1In 1992 the National Endowment for the Humanities gave me some money to travel from Idaho to Cambridge, Massachusetts. I spent a week there in July that year, staying in the unpretentious Irving House just off Harvard’s campus. $55 bought me a corner room with a single bed, a private bath, a closet, a clock radio, a telephone, a fan, smooth old wood floors, and breakfast. In the mornings I’d arrive at Houghton Library just before 9 o’clock and wait for the big double doors to open. Inside the reading room, a place that felt like a tabernacle of the mind, I read and copied out in longhand hundreds of letters that Julia Ward Howe and her husband wrote to various people in the 1840s.

2Julia Ward Howe, dead already eighty-two years when I started reading the fragile, faded pages preserved in acid-free files. People used to know who she was. She’s the subject of one of those orange-covered Bobbs-Merrill “Childhood of Famous Americans” biographies (Figure 1).

3Figure 1: Book Cover of Jean Brown Wagoner’s biography of Julia Ward Howe: Girl of Old New York, (Childhood of Famous Americans Series), Bobbs-Merrill, photographer unknown, copyright © 1945. Public domain.

4Hers climaxes with an account of writing “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” illustrated by a silhouette cut-out of Julia spiritedly singing as she rides through a group of Union soldiers. “The soldiers waved and shouted, ‘Good for you!’” says the caption. (The actual story of Howe’s famous poem-song is somewhat more complicated, I later learned. A Northern soldier wrote to the New York Times, “I can imagine nothing that would provoke the jeers of a regiment of United States soldiers so surely as the attempt of some man in the ranks to sing, ‘In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea.’”)

5I still have these notes—eighty-three legal-size yellow sheets of scrawl, way in the back of a jampacked file drawer, haven’t seen the light of day for a decade or more. I should compost them, I think. I transcribed them into WordPerfect files when I got home (nobody had laptops yet, and Microsoft Word’s widespread use was still a couple of years away). Years of re-reading these letters have shown me how cavalier my copying was that week. My right hand was a mess by Saturday afternoon, and my gut was churning with envy for people who could drop by Houghton for a few hours any time they wanted, without having to travel three thousand miles for the experience. But my mind was blazing. These yellow pages, pried out of the file drawer, invoke that blaze. I can’t get rid of them.

6What I had come across that summer at Houghton was the record of a woman figuring out how to write about topics women weren’t supposed to think about. A woman married to a man deeply entangled with another man. A woman who, though she loved her children, was isolated and depressed at having to embrace motherhood as her primary role. A woman drawn to men other than her husband, mostly because they spoke and listened to her as a person with a well-stocked mind. A woman with a uniquely broad-minded imagination, secret author of manuscripts featuring a hermaphrodite in various sticky circumstances (Howe, Hermaphrodite).

7The blaze those yellow notebook pages re-ignite is a memory of a voice heard for the first time—a vertiginous voice like few others in the antebellum, a woman-on-the-edge voice, a voice that, despite its having grudgingly found a register more or less tolerable to the male ears around her, grated and rumbled and needled. Reviewers of Passion-Flowers, her first book of poems, said things like “audacious,” “unblenching heroism,” “social independence,” “defiance,” “powerful, pungent, and unripe.” Nathaniel Hawthorne nailed it in a private letter to a friend: “The devil must be in the woman to publish them …. What does her husband think of it?”

8That week in Cambridge gave me a glimpse of what he thought. Julia wrote to her sister, “He has been in a very dangerous state, I think, very near insanity.”

9Between the first and second printings of Passion-Flowers, presumably to placate this furious man, she revised the most plain-spoken of these poems to dull its incisive elements. She also agreed to have another child, her fifth in a ten-year period, describing this decision in a letter to her sister as a sacrifice to propitiate him for having let herself be self-expressive. She stowed her hermaphrodite manuscripts in a box and forgot about them.

10That box didn’t surface during that quick summer trip, but it was there, waiting patiently for attention, its continuing existence a matter of astonishment and strenuous speculation once its contents began to be scrutinized. Why was it saved, when so much else got sent to the fireplace (as I later learned)? This question confronted another reader the following summer, an historian of religion from DePauw University who, like me, instantly resonated to this uncanny voice bouncing off the walls of Houghton’s austere sanctuary. We would later become friends, Valarie Ziegler and I, meeting in person in 1998 and subsequently emailing our notions about the Howes back and forth between Idaho and Indiana, speculating about the one or maybe two other readers who’d seen the pages in those days. Valarie’s book, Diva Julia, would include a definitive account of how the papers got preserved and how they made their way to Houghton.

