Poe-et or Poe-seur?
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing POE-ET OR POE-SEUR? BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Edgar Allan Poe is something of a mystery. On the one hand, he has been equally celebrated for his poetry, fiction and criticism. He is...
...At bottom Poe appears to be a mixture of device and true inspiration, of poet and poseur...
...Following the death of his cousin and child-wife, Virginia, he and the popular writer Sarah "Helen" Whitman actually became engaged...
...Unfortunately, Silverman shows no particular insight when crudely applying his theory...
...Poe's most disastrous association involved another notable member of the 19th-century literary world, Rufus Griswold...
...Certainly the French, who enjoyed Poe's writing from the beginning, idolized the new, wicked Poe, esteeming him as the first and greatest poete maudit...
...Upon the poet's untimely and mysterious death, Griswold artfully won the confidence of Poe's devoted aunt and former mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, and assumed the position of literary executor...
...In The Bridge he portrayed Poe as a retching alcoholic bum, riding the subways at night and shocking us out of our respectable facades...
...That the three principles were married to others at the time only ensured that their affair would run the gamut from melodrama to farce...
...As for his critical judgments, vitriol rarely retains its strength over the course of a century...
...Hawthorne wrote gruesome horror tales, while Whitman and Longfellow shamelessly promoted themselves...
...On the other hand, most of us would admit that Poe's style can seem—or worse, often is—embarrassingly awful...
...The author believes many of his subject's weaknesses—grandiose embroidery of his accomplishments, plagiarism, alcoholism, untrustworthiness—are the familiar symptoms of unresolved mourning...
...By everyone's account, one of Poe's real strengths is his ability to force us to confront the perverse and ignoble within ourselves...
...Perhaps Hart Crane understood him best...
...This allowed him to posthumously blacken his rival's character, even as he promoted and continued to express admiration for Poe's literary achievements...
...it includes a vividly delineated cast of characters and makes much of Poe's theatrical heritage...
...In judging it by the authors today deemed significant, we tend to forget its variety...
...Like the protagonist in Poe's story "William Wilson," Griswold felt he must destroy the double to assert his own identity...
...No one would deny that emotionally Poe was formed, or stunted, by the unremitting tragedies that marked his short life...
...There was "fat, gaudily dressed" Sarah "Stella" Lewis, a facile poetaster who made Poe her literary manager...
...Take the poetry, with its monotonous rhythms, morbid subjects and overdone onomatopoeia...
...Despite its reiteration time and again, his argument is devoid of enlightening evidence...
...Our problem in appraising him is thus largely the same one his contemporaries faced...
...Quite respectable journalists and authors cannibalized the works of others when pressured to churn out articles for their daily bread...
...The analysis is, to put it mildly, less compelling...
...Plagiarism was not unique to Poe either...
...With Poe he became a veritable doppelganger, or even one of the more dramatic antiheroes in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque...
...A country boy who transformed himself into a city dandy, Griswold rushed into passionate friendships with older men, aping their habits and mannerisms, only to cast off his mentors later...
...Although she ultimately broke the engagement, she continued to care for him, communicating with him through seances after he died at age 40...
...Is he simply a poseur, or is he a genuine poet...
...Recognizing that motives can be culturally determined, the biographer quotes the French critic, Remy de Gourmont, who saw in Poe's excesses "the peculiarly American taste for notoriety, billboards, barbarous publicity, extravagant journalism...
...The poetry never goes out of print, and frequently people who seldom read verse can recite " Annabel Lee" by heart...
...Since "Edgar" and "Allan" contain only commonly used letters, it is not difficult to construe nominal references...
...Silverman's "psychological" excuses are patronizing...
...Poe's handsome, melancholy looks ideally suited him for the period's salons, many of them dominated by high-minded female poets whose lives became linked with his...
...Do his admirers all lack taste, or do his detractors misread him because he probes a sensitive nerve...
...She eventually became a medium herself, and wrote spooky poems in his vein about their otherworldly contacts...
...In his macabre tales, putrefying corpses regularly rise from the grave like spookhouse bogeymen, or the worst sort of pulp magazine fare...
...If most of Poe's effects finally strike us as coldly calculated, we can nonetheless appreciate "the imp of the perverse," as he might have called it, that drove him to challenge the prevailing literary norms...
