The Weight of Water (31 page)

Excerpted from Anita Shreve’s remarks upon receiving the PEN/L.L. Winship Award

Normally, I am not at loss for words. But I found myself speechless when Stephen Fox called to tell me about this wonderful, wonderful award. I think judges of literary contests must sometimes be amazed at just how deeply inarticulate writers can be. I hope I can, in these few minutes — despite my awe at sharing a stage with Arthur Miller — finally convey to Stephen, and also to you, how grateful I am to have my novel
The Weight of Water
honored in this way.

That the L.L. Winship Award is one for a book specifically about New England means all the more to me, because, for me, a novel begins with the place. That place — the landscape, the houses there, its austere beauty or its haunting loneliness — sounds a note, like that from a tuning fork. A single note that quivers in the air and sets my imagination humming.

Some time ago, I got lost while on a sailboat in the fog. I was a guest aboard the sloop, and as I wasn’t much use elsewhere, it was my job to stand in the bow and peer into a fog and to call out if I saw a rocky ledge or an island or another boat. I don’t know if you have ever had the experience of being lost in the fog — there is nothing quite so disorienting. Anxious to acquit myself at least passably well amidst all the tanned and able seamen on board, I peered earnestly into the taupe nothingness until I began to see things that weren’t actually there: first, tiny moving lights, then minutely subtle gradations of gray. Was that a shape? Was that a lighthouse?

And then, so shockingly that I was once again becalmed by speechlessness (thus failing at the sole task I had been given), it was all there. Appledore and Londoners and Star and Smutty-nose — rocks emerging from the mist. Smuttynose, all of a piece, flat, with bleached ledges, forbidding, silent.

Perhaps it was the theatrical lifting of the fog. Or it was an intense desire, after the anxiety of being lost at sea, to step out onto the solidity of land. Or it was simply the charm of the place, a seductive charm both exhilarating and melancholy. The appeal was in the contradictions: the seductive draw of the perilous rocky outcroppings; the way every leaf of the homely low vegetation seemed to be imbued with its own radiance so that you felt you could see more vividly than you ever had before; the warmth of the clapboards of a wood-framed house banished to an off-putting exile; the tenacity of black sedge and sheep sorrel and sea blite in a place where human life was clearly transient. I was in thrall. The tuning fork had been sounded.

The Isles of Shoals form an archipelago that lies in the Atlantic, ten miles southeast off the New Hampshire coast at Portsmouth. The islands measure three and a half miles north and south by one and a half miles east and west. There are nine islands at high tide, eight at low. The largest island looked to its first residents like a fat pig wallowing in the sea, and hence the name of Hog. Smuttynose, the island that would most spark my interest, derived its name from a clump of seaweed on the nose of a rock extending into the ocean.

In 1635, the Isles of Shoals were formally divided between the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which included Maine, and the territory subsequently to be known as New Hampshire. Duck, Hog, Malaga, Smuttynose, and Cedar went to Maine. Star, Londoners, White, and Seavey went to New Hampshire. The division has always held. In 1635, when the ordinance was first declared, nearly all of the residents of the New Hampshire islands fled to Smuttynose, because it was still legal to drink in Maine.

In the seventeenth century, thriving fishing communities of as many as six hundred people lived on the Isles of Shoals. In the eighteenth century, American patriots, fearing that the islands harbored Tories, dismantled several dozen houses and floated them across the sea to the coast of New Hampshire and Maine where many of them still stand today. In the early twentieth century, children who were raised on this small archipelago never saw cars or trees until they were adults. On March 5, 1873, two women, Norwegian immigrants, were brutally murdered on the island of Smuttynose. A third woman fled and survived by hiding in a sea cave until dawn. When she was found the next morning, nearly frozen to death in her blood-soaked nightgown, she said the murderer was a man named Louis Wagner — a man about Portsmouth, a sometime fisherman, a journeyman, a vagabond. Wagner was arrested the next day in Boston and brought back to Portsmouth. Passions were running so high in that city that when Wagner was taken off the train, he was nearly stoned to death. Later, Wagner was tried, convicted, and hanged for the double murders. It was the last public execution in the state of Maine. Since that time, and continuing into the present, many people have speculated that the wrong person was hanged.