11We owed this access to Julia’s granddaughter Rosalind Richards, daughter of famous-in-her-day-but-lately-nearly-forgotten author of over ninety books for children, Laura Richards. Laura, with some collaboration from her siblings, stored and winnowed her parents’ papers; Rosalind, after Laura’s death, gave them to Harvard starting in the mid-1940s. In her bequests, she threw up obstacles against people like Valarie and me, but these had dissolved by the time I made that first pilgrimage, and I read like a famished man, unaware that anyone might ever have wanted to keep the larder locked.

12It’s not a mystery why Rosalind might have felt uneasy about just any old person reading her grandmother’s private letters and journals. Julia and Samuel’s children had been über-protective of their parents’ public images in the years after their deaths, several of them collaborating on biographies that, they hoped, would forestall other less hagiographically-minded researchers from sullying the record. Rosalind would have watched her mother and aunts work very hard to rid the archives of anything smacking of domestic friction. A lot got burned. However, what remained, though sanitized, still held the seeds of a more authentic story than the “Two Noble Lives” version of the nineteenth century’s preeminent power couple (Richards).

13Years later, after I had published a book about the difficult early years of Julia Ward Howe’s literary life and an edition of the explosive manuscripts featuring Howe’s intersex protagonist, my wife and daughter and I were driving down to New York City after attending a niece’s graduation from Bard College. Near Barrytown, we happened to pass a sign for the Hudson River estate called Rokeby. I knew of it: Julia’s brother Sam had married the granddaughter of John Jacob Astor and had lived for a while at Rokeby. Julia had visited frequently. What the hell, I said, let’s see what’s down the road. We parked, got out, and, noting nothing suggesting occupancy, began to poke around. My companions even ventured inside. After a while, a white-haired, friendly-looking fellow came out on the veranda, and I forged ahead with an overcomplicated explanation of why we’d been so bold as to invade his privacy. He listened with an amused expression, then turned to the house and called out, “Ricky, it’s some scholar-snoops. Shall we let them in?” (Those genial gents, Wint and Ricky Aldrich, are worth an essay to themselves. They did invite us in.)

14“Scholar-snoops” was exactly the class of readers Rosalind and Laura fretted about. In the first decades of the papers’ residence at Harvard, there were not many of us, and those who did begin to read a bit more deeply were likely to encounter blowback from Miss Richards. It was fifteen years after her death in 1964 before anyone ventured to say anything in print about the Howes, and that biography (by Deborah Pickman Clifford) essentially reiterated the family line. No mention of the hermaphrodite papers. When I first encountered this huge, daunting collection, I didn’t think of myself as a snoop, but rather as a fellow who, after a long period of engagement with the absolute dullest writings of James Fenimore Cooper, had finally found something absorbing. I didn’t interrogate my motives, didn’t feel discomfited at uncovering private stuff. The opposite, in fact. What was going on for me at that moment was a consciousness of having found a damn good story, a story I didn’t want to trivialize or sensationalize or rob of richness out of haste to publish it. I felt a little paranoid (“these are mine,” I wanted constantly to say to the keepers at the Houghton; “don’t let anybody else read them!”). Overridingly, I felt like Julia’s ally, a man looking for a new footing, a man hearing women’s voices maybe for the first time, a man eager to listen to this voice that hadn’t found many sympathetic auditors back in the day. Laura, if I thought about her much, was a foe.

15***

16See, now, me back in Houghton Library in 2014, comfortably on sabbatical leave, three Howe-focused books behind me, looking for a new blaze. I need a blaze. Where did this devil-voice go after Howe gave up poetry and forgot about her unexampled hero/ine? The search is not going well. Where should I begin to look for it in these boxes and boxes of uncatalogued manuscripts, most of them fairly inert? Why should I even postulate that such a voice continued to exist?

17I sense an existential threat, too. I grow old. What sense does it make on fiery September mornings to be trudging toward this hermetically-sealed palace of old things? Houghton, Cambridge, Boston—they can be, have been, invigorating spots to roost for a few months, but this fall, I’m not feeling it. Our rented attic apartment, though a good space, is a thirty-minute trek from Harvard Square and effectively isolates us. There’s a massive sewer-replacement project underway in the street outside, making neighborhood walks treacherous. The building quivers when they dig. We spend many evenings playing with the owner’s Roku stick, finding British police series to watch on his big-screen TV. Why are we here?

