BOOKS
503
Holme's Civil War letters
to
his parents, in
Secret History
if
the Dividing Line.
The form of feeling in her collage from Holmes is actually post–
Hiroshima; its
sous histoire
becomes our own history while the earlier war
closes off any nostalgic retreat-and all of this one hears coming between
the lines.
One can infer from Howe's work a traumatic submersion by history
that calls forth a myth of audition. Americans typically deny the weight of
history, and therefore pretend that they are still above water. To them
Howe's myth of audition may seem a fairy tale. But the American wave
compounds the submersion: the Puritan model of reinvented authority,
moralistic practicali ty projected fiercely against the night, and innovation,
has mounted the global epic of modernization. So its violences, Howe's
subject, are no antiquarian's hobby. They are more like volatile octanes, so
that Howe's dry archival materials turn out to be fuses. A decade ago in
My
ElIlily Dickinson,
Howe traced her exemplar's moves "backward through
history into aboriginal anagogy" to a "new grammar grounded in humil–
ity and hesitation .... What voice when we hesitate and are silent is moving
to meet us?" That is not Gertrude Stein's sort of question.
It
shapes Howe's
books into witching wands. Where have the bridges really gone down, and
the trails grown over? Who is that waving on the other side? Howe is con–
vinced that in words lurks an instrument, or an instrument lost in an
instrument, that might serve.
JOHN PECK
