Customer Reviews

Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway

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In this book, Joyce Carol Oates, (JCO), really shows her skill as a writer. In these five tales, Oates alters the final years of five writers: Edgar Alan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens; Henry James and Earnest Hemmingway. She writes a tale that for some of them is a shocking view, but never without merit. Oates shows truly unique and incredible talent, as each one of the stories is as if written in the hand of the author she is describing.

For example, in E. A. Poe's case, she changes the scene of his death to a lighthouse off the coast of Chile. But the real beauty is in the way she imitates Poe, writing about Poe. In her story about Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens, she imitates his writing style, while being both autobiographical and biographical, inventing some very interesting outside interests that Mr. Twain indulged himself in, but not in an improper or truly ethically aberrant manner, if at least a little inappropriate. Twain's story is significantly epistemological as she utilizes a letter format in much of the story to move her point along, and since there is such a plethora of Twain correspondence, JCO can more easily transport herself into Twain in that writing style.

While her stories of Dickinson and James are equally fabulous pieces, she truly outdoes herself in her depiction of Hemingway, in his later life, married to wife number four, describing his suicidal ideations and attempts in a highly autobiographical tone, with a truly polished `Hemingway' manner that only a true expert in the writings of the man and the history of the man, could conjure eloquent execution of another author's writing style, while still keeping within her inner framework of the psychological school of writing. She analyzes and exposits the thoughts of that old and famous mind in her story, truly creating a manuscript that is worthy of Hemingway himself, and perhaps if the reader was unaware that it was not written by Hemingway, such a distinction might not ever be made, so fine is her imitative authorship and literary craftmanship.

This truly is a classic piece of JCO's writing talent and should be highly prized by JCO readers and literary students of all types, considering the 5 authors she has depicted. It truly is a fine work of creativity, which should be read and even studied for the things that Joyce finds within the minds and the hearts and the words of these great literary figures.

Wild Nights, the latest from Joyce Carol Oates, is a collection of five longish short-stories, each of which fantasizes about the end days of one of America's best known and most respected writers. As indicated by the book's complete title, there are stories about Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemmingway, in that order. And strangely enough, at least to me, the stories seem to have been ordered in such a way that each tops the previous one in degree of sadness the reader will feel on behalf of the author being featured.

Edgar Allan Poe, grateful for having been given the job of lighthouse keeper on Vina de Mar and looking forward to the complete isolation promised by his employer, comes to find that sanity is not an easy thing to hold onto when one's only companion is an independent little dog. Emily Dickinson's end days, as envisioned by author Oates, come in the twenty-first century, not in the nineteenth, and are bought and paid for by a couple who decide to make their home more intellectually interesting by purchasing a robotic replicate of Dickinson's talents, emotions, and memories. The very fact that "Dickinson" would face similar end days numerous times in different homes marks the story as an even greater tragedy than the one faced by Poe.

Next comes the story of Sam Clemens, forced to "perform" as the character Mark Twain in order to make a living because his royalties will not sustain his lifestyle any longer, and desperately unhappy since the deaths of his favorite daughter and his wife. His only comfort is the friendships he so desperately seeks with little girls between the ages of ten and fifteen, something that drives his daughter Clara crazy and that, even in early twentieth century America, had to be a little suspect. This story is more realistic than the first two and it more directly reflects the actual lifestyle of its subject, rating it an even higher notch on the "sadness meter," as a result.

But things get worse because of the way that Henry James, up next, has his days as a London hospital volunteer during World War I so bleakly imagined by Oates. Himself desperately suffering from a heart condition that made physical work dangerous, James, when not debasing himself allows another to do it for him in a most shocking way, a scene that will stick in my mind longer than I really want it to (and, no, it is not the one between James and his favorite male patient).

