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A READING LIFE

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.RSS feeds

So leet'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.

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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,