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"Wherever That Great Heart May Be"
Every great artist has a sad life story, but Melville's is sadder than most--writing Moby Dick one day, working as a customs inspector (the nineteenth century's equivalent of an airport security guard) the next. Anyone who flirts even casually with the same kind of vocation knows something of that ironic gall, even in the best of times, and so feels a special sympathy with those hard, bitter last years of Melville's eclipse. And yet--well, there's more to the Melville story than that, and perhaps this is what my own story attempts: to act as a homage to the artistic struggle, which, even shorn of the romantic, Prometheus alone kind of sheen, still manages, in the everyday sense of the term, to be heroic.
That's one ingredient here, the thematic tinder waiting for a more specific, personal kind of spark. For me, the spark is the fact that my grandfather was alive during Melville's last years--a boy, certainly, but one growing up in the lower Manhattan through which Melville trudged each day to work. Could they have passed each other on the street? My grandfather was a very different man than the one depicted in the story, and yet it's this propinquity, this possibility, that got me started thinking--and then, of course, the story took hold of everyone, turned them around more than I would have thought, and let go of them at the end, only to say something about the world they inhabited, about stories themselves. But right from the start I intended to make this statement of faith as extravagant as I could.
The chain business, the linkage, was hard. How to do it right, not give the game away, not be any more melodramatic than the story needed. The boy has to make the wrong assumptions, and yet the correct evidence must be there, in just the right doses, coming in at the right intervals. From the technical point of view, it was my chief concern.
Reading it now? Well, I haven't changed my mind about anything. Melville's new biography is out and it paints an ever darker, more bitter picture than the one that has already come down to us. My grandfather--or rather the era he represents--seems even more distant now, a comet whose light has long since disappeared, and whose last faint trailings in the tail are just barely discernible. In the twenty-first century, the literature of the nineteenth century will seem as remote and curious and dated as the fiction of the seventeenth seems to us now. But stories themselves, the art? A harder call. But again, at least in this one story, I'd like to put all my chips on its continuance.
It's interesting how I came up with the idea of having Flanagan and the girl bound together. I was trying very hard to come up with the spiritual/emotional link between them, was having difficulty in giving it a name, a shorthand label, and out of this difficulty came a literal connection, as literal as you can make it. This shows, I suppose, how things can come backwards in a story; often, you find the literal action, event first, then understand the psychological implications of it later--here, the psychology suggested the event, even if it meant pushing the realism as far as I could without having it (back to the link!) snap.
I didn't want to hang this story strictly in the past, though the events described happened a hundred years ago. This, combined with the autobiographical shading provided by my grandfather, suggested having a narrator who was still alive--still able to continue the story-telling continuum he refers to so explicitly at the end-- "Stories, stories, stories!"
Whatever That Great Heart May Be, Part 1
Whatever That Great Heart May Be, Part 2