18One morning I read in Howe’s Reminiscences about the moment when she decided to curtail writing poetry and start writing essays. It was evidently crucial for her, right then (this was the mid-1860s), to consider herself as a person of “deep thought” as opposed to one merely of “expression.” She describes her wish to be heard—presumably in a different register. That desire propelled her into not only writing philosophy but becoming a public speaker and later a preacher of sermons. She characterizes herself as highly conscious of rhetorical effect in the preparation and reading of her essays, revising her strategies according to reaction from her hearers.

19I try to make it through some of these essays and lectures. They do not resonate. I read about other women of the day—Grace Greenwood, Caroline Healey Dall—who moved decisively out into the world Howe wanted to occupy and left some interesting but now forgotten writing in their wake. I wish I felt more engaged with these materials. Uncovering these lives seems like pointless antiquarianism. Julia Ward Howe is no longer in need of a megaphone—the Laurence manuscript has become a staple in academic study of the mid-nineteenth century, some chapters of it even appearing in a major anthology of American literature. Elaine Showalter, Renee Bergland, a whole cadre of impressive scholars in recent years have helped make Howe a highly visible and audible presence. But oddly, reading this later work, I feel stuck with Howe—angry at her, in a way, for apparently losing the verve and imagination that led to some provocative literary work in her days of youth, for abjuring those days and deciding to be boring. I project my own tediousness on her and cultivate an ever-more-foul mood. Doing this work, I’m choosing not to roam a mountain slope and pick wild fruit before the bears get to it, as my Idaho friend Jon did yesterday. I’m not walking hundreds of miles on the Camino in Spain, as another buddy is doing. Do I really still care enough about Howe to give away remaining professional years to this task? How is this making me a useful person?

20A few days later, again reading over this section of the Reminiscences, I note a cryptic remark about her voice: “I think that my best studies have been those which have made me most desirous to give to my own voice the echo of other voices, and to ascertain by experiment how much or how little of my individual persuasion is in accordance with the normal direction of human experience” (Howe 304). What can it mean, I wonder, to imagine your best work as the turning over of your own voice to other voices? What kind of experiment would tell you whether your thoughts were in accord with the experiences of “normal” others? Her reasoning at this point might have gone: I need to devise a strategy that allows my voice to reverberate, but from within a protective shell of some kind. It needs to sound and not sound both. It needs to be audible to careful listeners but indistinct, muffled, to most contemporary ears.

21Maybe Howe was thinking about Laurence as she wrote this passage. Laurence’s story stresses the masking and loss of identity as a strategy for self-expression. In the most straightforward declaration of this motif, in a scene set during the carnival season in Rome, Laurence notes that “fervent hearts must borrow the disguise of art, if they would win the right to express, in any outward form, the internal fire that consumes them.” In a later scene Laurence, playing the role of Juliet, feels “for a moment a nameless pleasure in being something other than myself.” The work holds many other such moments of echoing voices.

22So the writing of this novel might have been an experiment for Howe in relinquishing a direct for an indirect, presumably less inhibited voice. But since it had few contemporary readers, the work couldn’t have generated much hard information for her about the accord or lack of it between her “persuasion” and that of “normal” people. Perhaps she determined that she wouldn’t find such accord and thus abandoned the project. Laurence reflects: “[W]hat true artist ever sings to the audience actually present before him? …. Even thus is it with one who makes a mournful melody a medium for whining out to those who hear him, some sorrow of his own.”

23But Laurence’s story was dead and forgotten in a box. Her early poetry had made her infamous for her outspokenness, and then the fame that had come in the aftermath of the publication of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” in 1862 had made her respectable. She was an established literary presence, but much in her life pulled her spirits down. As the unimaginable Civil War ground on, her youngest child, four-year-old Sammy, contracted diphtheria and was dead within a week. Her aging, often ailing, imperious husband continued to limit her space brutally. Her other children needed her. Her diary shows a persistent sense of failure in efforts to do serious work. An entry from 1865: “Much tormented by interruptions. Could not get five quiet minutes at a time. Every body [sic] torments me with every smallest errand. And I am trying to study Philosophy!”

