What Did You See?

Karen Solie remembers Fanny Howe

I discovered Fanny Howe’s poetry through her Selected Poems, published by University of California Press in 2000. Her previous books – poetry and prose – had been published mostly by small American presses, and described as “experimental.” I didn’t then (and possibly don’t now) have a strong grasp of what constitutes the experimental. But Howe’s early poems were invigoratingly strange to me for how they inhabit a corridor or anteroom between Language Poetry and the lyric. They love the line as a unit of sound and sense; syntactical relationships are clear even when how the referents relate might not be; associations feel spontaneous but not arbitrary, assertive but not labouring to subvert lyric convention. The writing doesn’t appear effortless; the discipline of its attention and choices reminds me of an animal’s stillness as it confirms the origin of a sound or scent (what Howe wrote about Simone Weil’s work, that it’s “tense with effort,” could apply to her own). And as the animal is in that moment, the poems – for all their concerns with justice, with ethics, with others – are, resolutely, alone. They are deeply, naturally, weird.

When I left the west for Toronto, Catholicism was among the things I abandoned. It was, like the landscapes and work I grew up with, thrown into relief against a hyper-urban aestheticised agnosticism whose cathedral, back then, was the bar. Location became inseparable from dislocation. I had just published my first book and felt claustrophobic in my own anecdotes. Despite not really having a style, I wanted to blow it up. The way Howe’s work lingers in the temporary felt spacious, accommodating. The poems don’t make a home of the temporary so much as find its midpoint, wander through its empty house, look out from the middle of it. That this suggests a luxury of time the temporary wouldn’t seem to possess is part of the work’s effect. Time passes differently in the mind. The poems are like gaps that expand in the narrative when we realise that each of us is essentially wandering in our own wilderness.

Often, reading her Selected Poems, I was in over my head. At the same time, phrases, lines, passages would surprise with unpredictable and uncanny accuracy, abstractions articulated with an unsettling precision that’s felt in the way that proximity to a cliff edge is felt. “Loss is the fulfillment of the Law,” she writes in “Conclusively.” And in the same poem, disarming candour: “I can hear the hour, this never / happened to me before.” (Franz Wright wrote of it as “one of Fanny Howe’s poems in which I stand in hopeless awe”.) Do the great abstracts condition perception or arise from it? Who knows. In “The Nursery”

A plane above the patio

wakes the silence

and my infant who raises

his arms to see

what he’s made of

In the poems’ burgeonings and outward gestures, though, live doubts. Howe converted to Catholicism at 40. “Being called religious is embarrassing,” she says in one of her many interviews. “It suggests a certainty far from true.” The lineage of her belief was not only that of the mystics – of Weil, whom she loved – but of the conflicted, the agnostic, and the atheist visionaries – poets, philosophers, civil rights activists, theoretical physicists. Virginia Woolf may have said there is no God, but she still, Howe writes:

sees an aura of light around the objective world that she wants to capture and pass along. While the shimmer was a millimetre away from her face, she only had words to express what she experienced of it.

And to be aware of that aura required silence, time and oneliness.

Not a typo, not “loneliness”; though you can’t unsee it.

In “O’clock,” the final poem in the Selected, she writes: “Into the forest I went walking – to get lost”. But also: “I have backed up / into my silence.” Retreating into silence as into the corner of a stable condition while simultaneously wandering through uncertain terrain is a paradox fundamental to the later books; and it’s through the later books that I found, am still finding, my way into thinking about how to explore a relationship to faith and belief while no longer being, myself, a believer.

Among the things Howe hauls around in the peripatetic’s dreaded suitcase – having made herself purposefully homeless in part out of, as she says in her final Paris Review interview, “a neurotic fear of being stuck anywhere” – is the question posed by Marilynn Robinson in her essay “On Human Nature”: “Does religion manifest a capacity for deep insight, or an extraordinary proneness to delusion? Both, perhaps, like the mind itself.” Howe’s investment in the soul is an investment in the mind, which is an investment in the body, in how the brain works. Her experience of soul emerges as a conversation with psychology, inheritance, ethics, conditioning, the luck of the draw, wishful thinking. In her 2003 collection Gone she asks:

Was the chasm between her mind

and things

constituted by the intellect’s catalogue

or by the presence of senses

[. . . . ]

or by a sticky sub-atomic soul

Writing Gone, she says, “opened up the fact that doubt was my subject.” It wasn’t a spiritual revelation. She’d been “in love with a drunk” and had her heart broken. “And that abyss you fall into is doubt plus doubt plus doubt plus doubt.” She was 60. The wreckage clarified “an impulse to preserve something original. It’s almost not possible to live without that.”

