American Meteor: A Novel
Norman
Lock. Bellevue Literary Press, $15.95 paperback (208 pages) ISBN:
978-1-934137-94-9
At some
point in this brief, pithy book, I caught myself wondering why I was turning
pages so fast, why I couldn’t wait to find the next golden moment described in
lovely, burnished prose, when I knew how the story ended already. It’s not a
mystery, it’s not a puzzle novel, it’s a meditation on the Manifest Destiny
era. The myth of the poor lad who comes from nothing and nowhere to make a
fortune is an oft-told tale. Lock’s spin on that is to have the traditional
humble lad, this one named Stephen Moran, as protagonist:
“While
my father was out boozing, she'd read to me by the stub of a candle, a thread
of soot twisting upwards from its pinched, meager flame. By her voice alone,
she could raise up the old stories from the bones of their words and—lilting between
shades of comedy and melodrama—turn the dreary space around me into a stage for
my wildest imaginings.”
And
while she’s creating the world anew for her son, she’s also priming the pump
for his life-long belief that there is fate even if there isn’t a god to be
found, since all the old fairy tales involve come-uppances and just desserts.
Growing
up in antebellum Brooklyn, harvesting oysters to sell for his own food, and
working all the hours it’s possible to work leaves the narrator with a
clear-sighted picture of his future. His childhood, if you can stretch a point
and call it that, ended with mother’s death. Hard work, little pay, no future:
“I
had sucked on the tit of disillusionment and teethed on the bitter root of
cynicism. I was on the way to the misanthropy that would sour me.”
Intervention in this
soul-killing, life-shortening grind is the cataclysm of the Civil War. Young
Stephen Moran takes an escape route from worthless labor and attaches himself
(at thirteen, he can’t really be said to join) to the Army. He becomes a bugler
and loses an eye, but these events aren’t dwelt upon. Moran is more interested
in analyzing “the sickness of the degenerate age in which I lie at night,
listening to the boasts and grievances of the dead” for his audience,
interested in the powerful figures of the age for their benign or malign impact
on creating the age he’s lived though.
Looking back, reminiscing,
nostalgically reliving moments of pleasure, momentous and public or quiet and
quotidian, isn’t in Moran’s nature. He is leaching the poison of a life into
his listener’s ears. He has seen but never made a difference to events that
form the national mythology:
“Even
now, when I have time to consider what I've been and what I am, I doubt I
comprehend my humanity, if I can claim so grand a word for my own morsel of
life. I might as well be a meteor of a man, for all the difference I've made on
earth.”
The perspective of the
aging on the course of life isn’t always so searingly honest, but it serves the
narrative needs of the story for it to be so. I hope for all our sakes that
such unflinching clarity becomes pandemic in our own degenerate, I’d even say
diseased, age.
Back to the Civil
War...Moran’s lost eye lands him in the hospital, where he’s visited by a
familiar figure from his life in Brooklyn and Manhattan, Walt Whitman. As
Whitman pauses beside the bed of our sixteen-year-old hero, they share a moment
that will stay with Moran his whole subsequent life:
“‘How old are you, son?' Whitman asked.
'Going on
seventeen.'
'So young,' he said,
stroking the back of my hand with his poem-stained fingers. 'How did you come
to lose your eye?'
I told him the story
of my heroism, with embellishments--told it so well, I was nearly persuaded of
my exceptional character.
'You sacrificed what
little you had to call your own for democracy, freedom, and human dignity. You
gave an eye, half of man's greatest blessing, when rich men up north paid a
small price to keep themselves and their sons from harm.'
With those few
words, accompanied by a glance that seemed to measure the dimensions of my
meager existence, Whitman made me see myself as a sacrifice on the altar of
wealth, but a hero notwithstanding.”
