One of the most heartening trends in fiction in recent years is the reissuing of so-called lost classics by writers whose work didn’t get the attention it deserved the first time round.
Twentieth-century female writers in particular have benefited from renewed attention. Penelope Mortimer, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym and Lucia Berlin are just some of the writers finding new audiences in current times. Closer to home, writer and editor Sinéad Gleeson has done sterling work in this respect with two fine anthologies, The Long Gaze Back and The Glass Shore, that showcase stories by Irish and Northern Irish female writers across four centuries.
Sometimes the story of the “forgotten” author is almost as good as the fiction itself. This is the case with Bette Howland, a single mother and working-class Jewish writer from Chicago who published three well-received books in a decade and then disappeared off the literary scene. Not so remarkable perhaps, except that these books — a memoir, W-3 (1974); the short story collections Blue in Chicago (1978); and Things to Come and Go (1983) — won their author Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships. Howland also had a close friendship with Saul Bellow, whose letters she kept. This only came to light after an American editor, Brigid Hughes, discovered a copy of W3 in a second-hand bookshop in 2015. By then the author was in her late 70s and had dementia — she died in 2017 — but with the help of her son, her work was recovered.
One of the most poignant details of the story is that Howland came close to not publishing anything at all. A failed suicide attempt in her early 30s (in an apartment owned by Bellow) became the basis of W3, where she depicted life as an in-patient on a psych ward in Chicago Hospital. The book was praised for its outward-looking focus. Howland preferred to render the milieu, the other patients and everyday routines of the ward, rather than trawling through her own dark interiors.
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The same tendency is noted by Rumaan Alam in his introduction to the reissue of Things to Come and Go: “So often, there’s a first-person narrator who wants to tell us about everyone but themselves.” Alam later remarks on the sense of urgency in her writing, which he views as the urgency of the artist to create.
Family gatherings
This need pulses through the three novella-length stories in the collection. In the opening piece, Birds of a Feather, a teenage daughter gives a spirited account of her extended, first-generation family, the “big, brassy yak-yakking Abarbanels”. Full of intrigue, the narrative is restless, bouncing from one rambunctious family gathering to the next, with little concern for locating the reader in the madness. Howland’s striking prose breathes life into the everyday, the domestic world sung with a lyric note: “Stirring his tea with a long tinkling spoon. Lemon swirled in the glass; yellow motes; sedimented sunlight … The neighbours kept their blinds down day and night, though the voices of daytime serials — organs swoops and swells — came through the screen.”
The Old Wheeze is a bravura take on loneliness and lost connections in a cold, ruthless city, as seen from multiple perspectives: a young boy, his elderly black babysitter, a single mother, and her divorcee boyfriend. Howland shows great flair in switching between the voices. The babysitter, Mrs Cheatham, is a brilliant creation, a straight-talker who extrapolates on race, class and gender issues in the America of the day: “Leave it to white folks. What wouldn’t they think up next?”
The voice is reminiscent of Edna O’Brien, with shades too of Jean Rhys: “Well, let him. Men, men — they had to be humoured. She ought to know. Her father had been a man, and so had Mr. Cheatham.” From her fear of going into her apartment block alone, to the way she sews money into the lining of her clothes to keep it safe, Mrs Cheatham is a devastating depiction of old age for a widow without means.
The final piece in this short collection, The Life You Gave Me, is a gut wrench from beginning to end, which works as a summary of Howland’s writing on the whole. A middle-aged daughter tells the story of her father, a former titanic figure now seriously ill in hospital: “To see him brought down, laid low, damaged, hurting, like any other injured creature — was to see him disgraced.”
Like a companion piece to the Alice Munro short story The Moons of Jupiter, Howland’s father-daughter relationship is marked by love, loyalty, disappointment, mixed signals, miscommunications, and the stark realisation for the narrator that the time to fix all these things is quickly running out: “Words had been spoken — plenty of words; but not the most bitter. Not the Last Word. Nothing that couldn’t be taken back. We hadn’t shot all the arrows in our quivers.”
