Homage to Poe

It was Basil Rathbone, reading “The Tell-Tale Heart” and other stories by Edgar Allan Poe. We sat mesmerized, until the actor produced his final, blood-curdling shriek: “Here, here—it is the beating of his hideous heart!”

At the time, I failed to recognize that the voice on the record was the same as that of Sherlock Holmes, but I already knew a little about Poe. My steelworker father used to recite: It was many and many a year ago / In a kingdom by the sea / That a maiden there lived whom you may know / By the name of Annabel Lee. That was about all he could remember. As a child, I loved the wistful sound of the words, just as I would later be taken by the tintinnabulation of “The Bells” and the mournful repetition of “nevermore” in “The Raven.” But when, in sixth grade, I had finally borrowed a friend’s copy of the Signet Classics paperback of The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales, I found Poe disconcerting, even disappointing.

Mostly, this was because I could barely understand his complicated sentences and sometimes couldn’t figure out what was happening. “A Descent into the Maelstrom” dragged at the beginning, and its account of being caught in the vortex of a whirlpool went tediously on and on. “The Masque of the Red Death” was hardly a story at all, just a series of symbolic tableaux. Even “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” opened with pages of dry theorizing: “The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis.” Though I was suitably delighted when C. Auguste Dupin deduced that the savage murders could only have been committed by an orangutan, I nonetheless regarded this solution as farfetched, despite the usual caveat (frequently enunciated by my hero, the sleuth of Baker Street) that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

“The Purloined Letter” also charmed me with its central conceit that people will invariably overlook the obvious, even if the maxim’s application in this instance seemed distinctly unrealistic: The police would surely have examined every scrap of paper in the minister’s apartment, no matter where its hiding place.

My initial puzzlement about Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) was hardly surprising. His fiction can seem too rhetorical, too thickly textured, too literary for most young people. Still, Basil Rathbone’s recording did persuade me to give the writer another try—sometime. The opportunity finally arose in high school when I opened my new English textbook and discovered the revenge story “The Cask of Amontillado.” In class, our teacher emphasized Poe’s use of irony and guessed, like many other readers and critics, that the narrator Montresor was speaking to a priest. The phrase “You, who so well know the nature of my soul” could obviously be addressed to one’s confessor. But I wasn’t quite convinced of this.

What were the “injuries” and the “insult” that Montresor had suffered from the doomed Fortunato? I soon had my own ideas. When the two men repair to the damp underground vaults to sample the much-anticipated Amontillado, Montresor says to his tipsy companion: “You are rich, respected, admired, beloved; you are happy, as once I was.” I had read enough fiction by then to know that lost happiness usually meant lost love. Obviously, this rich, rather stupid aristocrat had somehow stolen Montresor’s girl, married her, and then, through neglect and drunkenness, made her life miserable. Just look at the sodden fool: He is out carousing by himself on the street, decked out in jingle bells and clown regalia, while Lady Fortunato, we later learn, sits at home waiting for him.

So I boldly contended that Montresor could no longer bear the repeated disrespect, probably coupled with physical abuse, endured by the woman he adored. He walls up Fortunato and, after a suitable period of mourning, weds his widow. As he lays dying, Montresor finally tells the whole story to the person who really knows his soul—his wife, the former Mrs. Fortunato. My teacher was somewhat nonplussed by my argument—especially when I extrapolated the future wedding—but I cling to it even now.

From that time on, I grasped that textual ambiguity could contribute to a poem or story’s power and appeal. Like Shakespeare’s plays, Poe’s tales of the grotesque and arabesque are tantalizing, open-ended, susceptible to multiple interpretations. When you finish “Ligeia”—in which a dark-haired beauty of indomitable willpower returns from the dead and takes over the body of the fair Rowena—you are left with some interesting questions: Is Ligeia truly alive again? Will she and her husband take up their marriage from where it left off? What will Lady Rowena’s relatives say about her disappearance? Could everything be just a hallucination of the opium-addled narrator?

