Andrew Taylor: The American Boy

by Andrew Taylor

'I had recently been re-reading Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination, old favourites.'

'The first thing I discovered was how little we really know about Poe's early life, how many mysteries it contains.'

'Soon I was spending more time in 1819-20 than in 2001-2.'

'Poe haunts the writing of the book, though for much of the time he appears to play a relatively minor role.'

THE AMERICAN BOY was never going to be a novel in a hurry. It sauntered into print by the scenic route. It took two years to write. The gap between the original idea and my starting writing was even longer.

The germ of the book emerged quite suddenly, as these things do, in June 1995. A theatrical producer invited me to lunch and asked me to send him some ideas for plays. In a flurry of creative panic, I sent him half a dozen. None of the plays was written but one of the ideas, Missing Edgar, concerned the childhood of Edgar Allan Poe.

I had recently been re-reading Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination, old favourites. I had been struck again by the European cast of Poe's imagination and by the sense of vulnerability, of wounds that had never quite healed. The margins of his fiction are populated with ghosts.

Afterwards I glanced at the introduction and discovered that Poe had lived in England from 1815 to 1820, while his foster father, John Allan, established a British branch of his American import-export business. One of Poe's short stories, 'William Wilson', is set mainly at an English school. It is known to have many autobiographical references.

William Wilson' is one of Poe's strangest stories. The eponymous narrator is a young man who since his schooldays has been haunted by a double – part doppelganger, part conscience. Poe gave both Wilson and his double his own birthday – 19 January – and something of his own background. Wilson is a rich, spoiled child who slips suddenly into depravity: 'From me, in an instant, all virtue dropped bodily as a mantle…' He plunges into 'years of unspeakable misery and unpardonable crime'. His hated double restrains his worst excesses until at last, in a fit of rage, Wilson murders him – only to discover that, in one sense at least, he has murdered himself.

In my original notes I wrote: 'While keeping within the confines of biographical fact, the play could invent a secret history of Poe's childhood. The story would concentrate on an episode in 1820 – the last year of Poe's stay in England.'

Gregory McDonald, author of the Fletch series, once wrote that authors should try to forget their ideas. If you succeed, the idea isn't worth remembering. If you fail, if the idea simply won't go away, then the only thing to do is to turn the idea into a novel.

That's more or less what happened with the American boy – he wouldn't go away. Five years later, in spring 2000, I bowed to the inevitable and did a little basic research on Edgar Allan Poe. The first thing I discovered was how little we really know about his early life, how many mysteries it contains. I jotted down a few notes on a sheet of A4 and faxed them to my agent to see what she thought about the idea I had failed to forget.

She liked it. She liked it so much that she sent a copy of the fax to my editor. She liked it too, despite (because of?) the fact that it was the shortest outline I'd ever written – indeed, it wasn't even meant to be an outline.

But then I had to write the book. I had never written a historical novel set so far back in time and I wanted it to reflect as accurately as possible the manners and mores of the period. I researched how people spoke and thought and acted in late-Regency England, from the mansions of Mayfair to the slums of St Giles and Seven Dials, from the leafy village of Stoke Newington to a country estate in Gloucestershire.

I learned about black people in London and how they were regarded. I studied that curiously inconclusive war between the world's one superpower and a small, pushy little country half a world away: the War of 1812, the last time the British and the Americans fought on opposing sides, has never received the attention it deserves.

I examined contemporary maps and newspapers. I looked at clothes and furniture, carriages and houses – and ice houses. I read memoirs, diaries and letters. I found many useful ideas in the Newgate Calendar. I read and re-read novels of the period. Soon I was spending more time in 1819-20 than in 2001-2.

The book has a first-person narrative, and perhaps foolishly I wanted the language to be as authentic as possible. For days on end, it seemed, I spent my working life trapped inside the Oxford English Dictionary trying to establish whether this word or that phrase could have been used in the particular context I wanted. I became so obsessive about this that by the end I was even dreaming in semi-colons.

But all this was the easy part. The real problem was how to coax a murder mystery and a love story from scraps of history and the oblique hints in Poe's writings. It meant pain and grief and quite intense happiness, as the writing of novels usually does. I wrote an opening 20,000 words and then threw them away (always a liberating experience).

At last I found a voice. Most of the novel is the narrative of an impoverished schoolmaster with a chequered past that includes a brief but disastrous military career and history of mental instability. I stole his name, Thomas Shield, from my own great-great-great uncle. (The real Tom Shield grew up in Northumberland and eventually emigrated to New Zealand. He was a Victorian poet so obscure that even the British Library has not heard of him; the finest poem in his one published collection is his magisterial 'Ode to My Pipe'. He fathered at least fourteen children and was also quite possibly a bigamist.)

At the heart of the fictional Shield's story is Wavenhoe's Bank and the families concerned with its fortunes and misfortunes – and especially the women. The collapse of the bank is based on a real-life embezzlement case, which led to the Fauntleroy forgery trial of 1824 and eventually to the gallows. Poe haunts the writing of the book, though for much of the time he appears to play a relatively minor role.

Writing this novel was a long haul – eight years from idea to publication – but the American boy found his way into the world at last. Now, perhaps, I can safely forget him.