Ernest Hemingway is saved for last and, although his final days are more familiar to most readers than those of the other four authors, his story seems saddest of all. Oates manages to place the reader into Hemingway's mind in such a way that his ultimate suicide seems almost justifiable due to the man's inability to face the loss of both his physical and his mental powers. It is heartbreaking to see this lion of a man go down with only the slightest of whimpers.

Wild Nights is one of those rare collections of which I will easily remember each of its stories for a long time to come. Joyce Carol Oates has, in a sense, "humanized" each of her subjects by emphasizing their weaknesses, the same weaknesses that, in combination with their particular strengths, made these writers the geniuses they were. Each of her stories mimics the writing style of the author being featured, part of the fun, and yet, part of the sadness that blankets the entire book. I'm not sure what motivated this particular book, nor what Ms. Oates hoped to accomplish by writing it, and I hesitate to recommend it to others because I don't know how other readers will react to the extreme "realism" at its heart. Those afraid to have the images they carry of these authors in their heads changed might best avoid the book because change they certainly will. But those willing to take a chance on it will likely find it to be a book they will always remember in great detail.

This one won't cheer you up, but I guarantee you that this time next year you won't have a hard time remembering what it was about.

Joyce Carol Oates notes where the title for this volume comes from, as she quotes verse from Emily Dickinson:

"Wild Nights--Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!"

This is a book, as the subtitle indicates, about the "Last days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway." As such, there is considerable idiosyncrasy and fantasy here. Poe's and Dickinson's last days, of course, were nothing as portrayed here. However, each short story does capture something of their minds and possibly of, in Poe's case, his state of mind "at the end."

There are five stories of endings. Some are fairly "realistic," whatever that term might mean. There is Hemingway. His story begins with his suicide, and then following thereafter is a set of vignettes letting the reader know something of his personality and thinking. Not an altogether pretty picture, whether imagining shooting his father, his macho views of women, his self-loathing as he ages and cannot perform (artistically or physically) as once he could, his disdain for his fourth wife. And always that self-loathing. His drinking? As Oates mentions as Hemingway is depicted as helping with the funeral/burial of his father (who also committed suicide) (Page 207): "Afterward he did in fact get damned good and drunk and the drunk would last for thirty years." A not-very-flattering picture, but the rage and all else seemed to push him to his inevitable end. A powerful piece of work in this book.

Then there is the science-fiction/fantasy story of the last days of Emily Dickinson. She appears here, actually, as a "replicant," smaller than life. A couple with a rather dead marriage purchase her to pacify the wife but also provide something new in the household. The arc of the story, as the reader begins to detect, is going to end up with unhappiness. The ending is ambiguous and telling, although the story does not "catch fire" as a whole.

And Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens. He is near the end of his life, he knows that he has lost his powers as a writer and recognizes the waning of his physical--and even mental--powers. One method for him to soldier forward is development of an Angelfish Club for girls 11-15. What he does is disturbing to the reader, as he uses these children for reasons of his own. In counterpoint to his strange attraction to the young is his cold relationship to his daughter, Clara, who only seems to want to capture his love and affection. This is a distressing and powerful story of "last days."

And the stories of Edgar Allen Poe, not fully convincing, and Henry James, poignantly done. . . .

All in all, a sort of "mixed bag." Some of the stories are genuinely compelling; others are less convincing. As a collection, though, this volume leads to some degree of self-reflection. I caught myself wondering if I could possibly end up like a Hemingway (doubtful) or a Twain (hopefully not!) or. . . . Anyhow, despite some questions about this book, I would rate it worth taking a look at if the premise seems at all intriguing.

In a recent phone conversation I had with a friend, she informed me that she had just finished Joyce Carol Oates' latest book. I replied that I had heard her read from it at an event in Atlanta not long ago. She asked: "What short story did she read from?" I find out then that THE GRAVEDIGGER'S DAUGHTER is not Ms. Oates' latest and have learned since then that WILD NIGHTS will be followed by a new novel to be published in June, MY SISTER, MY LOVE: THE INTIMATE STORY OF SKYLER RAMPIKE. She is nothing is not prolific. This collection of short stories is Ms. Oates' twenty-second book of short stories according to the list in the front of her latest. The publisher does not even bother to list novels, nonfiction, etc.

