Order from Amazon
Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway
reviewed by John Murphy
Wild Nights! The latest from Joyce Carol Oates, prolific novelist and essayist, is a dizzying hall-of-mirrors where she presides over a literary seance, calling from the deep five legends of American letters: Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Ernest Hemingway. They are each reflected, or deliberately distorted, in the mirror of Oates’ consciousness. In five chapters — discrete short-stories, essentially — Oates, herself 70 years old, fictionalizes the last days of her fellow writers. She meticulously impersonates, without quite caricaturing, the breathless, hallucinatory first-person of Poe, the chilly remoteness and angular symbolism of Dickinson, the freewheeling, epistolary Twain, the penetrating psychology of James, and the staccato rhythm of Hemingway. The energy never lags. Each story is a nimble, fantastically imaginative exercise in imitation.
Oates, however, is not content with an exercise. The five stories offer a profound leap into dark waters: the secret consciousness of a dying genius. Inevitably, imagining the Last Days of a writer is an eschatological exercise, an invitation to meditate on the final things. Grounding the spiritual in the material, Oates pays careful, almost perverse attention to the indignity of the authors’ failing bodies. (Hemingway’s liver is “like a leech” and portly James is likened to Humpty-Dumpty “fearing a sudden spill.”) But glimpses of the spiritual loom like opium-inspired visions, often nightmarish: Poe, in isolation-induced madness, hears his “ethereal and virginal” bride, Virginia, tell him: “I shall not see you again, husband. Neither in this world nor in Hades.” ‘Papa’ Hemingway insists on his unbelief, and yet “it would not surprise Papa that his name was known in Hell and in Hell his most ardent admirers awaited him.” Mark Twain, in his dotage, struggles to write what he believes will be his masterpiece, starring Satan “as an elegantly attired, monocled and moustached Viennese gentleman, with a seductive smile. Satan as the Mysterious Stranger who inhabits us, in our deepest, most secret beings.”
Oates attempts to penetrate the deepest, most secret being of her literary forebears. She is like an actor discovering the essence of her character through imitation, and in adopting the voices of others she has succeeded in sounding exactly like herself. It is a virtuoso performance.
Recent Comments