SO19:
I believe you did some college work and writing on Thoreau, whose family and
circle appear vividly in this novel. Could you tell us a little about what
draws you to that particular corner of the 19th century?
AB: It
was my undergraduate “thesis,” when I was a college student of American History
& Literature. It was also about William Carlos Williams, called “The Local
as the Universal in Walden and Paterson.” I was proposing a
distinctly “American” idea of finding the universal in one’s immediate
surroundings—almost as an intellectual counter-action to the American 19th century economic and geographical push to limitless expansion. Also, for Thoreau, for Williams, and for many other American writers, there is an impulse to rewrite the Bible, to create the new Book for mankind. Other writers who come to mind with this impulse are: Emerson, Dickinson, Melville, Whitman...
SO19:
One of the many things I found moving about your novel was a central paradox:
that Margaret Fuller was repudiated by some of her prominent contemporaries
despite having so many of the same qualities—energy, idealism, largeness of
heart, commitment to change, personal strength, resourcefulness—we admire in
them specifically, and in the ethos of the 19th century generally.
AB: She
was a woman. That’s been the deal forever: Women are punished for exhibiting
the qualities of mind and leadership we have traditionally assigned to men.
Even worse back then. So when someone like Fuller was able to persevere in the
face of it, her courage astonishes.
SO19:
You’ve said you first heard about Margaret Fuller in a college class. When
and how did she become the possible focus for a novel, if that transition is
possible to identify?
AB: It
wasn’t, at first, Fuller who captured me; it was that one strange anecdote of
Thoreau—my chief preoccupation at the time—going to Fire
Island to find her corpse or manuscript, and finding only a
button. (It’s in his journals.) That he, who had never been close to Fuller,
kept that button as a talisman, was something very physical and immediate to
me—the kind of thing I might do, you might do. I imagined the button as one of
those carved jet buttons so common back then; and over the years I have
collected those black buttons from junk stores and antique markets and sewn
them on my coats and jackets. They always made me think of Thoreau and Fuller’s
missing corpse.
Then, about 16 years ago, the story
began to haunt me again. I know why: I was pregnant with my first child, and I
was 41. I remembered that Fuller had her son very late—she was 38—and somehow
the vision of her drowning with her boy, and losing her book manuscript,
stirred up all sorts of fears I already had—about whether I could still be a
writer once I had a child, about the strange loneliness of having a child out
of sync with my friends, about whether or not I could be a loving parent, about
whether or not I was just too old, weak, and selfish to be doing this.
I found a biography of Fuller around
then, and was shaken to my boots by the terrible details of her death. But I
was also amazed by her strength and her courage, having a child in the middle
of a war, running a hospital, writing all the time to support her family.
All along, as I had first known when
reading Fuller in college, there was this awkward problem of her writing
itself. She did not—unlike Emerson, her great mentor, or Thoreau, my longtime
hero—write graceful, rhetorically powerful sentences. At least not for the most
part. Her writing was stilted, confusing, and often made me wince in
embarrassment—and while her contemporaries did not see as many flaws as I
did—she was a successful journalist and essayist, so must have been widely
read—I felt sad that she was so out of reach for readers today. Her ideas,
in her most famous book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, are still
radical and deserve attention.
Now back to that old story of the
button. What if, instead of finding only a button, Thoreau had found a
manuscript, not the “History of the Italian Revolution,” that she was bringing
back, but a manuscript in which Fuller expressed herself personally, privately,
and eloquently—on her actions and ideas? In some of her private letters,
there are flashes of relaxed, intimate writing, in which one can get a glimpse
of the brilliant conversationalist and dear friend that she was reputed to be.
What if, building on those moments, I could create a new prose style for her?
What if I could give her a clearer, more persuasive voice?
I wanted to rescue her. And I wanted, as
any psychoanalyst could tell you, to rescue myself.
SO19:
Language can be tricky when writing fiction about the 19th century
(or, for that matter, any historical period); there’s the Scylla of the
jarringly anachronistic on the one side, and the Charybdis of quaintness and
pastiche on the other. You did such a good job avoiding both and finding a
compelling voice for the book. Any thoughts you want to share about the craft
of “languaging” this novel, the past in general, the 19th century in
particular?
AB: It
is the story of the many drafts this novel went through, that it took me
forever to find Fuller’s voice for the middle section of the book. I had
written and discarded so many pages, over a 10-year period, it would make you
weep. It certainly made me weep.
