“Poor Eddy”: A New Life of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe spent his career as a writer trying to resurrect his beautiful dead mother, only to bury her alive again. Stories like “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” and the poems “Annabel Lee” and “The Raven” reenact the grief of this macabre psychodrama. Robert Morgan, Poe’s latest biographer, urges us to see the horrors of his tales as actually reflecting a kind of nihilism.[1] But to hear this haunted innovator in American gothic literature and science fiction referred to by intimates as Eddy is almost as startling as the revenance of Madeline Usher, who rises from the grave only to bring her eponymous family home toppling down around her. The resurrection and re-interment of Madeline Usher is so often repeated in the work of Poe that we can regard it as an obsession or a motif, probably both. Richard Wilbur pilloried the shallow reading of those critics who saw Poe’s tales as merely “complicated machines for saying ‘boo.’” Robert Morgan is more in agreement with Wilbur as he argues throughout his new biography that there is a psychological depth to these haunted contraptions, the horror of non-being, which has kept Poe alive as a writer long after he was critically buried. I had more than one teacher of American literature in high school and college who compared Poe unfavorably to Nathaniel Hawthorne. It was Hawthorne who achieved psychological depth, whereas Poe had all the staying power of a Halloween costume, more a holiday habit than a mystery. Reading Morgan’s psychological investigation of Poe’s life and work almost persuades me to rethink my prejudice; certainly the life with its losses and despairs should have given us something of Hawthorne’s depth. But then there is Madeline Usher’s brother Roderick wailing, as his sister’s resurrection shakes their house to its foundation, “We have put her living in the tomb!” And this declaration echoes throughout Poe’s work, even among the empty spaces of the southern sea in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. And once again I find myself comparing Arthur Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter with Roderick Usher, and finding that Poe has dressed his characters as freaks. When compared to Hester Prynne, Madeline Usher has the less legitimate claim on my sympathies. Still, she is just as memorable.
When in 1972 Daniel Hoffman published Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, which was and remains the best book on Edgar Allan Poe, the author’s question was why another book? Morgan’s justification for this one, unstated but implied, is that the crux of Poe’s mystery was his trouble with women, starting with the loss of his mother when he was a child. Poe grew up in the care his foster mother, the loving Fanny Allan, and her less than loving husband, John Allan. Allan’s surname was attached to Edgar Poe’s, though he never adopted him, and embedded as a middle name; the wealthy John Allan left Poe out of his will and otherwise did little to help him, making the name Allan like a lesion buried in Poe’s identity. But the fact is Poe was something of a waif, one that Allan in particular resented. After leaving college at UVA swamped in debt that John Allan more or less refused to pay, Edgar entered the family of his father’s sister, Maria, his aunt Muddy, and fell in love with her young daughter, Virginia, Sissy, his cousin, and married Sissy when she was thirteen. Sissy died at 24 of tuberculosis. She was a source of heartbreak and possibly disease and the fearsome motif of incest which unsettles the House of Usher. How Sissy and her mother and Fanny Allan and Edgar’s own mother and Edgar’s first love and final betrothed, Elmira Royster Shelton, affected his writing, the terrifying tales and the merciless criticism, it is actually hard to say, and I am not altogether convinced that Morgan does say. But the only thing that seems to have made Edgar happy was writing itself. Living at the beginning of the age of the magazine, a new venue for writers, Poe earned what he could by publishing his fiction and nonfiction, though he was still always in debt or out of pocket. Just why was not clear, either. It could be that his horror of non-being was also a fear of insolvency. It is tempting to allegorize this sad life, whose hapless central character Poe referred to once, in a letter to his aunt, as “poor Eddy.”
