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The publishing game is on, and the stakes are high, but Sena Jeter Naslund isn't letting the prospects -- or perils -- of a major launch rattle her yet. William Morrow is rumored to have paid more than half a million dollars for the writer's latest novel, Ahab's Wife, a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection that's met with strong advance reviews. Soft-spoken and unassuming, Naslund speaks of her novel with eloquent enthusiasm, but quickly becomes apologetic whenever her comments seem as if they might border on being boastful. "Of course, it's exhilarating to have a book this big," she says, "but I still don't quite believe it."
With her slight Southern drawl and loose-fitting earth-toned dress, Naslund blends right in with the crowd at the Mid-South Publishing Convention, in Little Rock, Ark. Naslund says she enjoys these kinds of literary gatherings, and that's a good thing -- once Ahab's Wife is released, she'll embark on a book tour that will take her to 36 cities in about three months. "I'm delighted to be doing the tour because I love to read aloud," she says. "I was read to a great deal as a child."
Being read to also -- at least indirectly -- provided the inspiration for her new novel. It was when Naslund and her 10-year-old daughter Flora decided to alleviate the tedium of a long drive by listening to classic books on tape that the idea of writing about Ahab's wife first came to her. Hearing audio versions of Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn, Naslund was struck afresh by an observation that had nagged at her before.
"It irked me a bit to be aware that these two candidates for the title 'Great American Novel' had almost no women in them. Half the human race ignored, yet their vision was considered among the most complete, the greatest." Believing that women deserved more narrative space in American fiction, she found that she wanted "to do for fiction what people have done with history in recent years -- find the women who were there and give them a voice and a story, so that when we think of these microcosms of the world, women are in them."
Naslund's admiration for what Melville achieves in Moby-Dick led her to pen an epic novel that looks at Melville's seafaring world from a female point of view. Specifically, she notes, "Melville in Moby-Dick is an advocate of cultural and religious tolerance. I wanted to follow him in suggesting tolerance for other people's realities."
What struck her most of all about Melville's novel, though, was her daughter's response to it that day in the car: "I noticed that of all the novels we listened to, the one that held Flora enthralled was Moby-Dick; she memorized and quoted Melville's language, and was particularly fascinated by Ahab. I was amazed that a young girl would be so taken with these words."
But Melville and Flora weren't Naslund's only muses as she embarked on the dauntingly ambitious task of creating a novel that would inevitably be measured against its famous antecedent (although, as she hastens to point out, one need not have read Moby-Dick in order to appreciate her book). It was, she reports, the support and encouragement of her then-editor Mark Polizzotti and publisher David R. Godine, whose Godine Press had just published her acclaimed novel Sherlock in Love (1993), that gave her the confidence she needed to tackle Melville: "I would never have had that wonderful burst of creativity if Mark and David had not been so wonderful to me. Being in a place where I was taken care of and appreciated was really enabling."
Naslund fosters a nurturing environment for other writers as a teacher of literature and writing at the University of Louisville, where she holds the post of distinguished teaching professor, and at Vermont College, where she is a member of the MFA faculty. Having earned a Ph.D. from the Iowa Writers Workshop, she is a firm believer in the value of creative writing programs. Her own advice to her students not surprisingly ech s the rhythm of much of her fiction: "I tell them to go freely between the internal and external worlds, to recreate the moment through language that appeals to the senses."
Naslund calls this kind of fictional universe "Woolfian," and cites Virginia Woolf as one of the most important influences on her own work. Other writers she particularly admires include Charles Dickens -- "I love the roll of his sentences; I read his novels over and over as a child, my relish growing every time" -- Charlotte Bronte, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter and Flannery O'Connor. "O'Connor was an astonishment for me," she says, "because she broke off from the Faulknerian mode and still wrote about the South -- about my South, the South of integration."
American History Transfigured
Born in Birmingham, Ala., where she also attended Birmingham-Southern College, Naslund d s not consider herself a "Southern" writer per se, and most readers would probably agree that there is not a distinctively Southern voice to her fiction, which is set in various regions all over the country. But her next novel may well draw on her appreciation for O'Connor's New South. It's about the civil rights movement and is set in Birmingham. Still in a formative stage, the novel may feature a character who's a descendant of Susan, a runaway slave who develops a mutually sustaining friendship with Una Spenser, the protagonist of Ahab's Wife. "I like that idea of having a kind of worm hole between one novel and another," she remarks.
That's characteristic of a playful quality evident in much of Naslund's fiction. Real historical and famously fictitious figures put in appearances in both Sherlock in Love and Ahab's Wife, for example -- Holmes shares a train car with a young Virginia Woolf, and is impressed by the intellect displayed by a boy he meets named Albert Einstein; Una Spenser's acquaintances include such 19th-century New England notables as Margaret Fuller, Henry James and Ralph Waldo Emerson. And near the end of Ahab's Wife, when Una meets a whaler named Ishmael and comments on his skill as a storyteller, he responds, "I would suppose that you yourself have a story to tell" -- which, of course, she d s.