The turning point for me came in the
fall of 2008. I can place it exactly, because I was then teaching an
undergraduate course, “Austen and the Brontës.” And we were reading Charlotte
Brontë’s staggering novel, Villette.
When one reads as a teacher, certain things press harder on the
brain—it’s one of the reasons I value teaching so much—and the strange,
timeless, immediate voice of Lucy Snowe, Villette’s narrator,
began clamoring at me to pay attention to it, not just thematically but
technically. If Brontë, in 1853, could
create a female voice that sounded so timeless, I realized, what was to stop me
from making Fuller in 1850 sound as intense and real as the women I knew today?
It is certainly not that my Margaret
Fuller sounds anything like Lucy Snowe; they are very different characters. I
did not abandon Fuller’s American-Brahmin pomposity, nor her twining tendrils
of language, nor her extraordinary jaunts over the rapids of sense on the
stepping-stones of dependent clauses. I used all of that, although unlike
Fuller herself I labored to make her eccentricity of expression charming, and
even self-knowingly funny, at times. And—with Brontë’s creation in mind as an
inspiration--I think I was able to write “from” the 19th century
with an invented voice that had the immediacy of a contemporary speaker.
SO19:
Fuller is present as an absence in various ways throughout the book. The
opening scene conveys the news of her shipwreck and death; her body as well as
her last manuscript is lost, her letter is repudiated or avoided by several
prominent men, her books are not checked out by the students at Harvard. That’s
interesting both as a historical reality, and as a fictional structure.
AB: I’d
argue with you, a little, here. The
novel does point to the ways in which the “world” is trying to make
Fuller absent; the novel itself is entirely engaged in the business of making
her very, very present: pressing on the life of Anne Thoreau, pressing on the
reader in the middle section. Maybe we mean the same thing.
SO19:
I think so. Fuller is indeed richly present in the novel; I meant, rather, to
point to the tension between her presence and absence as one of the novel’s
most powerful elements.
In
terms of her presence, could you talk a bit about the
creation of this long and intimate letter from Fuller to her onetime confidante
Mrs. Hawthorne? How did you go about finding a voice for her from her published
writing and/or contemporary descriptions of her conversational style?
AB: I
will say that choosing to have a person (Sophia Peabody Hawthorne) as the
particular audience for the letter—instead of Fuller writing in a
journal—seemed essential to me. Both because Fuller did so often express
herself to her friends, but also because I wanted her voice to be both private
(as in intimate, with one other woman, also a mother, in whom she
imagined she could confide) and still, somehow, public—a little self-conscious
in places, a little aware of her own performance. As Fuller also always was.
Moreover, I have been immersed in the
language of the 19th century, including the Transcendentalists, as a
reader, for most of my life. It’s almost as if it’s my second language. So I
made a sort of “pidgin” between a contemporary idiom and 19th
century one, which I hoped would put the reader in the past without it feeling
entirely alien. Doubtless it is more successful in some places than others, but
mostly readers seem to feel it works.
SO19:
In your novel, Anne Thoreau is an everywoman through whose eyes the exceptional
Margaret Fuller can be seen. Could you talk about the process of bringing this
invented character to life, and choosing the shape of her story and
personality?
AB: One
of my earlier conceptions for this novel involved a back-and-forth between
Henry Thoreau and Margaret Fuller—he being the oddly “domestic” man who stays
at home, she the oddly “adventurous” woman who ventures abroad. But it became
clear to me that my writing about Thoreau would be immensely burdened by the
preconceptions that readers would bring. Thoreau “belongs” to millions of
readers already, who have their own understanding of him. Moreover, the tension
in the story of this incredible woman, Fuller, began to seem more interesting
to me in light of, not how the male establishment saw her—that’s pretty obvious
and well-trod ground—but how other women perceived her. So my next
choice of a contrasting character was Sophia Thoreau, the youngest sister in
that family, who was Henry’s devoted younger sister and, among other things,
the guardian of his papers. (She eventually gets called “Sissy,” a common 19th-century
nickname for a sister, because I needed to differentiate her from Sophia
Peabody Hawthorne.) But when I tried to
write about Sophia Thoreau, the historical facts got in the way. Specifically,
she, along with her older sister Helen and their mother, were mavericks in the
Abolition movement. They ran a stop on the underground railroad, they
participated in violent confrontations with police who kidnapped escaped
slaves, etc. They were incredible, incredible, in their own way. But that, it
became clear, was a different story.
