Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  I researched the Shakers—visited Shakertown at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky—who befriend Susan the runaway slave, read about religious controversies and the science of the 1830s and 1840s. I re-read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (which came out the same year as Moby-Dick, with Stowe immediately selling over 150,000 books while Moby-Dick sold only about 1,500 copies during Melville’s entire life). The research was fairly extensive. Still, I wish I could have done more.

  Interviewer: You also actually spent some time living on Nantucket.

  Sena Jeter Naslund: Yes, for whatever periods of time I could afford to. I think doing research from so many different angles helped me to get a feel for the time and place, but at least as important was living there—not reading anything in particular, just being out on the eastern end of the Island, at ‘Sconset, looking at the ocean and the sky.

  The first time I stayed in Nantucket—my friend Karen Mann had rented a condo and invited me to stay there expressly for the purpose of advancing my novel—it was on the other end, at Madaket, where we walked the moors. I didn’t know yet that Una would move from town to ‘Sconset—and the last night of our week’s stay, I dreamed one of Una’s dreams—her consciousness had displaced my own at the level of dreaming. It was one of the most thrilling moments in the process of composing fiction I’ve ever experienced.

  Karen insisted also that we climb the Unitarian church tower, which figures in the book, and that on the last day, on the way to the tiny airport, we drive out to Siasconset, which we hadn’t seen. As soon as we got there, I knew Una would move to ‘Sconset. All the way from Portugal an incredibly spangled sea rushed to the shore to meet us—plumed into the air like a fountain, clapped its hands.

  Another time, staying alone, because I was at ‘Sconset, I was able to write the Starry Night sequence which is the spiritual climax of the book. I wasn’t ready for it, but the atmosphere of the place made me write it. I was up most of the night. Those “gift” scenes often take a toll on the body because they’re unplanned. But you have to embrace them, no matter how tired you are, or they evaporate. Taking notes is worthless for me; I have to enter the scene itself and write it as it comes.

  Another day at ‘Sconset I had been completely absorbed in creating a world with words, but I finally looked up and out the window, and there that same world was, in actuality. It was very affirming. In one of his poems, Keats writes that in his dream, Adam named the animals and then awoke to find it true. When I looked out the window and saw the inner world outside, it was like that.

  Interviewer: Nautical stories usually contain baffling details of things done with sails, and equally baffling is the way it comes so trippingly off the tongue: “He double-reefed the topsails and soon furled the jib and mainsail…” How did you learn about sailing?

  Sena Jeter Naslund: Mostly from reading. Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast was helpful, as was the Owen Chase account of the shipwreck of the Essex, which Melville also read. Wonderful contemporary books by Joan Durett, She Was a Sister Sailor, for example, quote observations from diaries and books of the nineteenth century. I have been on short, small sailboat cruises, and very much wanted to do more, on larger craft, but couldn’t manage it. I hope the details are accurate. I wanted to sleep on a sailboat, but never did.

  Interviewer: You touch frequently on Romanticism and various aspects of religion. Of course, at the time of which you write, ideas of literature, God, and man’s place in the universe were in a state of flux—in New England as well as in Europe. Tell us about your research into these ideas, and in particular, how you saw them affecting your characters.

  Sena Jeter Naslund: At the University of Iowa, where I wrote a creative dissertation for the Ph.D., I also did a lot of course work in literature and criticism—my main Ph.D. examination area was British Literature 1800-1945. Another was landmark European novels in translation. I also took five literature courses with lectures and readings in French or German. So that information was just a part of my own educational background.

  Margaret Fuller was certainly much more versed in Romanticism than I was, so it was easy to plug into her conversation what I knew she knew. With Una, I tried to stick to poets I felt it likely she would know: Wordsworth and Coleridge; Keats, whose brother George moved to Louisville and is buried in Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville. I also read about the childhood reading of Una’s contemporary Charles Dickens, who did not come from an especially educated family; I thought Una could be familiar with some of the books he liked.

