Authors: Sena Jeter Naslund
Â
Interviewer:
Who are some of the writers you like to read, and who are those who most influenced the writing of this book?
Â
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 teenâCharles 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.
Â
Interviewer:
Do you have a work in progress?
Â
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.
Â
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?
Â
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 witâhe made me laugh out loud on many pagesâand 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 challengeâto write a truly great work of art. Having such a lofty ambitionâpartly inspired by his love of Hawthorne, whom Melville compared favorably to ShakespeareâMelville 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 individualâIshmael, 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.
When I was writing
Ahab's Wife
, insight sometimes came unexpectedly and with 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 momentsâlike 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.
I played the senses against imagination again in Chapter 16, “The Brightness of Brightness.” Blinded by lightning, Una uses imagination and memory to visualize reality. That evening, when Giles reads Wordsworth's poems aloud, language makes vivid a world Una's never seen: London at dusk, or a host of daffodils dancing beside a lake. Simultaneously, I had the pleasure of using language to make my reader see, although the pages of
Ahab's Wife
present only ink on paper to the physical eye.
To balance the ascendancy of imagination over direct sensory experience depicted in “The Giant” and “Brightness of Brightness,” Una's response to the waves breaking on the beach in Chapter 124, “To Siasconset,” is purely sensual. Because of her physical excitement at the sight and sound of the pluming waves and expanse of ocean, Una claims the seaside as the place to create a home.
I am surprised to seeâjust nowâthat the spiritual liftoff moment for the novel, Chapter 126, “Journey Toward the Starry Sky, In Present Tense” (a scene I had envisioned in the initial concept of the novel), has its necessary precedent in that joyful sun-spangled moment.
The father of American poetry, Walt Whitman, posed the question within a poem: “Do I contradict myself? Well then I contradict myself.” Part of the pleasure of writing this novel has been to have enough space and time in which to contradict myself, to embrace the ebb and flow, to seek a passionate balance.
Â
âSena Jeter Naslund
Ahab's Wife
is a novel that invites the attention of reading groups. Along with this special-features-enhanced e-book edition, there is a trade paperback edition, published by Perennial. The questions below are but a starting point for the rich discussion that is likely to follow any group's reading of this novel.
“Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last.”
Â
This is destined to be remembered as one of the most-recognized first sentences in literatureâalong with “Call me Ishmael.” And Una Spenser, the transcendent hero at the center of
Ahab's Wife
may well become every bit as memorable as Ahab.
Â
Inspired by a brief passage in
Moby-Dick,
Sena Jeter Naslund has created an entirely new universeâan epic-scale, enthralling, and compellingly readable saga, spanning a full, rich, eventful and dramatic life. In the “soprano voice” whose absence critics lamented in
Moby-Dick
âthe strong, intelligent voice of a woman whose life is dominated by the seaâNaslund tells many stories. She narrates a family drama, as the child Una is sent away to live in a lighthouse by her mother, in order to protect her from the physical and emotional blows of her religion-mad father. She spins a romantic adventure, as Una finds early passion with a sailor, and, disguised as a cabin boy, runs away to sea to encounter disasters, murder, romance of virtually every variation, and of course, the behemoths of the deep. She paints a portrait of a real, loving marriage, as through Una's eyes we see Ahab before the White Whale takes his leg and his sanity. Finally, Sena Jeter Naslund gives us a new perspective on the American experience, as the widowed Una makes a new life for herself in the company of Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others.
Â
Ahab's Wife
is not a pastiche, sequel, or exploitation. It is transformative, rather than derivative. Sena Jeter Naslund has thoroughly imbibed the spirit of Herman Melville, and that spirit permeates every page of her novel. But great as her debt to Melville may be,
Ahab's Wife
stands alone, intact and vital for
any
reader. Inspired by a masterpiece,
Ahab's Wife
is a legitimate masterwork in its own right.
Â
The vision that informs this magnificent novel is so complete, the nineteenth-century voice so eloquent and sure, one feels the author hasn't so much written this book as lived it. She has fallen in love with this world, this woman's life, and her book evokes that same connection in the reader. From the opening line, and the spellbinding first scene, you will know immediately that you are in the hands of an eloquent and masterful storyteller, and in the company of an endlessly fascinating heroine. You will want to immerse yourself in this worldâa realm easily entered, enchanting, and fulfillingâand spend time indulging in one of the consummate human pleasures: reading a brilliantly written, vibrant, uplifting, and deliciously enveloping novelâa bright book of life.