Fanny Howe wrote to the end of her 84 years, leaving behind more than fifty books of poetry, prose, and essays, published across a half century. This staggering rate of production is perhaps attributable to the profound restlessness—both geographic and spiritual—that guided Howe’s life. As Howe remarked in her final interview, “If I could say I was assigned something at birth, it would be to keep the soul fresh and clean, and to not let anything bring it down.” To keep the soul fresh is to forgo the security that typically accompanies maturation, instead embracing solitude, transience, and above all else, uncertainty. Howe’s fragmented, digressive prose reflects these itinerant preoccupations, and her novels often feature protagonists who are compelled, or forced, to upend their lives and roam into the unknown. Hers are afflicted, searching characters, “lost souls” who challenge what it means to be found.
Holy Smoke, rereleased by Divided Publishing, is one such peripatetic narrative, following a mother’s serpentine journey across North America to find her missing daughter. Originally published in 1979, Holy Smoke is very much a reflection of its time, encapsulating a decade marked by political disillusionment and paranoia. The narrator’s addled psyche, documented through diary entries, mirrors a nation struggling to make meaning from the wreckage of 1960s idealism amid increased government surveillance and deceit. A former political radical, the narrator now leads a reclusive life in New York City, concerning herself with mothering, poetry, and Catholicism. She suspects that her daughter was abducted as part of a conspiracy involving J, a “would-be revolutionary” and the father of her child. Cast into the role of an amateur detective, she must follow a trail of gnomic clues and navigate a shadowy underground network populated by hard-boiled agents, criminals, and radicals. The clues lead the narrator to a cultish Christian encampment in New Hampshire, a deserted plantation along the Mississippi, and a seedy bar in Cuba, among other places. Along the way, she dreams that Lee Harvey Oswald attacks her while spewing vitriol against Jackie Kennedy and Jack Ruby; she narrowly misses Fidel Castro in Havana; at random, she declares that “the North Vietnamese are winning.” Fact and fiction collide to unproductive ends. The narrator claims, at the start, to be on “the track of Truth,” but the clues she accumulates do not coalesce into a coherent narrative. Her wheels spin; her path spirals.
Howe wrote Holy Smoke during the height of postmodern fervor, and the novella manifests many of the formal and thematic concerns of Pynchon, DeLillo, and Calvino. A work of bricolage, the novella blends its pulp plot with erudite musings on philosophy and religion. It retains many crime and conspiracy tropes while undermining the genres’ conventional aims: suspense and resolution. The investigation neither logically builds in a way that invites speculation, nor does it lead to definitive answers, even after the mother comes head-to-head with her daughter’s ostensible captors. Unreliable, if not insane, the narrator’s account cannot be taken at face value. While interrogating the narrator, a psychologist-cum-agent assures the narrator that he and his cronies are real people, not symbolic manifestations of her paranoid fantasies. But there is good reason for the reader to believe otherwise. When the narrator visits a Dog-Faced Woman who is said to possess prophetic powers, the hybrid creature fails to divine the location of the narrator’s daughter. She does, however, offer some parting wisdom: “They will give names to your business, like Lost Her Marbles, but you must ignore them.” Throughout, the narrator has visions of a world-weary Virgin Mary who delivers acidic quips such as, “Anyone who speaks of ‘growth’ is a phony and should be blown away.” Characters affirm her nutty reality but do not elucidate it. In true postmodern fashion, Holy Smoke cuts short interpretive leaps that might lead to stable ground at every turn, withholding catharsis from narrator and reader alike. The search itself is the point.
Holy Smoke’s poetic prose evinces this on a sentence-by-sentence level, too. “Construct a magic circle, made of good deeds, around your self, for self-preservation, if only.” This staccato phrasing complicates what could be a straightforward sentiment. Bracketed off with a comma, the interpretive potential of “if only” expands, viable both as a qualification and as a subjunctive flick of the wrist. Howe has been linked with the Language poets of the 1970s, alongside her older sister, Susan Howe. An artistic outgrowth of poststructuralism, the movement sought to destabilize traditional uses of language in order to draw attention to its constructed, material nature. Holy Smoke frequently lays bare its deconstructions. When the narrator reveals that her daughter has disappeared, she takes to splicing: “Child Hood” left, “Mother Hood” is in shock, but she needs “Child Hood”: “In the whole world, this is the saddest truth, accounting for the suffix Hood, which shields the truth from even the bright light of the stars.” Here, grief envelops discrete linguistic units—“Hood” acquires its own pathos. Elsewhere, in a two-pagedigression, the narrator catalogs words and phrases that she associates with five infinitives: to eat, to sleep, to want, to kill, to love. By the time she reaches the final infinitive, her associative faculties lose steam, abruptly morphing into an incantation of permutations: “to eat to sleep to want to kill / to want to eat to sleep to kill…” These semantic games, superfluous in terms of plot advancement, further reveal the narrator’s state of discombobulation. In Holy Smoke, language cannot be trusted to fulfill its pragmatic function, to orient the self within the social world. Although frightening, this state of linguistic affairs is also liberating, permitting playful experimentation that opens up semantic, and ultimately, existential possibility. If language mediates reality, then it can be wielded to create new ways of being in the world.