Receiving such a benediction from the “poem-stained fingers” (isn’t
that a lovely phrase?) of America’s most revered poet? Oh my! And the effect of
Moran’s story on Whitman leads to a momentous change in the fortunes of a
no-longer-needed bugler from an ended war. Whitman remembers Moran, and
mentions the tale of his heroism to General Grant. Grant summons the lad, gives
him a Medal of Honor for sacrificing his eye, and gives him one of the signal
honors available to any American soldier at the time: he is to be the bugler
playing “Taps” at each stop of Lincoln’s funeral train as it wends its way from
Washington to Springfield, Illinois, for the assassinated president’s
ceremonial burial.
Moran has plenty of time to accustom himself to the smell of death,
from battlefields to the decomposing president. He sleeps in the funeral car,
an ostentatious gift from the railroad interests to the living president for
his use in meeting with his generals in the field. (Lincoln scorned it, never
used it, while alive.) It is usual to meditate on the dead princes of our
world, and Moran is no exception:
“What is a good man
if not one who does not believe in himself to the exclusion of others? ... He
was asked to bear what cannot be borne—what should not be borne. I hope never
to be so tested, for I have it on the best authority that I will not bear it.”
No ordinary person can bear the extreme pressure of the Presidency;
Lincoln bore it in time of civil war. Moran is far from alone in his
realization that his ordinariness is also an advantage. His life after the
brief flash of fame will go on, unlike Lincoln’s. He will go on, traveling and
meeting remarkable men, running from all women, all of which confirms his core
belief:
“For all my
wanderings, I'm ordinary. I came to terms long ago with my littleness. A man is
what he is—he can't rise so much as an inch above his shortcomings—Horatio
Alger be damned!”
It doesn’t matter that one rubs shoulders with the world’s
history-makers, alive or dead. You are what you are, and that’s all there is to
it. Heresy to think, still less speak aloud, in that time of Manifest Destiny’s
ascendency. Moran rides in the Lincoln Parlor car as a steward to the paladins
of the day. He watches the slaughter of buffalo in their millions. He sees
mile-long swaths of prairie grass torched to amuse the grandees.
As horrible as he thinks all of that is, it brings Moran his life’s
purpose: He becomes a photographer as the largesse of his railroad tycoon
employer. He documents the progress of the railroad through the Indian country
his government swore would be theirs in perpetuity. His mentor, famous
wilderness photographer William Henry Jackson, makes photographs for the
railroad tycoon as a means of financing his true passion: recording the end of
the people called the Ute, starved, shot, and left for disease to finish off. Jackson
chose Moran as his assistant when Moran was learning basic photography from
Jackson’s portrait-taking brother in Omaha. Jackson scorned this as much as he
scorned the documentary whitewash he splashed on the railroad, an attitude that
well suited Moran. It was Moran’s gift to watch genius work:
“What was not
possessed of the 'fat light'—an immanence that shed radiance over the world of
gross matter—should be left to the portraitists of sausage-shaped ladies and
their rich consorts.”
It was
also Moran’s fate to travel, in the teeth of the oncoming winter, with Jackson
to photograph the Ute in their last days. As reluctant as Moran was, it
provided him with the agreeable experience of first love with a Ute girl. What
makes his experience endurable, though, and allows him to cling to the edge of
life:
“The negatives he did manage were made in the
hour or two when the sun seemed to rally with a yellowy light reminiscent of an
egg yolk; usually, it looked pale as a pearl on the steely blue or leaden sky
above the snow-scrubbed lake. That's a purple passage fit for a novel but
hardly descriptive of the actuality of that winter, which was almost past
enduring.”
Jackson’s art, his
astonishing eye and precise technique, set a bar that Moran knows he can never
reach, still less surpass. He is, however, urged on by the brush with
greatness.
