Finding Poe among the Shadows

[matt cardin]

Finding Poe among the shadows
By James Sallis | June 19, 2005

It is Edgar Allan Poe's fate forever to be misunderstood. Ostracized by power brokers among his literary contemporaries, grossly misrepresented by the press of his time and by executor and supposed friend Rufus Griswold upon his death, his name linked inextricably with bad horror movies and adolescent frissons, Poe today is taken for granted and goes largely unread, his work like those old, old songs we all know and can hum . . . we think.

So let's start off with a pop quiz. Hum a few bars together, as it were.

What American writer to all intent and purpose formulated both the modern detective story and the modern science fiction story?

Who set the standard for book reviewing in America, producing in 14 years almost a thousand reviews and essays, what Edmund Wilson called ''the most remarkable body of criticism ever produced in the United States"?

Is there any English speaker alive who doesn't know stories like ''The Pit and the Pendulum" and ''The Cask of Amontillado," anyone who cannot recite a few lines from ''Annabel Lee" or ''To Helen"? (I had a professor in college who was inordinately proud of being able to declaim ''The Bells" without singsonging it. Next party, I'll be happy to do ''The Raven" if you'll only ask.)

Yet through the fog of time and misapprehension there emerge only these shadowy figures: Poe the madman, Poe the despoiler of youth, Poe the drunkard, Poe the aesthete, Poe the other guy (besides Jerry Lewis) the French love. And while William Carlos Williams's assertion that ''on him is founded a literature" may indeed be hyperbolic, it is only mildly so.

No little courage is required to storm the substantial barricades of previous work on Poe. The new biography ''Poe," by James M. Hutchisson (University Press of Mississippi, $30), intended for the general reader rather than the scholar, is to be admired all the more for its bracing emphasis on aspects of Poe perhaps previously given short shrift, chiefly his life as a working literary journalist, his heritage and identity as Southerner, and his humanity.

The first of those aspects, working literary journalist, a profession for which no pattern exists today in the United States, may be difficult for the contemporary reader to grasp, and indeed demands considerable contexting of Hutchisson. Yet for all his brilliant originality, all his innovation, all his essential oddness, this was the daily life Poe lived -- much as bills come due and coffee must be ground, whatever grand thoughts we have -- and it is this quotidian life that Hutchisson keeps carefully in sight throughout.

Poe's self-image as a Southerner is, of course, a complex issue. Reminding us that Poe was ''the sole original voice coming out of the Old South at this point in the development of American literature," Hutchisson points up the possibility of reading several of Poe's tales as ''covert allegories" embracing the ethos of the antebellum South -- the fall of the house of Usher, for instance, as a metaphor for the death of the Southern aristocracy. Even in Poe's elitism, in his stand against Tocqueville's ''tyranny of the majority" and his insistence upon fellowship in an aristocracy of letters, Hutchisson suggests, we find evidence of his Southern upbringing.

Lastly, Poe's humanity, which is everywhere manifest in this wonderfully readable biography. Hutchisson feels great compassion for the man who sat holding youthful wife Virginia's hand as she died gasping and heaving up gobbets of blood on a bed of straw, wrapped in Edgar's old military cloak for lack of a bedspread, their cat resting on her stomach as meager source of warmth, a compassion he communicates with gentleness and authority to the reader.

Poe was himself a man who felt deeply, dulling those feelings with alcohol and continually revising reality -- as with his refusal to claim tuberculosis as the cause of Virginia's death, instead speaking again and again of ''a broken vessel" in her throat as the source of blood -- into some more acceptable form. This was a practice of evasion, excuse, apology, and outright lie put into place early on in letters to his adoptive father and continued throughout his life, a series of ever-shifting borders across which Poe confronted the world. (Finally, in ''Eureka," he would recast the entire universe as an aesthetic object.)

In passing, Hutchisson touches upon, dips into, and cites a number of major biographies and critical works, including Robert D. Jacobs's ''Poe: Journalist and Critic" and Kenneth Silverman's psychoanalytic biography, ''Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance." He also gives concise, apt critical readings of works like ''The Masque of the Red Death," Poe's fabulation of Virginia's death by tuberculosis, and the great doppelganger story ''William Wilson." There is an especially fine discussion of the place of the new medium, the magazine, in American life at the time Poe came to editorship of The Southern Literary Messenger.

Something disturbing there was about Poe, definitely. The parts of that face do not fit together, as indeed the parts of his life did not. The faces in separate photographs do not seem quite the same face; the parts of the life often do not seem to belong to the same life. Forever something erratic, eccentric, off-center, awobble, about to topple.

Yet his dedication, versatility, and output were astonishing, his influence paramount. ''On him is founded a literature."

We are all, all of us who believe passionately in literature, all of us who write professionally, all of us who take as subject this halting, grand-thinking, no-longer-new land where so many bills are coming due -- we are all Poe's children.

James Sallis's column appears monthly in the Globe. He may be reached via his website, www.jamessallis.com.

Link to the above article:
Finding Poe among the Shadows

[hopfrog]

I've only just stumbled upon this old review, of a book I'm not acquainted with -- but your review is so excellent it makes me want to find the book. I love that you proclaim yourself to be one who believes passionately in literature. And Poe is pure literature. He has been heavily on my mind this year wherein we celebrate his 200th birthday. (Are you attending WFC in San Jose this year? The convention's theme is remembering Poe.) My one slight pause in your review is your line, "....dulling those feelings with alcohol..." Hasn't his addiction to drink been rather exaggerated? Not its EFFECT on him, but rather his affection for it? In any case, this is a great review. Thanks.

