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All about Her Mother
John Palattella
The
Midnight
Susan Howe
New Directions, $19.95 (paper)
8
Whether
they are labeled experimental or mainstream, many contemporary
poems are the utterances of professional peers—memos passed
around the workshop about desiccated sentiment, flayed wit, deflated
belief, and the inadequacies not only of poetry but of language
itself. Susan Howe stands apart from this milieu, utterly alone
in her work, wandering on a blasted heath of books and contemplating
the presence of the past in poetry and language. She seems to
direct her poems less to a contemporary audience than to the writers
who are her frequent sources: Shakespeare, Blake, Swift, the Brontës,
Jonathan Edwards, Cotton Mather, Mary Rowlandson, Emily Dickinson,
Herman Melville, Charles Sanders Peirce. These writers, and not
avant-gardists such as Charles Bernstein and Lyn Hejinian, with
whom she is often grouped, are Howe’s true peers insofar
as they provide her with a shared tradition and vocation. Howe
is a poet-archaeologist who writes poems by seizing on a word,
phrase, or even the marginalia of a writer and excavating it for
a half-seen or half-forgotten meaning. While her tone is often
anguished and urgent, and her poems are sometimes little more
than fragments, Howe is less an iconoclast than a classicist.
She aims not to shatter the literature of the past but to rekindle
its vitality by freeing its spirit from a dank climate of prejudice,
misunderstanding, and neglect.
For nearly 30 years Howe has occupied
a particular and invaluable place in American poetry. She is a rigorously
skeptical and a profoundly visionary poet, a writer whose demystifying
intelligence is matched by a passionate embrace of poetry’s
rejuvenating power. Take the sentence “Where philosophy stops,
poetry is impelled to begin,” which appears midway through
her new book, The Midnight. This is a signature Susan Howe
sentence, at once an epigram quickened by a cutting assurance and
a riff on the idea of a 19th-century Romantic writer, in this case,
Friedrich Schlegel, who quipped, “Where philosophy stops, poetry
has to begin.” And impelled is a signature Howe verb,
one rooted in a sense of duty and obligation. Philosophy,
in Howe’s lexicon, is shorthand for a system of ideas anchored
in power that operates by prejudice and exclusion. The system she
targets most often is history.
“I am drawn toward the disciplines
of history and literary criticism,” Howe explains in The
Birth-mark, a collection of essays about American writing, “but
in the dawning distance a dark wall of rule supports the structure
of every letter, record, transcript: every proof of authority and
power. I know records are compiled by winners, and scholarship is
in collusion with Civil Government.” This is a deeply skeptical
view of historical knowledge, but Howe doesn’t follow it to
its bleak, anti-historical conclusion—that history is nothing
more than the inescapable expression of a will to power. Instead,
she undertakes reconnaissance missions in language and history.
In her invaluable meditation My Emily Dickinson, Howe brings
to light the sous-histoire of Dickinson’s fascicles,
those many points where the tics and strains of her poems in manuscript,
such as their idiosyncratic forms of punctuation and lineation,
skid away from the clean copy coveted by her several editors. “Her
soul’s deepest necessity was to flee such forced sterility,”
Howe writes. Why? Because poetry “is an invocation, rebellious
return to the blessedness of beginning again, wandering free in
pure process of forgetting and finding.”
For all its signature qualities, “Where
philosophy stops, poetry is impelled to begin,” seems out of
place in The Midnight. Like most of Howe’s books, The
Midnight is a prose-poetry hybrid, but unlike those other books,
it is not anxiously concerned about the tension between philosophy
and poetry. Moreover, Howe’s nemesis in The Midnight
is not “a dark wall of rule” but something even darker—the
oblivion of death. The Midnight is the most boldly autobiographical
of Howe’s 17 books; the woman at its center is Howe’s
mother, Mary Manning, the Irish playwright, actress, and novelist.
Born in 1905 in Dublin, Manning studied acting at the Abbey Theatre
and later collaborated on a few plays with her childhood friend
Samuel Beckett. In 1935 she moved to Boston with her husband, Mark
DeWolfe Howe, an American law professor and the future editor of
the papers of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. In Boston Manning
worked as the drama director of Radcliffe College during World War
II and later helped to establish the Poets’ Theatre, which
staged her adaptation of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
in 1952. After her husband died in 1967, Manning returned to Ireland
and wrote theatre criticism for the Hibernia. In 1972, in
the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, she published a somber and caustic
essay about Belfast in the Atlantic Monthly. Manning later
returned to the United States and died in Cambridge in 1999.
This kind of thumbnail portrait of
Mary Manning doesn’t appear in The Midnight. Instead,
Howe evokes her mother through a collage of materials: anecdotes
about family history, meditations on the political and literary
affiliations of her maternal relatives, and eccentric lessons about
the histories of Boston, where Howe was born in 1937, and Buffalo,
where her family lived for a short spell in the early 1940s and
where she has taught at the State University of New York since 1989.