Poe showed early talent as a writer of poetry and prose. As he tried to make a living, he developed two distinct styles, lushly florid or drily exact, and depending on the tale, one or the other was foregrounded, but they could occupy the same space. The poetry, which partook of both styles, was more like an excuse to pen a swooning chiming music of enthrallment, earning him the nickname “the jingle man,” from Emerson, but also renown as the author of “The Raven,” the most famous poem of its time and Poe’s most memorable work. The tales of ratiocination, his term for the intellectual deduction of problems he invented in order to solve, are usually lacking in ornamentation and can be as dry as they are methodical. The horror stories create a moribund atmosphere and can do so in a single sentence. One of his most gruesome stories, “The Black Cat,” sets the scene simply by describing a wife’s solicitous feeling for her husband’s pets: “We had birds, gold-fish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat.” That italicized cat will be the reason the narrator buries an axe in his wife’s head. He immures his wife’s body, accidentally including the cat. When the police come to investigate, he taps his cane on the wall, the cat cries out, and the police, already suspicious, tear down the wall and discover the body. Note that the cat, in the story, is the loving wife’s idea. Poe’s savage and incisive criticism scared the bejesus out of his contemporaries, but it also earned both opprobrium and respect.
The title of Morgan’s biography, Fallen Angel, suggests a loss of grace, like Lucifer’s, but this is hard to establish in any one event of Poe’s life or his writing. That his parents were actors would have lowered their status in society, but not like a fallen angel’s. There is no moment in the life or the work where we can hear, from Paradise Lost, Satan’s Evil-be-thou-my-Good. But admittedly a number of Poe’s characters, from Montresor in “The Cask of Amontillado” to Roderick Usher, seem to have forfeited their souls or at least their sanity. Only Poe’s foster-father, the unsympathetic and miserly Allan comes close to being a villain, but more in the strain of Dickens or Trollope than any of Poe’s ghouls. The series of failures, the pits and pendulums undermining Poe’s short life, were mainly his responsibility; even once he had achieved fame, there remained his failure to achieve financial stability. The stories, then, their horror and their terror are themselves the record of an angel’s fall, albeit a fictional one.
Marriage, which can be a kind of salvation, Morgan claims to be central to Poe’s tribulations, and we soon learn that Poe never had a happy one, or rather since he was only married once, never a happy long-term relationship with a woman he loved or who loved him. Singleness and incest are the two fallen states he returns to in his stories. Only the significant cerebral isolation of his great creation, the detective C. Auguste Dupin, displays a sense of redemption, but that is solely through the mind that can see through a crime and its causes. Also Dupin being French may combine the Catholic emphasis on the salvational and the Cartesian influence on the self-redeemed. It is clear that Dupin, a fictional creation after all, understands only what can be understood, even if no one else does. He is in a way a portrait of Poe’s best self as a writer. The tales of horror are populated by poor lost souls, who cannot understand themselves, much less their criminal acts. Roderick Usher’s exclamation at his sister’s resurrection, “We have put her living in the tomb!,” is hardly the solution to a crime. That is for Dupin to think through, whose ratiocination can identify the acts of an orangutang acting as a murderer in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” or a thief and blackmailer who hides his plunder in plain view in “The Purloined Letter.” But when Poe’s characters return from death, like Madeline Usher, they bring no revelation. Poe’s ambitious attempt to create a universal cosmology, Eureka—published in his lifetime though he continued to revise it up to his death—is easy to consider as the work of a crank. Unscientific, marred with errors of thought, but a monument to a kind of American anti-theology, it was meant to be a corrective to the likes of Emerson and Thoreau. It made Poe about fourteen dollars in his lifetime, but he died thinking it was his greatest work. That it accidentally includes a form of the Big Bang theory and some aspects of quantum mechanics was enough for no less than Albert Einstein to grant it the status of independent and original thought. In keeping with Robert Morgan’s reading of Poe’s life, Eureka looks like another failure to find integrity, unity, some kind of marriage between theory and fact. If there is a secret to existence, Poe was determined to find it or die trying.