  Interviewer: The sea is very much a character in this book. Speak about this, and whether, as in the case of many a writer—some of whom have never been to sea—it had any unimagined influence on you and your writing.

  Sena Jeter Naslund: When I was in the ninth grade at Phillips High School, in Birmingham, Alabama, I wrote a book report on Moby-Dick, in which I said that I considered the sea to be a character in that book. It pleases me very much that you would make the same observation about my book. My teacher asked if this were my own opinion or that of some “art critic.”

  Well, I didn’t know what an art critic was, but I was fascinated by the idea and hoped that some day I would read something by an art critic, who, after all, apparently thought as I did. The very nice teacher readily believed me when I said that it was just my own idea. I’d never seen the sea, but my mother, who was a great reader as well as a fine musician, told me that when Edna St. Vincent Millay had first seen the sea, she burst into tears. I was impressed with both her and the ocean, though I didn’t see it till I was twenty or so.

  As I was growing up, we did have terrific thunderstorms in Birmingham, and I often tried to find words to describe that grandeur and my own excitement. Being actually by the sea always helped me in the writing of Ahab’s Wife. When I couldn’t manage Nantucket, a dear writer friend, Daly Walker, lent me his condo on Gasparilla Island, near Fort Meyers.

  Another dear friend, Lucinda Sullivan, who was also one of my best writer-critics, also invited me to stay with her in Gasparilla. My friend and critic, Jody Lisberger, invited me to Cushing Island, off the coast of Maine. In Louisville, sometimes I’d go for a few days to work on the novel to Otter Creek Lodge, on the bluffs above the Ohio River—at least it was moving water. The research trips to the ocean made me fall in love with it; even though I’ve finished my ocean novel, I long to be seaside.

  Interviewer: You mentioned earlier your Morrow editor, Paul Bresnick, as being a participant in the creative process, and you are generous in your Acknowledgments. Here again you speak of what others brought to Ahab’s Wife. I can imagine, and there is certainly plenty of testimony to the fact, of the revision process that leads to a final novel being quite painful. And so the author retreats. But you seem to have managed the trick of taking advice while also shaping a complex personal vision. Can you speak some more to that?

  Sena Jeter Naslund: Yes, I’ve had a lot of help. The support has come from people who have listened to me talk about the ideas and encouraged me, from writing friends who carefully read this text, from Paul. I find that I learn something from every response; however, I rarely can use all of what any one person has to tell me. I’m truly grateful for the help I’ve gotten.

  I love the revision process. My hands fall in love with the work: I want to touch it again, to polish it, to know it better. Now I have Something instead of Nothing. I feel relaxed; I know I can make it better, or savor and learn from what is already pleasing. Sometimes in my casual reading I’ll run across a word and think, “Oh, I used that word. Now let’s look back in the text and see just how I used it.” The word draws me back to a sentence, and the sentence to the sentences around it and on to other parts of the book. Before I know it three hours have passed. I’ve had absolutely no idea that time existed. Sometimes I’ve missed luncheons, appointments, and parties because of this.

  I want to revise; I want to make my writing into a work of art. I’m totally absorbed by revision. My o
ldest friend, Nancy Brooks Moore, whom I’ve know since I was three, recently said to me, “I could never understand, when it was your birthday, why you’d ask for a book that I knew you’d already read from the library.” She added, “It made no sense then—you knew how it turned out; why read it again? Of course that makes sense now.”

  I think my early tendency to read books over and over trained me to be patient with revision, and to enjoy it. I’m still learning things about Ahab’s Wife and will continue to, long after it’s published (and probably wish I could revise again).

  Interviewer: Do you have a sense of the past being constantly present as you write?

