In the winter of 1968, a young woman called Bette Howland swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. Instantly regretting it, she called the doctor before her mind fused like a blown bulb. She was brought back to life on a ventilator in Chicago’s university hospital, and then admitted to the psychiatric ward which was called, like the US Government tax form, W-3. Here she received a letter from her former lover, Saul Bellow, in which he encouraged her to write. “One should cook and eat one’s misery,” he counselled. “Chain it like a dog. Harness it like Niagara Falls to generate light and supply voltage for electric chairs.”
W-3: A Memoir is the result of Bellow’s advice. At first Howland “did not have the energy for such reflections”, but as she recovered she digested, leashed and channelled her misery, observing, like a panopticon, every detail of the ward and its inhabitants: the gangs of student doctors “marching in with their stethoscopes jutting from their pockets”, the “dusty, disabled equipment propped up in corners”, the overflowing ashtrays, the basket weaving, the thin-legged black cleaning staff “thrusting their mops with a strange listlessness”.
Following the book’s publication in 1972, Bette Howland was launched in the literary firmament. Over the next decade she produced two books of short stories and was lauded with prizes, including a MacArthur Genius Award, after which everything went silent. No more publications, no more praise. By the nineties, Howland (who died in 2017) had disappeared altogether and her masterpiece was cast into the oubliette of forgotten books. Then, in 2015, W-3 was found by a literary editor in a dollar box in a second-hand book shop, and a new edition was published this Spring, which is when I discovered it myself.
The timing could not have been better: the world of Covid-19, with its regulations and mayhem and the way in which it has turned us all into inmates is just like W-3. Howland’s memoir is a metaphor for the pandemic. “Let me explain right away,” she says of W-3, “that I didn’t belong here. But that goes without saying, no one belonged here.” This alone might serve as the epigraph to the last 18 months, during which none of us has belonged in the place in which we found ourselves, which for many has been in front of a screen, staring all day at our own distorted visages.
The patients in W-3 belonged to a tight “community” in a large teaching hospital, itself a unit of a sprawling gothic university, which also happened to be where Howland, before her suicide attempt, had worked as a part-time librarian. Now a full-time member of the institution, Howland found herself, like a Russian doll, occupying less and less space in her own life. Sound familiar?
The first thing she noticed about W-3 was that despite being told there were “no rules”, the “air was thick with them”. There were rules everywhere, attached to everything. The rules came mostly from above, but the patients ruled themselves in after-dinner meetings where they requested various freedoms, such as permission to take a bus journey or to meet up with a friend.
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SubscribeDistilled alienation. A window upon nothing. Surgically sharp self-vivisection of the broken mind. You can cook, and you can eat, but who says it’s gonna taste good?
“Well I don’t live today Maybe tomorrow, I just can’t tell you baby But I don’t live today It’s such a shame spending the time away like this There ain’t no life nowhere”
– Jimi
I gather, from the fact that there is only one comment in the last three days, that we all find this subject very scary?
Not really. I’ve only just got around to reading it
Reading these ‘lockdown’ stories of people confined to their houses in pyjamas, I wonder what planet they were on. My recollection of, for example, 2020 after the first week of April is, apart from the closure of restaurants and ‘non-essential’ shops and fewer people on public transport (will we ever know how little difference that made?), everything else went on much the same. In particular, car owners went on driving all over the country spreading the virus. I and others who could not travel far went into the surrounding country, not spreading the virus in the wide open spaces. I walked more miles in 2020 than any year in my life, and found the country far more busy than usual with other walkers and especially families, who vanished almost instantly when ‘release’ was declared in spring 2021. Now the government has tired of so-called ‘lockdowns’, but I find it hard to establish a definite correlation between its actions and the rise or fall of waves, or where there appears to be one, which was cause and which effect.