing the way little nonbullies survive, with ingenuity and by taking their weakness and making it into a strength.
Cambridge in my high school years was much more vulnerable and broken and not ritzy. The folk music scene made a huge impact. And that era was different, because people read poetry, lots of people, so there were actual conversations in the street about E. E. Cummings. I loved his poems. The group that, of course, excited me the most was the Beatniks, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, Kerouac.
INTERVIEWER
When did you start writing?
HOWE
Everyone around me was a writer, and I vowed, Never, ever, ever, and then I did. I wrote a poem when I was eight or nine that I almost remember—it was just a few lines about nature and then a comment on the state of the world, but it worked, weirdly. It was like—let’s say pretend—“Rain, oh rain, falling on the street. How you remind me of the soldiers in Iran.” That’s sort of the way I’ve always written, letting the top come down on the bottom. My father was so pleased by it, and that gave me a boost. Then when I was fourteen, I wrote a poem in my bedroom and thought it was magnificent and brought it down and showed it to everyone, and then I didn’t ever show any of them anything again.
