Bette Howland’s Perpetual Now

Bette Howland was a contradiction.

We have to start somewhere concrete, so let’s begin with the accolades. Howland was a truly gifted writer from the south side of Chicago. Quantifiably gifted, in fact. She was the recipient of a Gugenheim fellowship, as well as a MacArthur “genius” grant, which anchors her among the likes of  Cormac McCarthy, Richard Powers, William Gaddis, Octavia Butler, Thomas Pynchon, Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead, and David Foster Wallace. All well-known names, all of whom have (even posthumously) remained heavy-hitters in the literary world—Howland, not so much.

 Howland’s grant was in 1984, the fourth ever class of MacArthur fellows. Howland was awarded the grant on the strength of her three books, W-3 (a memoir about Howland’s time in a Chicago psychiatric hospital), Blue In Chicago (short stories) and Things To Come And Go (novellas). At the end of Howland’s life, these remained her only published works. All of them long out of print.

One of Howland’s greatest works is her own myth, which she wrote by refusing to write. She also gave few, if any, interviews, and refused to engage with the literary world in really any capacity at all. Today, Howland’s Wikipedia article consists of just 11 sentences. It features no photos.

To talk about Bette Howland, we first have to talk about not talking about Bette Howland, which is the kind of acrobatic non-statement that often accompanies the act of plucking someone from the flow of time and bringing them back into present consciousness. And plucked she was, from a bargain bin. In 2013 (sometimes 2015, depending on the website, because nothing about Howland can ever be clear), Brigid Hughes, editor of the literary journal A Public Space, found a copy of W-3, Howland’s debut. She bought it for just $1. Hughes was amazed by the book, and thought Howland would be perfect for an issue of the literary magazine focused on obscure women writers. Hughes attempted to track down anything she could about Howland. There wasn’t much to find.

There were letters between Howland and her sometimes-mentor sometimes-lover Saul Bellow, unearthed by Howland’s son. Howland appeared occasionally, sporadically, as a contributor for magazines like Commentary. There were whispers of incomplete manuscripts (two of which had even been under contract at Knopf in the 90s, but never materialized). Mostly, though, there were second hand copies of her books, sitting untouched in bookshops and online resellers. So Hughes took matters into her own hands, starting a spinoff of the Public Space literary magazine, A Public Space Books, almost explicitly to reissue Howland’s work.

The first in a series of triumphant reissues was Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, a selection of Howland’s short stories pulled from Blue In Chicago and some of her literary magazine contributions. Almost immediately, Howland lays out the entire ethos of her writing, saying at the beginning of “Blue In Chicago”:

“I live in a small studio on top of a high rise; it’s mostly windows. A friend calls it a perch on a flagpole because I never draw the shades. Lately one visitor after another has expressed a wish for an apartment like mine: “it’s perfect,” they say. From which I infer that they all want to climb up the flagpole; remove themselves.”

And that’s precisely what she did—remove herself. 

Like I said, to talk about Bette Howland, we have to talk about not talking about Bette Howland. It’s a part of the contradiction of her life and work that the narrators of all of Howland’s stories both are, and are not, Bette Howland. Her fictions are almost always in first person, their narrators female. Once, almost as a wink-to-camera, the name “Bette” even appears in one of the short stories, like a secret that she’s asking you to keep. The line between fiction and nonfiction has always been malleable, but Howland often took it to an extreme, to the point that one might wonder why they needed to be fiction at all.

And yet, her layers of abstraction were intentional. The distinct absence of Bette Howland is one of the defining traits of Howland’s work, as is her flat-out unbelievable talent for observation, and in turn, description. One gets the sense of Howland’s life spent as an observer, an outsider, in the way that she writes. You can tell what’s interesting to her, and what she deems nonessential. She’s less likely to describe a room than she is the people and objects in it, which she does over and over with charm, and a wit that occasionally flashes like a blade in motion.

The distance from the eye to the pen is often very long, but Howland covers that ground in an instant, transporting readers into her scenes through something not unlike Hemingway’s (in)famous iceberg.

 Throughout her writing, Howland consistently mines enormous power from little details: The hats that rest on the knees of men in a courtroom; Her mother at dinner, cheeks bulging like fists; A fleeting glimpse of Howland’s own children, both sporting haircuts that she did not give them. These images stick out, rising out of their paragraphs, calcified in language the way that the brain stores memories—not as a film strip, but as photographs.

In “Birds of a Feather,” one of the three novellas that make up Things to Come and Go, an older man makes an uncomfortable advance toward Esti, our narrator, sitting next to her and placing his hand on the bare skin between her skirt hem and her knee. He pretends to be asleep, trying to make it seem accidental. Esti tries to maneuver herself so that her skirt will cover more of her leg, creating a barrier between her and the older man. The rest of the scene falls away, until all that is left is this moment of tension, wherein Esti tries to look at the man, to see if he really is asleep—if this is all an innocent accident—only to find he is sneaking a glance at her to gauge her reaction.  

“Out of the side of his head, over his wrinkled cheek, one whole white eyeball stared at me.

Skinned.