Though Poe himself thought “Ligeia” his best story, many of today’s readers would probably award that honor to the somber “Fall of the House of Usher.” Everyone recalls its opening:

How had I failed, even at age 12, to appreciate the splendor of such diction or the careful syntax of this beautifully balanced sentence? As I slowly began to reread stories I had originally disliked, I soon discovered more and more to admire in Poe, especially his use of language. The last paragraph of “The Masque of the Red Death,” for example, resounds with biblical grandeur and finality:

The alliterative Ds and the repeated use of “and” generated a suitably ominous cadence, but the real triumph lay in that phrase “illimitable dominion.” There was majesty as well as doom in those syllables. Halfway through college, I even decided that Poe’s verse occasionally surpassed Swinburne’s and Verlaine’s in its intricate interlacings of sound. Consider the lugubrious melody and tocsin-like repetitions of “Ulalume”:

In a French class I learned that Poe wasn’t only a genius himself, he was also the cause of genius in others. France’s three greatest poets of the 19th and early-20th centuries revered him: Baudelaire translated his stories; Mallarmé composed one of his best poems, “Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe,” for the dedication of the writer’s memorial in Baltimore; and Valéry insisted that the American was “the only impeccable writer.” Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym—a combination of nautical adventure story, racial allegory, and fictionalized speculations about the Antarctic, as well as his only novel—so impressed Jules Verne that he produced a sequel to it: The Sphinx of the Ice Fields.

In fact, Poe’s admirers were legion. Many scholars speculate that Pym influenced Moby-Dick. Abraham Lincoln, it was once reported, “suffers no year to pass without a perusal of this author.” Dostoyevsky himself introduced Russian translations of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Devil in the Belfry”—and surely, his Underground Man is a cousin to Poe’s soul-baring monomaniacs. To the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Poe was nothing less than “the supreme original short story writer of all time.” The usually prickly Bernard Shaw agreed with Conan Doyle, adding, “The story of the Lady Ligeia is not merely one of the wonders of literature; it is unparalleled and unapproached. There is really nothing to be said about it: we others simply take off our hats and let Mr. Poe go first.” Tennyson, Hardy, and Yeats regarded that same Mr. Poe as the finest of American poets.

By the same token, H. P. Lovecraft deemed Poe the premier exponent of the modern weird tale, the first writer to understand perfectly “the very mechanics and physiology of fear and strangeness.” Reconfiguring the trappings of the Gothic romance—the crumbling Bavarian castle, the insidious villain, the frightened heroine—Poe asserted that “terror is not of Germany but of the soul.” In their turn, his five “tales of ratiocination”—the three investigations featuring Dupin but also, to some extent, the cryptographic treasure story “The Gold Bug” and the ballistics-oriented “Thou Art the Man”—established virtually all the elements of the classic detective story.

As Howard Haycraft observed in Murder for Pleasure, Poe more or less invented “the transcendent and eccentric detective; the admiring and slightly stupid foil; the well-intentioned blundering and unimaginativeness of the official guardians of the law; the locked-room convention; the pointing finger of unjust suspicion; the solution by surprise”—and much else. In effect, he turned reasoning into a source of narrative excitement.

If, in the weird tale and the detective story, Poe is both pioneering and exemplary, he is only slightly less so in science fiction. His sense of wonder led him to extrapolate (some would say fool the public) with “The Balloon-Hoax,” a proto-Verne voyage extraordinaire about the supposed crossing of the Atlantic, and “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” a significant contribution to the long literature of journeys to the moon. In “The Man That Was Used Up,” Poe describes a steampunk version of a cyborg, half-human, half-machine, while “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” focuses on a corpse preserved and kept sentient through the power of mesmerism. Even the innocuous-sounding “Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” relates Earth’s collision with a comet, leading to fiery global apocalypse: “For a moment there was a wild lurid light alone, visiting and penetrating all things. Then . . . the whole incumbent mass of ether in which we existed, burst at once into a species of intense flame. .  .  . Thus ended all.”

Though “The Raven” did make him famous—the poem was quickly reprinted in 11 different periodicals—Poe was best known in his lifetime as a literary journalist. He began his career by submitting “Metzengerstein”—a gothicky revenge tale, featuring a spectral horse—for a prize awarded by the Saturday Courier of Philadelphia. (He came in second: The award went to Delia Bacon, now faintly remembered because she championed Francis Bacon as the author of Shakespeare’s plays.) In another competition, underwritten by Baltimore’s Saturday Visiter, Poe’s account of a castaway, “Manuscript Found in a Bottle,” earned him $50. Soon thereafter, he adopted journalism as his career, taking up a position as assistant editor of Richmond’s Southern Literary Messenger, where he remained for two years.

