THE
NAVIGATOR OF NEW YORK
By Wayne Johnston
479 pp. New York:
Doubleday. $27.95
By Kevin Baker
How much do we owe the past? What liberties can
we take with the historical record, even when we’re writing
something with a “fiction” label clearly slapped on
the cover, and is it permissible to slander even the dead in the
pursuit of a good story?
These are the sorts of questions that historical
novelists ask themselves all the time—or for that matter,
that all good storytellers have asked themselves, since long before
there were “historical” novelists and the past was
a much more quick and fluid thing. Surely the ancient Greeks didn’t
worry about whether Homer had all the details of the Trojan War
right; the story was a founding myth, and one that could be infinitely
reshaped as the teller saw fit. But should we cleave the same
standard now, in the age of Holocaust deniers and conspiracy theorists,
when the past is freely used as a weapon?
Like
a man diving into freezing water, Wayne Johnston plunges right
into this conundrum in The Navigator of New York, his
bold new novel centered around the bitter, years-long competition
between Admiral Robert E. Peary and Dr. Frederick A. Cook to be
the first man to reach the North Pole. Their race came to a climax
in 1909 when both men claimed the honor, and set off what Lincoln
Steffens would call “the dispute of the century.”
And then there was the thorny question of whether Matthew Henson,
Peary’s “Negro servant” and invaluable aide
was really the first man to set foot at the magic, 90-degrees
latitude mark—
Into this already crowded controversy, Johnston
drops his fictional hero, Devlin Stead. The Steads are a family
of doctors, socially prominent in the provincial capital of St.
John’s, Newfoundland. But soon after his first birthday,
Devlin recounts, “my father told the family that he had
signed on with the Hopedale Mission, which was run by Moravians
to improve the lives of Eskimos in Labrador.” This is an
unheard of break with propriety in their small, gossip-ridden
city, but Devlin’s father will not be dissuaded. After his
first, six-month stint with the Eskimos, he signs up for another,
and then for a polar expedition.
“A ship from Boston bound for what he simply
called ‘the North’ put in at St. John’s to take
him on,” and before long Dr. Stead has stopped coming home
at all, spending what few months he has between expeditions living
incommunicado in Brooklyn.
This mysterious decampment drives Devlin’s
mother around the bend. When he is six years old, she is found
drowned in St. John’s harbor, an apparent suicide. Even
this event does not bring Devlin’s father home, and a few
years later he succumbs to madness as well; he is last seen wandering
out on a Greenland glacier in the middle of the night. Young Devlin
is taken in by his father’s chilly brother and his loving
Aunt Daphne, who does her best to provide him with a real home,
but he lives a life of ineluctable isolation; ostracized at school,
watched eagerly by his fellow townspeople for any sign of his
parents’ derangement.
Then,
soon after Devlin turns fifteen, he realizes every lonely, odd
boy’s fantasy. Nothing is as it appears to be; he may not
even be his father’s son. Letters begin to arrive from Dr.
Cook, who was on his father’s last expedition, promising
to provide crucial details about the Stead family past. Soon he
is claiming that he, Cook, is Devlin’s real father,
though for various reasons this must be kept secret. Devlin is
invited to live in the doctor’s rambling Brooklyn home,
where he is indeed treated as a son (if a secret one); accompanying
his newfound father on his expeditions to climb Mount McKinley,
and then to attempt the pole itself.
Many more revelations follow, concerning Devlin’s
father and mother, and even Peary, Cook’s ruthless, savage-tempered
rival, whose life Devlin happens to save in Greenland. Indeed,
it is through Devlin that we shall come to understand the essential
bestiality of Peary; the sweet, yet tragically flawed, nature
of Cook, and the real crime that lies at the heart of their loathing
for one another.
It is here that Johnston, the author of a memoir and four previous
novels, including the highly regarded The Colony of Unrequited
Dreams, moves out onto thin ice. There is no hint of Stead,
or anyone like him, in Cook’s actual life, at least none
that I could find. (The surname itself, for reasons that are equally
murky, may have been inspired by the English editor, W.T. Stead,
who wrote a description of Cook’s return from the pole.)
Would we countenance such a story about, say,
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson? One in which the author invents
an illegitimate son for Adams, who is not only plays a part in
all of his father’s most momentous triumphs and failures,
but who is also a pivotal figure in the feud between the two men?
Who saves Jefferson’s life, and whose own story proves the
true unsavoriness of Jefferson’s character? If the author
intended to stray so far from the historical prototypes, comes
the inevitable question, why not simply invent the entire story
in the first place?
Yet Johnston gets away with it, I think, thanks
to the strength of his fictional melodrama. Polar exploration,
with its incredible hardships, its months of freezing isolation,
darkness, and despair, makes an irresistible metaphor for a lonely
and uncertain childhood (and vice versa). The story itself is
told through Devlin’s deliberately understated narrative,
and Cook’s long, expository letters, which can be tedious
at times, but which echo the straightforward, humble-heroic tone
of the Victorian explorer.
And as the title implies, young Devlin must first
make his way—must first return to humanity—through
a great, teeming city. Johnston’s turn-of-the-last-century
New York is moodily evocative though he is, unfortunately, often
a less than reliable navigator when it comes to anything to do
with America. George Washington did not live in a “modest
house” near the present White House “when he was president,”
the old Penn Station was not located in the West ’60s, and
I have never heard of tourists visiting “vaudeville shows
at Tammany Hall.”
It is in “the North” where Johnston
shines. His St. John’s is a city where, “In the woods
between neighbourhoods, men set snares for rabbits, hunted birds
with rifles within a hundred feet of schoolyards. Not outside
the city but at some impossible-to-pinpoint place inside it, civilization
left off and wilderness began.”
Johnson’s Arctic is even more engrossing,
and beautifully drawn, and one immediately understands why it
makes a perfect setting for his climax. This is a part of the
world where even the Eskimos cry when the winter returns, reducing
the sun to “that distant line of light [that] was all that
remained of the past, of all things recorded or remembered, as
if history and memory were fading and soon nothing would be left
of them but darkness.” A place where an exhausted explorer
hallucinates a spectral figure walking beside him, and can actually
watch the sea freeze. There are no other people, no game, nothing
else in this trackless, white waste. “There was no time
in this place where all meridians met,” as Devlin rhapsodizes—a
young man finally launched on his terrifying, heady journey into
life.
Kevin Baker is the author of the historical novel, Paradise
Alley, about the Civil War draft riots, to be published by HarperCollins
in October.
©
Copyright The
New York Times
