The Tell-Tale Artist

The problem, of course, is that this popularity among adolescents has tended to fill the high-minded with aesthetic distaste. Henry James’s snide put-down has stuck: “It seems to us that to take him with more than a certain degree of seriousness is to lack seriousness one’s self. An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.” And Aldous Huxley famously used Poe as exhibit A in his influential essay “Vulgarity in Literature”: “To the most sensitive and high-souled man in the world,” he commented, “we should find it hard to forgive, shall we say, the wearing of a diamond ring on every finger. Poe does the equivalent of this in his poetry; we notice the solecism and shudder.”

Is there any justice in this characterization of Poe as a sort of literary Liberace? Perhaps Huxley was a little too high-souled himself; vulgarity is a sin against taste rather than against art, as greater artists than Huxley–artists as various as Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens, Titian, Tintoretto, Wagner, and yes, Poe–have always known. Poe’s undoubted flashiness served his thematic purposes well. Madness, alienation, and mankind’s long love affair with morbidity were his subjects, and he didn’t mind admitting to being more than half in love with easeful death, to mangle a line from his favorite poet, Tennyson.

His elaborate stage sets were admittedly just that–stage sets, summed up succinctly by his biographer Jeffrey Meyers as “gloomy landscape, crumbling mansion, somber interior, sorrowful atmosphere, terrified narrator, neurasthenic hero, tubercular heroine, opium dreams, arcane books, premature burial, oppressive secrets, tempestuous weather, supernatural elements, return from the grave and apocalyptic conclusion.”

Once we have stripped away all this décor, what do we have left? Allegories, largely, of the individual’s alienation from society, which was why Poe was to prove so important and influential (more so than his actual skills would seem to warrant) for succeeding generations of writers. Literary movements throughout the second half of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th would claim Poe as honorary godfather: the Symbolists, the Decadents, the Pre-Raphaelites, the Freudians, the aesthetic art-for-art’s sake school. Dostoevsky, Kipling, Conrad, Melville, Mary Shelley, Nabokov, Mallarmé, Valéry, and many others were strongly influenced by him; so of course was Baudelaire, who took it as his personal mission to turn Poe into a greater figure in France than he had ever claimed to be in his native land.

And almost incredibly, Poe provided the basic inspiration for three genres now so popular that they have come to take up a large portion of every bookstore and library: horror, science fiction, and detection. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells declared the indebtedness of their work to tales like Narrative of A. Gordon Pym and “The Balloon-Hoax,” while the classic detective story is entirely constructed upon the outline provided by his Auguste Dupin stories, with the Dupin-narrator-police chief triangle memorably reproduced in Holmes-Watson-Lestrade and Poirot-Hastings-Japp.

No writer with such an enormous legacy spanning low, middle, and high art can be written off as merely juvenile or vulgar. Perhaps it is most fruitful to see Poe as a brilliant generator of archetypes. As with so many major artists, the psychic membrane between his ego and his id appears to have been unusually permeable, his access to the peculiarly potent magic of the dream-life extraordinary. The famous first line of “The Tell-Tale Heart” is emblematic of his entire body of work: “True!–nervous–very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” Echoed again and again, from Dostoevsky’s Underground Man to Camus’s Meursault, this was a clarion-call for the prophets of modern alienation. After all, as the narrator of Poe’s “Eleonora” argued, “the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence–whether much that is glorious–whether all that is profound–does not spring from disease of thought–from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.”

Taken up by Freud and countless others, this theme permeated 20th-century thought, finally becoming a little overworked. But science appears to have demonstrated that there is indeed a connection between madness, or at any rate bipolar illness, and creativity. It doesn’t necessarily follow that madness is a desirable state. Baudelaire and others have ascribed Poe’s terrible life and death to his being too fine and sensitive to withstand the crass commercialism of his world, but this is pure romanticism. Poe was a severe alcoholic from a family of alcoholics, and he was also a singularly self-destructive character, insulting or letting down almost everyone who tried to do him a favor. Perversity was his middle name.

Of course he knew this, and wove it into his art. In his fiction he explored the irrational impulses that guided his life, what he called in “The Black Cat,” “this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself.” His ire tended to be as inexplicable as that of the narrator in “The Cask of Amontillado,” who never explains just what “injuries” the hapless Fortunato had committed to merit his grisly fate.

