WILD NIGHTS!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway
Joyce Carol Oates
Ecco
Fiction/Short Stories
ISBN: 9780061434792

It’s doubtful that any writer other than Joyce Carol Oates would dare tackle the task she’s set for herself in this, her 21st short story collection. Not only has she vividly imagined the last days of a handful of American literary icons, she has done so while channeling the voices of those writers in these five haunting tales. WILD NIGHTS! is a stylish and original piece of literary craftsmanship that works both as a collection of effective stories and as a literary treat for those of a more scholarly bent.

Oates leads off the collection with “Poe Posthumous; or, the Light-House,” a story suggested by a single-page manuscript entitled “The Light-House” that was found among Edgar Allan Poe’s papers after his death. The Poe of this story has agreed to spend six months without human companionship tending the lighthouse at Viña de Mar, off the Chilean coast, as part of a scientific experiment on "aloneness." Accompanied only by his dog Mercury, Poe confesses early in the story that he is “one of those individuals of a somewhat fantastical & nervous disposition, who entertains worries where there are none…yet who does not sufficiently worry of what is.” The laconic, fairly mundane diary entries that open the story deteriorate when Mercury meets a tragic end, and soon reveal a mind that’s beginning to crumble. When Poe imagines he’s sharing the island with a herd of mutant creatures, his descent into madness is complete. It’s a story as chilling as any Poe horror tale.

“EDickinsonRepliluxe” is the only one of the pieces that is not set in the author-subject’s times. Middle-aged suburbanites Madelyn and Harold Krim have purchased a “Repliluxe” of Emily Dickinson, a “brilliantly rendered manikin empowered by a computer program that is the distillation of the original individual.” Soon after “Emily” arrives at the Krims’ home, she takes on the duties of their servant, while writing on little pieces of paper she stuffs into her apron pocket. Madelyn begins to write poetry of her own, afflicted with what her husband derisively calls the “scribbling disease.” As the bond between Madelyn and Emily grows stronger, Harold’s disdain for the creature culminates in a startling and violent climax to the story.

Mark Twain receives some rough treatment at Oates’s hands in “Grandpa Clemens & Angelfish 1906.” He is revealed as a 70-year-old curmudgeon, the line between whose literary and real identities has blurred, with an unnatural fondness for adolescent girls he calls his “Angelfish.” Twain encounters a young girl named Madelyn Avery at one of his performances and commences a correspondence with her that becomes increasingly affectionate and inappropriate, ultimately leading to meetings at a “secret place” in New York’s Central Park. But when he discovers that the object of his affection is 16 years old, two years older than he had imagined, he cuts her off with a cruelty that has tragic consequences.

The most touching story in the collection is “The Master at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital 1914-1916.” In it, an ailing Henry James, “The Master,” volunteers at a London hospital to care for British soldiers wounded in World War I. When the sadistic Nurse Supervisor Edwards discovers that James has become attracted to a Lieutenant Scudder who has been severely wounded in a grenade attack, losing his leg among his other injuries, she subjects the author to a gruesome penance before he is permitted to return to Ward Six, where Scudder is hospitalized. The story’s ambiguous closing pages, when the dying James and the young soldier embark together on an ocean cruise, are both tender and moving.

“Papa at Ketchum 1961” brings the collection to a grim close. Narrated in Hemingwayesque prose, it is a stark account of the writer’s musings as he contemplates the suicide he accomplished on July 2, 1961. The story reveals a physically wrecked man suffering from a titanic case of writer’s block --- “Mornings when work does not come are long mornings” --- as his mind ranges agonizingly over his life and literary career. The glimpses into “Papa’s” psyche, sinking ever deeper into depression and paranoia, are unromantic and disturbing.

Joyce Carol Oates has made an immense contribution to American literature, and we can only hope that her “last days” are far in the future. These five tales further demonstrate why she is worthy of being regarded alongside some of our most admired literary talents.

    --- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg (mwn52@aol.com)

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