24I eventually hone in on a family effort that began to develop in late 1866. The Howes, along with many others in Boston and across western Europe, were horrified in November to learn of the “holocaust of Arkadi,” a gruesome episode in the Cretans’ efforts to expel Turks from their island. Nearly a thousand Christian Cretans had taken refuge in a monastery-turned-fort while a huge Turkish force besieged the site. In an act of desperation, the abbot determined that the only way to damage the Turks was to explode the magazines of ammunition stored in the monastery walls. Nearly all the Cretans were killed, and 1500 Turks. The Turks were nevertheless victorious.

25Samuel Howe, long an ardent champion of Greek rights against the Ottomans, undertook a fundraising effort on behalf of exiled Cretans. Julia joined in. So in March of 1867, husband and dutiful wife sailed with two of their daughters—Julia Romana and Laura—to Europe to deliver clothes and thirty thousand Boston-raised dollars to the Cretans. A secondary intent was to introduce the daughters to European culture. Julia Romana had just turned 24, Laura 17. The trip produced a travel book called, festively, From the Oak to the Olive: A Plain Record of a Pleasant Journey. I read it with more attention than I expected it to generate.

26Meanwhile, my sabbatical months zooming by, I unexpectedly receive a request to produce something for a collection of essays honoring my grad-school mentor Michael Colacurcio. I do want to honor him. His seminars at Cornell in the early 1970s, where he had just been tenured, taught me how a scholar-snoop operates. Now he’s at the end of a career that produced many long, brilliant, era-defining, idiosyncratically-written essays and books. My cohort (including my wife) were the first of his acolytes—we had all done him proud in various ways, and there’s no way I cannot be part of this festschrift, though the timing of the call for a paper sucks, and trying to strike the right tone, a tone that pays tribute to his own quirky, dense lingo, is making me very nervous. I have to finish this task before my time in Cambridge runs out and I’ll be traveling too much to concentrate.

27I decide to write about From the Oak to the Olive—FOTO, as I’ve started to call it. I will put it in the context of an earlier travel work about a trip to Cuba undertaken in 1859, a collection of essays published first in the Atlantic Monthly before being collected into a book. I find myself suggesting—more or less off the top of my head and with dubious evidence—that this loose genre offered “a rhetorical structure that proved helpful in expanding and sharpening Howe’s sense of how to write oral public discourse.” Further, that the travel itself fostered personal growth by posing challenges to her perceptions of herself. These maybe-true/maybe-not premises get me going, at least. I realize, as I juxtapose A Trip to Cuba with FOTO, that the latter volume is much the more interesting tonally.

28In fact, FOTO is a charmer! I read Howe’s journal (written as the trip spun out) and then return to the text, and I begin to feel the book’s craft. The reportorial voice of the journal morphs into a persona that speaks in two main timbres. There is a George-Eliot-y, matronly voice that delivers conventional moral sentiment (the book is bromidically dedicated to her husband). And there is a bright, somewhat labored, cocktail-party-voice that makes me think of a Noel Coward heroine. This is the voice of the first section, called “Preliminaries,” in which Howe explains that she’s not going to use the collective “We” so common in the day:

The augmentative We is essential for newspaper writing, because people are liable to be horsewhipped for what they put in the sacred columns of a daily journal. We may represent a vague number of individuals, less inviting to, and safer from, the cowhide, than the provoking egomet ipse …. Yet I, at the present moment, incline to fall back upon my record of baptism, and to confront the white sheet, whose blankness I trust to overcome, in the character of an agent one and indivisible. (Howe, Oak 1)

29This style strikes me as frenetic, supercharged. Later in her life, Howe characterized this effect as “saucy,” aware that, on some topics, her audiences had come to expect it of her.

30And then there is—what to call it? An under-voice? A very quietly sardonic voice? The verbal equivalent of a wink? It’s a voice that invites us to view people and events as “queer.”

31Yes. Queer. Here’s an instance. After disembarking at Liverpool, the family travels to Chester. “The neophytes”—Howe’s word for her daughters—“here see their first cathedral, and are in raptures with nothing so much as with its dilapidation.” The sexton fastens on them “with the zeal of a starved leech upon a fresh patient” but is useless in helping them recreate a sense of actual lives lived there. Also, it’s very cold inside (it is late March). With an attitude you might expect from a Victorian-era Protestant in reflecting on a site like this (and in a tone appropriate for a mother instructing her young), Howe remarks: “The immortal spirit of things, which is past, present, and future, dwells not in these relics, but lives in the descent of noble thoughts, in the perpetuity of moral effort which makes man human.”

32Hm.

