Edgar
Allan Poe has been given credit in the genre of fiction for the invention of
what used to be called “stories of ratiocination” but that we now identify as
“crime fiction.” He probably receives the glory for this innovation because no
one could find anyone earlier than he who actually wrote a tale of detection,
but that doesn’t prevent The New
York Times Book Review from
marginalizing the type by reviewing it en masse in a column apart from the major reviews each
Sunday.
At
this point, however, let me propose that Poe also helped to invent, or at least
hinted at another fiction genre, what we today call “magic realism,” which can
boast some wonderful recent and current authors and books. This is the
definition of the term:
In
fiction of magic realism the
fantastic is treated in an ordinary way, as though it were "normal,"
part of everyday reality, as in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Besides Marquez, other names associated with the genre are Mário de Andrade, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Jorge Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie, Günter Grass, Angela Carter and Umberto Eco. One
will notice no American names in this list, so once more Poe has his influence,
but like his poetry it is again foreign unless a case might be made for a few
of the stories of Ray Bradbury, Conrad Aiken’s “Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” a
larger number of stories by John Cheever, such as “The Swimmer” and “The
Enormous Radio,” and several works by Ursula Le Guin and Shirley Jackson.
Poe cannot claim full credit for the invention of this genre,
however. Scott Elliott in his essay titled “Warranted Magic: Writing and
Discussing Magical Realism,” published in the May/Summer 2008 issue of the
Associated Writing Programs’ periodical The Writer’s Chronicle, suggests early examples of American
stories other than those of Poe’s 1839 “The Fall of the House of Usher” and
1846 “The Telltale Heart” that contain elements of magic realism including
Washington Irving’s 1819 “Rip Van Winkle,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1835 “Young
Goodman Brown,” and Henry James’ 1908 “The Jolly Corner”; his 1898 ghost story
“The Turn of the Screw” also has many of the elements of magic realism
including ambiguity, realistic setting and character.
Although I am not as well known in the genre of fiction as in
those of poetry and criticism, I have been writing stories as long as I have
written poetry and essays. In fact one of my high school teachers, Mary Flynn,
recommended that if I wished to make a living at writing I ought to cast my lot
with fiction rather than poetry because it paid better. Poe had his influence
on several of the members of the classes of 1951 and ’52 at Meriden,
Connecticut, high school where a dozen or so of us formed the Fantaseers
Science-Fiction Reading Club and gathered a small collection of volumes in our
circulating library at my house. A couple of years earlier, in 1949, the summer
before my sophomore year, I had won third prize in a senior-high contest and published
my very first serious attempt at short fiction, titled “My Father and I,” in a
local newspaper, anticipating by about a year my earliest published poems in
the same venue.
However, it would
take me until 2008 before I brought out my first volume of fiction, The
Museum of Ordinary People and Other Stories, which is full of examples of magic realism. One of the
reasons I was so late with a collection of prose tales was because I couldn’t
stop writing fantasies, not since the very beginning, and I faulted myself for
the habit. I wanted to write “normal” stories, “mainstream fiction” in the manner
that The NYTBR
prescribed, not all this eeriness that Poe had infected me with. But when magic
realism became popular I was ready. I could haul out of my secret locker and
gather into a volume a couple of dozen stories that I had written and published
over the years. In fact, I had long-since integrated that early effort of my
sophomore summer into “The Gunner’s Story,” one of the tales in my brief
trilogy titled “Shipmates,” included in both my first collection and in The Book of Dialogue (see both titles below), which was ostensibly about how to write dialogue in various literary genres but which included, in fact, all the elements of fiction writing but explicated from the viewpoint of a dialogist.
One story in particular from my new book was probably an outgrowth
of my memory of reading Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.” I wrote it at Yaddo in
1977 where I spent my second visit to that Saratoga Springs artists’ colony writing
fiction. I had spent my first visit to Yaddo writing poetry during the summer
of 1959, ten years after publishing my first story, graduating from high
school, and serving four years in the Navy. I had just received my bachelor’s
degree from the University of Connecticut and would that fall begin to attend
the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Until I recalled “The Cask of Amontillado” I couldn’t understand
why I had written my story titled “Vincent,” because it was set in France,
where I had never been, and its protagonist worked in a vineyard, about which I
knew nothing. It is, however, my most successful piece of fiction, for it was
included in the first P.E.N. / N.E.A. Syndicated Fiction Project; published in
seven major newspapers and Sunday supplements from coast to coast, anthologized
in the Available Press / P. E. N. Short Story Collection by Ballantine Books in 1985, and
broadcast nation-wide in the National Public Radio series The Sound of
Writing beginning in
1987:
VINCENT
Vincent's
complexion was as chalky as the soil of Champagne, his native province. His skin was the color of whey because
of the perpetual dusk in which he worked, the dusk of the caverns hollowed in
the chalk cliffs. In these caverns there was wine, miles of bottles, green and
brown, stacked seven feet high lying on their sides in their cradles. But there
was curiously little dust, for it was Vincent's responsibility each day, from
dawn to dusk, to walk down the aisle that extended under the hill into the
darkness beyond the flare of his lantern, and give each flagon a quarter
turn. A quarter each day, no more
and no less.
Vincent
carried a lantern. If the flame
burned low, began to gutter — which it had never done in ten years, he would
know that the air was becoming noxious, and he could return to the entrance
before he got into difficulty. He
would walk in the center of a pool of yellow light which reflected from the
colored glass, stopping each pace or two to turn the bottles with both hands,
reaching to both sides and stretching above his head. He could work extremely fast, which he had to do in order to
reach the end of the cave by midday.
At
noon he would stop to eat his lunch before the great wooden door at the end of
the cavern. The door was locked,
and it had been so since Vincent, at the age of sixteen, had begun to work for
the vintner, who had accompanied him on his first trip down the aisle of the
cave. When they had reached the
door Vincent had had the temerity to ask what lay beyond, but the vintner had
merely shrugged.
"There
is no key," he had replied.
"It was locked when my father was a boy, and my father's
father." Vincent had not
asked why the door had never been forced.
He had accepted things as they were, which was his nature and his
habit. But each day as he stopped,
set down his lunch pail and his lantern, and prepared to eat, he would stare at
the door and wonder what was behind its dark, rough wood and rusty wrought
iron.
When
he was through with the bread, cheese, fruit and wine his wife Melie had packed
for him that morning in the cottage near the vineyard, Vincent would rise and
begin to work his way back up the opposite wall of bottles. When he had reached the entrance again
the sun would be low in the sky, and Vincent would step out of gloom into
gathering dusk. He would close and
lock the gate with the brass key in his pocket, and he would return the key to
the vintner before he walked home beneath the poplars. In the kitchen he would find Melie
preparing the evening meal. She
was a bit younger than her husband about twenty-four, and plump, but not
unpleasingly so. She would greet
him as he sat down wearily at the table.
She would give him a glass of wine. Vincent would drink it slowly until supper was served. At such times he would miss the
children they had not yet had.
Vincent
would sit and think of a daughter as Melie bent among her kettles and pots,
stirring and seasoning, the steam rising from the stove. He would imagine the daughter, each
day, running into the room when he returned, climbing into his lap, and saying
— as Melie never did, "Tell me about the wine, papa." And he would tell her. The child would
never tire of the story, of the descriptions of the cave and the bottles, the
saffron lantern, and of the great door at the end of the passage.
But
no children ever came. Melie would
serve the meal and they would eat.
Afterward they would sit before the fire, if it were a cool night, Melie
sewing or knitting, Vincent smoking his pipe. After a while they would go to
bed, sometimes to see about making a child, but more and more often merely to
sleep.
He
did not know how it happened — he could not have imagined it during those first
ten years, but slowly Vincent, without realizing it at first, began to feel an
ache, an ache that eventually solidified around a center of
discontentment. Once Vincent had
identified the nature of his ache — after many days, even weeks, of giving his
bottles a quarter turn each day, of many solitary noon meals before the door
that drank up the light of his lantern as though it were wine, he began to
think of what he might do.
At
first his thoughts were desperate because they were new and unexpected. "I will find a new
line." But what new line? He knew nothing else. And more desperate still: "I will
abandon my wife, my childless home, and I will become a vagabond!" The word astonished him. He sat and pondered it at noon for
several meals, but eventually the astonishment wore off together with the
possibility, and he returned to thinking about the ache.
He
questioned his lot only at noon in the beginning, never while he walked the
aisle, when he never thought at all, but one day as he was giving a green
bottle a quarter turn he caught himself thinking, and again he was astonished;
again he had something to consider. More and more often he was startled to
discover himself walking in a forest of reflection while he worked, like an
insomniac who starts awake just at the verge of dropping off into the abyss of
dream. A great deal of time went
by, until it was clear to Vincent that he was obsessed. Even Melie noticed the change in his demeanor
and actions, but she never dared ask what was wrong. What could be wrong?
Nothing had changed excepting her husband. Like many women, she simply waited.
But
Vincent had reached the point of action.
One morning as he was walking down the aisle of the cavern he stopped,
and as he stared into the pinpoint reflection of his lantern in the glass of a
brown bottle, Vincent experienced a revelation. He considered it for a long while, lost in marvel. At last he reached out to the bottle
and gave it a half-turn. Then he
continued down the aisle with quarterturns, working faster than usual in order
to make up for the lost time, and as he ate his bread and cheese at noon he
dwelt, in the immense silence reverberating from behind the locked door, on the
thing that he had done.
He
was apprehensive and thrilled to the marrow at the same moment, but by the time
he had reached the entrance of the cavern and come out into waning daylight,
these emotions had given way to great satisfaction. At home Melie immediately sensed the improvement in her
husband's disposition, and she heaved a warm sigh into the steam rising from
her pots. That evening they went
to bed early and tried to make a child — it had been a long while. Afterward Vincent
dreamed of a daughter climbing onto his knee and asking him, "Please tell
me about the wine, papa."
He
replied, "Only if you promise never to tell anyone else what I am about to
say to you. It must be a secret
between us. You must not tell even
your mama."
After
suppressed joy, she promised, and Vincent began the story. He watched her eyes
widen into wonderment when he reached the part where he twisted the flagon a
half-turn — just one half-turn among an eternity of quarter-turns. But
Vincent's good humor seeped slowly away in the succeeding days. Gradually the ache returned until he
once again found himself compelled to act; his mode improved; he returned to
brooding — Melie was disconcerted by the ebbs and floods that appeared in the
character of her husband and in their daily lives. She never knew what was going to happen on a particular day
when Vincent returned from work, and at last even she was driven to desperation.
"What
is wrong, Vincent?" she asked, and what she had feared would happen indeed
did so — he shouted at her.
"Nothing
is wrong! Why do you ask such
question? What could be
wrong?" and he was surly in
his silence the rest of the evening. But a great deal was wrong. Her husband could no longer be appeased
with turning a bottle halfway now and again. In the cave he had begun to turn two bottles a week, then
three a week, and at last he gave a bottle a three-quarters turn before he
reached the door and ate his lunch.
The tunnel was as quiet as a graveyard at midnight.
"What
difference does it make how far I turn the bottles?" he asked the
darkness. "I turn them so
that the lees will not settle out, and so that the cork will stay wet and
tight. But what if I turn them a
quarter, or a half, or don't turn them at all for a day? Will the world be changed? Will the wine be worse?" He seethed and was morose alternately,
for the three-quarter turn had done nothing for him. He was so caught up in his anguish that he almost failed to
hear the sound when it occurred — a slight scraping behind him. When he
realized that he had, indeed, heard something where he had never heard anything
before, he was struck with fear and astonishment again, as on the first
occasion of his rebellion.
He
sat for a long time staring down through the shadows that gathered in the aisle
of the cavern, shadows that seemed to turn into a wall of darkness rising
between himself and daylight. It
was a long way back. He nearly
panicked and ran, but he made himself sit still and consider. Eventually Vincent gained control of
himself, and he forced himself to turn and look. He saw nothing.
He rose, examined the door, the floor before it, and the hinges. Nothing still. He began to think that perhaps the
sound had been a figment of his fancy.
For
several days Vincent considered what had happened, or perhaps had not happened,
and he reached a point of boldness he could not have conceived of at an earlier
time in his life. He decided to
experiment. He repeated the three-quarter
turn in the morning, but he heard nothing at noon. He turned one bottle a half, and another three-quarters in
the morning — again he heard the sound, but so faintly and, despite his
vigilance, so unexpectedly, that he continued to doubt.
Vincent
began to try combinations and afternoon turns — these latter did nothing more
than make his lantern flicker, or perhaps that, too, was a sleight of the eye,
or too quick a motion of the hand as he was carrying it. He was so absorbed in what he was doing
that both the vintner and Melie thought that things had returned to
normal. Vincent had always been a
silent man, and they could not know that this latest silence was of a different
quality, though Melie, who had been through so many vagaries of mood with her
husband, remained apprehensive.
On
the day that he turned his first morning bottle one whole revolution, Vincent
came to the door and sat down facing it.
He turned up the flame and placed his lantern so that its light shone
full upon the enigma of the locked door — the saffron flare fell into the
grainy wood and the iron, and it glowed deeply in the wine that fell back in
tiers into the recesses of blackness down the aisle. He kept his eyes fixed on the door even as he fumbled in his
lunch pail and began to eat.
He
heard it clearly first, and then he saw it — the great door scraped and began
to open. Vincent sat as though
stricken to granite, his eyes fastened to the widening crack of darkness. His lamp flickered, but it did not go
out; neither did its light penetrate into the well of silence and shadow beyond
the door, which at length stood open wide.
It
seemed to Vincent as though his heart might explode, as though the pulse in his
ear were as loud as summer thunder rolling over the poplars whipping in the
wind along the road to his home and hearth. And then both pulse and heart seemed to stop, for Vincent
heard a voice say, from the night beyond the door, "Papa!" — just the
one word, but crystalline, like a single lute string being plucked.
Vincent
did not move until his heart began again.
Then he drew a great, rasping breath, took up his lantern, rose
suddenly, and began to back away.
"Papa, don't go," he heard the child's voice say. "Tell me again about the
wine." But Vincent continued
to edge backward, and as he did so there was a hesitation — a pause felt rather
than heard, a flicker of light or of shadow — then the door began to scrape
again. Slowly it swung to, and
Vincent heard the latch, then the bolt.
Understanding that he had lost something, yet not comprehending what it
was, Vincent faced back to the tunnel of wine racks and, giving each bottle as
he went an efficient, precise, careful quarter-turn as was his habit, he began
the return through amber light.
“Vincent” is from The
Museum of Ordinary People and Other Stories, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2008, ISBN 978-1-932842-16-6, trade paperback,
196 pp., $19.95. ORDER FROM AMAZON. "Shipmates" may be found there too, as well as in
The Book
of Dialogue, How to Write Effective Conversation in Fiction, Screenplays,
Drama, and Poetry, www.UPNE.com, 2004. ISBN 1584653612, quality paperback,
$14.95, 190 pages. A companion volume to The Book of Forms and The Book of
Literary Terms. Order from AMAZON. Stories of The Fantaseers Science-Ficiion Reading Club are to be found in
Fantaseers,
A Book of Memories, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2005. ISBN 1932842152, quality
paperback, $14.95, 140 pages. ORDER
FROM AMAZON.
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