Teenagers are the picky eaters of literature.
Add to that the rebelliousness of youth, especially of a girl like me. I didn’t do drugs and I didn’t drink. I had braces until senior year, was president of the Latin Club, and should have been Most Likely to Achieve Sainthood. The only way I could rebel was to skip Poe.
So I did.
And I confess, here in this classy anthology, for an organization I love, among the writers I admire the most, that I didn’t read Poe until I was an adult. Until I finally grew up and, after my divorce, had no one left to rebel against. And when I won an Edgar, I felt like an impostor for never having read him. I couldn’t take the secret shame another minute, so I picked up a copy of his collected works and read a few of the stories. They were terrific, but the one that stayed with me was “William Wilson,” and I’ll tell you why.
It’s the story of a schoolboy, and at the very outset, his identity is uncertain. In fact, Poe starts the story, “Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation.”
Think “Call me Ishmael,” but more intriguing. Poe reportedly had an obsession with the color white, but we won’t go into the parallels between him and Melville here. Suffice it to say that what happens in “William Wilson” is as epic a battle as with any white whale, but in Poe’s story, the nemesis may be the hero himself.
Let me explain.
In the story, William Wilson meets a classmate who looks exactly like him. The other boy has the same name and even the same birthday. (Actually, William specifies their shared birthday is “the nineteenth of January,” which is Poe’s own birthday.) He’s the same height too. They even enter the school on the same day, “by mere accident.” The only difference between them is that the other boy has some defect in his throat that prevents him from raising his voice “above a very low whisper.” Bottom line, the other boy is the double, or twin, of William Wilson.
The boys start out as uneasy friends, then the double does everything to make himself more like William Wilson, except that he can’t copy his voice completely. William says, “His cue, which was to perfect an imitation of myself, lay both in words and in actions; and most admirably did he play his part. My dress it was an easy matter to copy; my gait and general manner were, without difficulty, appropriated; in spite of his constitutional defect, even my voice did not escape him. My louder tones were, of course, unattempted, but then the key,-it was identical; and his singular whisper, it grew the very echo of my own.”
It’s Single White Female, only with boys.
And, of course, a great twist. Instead of the main character being the good one and the double being the bad one, in “William Wilson” the narrator is the bad one and the double is the good one. It’s so much more interesting, and bolder. Imagine Goofus and Gallant, with Goofus as the storyteller. Isn’t he more fun to listen to than the goody-goody Gallant? (Patricia Highsmith, in the Ripley series, and Jeff Lindsay, in the Dexter series, would make the same wise choice. Though the first to do so may have been John Milton, whom you remember from your college broccoli. In Paradise Lost, wasn’t Satan more interesting than you-know-who?)
But to stay on point, in “William Wilson” the title character is witty, naughty, and an effete bully. He drinks too much, he uses profanity, he cheats at cards. His double is nicer, kinder, and more considerate in every respect. In time, William Wilson comes to dislike, then hate his double. He leaves school to get away from him, then time passes and he goes to Eton, where one day he invites “a small party of the most dissolute students” to his room for “a secret carousal.” Bam! In walks his double, to spoil the fun. William Wilson says, “I grew perfectly sober in an instant.”
The double is the buzz kill of the century.
William flees to Oxford, his thoughts haunted by his doppelgänger. He says, “[A]gain, and again, in secret communion with my own spirit, would I demand the questions ‘Who is he?-whence came he?-and what are his objects?’ But no answer was there found.” At war with itself, William’s psyche begins to disintegrate. He lapses into chronic gambling, drinking, and further debauchery until we see him at another card game, with an aristocratic “dupe” whom William plies with liquor to cheat him more easily. Suddenly, the double reappears and blows William’s cover, exposing his hidden cards when he says: “Please to examine, at your leisure, the inner linings of the cuff of his left sleeve, and the several little packages which may be found in the somewhat capacious pockets of his embroidered morning wrapper.”
Busted.
William hurries to Paris, then to Rome, decompensating further, and during a ball at carnival his lecherous eye falls upon the beautiful wife of a duke. Out of the blue, the double appears, this time masked and caped, to thwart our hero’s misdeed. The two fall into a sword fight, and-
Well, I can’t give away the surprise ending.
