The Ice Harp, page 1
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On The Port-Wine Stain
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On A Fugitive in Walden Woods
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On The Wreckage of Eden
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Other Books in the American Novels Series
Voices in the Dead House
Tooth of the Covenant
American Follies
Feast Day of the Cannibals
The Wreckage of Eden
A Fugitive in Walden Woods
The Port-Wine Stain
American Meteor
The Boy in His Winter
Also by Norman Lock
Love Among the Particles (stories)
The
Ice Harp
Norman Lock
First published in the United States in 2023
by Bellevue Literary Press, New York
For information, contact:
Bellevue Literary Press
90 Broad Street
Suite 2100
New York, NY 10004
www.blpress.org
© 2023 by Norman Lock
This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, events, and places (even those that are actual) are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lock, Norman, author.
Title: The Ice harp / Norman Lock.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Bellevue Literary Press, 2023. | Series: American novels
Identifiers: LCCN 2022028359 | ISBN 9781954276178 (paperback) | ISBN 9781954276185 (epub)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3562.O218 I24 2023 | DDC 813/.54--dc23/ eng/20220624
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022028359
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a print, online, or broadcast review.
Bellevue Literary Press would like to thank all its generous donors—individuals and foundations—for their support.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
This publication is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
Book design and composition by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc.
Bellevue Literary Press is committed to ecological stewardship in our book production practices, working to reduce our impact on the natural environment.
♾ This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
First Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
paperback ISBN: 978-1-954276-17-8
ebook ISBN: 978-1-954276-18-5
In Memory of Myrtle Jane Lock 1930–2018
* * *
Her memory is much broken,
and she confounds things sadly.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON,
in a letter to his brother
William, concerning their
eighty-four-year-old mother
At Walden Pond, I found a new musical
instrument which I call the ice-harp.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON,
Journal, December 10, 1836
FOREWORD
“It is a triumph to remember any word.”
TIME SEEMS TO HAVE PREPARED a particularly cruel end for the aging Ralph Waldo Emerson, the nation’s preeminent natural and moral philosopher, essayist, and poet of the nineteenth century. Not content with filching memories, it robbed him of words, which were his gift and sustenance. Lectures that he gave on platforms as distant from Concord as Oakland, California, (whose fees contributed substantially to his income) became increasingly impossible. He dealt bravely with his forgetfulness. Ellen, elder daughter, housekeeper, nurse, and mainstay of the Emerson family, wrote of his affliction: “Alone with us, he plays with it [his loss of words] and is very witty in his stumbles. Sometimes, having got through a short sentence, tho’ evidently jumping in the dark for his words, he laughs and says, ‘It is a triumph to remember any word.’” Only in the initial pages of this novel did I try to reproduce Emerson’s lethologia, as the pathological condition is known. (To have persevered in it would have been tiresome for both writer and reader and accomplished nothing of substance.) Thereafter, I made sparing use of malapropisms and spoonerisms, as well as borrowings from old songs and nursery rhymes, to suggest the disordered mind that led him to call his dressing gown “the red chandelier” and his umbrella by the witty circumlocution “I can’t tell its name, but I can tell its history. Strangers take it away.”
I have given Emerson an articulateness that he likely did not possess in his final years. (Memory began to fail him as early as the summer of 1871, ten years before his death.) To have denied him clarity would have made the book pointless. He must speak cogently of his past and of his present dissolution. I offer a sly justification for his lucid state of mind in this exchange:
“Your memory seems as muscular as ever, Waldo.”
“On that little word seems reality teeters. But yes,
Mr. Whitman, this is one of my good days.”
I ask readers to accept his “remission,” as they do Spoon River’s talking dead or Emily Webb’s unhappy visit to the living after her interment at Grover’s Corners cemetery, in Thornton Wilder’s wistful play Our Town. (The Ice Harp can be thought of as a play for
In The Ice Harp, Emerson’s conversations with his distant and departed friends should be understood as occurring within a consciousness fretted by doubt and the isolation that illness can sometimes bring. (As far as I know, the actual Ralph Waldo Emerson did not suffer from delusions.) As for the historical commentary that I have interjected into the novel, I considered it necessary to our understanding of the man and his universe, so distant from that of our own in the twenty-first century, already nearly a quarter past. This commentary is equivalent to the ground base of knowledge that lies, like a sounding board, within us and of which we are hardly aware. On it, we act or abstain from acting. (Whether to take up arms or not is, ultimately, the moral question posed by this novel, as it was in the fifth book in The American Novels series, The Wreckage of Eden.)
A note on how to read this book: Italicized passages set off by quotation marks represent Emerson’s “conversations” with his spectral guests. They are unheard by any actual persons present. His unspoken thoughts, asides, and soliloquys appear with neither quotation marks nor italicization. (At times, Emerson, his ghosts, and the other real characters talk at cross purposes.) Mostly, I have made do without speech tags, considering them inappropriate to a dramatization of Emerson’s beleaguered consciousness. The form of this novel is polyphonic and mongrel, containing elements of traditional narrative, poetry, song, history, and closet drama. It is an imperfect biography of its subject, as well as an autobiography of my thoughts and feelings to the extent that I am aware of them.
My mother died of one of dementia’s final stages as I was writing an early draft of this novel. That good woman, who read the great books of literature, kept diaries, and liked to salt her letters with literary quotations, suffered the insult of forgetfulness—of words and, at the last, of the use of her tongue, which could no longer perform its essential function. My mother’s bewilderment became, for me, Emerson’s own. My thoughts concerning her slow dissolution are the sympathetic resonance of this novel. As the Sage of Concord said regretfully and, at the same time, wonderingly, “Strange that the kind heavens should keep us on earth after they have destroyed our connection with things.”