[Russell Nash]

[Is there any English speaker alive who doesn't know stories like ''The Pit and the Pendulum" and ''The Cask of Amontillado"...?]

One of the best translations of Poe's tales to Spanish was done by Julio Cortazar, in 1953 (Edgar Allan Poe, Cuentos Completos). As a Spanish speaker on the list I have to mention the fact that I read Poe firstly in Spanish (but not all his work) and when my English level was decent enough I embarked myself in one of the most incredible adventures for someone who loves literature which is reading Poe in his original language. Some of his stories I read several times, I can only guess how many. My favorite story is perhaps "a Descent into the Maelstrom".

I started to read Nathaniel Hawthorne when I was 16, probably inspired by Borges, and when I was able to read English I finished reading all Hawthorne' writings, even his sketches, in a few weeks. Inspired also by Borges famous essay in American Literature. As far as I understood, Poe was the least American of all American writers. Poe is very much read anywhere, is quoted by many readers from different countries, and his fame is beyond place and time. In fact, all my friends, the ones with whom I used to discuss literature for long hours, had read Poe.

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Borges also published in October, 1949, in a Sunday newspaper,

Behind Poe there is a neurosis. To interpret his work on the basis of this anomaly may be legitimate or abusive. It is abusive when the neurosis is alleged to nullify or deny the work; it is legitimate when the neurosis is searched as a means to understand its genesis.

Poe's neurosis would have served to renew the fantastic tale, to multiply the forms of literary horror. One might also say that Poe sacrificed his life to his work.

Death and madness were the symbols that Poe used to communicate the horror of his life; in his books he had to pretend that life is beautiful and that the destruction of life, by death and madness, is atrocious.

Poe believed himself to be a poet, only a poet, but circumstances led him to write stories, and these stories to which he had resigned himself and that he faced as occasional works, are his immortality.

Also, and this is more important and intimate, he belongs to what is timeless and the eternal, for a verse and many unique pages. Of these I would highlight the latest stories of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which is a systematic nightmare whose secret idea is the color white.

Without the neurosis, alcohol, poverty, irreparable loneliness, there would be no Poe's work. This created an imaginary world to escape a real world; the world he dreamed will last, the other is almost a dream.

Started by Baudelaire, and not despised by Shaw, there is a perfidious habit of admiring Poe against the United States, to judge the poet like a lost angel, in that cold, hungry hell. The truth is that Poe would have suffered in any country. No one, besides, admires Baudelaire against France, or Coleridge against England.

(in Spanish) Edgar Poe por Jorge Luis Borges

[hopfrog]

Excellent, Alberto. Thank you. You've given me food for thought -- and (more importantly) a desire to return Poe, to read him slowly, carefully. To drink in all of his genius.

Regarding Poe and alcohol: my understanding is that its effect upon him was of heightening (or perhaps maddening) his sensibility rather than dulling it. One glass of wine was enough to set him on the path to a debauch. I don't think he was an alcoholic; but when he drank, he did not stop until he was inebriated. That's the reason he took the temperance pledge. All or nothing.

Recently I acquired three volumes of a 1902 edition of Poe's Collected Works (after picking up the first one, I hurried back to the bookshop a few days later and got the other two). All three consist of Poe's essays and book-reviews. Has anyone read "The Literati"? It's merciless.

Mark S.

[Evans]

Quote Originally Posted by mark_samuels

Regarding Poe and alcohol: my understanding is that its effect upon him was of heightening (or perhaps maddening) his sensibility rather than dulling it. One glass of wine was enough to set him on the path to a debauch.

I am not very up on the subject in question but was not there some speculation that he suffered a condition which caused him to become inebriated very quickly. I'm afraid I don't remember the correct medical term.

[Odalisque]

Quote Originally Posted by Evans

I am not very up on the subject in question but was not there some speculation that he suffered a condition which caused him to become inebriated very quickly. I'm afraid I don't remember the correct medical term.

I seem to have that condition myself, but I never suspected that there was a medical term for it. My solution is to drink alcohol very rarely, and I'm considering whether I might be better advised never to drink it again. It's not rocket science! ;)

The title of this thread made me wonder whether Poe was supposed to have played guitar with Hank Marvin and the lads.

[hopfrog]

Quote Originally Posted by mark_samuels

Has anyone read "The Literati"? It's merciless. Mark S.

I have it in the Library of America edition of ESSAYS AND REVIEWS, as "The Literati of New York." I've not read it but will do so tonight after the day's writing. The combination of dwelling on Poe last night, plus this exquisite new piece in Ye Repository posted by Des ("The Provenance of Souls") has helped me to see my way into my new tale, which has been stuck in my skull and refuses to spill forth. Now I think I've found my approach. As always, coming to TLO helps to inspire the artistic flame. Too, I've been listening to my audio Poe while awaiting slumber, and that has fed darkness to my dreaming. When last my friends were in Philadelphia at the Poe house there, they said they saw a recording available of a reading of Poe's work by Peter Lorre, an actor of which I know absolutely nothing but one who fascinates me whenever I catch one of his old films. He's like something out of Poe. He was featured in two or three of the eight Roger Corman Poe films -- how perfect he would have been in playing the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart."
(Wasn't Tim Burton planning on re-filming THE HOUSE OF USHER?)

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