Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer

  I’ve long admired the historical feminist figure Margaret Fuller, who edited the Dial literary magazine with Emerson and was the first foreign correspondent in Europe, of either sex, for an American newspaper—Horace Greeley’s Tribune, and I let her become Una’s friend. I wanted to anchor my fictive character with two outstanding historical women—Maria Mitchell the scientist and Margaret Fuller, the feminist and woman of letters. Of course there were many such women of that time; I wanted to establish a convincing context for Una’s radical and original thinking. Una is a feminist in that she takes charge of her own unconventional life. She defines herself, explores her own nature rather than always waiting for a husband to define her. But she loves several men, has children, and creates a home.

  Interviewer: Did the Transcendentalism of Emerson, Fuller, and other New England thinkers influence the thematics of Ahab’s Wife?

  Sena Jeter Naslund: Yes, but neither Melville nor Hawthorne, who became Melville’s great friend and neighbor at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, were Transcendentalists; to them, Emerson’s thought did not give sufficient weight to the reality of evil and suffering. In Ahab’s Wife, I do try to give sufficient weight to suffering and death, and yet I believe those realities can be transcended.

  Interviewer: So to what extent did these thematic ideas figure into the original concept?

  Sena Jeter Naslund: The original concept consisted only of the first sentence and the image of the woman on the roof-walk at night—of her looking up at the stars instead of out to sea for her husband. But both the feminist concept for Una and the notion of transcendence were inherent in that original image, and, yes, the book is true to that original concept.

  Interviewer: But was there an evolution in your concept of Una or in other characters? Do you have them figured out in advance, or is there a point at which they take off by themselves and guide the action?

  Sena Jeter Naslund: Tolstoy once wrote to his friend the critic Starkov that he, Tolstoy, was in his most creative mode when his characters surprised him and events took an unexpected turn. I agree, emphatically. I didn’t know that I would need to drop back to Una’s childhood in order to develop a young woman who would choose to marry Captain Ahab. I didn’t know until I started writing that Una would rebel against her fundamentalist Christian father, or that she even had one, or that her mother would send her to live at a Lighthouse with aunt, uncle, and cousin. The adventure just unfolded as I imagined it. I didn’t even know Una had a cousin at the Lighthouse until she was approaching the Island: she (and I with her) saw some goats from the ferry and then she saw another little white figure jumping up and down. As she (and I) drew closer to the Island, we saw that this figure was a little girl, Cousin Frannie. She literally jumped out of the rocks into existence. She wasn’t pre-planned at all.

  Several other characters also just materialized out of thin air, or snow, or whatever the landscape background was. In the opening, a pack of bounty-hunters come through the snowy woods to Una’s cabin, looking for a runaway slave. I looked at the pack more closely and saw that one was very short, a dwarf in fact, wearing a wolf skin over his head. Much later—hundreds of pages later, to my surprise, he came back to Una’s Kentucky cabin a second time. They began to talk, and David became a friend of Una’s. He also changed his mind about bounty hunting. And Susan, the runaway slave girl, got all the way to Lake Erie, and then to my surprise and hers, she felt she had to return to the South.

  I didn’t know who would be Una’s third husband until I was halfway through the novel, even though some additional husband had been promised in the first sentence. I just trusted the sentence—Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last—and thought I’d find out when I got to that part of the book. When I saw who it was, I howled with glee.

  Interviewer: How long did it take to write this longish book? Did you research first, then write, or did you do the research as you went along?

  Sena Jeter Naslund: I got the idea in November 1993, in Boston, as I said; then I re-read Moby-Dick, and began research, which included the wonderful Laurie Robertson-Lorant biography of Melville, the Carlos Baker biography of Emerson, Nathaniel Philbrick’s book on Nantucket, and many, many other books. One of my favorites was a history of the weather on Nantucket.

  I wrote the first page of Ahab’s Wife and the opening sequence in August 1994; in the fall I was very taken up with my teaching at the University of Louisville and at Vermont College in the MFA program, and with raising money to publish my literary magazine The Louisville Review, etc., and didn’t get back to writing for several months. In January and again in February 1995, I made the first of four research trips to Nantucket; I also later visited whaling museums at New Bedford and in Mystic.

  I finished the first draft of the novel, over 1,000 typescript pages, about two years after I wrote the first page. It took another two years to revise it, with the help and advice from writer friends, whom I thank in the Acknowledgments. In October 1998, I sent the book to Leslie Daniels and Joy Harris of the Joy Harris Literary Agency, and we worked some more on the book before Joy Harris sold it at auction, with six major houses competing for it, to William Morrow & Company in December 1998.

  With the help of my wonderful editor Paul Bresnick, we revised—the sixth complete revision (not counting the multiple reworkings of various parts) for me—the book again. Because of Paul’s urging to go deeper, some very important scenes between Una and Ahab were added in the sixth revision.

  During all this revising, I continued to do research—on lighthouse mechanisms, on whaleboats, on women who went to sea, on Kentucky pioneer life. I visited Connor Prairie, an 1830s reconstruction in Indiana. I visited Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts; the Concord homes of Emerson, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts; Melville’s home, Arrowhead, in Pittsfield.

  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 i
t 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 oldest 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 cro
wded 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.