Julian
Symons’ ‘Life and works of Edgar Allan Poe’ was published in 1978; he wrote it
because he was dissatisfied with existing biographies of Poe. He chose to break
the book into two sections – Part One: The Life and Part Two: The Work. Poe
produced ‘the most original prose fiction of the nineteenth century’ (p241).
Poe
used his imagination a lot – even to the point of fabricating his origins, and
stating that he was born in 1811 when in fact the date was 1809. He was born in
Boston, his father abandoning the family in 1810; his mother died the following
year and he was fostered by Frances and John Allan, a childless couple; they
never adopted him. John Allan and Edgar were often at loggerheads, and in later
years Edgar’s gambling debts and drinking became cause for heated arguments and
eventual estrangement.
Edgar
failed to apply himself to the rigours of the Army, eventually leaving West
Point before he was thrown out. He was determined to earn his living as a
writer – a precarious career that left him impecunious through most of his life.
He married his first cousin Virginia Clemm in 1835 – he was 27, she was 13
though the documentation stated she was 21. Virginia’s mother, Maria Clemm (née
Poe), lived with the couple. Their relationship has been debated over the
years: was it ever sexual, or were they living virtually as brother and sister?
It’s all supposition. Certainly, he adored her and she idolised him. He thought
she was beautiful. ‘Beautiful women have little chance of survival in Poe. They
are often seen both as the victims of men and as a cause of destruction.’
(p205)
Sadly,
Virginia developed consumption and became so weak that Edgar would carry her to
the dining table; she died after five years of illness in 1847, aged 24. Her
death was a devastating blow to Edgar. Over the years he had indulged to excess
in alcohol but recovered, even abstaining for lengthy periods, but now his depression
led him to the bottle with a vengeance.
‘Poe
is spelling out his personal agonies in fictional terms. The obsessions, which
were accentuated but not caused by Virginia’s illness and death, were concerned
with the supreme beauty of death, the association of pleasure and cruelty, the
fascination of blood. He offers us in some respects the world of de Sade, but
it is a sadism made acceptable to a mass readership by the elimination of any
ostensible sexual element.’ (p210)
In
1849, Poe went missing for five days and was found walking delirious in
Baltimore, wearing clothes other than his own; he died in hospital a few days
later. Since then all hospital records, including his death certificate, have
been lost.
Writing
articles and criticism, the journalist Poe had to move about the country to
obtain work. He was also an editor at times. He barely managed to keep the wolf
from the door. For example, his story ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ was printed in The Pioneer magazine and he was paid the
princely sum of $10 for it. Maria helped the family finances when she could,
sometimes by teaching. He was naturally pleased to win $100 for his story ‘The
Gold-Bug’, offered by the Dollar
Newspaper (1843).
He
sold a hoax story to the Sun
newspaper; it concerned a balloon crossing of the Atlantic, and its publication
caused a great deal of interest and excitement; not until Orson Welles
transmitted the radio play ‘War of the Worlds’ would a hoax story have such a
widespread effect.
What
made his hoax stories believable was the acute observational detail he brought
to his work. His The Narrative of Arthur
Gordon Pym is his longest prose fiction and W.H. Auden believed it to be ‘one
of the finest adventure stories ever written’.
‘I
have… rambled and dreamed away whole months, and awake at last to a sort of
mania composition. Then I scribble all day, and read all night, so long as the
disease endures.’ (p93)
Symons
believes Poe was the first great American literary critic, because Poe found a
balance between romantic perceptiveness and idealism with a vein of severe
common sense. However, Poe the critic accused other poets and writers of
plagiarism, but indulged in it himself. He castigated certain authors in his
critical essays, which were deemed ‘intelligent and prejudiced’, and thereby
made a number of enemies in the literary fraternity. Sometimes his vitriolic
criticism was anonymous, though many guessed at the author. Yet several of his
targets seemed to forgive him, acknowledging his genius. One writer he upset
was editor and compiler, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, yet Poe appointed this man as
his executor. Griswold then proceeded to destroy Poe’s reputation and by his
death in 1857 he seemed to have achieved his aim. W.H Auden has said, ‘That one
man should dislike another and speak maliciously of him after his death would
be natural enough, but to take so much trouble, to blacken a reputation so
subtly, presupposes a sustained hatred which is always fascinating, because the
capacity for sustained emotion of any kind is rare.’ (p161) Certainly, this
distasteful trait is still prevalent in academia, and even in online reviews – ‘sock
puppets spring to mind’. Symons goes on
to apprise us of a number of critical views, one of them concluding: ‘the
lowest abyss of moral imbecility and disrepute had not been reached until Poe
was born.’ Despite all these nay-sayers,
interest in Poe’s work never flagged. And of course he lives in his work while
his jaundiced detractors are forgotten and are but dust.
Not
without reason, Poe is considered the father of detective fiction with his
character Dupin. Yes, before his crime stories detectives did feature in
stories, but they did not do any detecting, or use logic, for example the first
instance of the marks made by a rifle barrel being used as a clue in solving a
crime. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said, ‘Where was the detective story until Poe breathed
the breath of life into it?’
‘Poe’s
complaint that the author may give the reader false information through the
mouth of a character, but must not do so in his own person [that is the narrative], was a forerunner
of the detective story reader’s insistence on “fair play”.’(p185, addition in my
italics)
His
influence on the detective story has been long recognised: ‘On this narrow path
the writer must walk, and he sees the footmarks of Poe always in front of him,’
said Conan Doyle. ‘He is happy if he ever finds the means of breaking away and
striking out on some little side-track of his own.’
Symons
observes that ‘more than half of Poe’s seventy stories are very little read,
except by literary critics and honours students. His reputation as a short
story writer rests upon some twenty tales which are famous throughout the
world. Apart from the four tales of detection, they are all horrific.’ (210) He
concludes concerning the horror stories, ‘There is nothing else like them in Western
literature.’
