It is fun to be hidden but horrible not to be found—the question is how to be isolated without being insulated, says Susan Howe.
An interesting comment when you consider "The Midnight." You could take Howe's statement as a key to how to read this text—or why to read it at all. Howe is hiding in its pages, often in plain sight, throwing out clues, occasionally popping up in autobiographical sections to say "here I am!" and then just as promptly disappearing again.
"The Midnight" is the sort of book that not only benefits from leisurely, multiple readings but requires it. This is a book to carry around, to cohabit with for a while. It's not a one-night stand. Or, as I read it, a two-night stand. Frankly, I don't have the time or the constitution for the repetitive readings that it wants and deserves, not the least because the book is due back on a public library shelf by October 20th.
What is "The Midnight" about? The best way to answer this question is to say it's not the sort of book of which you ask this question. It's a mysterious machine of many impressively moving parts but what it produces remains something of a conundrum—at the end of the production line you're left with an opaque bottle without a label. You'll have to open it and taste it to find out and still you may not know "what it is."
Here's an attempt to enumerate some of the working parts of the machine. In "The Midnight" you find:
a history of early textile manufacture
the story of Howe's elusive, eccentric Irish mother, who was an actress and novelist
the mother and daughter's difficult relationship
their shared love of reading
the reverence for books
anecdotes about early theater
Elizabethan England
English royalty
Emerson, Yeats, Edwards, Stevenson,
her uncle's copy of Alice in Wonderland
insomnia
Buffalo, New York
Olmstead, of park design fame
a rare manuscript room and what its like to do research in such a hallowed, privileged environment with a level of security rivaling the Pentagon's.
The prose sections are more conventionally accessible, comprised mainly of personal, literary, and historical anecdote; the poetry sections are more opaque, even hermetic in the way that Pound seems hermetic, if you don't recognize all historical/intertextual allusions that are being made. Here's a sample poem picked at random:
Some prepared cloth or other
left simply in the hair "glazed"
or "lustred" a kind of twilled
lasting when stouter John Legg
of Boston left to his daughter*
1 Coach bed camblet currant
vallens to disenchant blessing
All lands and to the bordering
*(I first mistyped this word as "daunter" which makes for an interesting variation.)
Do you understand what she's saying? No doubt out of context it's more difficult to discern her meaning. But within context it's no snap either.
"The Midnight" is also enhanced by a generous amount of photographic "evidence." These informal if artfully executed black-and-white photographs, mainly of texts in varying degrees of concealment and people connected to either the author's personal or literary life serve less to clarify the meaning of the book, than they do to deepen the mystery.
How I read Howe
After a while I found that letting my eyes zigzag down the length of the poem like ice melting on a window produced poetry of equal and often even greater effect. You can do this over and over again without worrying that you're missing the poet's meaning.
Some hair
lustred a kind of
stouter
left to his daughter
to disenchant
all lands
bordering
—or—
Some other
twilled lasting
left to his bed
blessing
all lands
a kind of daughter
to disenchant
left simply
in the hair
This sort of solipsistic reading may not be as absurd or even as solipsistic as it may at first appear. Do it enough times and its not entirely unreasonable to suppose that you might get a hint of the original poet's meaning if only by exhausting as many of the possible permutations of the poem and the ultimately limited definitions of the words that comprise it. The only limit is your own stamina.
If you have it—stamina, that is—"The Midnight" can be an almost infinitely rewarding text.
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