You’re probably thinking that you can predict the ending, but it’s more ambiguous than it first appears. I think I have a good guess about what happens, but I won’t ruin it for you, and sometimes I’m not sure my guess is right anyway. I checked online to read criticisms of the story’s ending, but all I found was a Web site called wiki.answers.com, which devotes an entire page to the ending of “William Wilson” but asks only, “What Does the Tale William Wilson by Edgar Allan Poe Mean? Show Us Your Smarts! Help Us Answer This Question!”
I declined to show my smarts.
Elsewhere on the Web are comments from people confused by the story’s ending, and my favorite is from mister_noel_ y2k of Cardiff, Wales, who posted: “for anyone who has read this story, could they perhaps explain what this story was about because I wasn’t sure whether or not the two william wilson’s were the same person or not or whether it was a jekyll and hyde kind of story or whether or not the narrator was obsessed with william wilson” (http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12581).
So why do I think this story is so great, and how does it speak to why Poe himself was so great? I think it’s in the pull of its terrific premise, the doubling between William Wilson and his look-alike. As our friend mister_noel_ y2k says, while it’s unclear whether William and his double are two halves of the same whole, or in fact two separate people, the effect is the same. His fragmented or broken identity terrifies us at a profound level, and when it’s the protagonist who’s having an identity crisis, we’re placed squarely in his very shaky shoes. So it’s impossible to read “William Wilson” and not identify with William, feeling his anguish and his evil, both at once.
And the threat is so much greater when it comes from within, as in this story of psychological horror, than from without, as in a conventional ghost story. Poe must have known that no monster is half as scary as the evil within us, and it’s tempting to wonder if he “wrote what he knew,” considering his own personal unhappiness and the fact that he assigned William Wilson his own birthday. Read that way, the story is poignant indeed.
Plus, Poe may not have invented the Evil Twin, but he certainly anticipated it, as well as the spookiness that comes from the fragmenting or doubling of the self, and the splintering of identity. Sigmund Freud would later explain the psychology at work here in his essay “The Uncanny,” written in 1919, but there’s no doubt that the concept gives “William Wilson” its dramatic impact. And the hold that doubling has on our collective psyche is underlined by more recent examples in popular culture, from benign sitcoms like The Patty Duke Show to the comic-book conflict of Spider Man and his evil flip side, Venom. Think, too, of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where the man looks like your husband but he’s not your husband. Or vice versa, in The Stepford Wives, when the terrified wife stumbles upon her own replica.
Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne novels trade on the doubling concept when our hero flashes back on a self he doesn’t know, remember, or even recognize. Bourne’s confusion about his own identity, and about whether he is fundamentally good or evil, echoes
“William Wilson.” And there’s even a hint of identity duality, or a split self, in Stephen King’s classic, The Shining, in which a frustrated writer takes a job as a hotel caretaker, loses his mind, and tries to kill his family. Not only is the caretaker a double of a previous caretaker, who had followed the same deranged path, but we see how easily Good Dad crosses the median to become Evil Dad when a hotel and a blank page drive him crazy.
The blank page I know well.
In fact, I was thinking of “William Wilson” when I wrote my novels Mistaken Identity and Dead Ringer. The main character in those books, Bennie Rosato, is a strong, independent, and clever woman whose life gets turned upside down when she’s summoned to prison to meet with a look-alike inmate-who claims to be her long-lost twin sister. I didn’t get the idea from Poe, I got it from my own life, when I learned I had a half sister I didn’t know about. That she looked uncannily like me, down to the blue eyes we both got from our father, at first unsettled me at the deepest level, and by the time we got to know each other, I knew I had to write about the experience. You can’t have this job and ignore something like that or you forfeit your advance.
I reread “William Wilson” for the inspiration to turn my life into fiction, and though my half sister is a lovely person, I made her into an Evil Twin (with her permission). The psychological journey that Bennie Rosato takes in my novels was informed not only by my own confused feelings but by those of the entirely fictional William Wilson, and I like to think they gave those novels an emotional truth.
So I owe Edgar Allan Poe quite a lot.
Thank you, sir, and Happy Birthday.
And what is the lesson in all this?
Eat your vegetables.
