Louis Bayard admits that, as a novelist, he's a collaborator. His previous book, "Mr. Timothy," imagined Tiny Tim from Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," as an adult.
"The Pale Blue Eye," his new novel, deviates slightly from the formula in that Bayard's collaborator is also one of book's main characters.
And, an unexpected choice.
While Dickens was "a cherished totem" of his childhood, Bayard surprised himself when he decided to write about Edgar Allan Poe.
"If you asked me to say honestly who were my favorite writers, I'm not sure Poe would have popped up on the list," says Bayard during a phone interview from his home in Washington, D.C. "But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how much we owe him. Anybody who writes a mystery or a thriller today owes him a debt. He's really so much a part of our cultural DNA, I think we don't even recognize him after awhile. So it made me kind of reconsider this figure I last really read in high school."
While other 19th century writers -- notably Mark Twain and Herman Melville -- loom larger in the contemporary literary consciousness, Poe's influence is ever-present, whether in a Stephen King novel or the latest horror film. For "The Pale Blue Eye," however, Poe's presence is initially as a secondary character, the central action of the novel involving Gus Landor, a retired New York City constable. Living in the highland country near the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., for health reasons, Landor is called upon to investigate the strange death of a cadet who has been hanged, then had his heart removed.
Bayard immersed himself in the works of Poe and his contemporaries, notably Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne, to get a feel for the language of the early 1830s.
"I tried to use words that were around at that time," Bayard says, "but at the same time, I'm not out to write a pastiche of the 19th-century novel. I wanted it to be something that still can be read by modern audiences. It's kind of a hybrid, really, between the 19th century and 21st century."
Poe's works easily bridge the centuries. But the Poe of "The Pale Blue Eye" is not yet the writer who would pen "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Tell-Tale Heart" or "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," but a young cadet with a vivid imagination. When Landor meets Poe, the latter is an intrepid, often gregarious lad who is drawn to the intrigue and drama of the crime and agrees to act as an undercover agent for the constable.
One thing Bayard accomplishes is a further examination of the life of Poe, who seems to be known to all but is, at best, an enigmatic figure. Referring to some of the curious aspects of Poe's life -- a missing father, an actress mother who died when he was young, a cruel foster father -- Bayard surmises that even the best biographers may not have truly captured Poe's essence.
"He has so many layers and so many complexities," Bayard says, "and that's what makes him such a fascinating person to make a character out of. Not all writers necessarily would make good characters, but Poe has so many dark patches and grandiosities and excesses. Even a moderately competent biography makes him really leap out at you."
Bayard tried to mimic some of Poe's writing in the dialogue -- what he calls Poe's "garrulous, Latinate quality" -- juxtaposed against Landor's staid Anglo-Saxon voice. But the third central character in the novel is silent throughout. West Point provides a backdrop that, like Poe, is familiar to the public but is basically unknown to those who have not attended the academy.
"It was like a secret society," says Bayard of the academy during Poe's tenure, noting that cadets were not at liberty to leave the campus, save the summer before their senior year. "Once you got there, it was like a little monastery. You had to stay there and could not leave the reservation unless you had express permission. Sylvanus Thayer (the superintendent of the academy from 1817 to 1833) wanted these people to be like monks, to be separated from the daily strife of things so he could turn them into soldiers."
West Point was also a flashpoint for controversy during Thayer's guardianship. Critics, including Davy Crocket and Andrew Jackson, charged that the academy was an elitist institution that favored the rich.
If it was that sort of institution, it certainly doesn't explain Poe's presence.
"Poe spent these rather feckless seven months at West Point," says Bayard. "I was struck -- and I think this is the anomaly that strikes everyone -- by what the hell he was doing there⢠What was an aspiring romantic poet doing at what was then, essentially, America's first engineering school?"
Capsule Review
"The Pale Blue Eye" starts slowly, and readers might feel a bit disoriented by author Louis Bayard's strange opening scene. Soon enough, that misstep is forgiven -- and the patient reader will see the wisdom of Bayard's opening gambit -- as the story inexorably gains momentum. A retired constable investigates a murder of a West Point cadet, and a young Edgar Allan Poe -- who actually attended the academy -- assists in the investigation. Bayard deftly combines elements of Poe's style with his own story; especially jolting is an ending that shocks but, nevertheless, seems fitting.
Additional Information:
Author: Louis Bayard
Publisher: HarperCollins, $24,95, 414 pages
