Inheriting the Library
Review: Susan Howe The Midnight, New Directions
$19.95, ISBN 0811215385
Susan Howe has been publishing since the mid-1970s and is considered by many to be among the leading poets in the US today. Often associated with the Language poets – radical American writers who came to the fore in the 1970s and 1980s – she also has affinities with mainstream Modernists such as Yeats, Eliot and Stevens. Her work combines a stringent lyric quality with the ability to absorb citations drawn from literary and historical texts, and a synoptic range of reference. Earlier books addressed questions of history and ethics, especially the representation of those pushed
to the margins of history. A recurring figure in these works was that of the father: often a metaphor for authorial, patriarchal, social or divine authority, and often depicted in terms of absence. If a thread of mourning for Howe’s own father, who died in 1967, can be discerned in this earlier work, The Midnight turns towards her mother, the Irish actress, director, playwright and novelist Mary Manning Howe, who died in 1999. Instead of the earlier poetry’s attention to war and colonial violence, The Midnight’s immediate
concerns are more domestic: familial ties, embroidered fabrics, and the process of reading. The work fans out from these starting points to explore the handing-on, through often-obscure lines of connection, of cultural motifs across generations and geographical boundaries.
The Midnight is, like most of Howe’s books, a hard-to-place item,
containing three poem-series and two long prose sections interspersed with photographs and illustrations. A book about books – books cited, inscribed, inherited, and loved – it is built around the editions of Yeats, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others that Howe inherited from her mother and her mother’s brother.Howe treats these heirlooms, with their annotations, bookmarks, and pasted-in newspaper cuttings, as the material bearers of feeling. She uses the
psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s term “transitional object” to describe the precarious terrain, somewhere between private and public selves, that the books inhabit. As soon as she opens their covers she is propelled along eccentric trajectories that mingle references to the books’ former owners with intricate and highly personal patterns of association. These span such diverse authors as Drayton, Milton, Sheridan, Dickinson, Allingham, Eliot and Hart
Crane.
Howe’s reflections on her mother’s Anglo-Irishness often seem to drive the book’s brilliant restlessness. At one point in The Midnight, Howe affectionately invokes a long list of minority religious sects, outsiders and misfits, concluding, “…I cling to you with all my divided attention. Itinerantly. It’s the maternal Anglo-Irish disinheritance.” The point of such a list seems to be to develop a style of expression which is true to her mother’s own sense of disinheritance: the neither-here-nor-thereness of her Anglo- Irishness – doubly displaced by replantation in the US.
Elsewhere, Howe suggests that her work is built on the energies of
montage-like juxtaposition: “Thousands of correlations have to be sliced and spliced.” And: “The relational space is the thing that’s alive with something from somewhere else.” This notion of being caught between two worlds is captured in a recurring figure in the book: that of the interleaf, the sheet of semi-transparent paper that was used to prevent an illustration from marking its facing page. In The Midnight the hazy indefiniteness of the interleaf represents a shadowy version of the idea of the crossing of borders – national,
aesthetic, formal – that has preoccupied Howe throughout her poetic career.
Howe’s prose has moved away from the enthusiastic polemic of her
earlier writings on American literary history, and she writes now with a quizzical form of erudition that is alive with oblique insight. The prose parts of The Midnight read easily but, watched closely, conceal an undertow of verbal density beneath their dry-as-a-bone wit and playful shifts of direction. Among the poetry sections,“Bed Hangings II” and “Kidnapped”, in particular, show Howe’s late style at its height, with their highly musical, if impacted, lyricism. (“She clung to William’s words by speaking them aloud”, she says of her mother reading Yeats.) Here’s a particularly condensed example, from “Bed Hangings II”:
Perilous quillwork needlework
Need wheat for an ogee epigram
if old Lille silk one ogival sliver
if miniature bobbin come from
dark underwood again again if
reeling wild silk precede reeler
Sound patterning holds the block of words together on the page, while syntax is held in suspension. The lines are internally fractured, with, for example, the architectural terms for a kind of arch –“ogee”, “ogival” – stubbornly unrelated to the words that surround them. Yet there is also a kind of coherence.Howe’s “Bed Hangings” poems contain many more-or-less direct references to working with fabrics. The phrase “dark underwood” appears in Matthew Arnold’s “Tristram and Iseult”, in which the heroine appears spinning at a
window and attired in silk. Three pages further into “Bed Hangings” is a poem that concerns another legendary spinner: Penelope. And, in the “Kidnapped” part of the book, Howe writes that her mother carried an Arnold poem, “Scholar Gypsy”, with her whenever she went out walking. Howe’s own method can be thought of as a version of this fabric work, her poetry becoming what one critic has called a “matted palimpsest”, patterned by crisscrossing associations. At the same time, she becomes a kind of scholar-gypsy
herself, slicing and splicing other writings into and across her own texts.
The two-way traffic between Howe’s ambivalent treatment of
motherhood and the broader theme of cultural inheritance is handled with a light touch throughout The Midnight. “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,” she writes of Mary Manning Howe. Similarly itchy feet animate The Midnight’s unique combination of musing, memoir, photography and lyric poetry.
Page(s) 95-98
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