Concord, Massachusetts
OCTOBER 21–22, 1879,
Two and a Half Years Before the Death
of Ralph Waldo Emerson
I
Every mind must make its choice between
truth and repose. It cannot have both.
—R. W. Emerson
“What is this crumblesome thing?”
“Toasted bread, Mr. Emerson. And will you please stop poking at it?”
“Tastes like straw.”
“What a mess you’re making! And I just put away the broom.”
“And Pharaoh said to his overseers, ‘Ye shall no more give the people straw to make brick, as heretofore: let them make brooms.’”
“Whatever are you going on about now?”
“What rots, neglected in the rain and ricks.”
“Mr. Emerson, eat your breakfast.”
“What is this implement?”
“It’s a spoon, dear.”
Spoon. Lovely in the mouth—word and thing of the word when jammed with mulberry or quince.
“Husband, don’t play with your food.”
Neither quince nor mulberry nor yet the common apple. It sits lumpishly on my tongue.
“Pease porridge, if I do not mistake.”
Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold,
Pease porridge in the pot nine days old;
Some like it hot, some like it cold,
Some like it in the pot, nine days old.
I scoop out the heart of the porridge; I agitate it to beat all; I give it a proper dashing!
“How sweet the words used to be! Not that I ever spoke with the fire of Webster, Father Taylor, Clay, or even gasbag Whitman! I should never have sent him my greetings at the start of a great career. I begged him to get rid of the sex in Leaves of Grass. Naturally, he wouldn’t.”
Wife removes a tub of boiling water from the stove and sets it in the sink.
Ride a cock-horse
To Banbury Cross,
To see what Tommy can buy;
A penny white loaf,
A penny white cake,
And a two-penny apple-pie.
“The man’s nothing but a gabbing, loafing prick in a slouch hat!”
“Anymore you talk like a hooligan! I won’t have it!”
“Will you wash out my mouth with soap, Lidian, old girl? Oh, not the lye, spare me it!”
I strum the airy lyre. I stick out my tongue waggishly.
Syllables may not have tripped lightly on my tongue, but on the lecture platform, I was smoldering. The ladies adored me. They hung on my every word. I held them in my hand. This woman’s hands are floury.
“The ladies adored me, Lidian, as I stood beside the philodendron leaves and orated. My words took whinge.”
Not whinge, surely, Emerson, old fool!
“What fiddle-faddle, Mr. Emerson!”
In the water boiling on the stove, Lidian stirs dirty dishcloths with a thing whose martial-sounding name chimes pleasingly with faddle … paddle…. Pshaw, Waldo, you’ve become a postman chasing fare-thee-wells blown from his bag of wind. I speak of words a-going, if not yet gone—not quite, only out of reach, just, and justing toward silence, which the dear one keeps. How I could joust, once upon a time!
“I was a veritable Lancelot in the lists, my dear.”
Imperturbable Walt and his lists interminable! How tiresome he’s become!
“Has he come, Queenie?” An endearment that befits her dignity.
“Has who come?”
“The village postman with his leather bag! I’m expecting a poem from old fart Whitman, ‘singing the phallus / Singing the song of procreation.’”
“Language, Mr. Emerson!”
“My ineffables are buttoned up.”
How the ladies used to flatter me! Had I not been a moral philosopher, I’d have plucked them.
“One of the San Francisco papers said of me that ‘I was tall, straight, well-formed, with a head constructed on utility rather than the ornamental principle … but ‘refreshing to look at.’”
I look outside the steamy window. On the branch of the elm tree in the yard, a bird sits. Your wings are broken, Emerson, old bird, and so is your memory. Something in the kitchen air stings; I give my nose a good snuffle.
“Mistress of the house, my nose is looming.”
“All the better for sniffing out hypocrisy. Isn’t that what you used to say?”
I bat my nose with a finger; I do battle with my proboscis.
Battledore—that’s the thing Queenie stirs the dirty laundry with! And there, professor, is one more word, thought lost forevermore, pulled up from the muck. Muck of ages, cleft for me.
“Mrs. Emerson, it’s a Hebrew nose. My pound of flesh.”
“You know very well you have the Haskins nose.”
I peer down its length till my eyes cross.
“It casts a large shadow.” I sniff the heated air. “The lye stings!”
“Will you try to write today?”
What’s in a nose? I lay a finger aside my own.
“Smut, likely.” “Tsk, tsk.”
I remember how Henry Thoreau would turn his face away, pinch his nostrils, and blow the snot from his snout. Disgusting habit! I rebuked him once; he laughed and said why spoil a linen handkerchief when nature’s hem will do just as well. He was no gentleman.
“I say, Henry T. was no gentleman.”
“You’re too fastidious, Waldo.”
Henry walks through the door that Lidian opened to rid the kitchen of steam, which has made my eyes water and my nose run. His hair is tousled, his beard patriarchal.
“Good morning, Henry. Did you sleep well?”
“I would have if the carpenter had left me room to stretch my legs.”
Henry stretches one leg, then the other, like Lidian’s cat Jeoffry, which “can tread to all measures upon the music.”
“You never seemed to know what to do with them; they gangled so!”
“They were made for walking.” Giving them a critical squint, he lets out a woebegone sigh of discontent. “I admit they were not made for dancing.”
