Worlds

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When I decided to write a novel about the founder of Mormonism, I’d lived in and come to know two contrasting worlds. In one he was venerated, a near-deity—the instrument of salvation for billions of people living and dead, a latter-day prophet, a miracle worker and sermonizer and healer on the order of Jesus. That was the world I lived in until I was about 19 and left the church.

In the other world, Joseph Smith was a horny fraud. He made up a tedious, readily falsified book of theological history, bilked his followers out of their money and land, seduced and coerced women by the dozen and told their husbands (and his first wife) that it was because God had told him to.

There’s ample documentation of Smith the trickster, predator, and violent authoritarian, all in primary sources. At the same time: “Whatever account of charisma is accepted, the Mormon prophet possessed that quality to a degree unsurpassed in American history” (emphasis mine). That’s Harold Bloom, the eminent literary critic and scholar who was a fascinated observer of Mormonism, writing in the 1990s. At the start I thought my job, or the job of my book, was to un-reduce the caricatures, to weave these two disparate dimensions of the person together—to give fiction’s emotional complexity to the compromised and towering figure I would find exposited by Bloom and by the rip-roaring Smith biographer Fawn Brodie.

The surprise was how many other worlds I’d have to pass through in order to locate my bridge between the first two. One was the early-19^th-century world of folk magic, astrology, and folk religion, woven into the Smiths’ context by the excommunicated Mormon historian D. Michael Quinn. The Smiths were treasure diggers who used occult ritual and seeric instruments to search for buried gold. Key dates in early Mormon history have a plain astrological basis. When Joseph went to retrieve the golden plates that he said were the ancient text of the Book of Mormon, a neighbor said he was instructed to do it “dressed in black clothes, and riding a black horse with a switch tail.” These were images of a world with an alien epistemology, images of a pre- or extra-rationalist time and place—about as far from the performative 21st-century normality of, say, Mitt Romney as you could get. To internalize every documented fact about these lives, if that were possible, would still fall short. If I tried to write about Joseph Smith with my logic or my physics, I would miss the story.

To list the worlds I’ve passed through over a decade of contemplating this project would be a novel-length undertaking. Most recently, the psychological perspective of Internal Family Systems—especially its rejection of the unitary, undivided self—and dead-sober contrarian inquiries into phenomena like saintly levitation and UFO abduction from the scholars Jeffrey Kripal and Carlos Eire have given me new registers from which to theorize about Smith’s authentic experience. I’ve always thought this story was more complicated than option A or option B, hallucination or imposture. Now I have a better idea, I think, of what he (or parts of him) might actually have believed.

But the most important place to spend time has been in the world of the novel itself, which I’ve now started five or six discrete attempts at. I always end up sinking into the soil of Joseph’s childhood, the part about which we know the least because, unlike the rest of his life, he produced so little of his own documentation. This has turned out not to be a research or reporting task so much as a meditative one, almost trance-like. I’ve written a gajillion scenes of Joseph or his siblings in the woods, imagined how they might work and play, how they might narrate their own reality, who their social contacts might be, how heavenly beings might appear to them and what they might want and what powers of formation all this would exert on my protagonist. I’ve imagined the family asleep, watched the dreams and visions floating through their heads, the minor spirits flanking their walls. I’ve looked up at their stars. Again, though, it’s not a documentary task, but almost the opposite. You actually have to detach from what you think the facts are, because—as with any attempt to live inside the experience of another person—that’s a foreign shore you’ll never reach.

So much of what I’ve written hasn’t quite been “it,” and four years in it can start to feel like you’re treading water. But that’s the wrong way to think about it: All those hundreds of pages that will never see the light of day were immersing me, ever so gradually, into the world of my novel—the world I will create myself, having passed through all the others. The two worlds I set out with were just the entry points, the first nodes in a network that’s now coursed through my life for a decade. That’s the thing about writing—it’s not the product of you at the moment you set out to do it. It’s what you become as you’re working.

Today I’m going to share the opening of the draft I’m developing now, which I expect to become my final manuscript. (It will go through many revisions between now and then, of course, but I don’t think I’ll start from the beginning again.) I’ve finally spent long enough with the story to feel big parts of it beat for beat, and turned that into a satisfying outline. Four years into active writing, I’ve been in this world long enough to start its description.

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1. Morning star

[December 1805 to summer 1806. This character in focus here is Joseph Smith’s father, Joseph Smith Sr.]

He’d first noticed it the night before his third son was born, that hour of late December when winter bled its widest shadow into the northern latitudes. A piercing bright star at the horizon to the south, its transit along the tree tops short-lived, either fading or setting as soon as the night flinched. He felt he’d never seen it before, he couldn’t name it, though he knew something of the heavens—constellations, nebulae, some features of the moon. He believed this astral body was new to his eye. It had a distinctive cast, an iron pinkness, which would oscillate in intensity for the nights to follow but always serve as identifier.

The moon was new and unrisen. Its absence was the reason Joseph was awake to see his star—because nights this dark made him sleepless. The air held a swift, hungry cold, affliction to body and spirit. The approach of a new child revived memories of Lucy’s first delivery, who’d died almost a decade earlier just before or just after it entered the world. They’d moved on all right. But as the years went by, and as acts of grimmer fortune mounted, the death began to seem more of an omen, or a gateway—away from a life they might have preferred.

The novel dot would slip backward in the sky each night, its little arc starting and ending earlier. Joseph still looked for it, catching it sometimes in the hours just after nightfall. Finally it rose and fell so early that it was hidden by the day. Still, he thought of it as his morning star—when he’d first seen it, the precipice hour.

But when he went to bed the star still greeted him, and the black of sleep blurred with the black of night so that in the hours after he lay down and before the sun rose he could not manage to be sure of his own state, whether asleep or not. If it was sleep, he’d slept himself into a world more pungent and tactile than the one he knew, where silence roared in the ears like a high flame; if it was waking, then militant dreams trespassed the way by his bed on heavy footfall.

One morning he told Lucy of the star. He’d held back because she worried when he went out at night, or if he passed too much of it awake. For Lucy, night was incontestable. Dreams may unsettle, but sleep protected the sleeping; what wandering spirits hunted was an eyelid ajar. Her husband was an accomplished dreamer, and deep, but he passed through these periods of something else—which he could not describe, and she could not understand. She noted the date of his star sighting in her weathered almanac—circling the date next to that of her son’s arrival, but lighter, tentative.

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com.