Out of the Seeming Blue: On Fanny Howe’s “London-rose”
Fanny Howe | London-rose | Semiotext(e) | April 2022 | 71 Pages
“When I was a child I was hyperconscious of the silence surrounding all matter,” writes Fanny Howe in an essay on Edith Stein, the twentieth-century German philosopher who died in Auschwitz in 1942. Howe was born right before Stein’s death, during a lunar eclipse in 1940, to a playwright mother and a civil rights attorney father. Shortly thereafter, her father joined the American fight in World War II, and Howe supposes that these years of patient yearning for her father’s return stoked an obsessive interest in absence and void. She recounts early memories of lying in her bedroom, where “the sun fell around the walls as a living presence that I called (secretly) God.” As she grew older, and tried to penetrate this loving body of light and listening with her curiosity, it fled from her, even turned against her. The loss of this gentle state of being led her to language, and her prolific output of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction over more than five decades represents the serial attempt to put words to this first and shining silence.
“Much of my writing has been an effort to rearrange, rewrite the word ‘God’ by filling up pages with other names,” she writes in another essay on Simone Weil, a convert to Catholicism like Howe and a lifelong influence. Words, to Howe, tend toward something unsayable that precedes or extinguishes speech. She has described her own writing as “more like drawing an invisible figure than painting what was in front of me.” A writer who seeks such silence is in deep trouble, one might think. Language, after all, can only offer nothingness a word. At many points in Howe’s writing, she has questioned the purpose of her vocation. “I could just as well have been a barmaid or a mailman,” she writes in one essay. Even in her most recent novel, London-rose, published in 2022 by Semiotext(e), the unnamed female narrator who much resembles Howe pauses to ask herself: “What have I been looking at when there is nothing there to see?” That is exactly the point: nothingness—the mute fact of being—is the ultimate object of Howe’s vision. For years, she has stared at the invisible, the unmanifest, and seen it anyway. It is only sufferers who need a name for the silence we live with, who are unable to relinquish hope. “Will I be happier if I call God Brahman? Will I be happier if I call God Divine?” Howe asks. “I will only be happier if I write a poem.”
•
Suffering and seeking are two major subjects of Howe’s fiction, and London-rose is no exception, written in the 1990s but published for the first time last year. The characters in her novels are often desperate and downtrodden, drifting and hoping. They are in touch, each of them, with deep currents of faith and privation. They want “to be known, to add up, to be necessary,” but instead they struggle inside small, ordinary lives. The narrator of London-rose has left one office job in the US for another in the UK, where she’s beginning a two-year contract as an error corrector. She documents her work traveling around the British Isles to speak with teachers and administrators in an effort to standardize grading systems internationally in a series of diaristic, increasingly esoteric fragments.
“The person who is correcting for a living is impotent,” writes Howe. “Even if this person can identify the solution to the problem that is creating the errors, she is silenced.” Her job humiliates her and fills her with rage. In one instance, her boss insists that she spend hours tracking data on a defective computer rather than listen to her observation that keeping handwritten notes would be more efficient. The office worker, she notes, is meant to be as interchangeable as “an orange in a supermarket.” She is not supposed to have a particular name, or voice. It matters not that she would rather spend her days taking the Eucharist or working on her amateur film projects; she must show up at her desk and work, even though she hardly knows who her work benefits and doesn’t recognize herself in her contribution:
How does the office worker sustain her pretense of interest in the impersonal agency for which she works? The adventure of coffee, lunch, a bit of gossip, pensions? Work all day and file for a company in which you have no “say”—just for pay—and see how the bitterness finds a way to be expressed.
