We have to begin at the end: Fanny Howe died in July. As she once wrote, “Plot can only be understood retroactively, and by the time a story is understood, most of the questions that were important earlier have been folded over into bewilderment.” She leaves behind her a bewildering and beautiful body of work; at 84, she was the author of dozens of books of experimental, polymorphic prose-poetry-philosophy, many of them out of print at the time of her death. Howe was the humblest of geniuses; a small-press star, always unreachable by the mainstream and in a perpetual state of rediscovery.
Howe came from a deep artistic and intellectual lineage. Her father was a Harvard-educated lawyer, a civil rights activist and early opponent of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and a biographer of Oliver Wendell Holmes. His father was a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer himself, and on his mother’s side he was a Quincy—part of an illustrious Boston family whose members included mayors, publishers, and a president. Her mother was an Irish-born actress and playwright, a founder of the avant-garde Poet’s Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts (the rehearsal space was in the Howes’ living room, and Howe would sit on the stairs to listen to Dylan Thomas, the Clancy Brothers, and John Wieners; she herself had a part in the play John Ashbery put on at the Poet’s). She was their second daughter; she and her older sister Susan together have been called “the most important sibling duo in American poetry.” After running away from a French language course, Howe once spent a day in Paris with Samuel Beckett, a friend of her mother’s. She rejected any efforts to characterize this life as singular. “There were many women like me—born into white privilege but with no financial security,” she wrote in her essay collection The Wedding Dress.
Howe’s novels and poems, in their elliptical, oracular way, reflect a deep commitment to hope and spiritual struggle, justice and understanding.
After leaving home, she went, like any good erstwhile East Coast aristocrat, to California, where she became a Communist and attended and dropped out of Stanford thrice over. The last time she dropped out, it was to marry Frederick Delafield, a conservative microbiologist, in something of a rebellion run backward. The marriage didn’t last, and she found herself back East, where she worked as a go-go dancer and a member of the Congress of Racial Equality, and eventually met and married the poet Carl Senna. They had three children, including the novelist Danzy Senna, in “parochial and paranoid” Boston, a “poor choice of a place to live as a mixed couple.” The experience served as a political education.
It was also through Senna that she first began going to church; his mother, a devoted Catholic, took her to Mass, and though the marriage ended, she ended up converting at 40. She was drawn in by the fact that the church had done “tons of practical good for the poor, has managed to accept the maddest among us, has a huge margin for visions,” and for the paradoxical struggle and heresy that seemed to her to come with belief. It is these experiences that ground and structure her writing; her novels and poems, in their elliptical, oracular way, reflect a deep commitment to hope and spiritual struggle, justice and understanding. She was a writer attuned to the uncanny confluence of chance, choice, and fate, and her literary brilliance has the feel of a creation myth she had to unmake for herself.
In the beginning, before the books she wrote under her own name, there were two romance novels about nurses. In discussions of Howe’s work, they are treated as a footnote, another charming detail in a life rich with incident. But read looking backward, having seen all that came later, the nurse novels come to look like more than a curiosity. Instead, they are the place where Howe first experienced the plotting of a novel as a kind of existential struggle; where she began working through, in writing, the questions that would sustain and bewilder her. They deserve the kind of careful attention Howe’s later work often likened to a spiritual imperative.
Howe wrote the romances at the time of the end of her first marriage, though she took her husband’s name, publishing the pair of pulp novels under the pseudonym Della Field. The first came out in 1963, the year of her divorce. She needed the money—they paid $500 each. Until recently, both were out of print. Then, last year, a small company called Nurse Novels Publishing made West Coast Nurse, the first of the pair—Fanny Howe’s first-ever published novel—available as an e-book. The company was founded by Susannah Clark, owner of “what may be the world’s largest collection of vintage nurse romance novels (more than 700 books).” Before she started republishing her collection, Clark began rating and reviewing nurse romances on her blog. She gave West Coast Nurse a B+. “I was fascinated to discover that the author of this book, Fanny Howe, is an important experimental poet,” Clark noted in her review. Howe’s second novel, Vietnam Nurse, got a C+ and remains out of print (this article is made possible by a long-standing eBay alert).
“I was fascinated to discover that the author of this book, Fanny Howe, is an important experimental poet,” Clark noted in her review.
