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book coverWild Nights!

Stories about the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway

by Joyce Carol Oates

New York: Ecco Press, 2008

238 pages

Dust Jacket Blurb

Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Samuel Clemens ("Mark Twain"), Henry James, Ernest Hemingway—Joyce Carol Oates evokes each of these American literary icons in her newest work of prose fiction, poignantly and audaciously reinventing the climactic events of their lives. In subtly nuanced language suggestive of each of these writers, Oates explores the mysterious regions of the unknowable self that is "genius"—for Edgar Allan Poe, a belated encounter with bizarre life-forms utterly alien to the poet's exalted Romantic aesthetics; for Emily Dickinson, resurrected in the twenty-first century in a "distilled" state, a belated encounter with blundering humanity and brute passion of a kind excluded from the poet's verse; for the elderly, renowned Samuel Clemens, a belated encounter with impassioned innocence, in the form of "the little girl who loves you"; for Henry James, an aging volunteer in a London hospital during World War I, a belated encounter with the physicality of desire and the raw yearning of love long absent from the master's fiction; and, for Ernest Hemingway, the most tragic of these figures, a belated encounter with the "profound mysteries of the world outside him, and the profound mysteries of the world inside him."

Wild Nights! is Joyce Carol Oates's most original and haunting work of the imagination, a writer's memoirist work in the form of fiction.

Excerpt

From "Poe Posthumous; or, The Light-House"

1 March 1850. Cyclophagus, I have named it. A most original & striking creature, that would have astonished Homer, as my gothic forebears to a man. Initially, I did not comprehend that Cyclophagus was an amphibian, & have now discovered that this species dwells, by day at least, in watery burrows at the edge of the pebbled beach: to emerge, in the way of the Trojan invaders, at nightfall, & clamber about devouring what flesh its claws, snout, & tearing teeth can locate. & in this way, Mercury died.

Primarily, Cyclophagus is yet another scavenger; tho' the larger specimens, clearly males, & magnificent tyrants of the beach they are, reaching the size of a wild boar, will attack & devour—living, & shrieking!—such creatures as very large spider-crabs (themselves a terror to contemplate) & a greatheaded fish, or reptile, with astonishing phosphorescent scales, I have named Hydrocephalagus, & the usual roosting sea-birds, gulls & hawks, lapsed into unwary sleep amongst the boulders; &, as it happened the other night, poor Mercury, who in a terrier blood-lust had unwisely blundered into the domain of one of these nightmare beasts. I can scarcely record it in this Diary, I had once hoped to express only the loftiest sentiments of humankind, how, wakened from sleep, I heard my companion's piteous cries, for it seemed to me that he cried "Master! Master!" & that my beloved V. cried with him, that I might save him. & so, casting aside my disgust for the Charnel House, I stumbled to Mercury's side, as the doomed fox terrier struggled frantically for his life, trapped in the masticating jaws of a Cyclophagus male intent upon devouring him alive. Desperate, I struck at the monstrous predator with rocks, & tugged at Mercury, shouting & crying, until at last I managed to "free" Mercury of those terrible serrated teeth—ah, too late! For by now the poor creature was part-dismembered, copiously bleeding & whimpering as with a final convulsion he died in my arms ...

I cannot write more of this. I am sickened, I am overcome with disgust. The shadowy regions of Usher are no more, Cyclophagus has invaded. Not the gothic spider-fancies of Jeremias Gotthelf himself could withstand such hellish creatures! In a nightmare vision my beloved V. came to chastise me, that I have abandoned our "first-born" to such a fate. My astonished eyes saw V. as I had not seen her since our wedding day, when she was but thirteen years old, ethereal & virginal as the driven snow; & I heard her weeping voice as I had never heard it in life, in this curse:

"I shall not see you again, husband. Neither in this world nor in Hades."

Contents

  • Poe Posthumous; or, The Light-House
  • EDickinsonRepliLuxe
  • Grandpa Clemens & Angelfish 1906
  • The Master at St. Bartholomew's Hospital 1914-1916
  • Papa at Ketchum 1961

Epigraph

Wild Nights—Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile—the Winds—
To a Heart in port—
Done with the Compass—
Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden—
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor—Tonight—
In Thee!

Emily Dickinson (1861)

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Interview

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http://jco.usfca.edu/works/stories/wildnights.html

  
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