Interview with Fanny Howe

The Lives of a Spirit / Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken
Fanny Howe
134 pages, $16.95
Nightboat Books; 2005
ISBN: 0976718510
Available from Amazon.com

Photo Credit: Ben E. Watkins

Question One

The pieces in the book have very solid senses of scene—we can always see where we are—as well as abiding interests in memory and loss. I suppose my first question, put indelicately, would be to ask how much of the work is autobiographical.
The bookjacket calls Glasstown a "coda" to The Lives of a Spirit, but Glasstown feels less like a pendant work than one which balances, perhaps a counterweight. How do you describe or envision the relationship between the two?
Your interest in theology reminded me of Marilynne Robinson's essays on what it means to assume and defend mantles like "Christian" (or, for that matter, "liberal"). I wonder how you perceive God as a presence or the Quest for God as a project—in your daily life and in your writing?
Related: your spelling "G-d" is a conventionally Jewish expression of piety, and visually compelling, especially when linked to your unconventional spelling of "d—th." It's especially interesting since the poems orient themselves with Christian or anyway Judeo-Christian spirituality rather than an explicitly or singularly Jewish tradition. I know, that wasn't a question, but can you answer it?
Reading Lives of a Spirit / Glasstown, and also your novel Indivisible, I noticed that you use both first and third person and shift between them at will. Why do you do that?
Are the scribblings (or imagetexts) in The Lives of a Spirit intended as illustrations or are they components of the poems in which they are embedded?
Finally, I'm curious about how the concepts touched on by the title, Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken, relates to the recurring depictions of glass as a form of water?

Answer One

Dear Justin,

I will try to respond to your questions in a holistic way, rather than piece by piece. The Lives of a Spirit was written in the mid-eighties when I was living in an apartment in Boston with my three children and some of their friends. I slept in the pantry. There was a Chinese restaurant that sent its flavors through the house day and night. I wrote the stories in bed when the children were at school. I was working at MIT as a lecturer. We were living at the poverty line. I had converted officially to Catholicism only a few years (1980) before.

"Onward Christian soldiers" was a song from childhood that I never could bear. I don't like the implications of the word Christian, and I was introduced to the horrors of war by my father when he returned from Potsdam. So when someone applies the word "Christian" to me, I think of crusaders and Ku Klux Klanners and I shrivel and feel sick. At the same time my evolving theology is inseparable from anything I write. It is perhaps more Hindu than Roman and more Jewish than Christian, which is why I can only say I am a Catholic.

The Lives of a Spirit was written through the lens of nineteenth century fiction (the Brontes, Hardy, the Russians) because their brand of naturalism was radiant. These novels gave me access to Paradise through descriptive language. I was saturated in the darker visions of Simone Weil, but my Anglo-Irish mother had introduced me to 19th century literature at an early age and it would never not haunt me. So this set of stories was written in an effort to recreate a place of childhood, of happiness (Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales) that bounced through time like a body on a trampoline, and to face the hard parts of time too. Finally, to face the grave. If it was autobiographical, this was at the level of having lived in the world, having read some books, and having been disappointed in love, as they used to say.

My life was all children and our dog, except when I went out to visit friends. I loved being a mother, I lived for my children and we were happy enough in our little apartment in Brookline. Writing Lives was really an act of gratitude for being safe for a while. It was a pre-War and a post-War book. In Camus' Notebooks you see that he quotes from 19th century writers when he wants to remember beauty. He also says, "My whole effort has been in reality to depersonalize myself."

Spelling God with a dash instead of an o was an act too full of contradictions to make any sense. Yes, Jewish and respectful. But much more—the problem of the very word is huge. And I can only finally associate G-d with d--th (a word I fear and hate), when I have to spell it out. If I don't have to use the word God, then I don't have to use the other one. The difficulty of the word God is behind all my writing and revising, which I do tons of. In a sense I don't write, I rewrite. The question of God is enacted in the effort of scratching at words to see what is behind them.

The Lives of a Spirit was a very independent act, separate from all my other writing. It is really a children's book. The baby falls out of the sky and its spirit is sent spinning and bobbing over layers of time. It is a child's spirit even when she is a woman eating a sandwich beside a grave. I returned to childhood, to writing in bed, to waiting for someone I loved to come home in that book. It was a process of self-salvation. Some dreams are there.

Glasstown was the name of a little world that the Bronte children created. But my Glasstown is the world that we live in as broken adults. It begins with a child again, but in this case the child is being nursed by a Nazi. (This is an autobiographical detail, by the way.) And it ends with a child in catastrophic circumstances with nuns as heroic beings, the only ones. The spirit inhabits both male and female bodies in Glasstown. Sometimes the voice is confident and sure of its purpose, and sometimes not. "I" is sometimes "She" and sometimes "He," in the sense that I can appear to be she or he, and I can see myself as an I or a she or a he, I can remember myself as she, or he, and the world only sees me as she when I am I. In my other novels I often shift between I and she and he. Why?

I am seeking something solid at the center of a human life. It turns out to be something solid that is not known by the senses. The malleability (water into glass) and fleeting nature of the self is very hard to recapture in fiction or prose, easier in poetry, but I still keep trying, or did, until I concluded the search with my novel Indivisible. What is a human being? That only a human being can ask the question is bad enough, but it throws into relief the whole tragic dilemma of an intelligence lost in space. If my mind is not a continuum of consciousness that enfolds the earth and planets, etcetera, and if it begins and ends inside my skull, then how can I have children? Why continue this parade?

In other of my novels I have had layers of handwriting inserted to remind the reader of the chaotic scrawl from which the printed stories emerged. The chaos is just a fingerprint version of the problem that language presents, and how pretty it is. I write all my books by hand, re-write by hand, and I wish I could just have a book of mine printed in my handwriting. For me it is a form of drawing. Writing by hand is manual labor, but it also affirms one's relationship to the mystery of one's own presence and to the potential beauty abiding in the alphabet.

The fact is, I am a mother of children and it is inside this condition, above all, that The Lives of a Spirit was written.

Half-Drunk Muse Poetry

Interview with Fanny Howe

Question One

Answer One

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