Fanny Howe: controversial origins, Catholicism, mixed marriages and experimental prose

00:00, 05.08.2025

Who was the American writer Fanny Howe and why her prose ended at the novel ‘The Undivided’

Fanny Howe: controversial origins, Catholicism, mixed marriages and experimental prose — Photo: Реальное время

Last month, on 8 July, the poet and author of experimental prose Fanny Howe died in the USA. Practically nothing is known about her in Russia, although her writing career began in the second half of the 20th century. She was not translated in the USSR. And after the collapse of the Soviet Union, for some reason, neither her poetry nor her prose was given due attention. Although Howe has written more than 20 books, she has won many literary awards in poetry and was shortlisted for the International Booker in 2015. It wasn't until this spring that No Kidding Press released her novel, Undivided. It was one of the last books to come out from the publisher before it closed. And it is Fanny Howe's last prose work. She said in an interview: this book was the ‘end of prose’ for her. Ekaterina Petrova, a literary columnist for Real Time, talks about the life of Fanny Howe and her only novel translated into Russian.

‘All families have their share of cruelty and rivalry’

Fanny Howe was born on 15 October 1940 in Buffalo into a family of intellectuals and was the middle of three sisters. Her mother, Mary Manning, was born in Ireland in 1906. She disliked the British and there were Quakers in her family, some quite radical. Mary was a playwright, actress and writer. She was friends with Samuel Beckett and ran a daily newspaper at the Gate Theatre. As an actress she performed at Dublin's Abbey Theatre under the direction of poet and playwright William Butler Yates. Quite quickly Mary Manning became a prominent figure in Irish theatre but, according to Fanny Howe, felt she had to choose a different path — marriage. ‘To that end she came to America (in 1935 — ed.), chose my father at Christmas dinner, and they were married,’ the writer said.

Fannie's father, Mark de Wolf Howe, was a legal historian who taught law at Harvard and fought for civil rights in his spare time. His ancestors came from the family of Josiah Quincy III (1772-1864). He was mayor of Boston, a congressman, and president of Harvard. Mark de Wolf also served as a clerk to long-time U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and even authored a biography of him. Even as an adult, Fanny Howe said that her father and mother were probably not a good match.

My father was a very serious and secretive man by nature, and these theatre people were always snooping around the house. I felt that he probably shouldn't have married my mother. But he didn't want to marry a Boston woman-they repelled him. What they had in common was that their families read the same books in Ireland and in Boston, and they shared a literary language that made them laugh. My father had a weakness — he loved the Marx Brothers (a comedy group — ed.) and jokes. And the mother could make anyone laugh.

During World War II, Fanny's father was drafted into the war with the rank of lieutenant and later became a colonel. He served in Sicily and North Africa, and after the war he went to Potsdam, where he worked as a legal adviser on the restructuring of Europe. The writer said that her first memory of her father was ‘when he was in uniform saying goodbye’. The next time she saw him was after the war. He approached the house like a postman bringing a newspaper. Fanny's mother opened the door and there was her husband, in the same uniform.

When her father left for the war, Mary took Fanny and her older sister Susan, who would also become a famous American poet in the future, and moved to Cambridge (a suburb of Boston — ed.), Massachusetts. They lived in a flat near Harvard Square. And on Sundays they went to visit Fanny's grandfather on her father's side, Mark Anthony de Wolf Howe. He was an influential man in Boston. His baronial chambers with purple stained glass windows amazed Fanny. There were ‘tables and chairs, objects brought back from China many generations ago,’ an elephant pagoda, crystal finger bowls, and Victorian storybooks with illustrations of ‘curly-haired children in aprons, stone walls, leaping figures with scissors chasing them to cut off their thumbs, and gardens with pale but clearly recognisable flowers.’

Fanny said that her childhood was spent in a creative atmosphere surrounded by books, films and plays. And they touched much more deeply than real events. ‘It seemed as if the suffering of the character in the book became our own suffering,’ Howe said in an interview. Fanny's mother founded a ‘Poetry Theatre’ in Cambridge. The girl loved going to her plays. And if a play needed a child to play a part, that child was often Fanny. ‘Rehearsals often took place right in our living room — without closed doors,’ the writer said.

Howe didn't consider her childhood to be particularly happy or particularly unhappy. She said that ‘all families have their share of cruelty and rivalry’. In Fanny's case, it was about her mother's love. Two daughters fought for it. And the older one usually won. Fanny thought her mother was ‘brilliant and incredibly funny’ and suffered when she saw her drunk. But at the same time admired ‘her complete libertinism’; at this time, in Fanny's opinion, she was ‘terrific fun, witty and cruel’.

