Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe

Kevin J. Hayes

REAKTION BOOKS

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London
EC1V
ODX, UK
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2009

Copyright © Kevin J. Hayes 2009

All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and Index match the printed edition of this book.

Printed and bound in Great Britain
by
CPI
Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
    Hayes, Kevin J.
    Edgar Allan Poe. – (Critical lives)
    1. Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809–1849
    2. Authors, American – 19th century – Biography I. Title II. Series
    818.3’09-dc22

ISBN:
978 1 86189 515 8

   Introduction

1 The Contest

2 The Birth of a Poet

3 The Gothic Woman

4 Making a Name

5 From Peeping Tom to Detective

6 The Tourist’s Gaze

7 The Narrow House

8 The Most Noble of Professions

   References

   Select Bibliography

   Acknowledgements

   Photo Acknowledgements

W. S. Hartshorn and C. T. Tatman,
Edgar Allan Poe
, 1904.

No American author has influenced the history of literature and the arts more than Edgar Allan Poe. But at the time of his death in 1849, the profound influence of his writings – verse, fiction, and criticism – was by no means assured. In his last few years Poe was known in the
US
primarily as the author of ‘The Raven’. A handful of his short stories were translated into French and Russian in the late 1840s, but not until the following decade would Europe discover his work and recognize his genius. More than anyone, Charles Baudelaire was responsible for celebrating Poe’s greatness and disseminating his work. Baudelaire saw Poe as a kindred spirit, someone who had crystallized into prose many ideas he had imagined himself but had yet to articulate. It was Poe’s fortune that one of France’s greatest poets became his greatest champion. Baudelaire’s translations not only helped Poe achieve a level of status in France akin to that of a major national author, they also circulated throughout Europe for decades to come. Overall, Poe’s critical reputation took two separate directions after his death. Whereas readers in English-speaking nations hesitated to recognize his genius, European readers accepted him and his works wholeheartedly.

The obituary Rufus Wilmot Griswold published in the
New York Tribune
largely shaped Poe’s reputation after his death. Griswold harshly criticized Poe’s personal habits, depicting him as a misanthrope, a mad and melancholy loner, someone who wandered the city streets night and day, alternately mumbling curses or prayers and not much caring which was which. According to Griswold, Poe was devoid of honour, devoid of morality, devoid of any and all elevating personal qualities. Griswold further asserted that Poe’s imaginative writings, especially the poems and stories of his final years, were based on personal events. The assertion gave readers licence to understand Poe’s stories through his life, his life through his stories. This dual impulse still affects the popular understanding of Poe’s life and works. Even now, many readers see his mentally unbalanced narrators as reflections of a disturbed mind, not as products of a rich imagination. Many contemporary readers were shocked by Griswold’s obituary, but few doubted its details. His portrayal became the accepted image of Poe in both the
US
and
UK
.

Perhaps the strangest aspect of Griswold’s scathing obituary is the fact that Poe had chosen him as his literary executor, the one to carry out his final wishes in regard to his writings. Why would Poe choose such a mean-spirited man as his literary executor? Poe’s forward-thinking fiction anticipates the future in so many ways: could he not foresee what Griswold would do after his death? Surely Poe must have had some inkling of Griswold’s intentions. After all, he had publicly attacked Griswold’s popular anthology
The Poets and Poetry of America
numerous times. He had to expect some sort of posthumous payback. But there are reasons to explain why Poe chose Griswold as his literary executor. In the time Poe spent as author and editor, he had learned much about the publishing world. Here’s one thing he learned: controversy sells books. And in his dealings with Griswold, he had learned something important about him: Griswold got things done. Poe could be reasonably sure Griswold would edit and publish a posthumous collected edition of his writings. And he did. The first two volumes, which consisted of Poe’s short fiction and poetry, appeared together the year after Poe’s death. Griswold subsequently edited and published two additional volumes of Poe’s miscellaneous writings. To reiterate his opinion of Poe, Griswold republished his obituary as part of the collection’s first volume, further disseminating his negative portrayal of Poe’s character.

The most substantial review of Griswold’s edition appeared in the
Southern Literary Messenger
, the magazine Poe made famous. The article, which appeared anonymously, was written by John M. Daniel.
¹
Following Griswold’s lead, Daniel reinforced Poe’s negative qualities. Though Daniel praised Poe’s literary originality, he did so only after depicting him as an immoral, inconsiderate brute. Oblivious to what passes for proper behaviour in polite society, Poe, according to Daniel, said whatever he wished and did whatever he wanted. Poe was someone who could control neither his drinking nor his critical opinions. He took in drink and spewed out criticism without regard to what others thought. He was a cast-off of society, an Ishmaelite, a deviant who went one way when everyone else went the other.

