The Lunatic’s Skate

Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806–1867)
From The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century

Interesting Links

“Before the One Percent, Americans Resented the ‘Upper Ten’” (Erin Blakemore, History.com)

Nathan Parker Willis’s obituary of Edgar Allan Poe (The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Masque of the Red Death,” Edgar Allan Poe
• “The Great Carbuncle,” Nathaniel Hawthorne
• “Absolute Evil,” Julian Hawthorne
• “The Refugee,” Jane Rice

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Moonlight [Hudson Valley], c. 1860–65, brush and oil, graphite on heavy cardboard by American painter Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900). (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum)

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Edgar Allan Poe’s essay on “The Literati of New York City,” published in 1846, began its consideration of Nathaniel Parker Willis’s contribution to literature with a comment on his social prominence: “Whatever may be thought of Mr. Willis’s talents, there can be no doubt about the fact that, both as an author and as a man, he has made a good deal of noise in the world—at least for an American.” Willis, in Poe’s somewhat envious view, had overcome the obscurity and poverty of the typical professional American writer by creating a persona for public consumption:

At a very early age Mr. Willis seems to have arrived at an understanding that, in a republic such as ours, the mere man of letters must ever be a cipher, and endeavoured, accordingly, to unite the éclat of the littérateur with that of the man of fashion or of society. He “pushed himself,” went much into the world, made friends with the gentler sex, “delivered” poetical addresses, wrote “scriptural” poems, traveled, sought the intimacy of noted women, and got into quarrels with notorious men. All these things served his purpose—if, indeed, I am right in supposing that he had any purpose at all. It is quite probable that, as before hinted, he acted only in accordance with his physical temperament; but be this as it may, his personal greatly advanced, if it did not altogether establish his literary fame.

By the mid-1840s, Willis was the highest-paid magazine writer in the country and made as much as $5,000 a year—the equivalent of about $200,000 today. When Poe wrote a largely positive review of Willis’s play Tortesa, The Usurer for the Literary Examiner, the editor responded that the piece was “scarcely severe enough but still Willis is a kind of national pet, and we must regard his faults as we do those of a spoiled stripling, in the hope he will amend.” Willis’s dandified European attire led Oliver Wendell Holmes, who would be one of the pallbearers at his funeral, to describe him as “something between a remembrance of Count D'Orsay and an anticipation of Oscar Wilde.” In a review of one of Willis’s travel books, Poe himself complained about how the experience of reading his work is often overwhelmed by the reputation of the author, “whose image is sure to jump up every now and then before us, in an embroidered morning gown and slippers, with a pen in one hand, and a bottle of eau de Cologne in the other.”

In April 1844, Poe had moved with his wife and mother-in-law to a farm near the Hudson River on the west side of Manhattan. Willis recalled how, in the fall, Poe ended up as an employee at The Evening Mirror, a daily newspaper he had cofounded earlier that year:

Our first knowledge of Mr. Poe’s removal to this city was by a call which we received from a lady who introduced herself to us as the mother of his wife. She was in search of employment for him, and she excused her errand by mentioning that he was ill, that her daughter was a confirmed invalid, and that their circumstances were such as compelled her taking it upon herself. . . . It was a hard fate that she was watching over. Mr. Poe wrote with fastidious difficulty, and in a style too much above the popular level to be well paid.

Willis hired Poe to work at $15 a week as a “paragraphist,” writing miscellaneous filler: literary news, announcements, capsule reviews, anecdotes, and such. The Mirror also published several longer pieces by Poe, including an infamous series of articles accusing Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism and culminating in the first appearance of “The Raven,” with a brief appreciative headnote added by Willis. Poe lasted less than five months before accepting a position in February as the editor of the Broadway Journal.

Poe had mixed feelings about Willis as a writer. He was largely dismissive of Willis’s efforts at poetry (“deficient in vigour”), and his works of criticism did not give Poe “a high idea of his analytic abilities.” In 1836, when he was editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, Poe reviewed Willis’s Inklings of Adventure, a suite of tales told by the fictional Philip Slingsby—much in the manner of Washington Irving’s early books of sketches by Geoffrey Crayon. Instead of assessing the entire two-volume collection, Poe zeroed in on one melodramatic tale, “Niagara” (“one of Willis’s worst stories,” confirms literary scholar Richard P. Benton). Poe found Willis guilty of neglecting “totality of effect”; “the whole narrative is disfigured, and indeed utterly ruined, by the grievous sin of affectation. It is this sin, and not, we are convinced, any imbecility in the conceptions of Mr. Willis, which has beguiled him into the egregious folly of writing a long article, in a jocular manner, about the cataract of Niagara.”

