The Wreckage of Eden
Page 22
John Brown’s part in the dialogue with Robert Winter is mostly invention, but some of the words I give him to say appear in Thoreau’s “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” in which the Concord Transcendentalist quotes the trial testimony of “Old Brown.” For dramatic unity, I chose to have him speak them in his jail cell rather than in a courtroom.
I have given Emily words of my own to utter and hope to have caught something of her oddities of expression, her mordancy and slant of thought. (My brazen imitations of her verse are best thought of as early drafts of poems she eventually discarded.) With the exception of the epigraphs, I have borrowed neither poem nor phrase from her. I am grateful to Harvard University and Amherst College for their permission to use certain of her verses as epigraphs. I have also taken words from Emerson, Thoreau, and Lincoln and have welded them to utterances attributed to them in the fiction.
I remind readers that the Democratic Party of the day and the then-new Republican Party were—in Lincoln’s metaphor—the “house divided” on the issue of popular sovereignty, used as a justification for the legal right to own human beings and as a fulcrum to launch the Civil War. Democratic statesmen like Daniel Webster and Stephen Douglas, as well as Presidents Pierce and Buchanan, aligned themselves with the proslavery faction, while the “Black Republicans,” which included Lincoln, championed abolition.
An acknowledgment of my esteem is due again to Bellevue Literary Press—in particular, to my publisher, editor, advocate, and friend, Erika Goldman; to its founding publisher, Jerome Lowenstein, M.D., and to Marjorie DeWitt, Elana Rosenthal, Molly Mikolowski, Joe Gannon, and Carol Edwards, my pricking editorial conscience. My gratitude to my wife is unflagging.
I consulted certain books while writing this fiction: Emerson Among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait, by Carlos Baker; Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds, by Lyndall Gordon; A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century, by Jerome Charyn; The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith, by Matthew Bowman; and The Preacher’s Tale: The Civil War Journal of Rev. Francis Springer, Chaplain, U.S. Army of the Frontier, edited by William Furry. I also relied on the Emily Dickinson Museum website.
I am indebted to the Reverend Dr. Mark Oldenburg, dean of the chapel, Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, and the Reverend Dr. Nelson Rivera, associate professor of theology at Moravian Theological Seminary at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, for their guidance concerning the theology and practice of a nineteenth-century Lutheran minister. I thank Edwin Toro, living in the mountains of Columbia, for the use of his mother tongue.
PERMISSIONS
“She dealt her pretty words like blades” J 479/F 458
—Line 1
“This world is not conclusion” J 501/F 373
—Lines 19–20
“Because that you are going” J 1260/F 1314
—Lines 39–40
“Remorse is memory awake” J 744/F 781
—Line 1
—Emily Dickinson
Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson.
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 four 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; and 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.”
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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