Her bitterness grows, inflecting her life in London: “The city is dirty, gulping pollution from the stuff of cars and buses, and by nine the working people look defeated, in their dark slightly shabby clothes.” Twice a week, she walks across the gray Heath to see her psychiatrist. On the couch, she fantasizes that she’s already dead, but tells her doctor that she’d have to quit her job before she could kill herself. “I’m embarrassed by my own letters to others,” she writes, “exposing the bitterness I am feeling. I walk around the flat alone, when it’s at its worst, wanting to die. It’s as if I’d been sipping poison for the past ten years and it was now beginning to work.” She is beset by physical ailments in addition to her depression. The pain is immense, brutalizing. She can hardly bear to go on. Yet she must continue to travel across the country for her job. Everywhere she goes, cruelty and indifference stare back at her. “What would Simone Weil say if she saw the world now?” she asks. “Factory work is more productive than ever to the people who will never see it . . . People walk past workers as if they are plastic statues, leaves, ladders.”
The interns under her guidance sense her disaffection and sorrow. She doesn’t recognize these young people. It’s as if they are “a new breed of human like an apricot poodle.”At a dinner where she’s been charged with providing the interns inspiration, she realizes that she’s been waiting for somebody to give her permission to quit her job. “Someone never will,” she thinks. “I have to act. But how can I, when I have to make a living?” She starts writing practice resignation letters, but can’t bring herself to send one to her boss. As ever, she fears having no money to support her filmmaking and no health insurance to cover her medications and therapy. She wishes she were the kind of person who could, like the characters in some of Howe’s other fiction, commit wildly to her own life through decisive action. Instead she wavers and suffers. She seems to need to believe her hope first, before she can have it. The thinkers who came before her, like Weil and Stein, reshaped their lives based on an inner conviction she herself struggles to find. How should she? She calls her doctor for more medication to bear the dread she lives with. He gives her loads of sleeping pills despite knowing she’s a suicide risk. “Fruitful, and frightful, pain,” she writes after taking them. “Beyond here, words don’t go.”
•
Simone Weil and Edith Stein—tragic figures of lifelong concern to Howe—both converted from agnostic Judaism to Catholicism around the age of thirty. “Anyone who tries, as [they] did, out of a systematic training in secularism, to forge a rhetoric of belief, is fighting against the odds,” she writes in the prose poem “Doubt,” from her 2003 collection Gone. Conversion, Howe comes to believe, does not hinge on an external stimulus, but rather an ardent effort to change one’s inner vocabulary. “You have to make yourself believe,” she writes. “Is this possible? Can you turn ‘void’ into ‘God’ by switching the words over and over again?” This question haunts Howe’s study of Weil and Stein. Howe, a convert to Catholicism at forty, was not therefore saved from maddening doubt, and she regards Weil and Stein with awe and envy for the strength of their certainty.
“How does a change in vocabulary save your life?” Howe asks. “Replacing one word with another word for the same thought—can this actually transform your feelings about things?” To be sure, this question goes to the heart of religious conversion, but it is also the poet’s question as she goes about her business. The poet waits for a feeling, a flood of happiness only the right word can bring. A word emerges out of the poet’s deep silence, the black of the throat, already formed yet somehow new. According to Howe, Weil and Stein both ought to be considered poets. Not only did each produce works that are rightly called poems, but each demonstrated in even their denser philosophical writings a particular “longing for a conversion that words might produce,” which is the foremost hope of poetry. It is this kind of longing for transformation, too, that might bring one to the therapist’s couch, in search of new words for one’s condition. To draw forth these unsaid, extant words is the supernatural task for the patient as well as the poet. Both share with the religious convert the desire for change, to be changed, as all sufferers yearn for some knowledge that will, unlike all the other knowledge that has come before, actually help.