It disappeared. Back in the bag.”

It’s a startling, visceral moment that demonstrates the way Howland thought about things, with a word like “skinned” emphasizing the veins and soft flesh of an eye, and calling to mind the language of hunting. Her word choices were careful, but never stuffy or clinical. She’s often very funny, when the situation calls for it, and she was always hyper-aware of the situation. 

Like in the above bit, the dead-on realism of her work sometimes requires that you read between the lines. Conversations trail off, or lead nowhere at all. People say things just for the sake of talking. She leaves intact the things we expect a fiction writer to edit out of the world, but Howland’s work hinges on the stretching thin of fiction so that reality is visible underneath. 

While “autofiction” isn’t exactly unique (hence the endless discourse circles) but one of the things that sets Howland apart is that she did write a memoir, but it’s almost indistinguishable from her stories. She even once complained to Saul Bellow about her work being categorized as fiction, because she had worked so hard on the facts. In the case of her memoir, the “I” could be anyone. All of her narrators both are, and are not, Bette Howland.

W-3 is Howland’s account of her time in a psychiatric hospital, and readers could be forgiven for thinking that it would follow the familiar arc of this type of book, detailing a person triumphing over themselves. Sinking as low as they could go—ruminating on traumas, active addictions, or just the general size and shape of the bottom—and then rising again, taking their shaky steps toward regular personhood. But as these trappings pertain to her, Howland could not possibly be less interested, as she says early on:

“By this time I had already revealed anything anyone really needed to know about me. It never mattered what you said you were doing here…A certain point had been reached; no one had to hear how.”

As is her way, Howland has once again removed herself. W-3 is a sleight of hand, a memoir mostly in the sense that Howland was there—a field reporter in her own life.  The book is almost entirely about the other patients in the psychiatric ward from which the book derives its name. Howland, despite being a patient herself, trades lengthy introspection for looking ever outward as people come and go—some sent home, while others are committed to different hospitals, worse ones, that sit on the horizon and loom like thunderclouds.

The closed ecosystem of the hospital ward is a perfect vehicle for a writer like Howland. It’s a microcosmic look at the societal whole, with interpersonal conflicts and bureaucratic power directing the flow of their miniature world. The hospital is claustrophobic, and occasionally hostile, but everyone eventually learns to navigate it. 

Despite being her only work of fact, W-3 sits comfortably with her fiction, partially because of its focus. Across the board, in both her fiction and her nonfiction, Howland’s people are rough around the edges. They are the residents of psych wards, and children wrestling with the pieces of issues too large for them to see whole. They are fretting Jewish mothers, and lonely college students, separated from the rest of town by the boundaries of the campus. Her characters are you, they are me, they are Bette Howland. 

In all of her work, we are given a cross-section of a life. Her characters exist in their own perpetual now. Nothing before, nothing after. Which leads to another of Howland’s contradictions: the person doing the work closest to hers is not a writer, but a photographer. 

A friend pointed out that Howland’s true contemporary might be fellow Chicagoan Vivian Maier, a street photographer who has also gained critical acclaim only after her death. Maier, like Howland, turned her focus on Chicago’s anonymous citizens, treating each of them as important, and finding entire oceans of humanity in the small moments. For example: in one photo, a woman is pulling on a shoe while checking her reflection in a window. Next to her stands a friend with a run in her tights. If you pile on all the little details, eventually they add up to a story.

The similarities of their work are a fact that A Public Space must be aware of as well, as Maier’s photographs grace the covers of two of the three reissues.

The qualities shared between the work of Howland and Maier also stems from the relationship between themselves and their tool of choice—Howland’s being her words, and Maier’s being her camera. As opposed to the work of a musician, or an actor, fiction writers and visual artists are often outside the frame, made invisible. Howland and Maier questioned that, finding unlikely subjects in themselves as glimpsed in window panes and mirrors. Often outside and looking in on their own lives, they crossed the boundary from artist to subject and back again.

The uncanny second-person nature of this work is best understood through the lens of the writer and theorist John Berger, who needs very little introduction. Berger wrote extensively about the relationship between artist and subject, but also about the participatory nature of the spectator. That, as a viewer, we help to construct the subject of a work of art—in this case, through the recognition of the artist. Without the audience, Howland or Maier would be just another of their anonymous subjects.

In his seminal Ways of Seeing, Berger wrote that “to be on display is to have the surface of one's own skin, the hairs of one's own body, turned into a disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded.” He wrote this in reference to nudity in art, but it follows as a metaphor. Howland’s work was personal, and so she turned herself into fiction. Absent from her memoir, and most visible in the invented versions of her life, Bette Howland asks us to help construct her.

And construction is the only course of action left for the audience of a writer who left behind so little. Howland died in 2017, at age 80, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She produced a body of work that is, in my opinion, tragically small, but it was the body of work that she chose to create. This is how she defined herself. 

There is no way to know what she would have made of the re-discovery and re-issuing of her work, but maybe it wouldn’t matter. Maybe it wasn’t really about her in the first place.

James Webster is a writer, reader, and social media person. He tweets at @exhaustdata