Ada Verdun Howell

Ada Verdun Howell (19 July 1902 – 1981) was an Australian author and poet. Born in Beaufort, Victoria, on her father's sheep property, she was educated at Ruyton Girls' School. Her sister was the artist Valma Howell. She lived in New York in the latter part of her life where she wrote most of her most famous works. Her early writing, which she later eschewed as adolescent, showed considerable skill utilising Indigenous Australian phonetic forms of her childhood in Western Victoria. She is best known for her later writing, much praised for its great formal and feminine qualities, as an early sound poet.

Her most influential works include the strangely disquieting Dookerimbud, Monmot and Neemini and the later Exit Strategies.

The last part of her life was apparently spent in much economic hardship and she died virtually unknown in her own country.

By the time she was in her late thirties Ada had abandoned Melbourne, where she was surrounded by what she felt were stuffy and provincial relations, for New York and the bohemian life, where she was soon surrounded by an artistic life and freedom she was unable to experience in Australia. Her first husband, Adrian Morten, an undistinguished writer and critic, by whom she had her two children, does not appear to have been very supportive. The marriage, like most of Ada's later relationships, floated on a tide of drink and was marked by spectacular rows. After Morten's sudden death she consoled herself with many lovers, including Christopher Isherwood, who soon fled, leaving Ada convinced he was 'a pederast at heart'(It is claimed that she was the only person to have bedded both Chester Kallman and Isherwood). However, "once I got Mr Morten out of my life I felt like a new woman," she told a close friend Harold Norse, and in her forties she stumbled into her métier, modern poetry.

In the early 40s she was taken under the wing of Peggy Guggenheim who was to provide both financial and intellectual encouragement. In the decades that followed she became a close friend to poet and beat Harold Norse. Her last years were a slow decline due to alcoholism.Little is known of her last years and she died of unknown causes in 1981.

...
Wikipedia