This attitude toward Poe’s character presented a barrier to appreciation for American and British readers. Committed to the increasingly antiquated notion that literature should perform a moral function, Anglo-American readers questioned the ultimate value of Poe’s work. How can the writings of someone so apparently devoid of morality exert a positive, elevating effect on readers? Robert Louis Stevenson’s reaction is typical. In an 1875 essay, Stevenson admitted that Poe had ‘the true story-teller’s instinct’ and appreciated ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ and ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, but derided other tales as he critiqued Poe’s personality. Stevenson observed: ‘I cannot find it in my heart to like either his portrait or his character; and though it is possible that we see him more or less refracted through the strange medium of his works, yet I do fancy that we can direct, alike in these, in his portrait, and the facts of his life … a certain jarring note, a taint of something that we do not care to dwell upon or find a name for.’
²
Clearly, Stevenson let his understanding of Poe’s character hinder the enjoyment of his work. In the English-speaking world, Poe’s idealistic verse was accepted earlier and more easily than his weird tales.

Continental readers developed a very different attitude toward Poe, though theirs largely stemmed from the same basic information. The scattered stories Baudelaire encountered in the late 1840s first attracted him to Poe, but when he read Daniel’s article, he found the figure of Poe enormously appealing. The way Daniel portrayed Poe closely resembled how Baudelaire saw himself. In Baudelaire’s eyes, Daniel’s depiction of Poe’s character was praise, not criticism. He fitted the mould of the
poète maudit
perfectly. Edgar Allan Poe is the bad boy of American literature.

In 1852 Baudelaire published a major biographical and critical essay on Poe. Though he did not admit it, nearly two-thirds of the essay is an almost word-for-word translation from Daniel’s article in the
Southern Literary Messenger
.
³
Baudelaire went on to translate many of Poe’s short stories as well as his most renowned critical essays. Before his death in 1867, he published five volumes of Poe translations. Oddly, he translated few poems, leaving that task to another major French poet. In 1889 Stéphane Mallarmé issued a substantial collection of Poe’s verse in French. The translation would foster the development of Symbolist poetry throughout Europe.

Baudelaire’s translation of the short fiction had a profound impact on Poe’s reception across France and throughout Europe. Guy de Maupassant used what he learned from reading Poe to perfect his own tales and, in doing so, developed a reputation as the greatest writer of short stories in French. Poe’s pioneering tales of science fiction significantly influenced Jules Verne, who also enjoyed Poe’s imaginative journeys. He wrote
The Sphinx of the Icefields
, a fanciful tale of polar exploration, as a sequel to Poe’s novel,
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
. Verne even dedicated
The Sphinx of the Icefields
to Poe’s memory.

Translations of Poe into other European languages often came second-hand. Instead of being translated from Poe’s English, in other words, they were translated from Baudelaire’s French. Early Polish translators of Poe, for example, used Baudelaire as their base text.
⁴
So did the great Russian writer Konstantin Balmont, who published his translation of Poe’s tales in 1895. Balmont also translated Poe’s verse into Russian, which strongly influenced the Russian Symbolist poets, as well as those working in other art forms.
⁵
Rakhmaninov’s choral symphony
The Bells
is based on Balmont’s translation of Poe’s similarly titled poem.

Like Baudelaire, major writers in Europe and Latin America found the depiction of Poe as
poète maudit
quite appealing. The great Croatian writer Antun Gustov Matoš saw himself as a tortured artist and identified with Poe closely. Poe’s short stories helped shape Matoš’s fiction significantly. For one work, Matoš even took his pseudonym from the name of a famous Poe character, ‘Hop-Frog’.
⁶
Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío identified with Baudelaire’s image of Poe, whose bold experimentations in verse set a precedent for Darío’s own innovative poetry. Darío also wrote an essay glorifying Poe’s accomplishments, depicting him as a misunderstood genius, someone whose brilliance blinded his short-sighted, dull-minded contemporaries.
⁷