Captivated by the spirit of the islands as well as the details of the double murder, which I learned about when we motored into Portsmouth later that first day for provisions, I sat on a berth in the boat and wrote a six-page short story called “Silence at Smuttynose.” (A title, by the way, that when I proposed it for the name of my eventual novel about the murders, was greeted by my editor and my agent with disbelief.) The story, the first I ever wrote, was published in the
Cimarron Review.
I received as payment six contributor’s copies. I was as happy with that payment and the publication of the story as I have been about any publication or payment since.

Several years ago, while cleaning out a box in the attic, I came across that extremely modest short story. I opened the
Review
and looked at the first page, and I knew at once I was not done yet.

I was no stranger to the charms of the New England landscape when I first went to the Isles of Shoals. I grew up in Dea-ham and went to Tufts. I lived in Cambridge and in Boston. I taught high school in Hingham and in Reading. I have family in Amesbury and Milton and Duxbury. I spent many childhood summer vacations in Maine and on Cape Cod. So why this rock then and not another? Why the light on this particular window and not another? Why this woman and not another? I do not have a profound understanding as to why certain places can be triggers to the imagination, why this landscape and not another can evoke an entire narrative, why houses and sea caves and scrub pine may become characters in their own hymns and psalms. I do know, however, that I follow a long line of writers whose work was inspired, at least in part, by the place — so much so in some cases that the mere mention of a town, real or imaginary, can conjure up the entire work: Starkfield. Tarbox. New Bedford. Salem. Grover’s Corner. New London. St. Botolphs. I also know that it is folly to speculate too much about the magic of inspiration, which can dissipate as easily as fog on a late summer morning. It is enough for me that it works.

Of course, a novel, will take on ideas and develop themes and characters. It would not otherwise be a novel, but rather a sort of poem. And ultimately, the work must transcend the place. But I believe that the place tells me the story. At the very least, it makes me ask a lot of questions.

Who, for example, were the women of the Isles of Shoals? And the rude fishermen they lived with? Did these women go mad from the isolation? From the poverty? From the stink of porgies and cod and hake that had gotten into the floorboards and would not come out? Did the islands shape these women in the same way the relentless east wind seemed to have bent the witchgrass? And if so, what really happened on the night of March 5, 1873, in the cramped and smoke-filled wood-frame building that would forever afterward be known as the Hontvedt murder house?

I now live in New England in an old house of my own. It has sloping floors, cracked ceilings, no bathroom big enough in which to take an actual bath. It is always dirty in the way of old houses and hard to keep tidy. Sometimes I feel awash in newspapers, plastic toys, and milk cartons I think I am recycling. But occasionally, when we have a fire in the kitchen hearth, I imagine those who have been there before me. The baby who was born in the tiny room adjacent to the kitchen, the woman who cried have been there before me. The bay who was born in the tiny room adjacent to the kitchen, the woman who cried at the inattentions of her husband in the upstairs bedroom, the teenage girl who died of diphtheria in what is now my son’s room. It is a house, a place, that, however inconvenient, evokes a shared history, a history no farther away than across my kitchen table — a history of dresses falling, accounts rendered, ashes and plastic toys swept from the floor. It is a place
full
of stories.

Alice Walker once said in an interview with Charlie Rose that she was visited by her characters. I cannot lay claim to such visitations, but I have been graced by places. They — and the people who went before me — continue to feed my imagination, and it is a gift, like the Winship, for which I am enormously grateful.

1. What are the similarities between Jean and Maren? In what ways are they different?

2.
The Weight of Water
is both a love story and a whodunit. Who do you think really killed Anethe and Karen? What evidence is there to support Louis Wagner’s innocence or guilt?

