Joachim Glage
The following tale is recounted in Percy Wyndham's gory compendium True Stories of the Macabre from Boston Harbor, first published by Gold Medal Books in 1959. The bulk of the account takes place in 1898, when Vernon Fowler, an old and hard-handed stevedore working the Boston docks, fell in love for the last time. As bachelors of advanced age are sometimes wont to do—when they become smitten with someone a good deal their junior—Fowler took a modest view of the situation: knowing it unlikely that his aging figure would arouse interest, he reckoned he at least could earn his beloved's gratitude by being gracious, and by speaking softly and with compliments, and by bestowing pretty but frivolous gifts and bagatelles sucrées. Fowler was moderately successful, and the two established something of a friendship.
When the object of his affection was found brutally murdered—I won't indulge any morbid longing for the details; suffice it to say that Fowler had nothing to do with it—the intense degree of grief felt by our longshoreman was unexpected. In time it proved too much for him to bear. Perhaps as a way of permanently connecting himself to the deceased, Fowler falsely confessed to the murder, and eventually was hanged for it. A year later the actual killer was discovered, and was also hanged.
What are we to make of these grim events?
Even a truth daily brooded upon is no match for the lie that sleeps in the heart. Even a graying longshoreman freshly in love—especially him—is barely familiar with the extent of the fiction he has brought to life and to which he is now leashed. It may happen that a softly-hummed melody is kept warm in a composer's mouth for some time before the composer himself actually hears it—until, that is, the day comes that it springs from him in a strange and commanding theme (for genius too is opaque to itself, and is a form of bewilderment). Likewise, a man madly in love scarcely knows what he is doing, but proceeds nonetheless with what feels to him like purpose; though in fact what drives him is more akin to the electricity visible on the face of a wide-eyed house cat that has just seen a string dance along the floor. Does the cat pretend the string is alive? Or is it merely helpless before instinct? Does it believe, or, more human-like, is it lying to itself? Is there some greater intrigue at play, something unfathomable to us? Lovers and cats are equally inscrutable in this way (especially to themselves), and are equally in the grip of fictions.
Don't let yourself be dismayed by my use of that word, by the way—fiction. In my view, there is no better ontological guarantee than the fictional dimension: the cat, for instance, is never more real, is never more fully itself, than when it is about to pounce upon an inanimate toy; and artists and lovers, when they are possessed by dreams, are among the weightiest of beings, as is the otherworldly mystic, the poet, the shaman, the grinning vagabond in need of nothing but his parcel, the murmuring monk, the revolutionary, the cult-leader, the brigand of the mountain or the hinterland, the laughing Buddha, the paranoiac, the theater-actor. The reason for this is not complicated: as a result of their fictions (that added layer), their existence is essentially doubled. (Opposite to this, and yet of a piece with it, is Blanchot's profound remark: les morts doublent de poids ["the dead double in weight"]).
We may speculate that, in those final moments before Vernon Fowler's execution, and while he wept tears of spurious remorse, there was more to his existence than ever before.