Poe’s influence on the arts extends well beyond the realm of literature. Mallarmé shared his own enthusiasm for Poe with Edouard Manet. In 1875 they collaborated to produce
Le Corbeau
, which consisted of Mallarmé’s French translation of ‘The Raven’ with illustrations by Manet. Mallarmé was also friends with Paul Gauguin, whose portrait of him depicts Mallarmé with a raven on his shoulder. Having read Baudelaire’s translations of Poe’s tales, Gauguin kept them in mind when he went to the South Pacific. He was moved by the paradox in ‘Ligeia’, the idea that great beauty requires a certain
‘strangeness
in the proportion’. Considering
Woman with a Flower
, which he painted in Tahiti, Gauguin said that the figure’s forehead ‘with the majesty of upsweeping lines, reminded me of that saying of Poe’s, “There is no perfect beauty without a certain singularity in the proportions.”’ Gauguin was not alone among French painters in his admiration of this idea. Eugène Delacroix had read Baudelaire’s translation of ‘Ligeia’ earlier and copied the same passage from the story into his journal.
⁸

The Surrealists found in Poe a kindred spirit, as well. Max Ernst, for one, greatly enjoyed Baudelaire’s translations. None of Poe’s works affected him more than ‘Berenice’, which resurfaces in Ernst’s collages, paintings and critical writings. Ernst’s automatic methods for painting involved a kind of obsessional staring reminiscent of the narrator’s behaviour in ‘Berenice’. Poe also inspired Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, who created several paintings named after Poe’s tales. Poe’s influence on painting went beyond Surrealism. To take just one more major painter as an example, Robert Motherwell created a series of Abstract Expressionist collages inspired by Poe’s works.
⁹

Poe has exerted a similar influence on the cinema, providing subjects for filmmakers, but also influencing the development of cinematic theory and technique. The subject of Poe and the cinema brings to mind those cheesy, low-budget adaptations of the 1960s directed by Roger Corman and starring Vincent Price, but Poe’s influence on the cinema is much more pervasive. It stretches back to the days of D. W. Griffith. In honour of the centenary of Poe’s birth in 1909, Griffith directed
Edgar Allan Poe
, a brief biopic that incorporates elements of ‘The Raven’ and other works and thus reinforces the longstanding tradition of reading Poe’s works as a reflection of his life. Notably, Griffith makes unprecedented use of chiaroscuro in
Edgar Allan Poe –
unprecedented in the cinema, that is. Poe’s short fiction frequently makes use of chiaroscuro and other vivid images of light and shadow. Griffith returned to Poe in 1914 with
The Avenging Conscience
, a feature-length adaptation of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’. For this tale, Poe created a way to express the profound psychological tension his guilt-ridden narrator feels. Griffith brilliantly replicates Poe’s psychological tension in visual terms.

Poe’s critical writings also helped shape the development of the cinema. According to his compositional theory, a short story should possess a fundamental unity, all elements working together toward a single effect. This idea resurfaces in late nineteenth-century short-story writing manuals and in other forms of expression. Poe’s compositional theory significantly affected Maurice Ravel, for instance. Priding himself on his craftsmanship, Ravel composed his music following Poe’s concept of the totality of effect.
¹⁰
Poe’s critical writings similarly affected the construction of film plots. Emphasizing the idea that all story elements should work toward a single, unified effect, early screenwriting manuals sound remarkably familiar to anyone who has read Poe’s criticism.
¹¹

The tales have continued to provide subject matter for cheesy, low-budget film adaptations, but they have also inspired some of the world’s greatest filmmakers. Federico Fellini’s feature-length films reflect an audacious absurdity or, perhaps, an absurdist audacity typical of Poe’s humorous tales. The leaders of New Wave French cinema greatly respected Poe, too. ‘The Oval Portrait’ helped inspire the story of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1962 film,
Vivre sa Vie
. Toward the end of the film, one character even appears reading Poe’s story from a collection of his fiction. And François Truffaut’s protagonist in
Fahrenheit 451
is memorizing an edition of Poe as the film ends.

Poe’s influence on world literature has persisted through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Franz Kafka’s expressions of persecution and alienation recall Poe’s tales of mystery and imagination. Walter Benjamin better understood the meaning of the modern world after reading ‘The Man of the Crowd’ and ‘The Philosophy of Furniture’. Poe’s writings have greatly influenced several major Latin American authors. Jorge Luis Borges appreciated Poe’s imaginative powers, his quest for originality and his ability to create works that transcended the times in which he wrote them. Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar first read Poe’s tales as a child and returned to them throughout his literary career. Like Poe, Cortázar recognized the power of dreams as both a source of inspiration and a mode of expression.
¹²
And Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes has filled his fiction with imagery eerily reminiscent of Poe’s.