Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  I shall call Ishmael, point toward the Sankaty headland, then read aloud this last writing, believing that he will like my own wind-flung confetti—words streaming from my hand. Each day and forever, by the ticking of the mantel clock and by the dark wheeling of the cosmos, we have given time a home.

  FINIS

  Acknowledgments

  AHAB’S WIFE is dedicated to John C. Morrison, my husband, who sailed with me throughout the voyage of writing this book, while writing his own book in physics.

  Karen J. Mann, Lucinda Dixon Sullivan, Robin Lippincott, and Susan Johnson read every draft of Ahab’s Wife, making innumerable valuable suggestions and offering constant encouragement. Without their generous help, both I and the book would have floundered.

  For their very detailed, insightful, and heartening response to the third draft, I must express deep gratitude to Neela Vaswani, Julie Brick-man, Jody Lisberger, and Judy Himmelfarb; and to Nan Goheen and Marcia Woodruff Dalton for their work on the second draft; and to Daly Walker and Bill Pearce for critiquing the critical opening chapters.

  For their encouragement at the outset of the project or along the way, I thank my brothers John Sims Jeter and Marvin D. Jeter, and my friends Nancy and Bernard Moore, Richard M. Sullivan, Roger Weingarten, Mark Pollizzoti, Alan Naslund, Lynn Greenberg, Elizabeth F. Sulzby, Patricia and Charles Gaines, Melissa Pritchard, Dennis Buchholz, Rob LaFreniere, Luke Wallin, Mary Gordon, Maureen Morehead, Bret Lott, Christopher Noël, Linda Beattie, Kay Gill, Nana Lampton, Kay Lippincott, and Lee Salkowitz. A special thanks to Ann Marin for sharing her office with me, in the spring of 1996.

  My gratitude to Leslie Daniels and Joy Harris, of the Joy Harris Literary Agency, and to my editor, Paul Bresnick, and my publisher, Michael Murphy, at William Morrow and Company overwhelms me.

  And with loving thanks to Flora Naslund and Marty Kelley and to Debra Morrison and David Rizzolo, Paul Morrison, David Morrison, Sara and Michael McQuilling, and Ryan Morrison.

  I also thank the Kentucky Foundation for Women for an Artist’s Grant and the Graduate School of the University of Louisville for a Completion Grant, which allowed me to lighten my teaching load by a course one semester and also helped to cover travel and research expenses to whaling museums at Nantucket, New Bedford, and Mystic. I also thank the University of Louisville for granting me a one-semester sabbatical leave of absence from teaching during which I worked on portions of this book.

  E-Book Extras

  An Interview with Sena Jeter Naslund: “The Ship of My Book”

  Author’s Note: The Surprise and Pleasure of It

  Reading Group Guide: Discussion Points

  An Interview with Sena Jeter Naslund:

  “The Ship of My Book”

  Interviewer: Describe the development of Ahab’s Wife. How closely does the finished product resemble what you’d planned?

  Sena Jeter Naslund: The concept for Ahab’s Wife seized me while I was driving a rented car in an unfamiliar city. I had come up to Boston for the publication of my novel Sherlock in Love, and I felt wonderful: my publisher and editor at David R. Godine, Inc., had been so kind and supportive, and I’d gotten a stunningly good review on National Public Radio and in Kirkus Reviews.

  I was in celebration mode, stepping on the gas, and finding my way when a sentence came to me—“Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last”—and an image: a woman on a Nantucket widow’s walk at night looking out to sea, hoping to see the burning try-pots of her husband’s whale ship.

  She had waited and watched for him a long time. Then she stopped looking out and began to look up, her gaze traveling the stars. Thus began her own spiritual journey. I stepped on the gas and realized that Una’s adventure was every bit as important and could be as compelling as the sea adventure of her husband. The whole concept for the novel seemed present in an instant, in the first sentence and in the stargazing image.

  Interviewer: Is this how astronomy entered the novel?

  Sena Jeter Naslund: Yes. Melville had written the quintessential sea story. I needed something more vast—the heavens. The first time I visited Nantucket (which was Ahab’s home), I went from the wharf into a tour guide mini-bus, and the guide immediately began to speak of the historical woman Maria Mitchell, who was the first person in the world to discover a comet using a telescope. She did this from her roof-walk observatory in Nantucket. For a moment I thought she might be Ahab’s wife, but as I learned more about her, I saw this was impossible.

  Melville also—amazingly enough—was struck by Maria Mitchell and wrote a long poem, “After the Pleasure Party,” based on the woman astronomer. In my book, Maria becomes a good friend of my totally fictional character Una Spenser, who does marry Captain Ahab. It also happened that my bedtime reading for the two years before I conceived Ahab’s Wife was in physics and astronomy. I met my husband, an atomic physicist who has also worked at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, about six months after I had the vision of Una on the roof-walk.

  Interviewer: Now to an unpleasant topic: cannibalism. Why is it a feature of Ahab’s Wife?

  Sena Jeter Naslund: Melville wrote a couple of books, Typee and Omoo (based on his South Sea Islands experience), that caused him to be known as The Man Who Lived with the Cannibals. He also went to Nantucket to interview the captain of the whale ship the Essex, which was rammed by a sperm whale and sunk. Members of the crew, adrift for many weeks in sixteen-foot whaleboats, turned to cannibalism. A close reading of Moby-Dick suggested to me that Melville had originally intended to explore cannibalism, following the Essex story in that particular as well as in the sinking of the whale ship, but for some reason turned away from it—perhaps the decision was part of his resisting the reductive label as the man who lived among cannibals.