The criminals in Poe’s stories are forever concealing their crimes, behind walls, in locked rooms, in graves, in their own irrational minds. Edgar Allan Poe whose very name has become associated with the spooky, the eerie, the horrific, was himself the embodiment of one of his horror stories. Exposed like Keats to the tuberculosis bacterium at a young age, it may very well have been dormant in him until he died at the age of 40, a carrier, possibly infecting the young cousin he married, though it is just as possible she infected him. Edgar himself had a poor constitution all his life, often ascribed to a weak heart. TB or consumption as it was known then was a plague throughout the nineteenth century. We know it killed John Keats, and like Keats, Poe may have contracted the disease from nursing a younger family member. Edgar’s stories are rife with pandemic disease, like “The Masque of the Red Death.” Poe’s favorite malady, a version of narcolepsy which he called catalepsy, sent its victim into a coma so convincing that the main character in “The Premature Burial” who is afraid he suffers from catalepsy goes to crazy lengths to keep from being buried alive. The ending of that story should remind us of Poe’s sense of humor, black as it may have been. Our main character wakes up in a strange place to the smell of earth and panics that he has been buried alive, when in fact he has spent the night in a narrow berth on a small sloop which is carrying topsoil.
Morgan goes to some lengths to describe the central obsessions that led to Poe’s tales. But walled up in Poe’s own unhealthy body was the disease that made him and some of his intimates corpses to be. Poe couldn’t hold a job and undermined every opportunity to succeed financially, but by God did he write. One of his longest employments as a writer and editor was for Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, which published “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Unfortunately the eponymous Burton was a dilettante and used Poe’s drinking as a good excuse to fire him before he stopped publication. Poe could make some decent money with his talents, but for some reason couldn’t seem to hold on to it. It took only a little alcohol to make him sick drunk. My speculation is that along with his alcoholism, his love of fine clothes, of being well dressed and living well, and his pride, might have contributed to his poverty. The handful of daguerreotypes we have of him shows him looking like a well-to-do mortician and a dandy. The dash associated with Lord Byron was a popular pose for Poe’s generation, and though Poe never fails to look haunted in his expressions in these fine photographs, he never looks shabby, either. Allen Tate, speaking for Southerners like himself, called Poe “our cousin.” Would for the sake of Poe and his women he had been a rich cousin. But he looks like one. The genteel dandy with the wide pale forehead, the fringe of dampish hair on his brow, and the nifty moustache (a late addition) is fixed as an image he lives up to. Along with the name, Edgar Allan Poe, and its bonging trochaic lyricism, his carefully created image is enough for us to open the House of Usher, with a skeleton key plied by a ratiocinator like Dupin. Disease, cognition, artistic aspiration, these were second nature to Poe, like the hubris of the fallen angels in Paradise Lost. He is an angel of decadence malgré lui.
But he was not a monster as his supposed literary executor Rufus Griswold made him out to be when he died. This should not be news to anyone who has read previous biographies of Edgar Allan Poe, almost every one of which gives the lie to Griswold’s sensationalism. But Griswold, who also published Poe posthumously, did have books to sell, and the lies he made up about Poe’s monstrous mental health and behavior gave Poe’s stories a profitable whiff of scandal.
My first encounter with Edgar Allan Poe was in the voice of my maternal grandmother, reading aloud “Some Words with a Mummy.” She assured me that Poe was probably too scary for me as a little boy, but I managed to appropriate her Modern Library edition of Poe, after she died in 1965, and have it still. In college a classmate, the critic David Gershom Myers, now deceased, led a student-directed seminar on Poe, and he focused on the newly published book by Daniel Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, the name repeated for each bell in the refrain of Poe’s “The Bells.” It was in that seminar that I was able to get beyond the dismissive opinions of my literature teachers, at least as far as the stories were concerned. The poetry remains second rate to my ear, even though Morgan recognizes its elegiac value. Whatever it was that Baudelaire and Mallarmé heard and saw in Poe’s verses, I can only shrug and say, “Figurez-vous, ça.” But Morgan does an excellent job of seeing Poe’s work as Symbolist avant la lettre and expressive of the kind of decadence that the French were looking for in the Second Empire. I wonder, however, if we would pay attention to Poe today without “The Raven” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” or even without Griswold, who seems to exist to be debunked while adding spice to Poe’s legend. Would we profit from Poe’s unique inventions? They may not grow out of Poe’s literary theory, but they certainly prepare us, with that theory, for what we will be encountering early in the twentieth century, in the literary theories of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. In an important way, Poe’s essay and polemic “The Poetic Principle” with its emphasis on compression and unity of effect is hard to get rid of. Morgan is right to call Poe the greatest critic of his day and in fact an inventor of American literary criticism, who looks ahead to the New Criticism. So, there is Poe, again, making his descendants feel uncomfortable, for his overwriting, for his wealth of genius, and for his undisciplined talent.
