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Eve Grubin: You were raised in an unreligious protestant family, but as
an adult you converted to Catholicism. How have you integrated your
non-religious upbringing and current secular literary life with your
religious observance and passion?
Fanny Howe: If you have grown up in a secular world you can't ever
really leave that point of view behind. I always say that I am (instead
of a Roman Catholic) an atheist Catholic. I am half an atheist; I am at
home, so to speak, in a secular intellectual environment.
EG: Your first poem in your book, Gone, ends with the line: "my face
shining up I lost faith but once." I have read that line so many times.
It's like a mathematical equation.
FH: Yes, it is a mathematical equation.
EG: I lost faith but once equals once I had faith. The point is, if you
have faith, even just once, that is very powerful.
FH: Exactly. I had this artist friend, Italo Scanga, who said that he
was happy for five minutes once in his life on a train in Italy with his
mother during the war. He remembered happiness down to a matter of
specific moments. Happiness in this case can be equated with God.
EG: All it takes is once.
FH: It explodes the sequence in some astonishing way.
EG: And then you are always trying to get back to that.
FH: Each religion has methods that are supposed to help you live with
the abandonment of that experience or to help you get back to that
experience. So it's either a going towards or a returning; as in so much
desire for good, there is no fixed direction.
EG: Didn't Simone Weil say that an atheist is more religious or is
closer to God than most people who call themselves "religious"? Is it
because doubt ironically intensifies religious feeling? In your poem,
"They Are, They Must" (see page xxx) you write that, "Money has always /
Been huge and out of sight like God / Who does not exist but is." Those
lines seem to capture the simultaneous faith and non-belief you hold at
the same time. And the money reference seems slightly playfully
blasphemous.
FH: Weil meant that those who describe God with attributes and emotional
responses to each person are transgressing against the unknowability of
God. Atheists have enough sensitivity to leave God alone. In this
sense, I know that I am half atheist, and if I didn't know it, I would
be blind. Half of me every day wakes up and feels alien, alienated on a
dangerous planet. As for money, it has developed many of the attributes
of the named God. It has replaced God. Penance, purgatory, these can
be metaphors for cash payments.
EG: What does this have to do with poetry? Is there a relationship
between religion and poetry?
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