33Then follows this passage:

The most curious thing we see in the cathedral is the room in which the ecclesiastical court held its sittings. The judges’ seat and the high-backed benches still form a quadrangular enclosure within a room of the same shape. Across one corner of this enclosure is mounted a chair, on which the prisoner, accused of the intangible offence of heresy or witchcraft, was perforce seated. I seem to see there a face and figure not unlike my own, the brow seamed with cabalistic wrinkles. Add a little queerness to the travelling dress, a pinch or two to the black bonnet, and how easy were it to make a witch out of the sibyl of these present leaves! The march from one of these types to the other is one of those retrograde steps whose contrast only attests the world’s progress. The sibylline was an excellent career for a queer and unexplained old woman. To make her a sorceress was an ingenious device for getting rid of a much-decried element of the social variety. (Howe, Oak 11)

34Suddenly, Howe veers away into an out-of-the-blue reflection on the mother of Johannes Kepler: “Poor Kepler’s years of solitary glory and poverty were made more wretched by the danger which constantly threatened his aged mother, who was in imminent danger of burning, on account of her supposed occult intelligences with the powers of darkness” (12). So, just to underline Howe’s experience with the help of graphics I find online, the ecclesiastical courtroom, this “most curious thing” she sees, is in a small corner of the huge cathedral, a room added (I learn from Wikipedia) in 1636 (Figure 2). The court itself is a smaller enclosure within this room. The person accused of witchcraft or heresy would sit in the elevated chair positioned at an angle to the foursquare organization of the court, as if to make concrete the deviancy (Figure 3). Howe—the “sibyl of these present leaves”—readily fantasizes herself occupying this chair. As a witch.

35Figure 2: Plan of Chester Cathedral. by Joopercoopers (talk), copyright © 2010. Public domain. https://en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Chester_Cathedral. Accessed 29 November 2024.

36Figure 3: Court in Chester Cathedral. by Historic England, copyright © 2016. https://historicengland.org.uk/​images-books/​publications/​iha-buildings-criminal-law/​heag140-criminal-courts-iha. Accessed 29 November 2024.

37To feature this particular room in an account of a conventional tourist visit to one of England’s standard tourist destinations is already an indication of the queer, or sibylline, quality of this third voice. It pierces with independence and authority. She will hold the cathedral to account. She will, in her black bonnet and cabalistic wrinkles, see what she sees, in addition to what she is advised to see.

38The association between sibyls and witches is called a “retrograde” progression. In an earlier time (earlier than 1636), a “queer and unexplained” woman found occupation, visibility, audibility, status as a sibyl. But then—as is illustrated in the reference to Kepler’s mother, which itself needs unpacking—this sort of woman was (for want of a better term) re-branded. Intimidating enclosures with raised, off-kilter seats were built to pillory her. An “ingenious device,” this re-branding, says the sibyl of the present leaves. What does she mean? How are we to feel about “poor” Kepler’s aged mother?

39Trying to figure out what Howe might be up to in this one passage is taking me far afield from my Colacurcio essay, which increasingly wants to highlight the sober, “wise” voice of the grown woman looking back ruefully on youthful immoderacies and indiscretions. Well, that’s true of this book too. It’s easy to see harbingers of the influential, centered, purposeful woman she became for the next forty years—the advocate for women’s rights, the sought-after lecturer, the clubwoman. After holding a few of these passages up for scrutiny, I conclude (lamely, I fret, but the deadline’s arriving) by saying that all the excerpts “inevitably distort the texture of the book as a whole and possibly even undermine claims for the tonal achievement of the narrative, the episodic form of which facilitates a kind of deft transition and control that is hard to illustrate.” There. True enough. I send off the essay.

40But I’m also wondering about the neophytes, especially Laura. (I don’t think much about Julia Romana, a cipher to most people when she was alive and even more of one after her death, soon after which her sisters sent virtually all of her papers up the chimney.)

41When I get back to thinking more about FOTO, weeks later, the puzzle of Kepler’s mother is dangling out there still. Turns out that the great pre-Galilean astronomer was newly a subject of interest in the 1860s as his three hundredth birthday approached. A comprehensive edition of his works was issued in Frankfurt, and an 1831 biography by one Baron von Breitschwert detailing Kepler’s difficulties with his mother was the focus of several mid-century magazine reviews. Howe, I suspect, read an account of the family’s struggles in The National Quarterly Review in March 1864. Kepler’s mother, according to this reviewer, was the illiterate daughter of an inn-keeper, unbeautiful, and with no pretensions to “amiability of disposition.” Johann was the fourth and last child, born two months early. The mother evidently favored the older siblings over frail, bookish Johann. She appears, in fact, to have done everything within her imagination to punish his interest in learning. He eventually was rescued from her abuse by his sister’s husband, who arranged for him to enroll at the University of Tübingen. Poor Kepler indeed.

