Bette Howland

Bette Howland was a forgotten genius of US literature – but now her sharp, sardonic work has been rediscovered

Her bracingly modern books resonate as much today as they did when first written

Sarah Hughes
January 7, 2021

Bette Howland is not the sort of author who should fall from fashion. While her output is slim – W-3, a devastating memoir about her time in a psychiatric ward, two books of short stories and handful of essays – her rhythmic sentences and striving characters resonate as much today as they did when first written in the 1970s and early 80s.

Considered one of American literature’s rising stars, Howland appeared on literary panels alongside contemporaries such as Joyce Carol Oates and Margaret Atwood and was the recipient of both a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as the “genius grant”, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Yet while the prize-winning likes of Oates and Atwood are still heralded today, Howland never published again after receiving the MacArthur in 1984. When she died in 2017 after years of ill-health, her writing had been out of print for decades. It might have remained forgotten, had it not been for a chance discovery in a second-hand bookshop that thrust her back into the spotlight.

“I was browsing the $1 cart at a used bookstore in New York and a copy of her memoir W-3 caught my attention,” explains Brigid Hughes, the editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space, who has spearheaded the republication of Howland’s work.

“At first I was attracted by the cover and the blurb from Saul Bellow, then, opening a random page, I was captivated by the joy of the writing. It was nearly impossible to find anything about her online, which of course only made me more curious.”

‘W-3’ by Bette Howland, a devastating memoir about the author’s stint in a psychiatric ward

Back in bookshops

Hughes’s quest to find out more has culminated in the republication of Howland’s work on both sides of the Atlantic. A selection of her short stories, Blue in Chicago, first published in America in 1978 to widespread acclaim, was reissued by Picador over the summer. W-3 will be published later this year.

W-3 refers to Ward Three, the psychiatric ward attached to the University of Chicago where Howland, a 31-year-old single mother of two small children, was sent in 1968 following an overdose.

Reading it now, what stands out is how bracingly modern it feels – Howland’s sharp portraits of her fellow patients, the unsparing eye she turns on herself, her refusal to look away from daily humiliations, could come straight from the pages of Terri White’s acclaimed memoir Coming Undone, published only last year.

Howland reserves her greatest honesty for her own experiences: “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.”

It wasn’t always like this. A piece in the Paris Review by the American poet Honor Moore recalls Howland “holding court” at the McDowell ­Colony, a writer’s retreat, in 1977, adding that while she lacked the “sheen and confidence” of the men surrounding her, “she had a resonant alto voice and an intensity and kindness that pulled me in”.

She could be funny, too, notes Moore, a claim that is backed up in her writing. In a story in Blue in Chicago a woman breathes “with an air of doing her duty”. Elsewhere another character notes sardonically that “All you have to do is say ‘Chicago’. At once the conversation turned to crime.” At a Saturday dinner: “Words of Yiddish passed over the table like the Angel of Death. It was the language of bad news; bodily functions; the parts of a dead chicken.”

Moore compares Howland to Jean Rhys. Both share a similar style, staccato and sardonic. Both struggled – Rhys with alcoholism, Howland with mental health – and both faded from the public eye. Both were “mentored” by well-known male authors: Rhys by Ford Maddox Ford and Howland by the Nobel Prize-winning, Bellow, whom she met when he was almost 50 and she just 24. A brief affair ensued but, as Bellow’s surviving correspondence makes clear, it was the deep friendship that developed that meant the most.

“As I walked by the river with uneven feet I missed you, I thought how grand if Bette were only here,” he wrote from Zurich in 1970, a letter cited by Howland’s son Jacob in a 2015 piece for Commentary magazine.

Overcoming imposter syndrome

Why then did Howland slip from sight? In part it’s that her working-class background made her easy to dismiss. She was born in Chicago in 1937, her father worked in a factory and her mother stayed at home; her decision to go to university and forge a career from writing was a ground-breaking one. The sociologist Edward Shils, a close friend of Bellow’s, reportedly referred to her as the writer’s “working-class queen” while a piece in The Glasgow Herald by Rosemary Goring notes that Bellow’s biographer, James Atlas, dismissed her as “a stocky woman with a pock-marked face”.

