Certain facts are fundamental. The first time I encountered Susan Howe she claimed her Irish roots. She told the Paris Review in 2012, ‘I’ve always felt a tremendous pull between Ireland and America, because of my parents – my mother being Irish, and my father being a New Englander from Boston. I felt torn between them – in the sense of allegiance to the word.’ In June 2015, Howe’s return to her mother’s native Dublin was a homecoming of real significance. She read her poems and prose in the newly refurbished Belvedere House at the top of North Great Georges Street. In James Joyce’s alma mater, Howe summoned the voices of Irish literary history: ‘I am a true Joycean’, she announced, ‘and I have always considered myself, at least partly, an Irish poet.’
With the publication of Howe’s selected essays in The Quarry and the republication of her seminal book, The Birth-Mark (both by New Directions), readers are invited to consider this preeminent writer in the context of the American literary tradition she draws on and reinterprets, and also as the Irish writer she was, at least partly, born to be. It is time for Dubliners to claim Howe as our own.
Born in Boston in 1937, Howe first travelled to Ireland as an infant in her mother’s arms in the summer of 1938. Her mother, Mary Manning, was an extraordinary figure in Irish literary life. A childhood friend of Samuel Beckett, Manning grew up in Dublin before moving to London to study drama. She and her mother Susan Manning are featured in Beckett’s first novel, Dreams of Fair to Middling Women, published in 1932. When Manning returned to Ireland from London she acted in plays in the Gate and Abbey Theatres, was directed by W.B. Yeats, and wrote several plays produced in Dublin. Later she would also publish three novels.
In 1935, Manning married Mark DeWolfe Howe, a professor at Harvard Law School, and she moved to the United States. They made a striking pair: a wild Irish writer and performer looking for new life across the Atlantic, and a law professor with Puritan leanings – serious, hardworking, a consummate scholar. Their daughter Susan inherited qualities from them both.
In Massachusetts, Manning founded The Poets’ Theatre and produced plays by Yeats, Beckett, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and many others. In 1955, she staged her adaptation of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, titled The Voice of Shem, in The Poets’ Theater.
Susan Howe’s childhood home was a wellspring of Irish poetry. Books lined the shelves of her father’s study, where her mother’s collection included works by Yeats, Synge, Swift, and Joyce. In a remarkable book published after her mother’s death, The Midnight (2003), Howe speculates,
Maybe one reason I am so obsessed with spirits who inhabit these books is because my mother brought me up on Yeats as if he were Mother Goose. Even before I could read, ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’ was a lullaby, and a framed broadside. ‘He wishes for the cloths of Heaven’ printed at the Cuala Press hung over my bed. I hope her homesickness, leaving Dublin for Boston in 1935, then moving on to Buffalo where we lived between 1938 and 1941, then back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, was partially assuaged by the Yeats brothers. She hung Jack’s illustrations and prints on the walls of any house or apartment we moved to as if they were windows. Broadsides were an escape route. Points of departure. They marked another sequestered ‘self’ where she would go home to her thought. She clung to William’s words by speaking them aloud.
To have known the Yeats brothers as ‘Jack’ and ‘William’ says enough about Manning’s position in literary Dublin. Howe’s literary preoccupations braid these strands together. The Irish strand is marked by a restlessness that lead her mother, like so many others, away from her native country, bound for something not quite certain. In The Midnight, Howe writes:
Mary Manning had crossed the Irish Sea several times, though never the English Channel, and had crossed the Atlantic Ocean both ways twice (third class). Economic survival tactics during a time of war, revolution, counter-revolution, and the traumatic birth of a nation, meant setting out as a poor relation […] Even into her nineties she kept leaving in order to arrive one place or another as the first step in a never ending process somewhere else.
An early encounter with Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man convinced Howe that she belonged in the Irish capital. After finishing high school, she followed her mother’s path to the Gate Theatre in 1955. Unlike her mother’s experience at the Gate under Micheál Mac Liammóir, Howe joined a company in decline. She stayed in Ireland as a paying guest in the family home of her mother’s friends, painted sets for Gate productions, and appeared on stage in a Restoration comedy in which she played a maid called Toilet. It turned out that the Ireland of her childhood – her mother’s Ireland – had changed. Yet the quality of conversation, the music of English on the Irish tongue, and the visual landscape made an impression that never left Howe as an artist. With her inauspicious beginning as a stage actor, Howe turned to visual art and became a painter. She returned to the U.S. and studied at the Boston Museum School of Fine Art.
A visual sense of words and their arrangements has always been central to Howe’s writing. She came to poetry through painting, perhaps responding to the examples of painter Jack and poet William Butler Yeats. When Howe became active as an artist in the early 1960s, both visual art and writing had gone through radical changes. New, increasingly abstracted, forms challenged her Modernist predecessors, and debts to Yeats, Joyce, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams.
Howe’s work is remarkably objective. She looks to the past for visionary, documentary evidence. She awakens slighted voices from history and brings them into contemporary focus. In this way, too, she is a writer with Irish sensibility: the tradition of literary greatness in this country is either a towering monument casting forbidding shadows or a beacon of light illuminating the paths we follow. Howe often finds her creative spark in the most obscure historical moments and fragments. She teaches patience in our time of fragmentary over-stimulation.
After discovering that her arrangements of words on gallery walls could also be read as poems, Howe emerged as an urgent voice in contemporary poetry. She has written numerous books of poems, beginning with Hinge Picture in 1974, through the masterful That This, which earned Howe the prestigious Bollingen Prize in 2011, placing her in the company of Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore.