‘Disgraceful’ Stanford

Fanny loved living in Cambridge. There were lots of ‘big gardens and parks’ where she walked, climbed trees and ‘looked at bugs’. ‘I laughed all the time, couldn't concentrate on my studies, was only happy alone or outside,’ the writer said. The girl was left to herself, and at the time she liked it. She did not study well, unlike her older sister, who was always reading, ‘her face was never taken away from the book’. Fanny, on the other hand, only read ‘about horses, dogs and detectives’.

Beatrix Potter (English children's author and artist — ed.) — her tiny pictures of small worlds. I've often been close to the beauty of smallness — watching little non-tyrants survive through ingenuity, turning their weaknesses into strength.

Fanny began to notice that there were a lot of writers in her neighbourhood. Then she swore to herself: ‘never, never, never’ to write. But at the age of nine, she did compose her first poem: ‘just a few lines about nature and then a commentary on the state of the world and, amazingly, it worked.’ Her father praised it. She wrote the next poem already at the age of fourteen, ‘thought it was marvellous’, showed it to those close to her, and their reaction was not to her liking. She never showed it to anyone else: “It became my secret, my own world — writing poems and thinking about them. It went on like that for a long time.”

Although Fanny was not at first keen on literature, she noticed that in post-war Cambridge people on the street talked a lot about poetry. ‘People were reading poetry — lots of people — and there was real talk in the streets about [Edward Estlin] Cummings (an American writer and artist — ed.),’ Fanny Howe once said. But she was most inspired by the beatniks: Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jack Kerouac.

In 1957, Fanny Howe was admitted to Stanford University (California) and found it ‘shameful’. The fact is that she was accepted because one of the university staff did a favour for her father. But gradually she got used to the idea, started going out and even fell in love with California. “California, of course, was amazing. That explosion of light was both frightening and beautiful at the same time," Fannie Howe said.

She was among the young writers who attended workshops of distinguished teachers, critics, authors and screenwriters. Along with writer Ken Keesey, Fanny went to workshops by screenwriter Malcolm Cowley, who, she says, would switch off his hearing aid and doze off instead of leading the workshop. “But that was fine — we kept studying on our own, passing each other's work around and discussing it. I don't understand why they don't always do that — just let the guys teach the class," Fanny said in an interview.

At Stanford, she studied Russian history and literature, in which she was captivated by ‘powerful, rough-hewn male characters.’ As she read Russian and simultaneously Latin American authors, the young writer began to notice the class divisions upon which many of the works of the writers she studied were based. In fact, Fanny learnt what inequality was as a child, but didn't fully understand it until she was a child. Her mother was Irish, and the Irish were not treated with much respect in the 1950s. When Mary Manning opened the door at her house, she often heard: ‘Is Mrs Howe here?’. People thought she was the maid. It was also at this time that Fanny developed ‘a sense of disgust at her origins.’

Della Field

Fannie dropped out of Stanford three times. As she said herself: ‘this is my life pattern — a neurotic fear of being stuck somewhere forever.’ The first two times she dropped out she dropped out because she was annoyed by the people around her. Especially those who refused to go to San Francisco and fight inequality. Activism was inherited from her father. Even as a child, he used to take his young daughter to rallies. In San Francisco, Fanny was not only involved in activism, but also went to creative meetings where books were read, as well as jazz concerts. Fanny dropped out for the third time in 1961 because she married Frederick Delafield.

He was a microbiologist from Berkeley who loved poetry. This was what attracted Fanny, who was younger than her husband. The writer said that he was like the Canadian theatre actor Christopher Plummer, but only with ‘neurotic traits’. Because of these ‘neurotic traits’ Fanny started smoking. He also strongly disagreed with her feelings about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He considered her emotional reaction to be adolescent rebellion.

For two years Fanny Howe turned into a typical American housewife. Frederick retired to his laboratory every morning, and Fanny sat down to write after household chores. ‘There was enough shame in me to realise that I had to earn my own money,’ Howe later said. She wrote several short novels and sent one to a literary agent. He suggested she work on a genre and sent her three romance books about nurses in love, but without the intimate details. And asked her to write ‘something in the same vein.’ Thus, ‘West Coast Nurse’ (1963) was born. By the way, the first books Fanny signed not his name, but a pseudonym formed from the surname of her husband Delafield. On the covers was the name — DeDella Field.

I learnt a lot from these books: how to write a novel, what a storyline is, what the main plot is. It was all by trial and error.

Fanny wasn't ready to be a housewife all the time, and Frederick wasn't ready for an activist and writer wife. But he refused to grant the divorce. At the time, the only way for a woman to get a divorce was to go to Nevada. Fannie went to the town of Reno, where she checked into a motel. She had to live there for exactly six weeks and then appear before a judge and prove that she had indeed spent those six weeks in Reno. “It was a really sadistic ruling. Every day you had to check in. You were under the control of the law," Fannie Howe recalled.

