Howard Maureen C and Paul We Annual Review of Immunologyvol 1 1983pp307333

Image courtesy of Marion Ettlinger.

Maureen Howard, an author of adventurous fiction and a prize-winning memoir, and an esteemed teacher of creative writing, passed away on Sunday in New York City. She was 91 years old.

Howard was the author of ten novels, three of which, Grace Abounding, Expensive Habits, and Natural History, were finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her 1978 memoir, Facts of Life, was the winner of the National Volume Critics Circumvolve Award. She likewise edited The Penguin Volume of Contemporary American Essays (1984). Among other honors she was the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and an University Award in Literature from the American University of Arts and letters.

Howard was, in the words of Anne Tyler, "a about agile, inventive, and satisfying writer" who was always seeking new ways of telling stories. "Why Howard isn't cherished more than is mystifying," wrote John Leonard in a front-page New York Times review of her late novel Big as Life. "It's as if, while nobody watched, Mary McCarthy had grown up to be Nadine Gordimer, getting smarter, going deeper and writing improve than ever before, and she was already special to brainstorm with."

Many considered Howard's masterwork to be her 1992 novel Natural History, a family chronicle that incorporated drawings and photographs, in which Howard took Bridgeport, Connecticut equally her Dublin. In a front page review in the New York Times Volume Review, John Casey wrote that "it is the combination, the leap-cuts, and layering and dovetailing of fiction and history and of a variety of voices that make reading this novel like watching a display of the aurora borealis." Afterwards in her career, Howard produced a boldly structured quartet of novels published by Viking Penguin (A Lover's Almanac, 1998; Big every bit Life, 2001; The Silver Screen, 2004; and The Rags of Time, 2009) that critics praised as "brazenly intelligent" and "raptly adventurous" works of "historical density and deep emotional power." Each of the iv novels was consummate on its own, but characters and themes were woven across the bike as a tapestry of seasons.

Howard was born and raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and educated at Smith College. Her outset novel, Not a Word About Nightingales, was published in 1962. A second novel, Bridgeport Charabanc (1965), told the story of a fallacious Irish-American adult female who leaves the emptiness of modest town life in Bridgeport for the maelstrom of Manhattan; Doris Grumbach called it "one of the nigh astutely funny novels of our fourth dimension." Beginning in the tardily 1960s, Howard taught writing at several universities, including Rutgers, Princeton, Brooklyn College, The New School, the University of California at Santa Barbara, Yale and Columbia.

A memorial is planned for the spring.

–Paul Slovak, Vice President and Executive Editor of Viking Books

*

Maureen was my writing teacher nearly thirty years ago. She changed my life, with her kindness and advice, her smashing encouragement when the chips were down. And her books—in a way that I've just get conscious of recently—left an imprint on my ain manner of constructing fiction. Maureen had a four-dimensional understanding of story, reliably shuttling between points of view and points in fourth dimension, keeping the folded clock (to use my classmate Heidi Julavits's term) ticking, deploying various forms to tell the story fresh, keep readers on their toes: diary and playlet (Bridgeport Bus), triptych (Big equally Life), double entry ledger (Natural History), the titular tome of A Lover's Almanac.

Even before she slipped away last week, I had a re-create of Natural History, Maureen'due south magnum opus from 1992, on my writing desk, equally a beacon to see me through the complicated novel that I am revising. See, the book whispered to me, it tin can be done! Later on she passed, I opened the book, to detect four pieces of printed affair, haphazardly preserved years ago, now as fascinating as glacial debris. (I retrieve she wouldn't listen the joke Moraine Howard.) What would Maureen do? I could imagine a whole book told through these documents, Howard-style; for at present, here'due south a cursory annotation, in the magpie spirit of her work.

A) Mauve bookmark from the defunct Bailey/Coy bookstore on Madison, on the back of which I've written, in a tiny hand, "27 mibs."