Nevertheless, when Poe published a long review essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne, he proclaimed that “the tales of Willis, I think, surpass those of any American writer—with the exception of Mr. Hawthorne.” One of Willis’s early travel pieces, describing a masquerade in Paris during a cholera epidemic, may have been an inspiration for Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”; similarly, “The Madhouse of Palermo,” another of Willis’s tales in Inklings of Adventures, probably influenced “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.”

“The Lunatic’s Skate,” one of three stories in a section of Inklings titled “Scenes of Fear,” has long been regarded by biographers and critics as one of Willis’s best. The genesis of the story can be found in a letter he wrote to his sister Julia during the summer of 1824, when he had just completed his first year at Yale:

I wish you were here to walk with me these beautiful moonlight evenings. I have seldom gone to bed and left the mild Queen of the Night riding in the heavens, for it seems a waste of noble feelings. When I am walking on such evenings as we have had this week past, and amidst such scenery as New Haven presents, chastened and softened in its beauty by the pure and quiet light of the moon, I have an elevation of thought and sentiment which I cannot drown in sleep without reluctance. I really think we had better lay it down as a rule never to go to sleep while the moon is shining. In fact, Julia, I suspect (for I find no one who sympathizes with me in this feeling) that I am something of a lunatic,—affected by the rays of that beautiful planet with a kind of happiness which is the result of a heated imagination, and which is not felt by the generality of the common-sense people of the world. Last Friday evening, you know, was beautiful. I attended a meeting of the professors of religion, statedly held on that evening in the theological chamber, and when it was out went alone to walk. I strolled along upon the shore of the bay towards the light-house a mile or more, and never did I meet with so delightful a scene. . . . The clock struck one, but I felt no disposition to go home, and, as the air was pure and balmy, the thought struck me that it would be a pleasant hour to bathe. Accordingly I undressed, and swam along the shore slowly for about half a mile in the cool, refreshing waters, with sensations which must be felt to be understood. After this delightful exercise I walked home, and, seating myself by the window where I could look at the moon, fell asleep, and did not wake till near morning.

Ten years later, while in England, he wrote the story we have reprinted below and published it in a London magazine. It has been included in the forthcoming Library of America collection, The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century.

Notes: The opening paragraphs place the boys Philip and Larry at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. The 17-acre Pomp’s Pond was (and is) less than two miles from the school. Born into slavery in 1724, Pompey Lovejoy was freed in 1765 shortly before the death of Captain William Lovejoy, whose will stipulated that he “be given some choice acreage so that he might better enjoy his later years.” Pompey built a cabin overlooking the pond on the 31-acre plot he received from the estate. Numerous accounts indicate that he and his wife, Rose, were popular with the town’s residents, and they often welcomed Phillips students at their home. Pompey died in 1826 at the age of 102; Rose, 99, died the following year.

As indicated in the story, students with Calvinist upbringings invariably went to Yale, while other students went to Harvard. As biographer Henry A. Beers notes, Willis’s father, known as Deacon Willis, “would almost as soon have sent his boy into the jaws of hell as into such a hot-bed of Unitarianism as the Cambridge college,” where William Ellery Channing was a prominent preacher and theologian.

“That two, or one, are almost what they seem;” is a line from Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Les montagnes Russes (French: literally “Russian mountains”) was the name of an roller coaster prototype constructed in Paris in 1804; the name came to be used for similar rides in France and the U.S. during the early nineteenth century. In Robert Southey’s epic poem Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), a green bird alights on the title character’s arm. Published anonymously (as were all Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels prior to 1827), Ivanhoe appeared in three volumes in London in December 1819; rival American editions, each in two volumes, were published by M. Carey & Sons and J. & J. Harper in 1820.

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For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the selection, in its entirety, below. You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs.

The Lunatic’s Skate

I have only, in my life, known one lunatic—properly so called. In the days when I carried a satchel on the banks of the Shawsheen, (a river whose half-lovely, half-wild scenery is tied like a silver thread about my heart,) Larry Wynn and myself were the farthest boarders from school, in a solitary farm-house on the edge of a lake of some miles square, called by the undignified title of Pomp’s Pond. An old negro, who was believed by the boys to have come over with Christopher Columbus, was the only other human being within any thing like a neighbourhood of the lake, (it took its name from him,) and the only approaches to its waters, girded in as it was by an almost impenetrable forest, were the path through old Pomp’s clearing, and that by our own door. Out of school, Larry and I were inseparable. He was a pale, sad-faced boy, and, in the first days of our intimacy, he had confided a secret to me which, from its uncommon nature, and the excessive caution with which he kept it from every one else, bound me to him with more than the common ties of schoolfellow attachment. We built wigwams together in the woods, had our tomahawks made of the same fashion, united our property in fox-traps, and played Indians with perfect contentment in each other’s approbation.