Howe said herself that everyone always laughed at the nurse novels, the “schlock” she wrote out of need. They are, in most ways and in contrast to Howe’s writing under her own name, conventional. West Coast Nurse follows Ellen Mallory, a nurse at a private hospital in the Bay Area. She lives with her sister Katie, both orphans after their parents’ deaths a few years prior. Ellen is friends with one of the doctors at the hospital, and he falls in love with Katie at first sight, though their relationship is hampered by an argument about women’s independence. Another doctor at the hospital, David Chase, is clearly meant for Ellen. At first, of course, they can’t stand one another, but Ellen realizes she loves him. She struggles to tell him; they struggle to communicate; they come together and apart and, eventually, together. Vietnam Nurse is the story of Natalie “Lee” Knight, whose fiancé, a Green Beret, has gone missing while fighting in the Vietnam War. Determined to find him, Lee enlists as a nurse and, once in Vietnam, befriends another Green Beret, Johnny, who promises to help her find out what happened to her fiancé. When Lee learns her fiancé is dead, she and Johnny fall, inevitably, in love.
What is striking about these books, though, is how much Fanny Howe can be glimpsed in Della Field’s novels. In West Coast Nurse, as in Howe’s later fiction, there are Irish daughters, neglectful actress mothers, meditations on loneliness and silence, the irreconcilable lure of the light out West and the seasons back East; ruminations on the parts we play and the parts of ourselves we struggle to understand. There is a politically astute indictment of what would come to be called the war on drugs. There are repeated references to Jane Eyre, and it is even possible to view the novel as a slight, slant retelling: an orphaned girl, a taciturn hero, pervading questions of relational equality.
Most remarkably, though, is the novel’s anticipation of Howe’s later spiritual seeking. There is, in the version published by Nurse Novels Publishing, an uncannily apt typo, which I like to think is an artifact from Howe’s original: “I think you could do a lot of god for him,” one character tells Ellen of David. It’s a line that could come straight out of one of Howe’s novels written under her own name. In Indivisible, Howe writes, “God is God and the godness of all being in all time gods that godness gods to God God greets God because it is already God … I don’t know who God is, godding inside of me.” Her nurse reads the Bible aloud and reflects on the imagery of Genesis. And there is a moment, serving no real purpose for the plot, in which Ellen comes upon a chapel in the woods. Inside, she finds that she “could actually listen to the silence; it was like listening to the inside of a shell.… She remained there for a while; as time and space receded from the chapel she found herself happily detached.” Howe’s nurse thinks of the man she loves and wants only “to stand in silence with him forever,” almost auguring Howe’s later writing. Her poetry collection Love and I takes William Blake’s line “Love that never told can be” for its opening, and her novel Indivisible, one of the five collected in Radical Love, thematizes unspeakable, silent love, romantically and spiritually. In West Coast Nurse, the primary obstacle to Ellen and David’s relationship is the fact that Ellen is “all closed up inside [herself] and can’t get out.” They cannot communicate something essential to one another, cannot figure out how to talk to each other. In this relationship, then, is the crux of a problem Howe would spend her life struggling with, the paradoxical necessity and insufficiency of language.
In Vietnam Nurse, too, there are hints of Howe’s religious searching, and of the syncretic Catholicism she would eventually adopt, as the novel detours into a comparative analysis of Buddhism and Catholicism. “Buddhism,” one character tells Lee, “is a religion of redemption…. There is, of course, a similar aspiration in Christianity—both religions had the concept of paradise, which has since become materialistic.” But in this novel, it is Howe’s politics that come to the fore. At the hospital where she works, Lee befriends Khai, a Vietnamese nurse whose husband, Lee comes to find, is in the Viet Cong. Howe is careful not to villainize Khai or her husband, who is said to be intelligent and honorable, and in interviews Howe has suggested that the Viet Cong is the real hero of the story. The two women identify with each other, their experiences fundamentally the same despite their men on opposite sides of the war. Lee was, she says, “brought up to believe in [her] country, right or wrong,” but through her discussions with Khai, Howe articulates a critique of American imperialism. Khai tells Lee, with some measure of sarcasm, “You are innocent. Americans are innocent. You are a nation of children. Don’t you see? Things are not good and bad, but contain many elements, and your soldiers have adopted the methods of the French, who raped us and left us.”