The only thing that saved her then was writing. All the time Fanny wrote poetry, which was quite successfully published. But poetry did not bring as much money as publishing novels.

After her divorce from Frederick, Fanny went to New York, where she had a nervous breakdown. “For me it was just terrifying. It's like a forest: you walk into it and it consumes you. You disappear," Fanny said of her two years in New York. There she worked at Avon Books in a low-paying job as an editor, and things were booming. But there still wasn't enough money. So she took a job as a cloakroom attendant at a bar. ‘There I hid in a pile of damp coats and read novels,’ Fanny recalled. At the same time she wrote another novel — ‘A Nurse in Vietnam’ (1966), where she made the Viet Cong the main character and the hero in principle. And this was not noticed by any of the editors. At that time Fanny Howe was also fond of foreign modern prose: Italian Alberto Moravia, Argentine Julio Cortázar, British Doris Lessing.

According to Fanny Howe, it was in New York that she developed a sense of anxiety she had not encountered before. ‘It was a sense of being invisible, of becoming invisible and weak, and the distinct power of men to win no matter what you did,’ the writer said in an interview. She was taken from New York by her father. Fanny found herself back in Cambridge.

‘A History Lesson in the Present Tense’

At age 60, Fanny's father had a heart attack while shoveling snow in the yard. In 1967, he died. It happened in the midst of high-profile political assassinations. ‘For me, his death was part of what ended with the death of Robert Kennedy,’ the writer noted. At that time, Fanny Howe was working at the small magazine Fire Exit with American writers Bill Corbett and Jonathan Kozol. The latter asked Fanny to meet a ‘very talented writer’ whom he thought was worth publishing. But Jonathan warned Fanny: ‘Don't fall in love!’. She said: ‘Why should I fall in love?’. And she did.

They met at her parents' house. After the death of her husband, Mary Manning decided to leave Cambridge for Ireland. Together with her daughter, they were packing when Carl Senna arrived. He was a black man of Mexican-African descent. Fanny and Carl immediately found common ground — ‘intellectual, lively, political conversations’. That's what their relationship was built on. ‘Just being around such an intelligent man who had a keen sense of what was going on — it was a history lesson in the present tense,’ Fanny Howe said of her second husband.

They married in 1968 in ‘the first cohort of interracial couples who were able to legally marry in the United States.’ Over the next four years, they had three children. ‘I could go on and on — ten children, like Harriet Beecher Stowe writing at the kitchen table while the children played,’ the writer said in an interview. They settled into Carl's family home in Boston's Jamaica Plain, where they lived with his mother.

In our house, a pot of beans was boiling on the cooker all day for everyone who came to visit. I'm sure everyone has a period in their life when everything is literally boiling like a pot of beans.

But it wasn't all smooth sailing. Despite Fanny's progressive social circle, many of her friends and acquaintances simply did not understand how she could marry a black man. ‘I spent seven years of our tumultuous marriage in warped relationships with many old friends and family members,’ Howe wrote in the introduction to her collection of essays, The Wedding Dress (2003). — None of them were rude or outright racist. But the media and the environment around Boston were so permeated with just such sentiments that any personal conversation about family life inevitably took on symbolic significance.” The racism became even more visible when Carl and Fannie's children went to school. There they were asked to send one of their children to a black school because the child's hair was too curly.

Racism was not the only problem of the young family. Sometimes they simply did not have enough money. Despite the fact that Fanny had noble aristocratic ancestors, their family had long been impoverished, so they could not count on the wealth of their grandfather. Carl and Fanny were lucky enough to get jobs at Tufts University in Boston. Carl then worked at Beacon Press and wrote for several newspapers. To make sure Fanny had time for work and writing, together with other women in the neighbourhood, they set up a daycare centre in the basement of a house and hired a former teacher to look after the children.

And then Carl and Fanny's perfect marriage fell apart. To make matters worse, they lost their home. “I remember walking down Central Street crying my eyes out because I had to go to social services to claim benefits, and realising that the money wouldn't be enough to live on. It was a crucial time for me, from which I had to crawl out," the writer recalled. The way out was books for teenagers. Yes, the writer of experimental prose started writing Young Adult. She was prompted to write the details of the novels by the children. She came up with the plot and characters, and they came up with the dialogue. She was especially helped by her eldest daughter Danzy, who herself started writing at the age of ten and is now the author of six fiction books and critically acclaimed non-fiction prose.

During her marriage to Charles, another important event happened — Fanny became fascinated with Catholicism. She went to Sunday mass with her mother-in-law and saw that ‘there was the deepest connection between the teachings of the church and the political theory that concerned me’. Thus, through the ideas of Simone Weil, whom Fanny admired, and going to church, she gradually came to God. Howe converted to Catholicism at the age of forty. “It's very profound — when you are struck by the truth behind all the idiocy of the Catholic Church. I was brought up Protestant or atheist and always felt as if I was lost in the world — asking myself: why be here? Catholicism became a surprising discovery for me in those desperate moments”, — said the writer. And she noted that true faith can only come through atheism: “if you have not experienced atheism in its entirety, you cannot understand the shock of believing in anything.

