No Ship Sets Out to Be a Shipwreck by Joan Wickersham. 124 pages. Eastover Press, 2024. $27.89

  
Full disclosure: I’ve known Joan Wickersham for some years and in many capacities. As a reader of her pitiless and heart-strong memoir The Suicide Index, and The News from Spain, a book of stories; as editor of her valued AGNI contributions; as a co-teacher with her at the Bennington Writing Seminars; as her interviewer for a Zoom series commemorating this magazine’s fiftieth anniversary; and, not least, as friend to a gratifying conversationalist.

  
It was in one of our long-ago conversations that I first heard about Joan Wickersham’s immersion in what she called her Vasa project, a most unlikely-sounding undertaking, which has now, many years later—unlikeliness be damned—been published as No Ship Sets Out to Be a Shipwreck, an utterly sui generis work that invites serious contemplation.

Where to find a launch point? Maybe it would be best to first recount the story of the actual launch of the Vasa itself in 1628. It was a terrible tragedy. The Swedish warship sank in Stockholm’s harbor almost as soon as it left the dock. A flawed design, hit not by a storm but a “gust” of wind. The Vasa sank and for more than 300 years lay on the seafloor, completely silted over and forgotten. It was not rediscovered and raised until 1956 (a year before Wickersham was born) when one Anders Franzen became obsessed with the search, and then, having found the ship, gave himself fully to its recovery and restoration—an enormous undertaking that finally resulted in the creation of a maritime shrine, a museum that’s now a popular destination for contemplatives, aficionados, and curious tourists.

~

It was as such a curious tourist that Wickersham had her first exposure to the Vasa. Her incidental visit—who knows how these things happen—triggered a powerful unconscious compulsion.

Without question, the most telling thing is that Wickersham traveled to Sweden nine separate times to see the Vasa. Here the psychologist dips his head and looks over the top of his glasses. Did you say nine times?

There’s no great mystery about the connection. No Ship Sets Out to Be a Shipwreck is an account of the raising of a vessel long buried, and of the effort of bringing its contents into the light of day. The reader of Wickersham’s The Suicide Index—which used the idea of an index to narrate the tragedy of her father’s suicide—goes right to the obvious: in that first encounter, she found a perfect objective correlative, a point of focus that would allow her to address her private trauma.

The problem with such an inference is that it tends to foreclose the possibilities of nuance, while nuance is the very thing that makes this presentation a tour de force. Of course, the raising of the vessel and its meticulous preservation signify. But it is the subtle psychological orchestration of the account, its indirection, that conveys the complexity of a long-held grief.

~

Wickersham’s presentation is in many ways liminal, hovering between poetry and prose. A work in five sections, it uses what feel like lines more than sentences and follows no direct path, instead deploying variegated elements in collage-like juxtaposition. These cover a broad range—from historical reportage about the disaster, to present-day narration from her visits, to more meditative sections that consider her family’s past. She may range freely, but she also uses her gift for sharply turned assertions and gnomic observations like “Everything is something someone can’t not want” or “The way things could have gone, the way things had to go.”

The grounds for linking the personal and historical are established almost immediately. After a prologue that sets out the context for what will follow, Wickersham opens the project with these eerie four lines:

Polished waxen ghost of a ship,
but you are the ship.
How can an absence
fill up all this space?

The note is struck—a ghost, an absence. And in the entry that directly follows, “The Shipbuilder’s Widow,” the writer tells us that in imagining the widow all those centuries ago, she hears her own mother’s voice. The fusion is introduced, and when she attributes these observations to the original widow, we are in no doubt of their private resonance:

The ship that was supposed to be so great,
such glory, sunk. The thing your husband built
to make his name, to keep you safe,
the things he promised you could count on—
him, the ship, his reputation—
gone.

And, further down:

Married to disgrace.
Surviving and wrecked. Your life changed in an hour.
“Can you imagine?” my mother would have said.

I think of the line from Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking: “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

~

Nine times.

Nine times betokens not interest but obsession, and obsession arises from a different place from interest. Mostly muted here, it nonetheless drives these pages from opposite sides. We have Anders Franzen’s obsession—to find, raise, and preserve the Vasa—and Wickersham’s to contend with a great unresolved loss. Were this just the account of the retrieval of the ship-become-fantastic-reliquary, it would be a compelling documentary. That the outer narrative is the product of Wickersham’s compulsion makes it riveting.

The five sections, with their many separate entries, do create a collage, which is especially apt as the Vasa story is so much about the assembling of parts. While there’s great writerly mobility in such a structure, the juxtapositions here are anything but ad hoc. Everything is positioned with the greatest care. Even as Wickersham contends with various layers of time, including the larger encompassing frame that holds her contemplation and reckoning, her reflections confirm the psychological truism that trauma stops time—inside. The world goes on as ever, but tragedy brings fixation.

