‘The Ice Harp’
By Norman Lock
Bellevue Literary Press, 239 pages

It is one thing to take the world by thought; it is quite another to die by that thought. So it is that the aphasic Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1879 wonders whether he has mattered, now that he can find the right words only on his good days.

The novel has the dying man visited by the dead — by his close but quarrelsome friend, Henry David Thoreau, who worked with his hands as well as his thoughts and went to jail for his convictions; by John Brown, who tells the philosopher that words without actions are not worth much; and by Margaret Fuller, who committed herself to revolution in Europe. Walt Whitman, still alive, shows up, taunting Emerson for his inaction.

Emerson’s dilemma — wondering what good are thoughts without deeds — becomes palpable when he harbors a fugitive from justice, an ex-slave, still a soldier, who has committed a murder in his own defense. Emerson muses on the legacy of slavery and how it has marked Stokes, who asks only for a respite from running away, not Emerson’s full complicity in an escape to Canada.

Emerson has to consider if he has been a slave to his thoughts and a runaway from them, never doing enough to make his thinking a reality in the way Thoreau, Brown, and Fuller did. 

Neither Emerson nor the novel — not to give too much away — resolve his dilemma. That, of course, is the point. What troubled Emerson still troubles us today, as Norman Lock makes clear in his Afterword, which touches on the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and the war in Ukraine.

“The Ice Harp” continues Mr. Lock’s series The American Novels, and culminates in a contemplation of what he calls “the old conundrum; whether individuals are obligated to act against wrongdoing or are obliged by uncertainty to ‘hang fire,’ in that picturesque Jamesian image.”

No wonder Emerson, then, closes out The American Novels series: He urged self-assertion yet held back the kind of involvement in social and political issues that engaged many of his friends and associates.

What Emerson ultimately thought of his own case is unknown but of vital importance to imagine, as Mr. Lock does. Emerson, after all, is left not even with control over all his words, which he always wanted to function as a summons to activism.

Without words, Emerson is in terror of his own dissolution: “Oh, to feel once more the exultation that follows the fluent lines of ink, the veins and arteries of thought itself laid down on paper for the world to see and marvel at!”

The body of the man and the body of his words disintegrate at the same time. What he has always wanted to believe is that words in themselves are a firmament: “I look up at the sky, as though I would see my words there like a flight of migrating birds.”

Emerson, going soon into the translation of nothingness, reaches beyond his world to colloquies with the deceased, as if, in fact, his words do resonate into eternity.

Norman Lock has written a harrowing novel in which there is no place for Emerson to preside as what he once was: the cynosure of public platforms across the nation and the world. He is now alone with his thoughts, in dread of not having any more thoughts to impress the world. 

At the end of the novel, Emerson has to make a decision. There is no point in giving away what it is, except to say that with a fugitive in the house, Emerson can no longer set himself apart by the force of his words. He must do something. Or must he?

You will have to read the novel to find out.

Oh, one more thing. Why is the novel called “The Ice Harp”? The author says the title came about from a reading of Emerson’s journal for December 10, 1836, but Mr. Lock does not quote the requisite passage. Except for a few references to the ice harp in the novel, you are on your own. And that, I would say, is a very Emersonian maneuver.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Biography.”