Bette Howland, lost and found

Ten years ago, Brigid Hughes, the founding editor and publisher of the literary magazine and imprint A Public Space, was rummaging through the $1 carton at the Housing Works' Bookstore in New York, when a title caught her attention. It was an old copy of a book with a cryptic name, W-3, by a writer called Bette Howland.

- Somak Ghoshal

Ten years ago, Brigid Hughes, the founding editor and publisher of the literary magazine and imprint A Public Space, was rummaging through the $1 carton at the Housing Works' Bookstore in New York, when a title caught her attention. It was an old copy of a book with a cryptic name, W-3, by a writer called Bette Howland. Hughes had not heard of her before, though a blurb by none other than that icon of American literature Saul Bellow spoke highly of the writing.

As Hughes flipped through the book, her eyes were arrested by a random passage. "All I knew was this: I couldn't take it anymore, no longer could bear this burden of concealment. Things seemed bad enough without adding extra weight. I wanted to be rid of it all, all of it. I wanted to abandon all this personal history—its darkness and secrecy, its private grievances, its well-licked sorrows and prides—to thrust it from me like a manhole cover," she read. "That's what I had wanted all along, that's what I was trying for when I swallowed those pills—what I hoped to obliterate. That was my real need. It had at last expressed itself, become all powerful."

It was impossible not to want to read on. So Hughes bought the copy, raced through the book, and began searching for other works by the writer. It was then that she ran into a roadblock. All the bookstores were unhelpful, so was the internet. Although Howland had published two books apart from W-3—which was a memoir of her time at a mental asylum in Chicago in the 1970s—all of them were out of print. There was no information about the writer either, except that she had won the prestigious Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships. Enquiries made to both funding bodies yielded nothing of note. For all purposes, Howland seemed to have vanished, presumed dead.