Ms. Oates has chosen five of America's best writers, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James and Ernest Hemingway, to include in WILD NIGHTS (the title comes from an Emily Dickison poem). I would love to know how she selected these five and wonder what she would do with the "last days" of Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner and Anne Sexton, for instance. Historical fiction-- if that's the word for it-- is not new to Oates. Her BLONDE, the fictional account of the tragic life and death of Marilyn Monroe is astonishing for how good it is and one of my favorite ten novels by an American writer.

Since it has been years since I have read either Poe or Twain, I cannot say as to whether Ms. Oates mimics the writing styles of those two writers-- I suspect she does-- although she certainly captures the horror of Poe's descent into madness reminiscent of his short stories. In what has to be the most macabre of any of the tales, "EDickinsonRepliLuxe," the poet comes alive in all her enigmatic reclusiveness. Ms. Oates is pitch perfect with the language in her stories about James and Hemingway from the former's dense, complex-worded prose to the latter's famous, often-copied terse, short unadorned sentences. Hemingway in his last days is the man we have come to think of, a chauvinist, in impotent depression, obsessed with guns and his reputation as the "greatest writer of his generation." His once womanizing good looks replaced by thinning, white hair. His definition of a wife cannot be written about in a g rated review. Clemens is old, tired of performing as Mark Twain, afraid that his writing muse has left him, is in perpetual grieving over the deaths of his wife and daughter and obsessed with young girls. In James, however, we see a loving, sympathetic side not usually associated with him as he volunteers at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London in World War I. James is chagrined that there are no odors "of human waste, gangrenous flesh" or "no names for such things" in either his novels or those his companions wrote. "In all of the Master's prose, not one bedpan." At first reticent to read to the wounded soldiers Walt Whitman's "more robust yet controversial verse, preferring Tennyson, Browning and Housman, James eventually comes to read Whitman aloud to the men, finding his work both "thrilling" and "suggestive."

Finally "EDickinsonRepliLuxe" rivals the chilling awfulness of Kazuo Ishiguro's brilliant novel NEVER LET ME GO. The Krims, a couple married for nineteen years who now sleep in double beds, select a RepliLuxe, a life-like, almost life-sized replica of Emily Dickinson to bring new life to their sad existence. "There is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won't receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time." What follows is a story like nothing else you will read.

In a recent interview Ms. Oates said that all these stories are about "wild nights - inchoate longings." I would add that each of these characters, although totally different, is terribly lonely. Surely no living writer writes so much so well and never repeats herself. Ms. Oates is one of our best.

"Wild Nights!" -- the latest from Joyce Carol Oates, prolific novelist and essayist -- is a dizzying hall-of-mirrors where she presides over a literary seance, calling from the deep five legends of American letters: Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Ernest Hemingway. They are each reflected, or deliberately distorted, in the mirror of Oates' consciousness. In five chapters -- discrete short-stories, essentially -- Oates, herself 70 years old, fictionalizes the last days of her fellow writers. She meticulously impersonates, without quite caricaturing, the breathless, hallucinatory first-person of Poe, the chilly remoteness and angular symbolism of Dickinson, the freewheeling, epistolary Twain, the penetrating psychology of James, and the staccato rhythm of Hemingway. The energy never lags. Each story is a nimble, fantastically imaginative exercise in imitation.

