Michael Connelly - In The Shadow Of The Master - Classic Tales by Edgar Allan Poe

In an absolute frenzy of wrath, I turned at once upon him who had thus interrupted me, and seized him violently by the collar. He was attired, as I had expected, in a costume altogether similar to my own; wearing a Spanish cloak of blue velvet, begirt about the waist with a crimson belt sustaining a rapier. A mask of black silk entirely covered his face.

“Scoundrel!” I said, in a voice husky with rage, while every syllable I uttered seemed as new fuel to my fury; “scoundrel! impostor! accursed villain! you shall not-you shall not dog me unto death! Follow me, or I stab you where you stand!”-and I broke my way from the ball-room into a small antechamber adjoining-dragging him unresistingly with me as I went.

Upon entering, I thrust him furiously from me. He staggered against the wall, while I closed the door with an oath, and commanded him to draw. He hesitated but for an instant; then, with a slight sigh, drew in silence, and put himself upon his defence.

The contest was brief indeed. I was frantic with every species of wild excitement, and felt within my single arm the energy and power of a multitude. In a few seconds I forced him by sheer strength against the wainscotting, and thus, getting him at mercy, plunged my sword with brute ferocity, repeatedly through and through his bosom.

At that instant some person tried the latch of the door. I hastened to prevent an intrusion, and then immediately returned to my dying antagonist. But what human language can adequately portray that astonishment, that horror which possessed me at the spectacle then presented to view? The brief moment in which I averted my eyes had been sufficient to produce, apparently, a material change in the arrangements at the upper or farther end of the room. A large mirror,-so at first it seemed to me in my confusion-now stood where none had been perceptible before; and as I stepped up to it in extremity of terror, mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood, advanced to meet me with a feeble and tottering gait.

Thus it appeared, I say, but was not. It was my antagonist-it was Wilson, who then stood before me in the agonies of his dissolution. His mask and cloak lay, where he had thrown them, upon the floor. Not a thread in all his raiment-not a line in all the marked and singular lineaments of his face which was not, even in the most absolute identity, mine own !

It was Wilson; but he spoke no longer in a whisper, and I could have fancied that I myself was speaking while he said:

“You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou also dead- dead to the World, to Heaven, and to Hope! In me didst thou exist-and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.”

Edgar Allan Poe was presented to me in high school the way he was probably presented to you.

As broccoli.

You know what I mean. It’s good for you, so you have to eat it. You’re fifteen, craving French fries and cheeseburgers, but all they have in the English syllabus is broccoli. Then they make you read it and try to convince you that reading is fun(damental).

No wonder it doesn’t work.

Unfortunately, high school broccoli is the way that lots of great writing gets introduced to us, and the sad thing is that there could be French fries in there somewhere, but we’d never know it. We don’t always give it a chance. We won’t even taste it unless there’s a pop quiz.

Teenagers are the picky eaters of literature.

Add to that the rebelliousness of youth, especially of a girl like me. I didn’t do drugs and I didn’t drink. I had braces until senior year, was president of the Latin Club, and should have been Most Likely to Achieve Sainthood. The only way I could rebel was to skip Poe.

So I did.

And I confess, here in this classy anthology, for an organization I love, among the writers I admire the most, that I didn’t read Poe until I was an adult. Until I finally grew up and, after my divorce, had no one left to rebel against. And when I won an Edgar, I felt like an impostor for never having read him. I couldn’t take the secret shame another minute, so I picked up a copy of his collected works and read a few of the stories. They were terrific, but the one that stayed with me was “William Wilson,” and I’ll tell you why.

It’s the story of a schoolboy, and at the very outset, his identity is uncertain. In fact, Poe starts the story, “Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation.”

Think “Call me Ishmael,” but more intriguing. Poe reportedly had an obsession with the color white, but we won’t go into the parallels between him and Melville here. Suffice it to say that what happens in “William Wilson” is as epic a battle as with any white whale, but in Poe’s story, the nemesis may be the hero himself.

Let me explain.

In the story, William Wilson meets a classmate who looks exactly like him. The other boy has the same name and even the same birthday. (Actually, William specifies their shared birthday is “the nineteenth of January,” which is Poe’s own birthday.) He’s the same height too. They even enter the school on the same day, “by mere accident.” The only difference between them is that the other boy has some defect in his throat that prevents him from raising his voice “above a very low whisper.” Bottom line, the other boy is the double, or twin, of William Wilson.

The boys start out as uneasy friends, then the double does everything to make himself more like William Wilson, except that he can’t copy his voice completely. William says, “His cue, which was to perfect an imitation of myself, lay both in words and in actions; and most admirably did he play his part. My dress it was an easy matter to copy; my gait and general manner were, without difficulty, appropriated; in spite of his constitutional defect, even my voice did not escape him. My louder tones were, of course, unattempted, but then the key,-it was identical; and his singular whisper, it grew the very echo of my own .”

It’s Single White Female, only with boys.

And, of course, a great twist. Instead of the main character being the good one and the double being the bad one, in “William Wilson” the narrator is the bad one and the double is the good one. It’s so much more interesting, and bolder. Imagine Goofus and Gallant, with Goofus as the storyteller. Isn’t he more fun to listen to than the goody-goody Gallant? (Patricia Highsmith, in the Ripley series, and Jeff Lindsay, in the Dexter series, would make the same wise choice. Though the first to do so may have been John Milton, whom you remember from your college broccoli. In Paradise Lost, wasn’t Satan more interesting than you-know-who?)

But to stay on point, in “William Wilson” the title character is witty, naughty, and an effete bully. He drinks too much, he uses profanity, he cheats at cards. His double is nicer, kinder, and more considerate in every respect. In time, William Wilson comes to dislike, then hate his double. He leaves school to get away from him, then time passes and he goes to Eton, where one day he invites “a small party of the most dissolute students” to his room for “a secret carousal.” Bam! In walks his double, to spoil the fun. William Wilson says, “I grew perfectly sober in an instant.”

The double is the buzz kill of the century.

William flees to Oxford, his thoughts haunted by his doppelgänger. He says, “[A]gain, and again, in secret communion with my own spirit, would I demand the questions ‘Who is he?-whence came he?-and what are his objects?’ But no answer was there found.” At war with itself, William’s psyche begins to disintegrate. He lapses into chronic gambling, drinking, and further debauchery until we see him at another card game, with an aristocratic “dupe” whom William plies with liquor to cheat him more easily. Suddenly, the double reappears and blows William’s cover, exposing his hidden cards when he says: “Please to examine, at your leisure, the inner linings of the cuff of his left sleeve, and the several little packages which may be found in the somewhat capacious pockets of his embroidered morning wrapper.”