The Ice Harp (The American Novels)
A reader would have to be a dedicated fan of Ralph Waldo Emerson to appreciate this novel.
It is 1879, Concord, Massachusetts. Lock’s Emerson, the Father of Transcendentalism and perhaps the greatest moral philosopher produced in the United States, is a seventy-six-year-old, confused by dementia and tormented by aphasia. He has frequent conversations with long-dead cohorts, like Thoreau, Whitman, and John Muir. He reflects on friendships with deceased luminaries such as the tragic Margaret Fuller, who still haunts the beach looking for the remains of her drowned son and husband. He imagines that his first wife Ellen has come to console him. He even imagines a talk with Samuel Long, a runaway slave he tried to help escape on the Underground Railroad.
Emerson is cared for by his second wife, Lidian, who was an energetic abolitionist long before he became involved in the movement. She comes across in the novel as a no-nonsense woman who knows her worth even though she has plaintive regrets about not being physically attractive. Also on scene is James Stokes, an appealing man who was a former slave and Union corporal. Stokes is trying to reach Canada after killing a white man who assaulted him. Emerson’s relationship with Stokes is fraught with conflicting feelings about justice and mercy.
These various interactions have a distinctive charm as they reveal the characters of some of the period’s notable personalities. Perhaps more importantly, these exchanges, along with Emerson’s solitary musings, reveal a man still deeply troubled by serious questions and regrets about his life’s work, particularly his lack of meaningful action in the matters of slavery and civil rights. Dementia is his “ice harp,” a symbol of his frozen mind. Lock is to be credited with capturing a great mind in distress, though the subject limits the novel’s approachability. But Emerson probably would have loved the novel.
