The White Devil

Or: “Every Good Plagiarist Deserves Favour”:

I first heard the Byron poem “Darkness” in the Tom Stoppard play Arcadia, which is now on Broadway. Funny to hear all the “Lord B” references on radio promos and reviews. The Times loved it. The New Yorker hated it. What I regret is that the scene about “Darkness” in the play, it turns out, was performed by the god-like Bill Nighy in an earlier production. Oh, to have seen that…

I haven’t seen the play since it was last in NYC ten years ago, but upon re-reading some snippets (on Google Bloody Books), I realize that The White Devil overlaps in certain conceits with Arcadia. 1) Callow literary shit–Stoppard’s Bernard, my Fawkes–obsessed with interpreting Byron’s life; 2) this obsession focuses on why Byron mysteriously left England in 1809. Bernard thinks because of an unpublicized duel with a lover’s beau; Fawkes learns that it is because in fact Byron… well that would be a spoiler. 3) recitation of Darkness.

Did these ideas reside in my subconscious for ten years, then emerge as I wrote TWD? Or, when you put two LITERARY GIANTS like myself and whatsisname–Stoppard, right–in possession of similar material, they are bound to come to similar, but delectably different outcomes?

Don’t answer that.

The Independent (UK) called Arcadia the greatest play of our age.

Then again, that same august publication reviewed my first novel, A Good and Happy Child, and said “it will have you staying up late.” So there.

A scholar at no less than Skidmore has published a piece on Byron in Arcadia, here quoted for your amusement.

http://www.skidmore.edu/academics/lsi/arcadia/byron.html

Byron’s daughter Augusta Ada, whose life ended early and unhappily, was something of a mathematical genius and probably inspired Stoppard’s creation of Thomasina. Ada worked with, among others, Charles Babbage, inventor of the computation machine and perhaps the world’s first computer scientist. On a lighter note, in Arcadia, after Bernard declares Septimus’s comically nasty reviews of Ezra Chater “read a damn sight more like Byron than Byron’s review of Wordsworth the previous year” (30), Stoppard has Byron admire Septimus’s satiric wit (36), tantalizing us with the strange possibility that Byron learned how to write like Byron . . . from Septimus Hodge! Less strange and more poignant, when Stoppard has Hannah quote the beautiful opening lines of Byron’s poem “Darkness,” written in 1816 after a volcanic eruption temporarily altered the world’s weather patterns (79), Byron seems not only a poet of his past and present, but of our terrifying future glimpsed by Thomasina as well.

Sometimes when I was working on the ms, my inner book critic would pipe up and say: “Only someone who went to college in New York, in the 1980s, could have written this book.”

This was mid-late period AIDS crisis, the phase where, rather belatedly, everyone was being educated about it. And as a college student during this time, in this city, here is what you learned:

Sexual anxiety.

Sex = disease, death, blood, gaunt gay men who are terrifying warnings.

At college, at Columbia, in Manhattan, in 1989, if you had sex with anyone, you basically assumed you now had a chance of dying. Maybe a small chance. But still a chance. Sort of the inverse of winning the lottery. I think we all had this feeling. By design. Impassioned people advocated condom-wearing and safe sex constantly. The art—from Kids to Terence McNally to Angels in America—was AIDS-focused. Sexual boundaries blurred. That increased your chances of getting sick. There was the heroin dorm, and its skinny, beautiful, underbathed people (including NYTimes cover gal Rachel Feinstein; who, by the way, was always a very sweet person)—and that was yet another way of passing the disease on.

You imagined yourself part of a chain of sex. Like a molecule. You are here. You are sleeping with Ramona from art class. Ramona is sleeping with Bart. Bart only goes to school part-time, giving him the leisure to date both Helen and George. Helen is a junkie, and George spends a lot of time at bathhouses….

The outer edge of the love molecule was hazy. Who was out there? What were they doing? Was whatever that was, creeping its way back up to you?

I think we walked around half-terrified; half too young and stupid to care.

It was not an auspicious introduction to booty.

How do the gods make love? Emanating rays. Emitting music. Triumphantly. Painted with gilt, free of guilt. Roaring, creating, frothing, soaring.

How do humans make love?

It begins with you and a woman at a bar, with martini glasses and olives, telling stories you never thought anyone would be interested in, and, taking a break from the energized chatter, going to the bathroom buzzed, and hearing in your head, over the hum of alcohol, a voice; it is the book critic again—the book critic of Eros—and he swoops in to whisper, quickly, so as not to distract you: You are falling in love.

Really?

By the time you return, you have forgotten the voice.

And by the time you return, you have.