Poe in his time now looks sui generis. He is not satirizing Puritan society as Hawthorne was. I agree with Morgan that Poe’s horror “balances the exuberance of Emerson and Whitman,” a kind of anti-transcendentalism. Poe has his own exuberance. We can see it in the modern horror movie. I have friends who like nothing better than to watch a good jump-out-of-your-skin shocker in the movie theater. That however takes us back to the Poe with his machines for saying boo. That is not why we keep coming back to “The Fall of the House of Usher” or even “The Black Cat.” They are works of art we can marvel at, as we do at the various eternal punishments depicted in Dante’s Inferno: Ugolino embedded in ice, gnawing on Archbishop Ruggieri’s skull, or the Schismatics holding their disemboweled intestines in their hands. And there is also the returning alive from death of the beloved, that impossible resurrection, or embodiment of guilt, the evidence of the black cat behind the wall shrieking. Or the raven perched on the bust of Pallas Athena, in a bedroom, possibly forever, with its eternal promise that the lost one will answer, “Nevermore.” There is a masochistic pleasure in being faced with one’s own sins or a sadistic one when observing the punishment of another. Morgan looking at one of the final photographs of Poe recognizes the “black electricity of guilt” surrounding him.
For Poe himself, that exuberant flourishing of the terrible ended with him ill and in debt, but wearing nice clothing, and being beaten up on a Baltimore street, while a cholera epidemic rages around him. His first love Elmira Royster has become a rich widow, Elmira Shelton, and Poe is unaware that she still loves him. He doesn’t know if he can remain sober enough to court her successfully. The opium fiend that Griswold portrayed him as is nothing more than a pathetic drunk. Would Poe have taken any solace in learning of his future celebrity? That not only would he cast a spell on American writers to come, from Mark Twain to Flannery O’Connor, Shirley Jackson to Stephen King, but also moviemakers like George A. Romero and Steven Spielberg? Fame butters no parsnips, and Morgan leaves us with “We can only hope that . . .” But when we recognize the power of the image arising in the cinema’s ability to portray a living body’s disintegration and link it to “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” there is a desire to understand more. More than one literary critic, as Morgan points out, has tried to see the bleak horrors of slavery in the depths of degradation in Poe’s stories. It is hard to say where Poe stood on the peculiar American institution, though he was no abolitionist. And as a Southerner he was dead before he could sing “Dixie” with his Confederate brethren. There is so much of the grotesque and the gruesome in Poe’s stories, so much of bleak loss in his elegiac poems, you need to find something moral going on. There is a sense that the horror Poe imagines dividing life from death was not imaginary in his world at all, but aesthetic, even classifiable; hence the title of his 1839 collection, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.
So I linger finally over two observations of Morgan, one obvious but the other surprising, and even shocking. Seeing Poe’s horror as a counterweight to Emerson’s and Whitman’s optimism, as it were, does have to do with a pleasure Poe took in bleakness, that “ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir” in “Ulalume,” for example. The shocking surprise for this reader, which I have realized is probably right, if one has been reading Poe all one’s life, is that Morgan ends with the following: “He [Poe] is an entertainer first and last. And readers around the world for almost two centuries have cherished his wit, ingenuity, surprises, exotic scenes, and playfulness.” And, brace yourselves or prepare for a laugh and a gasp: “Poe is fun.” That may be the dirty secret every lover of Poe’s stories has cherished since first hearing an elderly grandmother read them aloud. Poe is fun. Garbed in graveclothes, fresh or disintegrating, the secret is out now.
[1] FALLEN ANGEL: The Life of Edgar Allan Poe, by Robert Morgan. Louisiana State University Press. $39.95.