Finding the California Compromise

Image: “Paddle-steamer in a Storm” c. 1840 J.M.W. Turner. [PD] via Wikimedia commons

With the Compromise of 1850, the US Congress held back the Civil War more than a decade. California joined the Union with a constitution written in 1849 that prohibited slavery and gave some rights to women, laws that were progressive for their time. However, any story of California must contend with the unfortunate facts of history: violence, oppression, exceptionalism, and greed. Theft of land, genocide, and environmental degradation intensified in the decades of reckless growth.

Beyond Our Collective Failures

Yet, I write to hold them back, to re-envision the dreams and promises that our ancestors carried across continents and oceans. I claim that these dreams and promises were alive in their hearts before the tragedies began, and stayed alive even as so many futures were denied. The hope of this nation, I assert, lives beyond our collective failures. With fiction, I can build a new world, a microcosm, a womb like a ship full of life, bobbing in unsettling seas. The new lifeforms interact and make their futures: the missionaries, the spiritualist, the Marxist, the Californio spy, the diplomat, the housekeeper, and the spirits of the ship. In this post I will describe my decision-making at the novel’s inception and share guiding metaphors and short excerpts from the opening scenes.

The first phase of writing a novel is indeed like preparing to set sail on a voyage around the world. The feelings could be glorious and hopeful, fearful and foreboding. It should be psychologically honest fiction. The California Compromise opens in the way a great clipper ship, contrary to its design, can hold the lee tide, balancing wind and current at the edge of a continent, its destination in sight.

     With orders to work quietly through the early morning, the crew of the Blue Witch now stand at ease, awaiting commands from the ship’s mates. There is no signal to drop anchor. Sails are furled on the yards. The helmsman strains to find the lee tide to hold her still.

This is still historical fiction, and my reason for writing this genre are the same as for my previous writing. I want to communicate the power of the moments in our lives; those that change history are layered with the moments that change us.

Starting in third person and present tense, I establish some basics. Third person gives me more possibilities for close, distant, or omniscient perspectives. Present tense is immediate. It keeps me away from slower story-telling that infers psychological distance. These stylistic features will let me experiment with new colors on my palette.

     Barking seals are distantly audible. On the quarterdeck, the captain studies the hazy signal fire on the easternmost Farallon island. A single Russian merchant ship is anchored near the Kodiak camp. She has not raised her national colors and rides low, likely sailing from the Mexican Port of Manzanillo. The captain scans the mist for lurking masts of a frigate, Mexican, British, or Russian.
A merchant ship, the Blue Witch was built to outrun, not outfight. Under a different name and captain, she outran the USS Shark when her cargo was human contraband. Chosen specifically by Commodore Perry to be unseen and then forgotten by history, the schooner is to deliver an American dignitary to Yerba Buena.

This is the official story. Mr. Knox, the American dignitary, knows that war with Mexico has been declared, yet word of this declaration has not arrived on the west coast. He is already drafting the new constitution. This is one of many secrets that are revealed on the three-month voyage. And Mr. Knox is not working alone. His housekeeper is more clever than he knows and the spy is more devious. There are great and subtle stories to tell. For now, I ready my writer’s tools and materials. I read, research, and test ideas.

Discovering Interactions

British painter, William Turner (1775-1851) must have discovered what his materials and conditions could do by being attentive to their interactions. Painting is such a practice of discovery. What is there and not there together imply the direction of light and each texture’s reflection of it, the feeling of each momentary event.

“Burning Ship” c. 1830. J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Turner’s paintings enacts the practice of discovery I want for my writing. The watercolorist cleans the brush and daubs the paint to mix new hues. That seems intentional, but water, air, and temperature meet the paint and change rapidly. The brush strikes the page with color and form. The paper is wet and alive. Surprising or treacherous, creation exceeds intention or imitation. In art, sailing into a storm might turn into a burning ship. Arriving in the cove could become the last possible moment to breathe. Turner’s painting with its interplay of light and hue, study and risk, reminds me that writing too is an act of discovery. Meaning is made fresh and alive.

Natural Supernaturalism

The arts, past and present, also interact with one another like molecules. I have always been interested in the 19th century: movements like Romanticism, Transcendentalism and Marxism, the psychological impact of harnessing electricity, the sublime in painting and poetry, and the experiential practice of spiritualism. To create, I let these interests interact freely in my psyche, but each has a source to be kept active in my intellect.

In the Romantic period, literature can be understood by the concept of Natural Supernaturalism.

Natural Supernaturalism is interpreted as “the supernatural found latent in the natural, and manifesting itself in it, or of the miraculous in the common and everyday course of things . . . a recognition at bottom, as the Hegelian philosophy teaches, and the life of Christ certifies, of the finiting of the infinite in the transitory forms of space and time.” The Nuttall Encyclopedia (1900) quoted in Wikipedia

For my M.A. thesis (1997), I used the book by that name written by the literary critic M.H. Abrams (1912-2015). I described Wordsworth’s The Prelude or Growth of a Poet’s Mind, which was first published in 1850. Abrams drew the term from the philosophical writings of Thomas Carlyle (1795-1891). Natural Supernaturalism holds that “existence itself is miraculous, that life contains elements of wonder that can never be defined or eradicated by physical science.” Furthermore, wonder is not the antagonist of reason but at its foundation. It can drive creativity and precision. Some scientists and writers agree, though they have been known to fail, horribly, and then work to correct themselves. Their wonders should become still more wondrous when they collaborate with and dignify humanity.

Valley of Aosta: Snowstorm, Avalanche and Thunderstorm, 1836–37, oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago. J. M. W. Turner, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Sublime

Paul Harding, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, describes the sublime in his novel of historical fiction, This Other Eden (2023). The sublime is a quality that can inspire awe or even terror. In the opening of Harding’s novel, a powerful storm hits an island in 1815 and his precious characters miraculously survive. Melville’s Moby Dick swims through his imagination, like “an ancient great white shark cruising through a schoolhouse,” before returning to its “proper abyss.” Humans cling to each other and the tree of life. The reality of life, its precious fragility through time, and the simple fact that our foremothers and forefather survived, are found to be wonderful.

Harding’s storm also reminds me of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610) in which a new generation must join up in an altered reality and begin earthly society anew. The island is the place where spirits serve humankind.

I write to befriend my reader. I test and try each phrase so that what is assumed could enliven the senses. I do not seek to overwhelm, to strike terror, or to call out hate or awe, or to profit from the suffering of history. When I am satisfied, the prose will invite readers to set sail on a voyage, at times batted by sublime nature, but when the ship reaches land, the befriended reader ought to keep her footing. I want the reader to trust that stepping into the constructed wilderness of a novel is an opportunity to learn about tierra firma.

Stepping into the Unknown

Nock the arrow and pull back the bowstring. Everything I have is behind the assertion that I can tell this story, and I am still underwater. The current of revising history is powerful. I try to find the still point. Then I seek to use and redirect that force as in a battle. I scan the horizon for novel story elements and styles of dialogue and description.

I may be an unconvincing Prospero holding my staff and book, but reading Shakespeare has provided narrative tropes, spirits like Ariel and Caliban, to help my work: “To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride on the curled cloud, to thy strong bidding, task Ariel and all his quality.” However, in my story, spirits do their own bidding and like a medium in a seance, only they can understand the “garbled dark.”

My central stage is a ship that is haunted by its past, a microcosm where events intersect and the chains of cause and effect become webs. The ship’s hull is also a bardo for spirits who wind their destinies with the living. In the novel’s second scene, a ghost named Ginger speaks to her sleeping friend, Mariah. The spirit knows it is time to make landfall, but the ship’s captain is holding back. She must encourage the living to step into the unknown.

     "We’re holdin’ still despite the tide and the wind. What’s he waitin’ for, Doomsday?”
Mariah turns her face and flutters her sleeping eyes.
Ginger scowls. “Westerlies’re risin’, meanin’ land, just off starboard. Land you can walk on!”
“I know, I know,” whispers the girl. “But I got no legs. I can’t walk on land no more.”
“But you got good legs ‘an plenty a walkin’ ta do. It’s me got no legs,” says her friend, teasing. Ginger lifts Mariah’s hair tenderly, and wraps a lock of the girl’s straight hair with a lock of her own copper coil. “The sea’s done crushin’ your pride. I declare, its sins go deep, but they ain’t all yours to suffer alone.”

I bring together characters who do not share background, information, or goals and yet they become increasingly interdependent. This could be the role of fiction in our culture, but going forward into writing can feel dangerous. Certainly, the time it takes to write and the mental state required are risks to my security.

In this live event—recorded at Ralston College—Gregg Hurwitz discusses the concrete details of his own writing practice and explains how his training in literature and psychology have informed his craft.

“Landscape” J. M. W. Turner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Risk and Investment

Writing a novel must be an investment in knowledge and relationships. Writing into this wilderness of possibility requires a theory that your thoughts and feelings are like mine. My tentative, sometimes cowering words may eventually stand up and strike you with the force of shared experience and reveal hidden tenderness. Otherwise, we ask if this an appropriation of your suffering for my aesthetic pleasure or your appropriation of mine. It may even twist intentions to trivialize or pathologize. Frail and naked is the writer’s faith, that stumbling forward into one wilderness will invite you to stumble into yours. We are made of the same stuff, share some collective pride and heartache, and with luck and sympathy a story might defy what divides us. So let’s begin.

     The Blue Witch pivots east and plows toward Yerba Buena. She is flanked by a pod of dolphins leaping among whitecaps brightened by the sun. Sailors call from the rigging. The helmsman finds the center line between the southern and northern arms of the bay. As far as the eye can see, the coastal bluffs are alight with poppies. The passengers reach out to one another to wave, cry, and cheer the Golden Gate. Dolphins peel off in laughter.