42But, there’s more. Later, when Kepler was at the height of his fame for working out the laws of planetary movements, his mother was accused of having received instruction in “the magic art” by an aunt who’d later been burned as a sorceress. It was said, as well, that she couldn’t shed tears, that she willed the hogs in the neighborhood to die, that she was unable to look anyone in the face, and that she hired a grave digger to unearth her husband’s skull so she could make a goblet of it for her son! She was convicted of having carried out these vile acts and was sentenced to be burned alive. Kepler worked for five years on her behalf, finally persuading the Duke of Wittenburg to commute the sentence to a lesser punishment. Soon after she was freed, she died.

43The timing was pretty bad for poor Kepler. In addition to lost time, he ran the significant risk of having the public regard his discoveries as the result of intercourse—his mother’s or his—with the devil. Yet, says the reviewer, “he refused to allow any selfish motive to prevent him from performing what he regarded as a sacred duty. And old and weak-minded as his mother was at this time, she had understanding enough to feel deeply affected by his conduct as contrasted with that of his brothers.”

44In short, in the public imaginary of 1867, Kepler’s mother was, if not a witch, also not a character who evoked anybody’s sympathy. Yet for Howe—and no doubt for most 21^st-century readers—she was a woman victimized by her deviance from appropriate behavior, a latter-day sibyl. But the thing that strikes me most is this: Howe finds it quite easy to see herself, “queer and unexplained” two centuries later, similarly branded. The march from sibyl to witch may not quite yet have ended. This self-styled sibyl’s indirectness and comedic mask are proof that danger lurks. Maybe this is the blaze I needed to find?

45The more I read, the more I hear this voice reverberating, amplified, under the cover of an exercise in spousal and maternal rectitude. (Unlike Kepler’s mother, Howe seems determined not to jeopardize her neophytes’ options.) FOTO‘s subtitle, “A Plain Record of a Pleasant Journey,” is, to put it quietly, an ironic description. Her commitment to going in the first place was half-hearted and fraught with anxieties of various kinds. A month before they sailed, she received a long-delayed inheritance from her uncle that, as she noted, made her “a rich woman” and might have given her some leisure to settle in and write. As had happened before when money came to her, she conveyed it to her husband with misgivings. She knew he would place it out of her reach because, says her diary, “money is power, & a man never wishes a woman to have any wh [sic] she does not derive from him.” He did exactly that: bought $1100 worth of stock in his own name in the Broadway Railroad and gave her a check for the balance: $328.57.

46Then there was the matter of leaving three of her children behind. The trip developed in part as a way of giving 24-year-old Julia Romana some exposure to the world in hopes of sanding off rough edges on a quirky, even disturbing personality. It’s a mystery why Laura, the third daughter, was chosen instead of next-in-line Florence, who with the others—Henry and Maud—would stay in Boston for the six months they expected to be gone. Twelve-year-old Maud was a significant concern; perhaps Florence handled her better. Perhaps Julia preferred Laura’s company (as she clearly did in later years). Deeply torn and terrified about making the wrong decision, she finally persuaded herself to go in order to help Julia Romana, believing it would be a turning point in her troubled life. (And so it turned out to be—the family brought back Samuel Howe’s translator from Athens, Michael Anagnos, who readily married into the family, took over the management of both the Perkins Institution for the Blind and Julia Romana, and tutored Julia in Greek.)

47Finally, Howe’s need for public recognition of her intellect needled. She understood this trip as her husband’s chance to revisit the scenes of his glory fifty years earlier—to once again be the salvific “Chevalier”—and she seems genuinely to have wanted to keep out of the limelight herself. But when “the veteran” (as she calls him in the book) abruptly decided in early May to leave her and Laura in Rome while he and Julia Romana went on to Athens, Howe was disturbed. There’s a telling mixture in the diary of, on the one hand, concern for her older daughter traveling without a woman, and on the other, hunger to be part of the scene. “Chev” claims that expense is the reason for not taking the whole group, but Julia senses that the real operative emotion is “an indefinable fear of my predominance where he wd [sic] wish to be the sole figure.” The connective tissue between Julia and Laura very likely grew stronger during these months.