He would eventually quit that job over a salary dispute, but Poe—despite the occasional drinking binge—was too exceptional a writer and editor not to land another job right away. Over the years, he would grind out scores of book reviews, humorous squibs, essays, poems, and stories. As time went on, Poe even preferred to write his attractively legible script on narrow strips of paper that had been pasted into long rolls—almost certainly to emulate newspaper columns. He could turn his hand to any topic, once producing an article on the proper use of the dash (which may sound trivial until you remember how much the breathless pace of his stories relies on the dash). The scholar Burton Pollin even estimated that Poe coined, or first used in print, nearly a thousand words.

Poe was also given to puns and humorous coinages, though these are now likely to elicit groans: Aries Tottle, a German named “Kroutaplenttey,” the Snook Farm Phalanx (for the Transcendentalists’ Brook Farm). Poe may also be viewed as the Martin Gardner of his age, fascinated by contemporary science and pseudoscience (such as phrenology), fond of deciphering codes, and adept at exposing frauds.

With uncharacteristic modesty, Edmund Wilson contended that Poe’s was “the most remarkable body of criticism ever produced in the United States.” Wilson added that, with his knowledge of Latin, Greek, Spanish, Italian, French, and German, and possibly a smattering of Hebrew, Poe stood intellectually “on higher ground than any other American writer of his time.” Nonetheless, his notoriously snarky, sometimes ad hominem reviews earned him the nickname “the Tomahawk Man.”

Poe did write appreciatively, however, about the young Dickens, dedicate The Raven and Other Poems to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, publish an essay entitled “Art-Singing and Heart-Singing” by the then-little-known “Walter” Whitman, and praise Hazlitt as “brilliant, epigrammatic, startling, paradoxical, and suggestive.” Most important, in celebrating Twice-Told Tales by his near-contemporary Nathaniel Hawthorne, Poe used his review to lay out the modern theory of the short story:

Poe consistently emphasized art’s need for unity or totality of effect. Through careful verbal engineering alone, one produces fiction’s “intoxication of the heart” or the “excitement” that is poetry’s “province, its essentiality.” To believe “The Philosophy of Composition”—which is a bit tongue-in-cheek—no “fine frenzy” or “ecstatic intuition” was required to generate “The Raven.” It was a matter of method and doggedness. In that essay, Poe sounds as coolly calculating as Nabokov, which may explain the air of factitiousness and theatricality common to both writers.

And like the creator of Lolita (initially called The Kingdom by the Sea), the author of the Nabokovian “William Wilson” and “Annabel Lee” was a perfectionist. Poe speaks of an initial draft’s “vacillating crudities of thought,” of “true purposes seized only at the last moment,” and “fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable,” and of all “the painful erasures and interpolations.” Even after a piece was published, Poe would keep tinkering with it, completely revising certain early poems for later book appearances. In truth, Poe was astonishingly hardworking: “I have not suffered a day to pass without writing from a page to three pages.” In spite of poverty, drink, and multiple sorrows, this industrious writer managed to publish 10 volumes in his short lifetime—the last being Eureka, a dense philosophical essay on cosmology, with speculations about an expanding universe. Most impressive of all, with the partial exception of the Dupin mysteries, he almost never repeated himself.

Some of the legends about Poe—as the saddest, loneliest figure in American literature—almost certainly arose because he avoided the overtly autobiographical and once famously emphasized the impossibility of being wholly truthful about one’s inner life:

In his life, as in his writing, Poe was clearly obsessed with death, and according to the Freudian critic Marie Bonaparte, the symbolic presence of his dying mother, the talented young actress Elizabeth Arnold Poe, suffuses his whole oeuvre. Adopted by the well-off John and Frances Allan of Richmond, the infant Edgar was subsequently doted-on by his stepmother but eventually disowned by his stepfather because of gambling debts incurred while a student at the University of Virginia. Poe was thus forced to make his own way in the world. For a while, it seemed he might pursue a military career: He enlisted and proved a model soldier, rising to the rank of sergeant-major. Later, he enrolled as a cadet at West Point, but eventually dropped out to pursue his literary ambitions.

Poe exhibited the usual prejudices of white Southern gentility, as can be seen in his characterization (or, perhaps, caricaturization) of the devoted black retainer Jupiter in “The Gold-Bug.” (Still, Poe did describe his African-American friend Armistead Gordon as the most interesting man he had ever talked to.) Even more notoriously, Poe married his cousin Virginia Clemm in 1836 when she was not yet 14. He cared tenderly for his child-bride and her mother, who, together, provided a measure of stability to his sometimes-disordered life. Alas, in a repetition of Elizabeth Poe’s premature death, Virginia succumbed to tuberculosis in 1847 while still in her early twenties. Poe never recovered from the loss.