...The poet's hold on readers, Silverman rightly observes, rests in the "power to confirm oncereal beliefs from which most people have never entirely freed themselves, and which his own past kept particularly alive in him: that one can be devoured and annihilated [as in fairy tales], that the darkness is astir, that the dead in some form survive and return...
...Conforming to what appears to be the current fashion, Silverman tries a twofold approach, interweaving straightforward narrative with psychological interpretation...
...In "A Fable for Critics," James Russell Lowell put it succinctly: There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge, Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge, Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters, In a way to make people of common sense damn meters, Who has written some things quite the best of their kind, But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind...
...Villains are vastly more appealing than simply unfortunate souls...
...He is also acknowledged as the inventor of the detective story...
...It should be noted that most prominent writers of the American Renaissance were guilty of such indulgences...
...Kenneth Silverman's Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (HarperCollins, 564 pp., $27.50) is the latest attempt to establish a perspective on this troubling figure...
...his loving foster mother, Fannie Allan, similarly died young, then her husband rejected the young man...
...Elsewhere in Poe's life and work there are far more telling indications of his narcissism, as well as of his ambivalence toward his foster family and blood relatives...
...In this case the arrangement was primarily financial...
...The story is grippingly told...
...The dust jacket touts the book as the first life of Poe in over 50 years, a rather misleading claim that ignores several critical biographies...
...Even semiliterate schoolchildren somehow know "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue...
...Predictably, the results are dubious and irrelevant...
...The Jingle Man," Emerson aptly dubbed him...
...and a sad procession of sickly, beloved women was snatched from the poet by rivals, jealous husbands or death...
...The biographer may have missed a chance to explore the possibility that Griswold was a shrewd entrepreneur, in search of a means to boost sales of his editions of Poe's work...
...The book is on firmer ground when discussing the reasons for Poe's success as a writer...
...One outstanding feature of Edgar A. Poe is its depiction of the 19th-century literary milieu...
...Helen sounds as if she might have been the bride destined for him in his "Hell of the planetary souls...
...Indeed, reading the descriptions of Poe's contemporaries, it becomes clear that his hectic fiction resembles life more than one might have at first supposed...
...at other times his contact with women led to emotional involvement...
...To be sure, Poe had a great deal to lament: His father, an actor, decamped before Edgar turned two...
...Still, Silverman argues, the younger man' s growing animus toward Poe transcended mere circumstance...
...By robbing his subject of free will, however warped, he in effect reduces him to "just the product of a social disease...
...Over a month after his first wife's death, he visited the vault containing her coffin and held the decaying corpse in his arms for hours...
...For all of his faults, though, Poe continues to be the most widely read 19th-century American writer—more popular, in fact, than Mark Twain...
...Poe treated Griswold as he tended to reward all of those who befriended him: He cadged money, then trashed their books in reviews...
...His explanation of the interior family drama is woolly, and he fails to demonstrate any understanding of the psychological mechanics of bereavement beyond what might be gleaned from a popular article...
...This weakness goes hand in hand with superficial critical readings limited to plot synopses or to pointing out obvious parallels between Poe's life and events described in his writing...
...Nobody would deny that he exaggerated many of his one-time hero's foibles, but did he really possess a deep hatred for the man whose posthumous literary reputation he helped to build, and whose pictures surrounded him when he died...
...He can, for better or worse, be credited with giving the push that toppled 19th-century literary idealism from its Olympus, and with once again making the dark side of our natures acceptable material for art...
...his mother, a talented actress, succumbed to a fatal infection when he was not yet four...
...Apparently Silverman is obsessed with finding anagrams for his subject in titles and character names...
...Invariably, the bad luck and mismanagement that plagued the writer were colored by his executor to sound dissolute, and occasionally criminal...
...his C. Auguste Dupin prefigured innumerable gumshoes, CID officers and brilliant amateurs whose powers of "ratiocination" allow them to solve baffling crimes...
...In addition, both men discovered that they loved the same woman, "Fannie" Osgood, a well-regarded poet of the period...
...Helen took ether in public—for medicinal purposes, but also to escape from scenes with her difficult fiance...
...Here Silverman's portrait of a vengeful Griswold begins to run aground...
Vol. 75 • March 1992 • No. 4
