Fanny Howe didn’t want to write her last book, Manimal Woe. I know because I was her editor.

Fanny had intended to publish a pamphlet of legal writings by her father, civil rights scholar Mark DeWolfe Howe, hoping it would be of some use to law students. She brought this proposal to Askold Melnyczuk because they were good friends, and because it was unlikely any publisher other than Arrowsmith Press would entertain the idea. Out of personal and professional kindness (or maybe an avoidance of legal papers) Askold gave me the opportunity to work with her.

Fanny and I were not strangers when she began the book. I had been to her home many times over the years for tea and discussions about writing and god and the state of the world. At gatherings she was the unassuming lynchpin. I had never known anyone to so modestly carry so much respect with so little hubris.

I had never known anyone to so modestly carry so much respect with so little hubris.

When I finally read the thin file of her father’s papers, there wasn’t quite enough to fill even a pamphlet. There were a few reasonable opinion drafts, a couple of speeches with a Q&A transcribed, and one very excellent and complete essay on civil rights. Was there anything more? Well, said Fanny, I do have some letters.

There were two-hundred pages of letters, dated 1957 to 1966, all sent to Fanny whenever she was away from home. As letters from fathers go, these were wonderful. Besides the usual weather report and family gossip, Fanny’s father was consistently supportive of her writing, urging her not to rush through life too quickly, offering gentle advice in tough times without pretending to know it all, full of that Howe family wit and humor. In some letters he would express his feelings by projecting onto the drama between the family dog whom he’d named Sorrow and the cat he’d named Anger. He even wrote a proud letter addressed to Fanny’s pseudonym, Della Field, when (for the money) she wrote a romance novel entitled Vietnam Nurse. In short, he was an empathetic and curious father who loved his daughter. The final line of the final letter, dated March 2, 1966, read, “I’ve done my best to say my say.” Less than a year later he would die suddenly of a heart attack. She was 26 years old when he passed.

When Fanny spoke of her father (measured as she was at the age of 80) there was still clearly an open wound. In a 2008 essay for Poetry Magazine, she wrote: “My father worked for social justice and was eviscerated. I think when he died he had had enough. (Heart attacks can be a kind of suicide.) …For me his absence opened a door into a future as vertiginous as a long fall.” The essay is well written, but dark through and through. The figures depicted are lonely and fearful. The weather is cold and grim. The times chaotic and depreciating. And the death of her father feels (as it does to many who lose a parent) like an intent to abandon. She writes truly and piercingly, but it’s not an intimate portrait. Her sweetest words for him were: “I didn’t like grown-ups with the exception of my father…”

But now we had these letters from him, and the delight we both felt in reading and discussing them was purely joyful and fun and intimate. There wasn’t a full book there, and Fanny wasn’t interested in publishing them, but something was starting to brew in her. I asked, “where are your letters back to him?” She waved me off, “I don’t know, I probably lost them…”

Whole pages of gold would appear and disappear from day to day. It was like watching the Marsh Wren weaving and refining their many nests. To witness Fanny working was perhaps the greatest editorial privilege of my life.

Shortly thereafter began the pandemic of 2020. From a small island off the coast of Massachusetts she wrote: “I just hope the people who died wanted to die.” And later: “I am forbidden from going near a store. So I am forced to stare blankly into the past, and hope to conjure up the form of an indignant book in the midst of plague.” And on another day: “I hope you are happy wherever you are, the day is so magnificent with wind in it.”

Good, so she was working on the book. All the better that it was indignant.

We spoke periodically in those isolation days. Her father’s voice kept us company. Fanny went in search of the book, it had to be more than personal, she wanted to honor him but also the work he had done. I hadn’t seen any writing yet, and often this means that an author (even one as seasoned as Fanny) has some task they are trying to avoid. One day I cautiously made my suggestion: “Fanny, I think you need to reply to your father’s letters.” Through the screen I saw her look down at the floor like an embarrassed young woman. “Oh, I can’t do that, no,” she said. There was no discussion, no explanation.

