IN THE LAST panel of Maureen Howard’s splendid new triptych of novellas—after the love affair between a professor and a foundation executive; after a Sligo mermaid flees a Wall Street stockbroker’s gothic playpen to become a nurse; after church hats, folktales, property rights, banking secrets, and an altar of dandelions and wild garlic—Big as Life dreams itself into the nineteenth-century head of John James Audubon, the birdman who killed for his art. To which, as is her recent habit, Howard adds some memoir, recalling a sixteen-year-old Maureen who first looked at Birds of America in the Bridgeport Public Library in 1946, discovering there “an ardor brought to information of feathers, claws, beaks, flight, color, to song and violence, which was my natural world, too, though I hadn’t known it.”
Her winged world: from Bridgeport, Connecticut, “a vaudeville joke,” and Irish America, a lacework bog, to delirious New York with its Potemkin bohemias. From sex and money as family secrets, to marriage and children as botched experiments, to art and history as magnetic compass points, to writing and teaching as the calisthenics of moral intelligence. “We may be creatures of our time and place,” she has said, “but we make choices, not always for the best, when we love and work.”
Love and work, songs and violence, class, politics, literature, and womanhood—on these grids, she plots us. At least since Natural History (1992), her brilliant project has been to superimpose one grid on another on a third, fourth, and fifth, for depth perception and spectrum analysis. “Exhaustive events,” Artie wrote Louise in A Lover’s Almanac (1998), “cover all possibilities. So that’s where we must be… on the island of overlap in the beauty of intersection.” Almanac was the first book in a projected quartet on a calendar grid—the seasons in symbolic rotation. Thus, after an Almanac winter of discontent and expiations, these three tales for spring, these complicated Easter bunnies of renewal and redemption.
Why Howard isn’t cherished more is mystifying. It’s as if, while nobody watched, Mary McCarthy had grown up to be Nadine Gordimer, getting smarter, going deeper, and writing better than ever before, and she was already special to begin with. Maybe it’s bad timing—the feminist novel, Bridgeport Bus, a couple of years too early; the radical-sixties novel, Before My Time, coming to us after Watergate; the New York intellectuals novel, Expensive Habits, a sort of Ancient Mariner nobody wanted to listen to after all that selling out; the great postmodern pastiche, Natural History, obliged to compete near the end of the century with morose minimalisms and sullen memoirs. Or maybe it’s her unpredictability and impatience—you just can’t keep on leaving home, or minting earrings out of the exhausted vein of silver plate in the Irish American foothills, or rehearsing the same old road show of wayward girls, harmful husbands, angry academics, impudent strangers, suspicion of money, quarrels with the past, ambition, and corruption. Half card sharp, half Gypsy, she always finds another game.
And maybe it’s her refusal to compromise. She hasn’t learned, after all, “not to want the things I cannot have.” To each new haunted house, she brings not only her outcast eye but also her child’s hunger for grand passions, homely objects, happy endings, and big ideas; for contour, sinew, and resonance. Like Mary Agnes Keely in Bridgeport Bus, at her mother’s deathbed, “I must contain it all—all—coolly in my mind while the artifice burns in my heart.” She is almost too much for us. Like the Emerson she plundered for an epigraph to Expensive Habits, she dreams a dream of Eden’s apple and of Newton’s, too—“that I floated at will in the great ether and I saw the world floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, ‘This must thou eat,’ and I ate the world.” But she is also Ben Franklin, the slyboots so crucial to A Lover’s Almanac, the inventor of bifocals and lightning rods, rocking chairs and water wings. Rocking chairs and water wings!
Howard’s chain-smoking, pill-popping, channel-switching father—with his seminary schoolboy smattering of rhetoric and apologetics and his adhesive grudge against a society that treated the Irish “like guttersnipes and cartoon drunks”—was “a terrible man,” perverse and crude, who “never got out of his chair to get himself so much as a glass of water all his life.” Or so his daughter told us in Facts of Life (1978). But he was also a detective, with a badge, a gun, and a railroad pass.
Her mother—fey, fragmented, “somewhat wistful” and “too fine for the working-class neighborhood that surrounded us”—graduated from Smith, quoted Schiller, and married down, for passionate love, at age thirty-three, after which she carried herself “like a grieving queen.” But she was also artsy, with a “near perfect eye” for lotus pods and asparagus ferns. And when she wasn’t washing twenty-dollar bills in dish detergent and drying them on a towel rack (because “money is so dirty”), she dragged her children to concerts by the Budapest String Quartet, rather than the circus.