As a poet, Howe works in particular ways. Using archive material, historical journals, letters, or even physical fragments of lace, bed hangings and photographs, she combines them into a documentary poetry that unfolds narrative while remaining mysterious, obscure, and redolent of a spirituality that reaches far back beyond the New World to a speculative past. She prints lines upside down, crossed-out, and overlapping. Each poem becomes its own visual object, while the poems collected in sequence offer a strangely beautiful accumulation of sound and sight. The first line of The Quarry commands, ‘singeth spells’, and there really is something magical about what Howe can do with words and the spaces between, the voices she summons from nowhere.
One of Howe’s greatest strengths is her ability to transition from a kind of fragmentary verse into crystal clear prose that can be startling in its insight. Her essays have become indispensible reading for anyone interested in cultural history, from the U.S. colonial period to contemporary art and writing. Her most famous prose work is the staggering My Emily Dickinson (1985), which contributed significantly to our current understanding of the Amherst poet. Howe’s essays show her to be both a scholar and a storyteller. She never gets bogged down in stodgy academicism, but rather she engages her subjects on her own terms as an artist. In a favourite line of hers, she states emphatically: ‘Kneel to intellect in our work / Chaos cast cold intellect back.’
Howe has no formal academic background. She became a professor without obtaining a degree, which sets her apart from the institutionalised ‘avant garde’ poetry of her contemporaries. Autodidacticism is the norm of our new age, and our interests have become at once more particular and more diffuse than ever. Howe finds her facts in the wilds of research libraries, places we may not see as radical and rebellious, but that she sees as something else entirely: ‘True wildness is like true gold; it will bear the trial of Dewey Decimal.’
In The Quarry, Howe orders her own essential facts. The selection of her essays (pieces of which often include poetry and other verbal fragments) is organised in reverse-chronological order, working from today back to the roots of her early art criticism. Her themes are often American, in essays dealing with Wallace Stevens (‘Vagrancy in the Park’), an elegy for her late husband, the philosopher Peter Hare (‘The Disappearance Approach’), 18th century theologian and leader of the First Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards (‘Errand’), and the father of pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce (‘Arisbe’). She also writes beautifully on the experimental films of Chris Marker (‘Sorting Facts’) and the writing of Charles Olson and Herman Melville (‘Where Should the Commander Be?’). Her most succinct autobiographical statement is included, titled ‘There Are Not Leaves Enough to Crown to Cover to Crown to Cover’.
Though it is not always on the surface, Ireland is enfolded in Howe’s accumulated narrative. It is the spiritual home, the vestigial flicker of an ancient and undying past. In the Stevens’ essay (the first and newest in the book), scenes from a park in Hartford, Connecticut remind her of that personal history:
its mixture of sun and shade, dwarf shrubs, climbers, rock-plants, their magical effects of green, and gold, and grey – the whole ‘atmosphere’ recalled my first experience of Ireland in 1947. After the war we spent the summer over there, and I used to play in Herbert Park near my grandmother’s house on Wellington Place in Dublin. Hartford was Dublin. Home in the world – away in the world – landscapes and language threaded.
Landscapes and language. Visual and aural. Place and imagination. These are Howe’s concerns and her materials.
When she arrived in Dublin in June, Susan told me that she had been looking back at A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, stunned by the movement of the language and the descriptions of Dublin’s green-grey nature. I had also, ironically, been drawn to Dublin through Joyce’s writing. (Though he warns the artist away from the Hibernian metropolis, the depth and specificity of his vision paints an attractive, if doomed, city of the imagination.) As she gathered herself to read in Belvedere House, a hush of some peculiar silence came over the room. She swore afterward that the spirit of Joyce was about the place. She writes in the Marker essay, ‘I call poetry *factual telepathy*.’ Reading her changed my life.
It is difficult to determine our personal histories in the great morass of cultural studies. Yet Howe speaks clearly of the personal struggle that attends her excavations of the past. She writes in ‘The Disappearance Approach’, which makes up one section of That This and is dedicated to the memory of her husband Peter Hare,
Storytellers in the expanding middle class eager for professional careers move across sites of struggle in ‘battleground’ fields. We are our soul but we haven’t yet got the dead of it. You steal on me you step in close to ease with soft promise your limit and absolute absence […] It could have been the instant of balance between silence, seeing, and saying; the moment before speech. Peirce would call this moment, secondness. Peter was returning to the common course of things – our world of signs
That is our common world. The communicable, the obscure, the silent. Gestures of thought, will, and action. Howe is a master arranger of verbal music and emotion, of documentary fact and spiritual apprehension.
My personal relationship with Susan began through written correspondence several years ago. It developed through common interest in Irish literary life and also the poets of the United States we both hold dear. Her correspondence became even more important to me after my mother’s sudden death in Paris in 2013. (They share remarkable similarities in character, both physical and intellectual.) When Susan wrote to comfort me after that loss, she once again drew on dual strands of our entwined poetics:
Your elegy is beautiful. Elegies do provide comfort, the writing of them, I am sure there will be more to come because all of your writing will be somehow connected to the shock of her absence for some time. Having spent so long on Stevens’ last poems and even Yeats’ uncomforting ‘Cuchulain Comforted’, the mystery and wonder of the cries of birds and their language-music we can never understand is a tribute, answer, and call.
Susan Howe is a New England writer with a scholar’s mind and an Irish heart. Her essays are some of the finest we have, and the opportunity to read them in two new volumes should be treasured – here in Dublin and far afield.
The Quarry, a selection of Susan Howe’s previously uncollected essays is out now, published by New Directions Books, along with a republished edition of her work The Birth-mark.
Words: Jonathan Creasy
Photos: Ruth Medjber