His own final days in Baltimore have elicited the kind of speculation we associate with the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce or the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Odds are that the 40-year-old Poe was plied with drink by local politicos and moved around the city to multiple polling stations to stuff ballot boxes. Eventually found weak and delusional in a bar, he was taken to a hospital, where he died a few days later. Some have speculated that Poe might have been murdered because he was going to marry a certain Mrs. Shelton, which could have cost members of her family a substantial legacy.

There is even a flourishing subgenre of fiction in which Poe didn’t die in Baltimore. In one early example, “My Adventure with Edgar Allan Poe,” Julian Hawthorne (son of Nathaniel) encounters Poe in 1891 at an out-of-the-way Philadelphia restaurant. It turns out that Poe had suffered a premature burial, and when he finally awoke from his suspended animation—unchanged in appearance despite the passage of many years—he decided to put his literary life behind him. Initially mistaking Julian for his father, Poe explains that he now goes by the name of Arnold and is employed as secretary to a local banker.

Melancholy, prone to drink, slightly morbid, always dressed in black—to later generations, Poe became an archetypal voyager into the dark places of the heart and even darker places of the soul. In famous late photographs, the slightly down-at-the-heels gentleman of letters bears the tragic features of his own Roderick Usher: “To be thoroughly conversant with Man’s heart,” Poe once said, “is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of Despair.”

Today you can buy Poe T-shirts, action figures, and refrigerator magnets, as well as Raven Special Lager Beer and a children’s book, Edgar and the Tattle-Tale Heart. “Nevermore” must be the most famous single word in all American poetry. Poe’s stories—or sometimes just their titles—survive in numerous B-movie adaptations. More happily, some of our finest artists and illustrators have evoked the horrors of “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “Hop-Frog,” pictured William Wilson and his doppelgänger, or depicted that singular urban vampire, “The Man of the Crowd.” My own small Poe collection includes volumes illustrated by Harry Clarke, Arthur Rackham, William Sharp, and Gahan Wilson; but many other artists—Gustave Doré, John Tenniel, Edward Hopper, D. G. Rossetti, Manet, and Whistler—have been inspired by Poe’s stories and poems, as well as his own haunted face.

Which brings us to The Annotated Poe. Editor Kevin J. Hayes is certainly a respected Poe scholar, just as William Giraldi is a respected novelist. Nonetheless, the latter’s otherwise smart and insightful introduction is slightly marred by overwriting. (On one page we read about “the rips and rasps of a psyche” and “the strafings and strainings of the soul.”) Unfortunately, Harvard University Press has fumbled design and layout: The footnote numbers in the text are hard to see; the marginal annotations are printed in faint red ink, in flyspeck-sized type. Only fighter pilots and eagles could possibly read the commentary with ease.

Hayes’s annotations follow the usual guidelines for such volumes: As he writes, “I supply in addition to literary contexts a range of other helpful contexts (biographical, historical, political, philosophical), and gloss allusions and sources, topical references, obscure words and phrases, and words whose connotations may not be clear to modern readers.” To my mind, however, the notes don’t always give enough critical or bibliographical information. Discussing “The Masque of the Red Death,” for example, Hayes produces this tantalizingly inadequate comment: “In any case, the motley-colored suite of rooms offers numerous possible interpretations and critics have been happy to supply them.” An example or two would have been helpful.

While reprinting virtually all the major stories and poems, Hayes does leave out some key texts, notably “The Imp of the Perverse,” the prose-poem “Silence,” and Poe’s romantic tale of a Venetian Liebestod, “The Assignation.” None of the essays or marginalia is included. So while The Annotated Poe—because of the marginal commentary and many illustrations—is worth owning, it isn’t a clear standout in the crowded field of Poe collections. Online, moreover, one can rewardingly visit the superb website maintained by the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. It makes available digital texts of the standard Arthur Hobson Quinn biography, a great deal of important scholarship, and the two best editions of Poe’s complete works, those by James A. Harrison and Thomas Ollive Mabbott.

Michael Dirda is a weekly book columnist for the Washington Post and the author, most recently, of Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books.