48What ensued was that she tried on several occasions to arrange semi-public readings for herself. The first effort was a bare three days after her husband and daughter left. The site would be the Palazzo Poli, then the British Consul’s residence (it’s the building that provides the backdrop for the Trevi Fountain). She discussed this plan with Laura, who tried to dissuade her, and kept it a secret until the last minute from her sister Louisa, with whom the Howe family was staying. The day was “to me a nervous one. I was afraid to have caused vexation to the dear & friendly household.” But her sister and other friends turned out in good numbers, and Julia called it “an entertaining hour.” The audience was an odd assortment of people, “many of them much estranged from each other.” Her husband’s friend Colonel James McKaye was there, and so was the artist community—Charlotte Cushman and her entourage, William Wetmore and Emelyn Story, Shakspear Wood, the novelist William Black, Joseph Mozier. “Mrs. Skinner, Mrs. Freeman, Dr. Lyman, Hecker, Miss Stebbins, Mr. Lockyear and many others.”

49I consider trying to make sense of this mélange, Googling everybody, figuring out how they were “estranged.” I decide against it. Too many unfollowable threads. How did Laura react?

50No account of this evening makes it into Howe’s book, of course. The section about Rome narrates visits to St. Peter’s around Easter, visits to other churches, an expedition to tombs along the Appian Way, a tour of the city’s ancient mosaics. Some of it’s amusing, but mostly Rome seems to have offered her a chance to contrast autocracies with democracies, Catholics with Protestants.

51This sojourn also offered an occasion to regret her selfishness on the previous trip. These passages afford some glimpses of the woman I wrote about in Hungry Heart. Maybe their inclusion here reflects just the slightest impulse to make a point about the continuing existence of that woman—especially a note about Horace Binney Wallace’s “paroxysm of merriment” at her purchases of whimsical stuff. “Those days are not now,” she says, but even so, her husband wouldn’t have liked seeing Wallace’s name in a book dedicated to him. Wallace was one reason Howe and her husband had nearly separated for good around the time of that earlier trip, the younger man having offered her companionship and a sympathetic ear (and maybe more).

52Meanwhile, trying to think about the intricacies of this “plain record,” woops, what’s this, the end of my sabbatical, gee that went fast, and I’m back in the traces, hauling out teaching notes for The Tempest as spring semester 2015 gets underway.

53***

54The job (Howe’s and mine, too) of making a coherent piece of writing out of an amalgam of the private and the public… Howe’s sense of herself as a witch, “queer and unexplained,” continues to haunt me. She and Laura did eventually join the rest of the family in Corfu, and Howe performed sincerely as the helpmeet of the much-revered Chevalier. They had some rousing times in Greece, and on the way back in the Alps, Paris, and London. The narration of these travels is upbeat, saucy, entertaining; the diary account not so jolly. I keep electronic versions of the published book and a typescript of Howe’s diary on my computer screen, toggling back and forth between them, wondering how much of a struggle it was for her to transmute the one into the other. It’s a puzzle. The typed diary, which was produced fifty years after the trip under Laura’s direction and editing, is much bowdlerized. I can supplement it to some degree with notes I hastily took when I snooped through the actual journal during that 2014 fall of my discontent, but those notes are less complete than I now wish they were.

55My appetite for echoes of the under-voice drives the interpretive agenda too much, I know. Has always driven it. I seem to care more about catching glimpses of the unhappy, scheming, disruptive Howe than I care about looking directly at what’s actually in the text. I’m well aware, after all, that it was emphatically not her project to invite attention to this sibylline self. Howe started drafting her book two days after they landed in Liverpool. Half a week later, in London, she noted in her diary that she found herself seated next to Robert Browning at a dinner party—a coincidence that brought her profound embarrassment, since in her second book of poetry she had included two poems grumbling that Browning and his wife had never acknowledged her first book. Browning, however, proved a gentleman and spoke with kindness and magnanimity about what Howe called her “foolish errors.” She added: “Of course, my present self wd [sic] not publish, nor I hope write any thing [sic] of the kind. But I launched the arrow with the easy petulance of those days, more occupied with its’ fire & polish than with its’ direction.”

56This incident surely inflected the writing of FOTO, keeping at least her intentional self within bounds, focusing her dual purposes of honoring her husband and performing a model of maturity for her daughters. No more easy petulance, no more arrows. The neophyte Laura, eventual Bowdlerizer-in-Chief, probably had a role in reinforcing that effort. And (I begin to consider) Julia perhaps had a reciprocal role in the work Laura began to produce just a few years later.