3. Atmosphere — the terribly rough climate and unbearably close living quarters — plays a significant role in the characters’ psychological states. To what extent are these external conditions responsible for the events of the novel?

4. “No one can know a story’s precise reality,” Jean points out (page 117). Discuss the significance of this statement as it applies to Jean’s reading of Maren’s journal. Should she — should we — believe Maren’s document as truth? To what extent does Jean fill in the blanks of Maren’s story to explain her own life? Do you think Jean maintains enough objectivity to write a fair account of the murders?

5.
The Weight of Water
is concerned with the subject of jealousy and its consequences. Discuss this theme as it emerges in the exchanges between Jean and Maren and their families. Do you believe that Adeline and Thomas were having an affair?

6. Maren and Evan have a very close sibling relationship. What events from their childhood fostered this attachment? Is there evidence that their relationship goes beyond that of brother and sister? How does Anethe’s arrival on the scene affect this relationship?

7. Jean ponders, “What moment was it that I might have altered? What point in time was it that I might have moved one way instead of another, had one thought instead of another?” (page 192). Are there moments in which Jean could have acted differently and thereby changed the course of the events that followed? If so, identify them. How much control do Jean and Maren have over their respective fates? How much does anyone?

8. It is often small resentments and indiscretions that lead to greater misdeeds. What small offenses do Jean and Maren commit? Do you feel these acts should be taken into account when determining their culpability for greater crimes?

9. How does the structure of the story — the weaving together of Maren’s story with Jean’s — underscore the novel’s theme? Have you ever been so influenced by an event in the past that it changed your present or your future?

10. Jean’s story begins with a plea for absolution: “I have to let this story go. It is with me all the time now, a terrible weight.” Similarly, Maren’s document opens with an appeal for vindication: “If it so please the Lord, I shall, with my soul and heart and sound mind, write the true and actual tale of the incident which continues to haunt my humble footsteps” (page 39). How do these pleas affect you as a reader? Does it make you more sympathetic to the characters, more willing to believe in their innocence?

11. If members of your reading group have seen the movie
The Weight of Water,
discuss the ways in which the book and film differ, and the extent to which the film succeeds in capturing the book’s essence.

Anita Shreve is the author of several internationally praised and bestselling novels, among them
Body Surfing; A Wedding in December; Light on Snow; All He Ever Wanted; Sea Glass; The Last Time They Met; Fortune’s Rocks;
The Pilot’s Wife,
which was a selection of Oprah’s Book Club;
The Weight of Water,
which was a finalist for England’s prestigious Orange Prize and for which the author received the New England Book Award
and the PEN / L.L. Winship Award;
Resistance; Where or When; Strange Fits of Passion;
and
Eden Close.
She lives in Massachusetts. For more information, visit
www.AnitaShreve.com
.…

…AND HER MOST RECENT NOVEL

In October 2008, Little, Brown and Company will publish Anita Shreve’s
Testimony.
Following is a preview from the novel’s opening pages.

    
I
t was a small cassette, not much bigger than the palm of his hand, and when Mike thought about the terrible license and risk
exhibited on the tape, as well as its resultant destructive power, it was as though the two-by-three plastic package had been
radioactive. Which it may as well have been, since it had produced something very like radiation sickness throughout the school,
reducing the value of an Avery education, destroying at least two marriages that he knew of, ruining the futures of three
students, and, most horrifying of all, resulting in a death. After Kasia brought Mike the tape in a white letter envelope
(as if he might be going to mail it to someone!), Mike walked home with it and watched it on his television — an enormously
complicated and frustrating task since he first had to find his own movie camera that used similar tapes and figure out how
to connect its various cables to the television so that the tape could play through the camera. Sometimes Mike wished he had
just slipped the offensive tape into a pot of boiling water, or sent it out with the trash in a white plastic drawstring bag,
or spooled it out with a pencil and wadded it into a big mess. Although he doubted he could have controlled the potential
scandal, he might have been able to choreograph it differently, possibly limiting some of the damage.