by Norman Lock
Could I remake me! or set free
This sexless bound in sex, then plunge
Deeper than Sappho, in a lunge
Piercing Pan’s paramount mystery!
For, Nature, in no shallow surge
Against thee either sex may urge,
Why hast thou made us but in halves—
Co-relatives? This makes us slaves.
If these co-relatives never meet
Self-hood itself seems incomplete.
And such the dicing of blind fate
Few matching halves here meet and mate.
What Cosmic jest or Anarch blunder
The human integral clove asunder
And shied the fractions through life’s gate?
—Herman Melville, from “After the Pleasure Party”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“… it is possible to imagine almost anything about a man as tormented and great-souled as Herman Melville.”
—Laurie Robertson-Lorant, Melville: A Biography
While they are grounded in historical fact, whose truthfulness is always doubtful, the books in the American Novels Series are in no way biographies, official or otherwise, of the literary and artistic figures they present. They are evocations of their periods and their subjects—made real, or at least concrete, by particularities of the events and places depicted. The characters, drawn from literary history, are not necessarily as they were in actuality, but as they seem to be to the narrator, who is an unreliable one. The writing of fiction has also given me license to elide and consolidate occasionally in the interest of the narrative. (In 1883, for instance, Melville’s office was located at Seventy-sixth Street and the East River. I have stationed him at the 207 West Street and Hudson River office, where he spent the majority of his years in the Custom Service, to simplify the comings and goings of the characters. Henry James, Ellen Finch’s client, was in Boston and not New York City at the time.) What I hope to accomplish with these novels is to discover in our history the causes and beginnings of certain maleficent qualities in the American character. Since the writing is intended to be critical of contemporary life—at least of its vicious side, which is everywhere today apparent—it portrays the darkness at the heart of the nation’s past. That past is an amalgam of American history, its literary history, of primary and secondary sources, and of my imagination.
I acknowledge the presumptuousness of believing I am capable of creating narrators and characters whose experiences are alien to my own, of drawing the vast American landscape, and of imagining myself within the minds of illustrious men and women, like a worm eating its way through the great books of the past. I gently remind readers that it is a presumption to write on any subject. But if the truth be told, I don’t have an adequate defense for having written these books of mine. I am driven to do so, and it is for readers to decide whether or not it has been worth their while to read them and mine to have written them.
I gratefully acknowledge the authors and their works that I have chosen to represent nineteenth-century American literature—in the case of the present novel, Herman Melville and especially his Redburn and Moby-Dick—and other actual persons invoked, especially the silent auditor to whom Shelby Ross confides his story, Washington Roebling, chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge. His resolve, ambition, and suffering were as exceptional as Melville’s own. I am also indebted to certain invaluable books read or consulted for the present work: Herman Melville, by Elizabeth Hardwick; The Great Bridge, by David McCullough; The Brown Decades: 1865–1895, by Lewis Mumford; Why Read Moby-Dick?, by Nathaniel Philbrick; and Melville: A Biography, by Laurie Robertson-Lorant, a monumental piece of Melville scholarship to which I returned often. I thank Robert Fischler, historian, National U.S. Customs Museum Foundation; Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Research Professor of Medicine, NYU School of Medicine; and my friends at the Matawan-Aberdeen Public Library.
My obligation to acknowledge persons at the center of my life and thought is a pleasant one: my wife, Helen, well-wishers Eugene Lim, Dawn Raffel, Tobias Carroll, and John Madera, and especially Erika Goldman, publisher and editorial director, Jerome Lowenstein, founding publisher, and their colleagues at Bellevue Literary Press, Marjorie DeWitt, Elana Rosenthal, the diligent Molly Mikolowski, the patient Joe Gannon, and the scrupulous Carol Edwards.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. His most recent books are the short story collection Love Among the Particles, a Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year, and five previous books in The American Novels series: The Boy in His Winter, a reenvisioning of Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which Scott Simon of NPR Weekend Edition said, “make[s] Huck and Jim so real you expect to get messages from them on your iPhone”; American Meteor, an homage to Walt Whitman and William Henry Jackson named a Firecracker Award finalist and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year; The Port-Wine Stain, featuring Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Dent Mütter, which was also a Firecracker Award finalist; A Fugitive in Walden Woods, a tale that introduced readers to Henry David Thoreau and other famous transcendentalists and abolitionists in a book Barnes & Noble selected as a “Must-Read Indie Novel”; and The Wreckage of Eden, a story evoking the life and artistry of Emily Dickinson.
Lock has won The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, where he is at work on the next books of The American Novels series.
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