As Jackson heads off deeper
into the wilderness, Moran heads to Fort Abraham Lincoln, there to attach
himself to General George Armstrong Custer as personal photographer. He is
mesmerized by the aura of Manifest Destiny shining from Custer’s brilliant
golden locks. As he observes Custer more and more, and from an intimate viewpoint,
Moran comes to loathe the man, as he already loathed the philosophy that he
embodies:
“At
his request—a Custer request was a command impossible to refuse—I produced a
series of prints for the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia: the general
with Bloody Knife, his favorite Indian scout; with the Custers' pack of eighty
dogs; with his junior officers, planning the destruction of the Lakota Sioux;
with Libbie in the parlor of their quarters at the fort; and the general
striking a pose that would become as recognizable as Napoléon's; arms folded
across his chest, looking forward and slightly upward at his magnificent
destiny.”
The
repugnance of the images makes my skin crawl.
Lock’s clarity and transparency of prose has a way of allowing the
underlying emotional state to reach me before I’m aware that what I’m reading
is horrible, vicious, evil, full of the darkest smoke from hellfire. Moran, in
whose mouth these utterances are placed, is himself invisible. He feels, as
he’s said, his own smallness, and this is what makes him the perfect mouthpiece
for Lock’s excoriation of our founding Western myths.
Moran
makes his most life-changing decision while preparing to photograph the
slaughter at Little Big Horn. In the run-up to this national tragedy Moran
determines that it will be he who kills Custer, he who will stop this
particular monster from causing more horrendous suffering, win or lose. The
hubris of which Custer was guilty in his pursuit of the battle made Moran’s
task, oddly, more difficult, as it led directly to the almost immediate
destruction of his forces. Yet Moran manages to carry his self-imposed duty to
its end: He shoots Custer in the temple, destroying the seat of his evil
thoughts.
And at
this moment, Moran (the only white survivor of the massacre) has the single
most important meeting and takes the single most important photograph of his
life. A figure bends over him, he thinks to finish him off. Instead Moran will
lose the autonomy of his soul.
It is
Crazy Horse who seeks Moran out. Crazy Horse, the seer whose prophecies began
this branch of the war that will end at Wounded Knee, in bitterest defeat for
the Native Americans. Crazy Horse gives Moran the “gift” of prophecy. Moran, in
his turn, gives Crazy Horse the Medal of Honor he has come to despise. Prophecy
is a gift that Crazy Horse gives him by the simple expedient of living on after
his body dies in Moran’s mind. Crazy Horse as an intimate roommate? Sounds
horrible, knowing the future and seeing its inevitability as Fate unfolds
before your eyes:
“A
sour view of things, I grant you; but one borne out by the history of our age
and of the age to come, when Trinity--not the Christians' but
Oppenheimer's--will turn Alamogordo sand to glass. In the future, dead cities
will molder behind rusting thorns no prince can ever penetrate; dirty bombs
will engender tribes of lepers--not by germs, but by deadly atoms; and
radioactive isotopes will be left to cool for an age or more, sealed in burial
chambers with a pharaoh's curse.”
As the
reader shudders with the sense of doom, Moran’s listener is finally revealed to
be his own doctor house-calling on him at the end of his life. All the years of
his small life after the last brush with Manifest Destiny, Moran has never so
much as whispered of his extraordinary dual nature and his fellow passenger.
He also
tells the doctor that he has the only image of Crazy Horse on earth. His camera
had fallen with him during battle and, against all odds, the glass plate did
not break and the lens exposed Crazy Horse’s image. The doctor asks why
wouldn’t you sell such an incredibly valuable image, the price would be
astronomical. Sell?
“Crazy Horse said, ‘Remember this moment well.’
‘I will,’ I said solemnly…
‘I’m going to spare your life so that you’ll never be free of me.’”(June
2015)
Purchase
American Meteor HERE.
Reviewer
bio: Richard Derus (aka Expendable Mudge) is a biblioholic, a tsundoku carrier,
and a passionate reader. From underneath his tottering towers of unread tomes,
he writes obsessively about his darlings at Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud, where
many otherwise unknown books are praised, panned, or poked fun at; The Oak
Wheel, where he blogs enthusiastically about short story collections; The Small
Press Book Review, Shelf Inflicted (where he was a founding blogger), and
Lambda Literary.
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