Part of the fun for Naslund of bringing her characters into contact with such figures is the historical research involved; she's exacting in her use of facts and dates. Una's encounter with Henry James, for instance, takes place when both visit a beach near the spot where Margaret Fuller was shipwrecked and drowned -- which James actually did as a boy, hoping that Fuller's sea chest might have washed ashore there.
As Naslund imagines him, the young James already speaks in the "spiraling sentences" that characterize his fiction, suggesting that even as a child he showed signs of his future vocation. Naslund herself was quite young when she became entranced with the power of the written word and began to nurture authorial ambitions of her own. She vividly recalls "being in Birmingham and reading one of Laura Ingalls Wilder's novels. It was about 100 degrees out, but her description of winter on the prairie actually made me shiver as if I were cold. That was when I knew I wanted to become a writer."
She might easily have taken a different creative path. Her mother was a talented pianist and violinist, and, growing up in a musical household, Naslund was skilled enough at the cello to be offered a music scholarship to the University of Alabama. "But as much as I loved music, I didn't have my mother's hand-eye coordination," she says, "and I knew I could never become as good as I wanted to be. As a writer, I can work through my mistakes in solitude."
The Spiritual Life
Music is, however, a recurring theme in much of Naslund's fiction, and many of her characters are musicians, whose art provides both release from and commentary on their lives. "Music, for me, is a metaphor for the spiritual life," she explains, "a bulwark against death, a transcendent creation." Naslund takes a Woolfian interest in the intersection of the spiritual and the mundane. "I'm always concerned with exploring what is of sustaining value in difficult times," she says. "I want to invoke hope and courage."
The writer navigates another kind of intersection in writing novels based on classic fiction. "It's like writing a sonnet," she observes. "You have to work with what's already established, and still produce something that's fresh and new." In Ahab's Wife and Sherlock in Love, she "wanted to turn the figures of Ahab and Holmes so you see a side of them you haven't seen before, but I wanted to be consistent with the original portraits, too." And, of course, to show that both of these compelling male protagonists can have equally compelling female counterparts. "I asked myself, what kind of woman would Ahab love?" she says. "And the answer was, one who was his equal. So I set out to create her."
The creative process wasn't always easy. The book went through five drafts over a period of several years, and Naslund found herself absorbed in her characters as she never had been before. "I dreamed Una's dreams at night," she says. Her efforts were bolstered by her editor at Morrow, Paul Bresnick, who she credits with inspiring several of the book's most pivotal scenes. "Paul has been so wonderful and worked with me so closely that I think of this as our book," she says. As it happens, Bresnick is a Melville devotee who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Moby-Dick, so his enthusiasm for Ahab's Wife was particularly gratifying. But many fellow writers also provided input. "I've become friends with many former students over the years. They've all read drafts of my material and provided wonderful feedback. They've also written great novels of their own."
In fact, it was a former student, Leslie Daniels, who introduced Naslund to her agent, Joy Harris. "I marketed my first four books myself, but as soon as I met Joy, we were talking like old friends. I felt wonderfully connected to her."
Naslund's first collection of stories, Ice Skating at the North Pole (1989), was published by Ampersand Press after Roger Weingarten, who was affiliated with Ampersand, saw her work and recommended it. Sherlock in Love landed at Godine in a similar fashion. A friend of the publisher heard her read a chapter from the novel and told her to submit it for publication. Thinking the book wasn't ready, Naslund delayed doing so, then received a call from Godine asking to see it. "It was still very rough," she says, "but my friend Karen Mann insisted that I get it to them and offered to help me revise it. She worked with me on it for almost a year until we were satisfied with it."
Eager to help sustain the literary community she has found so welcoming, Naslund moved to create forums for others' writing in the Louisville Review, which she has edited since its inception, and through her involvement with the Fleur-de-Lis Press, both of which have recently found a new home at Spalding University in Louisville. "I had been teaching at Louisville for about three years, and the writing I was seeing was very good, so when a student suggested starting a magazine, we did," she says. "And I started my press to help aspiring writers get published."
It's fitting, then, that in Ahab's Wife, Una Spenser repeatedly insists that hers is not the only story worth telling, and that both her life and her narrative are infinitely enriched by others' contributions. Dedicated to Naslund's physicist husband, John C. Morrison, whom Naslund married in 1995 (Flora is Naslund's daughter from a previous marriage), the novel is a tribute not only to the strong, independent women who have been underrepresented in canonical American fiction, but also to the value of sustaining relationships.
Ahab's Wife has yet to hit the shelves, but knowing she accomplished all she set out to do in it, Naslund d sn't need sales figures to measure the book's success. "If at age 10 I was able to dream the dream of being a writer," she says, "this would be it."
Haynsworrth is co-author of Amelia's Daughters: The Wild and Glorious Story of American Women Aviators from World War II to the Dawn of the Space Age.