A mystery. I turn to page 27, which happens to hold a perfect noir passage that'due south typical Maureen—language imbued with retention, hewing to its own rhythm:

It wasn't a belle puffing smoke at him from the pouty lips, the restless desire in her eyes practiced on a hundred bar stools, or, what the hell give her the benefit of the doubt, verandas. Eyes shallow as mibs, the pale brown shooting marble James lost down the backseat of the car. Optics not pretty but useful and she gives that tough mib look to Billy Bray, the luster worn off it years ago, passing it effectually simply every bit natural every bit trying for a breeze, the eyes and mouth searching him as she has searched the soldier boy last nighttime, wanting something for herself.

That shrugging "verandas" makes me express joy. "Tough mib expect" is lucid and accurate; it's as well a word combination so weird it also makes me laugh. At present imagine almost 400 pages of such pleasures.

B) Invitation for a February 19, 1998 event at the PEN American Centre—Maureen in conversation upon the publication of A Lover'due south Almanac. Information technology'southward the sixth installment of "The Writer, the Piece of work," a series of "encounters with world literature," curated by Susan Sontag.

The description sounds similar Sontag in her all-time superlative register. "Maureen Howard is writer in a heroic American mold…[who] has explored the complexity of our dreams and of private life…[O]ne can only wonder why this extraordinary torso of work does not figure more centrally in the usual accounts of American literature."

Isn't it time?

C) Printout of my introduction to her 2005 event at the 92nd Y, where she read from The Silver Screen, sharing the stage with Cynthia Ozick.

This is the sole surviving copy of the text, most of which I've forgotten, save for the line: "As the Koreans accept been called the Irish of Asia, it'due south perhaps small wonder that we became friends." A good line: "At present, if you're going to proper name a character Artie Freeman [a key figure in her career-ending tetralogy], you'd better be prepared to brand your own art a model of liberty. And of grade, Maureen does." Also, I compare one graphic symbol's surprise reappearance to that of John Travolta'southward character in Pulp Fiction.

D) Toast-shaped, lemon yellowish business card for Columbus Baker, 474 Columbus Avenue.

The whimsical logo of this now defunct eatery depicts a happy slice of breadstuff toting baguette, wearing chapeau, yet this is the document that makes me sob. Salve for a spell on the East Side, I've basically lived within x blocks of the apartment where Maureen and her late, wonderful married man Marking resided on Central Park West. In the tardily 1990s, I lived in a small studio on West 83rd Street. Most mornings I would go to Columbus Bakery effectually the corner, to write what would amount to my 2nd unpublished novel. (Longhand—no laptop in the 90s.) Maureen would often see me there, buy me a pastry, basically make me not feel insane.

I loved her then much.

–Ed Park

*

Maureen was my only writing teacher, and after I studied with her, I never looked for some other. She was precise, impassioned, impatient, not exactly satisfied with anyone'south piece of work, but sizing us all up, information technology seems to me now, as possible writers, or at least as cocktail-party invitees. Maureen lived in writing constantly. She hurried (I remember her hurrying) betwixt the study in the dorsum of her apartment and the sofa in the front end, the New York Review, a glass of gin, a bowl of nuts, a chat about someone else's start novel—proficient, practiced, but perhaps ane could exercise better? Inviting an awkward ex-student to recall: peradventure me? I don't know if my books met her standards, just she did keep having me over for drinks. Her hospitality was flawless, and, similar many other things about her, it said, Let'due south get to the point. What are you lot reading?

Every bit for what happened when the invitee went abode and Maureen hurried back to her study, nosotros have her books for bear witness: keen-eyed, encyclopedic, often waiting for you to grab up. Reading them, you lot might think that Maureen wanted everything to go into a book sooner or later, but I wonder if it would exist more than authentic to say that, for Maureen, everything—students, walks, cocktail nuts—existed so that there could be books, and people who loved to read and occasionally write them.