The novella’s experiments extend beyond language, too. Images are interspersed throughout, including diagrams, maps, collaged angels, and charcoal drawings by illustrator Colleen McCallion. Near its opening, Holy Smoke includes Robert Smithson’s “Dialectic of Site and Nonsite,” a preparatory fragment for his earthwork Spiral Jetty. Through this dialectic, Smithson conceived of a sculpture that collapses spatial boundaries between metaphor and location, figuring as a material synecdoche. As the narrator takes off in a helicopter near Holy Smoke’s end, she detects a question mark–shaped stone jetty. A wink and a nod to Smithson’s earthwork, Howe pushes its message of multiplicity a bridge further, into indeterminacy.
Despite its playful language games and genre bending, though, Holy Smoke is at heart an earnest account of grief. In this regard, it doesn’t neatly square with postmodern aesthetics. Before the narrator’s daughter disappears, she appears to be reeling from an intangible loss—that of the dream of the 60s. She drinks to keep the past at bay; she pursues freedom of the flesh and soul through celibacy; she savors the increasingly shrinking scope of her existence. She dreams, at the novella’s start, that her real name is “Anon.” If only existentially, she seems content to disappear, having lost the will or capacity to engage with the world. There is a tragic irony, then, that her daughter does instead. Grief wrenches her from acquiescence into mobility. In fact, the entire “conspiracy” can be read as an outré metaphor for the need to act. As a gruff operative puts it, “We’ve come all this way, and we’re damn busy men, to get you to act. For the first time in your life.”
In Howe’s 1999 essay, “Bewilderment,” she describes the titular state as an ethics and a poetics that governs her work. She favors characters, like Holy Smoke’s narrator, who are “unable to handle the complexities of the world, or the shock of making a difference.” They do not have the makings of the heroes who comprise linear narratives of “imitation and success.” Rather, they call for narratives that operate by a dream-like, recursive logic, transmitting the experience of “non-sequential, but intensely connected, time-periods and the way they impact on each other, but lead nowhere.” These stories, in other words, generate a spiraling effect, à la Smithson’s jetty. Though I am here, I am also there again and again—this revelation suspends normal epistemological operations, casting doubt upon clung-to notions of causality and growth. To be bewildered, cognizant of life’s spiraling motion, is to crash into the limits of human knowledge while simultaneously approaching, yet never grasping, something like the truth. “Bewilderment circumambulates, believing that at the center of errant or circular movement, is the axis of reality.”
If postmodernism aestheticizes the crisis of knowledge, then Howe’s bewilderment aestheticizes the crisis of faith that follows. The bewildered narrator of Holy Smoke holds paranoia in tension with faith. She has transferred her trust in social transformation into a trust in spiritual salvation, but not without ambivalence. Her religious conversion is a central point of contention in the novella, an index of her retreat from social responsibility (alongside her interest in poetry). And it is unclear whether the fallout from this transference stems from external forces (the conspiracy) or her self-punitive, paranoid psychology. Howe pits politics and religion against one another neither to assert a correct hierarchy nor to neatly reconcile the two. A poor single mother, the narrator lacks the resources to synthesize and realize her multiple selves: revolutionary, mother, poet, and Catholic mystic. As she remarks at the novel’s close:
“Pressure, we all agree, is often put on the laboring force, and energy is released, sometimes violent, sometimes benign, until that pressure is removed again, by the rich and powerful perhaps. Daily we anonymous many lose more and more, including our children, our jobs, our lovers, our health and trust, until we are left only with our understanding of thermodynamics (order and disorder).”
This statement is both an indictment of class struggle and an expression of epistemological humility. The narrator’s profound doubt in the capacity for sustained social progress opens up faith in the transcendent, for meaning that enacts itself upon human beings cyclically. To return home, the narrator jumps from a helicopter, “descending by air in spirals, into the dank center of human vapors.” Just like holy smoke, the novella’s center does not hold, but the narrator nonetheless grasps for it, spiraling as she does. That which lies therein is faith itself.
Howe’s work draws amply from her personal life, and it is tempting to read her biography in the novella. At the time of publication, she had worked for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), married and divorced fellow activist Carl Senna, and brought four children into the world. She would convert to Catholicism just three years later. Perhaps the narrator served as a vessel through which Howe grappled with her religious curiosity. Then again, across Howe’s work, the grappling never ceases; the material world—with its inequities and cruelties—is ever-present, commanding attention. In her later works, Howe’s abolitionist politics interfuse with her mystical faith, imbuing the need for salvation, on this earth and beyond, with urgency. Though her characters may be ill-equipped to locate meaning and effect change, they continue to try. Howe tried throughout her lifetime, continuously uprooting herself to revitalize this imperative. Her corpus is a testament to this valiant effort.
Caroline Reagan
Caroline Reagan reads and writes in New York.