Fanny Howe Found Her Voice in the Romance Novel

Most remarkably, though, is the novel’s anticipation of Howe’s later spiritual seeking. There is, in the version published by Nurse Novels Publishing, an uncannily apt typo, which I like to think is an artifact from Howe’s original: “I think you could do a lot of god for him,” one character tells Ellen of David. It’s a line that could come straight out of one of Howe’s novels written under her own name. In Indivisible, Howe writes, “God is God and the godness of all being in all time gods that godness gods to God God greets God because it is already God … I don’t know who God is, godding inside of me.” Her nurse reads the Bible aloud and reflects on the imagery of Genesis. And there is a moment, serving no real purpose for the plot, in which Ellen comes upon a chapel in the woods. Inside, she finds that she “could actually listen to the silence; it was like listening to the inside of a shell.… She remained there for a while; as time and space receded from the chapel she found herself happily detached.” Howe’s nurse thinks of the man she loves and wants only “to stand in silence with him forever,” almost auguring Howe’s later writing. Her poetry collection Love and I takes William Blake’s line “Love that never told can be” for its opening, and her novel Indivisible, one of the five collected in Radical Love, thematizes unspeakable, silent love, romantically and spiritually. In West Coast Nurse, the primary obstacle to Ellen and David’s relationship is the fact that Ellen is “all closed up inside [herself] and can’t get out.” They cannot communicate something essential to one another, cannot figure out how to talk to each other. In this relationship, then, is the crux of a problem Howe would spend her life struggling with, the paradoxical necessity and insufficiency of language.

In Vietnam Nurse, too, there are hints of Howe’s religious searching, and of the syncretic Catholicism she would eventually adopt, as the novel detours into a comparative analysis of Buddhism and Catholicism. “Buddhism,” one character tells Lee, “is a religion of redemption…. There is, of course, a similar aspiration in Christianity—both religions had the concept of paradise, which has since become materialistic.” But in this novel, it is Howe’s politics that come to the fore. At the hospital where she works, Lee befriends Khai, a Vietnamese nurse whose husband, Lee comes to find, is in the Viet Cong. Howe is careful not to villainize Khai or her husband, who is said to be intelligent and honorable, and in interviews Howe has suggested that the Viet Cong is the real hero of the story. The two women identify with each other, their experiences fundamentally the same despite their men on opposite sides of the war. Lee was, she says, “brought up to believe in [her] country, right or wrong,” but through her discussions with Khai, Howe articulates a critique of American imperialism. Khai tells Lee, with some measure of sarcasm, “You are innocent. Americans are innocent. You are a nation of children. Don’t you see? Things are not good and bad, but contain many elements, and your soldiers have adopted the methods of the French, who raped us and left us.”

More than these early hints at the political and spiritual searching that Howe would develop in her later work, though, these books, by her own account, taught Howe about the novel’s structural properties. “I learned a lot from those books,” she told The White Review, “about plot and consequence,” and it is a point she repeated often. Romance novels are notoriously plot-driven, and writing her nurse novels was Howe’s apprenticeship in plot, which she believed was fundamental to the writing of fiction. “Plot,” she wrote in her essay “Incubus of the Forlorn,” “is to fiction what form is to poetry.” For her, fiction is not fiction without “cause and effect,” as she wrote in another essay, “Person, Place, and Time.” She is a writer interested in coincidence and accident. As she wrote in “Incubus,” “A chance meeting is a meeting that seems to exist with a great probability of not meeting circling around it. As we all know, almost everything doesn’t happen. So the chance occurrence must actually be everything that does happen.” And what is a love story if not a story about what follows from a chance meeting?