The Night Inspector
by Frederick Busch

List Price: $14.00
Pages: 240
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0449006158
Publisher: Ballantine

Since 1971, award-winning author Frederick Busch has published more than twenty works of fiction and non-fiction, including the novels The Mutual Friend, about Charles Dickens, Rounds, Invisible Mending, Sometimes I Live in the Country, Harry and Catherine, Long Way from Home, and the bestselling Closing Arguments and Girls. A compilation of his short fiction, The Children in the Woods: New and Selected Stories, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1995. His most recent books are A Dangerous Profession, a collection of essays about the writing life, and Letters to a Fiction Writer, an anthology for which he served as both editor and contributor. A new short story collection, Don't Tell Anyone, will be published early in 2001.

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Q: Of all writers, what drew you to Melville? Was there some particular circumstance that inspired you? And why, writing of Melville, did you use the letter M instead of his name?

FB: What drew me to him? His greatness as a writer--as we know him now--compared to how he was seen by contemporary readers, who scorned his Moby-Dick and Pierre and The Confidence Man and the great stories. They loved his racy, rather plagiarized early novels of adventure, and they detested his great advances in narrative structure and prose. He had the worst luck with his readers! And he mismanaged his career. He is the model of bad luck and mismanagement--and of dedication, of sheer hard work, of brilliance of vision. I wanted to write a novel about this vast man whose domestic problems and financial problems mirrored those of so many of us; he was huge, and as small as we, at once.

I called Melville "M" because, I think, I was intimidated by him. He is one of the gods in the American writer's heaven--the man who wrote the Great American Novel--and I didn't feel I could approach him more intimately unless I called him something that evoked the actual Melville but that also kept me one decorous pace away from him. As the Hebrews call their God by an approximate name, Yahweh, thus, M.

Q: Where did Bartholomew come from? At what point in your thinking about the novel did he emerge for you as the main character, and why?

FB: I invented Bartholomew because I needed someone in New York City in 1867 to approach Melville on behalf of the reader--he was my vehicle for our getting close to the great writer who, in his present "failure," was difficult and distant. I didn't know who Bartholomew would be, at first; I knew that he would be a Civil War veteran because Melville was so moved and horrified by the war and because it had torn Melville's nation asunder. You cannot write of 1867, two years after the war's end, and not consider the war's ravaging effect. I knew this, and then my wife, Judy, and I went to see a retrospective show of Winslow Homer's paintings at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Homer had covered the war for Harper's Weekly, and his etchings were as famous as [Matthew] Brady's photographs. The first painting we saw, on entering the show, was a big picture of a Union soldier in a tree, inspecting the landscape through his rifle's sight. A Marksman on Picket Duty, it was called. I knew at once that the marksman was my William Bartholomew. In the novel, Bartholomew even boasts of having posed for the painting for Winslow Homer.

I didn't yet know that he was maimed. That came to me from three sources. The first was a reference to a maimed soldier wearing a black silk mask in Hemingway's great short story "In Another Country," and the second was something I read about World War I veterans with their faces shot apart. Then my dentist showed me, as he was preparing a crown, an antique book about post-Civil War dental repairs. The three elements came together, and there was poor William Bartholomew, disfigured and angry and determined to have his revenge on fate by making his fortune.

Q: As in many of your novels, we see, at the heart of The Night Inspector, a fractured family: Melville's. Wrapping this image is the larger picture of the fractured national family of post-Civil War America. Could you comment on this connection, and how you chose to deploy it in the book? I wonder: Does this enlargement of scale represent any kind of culmination for you?

FB: You're absolutely right about the fractured Melville family and the larger issue of the fractured national family. I have always been drawn to write about domestic issues, especially about the family that is broken in one way or another. But I have always tried to expand my focus so that it would include more and more. Consider, for instance, the campus family in my novel Girls, and the scene at he end of that novel where all those men and woman are searching the field. They're searching for the body of one girl, but of course they're also looking for all our missing children. The narrator says, "We were going to more the entire field." That "we" is the human community, toward which I wanted the novel to reach, and on whose behalf I wanted it to speak.

The same is true of The Night Inspector. I wanted to deal with the larger national family, as you so well put it. But I must also say that I don't see the enlargement of scale as any kind of culmination. I see it as a continuation, and as a raising of the bar for my own efforts. The next novel, on which I have begun preliminary work, must reach higher, wider, and deeper.

Q: Would you say this is what drives you most as a writer? This "raising of the bar," as you call it?

FB: The raising of the bar, the severity of risk in the dive, the pitch of the mountain--no, that's now what drives me, though it surely does excite me. Actually, I love to write, so I write. I don't feel that I've earned my place on the earth during a day when I have not written. On the other hand, I'm also aware that loyal readers, who know my stuff, expect me to build on what I've done in the past. To one degree or another, each of my novels since 1974 has tried to draw my characters out into the world's concerns, and to draw the reader into the relationship between those two worlds. I want my novels to work in both dimensions, the private and the public. The Night Inspector, it seems to me, dives deeper into the darkness of the individual, and deeper into the darkness of the public world, than any of my earlier books. It is an examination--or I wished it to be--of one man's interior being, but also of the American soul.

