“The Belle of Sleepy Hollow”
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” by Washington Irving, is ingrained in American culture. As I was rereading the story yet again, I was amused by its timeless humor, yes, but also struck by its dated stereotypes. Ichabod is a regional comic character, but he’s also an American dreamer. Katrina Van Tassel is the physical and financial prize for which he and Brom Bones are competing under the harvest moon. But have you ever noticed? Her role is no bigger than, nor much different from, that of the luscious fruit and savory meat at the autumnal feast. We’re never inside her head. Idly, I began wondering what she had at stake in this world. What did she think of her two suitors? How did she see her future? Gradually, Katrina’s perspective, Katrina’s story, came to life in my imagination.
“Goodman Brown’s Curse”
Students, critics, teachers, and scholars over the decades have tested their interpretive skills on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.” Is it, say, a Puritan guilt-trip, a critique of Calvinism, a Christian parable, a Freudian riddle, all or none of the above? Most of the story depicts a single night in the life of the newly-married Brown, after which the author zeroes in on the ambiguity of what happened but the certainty of its aftermath—a life-long obsession with the sinfulness of humankind. For Hawthorne, Brown’s middle years are irrelevant to the moral arc of the soul’s damage, and so he jumps to Brown’s dying day. I love the tale’s economy, and yet the Brown who interests me is that man in mid-life, where obsessions and their costs are re-engaged and re-seen. One such drama is my tale.
“A Purloined Tale”
Those who love short stories owe a debt to Edgar Allan Poe for defining the genre as we’ve known it since the 19th century. His “unity of effect” is legendary, and in pursuit of that ideal he wrote many a tale of terror and invented the detective story. For me, however, what lingered was his own story, a tale of abandonment and morbidity, inseparable from the diseased beauty of his imagination. Inspired by Poe’s own fascination with doubling, I decided to write a new detective story in which he was the detective’s friend—a role given, in the original, to a reader-surrogate. The fate of this friend would comment on the life of the tragic genius. Or so I hoped, as I was drawn more and more deeply into that dark place, the mind of E. A. Poe.
“Bartleby, the Early Years”
It is impossible to revisit Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe without thinking about Melville, and if you limit yourself to the short fiction, you cannot avoid “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” It is the white whale of American short stories, about a soul who’d “prefer not to” engage with appeals to reason or fellow feeling. Like the bourgeois lawyer who employs him, we’re baffled by his impenetrability—a human copy-machine in a dead-end office—and read into it Melville’s quarrel with the universe. And yet, I could not help asking today’s questions: what social circumstances, what parental influence, what national ethos or personal trauma, made Bartleby the way he is? And it occurred to me to look not in some madhouse of despair but in the greenest fields of Transcendentalism. Where better to find the origin of such cosmic disillusionment?
“Sylvy and the White Heron”
I needed no prompting to turn from the founding fathers of American short fiction to one of its spiritual mothers, the local colorist Sarah Orne Jewett. Her most famous story, “The White Heron,” is a mere wisp of a tale that has survived the symbol-hunting fervor of generations. On the surface, hers is a simple world, seen here through the innocent eyes of a girl-child who must decide between the lure of a glimpsed womanhood and her instinctual love for plants and animals. Sylvy chooses to save the life of her soulmate, the white heron, in what is likely to seem a romantic gesture. Yet this is a story from an era of national growing pains. Jewett’s Maine was disappearing. Professionalism and commercialism were supplanting the old habits of the fishing villages. If it was tempting to paint a younger Bartleby, it was just as compelling to imagine an older Sylvy.
“Désirée’s Family”
The racial history of America is a manifold tragedy, grasped, in her way, by Kate Chopin (b. 1850), who was white, Creole, proto-feminist, and wryly frank in her quaint realism. A great many of her antebellum tales feature relationships between local gentry and their slaves, in what must be viewed, retroactively, as a window on social history. Who, by deliberate choice, would re-enter that scene, implying an acceptance of its normalcy? Doing so might seem to require more than the universal passport of the imagination. I can say only that I was lured by the resonant humanity of all her characters, white or black, male or female. “Désirée’s Baby” is a vivid story with a surprise ending condemning its reigning world view, and I couldn’t resist the temptation to surprise readers with a follow-up tale set after the Civil War.
“Grandison’s Wife”
Charles W. Chesnutt hasn’t the name-recognition of a Poe or Melville, yet the dialect story “The Passing of Grandison” is cherished by everyone familiar with Southern fiction, with its tradition of tall tales, and with the subversive humor by which a subjugated race outfoxes those in power. Suffice it to say that “passing,” a term usually applied to persons of color pretending to be white, undergoes an ironic twist both poignant and hilarious. In this slowly unfolding tale, as in the Irving story, I was struck by a female character present in name only, yet positioned, it seemed to me, to reveal much about the social and emotional stresses of the story-world. And so I shifted the narrative focus to the young female slave who might well have been driven, for the very first time in her life, to make a choice.