***
Lisa Scottoline will admit that she got interested in Edgar Allan Poe only after he got interested in her, which is the story of her social life in general and perhaps why she is twice divorced. After she won an Edgar, she picked up Poe’s stories and fell in love with “William Wilson,” a great tale of dual identity. She has mined that theme for many of her fifteen best-selling novels, which is a nice way of saying that she steals from the best. She has served on the board of MWA and teaches Justice and Fiction at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, her alma mater. She also writes a weekly column for the Philadelphia Inquirer, because nine hundred words comes a lot easier than ninety thousand. She still lives in her hometown, Philadelphia, the rightful home of Edgar Allan Poe, but let’s not get into that.
Manuscript Found in a Bottle
Qui n’a plus qu’un moment a vivre N’a plus rien a dissimuler.
– QUINAULT -Atys.
OF MY COUNTRY AND OF MY FAMILY I have little to say. Ill usage and length of years have driven me from the one, and estranged me from the other. Hereditary wealth afforded me an education of no common order, and a contemplative turn of mind enabled me to methodize the stores which early study very diligently garnered up. Beyond all things, the works of the German moralists gave me great delight; not from any ill-advised admiration of their eloquent madness, but from the ease with which my habits of rigid thought enabled me to detect their falsities. I have often been reproached with the aridity of my genius; a deficiency of imagination has been imputed to me as a crime; and the Pyrrhonism of my opinions has at all times rendered me notorious. Indeed, a strong relish for physical philosophy has, I fear, tinctured my mind with a very common error of this age-I mean the habit of referring occurrences, even the least susceptible of such reference, to the principles of that science. Upon the whole, no person could be less liable than myself to be led away from the severe precincts of truth by the ignes fatui of superstition. I have thought proper to premise thus much, lest the incredible tale I have to tell should be considered rather the raving of a crude imagination, than the positive experience of a mind to which the reveries of fancy have been a dead letter and a nullity.
After many years spent in foreign travel, I sailed in the year 18-, from the port of Batavia, in the rich and populous island of Java, on a voyage to the Archipelago Islands. I went as passenger-having no other inducement than a kind of nervous restlessness which haunted me as a fiend.
Our vessel was a beautiful ship of about four hundred tons, copper-fastened, and built at Bombay of Malabar teak. She was freighted with cotton-wool and oil, from the Lachadive Islands. We had also on board coir, jaggeree, ghee, cocoanuts, and a few cases of opium. The stowage was clumsily done, and the vessel consequently crank.
We got under way with a mere breath of wind, and for many days stood along the eastern coast of Java, without any other incident to beguile the monotony of our course than the occasional meeting with some of the small grabs of the Archipelago to which we were bound.
One evening, leaning over the taffrail, I observed a very singular, isolated cloud, to the N.W. It was remarkable, as well from its color, as from its being the first we had seen since our departure from Batavia. I watched it attentively until sunset, when it spread all at once to the eastward and westward, girting in the horizon with a narrow strip of vapor, and looking like a long line of low beach. My notice was soon afterwards attracted by the dusky-red appearance of the moon, and the peculiar character of the sea. The latter was undergoing a rapid change, and the water seemed more than usually transparent. Although I could distinctly see the bottom, yet, heaving the lead, I found the ship in fifteen fathoms. The air now became intolerably hot, and was loaded with spiral exhalations similar to those arising from heated iron. As night came on, every breath of wind died away, and a more entire calm it is impossible to conceive. The flame of a candle burned upon the poop without the least perceptible motion, and a long hair, held between the finger and thumb, hung without the possibility of detecting a vibration. However, as the captain said he could perceive no indication of danger, and as we were drifting in bodily to shore, he ordered the sails to be furled, and the anchor let go. No watch was set, and the crew, consisting principally of Malays, stretched themselves deliberately upon deck. I went below-not without a full presentiment of evil. Indeed, every appearance warranted me in apprehending a simoom. I told the captain my fears; but he paid no attention to what I said, and left me without deigning to give a reply. My uneasiness, however, prevented me from sleeping, and about midnight I went upon deck. As I placed my foot upon the upper step of the companion-ladder, I was startled by a loud, humming noise, like that occasioned by the rapid revolution of a mill-wheel, and before I could ascertain its meaning, I found the ship quivering to its centre. In the next instant a wilderness of foam hurled us upon our beam-ends, and, rushing over us fore and aft, swept the entire decks from stem to stern.
The extreme fury of the blast proved, in a great measure, the salvation of the ship. Although completely water-logged, yet, as her masts had gone by the board, she rose, after a minute, heavily from the sea, and, staggering awhile beneath the immense pressure of the tempest, finally righted.
