excerpt: Wrestling with the Angel: Remembering Fanny Howe
Feature by Caitlin McLoughlin
Photos courtesy of Danzy Senna
Kazim Ali, Eileen Myles, Chris Kraus and Fiona Alison Duncan share their memories of the late, great author and poet Fanny Howe, reflecting on a life and body of work that illuminated the intertwined mysteries of justice, faith, and bewilderment, and left an indelible imprint on generations of writers and seekers alike.
“All my life, I have been obsessed, overly distressed, by injustice,”(1) proclaims the narrator of London-rose: Beauty Will Save the World by Fanny Howe.
I first read London-rose, written in the early 1990s but published in 2022 by Divided in the UK and Semiotext(e) in the US, while on holiday in Suffolk in 2024, mostly on the train from London, which was fitting because it’s a book about transience and traveling around the UK. It begins as perhaps one of Howe’s more pessimistic works. Its dreary descriptions of English cities—replete with devastatingly accurate observations such as, “The greatest sin in England seems to be the sin of whining”(2)—along with its reflections on the tormenting monotony of office shit-work, and crushing explorations of failure, felt all too painfully recognisable. But then it becomes about beauty, and about God.
I have since sought out as many of her fifty-plus books as I could find – no straightforward task, with many out of print or not readily available in the UK. As Fiona Alison Duncan writes in her introduction to her conversation with Howe for The White Review, “to be a reader of Fanny Howe is to be a seeker.”(3) I spoke to Duncan—novelist and founder of literary social practice Hard To Read—about her exchange with Howe and what initially drew her to her work. She explains, “I think part of the appeal of her was that you feel like you've encountered a secret.” Howe’s work offered her a space to explore latent questions around the existence of a higher-power, whilst simultaneously grounding them in a reckoning with injustice.
When Duncan first spoke to Howe it was in a bohemian, ground-floor apartment in Greenwich Village where Howe was staying while visiting New York. It was one of the first interviews she had done in many years. Duncan was initially apprehensive, she explains that to her Howe was a writer who “is writing to figure out how she thinks and feels. The text is doing the work. And so, what do you ask beyond that? Because the text has so many of the answers.” She remembers, “She was this tiny person. It was like all her books would weigh more than her.” The conversation they go on to have, partly in that first in-person meeting and then “more fruitfully via a shared Googledoc,” is broad and beautiful, imbued with all the weight of Howe’s many books and the elasticity of her rapt, intuitive observations.
When we first landed on the theme of Faith & Worship for this issue of Worms, Howe was the first person I hoped to reach out to. Like Duncan, for me her books presented a way of thinking about spirituality, and of asking sprawling metaphysical questions about the self, that were not detached from a rigorous collective politic and a probing study of structural injustice. It felt like a salve to contemporary iterations of spiritual thought that sought personal development and ended there. However, not long after we began work on this issue, and before I’d had the chance to propose a conversation, Howe passed away.
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It was just over a week after Fanny Howe’s memorial service, organised by her daughter Danzy Senna, that I got on a video call with Kazim Ali, founder of New York based press Nightboat Books. He was initially a little tricky to pin down, his job as a writer and professor bouncing him between time zones. When we do talk he is generous and open, and it’s clear that his relationship with Howe was deeply meaningful to him. They first met, he explained, in 2000, when he attended a reading of hers in New York. Though their second meeting was the more significant one, facilitated by poet and mutual friend Paolo Javier, while Howe was teaching on a summer residency at Bard College, just ten minutes from Rhinebeck, where Ali had settled after finishing his MFA. “He [Javier] told me, Fanny's coming up. You should get together with her.” The pair went to Dia Beacon, a museum in upstate New York on the banks of the Hudson River and “we just sort of made a connection.”
Like many of Howe’s significant connections, a pull to her work was the initial spark for Ali, prompted by friends within the poetry world. It was to her prose that he was first directed, which for him “walked the line between philosophy and lyricism.” He recognised this as something he was seeing a lot of in the poetry he loved, “but in the fiction that I was reading, I wasn't seeing it as much.” He couldn’t understand why many of her novels—amorphous, experimental works that combine sophisticated plot-driven narratives with unwieldy explorations of God, loneliness, family, and failure—weren’t in print anymore. As their connection crystallised into a friendship, he conceived of Nightboat to start publishing her prose – “that's where Nightboat came from. It came from Fanny.”
Nightboat’s first title, Howe’s The Lives of a Spirit/Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken (2005), clouds poetry with fiction in a metaphysical investigation that is as much about the investigation itself as it is about discerning any answers. In 2006 they published their third title, Radical Love, a collection of five of Howe’s novels written between 1985 and 2000: Nod, The Deep North, Famous Questions, Saving History and Indivisible. In her author’s note at the beginning of Radical Love Howe says, “I hope this collection will contribute to the literary tradition that resists distinctions between poetry and fiction as one way to save history from the doom of duality.”(4) In the years since, Nightboat has become world-renowned for its distinct, experimental books that straddle borders between form and genre. I asked Ali how else Howe’s work continued to influence Nightboat as it grew: “this idea to publish work that didn't have as wide of an audience as I felt like it deserved, that ethos really continued with the press.”
