Pubspeaks

Inviting the Spirit: Louis Bayard’s October Pubspeak

By Jennifer Van Orman, Membership and Program Coordinator

WIW was pleased to host a Pubspeak featuring novelist Louis Bayard, October 24th at the Bertucci’s in Arlington, which was organized by WIW member Barbara LaBier. Bayard discussed his newest novel The Pale Blue Eye, published by HarperCollins in May 2006. The novel is narrated by a retired New York City detective named Augustus Landor, who is hired by West Point to investigate a mysterious death. Landor encounters Edgar Allen Poe as a young cadet and enlists his help to solve the puzzle. Bayard used Poe as a sort of “collaborator” with successful results; the New York Times Book Review says the novel is “[s]hockingly clever and devoutly unsentimental… reinvigorates historical fiction.”

For his previous novel, Mr. Timothy, which is described as the “grown-up adventures of Tiny Tim,” Bayard was inspired by the Charles Dickens character. With the success of the book, which was a New York Times notable book, and one of People magazine’s top 10 books of 2003, favorably reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and Entertainment Weekly, Bayard decided to continue with “literary collaborator” idea. Though Bayard counts Dickens as one of his favorite authors, what really inspired the work he said, was that he was never satisfied with Tiny Tim as a character and wanted to elaborate on him.

This time, instead of using an author’s character as the collaborator, he used the actual author. Authors he also considered for a novel out were favorites such as G.W. Griffith, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Mark Twain. He describes the idea of using Poe as kind of coming out of left field. Interestingly, whereas all of the authors above would have been counted among his favorites, Poe wouldn’t have been at the top of that list. Though Poe’s stories have become “coded into our cultural DNA,” and every mystery or horror author is indebted to him, his influence is so great that we might not even recognize it in our writing culture. But for some reason, the author stuck and he decided to pursue it.

During his research of Poe’s life, the more impressed with Poe he became. Poe is an author whose talents went largely unrecognized while he was alive and he received little, if any, encouragement as an artist. He was orphaned at a young age, battled mental illness and alcoholism, and was frequently disparaged. But by the time of his death at age 40, he had produced a substantial body of work; essentially, he “left no unuttered thought.”

Bayard likened Poe to gothic mansions that he wrote about, and that as an author, he needed to find a way to find a way in. The part of his biography that he decided to focus on was Poe’s time at West Point. This might have in part caught his attention because it seems like such an odd fit for Poe—in fact it probably was; he only spent about six months there before getting kicked out.

Bayard also chose this time period because he wanted to be able to prefigure what came later, what life events would lead up to Poe’s fiction. By using this time period, Poe was still unformed, and easier to invent. He wanted to make Poe a likeable, vulnerable character without being sentimental. He said that Poe as a figure was intimidating, because, as a writer and a person, he was decidedly “creepy.” He wrote about mania, death and obsession, people being buried alive. As much as Poe tormented his characters, he never had a moral superiority over them. Bayard said, as strange as it was, it was also really liberating to enter that world. As an example, Bayard mentioned the Poe story “Berenice,"written in 1835, about the narrator’s obsessive fixation on his fiancée’s teeth that culminates in her live burial and the narrator finding himself dirty and bloodied, in possession of a box containing all of her teeth, without memory of the event.

In addition to Poe’s work and biography, Bayard said he started the project by researching that time period in America. Once he had picked this era, all kinds of questions came to him, including not only what it would have looked like for Poe to be there, but what it would have looked like for any American to be in or around Virginia in the 1830’s. This was kind of a middle period in America literature. Thirty years before the start of the Civil War; James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and Henry David Thoreau were just starting to publish, and it was still another twenty years before Nathaniel Hawthorne or Herman Melville. Bayard researched general American history, including the Hudson Valley School of painters, and certain facts that would have been applicable to West Point at the time, such as its opposition from American congressman Davy Crockett, who opposed a standing army, thinking it too dependent on the British model. To get a better idea of the West Point atmosphere, Bayard consulted the James Agnew novel Eggnog Riot.

He noted that for the best descriptions of any place, it is often beneficial to go to a foreigner’s perspective. He said there were books by three or four Englishwomen that were very influential to this project, including the books by Fanny Trollop and Pamela Neville-Sington that describe tours of the Hudson River Valley around this time.

When asked what it is like to use an actual historical figure as a fictional character, whether he felt responsibility of using a historic figure, Bayard emphasized the obvious—he was writing a novel, not a biography, so he had some room to invent.

After noting all of his research approaches, Bayard gave the advice that, as a writer, you do enough so you can leave it behind. He said to be as thorough as you can, but be willing to throw it out of your writing as well. After hundreds of pages of notes, he said it is tempting to include all of the fascinating things you have learned. But he said he has tried to learn how to be disciplined enough to cut things that don’t move the story along. For instance, he said that for this book, he got rid of an entire character, adding that it’s even harder to do this than it is to kill a character off.

In The Pale Blue Eye, Poe is the emotional thread. There is a poem that runs through the book that he tried to write in the obsessive voice of Poe. Of course, any project like this involves a certain risk of failure, but he has made certain guidelines for himself when writing about historical events and figures, especially that his novels read in a contemporary voice: there are certain phrases and dialog that he vowed he would never use. When asked by an audience member if he ever got the urge to change anything about Poe’s life, he said no. He wanted to leave him there, because, as troubled as he was, it was the source of his art.

Bayard’s next book sprung from this project, another mystery novel set in 1818 Paris. He is creating another narrator based on Auguste Dupin, Poe’s main character in the short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Dupin is perhaps literature’s first detective and in his new novel, he interacts with another character mentioned in that Poe story, real life convict-turned-detective Eugène François Vidocq.

For more information about Louis Bayard and his novels, visit his Web site: www.louisbayard.com.

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