Howe has explained that books like William Carlos Williams’s
In the American Grain and her own My Emily Dickinson
are less explications of a writer’s work than tributes to writers—attempts
“to meet the work with writing—you know, to meet in time,
not just from place to place but from writer to writer, mind to
mind, friend to friend, from words to words.” With its rich
tissue of resemblances and reminiscences, its evocation, absorption,
and refraction of inherited family lore, The Midnight is
also such a tribute. Shimmering with grace and subtlety, it is an
elegy for Mary Manning that tries to coax the past into the present.
In My Emily Dickinson Howe rescues the poet from the betrayals
of her editors; in The Midnight she attempts to rescue her
mother from the betrayal of time.
That rescue effort begins in an oblique
enough way, with a series of short poems that catalogue the remnants
of an archaic nighttime world: bed hangings, wigs, breeches, hoods,
and pieces of lace. The source of much of the material in these
poems is a treatise on 19th-century bed hangings, which Howe admits
to having read as a remedy for insomnia. These poems first appeared
several years ago in the chapbook Bed Hangings, where they
are framed and accented by Susan Bee’s illustrations—silhouettes
of ladies in hoop skirts and collaged clip-art images of nineteenth-century
canopied beds. The language of Howe’s poems is even more archaic,
its incantatory rhythms wrung from lines thick with nouns and fluid
sounds: “A small swatch bluish-green / woolen slight grain
in the / weft watered and figured / right fustian should hold /
altogether warp and woof,” or “Stille one bare worde /
iseon at bare beode / iseon at bare beode.”
What are we to make of such lines? Is
Howe’s aim to divorce sound and sense or to merge them? Is
she writing cryptograms? The poems, above all, establish a mood
of mystery. They hint at radical doctrines and histories: “Sandemanian
sentiments of course he never preached.” (The Sandemanians
were a small, exclusive Protestant sect that disapproved of private
wealth and preached blind obedience to church authority.) They teem
with oddly spelled or misspelled words: “Nihtegale to the taunt
/ Owl a preost be piping.” Are “nihtegale” and “preost”
archaic spellings or just nonsense? They invoke a mythic world where
danger is eluded through singular creative powers: “fair trees
wrought with a needle / the merest decorative suggestion / in what
appears to be sheer white / muslin a tree fair hunted Daphne.”
Here Howe describes a bed curtain that depicts the story of Daphne,
who with the aid of her father, the river god Peneus, metamorphosed
into a laurel tree to flee the clutches of Apollo.
This mood of mystery thickens in the
two prose sections of The Midnight. In the book’s three
short sections of poetry Howe teases lyrics from an archive of myths
and curious historical materials. In the long, intervening prose
sections she organizes her past into something resembling an archive:
a trove of memories, quotations, and visual artifacts about her
mother and her relatives, along with observations about her own
literary and historical passions (among them Dickinson, Peirce,
Jonathan Edwards, and the Anglican mystic Nicholas Ferrer). The
writing in these passages is scrupulous. Here is Howe on the bibliographic
predilections of certain writers:
Jonathan Edwards was a paper saver. He kept old bills
and shopping lists, then copied out his sermons on the verso sides
and stitched them into handmade notebooks. When he was in his
twenties, Emerson cut his dead minister father’s sermons
in manuscript out of their bindings, then used the bindings to
hold his own writing. He mutilated another of Emerson senior's
notebooks in order to use the blank pages. Stubs of torn off paper
show sound bites. Thomas Carlyle, who liked to discover books
in odd places, once spotted a copy of a sermon by Richard Baxter
wrapped around the Christmas pie he was eating.
And here she is commenting on a photograph
of her mother:
I have one of the last photographs taken
of Mary Manning Howe Adams pinned to the wall over my desk. She
is sitting on her La-Z-Boy chair with an old lap robe woven in
Connemara, in her two-room apartment at the The Cambridge Homes
near Harvard Square on Mount Auburn Street. She appears to be
astonished, slightly submissive but sweetly welcoming nevertheless.
I can tell she is acting for the camera. The Cambridge Homes is
“an assisted living residence that fosters independence,
camaraderie, and well-being.” They still send us promotional
literature although she has been dead since 1999. Their most recent
annual development report is titled “Growing Older in Community:
Mastering the Challenges of Aging.” When she was a resident
she had a blunter way of putting it: “We’re already
in the coffin, Dear—but the lid isn’t closed yet.”
