Rediscovering a vital Chicago voice
Through the end of the year, the Chicago Tribune is revisiting books worthy of further recognition.
When I was an aspiring fiction writer going to high school in the Chicago suburbs, I longed to read the best authors who took our nearest city as their subject. When my English teachers at Downers Grove North assembled literary lists in response to my request, without fail they included a handful of worthy dudes: Nelson Algren, Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow, Stuart Dybek.
While I appreciated those guys, I often wished I could encounter voices that spoke of the city in different tones and from different angles. To put a finer point on it, I wanted to read some 20th-century Chicago-based fiction by a woman. Now, over two decades later, the publication of the collection “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage” has given me — along with the rest of the world — a new chance to encounter a talent who could fill that space: Bette Howland.
Born Bette Lee Sotonoff in 1937 to Jewish immigrants, Howland died in 2017. She married Howard Howland, a biologist, in 1956, and they had two children, then divorced, leaving her a single mother supporting herself as a part-time librarian and doing editorial work for the University of Chicago Press.
Although she moved away in 1975, she took Chicago and its people as her frequent subjects, often focusing both on the Jewish milieu of her own extended family and on the working-class residents of
overlooked neighborhoods. In “Twenty-Sixth and California,” for instance, a panoramic and righteously wry exploration of the criminal courthouse that still stands on that site, she quips, “On the slopes along the front steps — the name, Criminal Courts, set in a mound— signs warn you: Keep Off the Grass. Though the grass looks tough enough to fend for itself.” She continues, “I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t such a hot idea to build a city on this site. There is too much energy here. Along with the power of construction goes the power of destruction. Tohu and bohu. Vacant lots, buildings condemned, neighborhoods decayed. Chicago isn’t a city: just the raw materials for a city. The prairie is always reasserting itself, pressing its claims.”
Reading her for the first time this past summer felt like receiving an unexpected note slipped under the door from someone I’d never heard of, but who totally got me — who knew what I wanted to hear about, and how and why I wanted to hear it, and who just told me, page after beautiful page. Set in Uptown, the lovingly comic story “Public Facilities” draws on her time as a librarian, painting an exquisite a portrait of a library as a gathering place for people “who have no place to go.” She captures the late-’60s milieu of that neighborhood with a documentarian’s eye and a sardonic tone, noting that “The streaked grime — melting snow — characteristic of the bricks of Chicago in winter in winter, can be seen here even on the faces. Mexican, Korean, black, Puerto Rican, pensioned-off Jew: they get along more or less without racial strife. To tell the truth, that’s the least of their worries.”
Titanic literary critic Harold Bloom died while I was planning this essay, and the timing felt significant. In his 1994 book “The Western Canon,” Bloom — discussing 26 writers, 22 of them men and four of them women — declares, “You must choose. Either there were aesthetic values or there are only the overdeterminations of race, class, and gender.” His insistence that engagement with literature is a zero-sum, either/or, utterly binary game remains an enduring and specious bummer. I don’t want to choose, and with a writer like Howland, I don’t have to. Of course a book can be aesthetically good and present a perspective that’s underrepresented. Of course readers can enjoy both a book’s inherent qualities and consider it in light of the identity of its author. And of course those qualities shouldn’t be treated as isolated or inseparable, especially when the canon itself has been so narrowly shaped along lines of race, class and gender.
If you look at her résumé, Howland seems a canonical shoo-in. She wrote three books over the course of her lifetime, including “W-3,” “Blue in Chicago” and “Things to Come and Go.” She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in 1981, and a MacArthur genius grant in 1984. Yet she came dreadfully close to being completely forgotten.
Thankfully, the canon is less a monument carved eternally in stone and more of an ongoing sculpture, a malleable clay capable of being molded and shaped, added to and subtracted from. Through sheer luck, Brigid Hughes, editor of the literary journal A Public Space, happened to scan through the dollar cart at the Housing Works Bookstore in Manhattan in 2015, where Howland’s memoir “W-3” caught her eye. No average browser, Hughes included a portfolio of Howland’s work in a special issue of her magazine, which explored “a generation of women writers, their lifetimes of work, and questions of anonymity and public attention in art.” Ultimately, Hughes founded A Public Space Books, which included “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage” on its first-ever list, the book’s jacket copy declaring that it “restores to the literary canon an extraordinarily gifted writer, who was recognized as a major talent before all but disappearing from public view for decades, until nearly the end of her life.”
This deliberate act of recovery is exciting unto itself because it illustrates the adaptability of the canon, but it is even more so because the book in question is thrilling and worth rediscovery. Howland’s sense of humor illuminates every page, and even her sharpest barbs glint with wisdom and humanity, as in the story “How We Got the Old Woman to Go” when her protagonist observes, not without compassion, “What better way to tell your mother what you think of her than not to have children?”
Her lyrical passages approach not merely poetry, but something like the sacred, almost holy in their cadences. In the story “To the Country,” assorted lower-middle-class city dwellers head southeast around Lake Michigan to soak up some peace away from the wear of daily life. But this restoration proves chimerical, the lakeshore not an idyll, but a place equally beset by problems as anywhere else. “So where is it then?” the breathless final passage demands. “Where is the rightful life that is awaiting us? Where is that undiscovered territory? Where the air is clear and consciences are clean? How do we get there? How do we cut our paths through this wilderness? How do we run up our flags and stake our claims?”
At last Howland’s claim has been re-staked, hopefully with a degree more permanence this time, for the rightful (after)life that awaits her work is that she be recognized as a Chicago writer of near-universal delight.
Kathleen Rooney is the author, most recently, of the novel “Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk.”