By what miracle I escaped destruction, it is impossible to say. Stunned by the shock of the water, I found myself, upon recovery, jammed in between the stern-post and rudder. With great difficulty I gained my feet, and looking dizzily around, was, at first, struck with the idea of our being among breakers; so terrific, beyond the wildest imagination, was the whirlpool of mountainous and foaming ocean within which we were engulfed. After a while I heard the voice of an old Swede, who had shipped with us at the moment of our leaving port. I hallooed to him with all my strength, and presently he came reeling aft. We soon discovered that we were the sole survivors of the accident. All on deck, with the exception of ourselves, had been swept overboard; the captain and mates must have perished as they slept, for the cabins were deluged with water. Without assistance we could expect to do little for the security of the ship, and our exertions were at first paralyzed by the momentary expectation of going down. Our cable had, of course, parted like pack-thread, at the first breath of the hurricane, or we should have been instantaneously overwhelmed. We scudded with frightful
velocity before the sea, and the water made clear breaches over us. The framework of our stern was shattered excessively, and, in almost every respect, we had received considerable injury; but to our extreme joy we found the pumps unchoked, and that we had made no great shifting of our ballast. The main fury of the blast had already blown over, and we apprehended little danger from the violence of the wind; but we looked forward to its total cessation with dismay; well believing, that in our shattered condition, we should inevitably perish in the tremendous swell which would ensue. But this very just apprehension seemed by no means likely to be soon verified. For five entire days and nights- during which our only subsistence was a small quantity of jaggeree, procured with great difficulty from the forecastle-the hulk flew at a rate defying computation, before rapidly succeeding flaws of wind, which, without equalling the first violence of the simoom, were still more terrific than any tempest I had before encountered. Our course for the first four days was, with trifling variations, S.E. and by S.; and we must have run down the coast of New Holland. In the fifth day the cold became extreme, although the wind had hauled round a point more to the northward. The sun arose with a sickly yellow lustre, and clambered a very few degrees above the horizon-emitting no decisive light. There were no clouds apparent, yet the wind was upon the increase, and blew with a fitful and unsteady fury. About noon, as nearly as we could guess, our attention was again arrested by the appearance of the sun. It gave out no light, properly so called, but a dull and sullen glow without reflection, as if all its rays were polarized. Just before sinking within the turgid sea, its central fires suddenly went out, as if hurriedly extinguished by some unaccountable power. It was a dim, silver-like rim, alone, as it rushed down the unfathomable ocean.
We waited in vain for the arrival of the sixth day-that day to me has not yet arrived-to the Swede, never did arrive. Thenceforward we were enshrouded in patchy darkness, so that we could not have seen an object at twenty paces from the ship. Eternal night continued to envelop us, all unrelieved by the phosphoric sea-brilliancy to which we had been accustomed in the tropics. We observed, too, that, although the tempest continued to rage with unabated violence, there was no longer to be discovered the usual appearance of surf, or foam, which had hitherto attended us. All around were horror, and thick gloom, and a black sweltering desert of ebony. Superstitious terror crept by degrees into the spirit of the old Swede, and my own soul was wrapped up in silent wonder. We neglected all care of the ship, as worse than useless, and securing ourselves as well as possible, to the stump of the mizzen-mast, looked out bitterly into the world of ocean. We had no means of calculating time, nor could we form any guess of our situation. We were, however, well aware of having made farther to the southward than any previous navigators, and felt great amazement at not meeting with the usual impediments of ice. In the meantime every moment threatened to be our last-every mountainous billow hurried to overwhelm us. The swell surpassed anything I had imagined possible, and that we were not instantly buried is a miracle. My companion spoke of the lightness of our cargo, and reminded me of the excellent qualities of our ship; but I could not help feeling the utter hopelessness of hope itself, and prepared myself gloomily for that death which I thought nothing could defer beyond an hour, as, with every knot of way the ship made, the swelling of the black stupendous seas became more dismally appalling. At times we gasped for breath at an elevation beyond the albatross-at times became dizzy with the velocity of our descent into some watery hell, where the air grew stagnant, and no sound disturbed the slumbers of the kraken.
In The Shadow Of The Master: Classic Tales by Edgar Allan Poe Page 9