To Catch the Lightning: A Novel of American Dreaming - Hardcover

Cheuse, Alan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1402214049 ISBN 13: 9781402214042

Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark, 2008

Synopsis

"Until someone tells you, you never know in whose dreams you appear..."
- From the prologue of To Catch the Lightning

What is the price of our dreams?

Beginning in the late 1890s, Edward Sheriff Curtis undertook the seemingly overwhelming odyssey of capturing the past, of documenting and photographing the fading way of life of the American Indian.

In To Catch the Lightning, Alan Cheuse has created a remarkable portrait of the man who would become a legend. Drawn on his epic journey by a series of female muses, Curtis turns his lens on a landscape of unparalleled beauty and tradition. Curtis' desire to complete his destiny as foretold by Chief Joseph, to photograph all of the hundreds of western American Indian tribes, is a haunting tale of the struggle between ambition and duty.

The architect of the finest lasting visual record of a culture close to extinction, Curtis stands as a testament to the power of the sacrifices we make for the dreams that compel us.

With the ear of a poet and the eye of a historian, Cheuse has crafted a masterwork of American historical fiction. Lyrical, beautifully written, and impressively researched, To Catch the Lightning is a novel of the American spirit.

PRAISE FOR TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING:

"To Catch the Lightning is a story of loss - of choices made and prices paid, of the future coming fast and the past disappearing faster. Cheuse's narrative is refracted through multiple voices, each distinct, but each containing its own poetic precision. A wonderful, wonderful book of quiet power and great beauty."
- Karen Joy Fowler, author of Wit's End and The Jane Austen Book Club

"To Catch the Lightning tells Curtis' story vividly and eloquently. It is a great American story, about a life spent preserving and honoring those elements of life which are most respected and beloved. Alan Cheuse is to be congratulated for this vivid novel."
- William Kittredge, author of The Willow Field and The Next Rodeo

"Bravo to Cheuse for this incarnation of a major and unfairly forgotten American artist, capturing an era so crucial in native American, and therefore American history. I found it immediate and innovative."
- Diane Johnson, author of Le Divorce and Lulu in Marrakech

"The photography and cinema of Edward Curtis exist at the intersection of art, history, anthropology, and technology. He was an essentially American kind of genius, and Alan Cheuse has transformed his life into compelling fiction that digs deep into the mystery and sacrifice and selfishness of creative vision."
- Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons

"... the narrative brims with keen insight."
- Publishers Weekly

"Curtis devoted his life to creating the most significant and comprehensive retrospective of American Indian culture, which he viewed as 'one of the great races of mankind.' Curtis correctly predicted that the culture was near extinction ... and much of his work remains the only recorded history of a civilization even then becoming the stuff of legend."
- ForeWord Magazine

About this title

About the Author

For more than two decades, Alan Cheuse has served as NPR's 'voice of books.' He is the author of three novels, including The Grandmothers' Club and The Light Possessed, several collections of short stories, and a pair of novellas recently published in The Fires. He is also the editor of Seeing Ourselves: Great Early American Short Stories and co-editor of Writers Workshop in a Book.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Chapter One: the clamdigger

So, Sing in me, O Muse! (if you are still listening to pleas such as mine)....

Sing in me of Edward Sheriff Curtis...of his great quest and adventures, of his heroic yearnings to make known the faces and songs and souls of the First Americans before they faded into Time, and of the cost to his marriage, to his family, to his spirit, and to his life. Sing in me, first, of the echoes in his name, Curtiz, Cortez, which carries us back to the story of the man who conquered the New World, and then sing in me how our Curtis tried to turn the flow of time in the other direction, from conquered to conquering, from unknown to known, from now to then.

Sing how Edward Sheriff Curtis first arrived in Seattle when he was still a gawky boy, all arms and elbows, attending to his ailing father, a Civil War veteran and preacher; how they traveled by train all the way from the family home in Wisconsin, across the prairie where once buffalo by the millions grazed; and how young Edward in his day dreaming populated the empty landscape with all these absent herds.