Fanny Howe's first book of poetry was published in 1970. By 1990, nine more collections had appeared, as well as eight prose books. She has received numerous awards, including from the Poetry Foundation and other organisations. In 2014, Howe was a finalist for the National Book Award for her poetry collection Second Childhood. She has spent most of her life in and around Boston, where she taught at colleges for many years before moving to San Diego in 1989 for a permanent tenure-track faculty position. For many years, her experimental works were published only by small publishers, and she often stayed with them, even as her fame grew. In 2000, her latest novel, The Undivided, a loose sequence of events between Massachusetts, California, and Ireland, was published. This book Howe called the closest work to her biography.

Fanny Howe's last novel

‘The book “Indivisible” finally told my whole story in the way I understood it’, — said Fanny Howe in one of the interviews. And although many fragments of the novel do coincide with the biography of the writer, we cannot say that they repeat it. Rather, they reflect her spiritual journey rather than her physical one.

The novel begins with the protagonist Henny locking her husband McCool in a closet, and herself going to talk to God. Henny and McCool's relationship cannot even be called complex. They are confused and misunderstood. McCool is an attractive Irishman, a musician and the soul of the company. But in the family circle he is a tyrant, an abuser, a drunkard, a liar and a cheat. Henny really wanted children, McCool too, but he has ‘weak spermatozoa or something like that’. So the couple found another solution — they took custody of abandoned or orphaned children.

A total of twelve children passed through our home. Nine of them were temporary. Two came back twice, then left again. Three were siblings. Two were raped, four were beaten. Three had ammunition and drugs in their homes. One was planted on the steps of a church. Two went to stepfathers who didn't want them. One had autism. Three children came to us as toddlers and stayed with us for the rest of their lives.

The state paid Hennie and McCool for custody, but there wasn't enough money. So they rented out rooms in their house, because of which they always had a madhouse and noise, and the whole thing was like a passing yard. From this crazy house Henny would run away to her equally strange friends. She and Libby had been friends since high school. Libby was from a rich family and Henny's mother worked in her house as a maid. The girls were friends, but Libby was clearly bothered by this friendship in public. As they grew up, Libby became an uncontrollable person who could fly to India, buy a ruined house on the Mexican border, get into tantric sex, yoga and drugs. All at the same time.

At some point, Libby had an affair with McCool. It was with Henny's ‘approval.’ At least that's how both women justified the adultery. Libby was also dating Lewis. This was the third character in their strange company. Lewis was dark-skinned, an activist and journalist. He would later be shot in Africa, leaving him crippled. In political circles, Lewis did have influence. He travelled the world and reported on human rights abuses. And although he had sex with Libby, he loved Henny, who also loved him. But by a strange coincidence, there was only friendship between them. Henny felt that Lewis was uncomfortable building a long-term relationship with a white woman.

The only one who did not cause obvious pain to Henny was Tom. The protagonist met him in prison. He visited Gemma, the mother of Julio, a blind boy whom Henny would later take in. And Henny was visited there by Mimi, Lewis's mother, who went to prison in place of her youngest son.

Mimi loved me but didn't want to see me with Lewis, whom she loved more. I loved Mimi, Libby, Lewis and my three foster children. Libby didn't love Lewis but slept with him. I loved and didn't love Lewis. She loved McCool, but his body belonged to me. He loved her but felt guilty because he never loved me or gave me children. I loved him three times, but it wasn't enough for either of us. Lewis could have loved Libby if he dared, but he didn't. He kind of loved me, but he was afraid to be seen with me.

Against the backdrop of this quadrangle, Henny reflects on motherhood, friendship, race, class inequality and the search for a spiritual path. She turns to God, Krishna, John the Baptist, Nietzsche, Marx and even Bambi for answers. But she doesn't find them. She doubts all the time. After all, Howe herself said: ‘The end of doubt is death.’ Her heroine is determined to follow the path of higher spiritual development, so she is constantly asking questions and searching for answers.

Henny's story loops through her past, more like short notes than full-blown episodes. The novel's narrative is non-linear. It bounces around like a mountain stream trickling through rocks and trying to find its way, bouncing off one rock and then another. But at the same time, reading the book, there is no sense of being lost or not understanding what is going on. The temporal shreds fit seamlessly into the big picture. Henny locks her husband in the closet in the first sentence of the novel. Why she did this is revealed in the last chapter. And in the last sentence, Fanny Howe gives meaning to the ending in the blind boy Julio's line: