A huntress knows the heart has four chambers. They open and close as long as there is life. There are sections of The Compromise about love and family that are quiet but tense. Aware of their fragility, I work long and hard to breathe life into them.
Image: The hart. Lithograph of Kashmir stag by Charles Hamilton Smith via Wikimedia Commons [PD]
Writers know how much work it takes. In one of her essays in Upstream, Mary Oliver discusses Emerson’s work to achieve “a style for ideas that would reach forth and touch both poles: his certainty and fluidity.” Practicing the art of writing, we can persue artistic relevance through craft, style, and scholarship together. That relevance had better include the human heart on a path towards social engagement.
“It does not demean by diction or implication the life that we are most apt to call ‘real,’ but it presupposes the heart’s spiritual wakening as the true work of our lives. That this might take place in as many ways as there are persons alive….”
Mary Oliver Upstream (2019) writes of Emerson, who lectured in Missouri in the 1840s.
Work of our Lives
Writing an historical novel lets me describe work: cleaning, breaking stone, hauling on the river, trapping, tanning, sharpening, delivering babies, gardening, teaching, running a meeting, and writing. The minimum conditions of their employment, how they are paid and valued, not the work itself, determines their social and economic status, but there are other parallel themes. Growing up means exploring work as responsibility and redefining it through life.
‘This filthy enactment [of the Fugative Slave Law] was made in the 19th century, by people who could read and write. I will not obey it, by God.”
from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s journal
One of the themes of The Compromise is about “work taming a woman’s heart.” This is what the father, Jebediah wants for his girls, and my character Mariah wrestles with the idea of “women’s work.” Is it really so demeaning and undervalued? But there is more than one kind of work to be done. I do the writer’s work through metaphors: the chambers of the human heart and the keys that turn to let us in or keep us out.
Discovery
One short chapter is titled “The Keys 1844.” A reader said it was a “miniature detective story beautifully unfolded.” Thank you. It describes unsealing a secret inside of a frame: a small box frame containing two tiny brass keys, two four-inch squares of vellum, miniature portraits in India and sepia ink, and the parts bound together with sap from the birch tree. The dissection takes patience, special tools, and careful observation.
Miniature Portrait of Ewelina Hańska, 1820, Wikimedia Commons
Mariah’s discovery of the truth is both painful and good. Her father had a lover, the beautiful and talented mother of her half-sister Eliza. The miniature portraits of the lovers are uncoupled and examined: the man, the woman, her beauty, her artistic and musical talents, her name, and the date– June 21, 1823.
I pushed my chair back but leaned forward, curious despite my trepidation. These portraits were dated the year I was born, only two months after my birth. So they were secret lovers, the pious woman in sepia and my father, the religious man in India ink.
It felt like a stone in my chest, red as the earth it was buried in.
The date startles Mariah. On that day, her mother would have held her as an infant in her arms and stood as they often did on a hilltop to watch the sunset.
The wave of sweetness receded and stopped the blood in my veins. It felt like stone in my chest, red as the earth it was buried in. Where it had once been jagged, it had turned to roundness by a thousand years in water and soil. In my mind’s eye, my own mother was on the hillside, gilt by the evening sun with me an infant in her arms. I said aloud, “You were waiting for your man to come home.”
Inner Work
It split and healed, split and healed again as a human heart.
It usually takes a long time to turn a jagged stone to roundness, but the knowledge of those forces may come quickly. I hope the reader hears Mariah’s inner work, to be glad for her sister and grieve with her mother. Infedelity is privately acknowledged, without impositions or public exposure. She returns the artifacts of love as she found them.
I carefully replaced the squares of vellum, one picture protecting the secrets of the other. I glued the keys into the frame and replaced the backing with a thin line of glue that dried invisible in the air. This knowledge of my father’s past ached in me until it split and healed, split and healed again as a human heart. It was fissured into chambers by the truth.
The material contents of the frame do not belong to Mariah. The knowledge does. There are several events in this part of the story that should find their tension. I want the reader to feel Mariah’s humble readiness for love and anticipate its delays.
Separation
“My father’s eyes said that we could not know the true compass of his life.”
Discovery of Eliza’s mother is matched by Mariah’s separation from her father. She must let go of the false and childish memory of her father, and that makes way for new understanding of herself as a woman. (I blush at the orthodoxy of this statement.)
My father's eyes said that we could not know the true compass of his life. Maybe love, like the heart, had four chambers that opened and closed but could be locked inside.
The little box frame went back into the pillowcase and into the steamer chest which closed and locked. They all receded into darkness when I turned down the lamp.
Is this an overly minute exposition of 19th century conventions and materials? Or does it reveal an overly modern sensibility? A very quiet “miniature” space in the text, this scene may never come to print. If it does, the readers decide what can be learned.
Turn to Adulthood
Exploring the minature portraits and the tiny keys, I found another toy in the word compass. It is the range or scope of something, and it is a mechanical device often used to take a reckoning with the stars. And stars are a common reference to destiny or cosmic path. A parent holds the compass of a child for many years. Then the roles gradually reverse. In the United States, independence comes when we hold our own compass, neither measured nor determined by another. The turn to adulthood commonly includes separation from parents. The separation is indicated by a private life by definition ungovernable by others.
In this scene, the turn to adulthood, for me, is as full of life and death as a battle or a hunt. I hope the transition is nuanced. The heart is chambered and we cannot see its work directly. The parts open and close together, but not in unison.
“Now our stars have changed and mine are wider and deeper than you know.”
The Compromise, “The Keys 1844”
I said, “Jebediah, you were once my pa. You cannot know me now unless you open one of those chambers in your heart, that is if you have one for me. You once held the compass of my life. Now our stars have changed and mine are wider and deeper than you know. Here I am in Columbia, Missouri 1844. The whole of America is growing up around me even while parts are dying away."
And there is my greater metaphor. The nation is as chambered as the heart, as strange and real as a family. The blood-tie family and the bannered nation may fade as units of our devotion. Each generation does its best amid the others. Literature can teach us this if nothing else.
“Unrequited love is not an affront to man but raises him.”
Alexander Pushkin
The parts open and close together, intimate but not in unison.