Melville’s Mirror

The form of the historical novel is a tempting one, and lots of recent authors looking for masterpieces have tried it. History seems simultaneously large and manageable, for one thing, and for another, an author has the opportunity to ride one of his or her special hobbyhorses in a quite respectable fashion. Even so, the historical novel is a little suspect, maybe even, as Mary Helen Dunlop, the author of “Sixty Miles From Contentment,” a survey of 19th century travel narratives, informed me when I was beginning my own most recent historical novel, irretrievably corrupt. Nor is it enough to argue that, say, “The Iliad,” “War and Peace” and “The Charterhouse of Parma” are historical novels, and they are great. In fact, the illusion of historical accuracy in these works is far thinner-seeming now than it was when they were written; their greatness is acknowledged in spite of the dated quality of the authors’ historical interpretations. The works have a fascinating doubleness in that as they strive to reveal earlier times, they inadvertently reveal their own. But what author wants that? Dickens writing “David Copperfield” is always vast and authoritative. Dickens writing “A Tale of Two Cities” gets smaller and more fallible with every passing decade.

Feminists would say that women writers have not only a justification but an obligation to write serious historical novels. Having been written out of history, we must now rectify the situation by writing ourselves back in, and many of us have done so with great industry and enthusiasm. We are the heiresses of Virginia Woolf, who resented that she was not allowed into the libraries and classrooms of Oxford University. Once we got into the buildings, we realized that we were still excluded from the books. No longer, but even so, and with all the best intentions, the historical novel still carries an added measure of solipsism that seems to me to make it smaller and less manageable than contemporary realist fiction. In her beautifully written and very long novel, “Ahab’s Wife,” Sena Jeter Naslund almost eludes some of the problems of the historical novel but not quite.

And it is beautifully written. Naslund sustains a high, lyrical visionary style for almost 700 pages that owes very little to her inspiration, “Moby-Dick.” Without the relief and benefit of a little irony or even some low comedy, she goes on and on, her perspective getting wider and her figurative language getting more and more elegant and expressive. She manages to give her protagonist, Una Spenser, a believable voice that is both alluring and wise. Una, the putative wife of Capt. Ahab, the most famous of American male protagonists, is a Kentucky girl transplanted east, first to a lighthouse off the coast of Massachusetts, then to Nantucket. She is 12 when the novel opens and maybe 30 at the end. She has quite a few adventures that reveal her singular nature: She fights with an eagle, she is blinded by lightning, she ships out on a whaling ship in disguise, the ship is staved by a whale and so forth.

Here is the great temptation of the historical novel bodied forth. What fun to imagine such scenes! Corporate life, suburban life, driving down the freeway or any other parsing of contemporary experience can’t hold a candle to it. And Naslund does a pretty good job, though her high style prevents her from getting deeply into the realistic muck of Una’s experiences. She is more interested in their meaning than their drama, and Una’s quiet moments of reverie have more weight than her adventures. She does get to meet quite a variety of 19th century characters, though, and the reader is reminded that any narrowness and provinciality we may arrogantly attribute to our forebears is certainly a figment of our 20th century imaginations. America of the 1830s and ‘40s was alive with the cross-fertilization of many cultures and many ideas, most of which Naslund touches upon.

The core of the novel is Una’s relationship with Ahab, whom she meets when the Pequod takes her and her mad husband back to Nantucket after she is rescued from her own shipwreck. She feels an instantaneous kinship with Ahab, in spite of the difference in years between them (she is at this point about 17; he has gray hair). There are obstacles to their coming together, but the general chaos of 19th century life eventually removes them (I’ll not say how), and Una and Ahab marry. She journeys back to Kentucky to have their child, and misadventure follows. Their reunion, upon his return after several years chasing whales, is a happy and convincing passage of the novel, and they conceive another child. Naslund does a neat job of inserting the fictional Ahab and the fictional Pequod into real contemporary Nantucket society, and this part of the novel is quite lively and informative. Ahab then goes out whaling again, and it is on this third voyage that he loses his leg (and perhaps more) to Moby-Dick. Upon his return from that voyage, Ahab is neither the man nor the character he has been before. He seems faded and passed over, as if the author and Una had lost some of their interest in him. The focus now seems to be upon Una’s own spiritual growth, which has something to do with Ahab but not as much as the narrative alleges it to have.

The problem with the novel is that the author’s beautiful style makes Una’s transcendent visions toward the end seem like a setup. Everyone she meets loves her, admires her and treats her well and is himself or herself a good person. Any evil that one character does to another happens is a result of insanity, monomania or temporary necessity; Una doesn’t seem to actually have any pain or sorrow to wrestle with. She reports scenes of anxiety, fear and even despair but doesn’t render them in a believable way. To give up drama in favor of meaning is to give up suspense and felt anguish. And of course, if 16 or 18 years must pass, then the narrative must gallop along at a pretty good pace. All in all, though it doesn’t work especially well as a novel, “Ahab’s Wife” works wonderfully as a gloss upon 19th century American intellectual history and an evocation of seascapes and landscapes: Naslund clearly knows the period. In addition, the volume is beautifully produced, with lovely woodcuts illustrating many of the scenes.

In the end, maybe it is the redeeming social qualities of the historical novel that corrupt it: self-consciously instructive, self-consciously improving to the mind and intellect, self-consciously public, almost a form of Socialist Realism (tempting to the part of the writer who lives as a citizen in a particular place and time), never quite the pure present passion that real art grows out of. *