“that's where Nightboat came from. It came from Fanny.” — kazim Ali on the founding of nightboat books
Beyond Nightboat, there are many further parallels between Howe and Ali’s work; in particular an expansive, exploratory study of faith. Raised in a strict religious background—“as soon as I learned how to read, I was reading religious scriptures”—Ali is Muslim and his faith remains a large part of his writing. He also studies and teaches yoga as part of the Jivamukti lineage, which incorporates spiritual teachings within its practice. I ask him what Howe’s work has offered him in his thinking and writing about faith and he tells me: “Oftentimes when people try to write about the spiritual, it's not speculative. It's within whatever vocabulary or tradition that we have been given to think about broad questions like, Who are we? What did we come from? If there is a soul, then what happens to it? Where is it going? Whole organised religious traditions have sprung up over many thousands of years to try to answer these questions.” What Howe’s work allowed him to do was to dare to break from these existing structures and vocabularies, “to think and write about the metaphysical and the philosophical.” He continues “I think there's a reason why spiritual thinkers are sometimes thought of as insane. Because to be a radical, to actually contend with the metaphysical, is to wrestle with the angel – to fall back on another scriptural metaphor. That's what Fanny did. That’s what bewilderment is about.”
“to be a radical, to actually contend with the metaphysical, is to wrestle with the angel… That’s what fanny did. that’s what bewilderment is about.” — kazim Ali
Bewilderment is a concept that Howe developed first as a method through which to construct her poetry and fiction. In an essay called ‘Bewilderment’ collected in The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life she outlines the idea: “Bewilderment is an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability.”(5) It borrows from the swirling, deceptive logic of dreams—“a dream breaks into parts and contradicts its own will, even as it travels around and around”(6)—and builds in layers, dissolving before it solidifies into something tangible. Both an observation and a practice, it eschews conclusions, revels in doubt and confusion, in not knowing and, especially, in never pretending to know. In her writing, it was a way of “sustaining the necessity associated with plot and the blindness associated with experience.”(7) Something she achieved to no end in her beautiful, extensive body of work.
But bewilderment is also an idea that acts as the linchpin to her understanding of faith. In the same essay, Howe defers to a faction of Sufi thought that attributes creation to God’s loneliness, which made Him send “the heavens into a spasm of procreating words that then became matter.”(8) In this creation story “words proceed existence,”(9) imbuing language with enormous power. And yet, language fails to reckon with the staggering complexity of experience. As Howe puts it: “Language, as we have it, fails to deal with confusion.”(10) Bewilderment begins here, simultaneously with God and with language. This same puzzle of contradiction refuses to be solved, and yet Howe persists. “The mystery of thought can only be solved by thought itself – which is what?”(11) This is what faith offers, endless spiralling questions, perplexity, failure – it keeps the mind sharp and strong.
In the Book of Genesis (32:22–32) Jacob wrestles with the angel who is both man and God, in a scene interpreted as both one of struggle, and of persistent prayer. A simultaneous act of devotion and resistance. Even later, after many years as a practicing Catholic, Howe reveals to Kim Jenson in an interview for Bomb Magazine: “I don’t agree with many of the teachings. But this is the interesting part of being Catholic: The heresy that comes along with it. Indistinguishable from the rites is the rage, the arguing, the rebelling, the mind on alert. I like to be on alert. And I like to be in an atmosphere where people examine one more completely insane vision of the universe.”(12)
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Certain details of Howe’s biography are well documented. She was born in Buffalo, New York in 1940, but her family moved to Cambridge, Boston when she was just three years old. Her Irish mother, Mary Manning, was a writer and the founder of the Poets’ Theatre, a dedicated experimental troupe that hosted emerging American poets such as Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and Richard Eberhart, and is credited with introducing them to the riotous sensibility of Irish dramatics. Her father, Mark De Wolfe Howe, born into a family of historically upper-class Bostonians, was an academic and teacher, eventually becoming a Civil Rights activist. Fanny was still an infant when Germany declared war on the United States and he joined the war effort, where he was posted to North Africa and then Sicily. While he was away she was haunted by his absence, reflecting later in her essay, ‘My Father Was White but Not Quite’, for The Poetry Foundation: “That war was like an immense umbrella held high in the air and shadowing our every move.”(13) After he returned he became a professor of law at Harvard and not long after that, as Howe describes to Jenson, he “underwent the conversion that a few white men did. He woke up to the existential reality of race in America.”(14)
“I was really attracted to auto fiction and a new journalism - hype-hyper subjectivity. and it kind of got undone in that moment.” — Fiona Alison DUncan on her conversation with Howe in 2020
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(1) Fanny Howe, London-rose: Beauty Will Save the World.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Fiona Alison Duncan, “Interview with Fanny Howe,” The White Review, October, 2020, https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-fanny-howe/.
(4) Fanny Howe, Radical Love.
(5) Fanny Howe, The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life.
(6) Ibid.
(7) Ibid.
(8) Ibid.
(9) Ibid.
(10) Ibid.
(11) Ibid.
(12) Kim Jensen, “Fanny Howe by Kim Jensen,” Bomb Magazine, January 1, 2013, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2013/01/01/fanny-howe/.
(13) Fanny Howe, “My Father Was White but Not Quite,” The Poetry Foundation, December 1, 2008, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/69163/my-father-was-white-but-not-quite.
(14) Kim Jensen, “Fanny Howe by Kim Jensen,” Bomb Magazine, January 1, 2013, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2013/01/01/fanny-howe/.