For the mystics, the Via Negativa has a destination, even if that destination can only be spoken of, at least in this life, in terms of what it is not. The task of this mortal coil is not the arrival at that something, it’s the impulse to preserve; or, it’s the preservation of the impulse. And who doesn’t want to believe in “something original” in the world, in ourselves, that’s worth preserving? Indeed, Howe identifies it as “a religious action everybody has, whether they like it or are terrified of it.” I wondered whether it is possible to, in a manner of speaking, throw out the Baby Jesus story and keep the bathwater. To follow the disciplined strangeness and ecstasy of the mystics without their belief in its origins.

Since that early stage of my writing life, many poets past and present have shown me that it is. “I do think that atheism is the great ground for it all⁠,” Howe says; “that if you haven’t experienced atheism fully, you can’t grasp the shock of believing anything.” Her work is particular for me in how fresh the shock remains – the shock of how difficult, even brutal, belief can be in its demands for attention, its complicated joys – and how interested she is in maintaining its charge. This seems a possible avenue of solace. Not religious belief, but the state of being interested in the shock of not having it. Might Howe’s insight about atheism apply in the reverse? Might an experience of belief make for a more interesting atheism?

Though “the arguments for God’s existence are uniformly bad,” says the philosopher John Searle, it remains a hypothesis that logic can neither prove nor disprove. In a video interview with Robert Lawrence Kuhn, he tells a story of dining as a student with Bertrand Russell, who, when asked the first thing he’d say to God at the pearly gates, responded “You didn’t give us enough evidence.” Religious belief, Searle says, is connected to the desire for justice, and though logic leaves him no choice but agnosticism, he’s “suspicious of believing something we desperately want to believe.” This suspicion is active in Howe’s poems. She called herself an “atheist Catholic” in 2016, and a “pagan Catholic” in her last interview this year. Nevertheless, she affirms her faith in the “truth behind all the idiocy in the Catholic Church,” a faith consistently informed by her Marxist activism. She has always been frank about her attachment to the material world: “I won’t be able to write from the grave / so let me tell you what I love: / oil, vinegar, salt, lettuce, brown bread, butter, / cheese and wine, a fireplace” (“O’Clock”). In the later collections, while the poems continue to pursue the apophatic, their gnomic phrasings, it is as if much of what is theoretical about faith and truth has burned away, revealing its setting: a fridge bleeding rusty water onto a linoleum floor, beloved companions, persistent wars, the quaver in a child’s innocence, a single cup and a single bowl, creaturely pleasures of a pub drink, a bed. As she writes in her acknowledgements to Come and See (2011):

What I saw was what I became: that is, one of the people aging in various stages of usefulness, unbelief and loneliness, a relic of the twentieth century and its ceaseless wars, failures and technological advances, and a lover of films that helped me understand and survive these conditions [. . . . ] Movies generally gave me a meditative and focal point for my sense of things, as did the liturgy at the cathedral Kazanskaya and the offices at Glenstal Abbey and music. I saw the paintings of Peter Sacks in an upstairs gallery in New York and tried to answer the question: What did you see?

This reminds me of Robinson’s writing on faith: “an honest inquirer into its nature might spend an afternoon listening to Bach or Palestrina, reading Sophocles or the Book of Job.”

