Short Stories 1927-1956 (53 page)

It would be only too easy indeed, he had declared, to treat the subject of Poe in what might be called a pleasing, persuasive, and popular fashion. He had tried to avoid that, to be frank and just without becoming censorious. He had admitted that to look for lessons, instruction, spiritual insight, and what in his own country is called uplift, in the career and writings of the author of
The
Premature
Burial,
The
Black
Cat,
or such poems as
The
Conqueror
Worm
and
Ulalume,
was like looking for primroses and violets fresh with dew in a funereal wreath of artificially dyed
immortelles.
And though he would agree – and here he had cast a deprecatory glance at his chairman – that it was a lecturer’s office to expound rather than to indict, he could not avoid a dutiful word or two on the ethics of his subject. He had expressed his agreement with Longfellow that life is both real and
earnest, that books are more than merely a drug, an anodyne, a solace, a way of escape. Poets, too, have their specific value, and, unlike Plato, he would certainly not dismiss them from his Ideal Republic. ‘Not bag and baggage!’ Nonetheless poetry is in the nature of honey. It is not a
diet.
He himself was of opinion that a delight in beauty cannot be considered a
substitute
for the desire for knowledge, an excuse for any laxity of moral fibre, or for the absence of any serious convictions. And he had no wish to be partisan. However that might be, poets themselves, though they secrete this enticing honey, have not always proved themselves the best of bees. Their characters and their conduct, alas! are seldom as impeccable as their syntax.

A man’s style, whether in prose or verse, in some degree, of course,
reveals
that man himself. And Poe on the whole wrote well. But we must be careful. A style that may be good from a merely literary point of view is not necessarily the work of a good man, nor is a bad style necessarily the work of a rascal. Otherwise, how few men of science – philosophers even – would escape damnation! Though again, what a man writes may reflect himself, as in a sort of looking-glass, it does not necessasily reflect the complete self. By no means, surely, is the whole of Burns in his love lyrics. Was even
Paradise
Lost
all Milton? If so, the less Milton he. Byron, Baudelaire, Horace, Herrick, had they nothing of heart, mind, and soul but what was imaged in their writings? What then of Poe?

The professor had confessed impatience with the iridescent
veil
theory of poetry. Did the worn-out slogan Art for Art’s Sake, if examined closely, mean anything more profound than pudding for pudding’s sake, or
plumbing
for plumbing’s sake? Nor is a poem as a poem the better or worse for having been written at an age when most young people prefer the
excitements
of cricket or basket-ball; are, in fact, in Matthew Arnold’s words, young barbarians at play. Genius may sometimes manifest itself in
precocity
; nonetheless, such a poem as Poe’s
To
Helen,
which he professed to have written at fourteen, must take its place with the rest of his work. It must stand or fall on its poetic merit.

Nor again, the lecturer had insisted, is any piece of literature the richer or more valuable for having been composed in an attic, in wretched circumstances. Not for a moment had he conceded that between poetry and poverty there is only the difference of the letter V – ‘The viol, the violet, and the vine’ – that sort of thing. Men of imagination may be naturally sensitive, delicately poised, easily dejected – it is the price they pay for so precious an inheritance. But is it too extreme a price? Even Robert Louis Stevenson – an artist to his finger-tips – had not excused the man of genius the obligation of meeting his butcher’s bill. Indeed he had said harsher things than that. Chaucer proved himself a man of affairs; Shakespeare
made a handsome fortune and retired in his later forties to his birthplace; Robert Browning in the prime of life was occasionally mistaken for a
prosperous
banker; Westminster Abbey was at this moment positively surfeited with poetic remains. And that is hardly the Valhalla of the disreputable.

But even as a child Poe had been perverse and self-willed. And certainly in the brief months he spent at Jefferson’s beautiful and serene University of Virginia, and in his even briefer career as a cadet in the lovely natural surroundings of West Point – though every allowance of course should be made for the young and the gifted – he had without question shown
himself
arrogant, fitful, quarrelsome, unstable. Had he been the reverse of all this, which of its better qualities would be missing from his work?

