W-3 by Bette Howland / A review by Lucy Scholes

 

W-3 by Bette Howland

By Lucy Scholes

 January 7, 2021

RE-COVERED

In her column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.

When I began writing this column two years ago, I initially restricted myself to discussing only titles that were out of print. But over the past year, as publishers continue to increase their efforts to resurrect lost classics, I’ve begun including pieces about previously neglected books that have been rediscovered and repackaged for a new generation. There are many success stories: the unexpected triumph of the Vintage Classics edition of John Williams’s Stoner, a book that sold less than two thousand copies when it was first published in 1965 before falling swiftly out of print, but as a reprint went on to become the Waterstones Book of the Year in 2013; or Lucia Berlin’s unforeseen posthumous literary stardom in 2015 after her selected short stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women (edited by Stephen Emerson for Farrar, Straus and Giroux), became a New York Times best seller. But there’s no more interesting tale of neglect and rediscovery than that of Bette Howland.

 

Joanna Scutts on How We Find—and Lose—Women Writers

Exhumations and Revelations, from Zora Neale Hurston

to Bette Howland

JOANNA SCUTTS

May 13, 2019

How does a woman writer get lost—and found? Brigid Hughes’ story of rediscovering the Chicago writer Bette Howland follows a now-familiar path of chance encounter, pursuit, and recovery. A few years ago, on the dollar cart of a used bookstore, Hughes found a copy of Howland’s 1974 memoir W-3, spurring her to track down the author’s son, then uncover a trove of unpublished writing—selections of which she published in A Public Space, the literary journal she edits, in 2015. Now, the journal is launching a books division with a collection of Howland’s stories, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, titled after the novella that’s a highlight of the book.

Bette on the Blues / Rediscovering a forgotten Chicago writer

 

“Chicago, c. 1952,” by Vivian Maier. All photographs © The Estate of Vivian Maier. Courtesy Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York City

Bette on the Blues

Rediscovering a forgotten Chicago writer

by Abigail Deutsch

Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, by Bette Howland. A Public Space. 336 pages. $26.

“I should explain right away that I didn’t belong here,” writes Bette Howland (1937–2017) in her 1974 memoir, W-­3. “But that goes without saying, no one belonged here.” The “here” in W-­3 refers to an inpatient psychiatric ward. After a suicide attempt in 1968, Howland—then a single mother of two, living in Chicago—­received treatment at a university hospital. On the ward, the staff appeared to need help as urgently as the patients. Take Seymour Sobeloff, a physician who, rather than work with the residents, chooses to work on himself. He “spent all his time in Occupational Therapy making an ashtray out of colored tiles,” Howland writes, and attends just as thoughtfully to his dietary needs. Every night, the moment provisions for patients’ sandwiches appear in a common area, the doctor does, too:

 

Book of the day

W-3: A Memoir by Bette Howland review – postcard from the edge

The American writer’s account of her stay on a psychiatric ward is as dazzling and daring as when it was first published, in 1974

RACHEL COOK
Monday 14 June 2021

In W-3, the psychiatric ward of a sprawling university hospital in an American city that is quite possibly Chicago, everyone looks the same, which is to say: peculiar. So many varieties of strangeness! Frankie, famed for having ripped out a lavatory bowl with her bare hands, wears a shiny black wig that sits “crooked like a roosting wing” over her eyes. Zelma, who arrived with seven pieces of matching luggage, two wigs plus stands (hair, as you will have gathered, is something of an obsession on the ward) and a collection of hardback pharmacopeias, appears at dinner in full evening dress, complete with silk opera gloves. Trudy, meanwhile, is meant to be in isolation but keeps reappearing “like a cuckoo”, perambulating the corridors “lashed to her intravenous stand – bandages, pyjama strings loosened and streaming – looking like a sort of injured parade float”.

Bette Howland / The Tale of a Forgotten Genius

Bette Holland

BETTE HOWLAND: THE TALE OF A FORGOTTEN GENIUS

How Brigid Hughes Discovered a Lost Writer,
and Her Letters from Saul Bellow

Bette Howland

The Iron Year (1967)

W-3 (1974)

Blue in Chicago (1978)

Things to Come and Go: Three Stories (1983)

Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage (2019)

January 28, 1937–December 13, 2017

In 1984, writer and critic Bette Howland won a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship.

In 1983, she published Things to Come and Go: Three Stories. In 1978 she published her first story collection, Blue in Chicago. The same year, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her first book, the memoir W-3, was published in 1974.

 

Bette Holland

“Love Between Writers”: Saul Bellow and Bette Howland

• By  Jacob Howland
• Summer 2019

You and I are able to track each other in words to perfection. I guess that’s what love is between writers. Or perhaps what love is—period.

                                           —Saul Bellow, March 30, 1990

My mother, the writer Bette Howland, kept among her possessions an old postcard with a photo of stained glass from Canterbury Cathedral. The 13th-century “Miracle Glass” shows men carrying shovels and digging into the ground. “WILLIAM OF GLOUCESTER buried beneath a fall of earth, is dug up alive,” the card’s legend explains. William had been excavating an aqueduct when the accident occurred; St. Thomas of Canterbury appeared in a woman’s dream to tell her that he still lived. Bearing a Southampton postmark of July 8, 1968, the card is inscribed as follows:

Lynn Steger Strong on Bette Howland: Stories Straight from Life

Bette Howland

Lynn Steger Strong on Bette Howland: Stories Straight from Life

by Lynne Steger Strong

Too many stories teach us, my friend said to me the other day as we walked aimlessly around the city, that we’re all supposed to be heroes of our lives. He blamed capitalism. Perhaps too easy a foil in 2019. But all the systems that we build are implicated in and bolstered by the other systems under which we function. We can’t tell any stories in the western world not informed in some way by capitalism, by all the specific and myopic (see also: mostly white male) stories that we’ve been told before. We can’t tell stories that look like those stories without amplifying or reaffirming aspects of these systems in and under which we’re all functioning. 

 

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.

The Short Autofictions of Eve Babitz, Lucia Berlin and Bette Howland

Lucia Berlin in Albuquerque, 1963
Photo by Buddy Berlin

The Short Autofictions of Eve Babitz, Lucia Berlin and Bette Howland

NINA ELLIS

23 August 2022

ABSTRACT

What happens when autofiction meets the short form? Coined in France in the late 1970s, the term ‘autofiction’ refers to writing that blurs the boundary between fiction and fact. It is currently enjoying a vogue in the Anglophone publishing world, where it is used almost exclusively to refer to novel-length works. However, shorter autofictions have existed in English for decades. This study considers the short stories of the late-twentieth-century American writers Bette Howland, Lucia Berlin and Eve Babitz – who have recently been labeled ‘autofiction writers’ – and asks what happens to the genre when it is adapted to the short form. Howland’s Blue in Chicago (1978) demonstrates that brevity brings out the constructed aspects of autofiction. Throughout Berlin’s writing, the contrasts between short autofictions about similar but not identical events equally accentuate the fictional qualities of her work. And in Slow Days, Fast Company (1977), Babitz disrupts the short story collection, as a form, by interspersing her stories with love notes to a reader who isn’t quite fictional, but isn’t quite real. This paper concludes that shortness requires readers to engage with the ‘fiction’ half of the genre, which is too often overlooked in discussions of longer autofictional texts.