Some weeks later an email arrived entitled Here. “You will at once see it is strange and collage-ist. Mistakes you will note I am sure. But now you see the idea. I will proceed accordingly, imagining it being called The Letter, or Manimal Woe.” Attached were nine sparse pages that began:

Dear Daddy, don’t worry, I know you’re dead.

Over the next few months we spoke every week or two. I think on this particular book she wanted company. After forty pages I convinced her to use a shared google document, and so I got to witness what few people ever see: a book being written in real time by a master. Fanny was dedicated, but not precious about her words. Whole pages of gold would appear and disappear from day to day. It was like watching the Marsh Wren weaving and refining their many nests. To witness Fanny working was perhaps the greatest editorial privilege of my life.

What was she trying to accomplish with this book? It is unusual in every way. Once I wrote to her that it most resembled the Bible, another book that is a scramble of family and poetry and law and politics and lament. But she also suspected (or even hoped) this would be the last book she would write, and was keenly aware of what that really meant. I think Fanny understood that to make peace with the end of her life she would need first to make peace with her father’s death.

From Manimal Woe:

“One reason death is so perplexing is that it’s not what you think it is. Death comes before the wind stops blowing.”

And also:

“I wasn’t surprised by the news. I had been dreaming that he was dying. I will say that this coincidence increased my belief in a hidden order. An implicate order.”

And:

“Years after he disappeared, I am trying to trace the unfolding of his life and time. And two things more — not so simple — I want to think about his pursuits, and to know that he died when his work was complete and he could do no more.”

Towards the end of our process she wrote me an email (or a poem) entitled Epiphany:

I felt I should try at least to articulate the thought that came to me,
which was about my father’s quest through legal studies the same
as my quest through experience. That we (and so many others) are
running in the same race that can only succeed with equality of the
runners and freedom to go where they wanted.  In other words, we
are not as bad as we seem when we are running, but when we give
up and despair, we fall to the side, we are over.

I came to this by simultaneously reading religious texts and one wonderful
scientist on infinite potential.

If only I could express it.

I think, when the writing was done, she knew that she had expressed it through what was not revealed. Fanny wrote a relieved message to me once the book was bound and printed, but it began with a sentence I didn’t understand at the time: “Today my father died.” By this I now think she meant that in finishing the book she could release him from her accusation that his heart attack was a suicide, to forgive him for the sin he never committed but that she’d clung to for so long.

“About the death of the parents,” she wrote to me, “I can only say it is glassy, prismatic, unspeakable, impossible. It would be good to ask each one questions now, about their childhood, parents, etc.

There are surely things you don’t know, they would matter then later.” I was not one of her children, of whom she spoke often and always with pride and admiration, but I was incredibly lucky to have asked her so many questions.

And once, after the book was done, I wrote to ask her (casually) if she believed in an afterlife. I am still waiting for an answer.

Together, Fanny and I learned that when you don’t get an answer from the dead, you should write them a letter. So I will do my best:

Dear Fanny, don’t worry, I know you’re dead.

You did not want to write your last book, but you needed to. To know that your work was complete and you could do no more. To know that your work is still doing and doing. That writing is a form of suicide, and a form of immortality.

Dear Fanny, you’ll forgive me for stealing your lines, just like you taught me. I’m sorry for the essay I always promised and never finished. I offer you this one instead. You are finally joined with nature and god and the eternal physics of the soul, the wind hasn’t stopped blowing for you, the red and wilding cosmos pulse your song. From where you are (there and here) you have the best vantage from which to read. Reading is best as a necromantic art. I’ve left many of your books unread until now.

Dear Fanny, don’t worry, I won’t embarrass you much longer. You told me not long ago that you didn’t miss writing, that the urge had left you with a soft departure. On the last page of your book you wrote: “In the end I always turn back to the heartbeat of poetry — it’s healthiest when it’s irregular.” I don’t know how to end this letter. We’ve all done our best to say our say. But you always managed to say it best.