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 Two
- That you could be a lecturer at MIT and still be living at the poverty line touches on what I see as a huge problem in America—how poorly we treat/employ/support both our teachers and our artists. I think they're related, since teaching seems to be the most reasonable employ for artists whose work alone does not support them, but it's problematic because teaching (especially at, say, an adjunct level) isn't necessarily enough to live on either. Would you say that's a fair assessment?
- I noticed you called the pieces in Lives "stories," yet they were released by Nightboat as poems (albeit with jacket copy to the effect that your writing bends/transcends genre and form, but still). How do you distinguish your poetry from your fiction?
- The "evolving theology" that you spoke of is well in evidence in Indivisible. Can you describe, or even briefly timeline, the evolution of your theology?
- You are clearly partial to the 19th century. Maybe the most current names were Weil and Camus. Who are some contemporary writers—poets in particular—whose work you enjoy, appreciate or admire?
- You said that "when someone applies the word "Christian" to me, I think of crusaders and Ku Klux Klanners and I shrivel and feel sick." I think this is a common problem for would-be Christians today, especially those who are also progressives. Is your reluctance to be labeled Christian only personal preference, or do you think the term itself is so fraught with unwelcome implications that it needs to be abandoned altogether?
- What were the circumstances of your being nursed by a Nazi? Furthermore, since children, and childhood, are clearly central factors not only in your written work but in your life, I'd like to hear more about your own early childhood as well as your conception of what childhood is or should be.
- Back to Indivisible again: I was planning to ask you about your politics, then once I saw you had done a book with Semiotext(e) I figured I had a pretty good idea of what they might be. But that's probably reductive, and anyway I think it's important to talk about this. Do you vote? What sort of real change would you like to see effected this country, and more importantly—to what degree does real change seem within "our" grasp?
- It makes sense to me that your movement would have been from poetry to prose as the thing you are calling "the search" developed and advanced into stranger territory—a movement that seems to echo the metamorphosis of water into glass. Nonetheless, does some malleability remain? The shifts between he/she/I and also between the various theologies would seem to suggest as much, unless what we're really seeing is a sort of multivalent presence or active synthesis.
Answer Two
Dear Justin: Okay, here's the end of it.
The relationship between Glasstown and The Lives of a Spirit can be measured first by time (the years between writing them) and then by social change. For people my age, there has been a radical break between our post-Victorian and post-War childhood and the Gap-world we inhabit now. I wrote The Lives in a kind of delirium of hope that I could re-create a child's view of reality that superseded specific time periods. I had a feeling no one would read it. So I was quite free, a state that liberated my ecstasy. Then the childhood fantasy ended and the world went on. For many of us the first Gulf War was the second in a series of shattering American moves that changed our sense of democracy and progress. The assassination period was the first.
Glasstown is made of separate prose pieces that I wrote, without any sense of their cohesion, over a twelve year period. Most of them were written outside of this country, when I was wandering around Ireland and working in the United Kingdom. They have no literary references, no nostalgia, no sense of a future from sentence to sentence. Each line erupted while I was in motion and seemed to be part of the motion, a footstep, an approaching but coincidental design. I can conjure up the sensation of writing them. One was based on an actual murder that was being followed in the newspapers in Ireland. I couldn't stop thinking about the woman and the young soldier who killed her. Others came out of a slamming consciousness (in London) of what World War Two had done to the west, and the rupture that was created between a sacred and a secular text-world. The sacred world was in The Lives but no longer in Glasstown. I stepped over the border between two senses of reality in these two sections. However, The Lives contain the seeds of the error that is manifested in Glasstown.
As for autobiography: When I was born, I was sick with a kidney infection and had to be nursed for several weeks, first in the hospital and then at home. A German nurse was the one in charge of me, and she was deported in the middle of her care-giving because she was a Nazi sympathizer. My mother thought this was a story worth repeating for its macabre overtones. My mother was Irish, she came to America in her thirties from Dublin. She had a different view of the world than my father, a true American, did. She had lived through the Troubles and had lost cousins in the Spanish Civil War. She was a skeptic to the bone. Who could blame her?
Her childhood was traumatized by war and poverty. Yet she was fun. She was at home when we came home, although she worked in the theater, and she was someone you wanted to report your day to. For these reasons I was a lucky child. Mothers should be fun.