  Sena Jeter Naslund: Absolutely—my own past, the pasts of my ancestors and friends, everything I’ve read in the past. I want to write both out of the tradition and against the tradition. One of the things I love about Virginia Woolf is her sense of the presence of the past. Mrs. Dalloway is not separated from the young woman kissed in the garden: that girl is still a part of Mrs. Dalloway preparing for her party at age fifty. The best moments transcend any sense of the categories of past, present, future. Revision is one of the best moments—when everything is present at once.

  Interviewer: Do you view writing as a vocation, something you have to do? A compulsion?

  Sena Jeter Naslund: I think I was born to write. As a very young child I made up stories, which my friend Nancy and I acted out; I told myself stories in bed at night when I couldn’t sleep; I wrote a cowboy newspaper; I wrote a pioneer novel at age nine. I was told stories, particularly by my invalid Aunt Pet (Bertha Sena Jeter Petry) over and over about mad dogs and haunts in South Alabama (where the real South was, not in the city). My parents both read to me a great deal; I read books with my great friends Janice and Juanita Lewis and we made tape recordings, with sound effects, of our favorite parts. My wonderful teachers at Norwood Elementary School, Phillips High School, and Birmingham-Southern College encouraged me to enjoy reading and writing.

  Writing is part of my identity. I wouldn’t call it a compulsion. I love doing it, just as I love reading. They seem very similar activities to me. Often university teaching and required committee work have crowded out writing, and I’ve felt guilty and desperate to get back to it—though I really could not write and also fulfill my teaching obligations. And I’ve loved teaching, too. But the great thing about teaching as a profession for a writer is that you get time off in the summer. One of my teachers at Iowa, Richard Yates, said to me once, “It’s such a shame, Sena, that there’s no way you could be taken care of so you could spend all your time writing.”

  The idea never occurred to me: I’ve always felt I must provide for myself in a practical way. Maybe if I’d had more time I would have squandered it. After I build up a lot of guilt and frustration about not writing, I write like fury. And I have received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council which have made it possible at times to cut down on the teaching. But now I have begun to feel the press of time: I have so many ideas for books. I wish I could teach less. In the last ten years, I’ve published five books. Thanks to the success of Ahab’s Wife, I’ve taken 1999-2000 off from teaching at the University of Louisville. It was only after my third book that I was able to say to myself with confidence, “I am a writer.”

  Interviewer: Who are some of the writers you like to read, and who are those who most influenced the writing of this book?

  Sena Jeter Naslund: Of course Ahab’s Wife begins with Melville’s Moby-Dick. My taste in general is fairly orthodox, and I read many of the classics as a young teen—Charles Dickens, Alexander Dumas, Victor Hugo, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot. I read some of them again in high school, college, and graduate school, and again as I teach them. Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Katharine Anne Porter, Flannery O’Connor are the main influences on my sensibility. Also, Flaubert, James, Faulkner, Fitzgerald.

  My tenth-grade English teacher Leslie Moss Ainsworth made Julius Caesar come alive for me, and gave us the assignment of writing a scene that is referred to but not rendered in the text. I chose the suicide of Brutus’s wife Portia, who was said to have “swallowed fire.” For my eighteen-page scene, Miss Moss gave me an A with four pluses trailing after it, like the tail of a little comet. I think that assignment and my teacher’s response to it instilled in me the courage to try to match my writing with the greatest I knew. And, even then, I chose to do the neglected story of the wife of an important man.

  As a senior in high school, I began to read and understand the British romantic poets and especially admired, as does my character Una, the jeweled lines of Keats. At Birmingham-Southern College I learned how language creates art by analyzing Tennyson’s short poem “The Eagle.” Other poets whom I have loved and learned from are Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Theodore Rothke and among contemporary poets, the work of Richard Hugo, Denise Levertov, Lucille Clifton, Yusef Koumanyaka, Maura Stanton, Richard Cecil, Maureen Morehead (whom I quote in the epigraph to Ahab’s Wife), Roger Weingarten, Greg Pape, Alan Naslund, Richard Jackson.

  Interviewer: Do you have a work in progress?