The celibate might provide both example and method. Stein and Weil lived the majority of their lives as celibates, wedded, as it were, to their attention and waiting. Stein entered the novitiate as a Discalced Carmelite in 1934, while Weil’s self-denial and renunciation never found a precise form in the Church. Celibacy, for each of them, was a genuine search for a different type of knowledge, a technique not of privation but of radical fullness and hope. As Howe writes,
A turning inside out of physical perception is the hope behind voluntary celibacy. What we think of as being a metaphor—a correspondence between the images of the world and the feelings they inspire in us—seems to be reversed for the long-term solitary. Unlike the body of a beloved lover whose arms and legs enfold you, give you joy, then part and depart, the air and your own senses of hearing, seeing, feeling become your companions and spiritual oxygen. They stay with you. The visible world is soon emblematic of the intentions of the invisible. Invisible, as in Amor, comes first…
By denying sex its ordinary locus in human relation, the celibate drives sex inward, into her own being and her senses that open to experience. “Celibacy,” the narrator of London-rose announces, “is not cerebral but blushes like a salamander and intensifies all colors.” Celibacy, that is, does not depend upon another for provision, but calls forth otherness—knowledge—from deep within, the way a salamander changes color according to its shifting sense of the physical world. Change comes not from the outside but from a strong and pending reserve of interiority. The question for Howe, and her narrator in London-rose, is how to shift one’s dark interior into something like light.
•
Rattled by a night of pill-induced dreams, the narrator travels to Ireland for work. She takes a solitary drive to a cave under the Burren, where “silver water showers flowed through holes, [and] there were bats and a bear’s bones from before history.” As she descends, she becomes terrified and claustrophobic and flees back outside. “I didn’t want to know nothingness,” she says. She is torn in two by fear of God’s emptiness and a desire to surrender to it. “Celibacy’s bed,” she notes, is “a triangle.” What intervenes in the human soul’s flight into absence is God. One must be with one’s own darkness, though it terrifies. That night, she has two dreams in a row: in one, she’s in her childhood home with loving parents, but she’s her age, an old woman, not the age of a child. Then she has “a hell dream about my same family robbing me.” It turns out they are living in an apartment building where both lives are happening at the same time.
She gets sicker and sicker. In Limerick her host serves her porridge and whiskey, which makes her the sickest she’s ever been. She cannot take her job any longer. Depleted, anxious, she returns to London and tells her boss she wants to quit. He says she should go away for a while instead. “Change your vocabulary back to poetic,” the boss's secretary advises her. But she’s been moving—she’s been trying to change. Is the modern world so evacuated of poetry that no amount of wandering can lead one to the right words? Earlier in the novel, the narrator travels to Buchenwald with a professor she’s only just met, who is also trying to confront nothingness. After a day walking around the silent, haunted camp, she returns to her hotel room and writes in her pad to never forget a certain Mayakovsky poem, which begins, “We will smash the old world / Wildly / we will thunder / a new myth over the world” and ends with the exhortation “We will invent new roses / roses of capitals with petals of squares.” To invent new roses is not to create from whole cloth: it is to turn thought into the unthinkable. Out of what is, what hasn’t yet been becomes. The crucial act for Howe is thus one much like reading: thundering a new myth over the world, interpretation, staring again and again at the same until it becomes different.
The narrator has another dream which provides her with just such an interpretation. An angel comes down to inform her that she is a great poet, not a failure. After all, she’s been a poet since she was fourteen! “I liked the way my years of labor were enough to reassure me of my status. I was, in a sense, being reproached because I should have known it already. But I was happy.” Perhaps an angel is one who can turn misery inside out, and see it as happiness. How do we, in our small lives of both hell and love? We must learn how to read, how to misread. Near the end of the book, the narrator mistakes a sign that says “Lansdowne” as “London-rose.” Out of the seeming blue, she invents a new rose of a capital, as Mayakovsky dictated long ago. His old poem has come true in new speech, with a new participant. Writing, to Howe, is always a kind of magic reading, reading the future inside the present. The novel, in fact, ends with a presentiment of that future, and the worldwide rebellion that takes place there. It will be “a revolution based on an emotion,” the human horde rising up in mystified hope. “Music must take care of the children,” she writes. Music, like happiness or poetry, is the trace of God inside nothingness, the rearrangement of silence, and must be fought for, found and refound, profoundly reinterpreted, until the world be made from it, as it will be one day, through a titanic effort that we begin here, that we are always beginning.