  But Melville does describe the Pequod as a “cannibal craft,” all trimmed in ivory and bone, and he has Captain Ahab refer to himself as “cannibal old me.” So I wanted to explore a territory that Melville had decided against, but one that was in keeping with the ambiance of Moby-Dick. Since I was a child, taboos have interested me—how do people invent ideas that they consider the boundary conditions of being a human being? It’s a question about the origin of moral values. My early novel Sherlock in Love explores another taboo. From Moby-Dick, it’s clear that Ahab has a philosophical turn of mind. Captain Peleg says of him that he’s fixed his lance in “mightier, stranger foes than whales”—that he’s tried to penetrate the mysteries of reality. If I was to create a wife worthy of him, she too needed to have had a profound wrestling with fundamental questions and experiences.

  Interviewer: Such as cannibalism.

  Sena Jeter Naslund: Yes.

  Interviewer: What were your thoughts when writing this episode? What was your process?

  Sena Jeter Naslund: Sometimes ideas come to me for scenes that are in advance of the chronology I’m in. That is, a scene that I shouldn’t get to for another hundred pages will present itself early. I always grab pencil and paper, or go to the computer, and take those sequences as gifts; they’re impatient to come into the world. This particularly happens if I’ve wondered consciously what I was going to do when I got to that section, but I haven’t tried to write it, since I haven’t needed it yet. But it’s kind of looming out there.

  This was the way the cannibalism sequence came to me. It simply began; I was in a transport. I experienced it intensely as I wrote. Of course I revised it later, but it was not an effort of will to write the first draft, though living it was excruciating. I call these premature scenes “grappling hooks”: I throw the scene ahead of me, write the scene, then use it to pull me to that place, to close the gap between where I was and the “gift” scene.

  I had been interested in the Donner party, probably since high school or earlier, so the cannibalism scene in Ahab’s Wife really had a very long incubation period, but on the unconscious level. The Starry Sky sequence was also a “grappling hook” scene: the image had been hovering in my min
d, though not the language, since the moment of conception, when I was feeling happy and driving the rented car, but the scene seized me at ‘Sconset before I was ready for it.

  Interviewer: Why did you dip into the slavery issue?

  Sena Jeter Naslund: Again, my starting point was Melville and what he didn’t do. Melville does deal with slavery in books other than Moby-Dick, and in Moby-Dick the best friend of Ishmael is Queequeg of the South Seas and of another race. Melville very much wants to promote brotherhood and to work against racial prejudice—remember Moby-Dick was published in 1851, nearly ten years before the Civil War. I gave my narrator, Una, a dear friend who is a runaway slave—to promote sisterhood and to work against racial prejudice, which of course is still too much with us. Just as Ishmael and Queequeg share a bed in the opening chapters of Moby-Dick so do Una and Susan.

  Interviewer: And so do you also include the issue of religious tolerance because Melville did? He not only has Ishmael embrace Queequeg but also Queequeg’s religious practices—placing a little wooden idol on his head and worshiping it.

  Sena Jeter Naslund: If anything, the need for religious tolerance is greater today than in Melville’s time. Consider the current horrifying tensions between Irish Catholics and Protestants, Moslems and Christians, Jews and Moslems, Hindus and Moslems; between the fundamentalists and liberals within most religions. Ahab’s Wife tries to embody the idea that each person has the right and often the need to make a spiritual journey—it need not fit into any established religion. For a while, Una becomes a Unitarian, because of their great openness to world religions, social justice and the individual spiritual quest.

  Interviewer: Melville doesn’t deal with feminist issues, yet even more than astronomy, cannibalism, slavery, or religious tolerance that issue is central to Ahab’s Wife.

  Sena Jeter Naslund: Moby-Dick along with Huckleberry Finn used to be mentioned as candidates for “the great American novel.” It always bothered me that neither book has any significant women characters in it. A large part of rewriting history, thanks to feminist thought, is to include women. I feel a need to do that with the fictive landscape.

  The Sherlock Holmes canon also largely ignores women; I wanted to suggest there was a woman worthy of that great intellect, Holmes, and of equal integrity (or more). Of course adding a figure to the landscape of Moby-Dick was a much more serious and ambitious undertaking since Moby-Dick is now an undisputable literary masterpiece—though it was not recognized as such till well after Melville’s death.

  Melville does include, in three places, the information that Ahab had a wife and child back in Nantucket and that he loved them; Ahab wished he could turn away from his obsession with killing Moby Dick so that he might return to his hearth. With those passages in the novel, Melville gave me a kind of “license” to suppose, at least, that Ahab had a wife.

  Melville also has Ishmael say near the end of the novel that his book is like the great cathedral of Cologne which was not finished by the original architect. I use the metaphor and add the image of the slowly finished Chartres cathedral with two unmatching spires, built a century or two apart. By Melville’s saying within the text that his novel was unfinished, again, I felt Melville was giving permission for someone to complete some aspects of it—that I might attempt to create a woman’s story to place beside that of Ishmael.

  Of course we all have limits to our vision, no matter how much we want to be open-minded and inclusive, as Melville was on so many important issues of his time. If Melville had given a significant role to women, if he had seen women as having their own quests, I wouldn’t have felt it necessary to write Ahab’s Wife.

  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 s
equence 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.