~

By displaying the remains of the Vasa, the museum has embalmed a great loss. On display are so many objects taken out of their original continuity, extracted and assembled—a vast still life, though the better term would be nature morte. With so much to contemplate, we almost inevitably enter the world of if. If only this, if only that . . . Was it chance, or was it somehow fated? I think of Pompeii, the massive volcanic cross-section cut through what had been everyone’s ongoing day. Exhibits feed our fascination with disinterred things, especially those that carry the pathos of life curtailed.

So many recovered fragments, but finally so very little to work with. Wickersham’s inventorying by way of select detail becomes a process of psychological forensics. In what would otherwise be a chaos of speculation, her close attention lets us begin to imagine the event. Studying a surviving skull that has been given the name “Filip,” she struggles to picture the man in his moment, that there was such a he, if not with that name—finally giving up, but nevertheless noting that the man still had two milk teeth. There is also “Tove,” known only by a few shards but identified as “a tall teenager.” Heartbreak wherever she looks.

~

As the sections and entries accumulate, Wickersham brings her mother and father forward. At one point, we find her going through her mother’s drawers after her death, itemizing and trying to draw near—just as she does with the contents of the Vasa:

Stamps
and pencils. Jewelry. Papers in labeled folders.
I could go everywhere, look at everything. The drawer
where she kept her brushes and curlers—when I lifted them
I found some strands of hair, soft and dustlike.

Watching her, we might rightly feel a sense of trespass, never mind that the woman is long dead. Wickersham’s focus on the ship—a public display—feels quite different. But is it not likewise a trespass, a sanctioned sort of rubbernecking?

~

One entry in particular deploys what we have already accepted as a ready shifting between stories. Wickersham begins by addressing Franzen, but then, citing a note on the back of his book Vasa: The Strange Story of a Swedish Warship, she sticks on the word furthermore, used there to segue into the idea that Franzen found considerable financial support. She interjects:

Was “furthermore” a crow, a jubilant champagne-spray
of triumph piled on triumph . . .

Everything that could have stopped you, hadn’t.

A peculiar but telling crux, that single innocuous adverb shifts everything—she right then slips into third person to describe a crucial moment with her father. They are together, he is teaching her to drive. Suddenly:

“This is dangerous,” my father said,
when I stopped the car in the middle of the empty street
the night he told me he had lost his job. Forced out,
was how he put it.

Her address mingles her father and Franzen, who was, as she has told us, swindled, with most everything taken away from him:

You know your story better than anyone,
you knew when it was starting: how possession
leads to dispossession: a job, a ship, a museum, a life.
I want to hold onto everything and know I can’t,
but can’t stop wanting.

This is how the writer uses indirection. The theme of both stories is failure. Franzen’s ultimate loss and then her father’s, which undermines him as well as the family. If this subtlest shift, her turning on a single word, her stopping there on the road, needs underscoring, that whole section of the book is entitled “Furthermore.”

~

Wickersham’s father loved sailing-ships. He had a model of the Cutty Sark in his office at home, and together he and his daughter built a model that he christened the JoanieB. There, encapsulated, is the terrible work of time. The JoanieB, she tells us in another entry, “is in my basement now, held upright in a vise, dusty and spider-webbed.”

Later, she describes how she bought a model ship for him just a year before he died. “I remember buying it. . . Here, I remember thinking, pulling out my checkbook, squinting at this wooden ship—crudely made; crudely painted; but charming I hoped—maybe this will appeal to you in some way I will never understand, maybe it will help you to remember what you love.” “I will never understand”: this could be called the crux of the project.

Wickersham’s references to her own family’s story, the revelations of failure, defeat, and shame, have been handled fairly obliquely, without drama, but then comes a premonition:

A collision is coming.

With the finite. My father’s gun.
My mother waking up one morning
unable to walk. At what point did they understand—

if ever—the ending of their stories.

We feel deeply her effort to hold things together—after the suicide, through her mother’s decline and death, and then the weight of the legacy of it all. She does at times question that work. In one of the most poignant and fully voiced lines in the book, she calls out: “Come back, I want to say, to my father and my mother / Be who you were, and not who I try to make you.”

The final pages gather to a bleakness. I found almost no redemption, except what any expressive work—the fact of it—offers. For the reader who expects a Eureka moment, some final correlation of stories that redeems and gratifies—there is none. The achievement is the portrayal, the inwoven complexity, the sense of a trauma engaged at depth. Wickersham’s is finally a stark vision of loss—but it is not without a paradoxical and significant little fillip.

The last section, “Shipworm,” invokes the slimy sea creatures that consume wood wherever they find it—consume until there is nothing left. Wickersham remembers the ghoulish childhood rhyme about worms moving in and out, “playing pinochle on our snouts.” The worms are the black hole, the void. They leave behind no memory, no traces. Except. Except that she informs us—almost a final footnote—that the saltiness of Stockholm’s northern waters kept these worms away from the Vasa. Salinity enabled preservation, held the tragedy intact—a cold comfort if there ever was.