Oates, however, is not content with an exercise. The five stories offer a profound leap into dark waters: the secret consciousness of a dying genius. Inevitably, imagining the Last Days of a writer is an eschatological exercise, an invitation to meditate on the final things. Grounding the spiritual in the material, Oates pays careful, almost perverse attention to the indignity of the authors' failing bodies. (Hemingway's liver is "like a leech" and portly James is likened to Humpty-Dumpty "fearing a sudden spill.") But glimpses of the spiritual loom like opium-inspired visions, often nightmarish: Poe, in isolation-induced madness, hears his "ethereal and virginal" bride, Virginia, tell him: "I shall not see you again, husband. Neither in this world nor in Hades." `Papa' Hemingway insists on his unbelief, and yet "it would not surprise Papa that his name was known in Hell and in Hell his most ardent admirers awaited him." Mark Twain, in his dotage, struggles to write what he believes will be his masterpiece, starring Satan "as an elegantly attired, monocled and moustached Viennese gentleman, with a seductive smile. Satan as the Mysterious Stranger who inhabits us, in our deepest, most secret beings."

Oates attempts to penetrate the deepest, most secret being of her literary forebears. She is like an actor discovering the essence of her character through imitation, and in adopting the voices of others she has succeeded in sounding exactly like herself. It is a virtuoso performance.

In these five stories, Oates imagines the final days of five iconic American writers: Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Ernest Hemingway. Each of these is both an homage to the writer, and an often ironic look at his or her work. The Poe story, for example, was suggested by a one-page draft Poe left behind at his death, and the result is certainly something we might imagine Poe writing. Similarly, the Hemingway story has the cadence and repetition of his prose. The Twain finds the old man fixated on young girls, and dealing with the consequences of that fixation. But my favorites are the Dickinson and James stories. "EDickinson RepliLuxe" finds the poet turned into a reduced scale robot and adopted by an unhappily married couple, while the James story (the most genuinely moving of the five) finds the aging writer working as a hospital volunteer in London during World War One, falling in love with his handsome yet horribly injured patients. This collection is further demonstration of what a genuinely brilliant writer Oates is: well worth reading!

"Wild Nights!", Joyce Carol Oates' latest short story collection, lives up to its title well beyond the reader's wildest imagination, offering tales told in the voices of Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Samuel Clemens ("Mark Twain"), Henry James and Ernest Hemingway. Bittersweet, macabre and compelling, these stories are not mere imitations of the literary styles of each of these distinguished American writers, but are beguiling literary explorations of their psyche, rendered vividly as they are compelled to deal with their own mortality. In "The Light-House", Edgar Allan Poe loses his sanity as he stumbles upon a hitherto unknown species of amphibian. In the 21st Century, a robotic Emily Dickinson confronts her humanity and those of her human masters in "EDickinsonRepliLuxe". Samuel Clemens has a most unlikely encounter with youthful innocence in "Grandpa Clemens & Angelfish, 1906". Amidst the sick and dying of a World War I hospital, Henry James confronts unexpectedly, physical desire and passion in "The Master of St. Bartholomew's Hospital". Wrestling with demons within his troubled soul, as well as those of the world outside, Ernest Hemingway confronts them in "Papa at Ketchum, 1961". Oates has demonstrated again with "Wild Nights!" why she is one of the most compelling, most insightful, writers of the human condition.

I like Oates as a writer, I often find her interesting. I don't think it's necessarily effective to go for the jugular quite as much as she does (that tendency to inspire comments like 'unflinching', 'not scared to...' in reviews...), but okay. On this occasion I could sense Oates' interest and imagine her poring over her subjects - their faces, their styles, the mental landscapes they inhabited, and 'Wild Nights' is a very self-assured piece of work (in the world of letters you have to earn the right to take on a project this ambitious). But by the end it felt like watching a surgeon saw off the tops of some illustrious heads to poke around in the goo, as though Oates had gone to considerable effort trying to figure out what made her fellow writers tick, without understanding what made them human.