”Revisiting the Jolly Corner”
If Poe is known for brevity, Henry James is both loved and hated for the longeurs of his syntax. The wonder of his prose lies in its microscopic revelations, its pin-point disclosures. The novel is his métier, and yet, surprisingly, he wrote a number of short stories that are fixtures in the canon. One of these, “The Jolly Corner,” is both a ghost story and a portrait of New York just after the Gilded Age, at the beginning of the 20th century. To his uneasy regret, the decencies of old gentility had given way to the crass energies of new money. James, like Poe, was intrigued by doubling, and imagined a tale in which a returning expatriate meets the ghost of the man he’d have been if he’d never left America. For me, it was but a further sleight of hand to switch their identities in another tale of man-meets-ghost.
“Hills Like Gray Elephants”
Having been at home in the nineteenth century, with only a slight nod to the modern age via James, I could not help feeling the air change as I turned to Ernest Hemingway. Cultural icon, feminist target, stylistic guru, and inventor of the modern short story, he is inescapable. His minimalist tales are tattooed on our brains. That is certainly the case with “Hills Like White Elephants.” For the first time, I felt little kinship with an author I admired. Rereading the story, I saw yet again what we’re meant to see—the absence of any true connection between this “man” and this “girl.” Thin-skinned and self-absorbed, they will continue to devour each other, ounce by ounce, day by day. And when I understood the pathos beneath the pettiness, I knew I was meant to see that, too, and I needed to write that story.
“The Belle of Sleepy Hollow”
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” by Washington Irving, is ingrained in American culture. As I was rereading the story yet again, I was amused by its timeless humor, yes, but also struck by its dated stereotypes. Ichabod is a regional comic character, but he’s also an American dreamer. Katrina Van Tassel is the physical and financial prize for which he and Brom Bones are competing under the harvest moon. But have you ever noticed? Her role is no bigger than, nor much different from, that of the luscious fruit and savory meat at the autumnal feast. We’re never inside her head. Idly, I began wondering what she had at stake in this world. What did she think of her two suitors? How did she see her future? Gradually, Katrina’s perspective, Katrina’s story, came to life in my imagination.
“Goodman Brown’s Curse”
Students, critics, teachers, and scholars over the decades have tested their interpretive skills on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.” Is it, say, a Puritan guilt-trip, a critique of Calvinism, a Christian parable, a Freudian riddle, all or none of the above? Most of the story depicts a single night in the life of the newly-married Brown, after which the author zeroes in on the ambiguity of what happened but the certainty of its aftermath—a life-long obsession with the sinfulness of humankind. For Hawthorne, Brown’s middle years are irrelevant to the moral arc of the soul’s damage, and so he jumps to Brown’s dying day. I love the tale’s economy, and yet the Brown who interests me is that man in mid-life, where obsessions and their costs are re-engaged and re-seen. One such drama is my tale.
“A Purloined Tale”
Those who love short stories owe a debt to Edgar Allan Poe for defining the genre as we’ve known it since the 19th century. His “unity of effect” is legendary, and in pursuit of that ideal he wrote many a tale of terror and invented the detective story. For me, however, what lingered was his own story, a tale of abandonment and morbidity, inseparable from the diseased beauty of his imagination. Inspired by Poe’s own fascination with doubling, I decided to write a new detective story in which he was the detective’s friend—a role given, in the original, to a reader-surrogate. The fate of this friend would comment on the life of the tragic genius. Or so I hoped, as I was drawn more and more deeply into that dark place, the mind of E. A. Poe.
“The Belle of Sleepy Hollow”
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” by Washington Irving, is ingrained in American culture. As I was rereading the story yet again, I was amused by its timeless humor, yes, but also struck by its dated stereotypes. Ichabod is a regional comic character, but he’s also an American dreamer. Katrina Van Tassel is the physical and financial prize for which he and Brom Bones are competing under the harvest moon. But have you ever noticed? Her role is no bigger than, nor much different from, that of the luscious fruit and savory meat at the autumnal feast. We’re never inside her head. Idly, I began wondering what she had at stake in this world. What did she think of her two suitors? How did she see her future? Gradually, Katrina’s perspective, Katrina’s story, came to life in my imagination.
“Goodman Brown’s Curse”
Students, critics, teachers, and scholars over the decades have tested their interpretive skills on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.” Is it, say, a Puritan guilt-trip, a critique of Calvinism, a Christian parable, a Freudian riddle, all or none of the above? Most of the story depicts a single night in the life of the newly-married Brown, after which the author zeroes in on the ambiguity of what happened but the certainty of its aftermath—a life-long obsession with the sinfulness of humankind. For Hawthorne, Brown’s middle years are irrelevant to the moral arc of the soul’s damage, and so he jumps to Brown’s dying day. I love the tale’s economy, and yet the Brown who interests me is that man in mid-life, where obsessions and their costs are re-engaged and re-seen. One such drama is my tale.
“A Purloined Tale”
Those who love short stories owe a debt to Edgar Allan Poe for defining the genre as we’ve known it since the 19th century. His “unity of effect” is legendary, and in pursuit of that ideal he wrote many a tale of terror and invented the detective story. For me, however, what lingered was his own story, a tale of abandonment and morbidity, inseparable from the diseased beauty of his imagination. Inspired by Poe’s own fascination with doubling, I decided to write a new detective story in which he was the detective’s friend—a role given, in the original, to a reader-surrogate. The fate of this friend would comment on the life of the tragic genius. Or so I hoped, as I was drawn more and more deeply into that dark place, the mind of E. A. Poe.
