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Oh, I don’t know. Those voices are remorseful, too—they’re voices of regret. In any case, when we write novels, we can’t choose sides. We have to be on everyone’s side—the woman’s, the man’s, the child’s. That’s what I find marvelous about novels, anyway—that they allow us to hear everyone.
in response to
I was surprised to notice, when I reread the book, that at the end of two of the women’s stories, there are counterpoints from men who are close to them. Why give the last word in a woman’s story to a man?
I suppose that character was a way of exploring what it is when one’s life is one’s art. But her extreme asceticism, the way she rejects whatever doesn’t serve her art—that’s not me at all. I don’t know if it’s obvious from reading that book, but I hate the Cheffe’s intensity—the way, for instance, she astounds the family she works for, laying out meals for them that they have absolutely no way to appreciate, or even to comprehend. And her intensity makes her totally unreliable, or at least means she can’t operate at her highest level. I hate all fanaticism, actually. What I aspire to in my own life is a certain kind of harmony. I don’t subscribe to the idea that we’d write better in a cave, alone—quite the opposite. When it comes to writing, one has to live as much as one can.
responding to
When you wrote The Cheffe (2016, 2019), were you thinking about your own artistic journey?
[...] The obvious issues with her outfits started coming up, that her bra straps were visible beneath the straps of her tank top, that the pants she wore when going out were too low-rise, but what bothered her mother often had less to do with how revealing her clothes were than with the strange ideas of style they seemed to involve, for example the ripped, intentionally distressed jeans she’d begun wearing, which her mother found especially offensive. Her mother would claim the jeans made her look poor, like she didn’t have anyone to take care of her, and her insistence that what her mother found ugly or ridiculous was in fact stylish only seemed to confirm her sense that her daughter was drifting away from her, falling under the sway of powerful, obscure, occult influences in the outside world. The only clothing her mother was still buying for her by the time she graduated from college was underwear—maybe she assumed there was no such thing as style when it came to underwear—and even after Navini had started working full-time her mother would furtively inspect her bras and panties whenever she did the laundry, taking note of all the fraying pairs she saw and then going out later to buy replacements, leaving them for Navini to find on her bed or dresser. Navini had found the heart to halt this practice only after the end of her first year in New York, confessing finally that she hardly wore the underwear her mother got her, that it wasn’t the kind of thing she or her friends wore these days. Her mother took the rejection in stride, but in retrospect the disclosure had come to seem needlessly cruel, and maybe it was for this reason, seeing all the tourists with their shopping bags in Midtown a couple of days earlier, that she’d decided to take her mother shopping during her visit, not just because it would be a way to spend time indoors, away from the cold, but also because it felt like a way of making amends, especially if it was her money they spent this time. She would help her pick out a few nice, stylish, more expensive items, some trousers and sweaters, an elegant coat to replace the ugly parka with the Scotiabank logo she’d gotten for free years before, things she could take back to Scarborough and wear proudly around the neighborhood, telling people they were gifts from her daughter in New York. It was true that her mother had never liked receiving gifts from her children, that she considered them a waste of money, but the more Navini considered it, the more drawn she was to playing the role of the hardworking, magnanimous daughter, the grown-up child who bought her working-class mother things she’d never been able to afford. She’d shared the idea hesitantly and her mother had, after some resistance, seemed genuinely moved, taking her by the hand and telling her she’d accept the gift proudly, that she’d be so happy to wear something that her daughter had bought her with her own hard-earned money.
need to think about why i find this so annoying. is it the passive feel of it all? it's weirdly cloying almost in a cut fruit poetry way. is it just not sufficiently funny?
[...] It was so typical of her mother to act like she wasn’t wanted, so manipulative of her to say she wished she hadn’t come, to try to hurt the daughter who was in fact the only one in her life who took the time to talk to her and try to understand her, though it was no use anymore, she went on, straining at the edge of her voice, she was too old to be manipulated like that now, her mother could no longer make her feel bad for things she hadn’t done, she was no longer a child and was too old to keep playing these stupid fucking games.
girlll just leave it alone
[...] The most beautiful woman in the world had become, after some years, the woman she found most beautiful, and the woman she found most beautiful had become, after a while, merely beautiful, merely nice-looking, turning, eventually, around the time Navini was sixteen or seventeen, into just another middle-aged Tamil woman in the neighborhood, just another aging immigrant whose appearance was unworthy of remark.
see this is sentimental in the most annoying cut fruit diaspora way. 'aging immigrant' is cheap.
