I’m just a Poe boy from a... chosen family?

Edgar Allan Poe was orphaned just a month before his third birthday, when his actress mother Eliza died in Richmond, Virginia. Her husband and Edgar’s father, David Poe, had abandoned the family some time before and died the same month in obscure circumstances. The three Poe children were divvied up: the eldest son, Henry, went to live with David’s parents in their hometown of Baltimore. The youngest, Rosalie, was adopted by a Richmond family. Edgar, the middle child, was fostered but never adopted by the wealthy John and Frances Allan, also of Richmond.

Edgar’s relationship with his foster father was famously volatile, at least once Edgar reached adolescence and especially after the death of Frances. Eventually, John Allan cut Poe off from all contact and assistance and did not even mention him in his will.

I note all this by way of introducing this passage from A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe, an otherwise good Poe biography by Mark Dawidziak that I’m currently reading. Here the author quotes the director of a Poe museum to illustrate the important changes brought about by Poe’s relocation to Baltimore after having left the army and intentionally flunked out of West Point:

“The idea of your chosen family is a more modern idea, but you see that with Poe. . . . In Richmond, he ultimately finds rejection. The message is, ‘You don't really belong here.’ Then he goes to Baltimore and finds the family that says, ‘You’re one of us.’ He finds his chosen family here. This is the house where Poe sought refuge. Maria, no stranger to poverty, welcomed him into her household. He goes dark here and begins to write those short stories. This tiny little house is where a huge literary career has its real start.”

This is a truly bizarre bit of sentimentalism since Poe’s “chosen family” in Baltimore is, in fact, his actual family.

Poe—as the author describes immediately before that paragraph—moved in with his paternal grandmother, his aunt (the Maria mentioned above, his father’s sister), his older brother, and two cousins, one of whom, Virginia, he would eventually marry. “You’re one of us” is not just a statement of group affinity, it is literally true. If anything, Poe’s return to Baltimore and the love and support he found among the Poes there shows the power of real blood relation rather than the self-fashioned groups championed by so many in this atomized age.

To be fair to the person quoted here, the passage above comes not from a scholarly article or a book but from a taped phone interview, so it’s likely she was speaking off-the-cuff and blundered in trying to make Poe’s changing fortunes relatable. But it’s still a good object lesson in the danger of letting twee modern sentimentality color your view of history.

Poe on Progress

The capital P above is intentional. Here’s a passage by Poe that I’ve run across in excerpt several times, from an 1844 letter to fellow poet James Russell Lowell, who had requested “a sort of spiritual autobiography” from Poe. In the course of laying out his beliefs and opinions, Poe writes:

“I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active—not more happy—nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary—and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain—that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future—that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves—nor are we with our posterity.”

— Edgar Allan Poe, July 2, 1849

I’ve written often enough about the myth of Progress—whether applied to politics as Progressivism, to the study of history as Whig or Progressive history, or in the popular imagination as the constant general improvement of everything over time—but Poe captures both my beliefs and my mood just about perfectly. Not only does the myth of Progress blind us to our own potential for failure, it rubbishes and belittles our forebears. It is not only incorrect, but impious.

You can read Poe’s entire letter to Lowell, which is full of personal asides and opinions, here. It’s available as part of a great archive of Poe correspondence made available online by the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, an act of service that I deeply appreciate. You can peruse that here.

Beethoven, art, criticism, and enjoying yourself

From the late Edmund Morris’s Beethoven: The Universal Composer, an excellent short biography for the Eminent Lives series, on the composition Beethoven undertook during a dark period before the premier of his Eighth Symphony in December 1813 and his hugely successful revision of Fidelio:

He went about the task of composing the “Battle Symphony” (known in Germany as Wellingtons Sieg, or “Wellington’s Victory”) with typical professionalism, expanding it to two movements and throwing in “Rule Britannia” for good measure. After scoring it for Panharmonicon, he composed an alternative version for grand orchestra. This enabled him to indulge his love of military field drums, beginning the piece with two enormous rattling crescendos in contrasting rhythms, as if marshaling his aural forces. In the ensuing “battle,” he marked 188 exact cues for cannon fire, with solid dots for British artillery and open ones for French, plus twenty-five musket volleys of precise length and direction, indicated by tied, trilled ghost notes. He synchronized all these salvos with his music so precisely that at the height of the conflict, six cannonades and two musket volleys went off within three seconds.

The “Battle Symphony” commemorates Arthur Wellesley’s victory at Vitoria, the victory that resulted in his elevation to the peerage as the Duke of Wellington. I’ve loved Beethoven since childhood but am by no means a connoisseur, so I had to look the “Battle Symphony” up. It’s wild. In addition to “Rule, Britannia,” it incorporates “God Save the King” as a leitmotif for the British and a French folksong better known as “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” or “The Bear Went Over the Mountain.” I’ve embedded von Karajan’s performance in this post; you really have to hear it.

