A Classic Crime Collection (44 page)

Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many,
but few will be grieved by it
. The poet was well known personally or by reputation, in all this country; he had readers in England, and in several of the states of Continental Europe;
but he had few or no friends;
and the regrets for his death will be suggested principally by the consideration that in him literary art lost one of its most brilliant, but erratic, stars.

It was my sad duty as his physician to sit by his deathbed; to administer the cup of consolation; to moisten his parched lips; to wipe the cold death-dew from his brow; and to catch the last whispered articulations that fell from the lips of a being, the most remarkable, perhaps, this country has ever known. Let me entreat your thoughtful attention, therefore, to a plain, unvarnished story of a checkered life, and the strange and melancholy events that darkened the last hours of a dying genius. . . . I am persuaded that I should lend my feeble aid as a witness to the truth, and refute the foul accusations cast upon the memory of Poe, and repel the vile slanders respecting his death.

Reams of print have dealt with the question of whether the sorrow of the poet was described objectively by Poe or whether he was dramatizing a real love. This controversy is really unnecessary. Poe’s dread of the loss of Virginia, born of her recurring danger and nurtured by his devotion, had become a spiritual offspring, as concrete to him as the child he was denied could ever have been. In one sense, therefore, the poet was describing an emotional creation which had become objective to him, and the vivid reality of the poem is a consequence. But the primary inspiration was the abstract love of a beautiful woman—whether she was Helen, Eleonora, Lenore, or any other variant of the same name. Whether she was actually dead, or whether he feared her inevitable doom, is a detail.

Earlier that morning, after a journey of some thirty hours by train and steamboat, he had reached Richmond from Philadelphia, where he stopped over on his way south from his home in New York. The latter part of the journey had not been pleasant, for he was still feeling the effects of another of his prolonged drinking bouts, this one in the Quaker City, and in fact the worst yet. So extreme had been his intoxication in Philadelphia, where he lingered for two weeks, that he’d experienced his first full-blown fit of
delirium tremens,
complete with visions.

. . . we shall see that this author, product of a century fascinated with itself, child of a nation more infatuated with itself than any other, has clearly seen, has imperturbably affirmed the natural wickedness of man. There is in man, he says, a mysterious force which modern philosophy does not wish to take into consideration; nevertheless, without this nameless force, without this primordial bent, a host of human actions will remain unexplained, inexplicable. These actions are attractive only
because
they are bad or dangerous; they possess the fascination of the abyss. This primitive, irresistible force is natural Perversity, which makes man constantly and simultaneously a murderer and a suicide, an assassin and a hangman. . . .

Poe had a pretty bitter doom. Doomed to seethe down his soul in a great continuous convulsion of disintegration, and doomed to register the process. And then doomed to be abused for it, when he had performed some of the bitterest tasks of human experience, that can be asked of a man. Necessary tasks, too. For the human soul must suffer its own disintegration,
consciously,
if ever it is to survive.

But Poe is rather a scientist than an artist. He is reducing his own self as a scientist reduces a salt in a crucible. It is an almost chemical analysis of the soul and consciousness.

Was Edgar Allan Poe a major poet? It would surely never occur to any English-speaking critic to say so. And yet, in France, from 1850 till the present time, the best poets of each generation—yes, and the best critics, too; for, like most excellent poets, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Paul Valéry are also admirable critics—have gone out of their way to praise him. Only a year or two ago M. Valéry repeated the now traditional French encomium of Poe, and added at the same time a protest against the faintness of our English praise. We who are speakers of English and not English scholars, who were born into the language and from childhood have been pickled in its literature—we can only say, with all due respect, that Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry are wrong and that Poe is not one of our major poets. A taint of vulgarity spoils, for the English reader, all but two or three of his poems—the marvelous “City in the Sea” and “To Helen,” for example, whose beauty and crystalline perfection make us realize, as we read them, what a very great artist perished on most of the occasions when Poe wrote verse.

Poe is indeed a stumbling block for the judicial critic. If we examine his work in detail, we seem to find in it nothing but slipshod writing, puerile thinking unsupported by wide reading or profound scholarship, haphazard experiments in various types of writing, chiefly under pressure of financial need, without perfection in any detail. This would not be just. But if, instead of regarding his work analytically, we take a distant view of it as a whole, we see a mass of unique shape and impressive size to which the eye constantly returns. . . . I can name positively certain poets whose work has influenced me, I can name others whose work, I am sure, has not; there may be still others of whose influence I am unaware, but whose influence I might be brought to acknowledge; but about Poe I shall never be sure.

Both these types of Poe story have had an extraordinary influence. His portraits of abnormal or self-destructive states contributed much to Dostoevski, his ratiocinating hero is the ancestor of Sherlock Holmes and his many successors, his tales of the future lead to H. G. Wells, his adventure stories to Jules Verne and Stevenson. It is not without interest that the development of such fiction in which the historical individual is missing should have coincided with the development of history as a science, with its own laws, and the appearance of the great nineteenth-century historians; further, that both these developments should accompany the industrialization and urbanization of social life in which the individual seems more and more the creation of historical forces while he himself feels less and less capable of affecting his life by any historical choice of his own.

It is not really surprising that some critics should think Poe meaningless, or that others should suppose his meaning intelligible only to monsters. Poe was not a wide-open and perspicuous writer; indeed, he was a secretive writer both by temperament and conviction. He sprinkled his stories with sly references to himself and to his personal history. He gave his own birthday of January 19 to his character William Wilson; he bestowed his own height and color of eye on the captain of the phantom ship in
Ms. Found in a Bottle;
and the name of one of his heroes, Arthur Gordon Pym, is patently a version of his own. He was a maker and solver of puzzles, fascinated by codes, ciphers, anagrams, acrostics, hieroglyphics, and the Kabbala. He invented the detective story. He was fond of aliases; he delighted in accounts of swindles; he perpetrated the famous Balloon Hoax of 1844; and one of his most characteristic stories is entitled
Mystification.
A man so devoted to concealment and deception and unraveling and detection might be expected to have in his work what Poe himself called “undercurrents of meaning.”

And having in general sound literary values, he condemned the prevailing notion that popularity and sales were measures of a book’s worth by insisting there were standards of judgment other than those of the market place.

The efforts that Poe made to safeguard a tradition whose value it is impossible to exaggerate were absolutely necessary, but a less militant man would not have devoted a career to the task. Whatever his motives, for he was by no means entirely altruistic, his militancy is attested by the fact that for almost his entire career he single-handedly fought the two most powerful cliques in America—those in Boston and New York—which were determining that tradition. Whatever his motives, his devotedness to that tradition is attested by the fact that he persisted in his assaults (the lapses that occurred during his breakdown notwithstanding) despite the very real danger of ruin—a ruin to which he was finally reduced.

Typical of Edgarpoe. His art conceals while it reveals, reveals while it conceals. Nothing is further from his intention than to sing a simple song, or use the language of clear and common speech. These meters, rhymes, and redundancies, the portentous tone, the inflated diction, all, like the early references to musician and painter, put the actual experience at a poetic distance, impose upon it a new form, an expression completely different from that given to gross affairs like passions and hungers of the flesh, a language other than that in which this workaday world haggles over prices and orders breakfast. To explore his inward soulscape Edgarpoe had to take the vocables of the workday dialect and from such unpromising stuff create moods and meanings ne’er attempted yet in prose or rhyme.