[...] Whatever vague concept of truth I had previously tried to represent in pigment had evaded me, not because I lacked skill but because truth simply did not exist, especially not in art. Yes, I told myself, standing before the unstretched canvas, sipping from a jug of martinis Webb had fixed for us, I would try to take the low road. Wherever it led, I would take it, even if there wasn’t a road, even if it was just a dirt path or not even a path at all, a cornfield or a marshy swamp. Or even if, in all likelihood, the path to success was more like one of those human conveyor belts at the airport, I had to allow myself to take it. [...]
Well, he would go off to the lab, and I would scribble away and type and read. I had written short little novels that were like bad dreams, and randomly I wrote to an agent and sent him one of my manuscripts, because I had enough shame in me to know I had to make money for myself. He said I had to have a genre. I couldn’t just write random stuff like that. He sent me copies of three “sweet nurse” books—they were all about nurses who meet a man and fall in love, but there’s no sex—and told me to give it a shot. So I sat down and wrote West Coast Nurse (1963). Vietnam Nurse (1966) was more demanding, because the war was still happening and I felt responsible for getting it right. After I moved to New York, I went to visit WACs at their offices in Manhattan and talked to them about what it was like. I learned a lot with those books about how you write a novel, like, What’s the subplot? What’s the top plot? I did it just by doing it. The editors never really even read the manuscripts, which is why I could get away with writing a Vietnam narrative where the Vietcong was the hero.
lmao. legend
INTERVIEWER
There’s a story in Forty Whacks in which the narrator is writing to a shrink. Did you go see one?
HOWE
I’ve never been a shrink person myself, but I did go briefly because I was ordered to.
INTERVIEWER
Hence the irreverent tone.
HOWE
Well, I never stopped wisecracking or trying to make people laugh, no matter whether I was holding a gun to my head. I think probably everyone goes through a breakdown period, where something ruins your confidence, and that can be an interesting place to retreat to.
INTERVIEWER
Will you tell me about your relationship with Carl?
HOWE
That would be fine. Especially now that we’re both almost dead, it’s a good time to talk about what happened. Nothing was the same after we met. I mean, it was 1967, the civil rights movement was exploding. That was the heart of the heart, the actual breaking, in my life. Just being with someone as intelligent as he was, who was very conscious of what was happening, was a history lesson in the present. If I had just worked for CORE or done those obvious acts of resistance, it wouldn’t have been the same as getting that entangled in someone’s life. I became sort of frantically aware of the social value of writing.
INTERVIEWER
How did the two of you meet, exactly?
HOWE
I was editing a little magazine called Fire Exit with Bill Corbett, and Jonathan Kozol wrote to me and said that he had just met a very good writer whom he thought we should publish. He said, “You probably better meet him, but don’t fall in love with him.” I thought, Why would I? Carl came out to Cambridge from Roxbury and met me in my family house on Highland Street. My father had died, and I was helping my mother pack her things and send them to Ireland because she was moving back. Carl arrived in the middle of all that chaos, and he met my mother. We instantly were able to talk—intellectual, lively, political talk. That was our relationship—it was based in conversation that we produced three children in four years. I could have gone on and had ten children, like Harriet Beecher Stowe writing at the kitchen table while the kids played. I wouldn’t have minded. There was life, not artificial life but real life with laughter and mistakes, though there always were the stirrings of problems with us. The house was in Jamaica Plain, at 1 Robeson Street, and Carl’s mother lived with us. She was basically like my second husband. And we had lots of people living with us and staying there. I had a pot of beans going all day, bubbling for whoever came in. I’m sure we all have such a point in our life, when it’s literally like a pot of boiling beans. [...]
[...] She’d always assumed her mother was averse to abstract or speculative thought, but she became doubtful of this assumption now as she remembered how often she’d seen her mother reading in Tamil when she was younger, newspapers, magazines, novels, and biographies, anything she could get her hands on. Maybe, it struck her, the issue all these years had been purely linguistic, maybe her mother had shut down her attempts at conversation only because they were expressed in a language that she could, at best, speak haltingly, a language in which she inevitably appeared less intelligent than she really was.
come onnnn