There was, of course, the other side of the account to consider – Mangan, De Quincey, Coleridge. One could hardly, alas! think of their writings
dissociated
from certain weaknesses not merely of constitution but of moral fibre. Mangan had died in poverty in deplorable circumstances in the same year as Poe himself, 1849; and this too was the death-year of Beddoes, while Emily Brontë had died only the year before – a strange eventuality, since there was much in common between them all – ill health, adverse fortune, extremes of mood and imagination. But Branwell’s habits rather than her own were Emily Brontë’s scourge, and the tragic and morbid end to
Beddoes’s
career seemed to be proof of ‘a sadly unstable mind’.

On the other hand, virtue, the lecturer was bound to confess, is not the prerogative either of the Stock Exchange or even of the Church; and our public-houses, our workhouses, and other abodes of the unfortunate and the unwise are thronged with human beings incapable even of scribbling a limerick or of rhyming
dove
with
grove.
In other words, it is by no means only the rarely gifted that are responsible for all the failures in life.

Poe’s two years as private soldier, corporal, and sergeant in the American Army, though it had been an experience forced on him, had proved him capable of endurance, discipline, and responsibility. He had been sober and diligent, and had won the respect of his officers. No man of genius need be the worse off for
that
!
In after years he had remembered the experience with sufficient tolerance at least to make its surroundings the scene of one of the best, one of the most original, and, even better, one of the least bizarre of his short stories:
The
Gold
Bug.
The
Gold
Beetle,
as we should say. And though the writing of verse and even of poetry is seldom fated to be much more than its own reward, fiction may well be.

One of Poe’s earliest stories, indeed, had won him a substantial prize; and it was only editorial discretion that had prevented him from carrying off a prize for the best poem also. ‘Your
Raven
,’ wrote Elizabeth Barrett from her sick couch in Wimpole Street, ‘has produced a sensation … Our great poet, Mr Robert Browning, was struck much by its rhythm.’ There was little
indeed
to suggest that Poe had any extreme aversion to becoming a popular writer. Again and again success – and ‘I mean,’ the professor had
emphasized
, with a tap of his finger on the desk, ‘I mean
material
success’ – had been within his grasp. Yet his feeble fingers had refused to clutch at it.

Nonetheless, the professor had refused to ally himself with those who maintain that to be popular is a proof of mediocrity. There were great books whose appeal is universal. Poe’s triumphs, however, had been brief and very few. It could hardly be otherwise with a writer so egregious and
idiosyncratic
.

In spite of a personal charm and fascination almost hypnotic in effect, even at times on those of his own sex, Poe utterly refused to tolerate any opinions or convictions contrary to his own. He was obstinate and
contumelious
, scornful of the workaday graces that so sweeten human inter course, and – to change the metaphor –
oil
the wheels of life. In his youth he had been treated harshly perhaps, had been denied what no doubt he
regarded
, but quite erroneously, as his rightful inheritance – his foster-father’s fortune, for example; but he had failed to profit by so drastic a lesson. It could scarcely be said that it was the mere hardships of destiny that had prevented him from rivalling in general esteem even Longfellow himself, who, whatever his failings, seems to have been consistently true to his
principles
, was accepted as the laureate of his own people, and was a man of as many simple and homely qualities of head and heart as he was nobly
leonine
in appearance. And
he,
again, had made a fortune!

To compare, moreover, Poe’s work with Emerson’s was like comparing a neglected graveyard, dense with yew and cypress under the fitful lightings and showings of the moon, with a seemly, proportionate, if unadorned country parsonage, in the serene sunshine of a transatlantic morning in May. Man for man, Poe had not the virtues of Emerson, and Emerson had neither the exotic gifts nor the failings of Poe. Let us acknowledge it then. If in literature there is such a thing as the diseased, and even the sordid, why not attempt to exemplify them, even though it was exceedingly difficult to define them? The professor had, rather tentatively, made the attempt.