I had found out, soon after my arrival at school, that Larry never slept on a moonlight night. With the first slender horn that dropped its silver and graceful shape behind the hills, his uneasiness commenced, and by the time its full and perfect orb poured a flood of radiance over vale and mountain, he was like one haunted by a pursuing demon. At early twilight he closed the shutters, stuffing every crevice that could admit a ray; and then, lighting as many candles as he could beg or steal from our thrifty landlord, he sat down with his book, in moody silence, or paced the room with an uneven step, and a solemn melancholy in his fine countenance, of which, with all my familiarity with him, I was almost afraid. Violent exercise seemed the only relief, and when the candles burnt low after midnight, and the stillness around the lone farm-house became too absolute to endure, he would throw up the window, and, leaping desperately out into the moonlight, rush up the hill into the depths of the wild forest, and walk on with supernatural excitement till the day dawned. Faint and pale he would then creep into his bed, and, begging me to make his very common and always credited excuse of illness, sleep soundly till I returned from school. I soon became used to his way, ceased to follow him, as I had once or twice endeavoured to do, into the forest, and never attempted to break in on the fixed and rapt silence which seemed to transform his lips to marble. And for all this Larry loved me.

Our preparatory studies were completed, and, to our mutual despair, we were destined to different universities. Larry’s father was a disciple of the great Channing, and mine a Trinitarian of uncommon zeal; and the two institutions of Yale and Harvard were in the hands of most eminent men of either persuasion, and few are the minds that could resist a four years’ ordeal in either. A student was as certain to come forth a Unitarian from one as a Calvinist from the other; and in the New-England States these two sects are bitterly hostile. So, to the glittering atmosphere of Channing and Everett went poor Larry, lonely and dispirited; and I was committed to the sincere zealots of Connecticut, some two hundred miles off, to learn Latin and Greek, if it pleased Heaven, but the mysteries of “election and free grace,” whether or no.

Time crept, ambled, and galloped by turns, as we were in love or out, moping in term-time, or revelling in vacation, and gradually, I know not why, our correspondence had dropped, and the four years had come to their successive deaths, and we had never met. I grieved over it; for in those days I believed with a school-boy’s fatuity,

“That two, or one, are almost what they seem;”

and I loved Larry Wynn, as I hope I may never love man or woman again—with a pain at my heart. I wrote one or two reproachful letters in my senior years, but his answers were overstrained, and too full of protestations by half; and seeing that absence had done its usual work on him, I gave it up, and wrote an epitaph on a departed friendship. I do not know, by the way, why I am detaining you with all this, for it has nothing to do with my story; but let it pass as an evidence that it is a true one. The climax of things in real life has not the regular procession of incidents in a tragedy.

Some two or three years after we had taken “the irrevocable yoke” of life upon us, (not matrimony, but money-making,) a winter occurred of uncommonly fine sleighing—sledging, you call it in England. At such times the American world is all abroad, either for business or pleasure. The roads are passable at any rate of velocity of which a horse is capable; smooth as montagnes Russes, and hard as is good for hoofs; and a hundred miles is diminished to ten in facility of locomotion. The hunter brings down his venison to the cities, the western trader takes his family a hundred leagues to buy calicoes and tracts, and parties of all kinds scour the country, drinking mulled wine and “flip,” and shaking the very nests out of the fir-trees with the ringing of their horses’ bells. You would think death and sorrow were buried in the snow with the leaves of the last autumn.

I do not know why I undertook, at this time, a journey to the west; certainly not for scenery, for it was a world of waste, desolate, and dazzling whiteness, for a thousand unbroken miles. The trees were weighed down with snow, and the houses were thatched and half-buried in it, and the mountains and valleys were like the vast waves of an illimitable sea, congealed with its yesty foam in the wildest hour of a tempest. The eye lost its powers in gazing on it. The “spirit-bird” that spread his refreshing green wings before the pained eyes of Thalaba would have been an inestimable fellow-traveller. The worth of the eyesight lay in the purchase of a pair of green goggles.

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