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[...] 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
My second wife is young, the age of my first son, who played guitar too long and has made nothing of his life. She is beautiful, and sparkles like jewels when she is wearing none: skin like gold, white teeth and clear blue eyes. We have two small children. The more I see other children, the more I think mine are the most attractive. Since I realized I was too old for guitar and married, I have had two good lives, with two good wives. I am a lucky man. When I ride in the country, not in circles but moving forward, all alone, I think what could happen to leave behind a widow. Nothing much would have to happen; my brother is younger than I, and already dead. But sometimes I think I will fall from the horse, hit my head or break my spine, with no one to help. I would leave the widow that much sooner, and she would marry again and have two lives, too, with two husbands. She is young enough for that, the way she shines. And then sometimes I think I can outlive them all.
the last line kinda moves me
[...] I had not wanted a dog, but the children loved him. It was true they did not fight so much now. The day my wife brought him home, my daughter held the dog in her arms and said, “This is the happiest day of my life.” Children are whores. They will say anything. But I thought it could be true.
lol
Des Esseintes' Last Book
after Huysmans
It was red, which pleased him. Small
and hard, it fit in his palm
as if it loved him and was listening
to the strange, murmurous thumps
of his ambivalent heart. How sleekly
the pages brushed his skin, like sunlight
after a late afternoon bathe, when
suddenly the world is believable
and for an instant he does not want to die.
Yet the empty shelves still sing to him, those slim
alabaster brides, calling him in
from the garden, raising a glass of light.
Through the brambles, one breaks out onto
a rock-cut stair down to the sea.
pretty
As for the relationship of my fictional characters to me, their author, I suppose it would depend on which characters you mean. Each has a slightly different relationship, I believe—I hope. I assume you mostly mean the protagonists, who sometimes have the burden of having a couple of things in common with me and sometimes don’t. I’m never writing autobiography—I would be bored, the reader would be bored, the writing would be nowhere. One has to imagine, one has to create (exaggerate, lie, fabricate from whole cloth and patch together from remnants), or the thing will not come alive as art. Of course, what one is interested in writing about often comes from what one has remarked in one’s immediate world or what one has experienced oneself or perhaps what one’s friends have experienced. But one takes these observations, feelings, memories, anecdotes—whatever—and goes on an imaginative journey with them. What one hopes to do in that journey is to imagine deeply and well and thereby somehow both gather and mine the best stuff of the world. A story is a kind of biopsy of human life. A story is both local, specific, small, and deep, in a kind of penetrating, layered, and revealing way. [...]
[...] In general, if a person were to watch me work—which I am grateful no one ever has—I suspect it might look like a lot of cutting and pasting of notes, stopping, starting, staring, intermittent flurries (as the weatherpeople say), sudden visitations (by invisible forces), the contemplation of the spines of various dictionaries and reference books stacked behind the computer, and much reheating of cold coffee (a metaphor and not a metaphor). But what it feels like is running as far as I can with a voice, a tuneful patch of a long, nagging idea. It is a daily struggle that doesn’t even always occur daily. From the time I first started writing, the trick for me has always been to construct a life in which writing could occur. I have never been blocked, never lost faith (or never lost it for longer than necessary, shall we say) never not had ideas and scraps sitting around in notebooks or on Post-its adhered to the desk edge, but I have always been slow and have never had a protracted run of free time. I have always had to hold down a paying job of some sort and now I’m the mother of a small child as well, and the ability to make a literary life while teaching and parenting (to say nothing of housework) is sometimes beyond me. I don’t feel completely outwitted by it but it is increasingly a struggle. If I had a staff of even one person, or could tolerate a small amphetamine habit, or entertain the possibility of weekly blood transfusions, or had been married to Vera Nabokov, or had a housespouse of even minimal abilities, a literary life would be easier to bring about. (In my mind I see all your male readers rolling their eyes. But your female ones—what is that? Are they nodding in agreement? Are their fists in the air?) It’s hardly news that it is difficult to keep the intellectual and artistic hum of your brain going when one is mired in housewifery. This is, I realize, an old complaint from women, but for working women everywhere it continues to have great currency.