It’s hard to believe that these comments are all in reference to the same writer:
• “An enthusiasm for him is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.” –Henry James
• “His writing was skillful, marvelously constructed, and … dead.” –Ernest Hemingway
• “(A) highly gifted young person before puberty.” –T.S. Eliot
• “The finest of fine writers, the born aristocrat of letters.” –Bernard Shaw
No one familiar with American literature will have any trouble recognizing the abuse heaped on the head of Edgar Allan Poe; it’s Shaw’s praise that might come as a surprise. It’s been said that even today, many adults feel a little guilty if they’ve carried a love for Poe’s Grand Guignol over from adolescence, as if there’s something disreputable in an appreciation of full-blooded melodrama.
Not that Poe was a misrepresented saint. According to James M. Hutchisson’s mostly level-headed and positive biography, POE, the man had a reputation for “alternately, viciousness or crankiness” and the well-known writers of his time thought of him as “a young talent who had flashes of brilliance but was something of a crank.”
Tales of his “viciousness” had nothing to do with any nonexistent physical cruelty, but with his take-no-prisoners style of literary criticism. Never just a writer of short stories, Poe was also a poet, humorist, essayist, playwright and book reviewer, and it was in that latter capacity he could bring the walls a-tumbling down. “He often drew more blood than he intended,” Hutchisson tells us.
That technique can be a two-edged sword. While slashing critiques of others’ work can help you build a reputation as a no-nonsense observer of the literary scene, it can set you up to receive as good as you give if you are also a working creative writer.
On Poe’s move to New York in 1844, Hutchisson tells us that he “was definitely regarded as a minor talent, probably due more to his personal character than his actual work. His reputation for drinking and quarrelsomeness was widely known, and it is doubtful that most of his contemporaries had read seriously his tales and poems. Also, Poe’s abrasive and often bellicose personality made itself felt all the time, and this, of course, was what tended to register the most resoundingly with those he met.”
And that brings up the other thing everyone knows about Poe: He was a drunk.
Well, there’s no denying that. Hutchisson writes that a single glass of wine could send Poe into a drunken funk. He just had no tolerance for alcohol – a tragedy, since he had such a mental need for it.
POE, unlike many revisionist biographies, feels like it just wants to set the record straight and not grind any axes. Hutchisson, an academic at The Citadel, has written a highly readable account of this most interesting American life. Don’t let the fact that the book is published by the University Press of Mississippi scare you off. Index included, the book is less than 300 pages long.
But best of all, POE examines the writer’s most famous stories in light of the American popular culture of his time, and shows that his macabre subjects were not that far out of the contemporary mainstream. Poe wasn’t a monster. If anything, he was all too human. –Doug Bentin
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