The speaker of “Oxford” turns up in that place intent on purchasing a copy of Thomas Merton’s The Seven Story Mountain. She asks directions to the city centre and we accompany her past “the Phoenix Cinema on Walton Street / where you can bring your wine into the film. / Asbestos, / white dust, condiments, Pret Manger,” with “Blake’s engravings of the double bind” in mind – “I made this fruit for you. Don’t eat it!”– only to find the book, and its comforts, out of print. Exhaustion. “Everything you see is finished./ Even the ground underfoot and ahead.“ But it’s the poem’s first lines that strike me in the audacity of their pathos. “Homeless and never sadder / dragging bags, spending money.” We’re not supposed to write things like that. Never sadder. Many poets, I’d guess, would have trouble letting that stand. It’s too much. It’s too little. But especially when recalled in the light of later lines, it also invokes the work of trying to find any other possible way to say this before coming back around to the unavoidable and utterly human fact of the matter. Which in no way decreases the discomfort, even the cringe, at reading them. She wasn’t afraid of this. Howe was an avowed student of failure, and her poems are full of such moments.

In Second Childhood (2014), “Loneliness” insists, despite religious and secular assurances that suffering instructs – what is not killed by it is made stronger, etc. – that “Nothing great happens as a result of loneliness. / Your character flaws remain in place.” Near the end of the poem we read that “shame and loneliness are almost one. / Shame at existing in the first place. Shame at being / visible, taking up space, breathing some of the sky, / sleeping in a whole bed, asking for a share.” The poem leaves us with the insight only that each makes more of the other, a cycle of isolation. This might seem difficult to square with Howe’s belief that her birth-assignment was to nurture “the spirit of childhood,” “to keep the soul fresh and clean, and to not let anything bring it down”.

There are also many passages of contentment, wonder, and joy in her collections, even if modest, and complicated: “I climb back upstairs with a hot water bag. / Tomorrow I get everything I need. / I mean today. I did” (“The Grotto”). The paradox of simultaneous belief and unbelief, truth and doubt, joy and despair, is the source from which she drew (“paradox is deep,” she says) to do what she identifies for the Paris Reviewinterviewer as her job – to provide an “antidote to cynicism”. It’s a reason we need to read her now. It’s also a reason – in times hostile to, among other things, difficult, serious art – to go on making it, even as it’s hard to see why it matters, even as it appears brutally insufficient. “Disappointments are everywhere waiting to catch you,” Howe writes in “Doubt,” “and an ironic realism is always convincing.”

What she published more than two decades ago is equally, differently, relevant now:

When all the structures granted by common agreement fall away and that ‘reliable chain of cause and effect’ that Hannah Arendt talks about – breaks – then a person’s inner logic also collapses. . . . Yet strangely it is in this moment that doubt shows itself to be the physical double to belief; it is the quality that nourishes willpower, and the one that is the invisible engine behind every step taken. (“Doubt”)

Fanny Howe died July 8 at the age of 84. In her final interview she says that the old vocabulary doesn’t work for her anymore, as it doesn’t, perhaps, for many of us. “A lot of the words, devotion and prayer, have been destroyed for me by the world we have now that’s creeping in. They seem sentimental and literally impossible.” In poetry, she saw “a place where you connect your doubts to the things you don’t doubt.” What did you see?she asks us. Where are the contradictions, the paradoxes? What doubts emerge from your belief, and vice versa? “Free-floating doubt wouldn’t trigger the lightning that contradiction does,” she says. Those flashes illuminate new paths, make old ones look strange. When asked what she thinks of the Bible, she says “That one’s good. Because it’s insane.” “Insane” is a favourite adjective.

Cynicism is easy to fall back on when it seems the only thing able to grow in these conditions. Equally inadequate, though, according to Howe, are the sentimental “old hope-filled words” that obscure the problem. Both rely on an overconfidence in what we believe, and what we believe we know. What we see, and the vocabulary to describe it, change; and “multitudes succumb to the sorrow induced by an inexact vocabulary” (“Doubt”). It’s a sharper take on William Carlos Williams’ often quoted lines from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” I haven’t yet read Howe’s final book of poetry and prose, Manimal Woe (2021). It’s sad to read the work of a beloved writer knowing it will be the last. But two additional lines from Williams’ poem gesture toward a paradox I think she’d like: “Listen while I talk on / against time.”

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Karen Solie will be teaching on the autumn course ‘Writing With …’

The next event North Sea Poets event is The Rhyme of Things: a new approach to metaphor with Don Paterson on July 26th. Tickets are still available!

Get all the course/event details at northseapoets.com 🌊