–Paul La Farge

*

Maureen had a capacious intelligence, and she was generous with its expression. She got on with her work as a writer without a lot of fanfare. She did what the greatest artists exercise—stretched bachelor forms to their limits. In the process, she made everything interesting. All she had to do, information technology seemed, was tell what she was thinking.

I'm reminded of a couple of pages deep inside her last book, The Rags of Time, when the narrator is thinking. That's it. She'south thinking, and it's powerfully gripping. She thinks virtually a garden in the Berkshires. She thinks about the building where she lives, beyond from Central Park. She thinks about the war in Iraq and the lies of politicians. She thinks near her mother cut a piece of navy cloth for her brother's confirmation suit. She thinks about her own responsibilities and privileges. She thinks nearly her beloved grandchildren and a tropical fern in their terrarium. She thinks virtually reading and writing and the books on her shelf. At this point, with her thoughts roaming beyond literary history, they land on Don Quixote, and it's like a cardinal turning in a lock. The door swings open up and we go a glimpse of the driving purpose that powered Maureen Howard through her long, magnificent career:

I'm even so mad every bit Quixote, the spindly knight. Lost in the tragedy of my bookishness, I share with the Don the illusion that tales are the truthful documentation of life.

Mad… lost… tragedy. It all sounds dire, but there's a slyness behind the lament. The passage may brainstorm with madness, but look at how it turns tragedy upside down and moves from illusion to truth, from bookishness to life. For this teller of tales, this author who, I wager, volition be among those still read in a hundred years, life is best understood when we're given the chance to document it, imaginatively and with artistry.

As for existence as mad as Quixote, that's not necessarily a bad matter. It takes me back to a line from a chatty email Maureen sent me twenty years ago:

Finishing the semester. Mad to get dorsum to the sanity of piece of work.

(She certain could tell a good joke. In that same email, in response to my complaints most the challenges of writing and publishing, she wrote, "Call up of a plot for a best seller and I'll hammer it out." Damn—I never came up with that plot.)

It was a privilege to be Maureen's friend and share with her the wonderful illusion that tales are worth telling. When I reread her books, I continue seeing how much I missed on the commencement reading and am grateful for all there is to learn. I remember when she started to talk about her vision of a ready of interconnected books organized around the seasons. I remain astonished at her power to excogitate of such an ambitious project in its totality and to see information technology through over the class of more than than a decade. There were times when she worried about its prospects, merely she kept on, quietly undaunted, modest and yet fiercely dedicated to making her fine art.

Maureen looked hard at the world in her attempt to document it. She did what she could, through her writing, to make people aware of injustice and degradation. She also wanted to requite readers reason to be fascinated. She herself was fascinated past acrobats, magic tricks, birds, almanacs, maps, quondam photographs, new photographs, the past, the present, Bridgeport, Connecticut, and New York City. I call up the place that fascinated her most, outside of the space of her elegant apartment, was Central Park. She fabricated it her mission, through multiple books, to document the beauty and history of the park.

In Rags of Time, amid all the thinking the narrator is doing, she tells us about sneaking out of her apartment building without a coat, hat, or scarf, to get for a walk in Central Park. It is winter in this fourth book that completes the four seasons. "Snow fell gently, translucent on the pavement." It is slippery in the park, but still the narrator manages to climb upwardly the slope to the Reservoir Track. She takes in the scene. She looks downwardly and sees an image that encapsulates the purposefulness of Maureen Howard'due south artistry: "All I want: my footprint in the starting time snowfall of the flavor, faint proof that I still venture."

She leaves behind her tales total of brilliance, documenting moments in time, there for an instant, and nevertheless there, long after the snow has melted.

–Joanna Scott

*

Maureen Howard was a bold, adventurous writer of the first rank who loved the idea of making the novel practice and hold more. Her fiction was innovative and exploratory, but it was also intimate, personal, and vivid. I ever thought of her equally a kind of Smithsonian, recreating America of the 20th century through collecting and curating endlessly resonant, dense details. Her mind was both tender and satirical. She saw and remembered everything. In a work similar Natural History,she perfected a profound microscopic-macroscopic mode built out of supple sentences that leveraged all the senses. She was the best of modernism wedded to a timeless introspection.