On the technical side of Poe’s work, he had himself always realized that his appreciation had been less full and less penetrating than it might have been. Here his lecture had skipped a little. But had it been otherwise how many of his listeners – those rows of silent faces – would have continued to listen? There were children among them. One little girl had a slumbering infant in her arms! Temper then the wind to the shorn lamb.
Craftsmanship
, artistry, he had announced, however, is vital alike in prose and verse; but you cannot really separate words from what they say. And the highest art is the concealment of art; and, beyond that, the concealment of the
concealment
. Could this be said of Poe’s technique? Is not rather one of the
chief defects of his poems their flawless mastery of method? Poe, it seems, had never
lisped
in numbers, but (quite apart from his own account of the composition of
The
Raven
), we know how laboriously many of his later numbers came.

Still, if writing is an art, so also in its modest way is the compiling of a lecture. The professor had dealt briefly with what he described as Poe’s mere tricks as a versifier, his verbal repetitions, his childish delight in the jingling of rhymes, and in emphatic metres. He had referred to his theory and
practice
of lyrical brevity – and there is no such thing as a
poem
that cannot be read and enjoyed in the course of half an hour. There was, he agreed, a measure of truth in this, but surely it is a question for the reader to decide – the reader, say, of the
Iliad,
the
Divine
Comedy,
the
Prelude.
For his part, there could not be too much of a good thing. He had agreed also that the primary impulse of poetry is the sharing of pleasure rather than the
teaching
of lessons. But there are various kinds of pleasure, they are of differing values; and poems whose chief appeal is to the senses – whether they are in the nature of a stimulant or a narcotic – should for that very reason be examined in the light of reason.

He had, however, left that examination to his listeners, and instead had specified where and when and to what end certain of the poems had been written –
The
Bells,
for example, which from being a few lines enshrining an idyllic and rapturous moment in the company of the charming but minor poetess, Mrs Whitman, had gradually been expanded by the poet into the rather heady masterpiece of its kind now only too familiar. It had been not only easier but more practical to do this than to attempt a close analysis.

Apropos of Mrs Whitman, he had broken off to refer to the poet’s rather numerous infatuations and attachments, or one might almost say
de
tachments
– those fleeting and even fugitive Egerias – from the lovely and doomed Mrs Stannard, the original of his Helen and the idolatry of his boyhood, to the ladies to whom each in turn in his later years he had proposed

– and indeed almost insisted on – marriage: after the death, that is, of his young wife Virginia. Like many other poets, Poe had loved at times
unwisely
and by no means always too well. He had sipped deep of the cup of feminine adulation – whatever its sediment might be. Scandal in
consequence
had not spared him, nor even slander, but for the most part it had left him unscathed.

The professor had referred in this connection to the poet’s childlike, ethereal, camellia-pale Virginia, ‘the tragic bride of but fourteen summers’, whose brief life, with all the recurrent horrors shared by them both and incident to her fatal disease, had been but a protracted journey to an early grave. And that said, how could he but also refer to Poe’s humiliating
dependence
on his more than motherly mother-in-law, Mrs Clemm? Muddie,
as he called her, to whom he wrote letters as naturally affectionate and
commonplace
as most of his correspondence tended to be high-flown.

There were indeed episodes in Poe’s life which it would be futile to pass over, and impossible to condone – dismal lapses, even apart from those due to physical disability and the ravages of drugs. Truth imposes on us the obligation to record what only sympathy and indeed humility can help us to understand. Nonetheless, he had tactfully, regretfully refrained from bestowing that scrutiny on ‘the dark side of the poet’s career’ which one is apt to fix on a drop of ditch-water seen through a microscope. Not that Poe himself had spared others. As a critic alike of humanity and of literature, his bias was on the side of severity; he despised a fool, ridiculed failure, had no mercy on his enemies, and little patience with aims and ideals contrary to his own. Whatever the value of his writings might be, in
Poe’s eyes
‘an inferior poem was little short of a crime’. An arrogant assurance of his own powers was alike his weakness and his strength.