The White Devil

Harrow, the elite English boys school, provides the setting for Evans’s gripping second novel (after A Good and Happy Child). Andrew Taylor, a 17-year-old American expelled from a Connecticut prep school for heroin use, gets into Harrow thanks to his father’s generous gift to the school, one of whose more illustrious alumni is Lord Byron. In a cemetery on nearby Harrow-on-the-Hill, Andrew is horrified to witness the murder of a fellow student and resident of the Lot, a dilapidated dormitory reputed to be haunted, at the hands of a pale skeletal figure in an old-fashioned frock coat. Soon plagued by nightmares, Andrew learns that someone resembling this gaunt figure appeared in a performance of John Webster’s Jacobean tragedy, The White Devil, at Harrow in 1803. Meanwhile, cast in the role of Lord Byron in a play written by drunken and bitter housemaster Piers Fawkes, Andrew finds himself adopting Byron’s exotic lifestyle amid a love affair, a TB epidemic, and various bizarre elements in this disturbing gothic thriller. (May)

“THE WHITE DEVIL is part ghost story, part murder mystery, part  coming-of-age tale, part romance. It’s a delightful cocktail: Justin Evans gets the balance just right. His writing is crisp, his storytelling vigorous, his sense of the uncanny pitch perfect. And he’s written a wonderfully creepy book.” –Scott Smith, author of A Simple Plan and The Ruins

Thank you for your gracious remarks, Mr. Smith!

The White Devil is full of sexual ambiguity. Is the hero straight or gay? Is Lord Byron straight or gay? Is England straight or gay? These are the questions that plague a young man’s soul. They get especially intense at the psychically vulnerable and polymorphously perverse age of 17, when our hero Andrew Taylor comes of age.

Some movies succeed in blurring the gender boundaries even more. Here are a few of my favorites.

Sure, there are a lot of Anglophilic homoerotic movies, like with Hugh Grant.

Eh.

Sure, David Bowie looks all vampiric and whatnot in some 80s movies.

Not for me.

I need a little madness in my sexually ambiguous cocktail. Here are a few of my favorites. I would love to hear yours. It’s okay if they include Hugh Grant and David Bowie.

1. The Dresser. Tim Courtenay is a fay cockney “dresser” for Shakespearean actor Albert Finney.  What an amazing film, that will make you want to stage Macbeth in your garage. Is this a gay love story? I don’t think so. But Courtenay’s obsession with Finney has the most aching, empty longing to it; and Finney is unreachable; and is officially the king of the heroic bellow. STOP THAT TRAIN!

2. Farewell My Concubine. The Dresser in Chinese, except with two Chinese opera performers. This movie drove me to see real Chinese opera in Shanghai. Which was not as good as this movie.

3. Performance. James Fox pushed to the brink–and beyond–by a night of sexual psychosis with Mick Jagger. Apparently even making this movie freaked out James Fox so much he didn’t act again for 10 years. And you can see why. If the 60s had continued, we would have had to add a new category: “Metasexual.”

4.  Liquid Sky. C’mon, you know you love it! The most brilliant garbage. All I remember is the line, “My cunt has teeth on it.” And really, what else do you need to know?? This film fried my small town gender membranes right off me, at least temporarily. I saw it with my friend Lizzie Beard. We were lounging around guzzling purloined white wine and smoking bummed Marlboro Lights. Her parents were asleep. I think I was going to put the moves on her that night but this film convinced me that any such move would be ill-conceived, since aliens were just going to suck the pleasure out of my brain with a space-syringe anyway.

5. The Wall. Not exactly an erotic film, or even androgynous; but I’m giving points for destroying cross-gender affinity. Mother, and those carnivorous attack flower animations, were enough to make a boy think twice about the health benefits of loving women. I watched this film in a state of intense stoned-ness. This was unfortunate. The pot stripped away my resistance and the movie hit the back of my brain like a missile.  Afterwards I had trouble ever using pot again (not a bad thing, I guess), and even a few bars of Pink Floyd would make me feel intensely suicidal.

Up the androgyny, the teenaged misery!

“The White Devil is a page-turning tour de force.  Both a thoughtful and learned homage to the ghost story, and a clever and compelling rethinking of the genre, this is an amazing, frightening, and believable novel. I loved it.” – David Liss, author of The Devil’s Company, A Conspiracy of Paper, and the forthcoming The Darkening Green.

Very generous, thank you Mr. Liss. May all your comics be licensing bonanzas.

Thank you, Gillian Flynn! “THE WHITE DEVIL is an intelligent, bristling ghost story with a stunning sense of place, a uniquely frightful spirit, and a band of absolutely charming heroes—Byronic and otherwise. You’ll dread reaching the end—while flipping the pages furiously.” –Gillian Flynn, author of Sharp Objects and Dark Places

A few nights ago I felt very lucky when I got a phone call from a Hollywood producer.

I know this scene well enough to know how it starts: “I have David Kanter for you.” It always starts with an assistant, who’s rolling the executive’s call list.

If I had any moxie I would have bellowed, in an Ed Wood mid-century accent, “Put ‘im through!” Instead I fumblingly asked if the assistant would call me back on a land-line.

David Kanter, it turns out, is a gentleman, with a lot of brains and a great sense of humor. By the time the call was over, not only did I have a film option, but his “take” on the book already felt, well, a little better than the book.