Though he created indelible fictional and poetic images, Poe was surpassed by many of his admirers; he was a master of the moment, the image, the impression, and could not have carried off the “sustained effort” (a value, and a term, he affected to despise) necessary to produce a work as complex as Crime and Punishment or even A Study in Scarlet. Poe’s aesthetic strictures, expressed throughout his literary journalism, may have been held in earnest; then again, they may have been formulated to justify the only sort of work of which he was temperamentally capable, and to elevate his own style of writing at the expense of others. (Poe was one of the most considerable critics of his era; modern readers can find all of his journalism in the Library of America’s volume of his essays and reviews.)

Brevity, for example, he asserted as essential to great art: a poem or a piece of fiction should be short enough to be read at a single sitting so as to maintain unity, the “vital requisite in all works of Art.”

At best, he maintained, an epic can only be “a series of minor poems,” and he thumbed his nose at the critics’ tendency to be impressed by “sustained effort”: length and quality have nothing to do with one another, he said, and the whole only amounts to a list of parts. This is ridiculous, tantamount to saying that the Taj Mahal is nothing more than a random collection of walls and doorways; that he did not always hold to it is demonstrated by his enthusiasm for Dickens’s early novels, but his own work reflects it faithfully–or perhaps the critical position was formulated in favor of his own artistic limitations, for he found it impossible to construct and finish a full-length novel.

Another debatable tenet Poe insisted upon was that “beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.” He maintained that “that pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, and the most pure, is, I believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful.” Is this true? Plenty would argue with it. Poe separated beauty from truth and passion:

He took this principle to its fullest extent, anticipating l’art pour l’art by glorifying the “poem per se–that poem which is a poem and nothing more–this poem written solely for the poem’s sake.” Correspondingly he considered a didactic poem “no poem at all,” and lost no opportunity to express scorn for his contemporaries, the Transcendentalists, referring to them as the “Frogpondians” and characterizing Massachusetts literary life as a “spirit of mixed Puritanism, utilitarianism, and transcendentalism.”

No–beauty was the only justification for poetry, and when Poe tried to come up with a definition for poetry, he was constrained to call it “The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty.” His truly amazing account of how he came to write “The Raven,” included in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” would seem to support his theories. Here he admits to having chosen subject, meter, rhythm, everything with the sole intention of enhancing beauty, of which the supreme development is melancholy. The process of composing “The Raven” (if he is to be believed), so far from being “inspired” in the true Romantic fashion, is almost laughably technical, with Poe cheerfully admitting to having selected “o” as “the most sonorous vowel” and “r” as “the most producible consonant”–hence Nevermore, “a word embodying this sound, and at the same time in the fullest possible keeping with that melancholy which I had predetermined as the tone of the poem.” His subject, too, was chosen deliberately, the death of a beautiful woman being “unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”

Easy to laugh; but it should be remembered that Poe’s own mother had died young and beautiful, and that his beloved young wife was at that very moment in the process of expiring from tuberculosis.

Another poetical ideal to which Poe clung tenaciously and which might account for some of his own limitations was his belief that “the indefinite is an element in the true poiesis,” and that “a suggestive indefiniteness of meaning, with the view of bringing about a definiteness of vague and therefore of spiritual effect” is the desideratum. Again, this is a principle we see richly illustrated in Poe’s imaginative writing; again, the author’s insistence on it shows the limits of his technical abilities. Indefiniteness is appropriate for a brief poem or story; for a “sustained effort” (a necessary endeavor, Poe’s protestations notwithstanding) it is not enough.

Poe’s aesthetics and critical standards were too narrow, but they were influential in their day and turned out to be remarkably prescient of the sort of aesthetic ideals that would predominate for more than a century after his death in 1849. They apply very little to the current scene; we have passed into an extremely didactic phase both in literature and criticism, and the “sustained effort” is, if anything, overvalued today.

What on earth would Poe the critic make, for example, of the modern fashion for encyclopedic metafiction? As an imaginative writer, he would certainly be pleased by the esteem in which he is still held, and still more gratified by his towering reputation in France. For as he once admitted in his typically unbuttoned fashion, “My whole nature utterly revolts at the idea that there is any Being in the Universe superior to myself!”

Brooke Allen is the author, most recently,of Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers.