Mysteries of Winterthurn
Page 63
As to your question, my dear friend,—YES. If, pray God, you can forgive me my years of blindness; and if, at this juncture, you still want your Thérèse. . . .
IV
Mystery now being formally concluded, and naught but mere Life, and Matrimony, remaining, I am obliged to end my narrative forthwith: noting primarily that, the following September, both couples were at last wed, not in Winterthurn City, but, for decorum’s sake, in Contracoeur, where their histories were less known.
The double-ring ceremony, held at St. John’s Episcopal Church, was modest in scale, and attended by very few persons: for Mrs. Perdita Bunting was judged nearly scandalous, in marrying Xavier Kilgarvan, of whom her late husband could not possibly have approved; and, indeed, in marrying but a scant year and a fortnight after her husband’s untimely death. As to Miss Thérèse Kilgarvan and Murre Pitt-Davies,—this union was naturally met with more favor; yet, the fact that Thérèse should so publicly align herself with her sister, in a ceremony of such solemnity, aroused waves of disapproval. (“One might have expected a higher degree of propriety from the elder sister,” the Winterthurn ladies complained, “—if not the younger.”)
The Pitt-Davies lived, of course, in Winterthurn, each being greatly devoted to the education of the young; the Kilgarvans made it a point, it seemed, not to live in Winterthurn,—indeed, not even to return to their native city, for the briefest of visits. And though Xavier Kilgarvan was to try his hand at various enterprises in Manhattan and elsewhere,—some rather more suited to his talents than others—the chastened gentleman was never again, alas, despite the appeals of his admirers, to return to the accursèd art of crime detection. “Such explorations are, perhaps, suited uniquely for bachelors,” he was reported to have said, upon more than one occasion, “—and not at all fitting for a husband, and, of late, a father.”
Author’s Afterword
“AN INEXPRESSIBLE SWEETNESS LACED WITH TERROR”
I will maintain that an artist needs this: a special world of which he alone has the key.
—Andre Gide, Notebook
Of my quintet of (post-Modernist) Gothic novels Bellefleur (1980), A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982), The Crosswicks Horror (written in 1981–82, withheld from publication), Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984), and My Heart Laid Bare (1998), it is Winterthurn that has always been my favorite. It had not seemed like an entirely quixotic plan to write a sequence of “genre” novels linked by political, cultural, and moral (especially “feminist”) themes, set in a long-ago/mythic America intended to suggest contemporary times: a Gothic family saga, a nineteenth-century “romance,” a saga of Gothic horror with its antecedents in H.P. Lovecraft’s bizarre and riddlesome works of “mythic” fiction, and a “novel of mystery and detection.” It had not seemed quixotic—but then, it never does, for otherwise we would not have outsized and unclassifiable works of art, of any kind—to hope that there might be readers for such novels, that seek to transform what might be called psychological realism into “Gothic” elements: taboos involving forbidden knowledge, the powerful attraction of “opposites,” in the case of Winterthurn the seduction of the devoted and virtuous detective by his very nemesis, the (unrepentant, remorseless, defiant) murderess. The Gothic novel differs from the realistic novel in mostly superficial ways, as a dream can be said to “differ from” the dreamer’s waking life, yet is clearly a transmogrification of that life, rich with images, symbols, unarticulated wishes that seem to taunt us, that we might decode them. (But who has ever truly “decoded” a dream? To describe a dream after the fact is a futile endeavor, for a dream is primarily feeling; a dream is a kind of interior music, not to be reduced to mere words.) Great surreal art isn’t the obverse of realistic art but its extension into the privacy of the nocturnal imagination. We relate to classic Gothic works (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Edgar Allan Poe’s “tales of the grotesque and arabesque,” Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, the “weird tales” of H.P. Lovecraft) not because they are entertaining fantasies of escape from our lives but because they are, in their unique ways, mirrors held up to our innermost lives. “Realism” might reflect what we look like externally, how we live, in what kind of houses, and where: but the mirror of the surreal reflects what we look like, what we are, inwardly.
No wonder that (distorting) mirrors and (unflattering, alarming) doppelgangers so frequently emerge in Gothic art, like prankish gargoyles that have somehow seized control of our “rational” beings.
And no wonder that, for many readers, such surreal visions are an affront, while, for other readers, the surreal exerts an appeal that is obsessive, if not addictive.
IT WAS IN THE LATE WINTER and early spring of 1982 that the narcotic-like spell of Winterthurn first settled over me, and would remain the most obsessive interlude of writing I have experienced, more mesmerizing even than the composition of Expensive People in 1967; not until, in the summer of 2002, when I rewrote approximately four-fifths of my novel A Garden of Earthly Delights, for a Modern Library reprint, would I feel such protracted, intense, unwavering and uncanny involvement with any novel. Such experiences are a kind of hypnosis, yet a “hypnosis” in which the novelist is somehow both the hypnotist and the subject. For a very long time in the winter of 1982 it was impossible for me to begin to “write” Winterthurn, though I worked every day, many hours every day, taking notes, drafting chapters and scenes, frustrated and depressed at my lack of progress. Entries in my journal from that time, when the working title was Mysteries of Winterthur, suggest my fascination with the novel as if it had an existence eerily independent of my own:
MYSTERIES OF WINTERTHUR. An inexpressible sweetness laced with terror. The very fact, the feel, the aura of . . . Winterthur, which means mystery, which means Xavier, that fragment of my soul. Growing up in Winterthur; being expelled from Winterthur; outliving Winterthur . . . “The blessed day is imminent. My faith shall never slacken. God have mercy on us all.” (Journal, March 20, 1982)
WINTERTHUR, MY WONDERLAND. Through the looking glass . . . (March 28, 1982)
. . . A VERY REAL, very tangible desire not to finish (Winterthur) but to stay with congenial Xavier Kilgarvan forever. Where will I find a character quite like my “detective” after this? (June 29, 1982)
(Nowhere. Never.)
EXACTLY WHY MYSTERIES OF WINTERTHURN, or, more specifically, the youthful detective-hero Xavier Kilgarvan remains so close to my heart is something of a mystery to me. It must be that Xavier, the painstaking, often frustrated, balked, discouraged and depressed amateur detective so misunderstood by his public, is a self-portrait of a kind: after Xavier has achieved a modicum of fame, or notoriety, in his “hazardous” profession, he comes to feel that his public image is terribly misleading, since the public can have no awareness of the “painstaking labor, the daily and hourly ‘grind’, of the detective’s work: and is woefully misled as to the glamorous ease with which mysteries are solved” as novels may appear, at a distance, to be “easily” written if the novelist has a reputation for being prolific. In fact Xavier’s “accursèd profession” is even more exhausting and harrowing than the novelist’s, for Xavier retires from it abruptly at the age of forty, after the presumed solving of the most difficult case of his career, “The Blood-Stained Bridal Gown.” Ralph Waldo Emerson’s boastful wish, or wishful boast, I make my circumstance, quoted on Xavier Kilgarvan’s “consulting detective’s” card, is surely an allusion to, if not a slyly ironic acknowledgment of, the author’s Transcendentalist optimism. (See also William James’s My first act of freedom is to believe in freedom.) While I wouldn’t claim “Xavier Kilgarvan, c’est moi” in the way of Gustave Flaubert famously claiming identification with his fictional Emma Bovary, it’s obvious that novelist and detective-hero are cousins of a kind, Xavier far more steeped in evil than I, who merely chronicles it, in prose; and that both of us are exiled forever from mythic “Winterthurn”—the long-ago, the far-away, the lost, the inaccessible, the despoiled y
et beloved Eden.
JOYCE CAROL OATES, June 2007
About the Author
JOYCE CAROL OATES has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestsellers The Accursed and The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Also by Joyce Carol Oates
With Shuddering Fall (1964)
A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967)
Expensive People (1968)
them (1969)
Wonderland (1971)
Do with Me What You Will (1973)
The Assassins (1975)
Childwold (1976)
Son of the Morning (1978)
Unholy Loves (1979)
Bellefleur (1980)
Angel of Light (1981)
A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982)
Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984)
Solstice (1985)
Marya: A Life (1986)
You Must Remember This (1987)
American Appetites (1989)
Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990)
Black Water (1992)
Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993)
What I Lived For (1994)
Zombie (1995)
We Were the Mulvaneys (1996)
Man Crazy (1997)
My Heart Laid Bare (1998)
Broke Heart Blues (1999)
Blonde (2000)
Middle Age: A Romance (2001)
I’ll Take You There (2002)
The Tattooed Girl (2003)
The Falls (2004)
Missing Mom (2005)
Black Girl / White Girl (2006)
The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007)
My Sister, My Love (2008)
Little Bird of Heaven (2009)
Mudwoman (2012)
The Accursed (2013)
Carthage (2014)
The Sacrifice (2015)
A Book of American Martyrs (2017)
Hazards of Time Travel (2018)
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
MYSTERIES OF WINTERTHURN. Copyright © 1984 by The Ontario Review, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
A hardcover edition of this book was originally published in 1984 by The Ontario Review Press.
FIRST ECCO PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED 2018.
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Digital Edition DECEMBER 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-279573-1
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*“Damsels of the Half-Acre” proved the most catchy of the various names affixed to the victims, by one or another of the sensationalist newspapers. Though the appellation evidently originated with the New York Tribune,—an especially offensive publication that quite upset the more conservative residents of Winterthurn City—it was taken up with gleeful alacrity by most of the other papers; and cannot legitimately be excised from this narrative.
*Bertillonage, already beginning to be superseded by the newer science of fingerprinting, at the time of Xavier’s meeting with the famed Bertillon, is a method of criminal identification, now quite forgotten, in which suspected criminals were laboriously measured: sizes and shapes of noses, ears, heads; length and breadth of the trunk, fingers, forearms, legs, feet, etc. I hope the reader will forgive Xavier for having failed to lead a crusade in his native country for this cumbersome means of detective work, despite his rash promise.
*Though it was never officially announced, word had spread in certain Winterthurn circles that the Shaw family had commissioned Allan Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency to determine if Isaac Rosenwald was in truth the murderer of Eva Teal,—and if the murder had taken place on property owned by them. Whether Xavier Kilgarvan had only heard this rumor, or whether he had sighted a professional detective known to him, in the city, I cannot say: for nothing came of the Shaws’ commission; and no private detective save Xavier Kilgarvan himself is on record as having investigated the case.
*Albeit my research has unearthed a rival composer for “She Sang of Love,”—one Thomas Moore, who died in 1852, and whose Irish Melodies had once been popular through America.
*Albeit I should mention here, I suppose, that certain carping students of the case, and one or two vociferous monomaniacs, insist to this day that Xavier Kilgarvan did not truly “get his man.” Such caviling, however, we need not take seriously, as, amongst aficionados of Crime, you will invariably find eccentric personalities who argue, for instance, that Miss Madeleine Smith was blameless of the charges laid against her; or Miss Lizzie Borden; or that Jack the Ripper did not exist, or was a renowned surgeon, etc. The more perverse a notion, the more inclined are certain temperaments to believe it!
*By the time of our present narrative, Xavier Kilgarvan had been struck on the head from behind so often, no one has offered a very convincing estimate; and, with nearly as much frequency, he was stabbed,—by way of instruments as divers as ice picks, nail scissors, fish forks, et al., in addition to knives. Upon one singularly disagreeable occasion, he was trussed up in a tarpaulin, and thrown into the freezing East River; upon another, he was bound with yards of wire, and left in a baker’s oven, to die a most wretched death,—saved at the last possible minute, as it turned out, by his own ingenuity. On the West Coast, he was once set upon by a pair of ferocious mastiffs (with ugly scars on his ankles and legs to show for it): in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he was near-devoured by a three-hundred-pound sow: in a luxurious resort in Barbados, he was nearly pecked to death by an African parrot, of the giant species. In addition, he had come very close to dying beneath the hooves of wild horses; and fifty feet below the surface of the earth, in a mining shaft in West Virginia. Most frequently, as one might suppose, he was shot at, though rarely shot: for, despite these
incidents, Xavier Kilgarvan led a remarkably charmed life, in never having been seriously wounded; or laid up in the hospital for more than a week. The only disfigurement on his face, after these many years, was the pebble-size scar at his left temple, which was queerly achromatic of hue, and grew more livid and pronounced, and, as it were, disfiguring, when his color was up.