an invaluable resource. The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum was built according to the Thomas Story Kirkbride method, and he was the first to advocate moral treatment for the mentally ill in the U. S. For Night Watch, I invented a nephew of his, Thomas Kirkbride Story, who was mentored by him, and carries his ideas to the asylum in West Virginia. The idea of“ moral treatment”— treating the mentally ill with respect and empathy— was a revolutionary idea. Dr. Kirkbride’ s methods really provide the irony at the heart of Night Watch, you know— the fact that the world itself was such a brutal place, both during the war and afterward— that this asylum, which one expects to be even more menacing, is actually a refuge during that time, a place of healing.
Shared trauma seems to be a central theme in Night Watch. How do you see this trauma playing out in the novel and what drew you to explore this concept? I wanted to try to give this sense of a generational experience, an experience that really straddles two generations, and, of course, affects their descendants. The incredible shadow of the Civil War still casts itself over us today. After the war, after Lincoln’ s assassination, Jim Crow thrived in the South and set back civil rights for 150 years. What a testament to the fact that a nation requires a strong federal government, that history doesn’ t“ bend toward justice,” in the words of Martin Luther King, without leadership. Something like a sixth of the population died during the Civil War. It was quite different from anything we’ ve ever experienced, until the pandemic. Many of us alive on the planet now have experienced that together, and it has left us with certain fears that are not exactly irrational, but fear does not lead us to express our better selves. This whole idea of shared trauma is something that I find interesting. And how can we oppose this trauma?
How did you approach creating an authentic world for your characters in a book of historical fiction like Night Watch? We really think in narrative because we are creatures of language. The creation of empathy really happens through literature because we all share language. Hopefully, a novel that is literature can allow the reader to time travel, to know what it might have been like, to really
experience another time. I do not claim to be a historical novelist. In fact, I reject that label, because even though almost all my books are anchored to a history, what makes them come alive are the characters and their involvement with one another, and the sort of cold, loving eye of the novelist in creating the world they live in, a world so convincing that the reader enters into it totally. For both reader and writer, it becomes real— a kind of real world alongside the world that we live in.
You’ ll be speaking at The Mount, the former estate of another Pulitzer Prize winner, Edith Wharton. As a writer who deeply explores complex social dynamics, what resonance do you see between your work and Wharton’ s? I think she’ s one of the important writers, not just an important woman writer, of her time. She was a genius at exploring and interviewing her own time, the“ Gilded Age,” writing about class and cruelty in a way that crept up on her readers, yet she also wrote Ethan
Frome, a perfect book, a masterpiece that is so connected to this landscape, the Berkshires. The Mount is a sort of sacred place. I feel a special connection to the Berkshires because of the mountains. I love mountainous areas that remind me of home. n
For more information about“ In Conversation” with André Bernard and other author talks this summer at The Mount, as well as to purchase tickets, go to edithwharton. org.
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