These guys don’t get to be successful without being able to sell.

And the production company, Anonymous Content, has made some good movies, including Babel, Being John Malkovitch, and an all-time favorite of mine, The Game.

I’ve been lucky with Hollywood. The producers I’ve dealt with seem like real people. Real people to a New Yorker. Which means thoughtful, funny, and well-mannered, with touch of brass.

The producers who optioned “A Good and Happy Child” were a little too well-mannered. Oddly self-deprecating, in fact.

I went for a drink with the top guy at the company. He was middle-aged, affable. He introduced me to Robbie Robertson, from The Band, whom he introduced as a close friend. Robbie Robertson was nice. Feeling very cool for several whole minutes, I ordered my favorite, quite expensive single-malt scotch, wringing my hands momentarily over whether I would get stuck with the check.

Then the producer settled down with me.

“I think your book is a movie,” he said, shrugging. “But I’m not sure.”

Really? I wondered. Why did you option it? Then it occurred to me: the only thing worse than being overwhelmed with fake Hollywood enthusiasm… is not being overwhelmed by fake Hollywood enthusiasm.

At the time, I forced myself to believe that this was refreshing.

Despite the camaraderie, no movie emerged (obviously).

I have worked in the movie business, so I’m pretty philosophical about the odds of a movie, based on my books, finally emerging.

But if I didn’t believe it could happen… and that the movie would be excellent… and that all these clever charming gentlemen didn’t know what they were doing… well, what fun would that be?

And movies, above all, should be fun.

Put’em through!

First official review is in. A star! Daniel Kraus from BookList…allow me to buy you a big ol’ drink!

Readers of this thoroughly upsetting horror-mystery hybrid will find their nightmares imprinted with several unshakable images, the worst of which is that of a withered child hunched over a bed, vomiting bile into the mouth of a sleeping girl. The child—known as “the Lot Ghost” by students of England’s esteemed Harrow School—is revealed to be an early gay lover of Lord Byron, brought back to bloodthirsty life by the arrival of 17-year-old Andrew Taylor, who has fled his American school following a disastrous drug incident. Andrew is the spitting image of Byron, which gets him cast as the lusty poet in a school production written by housemaster Piers Fawkes, ex-genius and current alcoholic. Two boys who befriend Andrew are abruptly taken with a horrific respiratory illness, the details of which dovetail with the play’s foremost concern: Who was Byron’s greatest love? Evans’ crackling literary mystery is resolutely academic; part of the climax actually involves the writing of an essay. If that sounds dry, fear not: the scourge of tuberculosis provides visceral, icky counterpoints, while Harrow itself contains Shirley Jackson levels of gloomy passages and dark secrets. Smart, scary, sexy, and gorgeously written to boot. — Daniel Kraus

I had an amazing conversation with my Uncle Freddie tonight. Uncle Freddie is 82 and is heart and soul of southern storytelling.

I sometimes try to interrupt him on our telephone calls, in my New York way, and must stop myself. (He’s mid paragraph! I scold myself. Let him finish.)

Every anecdote is pretty much fully formed, and his style is, usually, to end with a kind of rhetorical question–”Now isn’t that a different world from the one you and I live in?”–or a gentle punchline.

Tonight he told me how, in his day, whiskey was either evil, or medicine. The way to make it medicine was to mix it with rock candy and give it to children. One day when he came home cold and wet and sick, his mother gave him whiskey as medicine, and put him in a hot bath. And–here it comes–don’t you think I slept well that night? We both laughed.

I can’t do him justice. His timing, his pauses, are brilliant.

He got so enthusiastic about whiskey while we were talking, he handed the phone to my aunt so he could go pour himself one.

The theme of our discussion tonight was “a different world.”

He told me about the one-room schoolhouse his father attended, with 43 kids and a 19-year-old principal. They didn’t work on days they had to farm. I know these sound like cliches, when stripped of their context–and my uncle’s honeyed accent. But I lay on my bed listening to him, and I practically watched black and white photos–and echoes of To Kill a Mockingbird–come to life on my ceiling.

He also told me about how when his daughter–my cousin Margaret Evans Porter–first started publishing her historical romance novels, he was startled at the…well… the romance.

He didn’t say the s-e-x word. He said “romance.”

I started getting nervous.

The White Devil has a fair amount of romance in it.

Like the romance in Chapter Seven.

And the romance in Chapter Nine.

Let’s not forget the mild romance in Chapter Eleven.

Chapter Fourteen has some romance.

But of course the big finish–from a romantic perspective, anyway–is Chapter Seventeen.

And, naturally, there are hints of romance throughout.

I wouldn’t call it a romantic book. The bits I describe are, of course, tastefully done.

But… what will Uncle Freddie say?

I hope he will take some medicine, and say, “Maybe we are in different world.” Then pause and say, mischievously, “But I think your world is a good one.”

And we will both laugh.