Wild Nights (the phrase is borrowed from a poem by Emily Dickinson) is a collection of five short stories by Joyce Carol Oates. The prolific Princeton professor imagines the final days of five great American writers. Oates has a fecundly wicked imagination displaying her literary acumen as she examines:
Edgar Allan Poe-Oates places him on a remote island south of South America where his job is to tend a lighthouse. In this macabre tale reminiscent of something which Poe might have produced he becomes mad, copulates with a weird one eyed sea creature and laments his loneliness. The tale is written in diary form with entries being inscribed by the fictional Poe. The tale is grotesque and unpleasant.
Emily Dickinson: An upper middle class couple buy a clone-like computerized doll of Dickinson. The computerized device acts like the reclusive Emily staying hin her room, baking bread, tending flowers and placing hastily scribbled poems in her apron pocket. When her owner attempts to rape the sexless robot the wife and Emily bond in rebellious acts. Weird but fascinating worthy of a Twilight Zone episode. The tale will also appeal to feminist in its depiction of male domination and brutality manifested in the stupid male owner's rape of the doll.
Mark Twain: He is portrayed as Captain Admiral Twain whose aquafish (prepubescent girls who are virgins and under 16) cavort at parties and secret assignations in Central Park all to the dismay of his scornful daughter Clara. Twain was disillusioned, in poor health and bitter against the world when he died in 1910. He had been neglected by his father,found American imperialism revolting and was an atheist. His interest in young girls was creepy. Twain is not the belovedly irascible old coot telling tall tales of boyhood most Americans picture him as being. Instead he was a trenchant social and political critic who had been broken by the deaths of his daughter and wife.
Henry James-The dullest of the stories finds the prudish James working at St. Bartholemew's Hospital for wounded World War I soldiers in London. James gets an understanding of human pain and suffering. As a homosexual he is attracted to a few of the men whom he tends.
Ernest Hemingway: My favorite among these tales. Papa Hemingway was a burnt-out, sexually impotent, mentally disturbed man by the time he killed himself with a shotgun in Ketchum, Idaho in 1961. Hemingway hated his mother; his father had also committed suicide. A sad final chapter for a great American stylist. Hemingway was a narcisstic man whose ego was massive; disdain for women profound and hatred of his family gargantuan. He cared only for himself and the written word of his art.
These stories will not be everyone's cup of tea. It helps the reader to have some background understanding of the works and career of each artist who is profiled. I enjoyed them and appreciated Oates ability to write in the style of the writer she is chronicling in her fiction.

Few authors would have the guts to take on this group, but Oates has never been a writer to shy away from a challenge. Collecting 5 stories from various sources where Oates takes on the guise of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Henmmingway, this book gives the reader a look at various "last days" of these writers, sometimes successfully and at other times painfully.

Poe, Posthumous: is an example of the aforementioned "painfully". Here Oates channels Lovecraft, rather than Poe, in a story that drifts so far into the ridiculous that I was stunned by its wretchedness.

Things don't get much better for Emily Dickinson, who is transformed into robotic pet for a couple, leading to an inevitable and predictable conclusion that once again left me puzzled by Oates intent. Are we supposed to see Dickinson as the eternal victim or manipulator?

Twain also gets hit pretty hard but to better effect by Oates in "Grandpa Clemens and Angelfish, 1906. I had to go check my copy of Kaplan's The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography to find mention of Clemens's odd fascination with this group of young girls. But where Kaplan makes it plain that this was a Twain eccentricity that was seen as non-threatening, Oates puts a much darker spin on it, making it effectively dark and disturbing to Twain fans, like myself.

I have not read much Henry James but "The Master at St. Bartholomew's Hospital" is a glimpse of a very reserved old man exposed to a world of damaged young men and who must be punished for the sin of becoming to attached. This is an odd little fantasia with perhaps more meaning for someone more familiar with Henry James.

Finally Hemmingway is dissected by Oates in the sharpest piece here. His arrogance and attitude seem to be well-captured in this examination of his last day. The ego and machismo are well-defined as this story unfolds, examining a man who considers himself a shadow of what he was and deciding to leave on his own terms, abusing and insulting on his way out.
Despite my not being enthused about all these stories, I still can't help but admire Oates for doing them. She remains an intriguing writer who refuses to be boring.