What I realized I needed, as a foil to
Fuller, was a smart, sensitive, but “ordinary” woman of the time—someone who
would find her both attractive and a little frightening. Women who put
themselves into the public eye are always alarming to the rest of us—we fear
for them, and we also judge them, very harshly. I wanted to explore that
dynamic. And so I invented Anne, as an adopted-in youngest sister to the
Thoreau household. She would get married, and she like “Sissy” would also have
a younger sister’s devotion to Henry.
SO19:
Anne is a young girl when she first encounters Margaret Fuller, a mature and
seasoned widow when she engages with the problem—and invitation—that Fuller’s
unread letter represents. It seemed to me that her own journey had given Anne
the fullness of soul necessary to embrace this “impossible” woman, who was
still more alive than anyone else. Fair reading?
AB: Absolutely.
But by the 1870s it is not only Anne’s personal experiences that have made her
grow; history has changed everyone. The Civil War has come and gone, the
railroads and the boom of American industry have taken hold, the seeds of
women’s independence, much of it fostered by their participation in the
Abolition movement, have started to sprout. So Anne has a different climate
around her in which to read this letter, as well.
SO19:
Miss Fuller is a novel full of
accurate historical detail, but it’s also so rich with imagery—most obviously
the pervasive motif of the sea, but also smaller things like that wonderful
canary. Where do such images fit in your process? Are they starting points,
later additions, or is it impossible to generalize?
AB: This
is where I must plead poetry. Like many poets, I think simultaneously in words
and images. They move together. The sea was a given—Fuller died there, and to
think about water was to think of her death. But since I also love the sea, I
allowed its presence to not be only deadly; it is also the source of life, and
crossing it, for her, in 1846, gave her the chance at a full life in Europe . The canary—who knows? It just flew in, when I was
writing about Anne taking Henry to the train. And the rescue of the bird became
embedded in my project; the rescue of a reputation, the rescue of the image of
a woman who could do so many things.
SO19:
Your first novel, Pirate
Jenny, is
a contemporary story (though it too makes rich use of texts and writers from
the past). Did the choice to set this second novel in the past change your
process at all, or your perceptions about writing fiction?
AB: I
had no sense of a conscious choice, for either novel. The outline of the story
for Pirate Jenny came to me as a whole thing when I was
swimming, one day. (I swim as often as I can, and often solve writing problems
in the water.) And Fuller’s story, and her “problem,” has been swirling around
in my head forever.
If there are writers who say to
themselves: “Time to write a historical novel!” or “Time to write a
contemporary story about self-invention!” I do not personally know them. And I
know a lot of writers. Maybe hacks think that way, but no serious writer I have
ever met does. It happens much more deeply than that.
One thing writing Miss Fuller did
teach me, though, is that it is the hardest thing in the world to write well in
a different historical period, even one you think you already know pretty well.
If you have a passion for accuracy—and I do—it almost kills you. When I think
of the size and scope of great historical fictions, such as what Hilary Mantel has been doing with Thomas Cromwell, my admiration amounts to awe. So I
can say that I do not plan to write another novel set in a historical period
any time soon.
SO19:
What about your own reading? Are there 19th-century texts you return
to over time? Contemporary writers that you feel evoke history or the past
especially powerfully?
AB: There
are many, many 19th-century texts I return to. As well as the great
English novelists (Austen, Dickens, Eliot, the Brontës, Trollope), I also
reread Walden at least once a year. I turn to the Romantic poets
(especially Keats) often, and to Hopkins .
I read Dickinson
quite a lot, though like many readers I am convinced she wrote “out of time,”
so that is not really a visit to the 19th century. In addition to
Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell novels (Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies,
so far) I have enjoyed Julian Barnes’s ventures into the past (especially Flaubert’s
Parrot and Arthur and George) –and of course, the mother of all
historical fictions, War and Peace.
SO19:
What are you at work on now? Do you have any new fiction under way or planned?
AB: I
have just written a ghost story, “The Nockamixon Road,” out in Little Star #5.
It’s mostly set in the recent past—the 1980s. I am working on my fifth collection of poems.
That is a long, slow, internal business that is almost impossible to describe;
but I will say that many poems I write do not end up “belonging” in the book,
so that is why it’s so slow. As a side note—a poem of mine that was in my last
collection, Romanticism, might be of especial interest to Society 19 readers:
It’s called “The Heroine in the Novel,” and it’s a five-part poem describing an
(entirely fictitious) late-19th century novel, Under the Rose by Langley
Boisvert. [Editor’s note: you can read
the poem on Society Nineteen here.]
Margaret Fuller, c. 1846. |