More than these early hints at the political and spiritual searching that Howe would develop in her later work, though, these books, by her own account, taught Howe about the novel’s structural properties. “I learned a lot from those books,” she told The White Review, “about plot and consequence,” and it is a point she repeated often. Romance novels are notoriously plot-driven, and writing her nurse novels was Howe’s apprenticeship in plot, which she believed was fundamental to the writing of fiction. “Plot,” she wrote in her essay “Incubus of the Forlorn,” “is to fiction what form is to poetry.” For her, fiction is not fiction without “cause and effect,” as she wrote in another essay, “Person, Place, and Time.” She is a writer interested in coincidence and accident. As she wrote in “Incubus,” “A chance meeting is a meeting that seems to exist with a great probability of not meeting circling around it. As we all know, almost everything doesn’t happen. So the chance occurrence must actually be everything that does happen.” And what is a love story if not a story about what follows from a chance meeting?
Writing her nurse novels was Howe’s apprenticeship in plot, which she believed was fundamental to the writing of fiction.
Howe’s novels are indeed almost unusually plotty for so experimental a writer. People in Fanny Howe novels have affairs and get divorced, commit murders and go mad, even get roped into organ-selling schemes. This commitment to plot seems to grow out of her experience writing romance novels and parallels her lifelong interest in schematic stories. “There is,” she wrote in her book Night Philosophy, “a classic sequence of actions that you find in legends, myths, folk and fairy stories”—you could easily add romance novels to this list. The tropes of these archetypal stories run through her works; her novel Nod is a kind of fairy tale, with its sisters and their “step-like mother,” structured by lines from Robert Louis Stevenson’s children’s poem “The Land of Nod” and Famous Questions riffs on the myth of Echo.
But as much as she believed in plot, like a worshipper before God, she also doubted its totalizing power. Plot, for Howe, was a treacherous thing. “Time,” as it is lived, she argued, “is not a progression but something more warped and refractive,” and this is a challenge for a novelist because “language, as we have it, fails to deal with confusion.” She was concerned with “sustaining a balance between the necessity associated with plot and the blindness associated with experience,” and it was the delicacy of this balance that convinced her that all novelists are “wrestling with the torturous clamp of plot.” For Howe, this wrestling led her to what she called “bewilderment as a poetics and a politics.” In pursuit of bewilderment, she wrote novels that “reverse … the usual narrative movements around courage, discipline, conquest, and fame,” populated with characters who “remained as uncertain in the end as they were in the beginning, though both author and reader could place them within a pattern of causalities.”
She is not the kind of experimentalist who makes something out of nothing; it might be closer to accurate to say she turns something into nothing.
For all their high-octane plot points, Howe’s books deal in repetitions, slips in tense and narrative voice, suspensions of time, and strange sequencing; her plots are never straightforward or fast-paced—it is the language and thought that sticks to you after reading, not the mere facts of what happened, which, besides, is not always clear. She is not the kind of experimentalist who makes something out of nothing; it might be closer to accurate to say she turns something into nothing. Nothing is important to her—“Nothing,” the narrator of Indivisible says, “is love, because if you add anything to zero it becomes a word.”
If it was her apprenticeship in the workmanlike plots of romance novels that first caught her in plot’s trap, it is also in those first novels that you can see her start to work the trap, discovering that fiction’s primary tool turns easily against itself. The archetypal end to a romance novel, after all, is a new start: a wedding. Perhaps the genre, so seemingly unlikely a starting place for Howe, is rather fitting. She preferred plots with “strange returns and recognitions and never a conclusion.” When the inevitable happy ending is reached, in both the Della Field novels, they bend back on themselves, as if they are circling back and beginning again. Vietnam Nurse began with Lee’s first fiancé dead in the midst of the Vietnam war and ends with Johnny and Lee newly engaged. But Johnny is also wounded and on a plane to the United States, while Lee is staying on in a war zone for another year; there is a lingering fear of death, an unshakeable sense that the story may be starting over again.
The very thing that makes the romance novel feel like so unlikely a genre for a writer like Howe, and that makes these works so easy to overlook in her oeuvre, is what makes them so compelling a place for her to start. The conventionality the genre requires comes to seem like an impossible demand, the novelist seeking the unreachable; the end unraveling itself. This kind of continual seeking, this spiraling search, came to define Howe’s writing. In West Coast Nurse, the ending comes hurriedly; with neither Ellen nor David having found anything like a solution to the problem of silence and speech, there is nothing to mark their coming together now as more secure than their previous attempts. Howe’s first novel ends, appropriately, in a confusion of beginnings and endings—the last word spoken between her lovers is, “Hello.”
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