Decades of blunt, graceless realpolitik have done a number on Shelley’s notion that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. But Norman Lock still believes that poets have an outsize role in the moral shape of the American republic. Across 11 titles in his American Novels series, he’s imagined stories in which 19th century America has been defined and improved by its best writers — Poe, Twain, Dickinson, and, most fervently, Walt Whitman. In 2018’s The Wreckage of Eden, Dickinson is the aloof recipient of a pastor’s confessions of romantic devotion and loss of faith, and it’s as if her inscrutable nature alone is what shifts him. In 2022’s Voices in the Dead House, Whitman’s repair work is more direct, as he attends to the Civil War wounded in Washington, D.C. But whether hands-on or at a distance, Lock’s assertion is the same: If we’re socially out of plumb, authors are our best hope of righting ourselves.
Lock’s latest, The Caricaturist, largely concerns Stephen Crane, though like other Lock novels the main protagonist is an imagined one. Here that’s Oliver, a Philadelphia art student whose gift for sketching is undermined by a callow, youthful pretentiousness. As the book opens, it’s 1897 and he’s scheming with friends and fellow art students to reenact the scene of Edouard Manet’s provocative pastoral “The Luncheon on the Grass.” Borrowing a boat from his grandfather — an admirable figure, we know, because he’s “drunk on Whitman” — the reenactment quickly becomes a calamity involving police, accusations and public indecency, and yet another case of Oliver facing his wealthy father’s judgmental wrath.
To Oliver, dad is mainly just a banker and a bigot; the novel includes flashbacks to his angry disapproval of Oliver’s relationship with an immigrant Italian girl. His true father figure is the painter Thomas Eakins, best known for his unflinching images of surgical theaters. Eakins is disappointed with the idea of trying to paint a scene that’s not just contrived but imitative and un-American: “What value is there in a clumsy reproduction of an original work, except as pastiche?” Set right on the path of originality, Oliver takes some inspiration from Crane’s 1894 story “An Experiment in Misery,” about the inner life of a homeless man. His sketches soon improve, but living as an artist of integrity only means more cops and more of dad’s anger. “I had fallen into the mill of justice and was being coarsely ground,” he laments.
The events of The Caricaturist are framed by the jingoism that attended the United States’ imperial ambitions generally and the Spanish-American War in particular. If Oliver isn’t getting into trouble on his own steam, he’s witnessing it directly, particularly in the violent rallies that pit colonialist and anti-expansionist protesters. Mark Twain makes an appearance at one event, reading his sardonic “War Prayer” and summarizing the moment for Oliver: “Times being what they are, a man can’t rightly tell where life leaves off and hyperbole begins.” This sort of cameo is common in Lock’s novels, and often precious (“Look who it is, Ollie! William Jennings Bryan!”). But Lock doesn’t lose sight of the notion that this novel is essentially Oliver’s, never overwhelmed by its celebrity cameos. Indeed, Crane, when he arrives in the closing chapters, is positively spectral.
Crane, who died at 28 in 1900, wrote copiously and often desperately, two elements that power two excellent biographies, Paul Sorrentino’s Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire and the late Paul Auster’s Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane. In The Caricaturist, Lock wants to emphasize Crane’s oracular, truth-telling nature — he was the street-savvy author of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and “An Experiment in Misery,” the tempest-tossed observer of horrors in The Red Badge of Courage and “The Open Boat.” And he was also a person willing to sacrifice his reputation for the sake of defending a suspected prostitute. “I was the main attraction at New York’s Circus Maximus, and the lions were ravening,” Crane tells Oliver late in the novel, when they finally meet in Florida. Like Whitman and Dickinson before him, Crane is the person willing to accept the arrows of other judgment for the sake of moral and artistic integrity.
This is a romantic notion, and Lock doesn’t try to disguise his affection for it. When Eakins and Oliver’s grandfather meet and shake hands, they try to prove themselves “equals in the rough-and-tumble democracy sung by Whitman in his Leaves — that is to say, each tried to squeeze the other’s hand blue.” The idea that every good idea about America is most purely filtered through its most famous writers can feel cloying. (Lock says the twelfth and final American Novels novel will center on Jack London, whose history of racist rhetoric makes him a tricky novelist to lionize, to put it mildly.) Lock keeps from lapsing into corniness in part because he researches his authors’ eras so thoroughly; however clunky the plot, The Caricaturist is fully immersed in the war fury of the era, and does a fine job visualizing it. Oliver discovers his creative spine while working as a cartoonist for a Philadelphia paper: “Instead of an unspooling apple paring, I drew the western hemisphere skinned of the Caribbean, on whose shaving I drew Cuba and Puerto Rico. I drew three smaller peels, tagged Philippines, Guam, and Hawaiian Islands. At the top of the sheet, I hand-lettered the caption Ripe for the Pickin’.”
Still, Crane’s arrival in the latter pages gives the novel a strange, melancholy lift — he isn’t dead yet, but he’s getting there, inspiring some of Lock’s liveliest writing. “Dressed in dirty ragged overalls and a shirt that flapped like a sail on his emaciated chest, Stephen Crane might have been one of the Almighty’s botched attempts to make a man,” Oliver observes. Later, his chest will become “as noisy as a carriage spring.” Whatever wisdom he might impart is matched by the awfulness of the price he paid for it. In such a way, the caricaturist becomes a true artist. As Oliver noted after his stint cosplaying as a tramp: “I looked at the drawings, none of which was an exaggeration of the original, because the poor are their own caricatures.”
Could such a novel series featuring 20th or 21st century writers exist? The ironies and satire of Modernism and postmodernism would make it tough to do in an earnest, Lock-ian mode — William Carlos Williams or James Baldwin or Wallace Stevens or Philip Roth or Toni Morrison all studied American idealism critically, if not sourly. The freedom that they spoke to were of different sorts, something blunter and less romantic. Lock’s series persuades, when it does, because it suggests a time when writers had a true stake in defining and elevating national values. Today’s poets, perhaps more overtly political than ever, are unquestionably concerned with power, but lack the clout to wield it. Legistating, alas, is now solely the province of legislators.
[Published by Bellevue Literary Press on July 2, 2024. 352 pages, $17.99 paperback.]