  Sena Jeter Naslund: I’ve barely begun a civil rights novel set in Birmingham, where I grew up. I also have ideas for another historical novel or two, and another Sherlock Holmes adventure; I’d like to have another short story collection to follow The Disobedience of Water, which came out in the spring of 1999.

  Interviewer: Finally, a question about Melville. Albert Camus thought of Moby-Dick as “one of the most disturbing myths ever invented concerning man’s fight against evil and the terrible logic which ends by first setting the just man against creation and the creator, then setting him against himself and his fellow men.” Briefly, what is your analysis of the book?

  Sena Jeter Naslund: I’ve been fascinated by the book since I was thirteen, and I wouldn’t want to attempt a definitive analysis of it. The last time I read it I was struck by the digressiveness of Melville’s mind, and yet the unity of it, also by his wit—he made me laugh out loud on many pages—and by the sheer lyricism of the language, as fresh and evocative as any romantic poet in his nature descriptions.

  Moby-Dick changes as I change. It’s as changeable as the sea. Most recently, Melville’s novel seemed unified to me by a Shakespearean concept of a great man greatly flawed; certainly Ahab thinks of himself in his monomania as being a kind of Lear, with Pip as his Fool. And Starbuck considers murdering Ahab just as Hamlet considers murdering the murderous King Claudius. Melville wants us to see the Shakespearean tragic element of the book. He wants to rise to the challenge—to write a truly great work of art. Having such a lofty ambition—partly inspired by his love of Hawthorne, whom Melville compared favorably to Shakespeare—Melville finally transcends or transforms Shakespeare’s vision, I think, by being so thoroughly democratic: American. He’s interested in the movement of the mind of an individual—Ishmael, as well as in the agony of Ahab.

  Shakespeare’s stage cannot contain Moby-Dick; it’s epic and narrative, not just dramatic, in its scope; and as private as prayer. I don’t know that I agree with Camus in his statement that Moby-Dick sets man against the creator and then against himself and his fellow man. Certainly, Ahab is not set against his wife and child. In the chapter “The Symphony,” just before the climactic chase chapters, Ahab says to his first mate Starbuck, “Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land, by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye.”

  The ship of my book, Ahab’s Wife, sails under that flag.

  Author’s Note:

  The Surprise and Pleasure of It

  When I was writing Ahab’s Wife, insight sometimes came unexpectedly and w
ith a thrill of pleasure; for example, once when I was looking at a dear friend’s tablecloth. Cinda Sullivan and I had walked out to enjoy her new little brick house, which consists inside of a single exquisite room with tall pink walls and a telescope in one corner. Using a gold marker, Cinda had written celestial quotations on a white, round tablecloth. Among them I read our friend Maureen Morehead’s lines, that came to be the epigraph of Ahab’s Wife:

  One must take off her fear like clothing;

  One must travel at night;

  This is the seeking after God.

  And this, I thought, is the idea I’m trying to embody in my novel.

  I went home to review my novel-in-progress and found that, indeed, Una’s spiritual journey was the core of the novel. Since the book also focuses on friendship among women and on living creatively, it still pleases me that the gleaming epigraph about the individual journey arose from a context of friendship and beauty.

  Writing this novel was, at times, a difficult and solitary night journey, but there were many joyful moments—like meteorites shooting through the dark. I especially enjoyed writing Chapter 10, “The Giant.” Here Una uses sight, smell, touch, hearing to apprehend the nature of the Giant (the Lighthouse). Sensual data proves inadequate for exploring something mythic, and Una turns to metaphor, a more appropriate tool for knowing what is beyond the realm of science. Dwelling inside her whimsical, searching mind led me to comparisons that surprised me and made me smile: she imagines the tower to be like a flower stalk, a mountain abstracted into height and stone, the wick of a candle, the thighbone of God. This playful treatment of the tower has its shadow side in Chapter 13 when Una prays to the Lighthouse to be a Friend to Frannie, who has smallpox.