One grandfather made a pile in the contractor business, married a department store clerk crazy about opera and horses, and conveyed his patriarchal self about town in a luxury Locomobile. The other, having failed to organize workers at Singer Sewing Machine, settled for a political patronage job and walked each day to the county jail.
So Maureen, playing Puck and Portia and reading Eugene O’Neill, knowing that she was “a sinner from the start, never one of the good girls the nuns fussed over,” grew up a plump and pigtailed hostage to piano lessons and modern dance, in a household where mom carved Mary, Joseph, camels, and lambs out of bars of Ivory soap while dad sang “Danny Boy” with tears in his eyes and rooted for Joe McCarthy. She only went to work in the public library in the first place because she thought her parents needed the money—and then all of a sudden saw those Audubon prints, as Big As Life, and decided to fly away.
For a writer “at the beginning of my long caeer as an escape artist,” this is a pretty good tool kit. “I am not the lady I was meant to be,” she didn’t have to tell us.
Her first novel, Not a Word About Nightingales (1960), was a Randall Jarrell campus production she would rather we ignored, like a first marriage, simply practice. But her second, Bridgeport Bus (1965), was a Fear of Flying before the feminist resurgence, as if Bridget Jones’s diary had been written by Rebecca West, Maud Gonne, and Hildegard of Bingen, and very funny, like early Waugh. No American heroine has ever been more wayward, nor more pregnant, than Mary Agnes Keely, a white whale, a “Molly Mick.” And in her pilgrim’s progress from Bridgeport to Greenwich Village, from a job in a zipper factory to a job at Wunda-Clutch the miracle grip, from virginity to martyrdom and from reading to writing, Mary Agnes is more than a match for Studs Dedalus.
Maggie Flood in Expensive Habits (1986) is equally Irish (née Lynch), also a writer (including screenplays), has likewise not succeeded in telling the whole story, and may be dying at age forty-five. Before her heart is bypassed, she has amends to make: Her first husband didn’t deserve her unkind first novel; her only son is owed “some uncorrupted text.” But also scores to settle—with the editor who “took me to be raw material like sugar cane and refined me into a small bowl of salable white crystals to draw the ants.” And the Hollywood director who turned her into a pretentious movie. And the left-wing New York intellectuals who patronized her. You may notice in these pages hanks of Lillian Hellman’s hair, rags and bones of Philip Rahv and Hannah Arendt, and the passing resemblance of poor Pinky, the father of Maggie’s child, to Robert Lowell and Dwight Macdonald. But Expensive Habits is best described as a self-punishing American version of Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter.
Yet all her heroines are self-punishing, harder on themselves than we are. This is why they’re so refreshing in the modern period of crybabies sanctioned by designer therapists. Even as they peel off the Irish, they accuse themselves of envy and class animus. They have no sooner buried their tin-pot fathers and cannibal mothers than they dig them up again to keen—the same sad song on the same damned harp; burning themselves instead of peat. Or, swimming up through fathoms of money to butter knives, serving plates, golf trophies, maybe a clavichord, probably Princeton, certainly a horse, they get the bends, as if they didn’t deserve these goodies, as if anybody does. Don’t look back on the potato famine or you’ll turn into a bottle of Guinness.
And I should say “we” instead of “they.”
So they try to read their way out of the discrepancies—Mary Agnes with the French poets; Laura Quinn with Frost, Freud, and Joyce; Maggie Flood with Plato, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, and Anne of Green Gables. And to politick: civil rights, Vietnam, Bed-Stuy, Woodstock, Pentagon. And to mediate: Mary Agnes writes parables and playlets, as well as ad copy, before her short stories, while all around her in a lofty Village, poets pose and artists arty. Laura’s books include a novel, and she also tape-records a lot. Maggie goes from fiction to screenplays, before confessing all like Augustine, while Pinky in a basement full of alcoholic fumes compiles his secret archive: “family tales,” “scraps of romance,” “naive realism,” “correspondences.”