Both passages shine because Howe catalogues
details, in an almost forensic way, without cramming her sentences
with facts. This allows for a certain degree of intimacy; the eccentricity
of her subjects is foregrounded without being pathologized or coddled
by a litany of damning or fawning revelations. In the first passage
the verb mutilate is like a depth charge that, with one jolt,
brings the complexity of Emerson's motives to the surface. In the
second passage Howe spotlights her mother’s theatricality by
giving her the best line and letting her bring down the curtain
on the scene. Howe’s affection for her mother is expressed
in other passages through a somber, tender eloquence. “We loved
to read that one together. So when I read it now all the words fall
softly over what we believed then and desired,” Howe says of
reading W. B. Yeats’s “The Cap and Bells” as a child
with her mother.
Equally scrupulous and intriguing are
Howe’s descriptions of several books she inherited from her
mother and her mother’s relatives. The end papers and margins
of those books, Howe notes, teem with “dedications, private
messages, marginal annotations, hints, snapshots, press cuttings,
warnings—scissor work.” Edwards and Emerson are not the
only paper savers whom Howe admires. Among the snapshots reproduced
in The Midnight are several black-and-white photos of scissor-worked
pages in books owned by her mother’s brother, John Manning.
In one photograph, swatches of text from the Irish Times
are pasted over a page of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
In another, a photo clipped from a newspaper unfolds, accordion-like,
from Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel The Master of Ballantrae.
Howe doesn’t explain why she thinks her uncle went about such
scissor work. All she offers are the photographs.
Howe’s intentions, I think, are
a bit clearer. By focusing on her relatives’ books, she has
found models for arranging material about her mother's past. After
all, what is The Midnight—with its crazy collage of
hints, descriptions, catalogues, and snapshots—but the Manning
family’s most recent piece of scissor work? Because her relatives’
books are models of incongruity, Howe mirrors them in her own book
by cracking the looking glass and making the incongruous appear
even more so. The past is absorbed only through its transformation.
How else account for the organization of The Midnight, which
frustrates any attempt to explain exhaustively the contents of the
Howe archive? The prose sections scuttle chronological order and
instead present a collage of brief narratives, with coincidence
and synchronicity being the only means offered for aligning and
organizing them. Some of the coincidences are rhetorical, such as
anagrammatizing Erie into Eire. Some are naturalistic:
1905 is the year of several momentous events recounted by Howe,
such as Mary Manning’s birth and Henry James’s final ocean
crossing from New York to England. And some coincidences are utterly
subjective, as in the case of Susan Howe, insomniac and resident
of Buffalo, New York, and Guilford, Connecticut, noting with fascination
that Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Buffalo’s park and
parkways system, also suffered from insomnia and, during his youth,
boarded with a preacher in Guilford. In one of the Duino Elegies
Rainer Maria Rilke writes, “Strange to see meanings that clung
together once, floating away / in every direction.” The effect
in The Midnight is the opposite: strange to see floating
together so many meanings that once clung to something else. We’re
left to consider whether these meanings have a causal relation,
and whether the book’s skein of memories and observations is
haunted by a larger personal, familial, or collective destiny.
For all these difficulties, The Midnight
is neither a lesson in the inadequacies of storytelling nor a tribute
to that hobbyhorse of postmodernism, the slippery signifier. If
anything, the book’s narrative recursiveness, the manner in
which photos and prose reflect, extend, and complicate each other's
patterns and themes, is the perfect device for the larger story
being told: the dead are ever returning to us in a palpable and
unpredictable way. The Midnight is a haunted book, an unquiet
grave teeming with ghosts—the Weird Sisters from Macbeth,
ghosts in stories read by the Brontë sisters, and Atsumori,
the title character of the Japanese Noh drama who haunts the warrior
who killed him in battle. These are apt symbols for the beguiling
narrative dimensions of The Midnight. Each new detail and
episode seems haunted by a crucial but not entirely revelatory antecedent.
Total comprehension seems to be forthcoming but is invariably postponed.
The Midnight is not simply an elegy for Howe’s mother
but a cenotaph that invokes nothing so much as itself.
“I’m only a gentle reader
trying to be a realist,” Howe confesses. “Can you hear
me?” One hears the voice of a gentle reader, but one also hears
the voice of a vital poet demanding to be recognized as radical
and traditional, irreverent and devotional. And, as in My Emily
Dickinson, the joy and poignancy of Howe’s demand lies
in the drama of pleading. “Listen, quick rustling,” Howe
remarks in the opening passage. What has she heard, bed hangings
being swept aside or scraps of paper being scissor-worked into a
book? Listen, quick rustling. Is it Daphne’s voice clinging
to laurel leaves with paper-thin edges or Mary Manning whispering
stage directions from the wings of pastimes?
Secrecy let me light you in
In shadow something other
echoed and re-echoed only
Quick now, you’ve been called.
Will you listen? <
John Palattella writes about
poetry for The Nation and the Los Angeles Times Book
Review, among other publications. He lives in Brooklyn.
Originally published in the December
2003/January 2004 issue of Boston Review
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