She was also the most generous and tireless distributor of other writers that I've ever known. Maureen helped me and other writers of my generation become established, and she spent tireless hours reading, reviewing, discussing, education, and promoting the literature that she most admired. No one I know has done more than for American letters.

–Richard Powers

*

Maureen began as my teacher and mentor at Columbia and became my dear friend, and my life would exist very unlike if she hadn't been all of those things. When I was writing my first novel, I reached a point where I was scared to continue with it. After months of dithering, I expressed my doubts to Maureen. She said, "Nonsense. You mustn't exist afraid of your book. Only make damn sure you practise information technology right." Then, with a petty wave of her paw, "And of class, y'all'll practice it correct." I loved that fierceness she had, when it came to what she called The Work (I always heard it in capital letter letters when she spoke of it—I'one thousand certain I'm non alone in that). For Maureen, writing was of the utmost importance, and and so when she believed in you and your work, yous began to believe in yourself.

I was lucky enough to alive beyond the street from Maureen and Marc for a time, and so I got to run across them often. Their place was a hive for writers, and there were ever a bunch of u.s.a. buzzing around, for drinks and dinners. Maureen'due south interests were far-ranging, and she brought her ferocious intelligence and wit to whatsoever topic. She had a disdain for season-of-the-month writers and posers of all stripes, and her take-downs were deliciously mordant. To her students and friends, she was supportive and generous and challenging in a manner that made you lot desire to be meliorate. Knowing her was a tremendous souvenir for which I'll always exist grateful.

–Hillary Jordan

*

My favorite matter I heard Maureen say—to a student in a Q&A who asked naively but meaningfully what was the well-nigh of import thing for a young writer to do: "The most of import thing for a young writer is to affix the ass to the chair."

–James Longenbach

*

How unlikely information technology would be to think of a fashion in which Maureen Howard didn't bear on many of united states of america, every bit she did me and whatsoever I was doing, whenever and wherever it was. Early on in our blessedly long human relationship, when she would come up over and bring together a group of us, readers and writers and all graduates of Smith and Holyoke and Bryn Mawr, information technology would e'er experience, no thing where like home, and every bit if we had always been there together.

Manner back when, I would get to her place downward in the hamlet for drinks and meeting always fascinating talkative types. Then, whenever it was, I knew her second husband David Gordon, every bit a colleague at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, for a few years. There, of class there, where else? (I am not prejudiced, having taught there so happily for fifty years) the all-embracing Alfred Kazin. When Maureen so brilliantly married Mark Probst, I would go over (often) to have dinner with them on Central Park W, and always loved reading his writing as well as hers, of which I read every single bit. I would sometimes spend weekends with them in the country, going with him to go various tomatoes and such in their hamlet while she was writing.

In the urban center I would be taken along with them to brunch or lunch at the Café Luxembourg, and various historic personages would come to greet and chat with Maureen, while I was always happy to sit with Mark and talk about whatever and whomever came upward. In later years, my married man and I would go over to their apartment on Cardinal Park West. I was tickled, when we would exist late after some musical event, she would say "we volition be in the other room," while I hadn't figured out usually that the "other room" was the dining room, after the living room, where nosotros would oftentimes meet other famous writers and poets like Richard Howard and many scientific and medical friends of theirs. At the dining room table, we so gladly would see Gloria Loomis, who was my agent also, and often other poet and scientific friends we knew through Mark and Maureen.

We'd go over for tea or drinks or tiffin, where Maureen introduced me to those superb purplish Kumato tomatoes. I loved it when Loretta and her family would be in that location: always we, my husband Boyce and myself, felt family with Maureen and Mark. Years later, when Mark was in a wheelchair, Boyce and he would have dejeuner, or all four of us, on the same café on Columbus Artery. And later nonetheless, I would visit her when I could.

