champ’s famous French window called Fresh Widow, and the readymade is
further replicated in Duchamp’s various boxes and boîtes en valises, but it
could never have any other name than Fresh Widow.
While I was contemplating these issues, I received a copy of Susan Howe’s
new book, The Midnight (2003), her extraordinary intricate verbal/visual/
“textile” collage memoir of her mother, Mary Manning, who died in 1999.
The notion of “difference in repetition” governs the whole book, whose “Bed
Hangings” are themselves texticles, whose stitchings and unstitchings re-
veal the most infrathin changes. Examples abound, but here let me men-
tion just one such infrathin moment, which occurs on page 119, following,
on the facing page, Howe’s witty and malicious biographical sketch of the
Irish actor and director Michael Mac Liammóir (born Alfred Willmore in
1890 in Kensal Green, London)—an actor-director whose memoir “Some
Talented Women,” published in Sean O’Faoláin’s magazine The Bell (1944),
commented cattily on Mary Manning’s “caustic tongue” and remarked:
Her ruling passion was ambition. She worshipped success. It was the
most natural reaction of a temperament set in the major key against
the country in which she had lived all her life and where every thing
had failed; and it was inevitable that she should later have married an
American and gone to live in Boston.^23Howe never comments on the justice or injustice of this assessment: it
awaits the adjudication of myriad collage fragments. Con®icting images and
references to Manning both precede and follow the Mac Liammóir pas-
sage. But on page 119 (see ¤gure 1), the poet reproduces a facsimile of the ¤rst
or “A” page of Mary Manning’s address book, the last such she owned, in
which she was jotting down phone numbers at the time of her death. The
facsimile page is separated by a block of print (Howe’s account of her moth-
er’s comings and goings between Ireland and Boston, ¤nally settling in the
latter) from a rather muzzy photograph of a young girl, pasted at an angle
into its frame, reproduced at the top of the page. Howe’s note for this image
reads “Photograph of Mary Manning, circa 1913. Caption reads: ‘Watching
an aeroplane / Mary Manning.’ ” But the caption is not reproduced here.
Watching an aeroplane in 1913? The page from the address book has been
cropped and angled so that only two numbers are legible: Aer Lingus (800–
223–6537) and Audio-Ears (484–8700). What do these signify? Was Mary
Manning Howe planning a trip to Ireland when she died? Did she want to
die in her home country? Or is it merely a useful phone number to have when
Irish visitors come to Cambridge? Again, if this very old lady wanted to call
xxx Introduction