Bellow himself was far kinder, calling her “one of the significant writers of her generation” and encouraging her when she struggled. Not that his kind words always helped. “There is a feeling of her having come from a working-class background without real connections and lacking the innate sense of entitlement that brings,” says Kishani Widyaratna, who oversaw Picador’s acquisition of Howland’s work.

“You perhaps don’t have that sense of being happy, of having been given permission to write. Then when you do rise, higher multiple things can happen that play into a sense of imposter syndrome. That’s partially what happened to Bette Howland.”

There are also wider questions at play here, in particular the notion of how much easier it is for women to slip to history’s margins. “It is harder for women to make their mark, particularly working-class women,” says AN Devers, the proprietor of feminist bookshop, the Second Shelf, who was renting a desk at A Public Space when Hughes firstrediscovered Howland’s work. “Bette Howland did have a very difficult scenario where she married well but it didn’t last and her husband’s family weren’t kind to her after the divorce. She often struggled to finish work and was prone to self-sabotage but she also had people like Bellow advocating for her writing.

“The fact that that still wasn’t enough, that she still fell out of publication, is down to an underlying sexism where men who struggle with mental health issues, such as David Foster Wallace, get canonised, but women are ignored and even dismissed.”

A. N. Devers, who owns London feminist bookshop The Second Shelf, believes that writers like Bette
Howland are ‘ignored and even dismissed’ (Photo: TOLGA AKMEN/AFP/Getty)

In truth, a number of factors contributed to Howland’s fade from the spotlight. She struggled financially and mentally following her divorce both prior to and on release from Ward Three. Jacob would later say that she felt “paralysed” by the MacArthur Grant, increasingly failing to finish stories. She died in 2017, aged 80, following years of living with multiple sclerosis and dementia.

“I suspect that one of the major issues was that people didn’t quite know how to place her work,” says Hughes. “Was it fiction? Non-fiction? Her response was that people shouldn’t worry about how much invention there is, they should worry about how much imagination there is. According to her, imagination was ‘the only way of experiencing life’. The question of what she should or shouldn’t write or what was fashionable wasn’t her frame of reference.”

It doesn’t help that the subject matter of much of Howland’s work, in particular the short-story collection Blue in Chicago, which follows ordinary people doing everyday things – collecting garbage, patrolling the streets, planning funerals, preparing food for their families – is too easily dismissed as “domestic”, a complaint that is commonly used to discredit or belittle women writers.

“I do think that we need to have a serious discussion about how we evaluate and talk about work by women,” says Devers. “This idea that the books aren’t big because they’re dealing with small moments in life is really problematic and it shuts out books by women.

“Bette Howland had some terrible hits in life but they are not the only thing that held her back. It’s very difficult to have an afterlife as a woman writer and many of those that manage it do have a certain amount of privilege on their side. It’s not just about talent. It’s about talent, a bit of luck plus some privilege. Really it’s something of a crapshoot.”

Reading W-3 and Blue in Chicago it seems ridiculous that Howland’s work was forgotten. These are stories both intimate and universal, populated with recognisable characters, from a grieving widower to overlooked delivery men and set in a busy, bustling world that is brought vividly to life. “There’s something in the way that she captures how you can be in a crowd and yet feel very lonely in yourself that feels particularly timeless,” says Widyaratna. “Her stories take place in very public spaces – libraries, hospitals, crowded apartments and often feature people other writers might have ignored. There’s a wonderful music in the voices of her characters – the stories make you feel that you’re really there on those streets with those people. That’s a very hard thing to achieve.”

Hughes is delighted that Howland is finally getting the recognition that she deserves. “The thing about Bette Howland that’s easy to forget is that there is so much humour in her work,” she says. “Her stories can be painful at times but they’re hugely joyful, too. What I hope people realise is that she’s just so much fun to read.”

Blue in Chicago by Bette Howland is published by Picador, £12.99; W-3 will be published by Picador this year

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