I and so heartily hold with Gary Davenport and my now gone friends Noel Perrin and Alfred Kazin, in saluting her warm in fact glowing intelligence and pen. She was the spirit of interconnectedness. When she was figuring out, for a illustrated book, the seasons and how to add the visual elements (not the irksome stuff like permissions and all those boring if essential things) and how to have the relations both startling and subtle, I was excited to be somewhat involved. All my lengthy involvements personal and professional person with Maureen Howard were, to me, something of a marvel.

–Mary Ann Caws

*

Maureen Howard was, along with such figures equally William Kennedy, John Gregory Dunne, Robert Rock, Jimmy Breslin, Mary Gordon,  her great predecessor (and, I suspect function model)  Mary McCarthy  and her great successor Alice McDermott, one of the nigh notable fictional chroniclers of the  Irish American experience of the past century. (Stone's uncertain parentage makes his actual ethnicity equally uncertain, but he certain wrote, thought and drank like an Irish Cosmic, so I claim him for our own.) She was a brainy, astringent, exceptionally elegant writer, and she never made information technology easy on herself or her readers. She never stepped into the same narrative stream twice.

I had the pleasure of working with Maureen on 2 superb books. The first was the Penguin Book of Contemporary American Essays, a book assembled with such exquisite gustatory modality and judgment that, as I recall, even the impossible to please critic John Simon, was impressed. The other was possibly her all-time known and certainly most aggressive volume, Natural History. It was fix in her native Bridgeport and, much like her fellow Connecticut author John Dunne'due south work, centered on municipal abuse, family ties, and a notorious crime. It was an immensely erudite book, presided over past the unlikely paired muses of Walter Benjamin and P.T. Barnum, and information technology truly earned this sometimes hackneyed encomium: She did for her native Bridgeport what James Joyce did for his native Dublin. The critics raved, and they should have.

Maureen and I were close for a while, possibly too shut. We'd both made our way from unpromising and parochial (in both senses) backgrounds to fancy colleges and the New York literary world. We both had fathers who were large city detectives. I especially admired her memoir Facts of Life—the best affair in its line, I believe, since Memories of a Catholic Girlhood—and I had read it as a sort of instruction manual on how to practice this thing—become, I mean, someone other than the person you lot had been raised and expected to be. Our closeness was also related to the fact that she looked a good deal like my not specially literary mother, both dark-haired and lovely, both fond but tough-minded in a watch-information technology-mister way. I e'er regretted that we drifted apart after I ceased to publish her.

Maureen Howard was, in every sense, a class deed. Her books advantage re-reading and are built to last. I'll miss her, but those books are over there on my bookshelf and are coming downwardly for renewed inspection right this minute.

–Gerald Howard

*

Maureen Howard taught me how to write books. She was my professor at Columbia University and ane of the best I ever had. She was generous and insightful, wickedly funny and also quick to call out fools. Equally a writer she was elegant and stylistically daring, ambitious and big-hearted. I absolutely adored her.

–Victor LaValle

*

I met Maureen when I was a pupil. She was kind and steely, e'er acknowledging what it meant to me to be from working-form Queens (the way she was, from Bridgeport), just never allowing that to be an alibi for what she deplored equally sentimentality, or (the worst) "lady writing." She entered my piece of work into contests, and wrote me long handwritten notes nearly my stories' intentions. Here's Maureen in a scene that could've been from one of her novels: meeting my partner for the first time the afternoon of New Year's Eve, giving united states thick woolen hats and ordering us to "get and see the ball come up down tonight." Considering of her, we did; because of her, like many of the other students who loved her, I became a writer.

– Chaya Bhuvaneswar

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Source: https://lithub.com/remembering-novelist-and-teacher-maureen-howard/

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