Lynn Steger Strong on Bette Howland: Stories Straight from Life
by Lynne Steger Strong
Too many stories teach us, my friend said to me the other day as we walked aimlessly around the city, that we’re all supposed to be heroes of our lives. He blamed capitalism. Perhaps too easy a foil in 2019. But all the systems that we build are implicated in and bolstered by the other systems under which we function. We can’t tell any stories in the western world not informed in some way by capitalism, by all the specific and myopic (see also: mostly white male) stories that we’ve been told before. We can’t tell stories that look like those stories without amplifying or reaffirming aspects of these systems in and under which we’re all functioning.
What does the character want and what are they afraid of asks almost every writing teacher ever (including this one). But what do wants and fears matter if no one sees or listens to you or cares. If you’re poor, for instance, or female, or a person of color, how often have your wants and needs been a priority to anyone. If you have children, your wants become something different, their weight is shifted; you still have other fears, but the fears you have for them overpower almost every other thing. What are the character’s motivations, why did she choose what she chose, and how might you show the consequence. Except how often, assuming you lack resources, assuming your wants aren’t accepted or considered, are you able to make choices based solely on your own feelings and thoughts. The book should open with or deploy a rupture. The character should shift in some clean clear way. There should be an event for which there is a before and after, after which real change is felt. Except when in real life does that happen? Except the more life one lives the more sure it seems to me that life just doggedly continues on, even as massive awful ruptures happen. Most events in a single life, regardless of their initial impact, recede pretty quickly into the textures and the systems of all our daily lives.
Often, as I help students try to navigate or create the plots of their stories I ask them to say out loud to me the main plot points of their favorite fiction. They say them. I watch them hear what they say: that’s absurd right? I say. It sounds insane. One of the great thrills of fiction writing is that it is not like life and therefore it can be stretched, blown up, altered. But also, so much of my investment in fiction writing is tied up in my desire to talk about what it is to try to live.
A different story, straight from life: the writer Bette Howland was born in 1937 in Chicago to a machinist and a homemaker. In 1956, she married. She had two sons and was divorced. She worked as a librarian and as an editor for the University of Chicago Press. In 1978 she won a Guggenheim. In 1984, a MacArthur Grant. When she died in 2017, the headline of her Times obituary referred to her as “A Protegee of Bellow’s.” She’d met Saul Bellow, 22 years her senior, at a writer’s conference on Staten Island in 1961. In 1968, staying alone in Bellow’s Chicago apartment, Howland attempted suicide. In her book W-3, published in 1974 and using her suicide attempt and its aftermath as her subject, Howland wrote, “For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin — real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business; time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life could begin. At last it had dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.”
This last bit feels connected to concepts of narrative—to the ways narratives teach us how life should be, that shifts can and do happen, that life makes space to get better—and the strange realization that much of life is not like this. In stories, there are obstacles and the narrator overcomes them. Life, or something, perhaps triumph, is now set to begin. In life, by contrast, there often is no other side.
In Howland’s books triumph seldom happens. Obstacles occur, then others come. There is not what one might call rising action, climax, denouement. There is the long slow boil of lives lived. There are lives, piled over top of and inside of, brushing up against one another. There are doors left open. It is sufficient that there is no hero, no dominant or singular narrative.
“In modern art as a whole,” said Howland in an interview with StoryQuarterly, “the artist has shifted from describing the world around him to describing his own perceptions. Fair enough. But I also think this has gone far enough. Although there is a first person narrator in Blue, the book is not about me; and it is not about my way of perceiving the world.” Though all her books have been described as autobiographical, though she mines the same topics, speaks from the first person point of view, the “I” comes across in Howland’s fiction as secondary to the project. She is the observer, present insofar as she is seeing the world that she’s describing in order that she might get it right, to show it to us, but her wants and fears are very seldom what we (or she) are in it for.
More importantly, perhaps, her wants and fears are very seldom what she’s looking at. When we do get glimpses of this—who this character is, what she might want, how she might be tied up in this world we’re watching—it is almost incidental, secondary to the main event.
In the story “To The Country,” amidst a litany of violences being described as having been enacted in a specific Chicago neighborhood, the main character slips this in: “I must confess I take an interest myself. My aunt was murdered when I was a very small child, and my cousin—her daughter—and I discovered the body…. We thought she was fooling. We each grabbed an arm…. For many years I could remember her heavy hand pulling on mine, but thought it was a dream.” This is trauma, rupture, as it might be better understood within another type of novel, but in this book it is simply a fact among many facts about a certain type of life. The story further undermines the importance of this anecdote by going on to show that, while the narrator had assumed this type of violence was specific to the city, while certainly not to her particular life, “it surprised me to learn that it’s the same in the country, that people talk about the crime, they are preoccupied with crime—and all that goes with it.” Specificity is an attribute we’re meant to celebrate in fiction; it’s how one brings a character to life. And yet, while offering up plenty of specifics, in piling those specifics upon the specifics of everyone around her, and then further from her, Howland continually reminds us how much like everybody else and one another we all are.
Lynn Steger Strong
In “Golden Age,” the narrator goes to visit her grandmother Uptown, “the home of the displaced, the disinherited, the uprooted. What are called today, ‘internal immigrants’…. They are more than old; they are outcast. They have escaped the net; they are outside every institution.” The narrator goes to visit her grandmother and her grandmother is constantly leaving the door open, welcoming visitors, which infuriates the narrator at first. “Why now? When I’m here. And—since it’s no use if you don’t tell the truth—who needs such visitors? Who wants them…? My grandmother is my grandmother—but who are they?” This is a shocking level of particularity for this book, a moment so wholly embedded inside the specificity of the narrator and her wants and needs as to feel separate from so much else of it, but then it’s only a paragraph later that we get the answer to all of this. “My grandmother is one of the few in this building, in this whole neighborhood for that matter—which is nothing but a reservation for the elderly—one of the very few who ‘has anybody.’ Family, that is, who love and care; who don’t just ‘pay visits’; who feel more than duty. And these others come to be close to that forgotten feeling. To steel up next to it, warm themselves at the fire.” In other words, this brief moment of wishing for specificity and wanting to assert it is not only undermined; it’s shameful. The narrator’s want—to be left alone with her grandmother, a moment of singular specialness—is not only absurd; it would obscure something seemingly so much more imperative, these brief glimpses of intimacy for these desperate displaced souls.
Bette Howland’s project feels less about the wants and needs of the individual and more about the places and the systems and the mechanisms through which the wants and needs of certain types of individuals are misplaced, distorted, or ignored. “The fear of crime is profoundly a class fear,” she writes. “The fear of becoming a victim, of joining the ranks of the expendables—those spewed up by the system; of offering your neck to be butchered and slaughtered and laying yourself down with the rest.” Her project seems to be to bring those lives back up in front of us, to present them not as single individuals but as whole groups of lives, made up almost wholly of all the various obstacles created by these systems, lives that perhaps the myopic mechanisms of fiction-writing have not often worked hard enough to make space for, lives that we’ve not listened to before.
Lynn Steger Strong’s first novel, Hold Still, was released by Liveright/WW Norton in 2016. Her nonfiction has appeared in Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, Elle.com, Catapult, Lit Hub, and other publications. She teaches both fiction and non-fiction writing at Columbia University, Fairfield University, and the Pratt Institute. Her second novel, Want, is forthcoming with Henry Holt.
(Above image of Bette Howland by Jacob Howland)