His father read the Bible and dozed-his heart was wearing-and Edward, after the prairie faded behind them and they had climbed into the mountains, gazed at slide after slide in the stereopticon given to him as a gift by a photographer for whom he had worked after school and in summers. A tall boy, he could muster a long reach when he tried, and adults liked that. He had a future, they all decided, the nature of which was not yet clear.

His older brother, Raphael, a Seattle resident of some years now who had prompted the family relocation, liked that. As soon as Edward arrived in town-and settled across the Sound where his father rented a small wooden house and prepared to bring out his wife, daughter, and youngest son who had remained behind in Wisconsin-Ray gave him a job in his livery stable. Within a few years Edward had saved some money, and with his brother's help he bought a partnership in a small photography business downtown. (A partner in a business at such an early age! Oh, America! Oh, commerce!)

Seattle-my Muse, help me to conjure its watery-blue skies, the Sound, its lake, its hilly streets, the distant snow-capped mountains-had suffered a major fire and the city was slowly recovering from the ordeal. Though not a single life was lost, family portraits went up in smoke, and photographers such as Edward were helping to restore the images to the walls, images of the new families if not the old. And in the midst of this he lost his own father. Soon after his business partner retired, he, now sole owner, moved across the water and started a family of his own, marrying red-haired, pale-skinned Clara, whose portrait he had made a few years before.

CLARA, IN HER WORDS
And she? Oh, she! She plunged into this infatuation she called by the name-in a diary that she kept for a while but abandoned after her children came along (but not to get too far ahead of things here)-of first and only love. I feel, she wrote, like the child my parents always treated me as being. I am lost, and I need a hand to hold in order to stay on the path. He seems ten feet tall to me, I look up to him so far.

And yet he does not look down on me. He talks to me, the only man who has ever talked to me, as an equal. He tells me about his work, about his past, his family, his dreams for the future. Perhaps the cause of this goes back into the time in his adolescent years when, injured in a fall in the warehouse where he was working to bring home some needed money to his family, my father and I, who happened to be on an errand in that same place, gave him aid and brought him to a doctor who wrapped his aching back.

Though Edward did not remember me the day my family and I came into his studio for our portrait, I believe that we were destined to come together. I was more than a plain girl, my Papa told me. I think he was right. Look into the eyes of that portrait Edward himself made of me (and the others) on that fated day we met again in the studio, and anyone who sees deeply enough will see more than they might have bargained for in me. At first sight, plain-and, clearly, unmemorable. The second time, and thereafter, see my depth. My own mother often told me that, and from her I learned I had a history myself, a family history that began to the north and east and extended westward (a word Edward liked to say).

Canada, the home of both my father and mother, was just a word to me. As was Pennsylvania, the state where I was born. I loved where I lived when I first awoke to being alive, here on the shores of the Sound. I kept dolls, my first loves. Edward courted me as though I was one of them, and I enjoyed it.

He was very sweet. He would sit with me in the parlor on my mother's best red chairs and talk about his life, telling me about a birdcall in the night that first woke him to himself when he was a boy, about his mother, his father, about his stereopticon, and his first photography lessons. He told me about the great train ride he and his father had made, and how he had imagined vast herds of buffalo racing alongside his window. All of this made me see he was a sensitive young man, someone who would care for me with affection and feeling. I told him about my dolls. I couldn't tell him how I hoped for a good husband and children.

We walked along the shoreline, side by side but never touching, looking west to the mountains. It was always west, west, west that he talked about.

"One day," he said, "I would like to sail to Hawaii." Never a word, never a notion about returning again to the mountains to the east of us, or scouting the snowy country to the north, or returning to cross the Great Plains, which he had traveled a while ago.

We gazed out over the Sound, the wind whipping up whitetopped waves that looked as dangerous as ice. I don't understand why I have always been afraid of the water.

About this edition

• Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1402214049
• ISBN 13: 9781402214042
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 502