Q: Building on your remarks about Bartholomew: My own response to him, as a reader, was bound by contradiction. I found myself profoundly horrified by his cold-bloodedness, yet deeply moved by his torment, and fascinated, in an admiring way, by his financial acumen and physical competence. He's a man who gets things done, even if they're awful things--a deeply American character, in other words.

FB: Yes, absolutely! He is The American: physically competent in a harsh landscape, a survivor in a dreadful war, a warrior with pleasure, and a man who is also capable of real thought and profound feeling; he is a frontiersman, a merchant, a mourner-of-children, a man available to the wonders in women, and, when next you meet him, a cold-blooded fighter. Melville describes Ahab "with a crucifixion in his face," and that's Bartholomew. He suffers for the nation and, at the same time, he is the nation's cruelty.

Q: What sort of specific research did you have to do to write this book? How did it pose different challenges from researching your other novels?

FB: I did a fair amount of ambient research, traveling with my wife, Judy to places Melville had been. It's a matter of sniffing the psychic air, of waiting for the ghosts that the setting generates. Together we visited Melville's Pittsfield farm, and the room--the very desk and chair--in which he wrote Moby Dick while staring out at his beloved Mt. Greylock. We stood in the small piazza, which gives the title--Piazza Tales--to his great short story collection. We walked the street in Manhattan-East Twenty-sixth, near Madison Square-- where he might have sat. I read newspapers of the day and studied the works of journalists who wrote about New York City in the late 1860s. I read Harper's Weekly to see the ads as well as the news. I looked at hundreds of photos of the New York of 1867, and I read studies of nineteenth-century New York brothels and recollections of New Yorkers. I reread much of Melville's writing, his correspondence, and Jay Leyda's wonderful Melville Log. And then I found that I was hiding in the research. Page one had been on paper for eighteen months--the same dialogue, with little changed, with which the novel opens. I flushed myself from cover and forced myself to write page two.

Q: The Chinese laudress, Chun Ho, who becomes Bartholomew's lover: How did she emerge? She appears at first peripherally--as part of the setting--but eventually she becomes deeply wedded to the story.

FB: Chun Ho was, indeed, part of the setting. Bartholomew was a warrior and, during the war, as filthy as his environment; it's a novel filled with odors, and he is alive to them. In New York after the war, however, he is somewhat fastidious--he wishes to be clean, enjoys luxuries, and tries to establish a separation between himself and the stench of burning buildings, and killed horses, and men. At first, I simply wanted Chun Ho to rent her tub so she could bathe. She existed to serve that function. But you always owe your characters more than merely a role in the events of your book. Chun Ho, despite my plans, lived, and she wanted more life, and I knew that I owed it to her. how did I know? When Billy Bartholomew, one day, noticed that he had brought over unsullied laundry. She sniffed it and found it clean, and she sensed that he had unbusinesslike motives; and I, knowing that he found his shelter in business, flushed him out of hiding. He was a clumsy and shy lover as he approached her and, finally, Chun Ho--almost in defiance of her nature and her upbringing--took charge. When she asked him to divulge his inner self--to teach her not English, or American ways, but to "teach meÉyou," I have to confess I was close to tears. I loved her way of cutting across traditional American speech and coming up with great ways of saying deep truths. Chun Ho, like Billy, grew from my subconscious and flowered on the page; where they led, I followed.

Q: I know you to be a native New Yorker. New York City in 1867 is obviously a very different sort of place from the New York of your youth, or the New York City we know now. Or is it?

FB: I am a New Yorker, born in Brooklyn; a resident with Judy in our early married years of Greenwich Village--Morton Street and Bedford Street. And I have written a good many novels and stories set in the city. The New York I knew as a child, in the forties and fifties, was bucolic. We played stickball on Eighteenth Street in the Midwood section of Brooklyn; when a car turned our corner someone would call out, "Car!" and we would pause. We didn't have to pause that often. I could take the BMT subway--elevated near home, then either descending under the East River or crossing high on the Manhattan Bridge--and ride to the city alone. I could walk back from a Boy Scout meeting on Friday night pretty late, and my mother could take walks through Brooklyn at night when she chose to. Yes, it's a different city. And yet I was able to return to the Manhattan streets that Melville strode and see the same statues and many of the same buildings, the same parks, the same Broadway--looking so different--on which horse-drawn buses might have taken him toward work on the docks downtown.

Q: You've written about Dickens in the novel The Mutual Friend, and now Melville. This has the feeling of a triptych. Who's the third? Is there one?

FB: I think I might once have wished to write fiction about Kafka, who is in some senses the patron saint of dysfunctional families, paranoia, neurosis, and the general psychic disturbances we think of as modern. But I don't want to live inside that mind. And, anyway, Woody Allen has already done great work along those lines. No, I think I've finished my large historical projects. I think I'll just try to deal with dysfunction, paranoia, neurosis, and general psychic disturbances in a contemporary setting from now on.



Excerpted from The Night Inspector © Copyright 2009 by Frederick Busch. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine. All rights reserved.

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