I have to say I don't make a distinction anymore between my prose and my poetry. It's like playing with two hands instead of one and hearing the left hand as equal to the right, in that they are all the time music but the balance is shifting.
Contemporary for me is my generation. And I am sympathetic to all of us who struggled with economic issues, political disappointments, failed relationships, children, and the rise of the academic marketplace from our birth in the forties and fifties until now. As a result I resist stating whose work, among my friends and contemporaries, has meant the most or a lot to me. My preference usually comes down to a single book by each one of them. (like Oxota by Lyn Hejinian or A Midwinter Day by Bernadette Mayor). I follow certain people's work and usually these are people who were friends first. I like short novels and long poetry sequences. There are some younger poets whose work I like; they come from Chicago, New York, California. (Terrance Hayes, Peter O'Leary....) Their work often arrives uninvited in the mail.
In the old days it was a single poem that survived into posterity; now it seems to be single books that stand for the person and the time they lived in. It's hard to explain but in the end it is your generation, not the single individual works that you admire.
Nightboat is bringing out five of my novels together in one volume. The last one is Indivisible. It is my least despairing of the five, only because the questions are so demanding that they seem to assume there will be new and better ones to follow.
Questions, I mean. But all my main characters are failures in the social world who trail around after a hidden meaning that finally defines, rather than defies, them. What they seek becomes them as integrated beings. This is a very Thomist vision of reality that is also found in philosophies of culture everywhere. But I really care about failed American women from the 20th century, the anonymous saints and geniuses who couldn't make a living. My pronouns shift because people are objects sometimes, subjects other times, and their minds can also leave their bodies and become joined with other minds that are out there with them. I feel there are actual spheres of consciousness, but I am also steeped in the 20th century's tragic view of language as being a closed system.
It is very hard for artists to make a living now and for all people who are young. The conspiracy of the corporation has succeeded in creating a culture of citizens who make a living on short-term contracts like immigrant workers. They get no benefits, no health insurance. In the academic world it is the TA's and part time lecturers who face this unjust situation. But corporations like Sony and Wal-Mart, as we know, hire people for fewer and fewer hours so that the long-term benefits can be withheld. This is not all that new.
For many years my children and I lived on $6000.00 per annum while I was a lecturer who accrued no pension and went to a neighborhood free clinic for health care. If I had been more competent in negotiating the institutions, I would have done better. The opportunity was there, but I couldn't locate it. I suppose I didn't want to, I wanted to be free, to stay at home with the children and play in our little utopia. It was always imperiled anyway... I know that people could say, "You chose to be a single mother of three children and therefore you deserve to be poor." They would be right as long as money describes our entire value system. I have hoped to show that it doesn't.
The main danger, as I see it, is the invention of alternate worlds made of theories and systems that work in the mind, but not on the ground. We all have this capacity and it can just involve a slight tip of the mind to change what is actual into what is true. Christianity has done this, as did Communism. The global marketplace is an imaginary place for those who sit in the offices arranging it. The internet increases the scope of the imaginary and brings it home to our desks. Maybe it is an inevitable stage in human development, the way deep atheism prefigures a new religion. It might be good. But at the moment I think the imaginary can go in a number of dangerous directions. It already has. Christianity is nothing if it isn't an action in the world. The action of the eucharist preserves this truth. A mouth, a hand, a piece of bread. There can be a communalist village, where the actions determine what it is called. But the great theories are hot air if they cannot be tested in the body. The great novels prove this.
As usual Simone Weil said it right:
"The Gospel contains a conception of human life, not a theology.
If I light an electric torch at night out of doors I don't judge its power by looking at the bulb, but by seeing how many objects it lights up.
The brightness of a source of light is appreciated by the illumination it projects upon non-luminous objects.
The value of a religious, or, more generally, a spiritual way of life is appreciated by the amount of illumination thrown upon the things of this world.
Earthly things are the criterion of spiritual things."
And that's it!
I will be interested to see what you make of it all, Justin. God knows what made me respond with such gusto. I must have been ready.
Thanks for the questions!
Fanny
Justin Taylor is the criticism editor at Half-Drunk Muse, and an associate editor at Pindeldyboz. Visit his personal website at http://www.justindtaylor.net