THE NAVIGATOR OF NEW YORK
by Wayne Johnston
Doubleday
483 pages
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 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 just right; the story was a founding myth, and one that could be infinitely reshaped as the teller saw fit. But should we cleave to the same standard now, in the age of Holocaust deniers and conspiracy theorists, when the past is so 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 on the bitter years-long competition between Rear Adm. Robert E. Peary and Dr. Frederick A. Cook, as each sought to be recognized as the first man to reach the North Pole. Their race came to a climax in 1909 when both men claimed the honor, setting 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 reports, ”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,” Devlin tells us, 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 6 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 onto 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 the boy lives a life of ineluctable isolation, ostracized at school and watched eagerly for any sign of his parents’ derangement.
Then, soon after Devlin turns 17, he realizes every lonely, odd child’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 supply crucial details about the Stead family past. Soon Cook is claiming that he 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 treated as a son (if a secret one) and allowed to accompany his newfound father on expeditions to Mount McKinley and then 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 come to understand the beastliness of Peary; the sweet, yet tragically flawed, nature of Cook; and the real crime that lies at the heart of their loathing for each other.
But it is also here that Johnston — the author of a memoir and four previous novels, including a highly regarded evocation of Newfoundland, ”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 journalist 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 not only plays a part in his father’s most momentous triumphs and failures but 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, 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. The story itself is told through Devlin’s deliberately understated narrative and Cook’s long expository letters and monologues, which can be tedious at times but which echo the straightforward, humble-heroic tone of a Victorian explorer.
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, although he is, unfortunately, often a less-than-reliable navigator when it comes to America. George Washington did not live in a ”modest house” near the site of the present White House ”when he was president.” The old Pennsylvania Station was not located in the West 60’s. And I have never heard of tourists visiting ”vaudeville shows at Tammany Hall.”
It is in ”the North” where Johnston shines. Consider, for example, this description of the city where Devlin Stead was raised: ”St. John’s was on the edge of a frontier that had not changed since it was fixed 400 years ago. I imagined what it looked like from the sea, the last light on the coast as you went north, the last one worth investigating anyway. . . . In the woods between neighborhoods, 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.”
Johnston’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 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.” This is 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 embarking on his terrifying, heady journey into life.