57Laura Elizabeth (Howe) Richards, writer of children’s books, has become an object of curiosity and study in recent times, the interest fueled almost single-handedly by Etti Gordon Ginzburg’s penetrating readings of Richards’s “nonsense” verse. Nonsense they are not, Gordon Ginzburg argues, but rather encryption—in fact, often “acts of defiance or self-exposure.” They “give vent to personal strains, private family predicaments, or parental discontents.” The days of Laura’s life were by all accounts happier than her mother’s, but she, too, had an alpha husband whom the family called “Skipper” and a conventionally-ordered patriarchal family life. Did the neophyte become a witch herself?

58Nobody was ever better positioned than Laura to grasp the strategies of FOTO, the premises of its construction, the crafting of its voices. Consider that the book’s inscription “TO S.G.H., THE STRENUOUS CHAMPION OF GREEK LIBERTY AND OF HUMAN RIGHTS” offers homage to the veteran in exactly the tone that Laura, Maud, and Florence later settled on in their biographical writing about their parents. But in addition to that reverential tone, we know also that at a meeting of the Brain Club back in Boston, before the book was published, Howe delivered a comic version of her trip (reproduced in Showalter’s biography):

Oh! Who were the people you saw, Mrs. Howe?
When you went where the Cretans were making a row?
Kalopathaki—Rodocanachi—
Paparpopoulus—Anagnostopoulos—
Nicolaides—Paraskevaides—These were the people that saw Mrs. Howe
When she went where the Cretans were making a row.

Oh! Give us a specimen, dear Mrs. Howe,
Of the Greek that you learned and are mistress of now.
Potichomania—Mewsopotamia.
Tatterdemalion—Episcopalian—Megalotherium—monster inferium—
Scoulevon—auctrion—infant phenomenon.
Lyrie ticamete—what’s your calamity?
Pallas Athenae Aun,
Favors no Fenian.
Such is the language that learned Mrs. Howe,
In the speech of the gods she is mistress of now.
(Howe, qtd. in Showalter 181; emphasis in the original)

59It’s doubtful that the veteran ever saw this irreverent account of the trip (although it’s true that the autumn of 1867, when Howe declaimed her poem and was working to finish FOTO, was also the time of Samuel Howe’s most virulent attacks on her desire for independence). This is sauciness to the max, possibly even offensive to Bostonians who the year before had labored to sew clothes and pool money for the Cretans. In this version, the main character is Mrs. Howe, not the veteran, and it’s a little off-kilter to describe the events as the Cretans “making a row”—they were, after all, the victims of Turkish aggression. The purpose and outcome of the whole venture was that Mrs. Howe learned some Greek—or rather, learned how to mesh some Greek-ish words with nonsensical polysyllabic English words in a Gilbert-and-Sullivan-style patter song. But this “nonsense” will certainly resonate with readers of Laura’s poetry putatively for children and possibly suggest that the daughter found authorization and example in her mother’s masterful array of voices when she launched her own literary career.

60The upshot for me is, I value Howe for her conflictedness. Laura, too. I like it that they both evidently spent a lot of their time devising ways to project their queer selves indirectly. I like the doubleness, the overt/covert thing. I still get bored and sad when Howe is univocal, even as I admire her determination to be a better parent and partner. I understand the melancholy in her face in photographs beginning in the 1860s (Figures 4 and 5), and I resonate to the comedy that peps up accounts of trying times in the Greek islands. I think I, too, see her strategies.

61Figure 4 (left): Portrait of Julia Ward Howe (ca. 1865–1870), Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, photographer unknown, copyright © https://nrs.harvard.edu/​urn-3:HUL.eother:idscopyright. Provided by Harvard University.

Figure 5 (right): Portrait of Julia Ward Howe (ca. 1865), photographer unknown, copyright © ca. 1865. https://www.americanmusicpreservation.com/​BattleHymnoftheRepublic.htm.

62Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” includes a few stanzas that characterize this doubleness another way, as mindfully-masked sorrow:

I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.

But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more. (Tennyson V, 5)

63At various points in her bumpy marriage, Howe’s resolve to embrace self-sacrifice as part of the “religion of life” did lead to large grief, no doubt. Measured language helped her get through it. That anyone pays attention to her at all these days, this snoop concludes, is the happy outcome of her forging of this double voice.