Steller: After 25 years, Tucson author catches big break

Back around 2013, the discouragement was deepening into hopelessness.

Tucson writer Mark Zero — that’s his real name, or part of it — had been shopping around a novel he’d finished. It was good, he thought.

“I thought it was the best idea I’d had for a novel,” he said, “and nobody wanted it.”

Naturally, that made him wonder.

“If it’s the best idea I’ve got, and the best I could do at it, and nobody wants it, and I didn’t have another idea for a book at the time, well, this is over.”

It wasn’t, of course. Otherwise I wouldn’t be writing about him. But if you look at Zero’s trajectory up to then, you can see why he doubted.

Zero, born Beauregard Mark Zero, grew up in Tucson with a pen in hand, always imagining and writing. After he graduated from the UA in 1990, he took up the kind of dual life so many writers embrace. He worked odd jobs to support his writing vocation.

Dishwasher, line cook, ice-cream maker and, more recently, grant writer. Whatever. For years, his paycheck came from working as the overnight funeral attendant at Bring Funeral Home. He would work from 6:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. If a body needed to be picked up, he handled it. If not, he had free time to read, write and doze.

“It was a beautiful job, though, because if nobody died, I didn’t have to do anything,” he said.

Zero’s wife, Rosemarie Todaro, is a well-known local violinist and teacher, and they’ve lived for about 10 years in Feldman’s neighborhood, north of downtown.

Zero, now 47, persisted through five novels, though honestly he doesn’t think he wrote a good one until number five. That one, Blood & Chocolate, was a Gothic romance put out by a tiny company called Giant Publishing in 2006.

Then, in 2008, he came across the idea. Zero is a fan of Herman Melville, and reading Melville’s letters, he learned of the fraught relationship Melville had with then-established author Nathaniel Hawthorne.

They, along with writer Oliver Wendell Holmes, all lived in Massachusetts in the mid-1800s. But Zero thinks Melville had a problem that went beyond the typical author’s issue of not making a living at his craft.

“Melville was raised by Calvinists, and he’s gay, probably, or he’s different from everybody else,” Zero said. “He goes off to the South Pacific and has these wild polyamorous adventures with South Seas islanders, which he describes in his first two books. He meets cannibals and convicts and escaped slaves. He comes back 4½ years later and the Calvinists are still there waiting for him.”

It’s hard to overstate the conservatism of 19th-century New England, he says, but Melville eventually found a comfortable crowd of writers and other more open-minded friends who hung out in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts.

“He meets Hawthorne on a trip to the Berkshires, on a vacation, then he buys a house he can’t afford on a trip to the Berkshires,” Zero said. “The duration of their relationship is almost exactly the duration of his writing Moby Dick.”

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Like many scholars before, Zero combed through Melville’s and Hawthorne’s letters and journals, read their novels, and read scholarly writing about them. The idea that there are gay themes in Melville’s writing is not controversial. After all, there’s a gay wedding in Moby Dick. But the idea that Melville and Hawthorne had a love affair is not completely accepted, because it’s not explicit in the letters, though it is strongly implied.

Zero went looking for the historical novel he assumed someone had written about the Melville-Hawthorne relationship. No one had.

Zero sees Moby Dick — a book that has always been my Great White Whale, in that I can never seem to finish it — as something different than what most teachers see.

“I think Moby Dick is the greatest romance in American letters. I think it’s a story of repressed longing. It’s a love letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

This insight came around 2008, but it took years for Zero to get words on the page. Once he finally finished what he thought was his best effort, he had a 140,000-word monster that even his friends didn’t like. It was an encyclopedic homage to Melville and Moby Dick.

After everyone rejected this draft, in 2013, Zero had a realization:

“I realized this experience of the world was the same one writers everywhere had. They’re desperate, they’re lonely, they feel like they’re not a part of any community, and they have no money,” Zero said. “That’s me. That’s Melville.”

“I started hacking away at it and rewriting vast swaths of it,” Zero said.

He got his novel down to 80,000 words. In early 2015, he started contacting agents. Rather than sending out one query letter at a time, as you’re supposed to, he started sending out what he expected would be four batches of more than 40 each.

He got two hits on the first batch.

“I send the thing out. In three days I have an agent. Three weeks after that, I’ve got a publisher.”

Not just any publisher. Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House — the largest publisher in the world — offered him a six-figure advance for “The Whale: A Love Story.”

It’s scheduled to come out in June, in time for summer reading season. It will be under his new pen name, which switches around his given first and middle names: Mark Beauregard.

It all makes Zero smile in disbelief.

“In February of 2015, I’m an unemployed sad sack,” he said. “And a month later I’m an author, and the fact that I’m sitting around in my pajamas at noon suddenly looks a lot more respectable.”