Which blasts the heath for Natural History, a multimedia novel asking why, in 1945 wartime Bridgeport, a socialite vamp with a Southern accent got away with murder. Because Natural History is an Oedipal mystery, keep your eye on the county detective. But spectacle and illusion are the bigger villains. Bridgeport, home of P. T. Barnum, Walt “Pogo” Kelly, Remington rifles, and Sikorsky aircraft, may have declined from an Arsenal of Democracy into needle-park housing projects and jai alai frontons. But not as seen through the self-deceiving eyes of the Irish Catholic Bray family, who imagine the city and themselves in children’s stories, fairy tales, stage plays, film scripts, lives of the saints, and a double entry that mimicks the Arcades Project of Walter Benjamin, with narrative to the right while on the left we shop in a typographic mall of time-coded mugshots, history lessons, odd stats, snide asides, quotes, and jokes.
In this dreamscape of stage and screen, circus and rodeo, museums, marching bands, and even operatic stagings by the Catholic Church of our “primary narrative myth,” nobody notices the real-life disappearance of Peaches, who turns coat hangers into wire effigies of men who abuse her mother. And when a name and an identity are both erased from a computer file, we sense that Maureen Howard is about to go digital, virtual, and World Wide Webby. And so she does.
A Lover’s Almanac is the story of two pairs of lovers coiled in a double helix. Artie, a young mathematician, and Louise, a young artist, love each other, but are both so callow they let talk-show issues get in the way. Besides, neither is sure of being the real thing: the first-rate mind, the genuine original. Cyril O’Connor, Artie’s grandfather, and Sylvie Neisswonger, an Austrian refugee, loved each other fifty years ago. But Cyril married Mae, the good Catholic daughter of his Wall Street boss, to escape his boggy origins (cop father drinks, mother is abused), while Sylvie went home to the nice man with the okay stepchildren. It is, however, a new millennium. Sylvie is alone in Connecticut. So is widowed Cyril in a leather chair in his Fifth Avenue apartment, reading the books he gave up for money. And so, briefly, they will put their stories together while Artie and Louise dream up ways to tear theirs apart. “It seems,” says Louise, “you must reinvent yourself to meet love’s impossible demands.” Well, yes.
But A Lover’s Almanac is also a captivity narrative, where everyone is kidnapped, if not by Indians, then maybe Freud, or Marx, or bad luck, or probability theory. To all her other intersecting grids, Howard has added mathematics and music, astrology and Egyptology, medical science, a Mayan calendar, and what she calls “The Endless Page.” Scroll down, she tells us. And we do, learning a lot about dairy farms, number theory, conceptual art, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Edison, Darwin, Newton, and St. Paul. But we don’t find out what happened to Sissy, orphan of the savage streets. Nor who Artie’s real father was, back in the radically permissive sixties. So many data and coordinates, such a density of language, and I haven’t even mentioned the machine-gun italics when the author wants to confide in us herself—and still we never know enough to be positive about anything.
Which is the point of this amazing novel. Knowing as much as may be humanly possible, and yet not enough to be absolutely sure, guarantees choice—free will’s wiggle room.
I can’t be sure (of course!), but I think we meet Sissy again in Big as Life, before she had to hit the streets and sleep at night in empty day-care centers. We certainly meet Mae Boyle, before she married Cyril O’Connor, the only creature in her father’s house who isn’t dipped in bronze, a prim tormented child who worships the Virgin at her own wild altar of buttons, garlic, and pigeon feathers. And Artie and Louise put in an extended reappearance, not yet married but the parents of a child, on a Long Island sabbatical from the delirious city. Artie plays games at a seminar with Fermat’s Last Theorem, Euclid’s Fifth, Riemann’s Hypothesis, and the Parallel Postulate. Louise, in a garage, consulting her Audubon, dreams of Peaceable Kingdoms and does kinky things to an owl. Maureen looks on, eagle-eyed. While she clearly cares about them, she’s itchy to have her own say.
After speaking in tongues of endings that are almost happy, in fables intended to remind us of Perrault and La Fontaine, Howard seizes her own stage. She will stick pins in Audubon, with his gun, violin, and dancing slippers. “I hardly call it a day,” said the American Woodsman, the son of a slave trader, “if I have not shot a hundred birds.” And in his journal: “Cuckoos, killed 5. Painted Buntings, killed 20.” This is another, darker parable, and she is made to wonder: Killing for art, for science, for greed, for the blood-drunk lazy crazy hell of it? It is also the self-consciousness of a great artist in her own forest—more love, violence, work, and songs.