Morris points out several times that critics—actual connoisseurs, unlike yours truly—hold Beethoven’s “Battle Symphony” in pretty low regard. But he also offers this important caveat:

The “Battle Symphony” is by scholarly consensus the worst potboiler Beethoven ever composed, infamous for noise and naïveté. Yet its disparagers ignore that he obviously enjoyed writing it, and that its huge popular success—fanned by Prince Karl Schwarzenberg’s defeat of Napoleon at Leipzig in mid-October—helped pull him out of the Slough of Despond.

Critical consensus matters, as it often does, over enough time, sift what is best from what isn’t, but popular success and pure personal enjoyment matter, too. Sometimes it’s good to remember that. In any art form, if you’re not having fun doing it at least some of the time, why bother?

Bonus trivia or, When Interests Collide: The idea for the “Battle Symphony” came from Beethoven’s acquaintance Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, an inventor who wanted something topical to play on the mechanical orchestra contraption mentioned above. The name sounded familiar to me, and I finally realized where I’d run across it: an early and influential Southern Literary Messenger essay by none other than Edgar Allan Poe, in which he exposes a chess-playing automaton called The Turk that Mälzel had exhibited up and down the East Coast as a hoax. Small world.

The Pale Blue Eye

Speaking of breaking the basic rules of fair play in a whodunit, my first fiction read of 2023 was the historical mystery thriller The Pale Blue Eye, by Louis Bayard. I first heard of this novel late last year when the teaser for the Netflix film adaptation arrived. A lifelong Poe devotee, I was immediately intrigued. I dithered over whether to read the novel as I have had some of my own Poe-related fiction simmering for a few years, but as I don’t have Netflix and the basic premise wouldn’t leave me alone, I decided to go for it.

I read it in just a few days right after the New Year. I’ve been thinking about and reconsidering it ever since.

The film has been out a while now so the broad outlines of the story should be familiar. Retired New York City constable Gus Landor is called one fine autumn day to meet with the commandant of the United States Military Academy at West Point. The commandant, Sylvanus Thayer, tells Landor that one of the Academy’s cadets has been found hanged. Thayer has already ruled out suicide, as after the victim was discovered his body was cut down and his heart cut out. The corpse they removed to the infirmary. The heart has yet to be found. Thayer asks Landor to investigate, both to find the killer and to protect the Academy, which is still new, untested, and the object of suspicion among some citizens of the young republic.

Landor, a consumptive who lives continuously aware of his impending death, agrees to his request with some strict conditions and begins. He questions witnesses, examines the body, searches the barracks, and goes over the grounds of the Academy and the place near the Hudson where the body was found. In the course of his searches he meets a first-year cadet from Virginia, one Edgar A Poe, who offers Landor one sharp bit of advice and disappears. His curiosity piqued, Landor later seeks Poe out at a local tavern and the two strike up an odd partnership built around solving the crime—part crime-fighting duo, part mentor-protégé, part estranged father and orphaned son.

Their partnership is deepened and tested when more cadets are murdered and, even more disturbingly, evidence mounts of some kind of satanic worship extending right into the ranks of the Academy itself.

I don’t want to give much more away, as the unfolding of the investigation, the accumulation of clues, and the working relationship between Landor and Poe is one of The Pale Blue Eye’s great joys. It is also, as it turns out, one of its great frustrations.

Before I get into the one major spoiler, let me praise the two best features of the novel. First, the narrative voice: wry, sardonic, blunt and straightforward but with a finely honed poetic edge, Landor tells his story in such a way that a reader is guaranteed to be hooked. Even when the story’s pacing flagged—as it does in a few places near the middle—I was drawn along by Landor’s narration, which never lost my interest.

The other strength of The Pale Blue Eye is its portrait of young Poe. His semester and a half at West Point is often passed over as a biographical curiosity, but Bayard gives Poe’s time there a central place in his life story and brings this young man, burdened with a hard background and self-sabotaging flaws but buoyed by a tremendous trust in his own gifts, to vibrant life. (Bayard’s interpretation owes too much to Poe biographer Kenneth Silverman, who psychologized and pathologized and autobiographized Poe’s work to death, but that angle is probably only discernible to the enthusiast.) I’ve seen some readers complain that the novel is dull whenever Poe is “offscreen”; I disagree, but it does take on an irresistible energy whenever he appears.

That said, I’ve been reflecting on The Pale Blue Eye ever since I finished it not only because I enjoyed it so much, but because its conclusion, its climactic revelation, was such a cheat: it turns out that the first murdered cadet was killed by Landor himself.

In my post about Glass Onion’s failure to play fair with its audience, I mentioned Ronald Knox’s ten commandments of detective fiction. Knox’s rules had been on my mind because of that movie and I sought out the specific rules again because of this novel. In the case of The Pale Blue Eye, rules seven and eight are broken: “The detective himself must not commit the crime” and “The detective is bound to declare any clues he may discover.”

Given the structure and narration of The Pale Blue Eye, violating the one necessitates violating the other. Landor, having already murdered the first victim when the novel begins, withholds key information—namely, that the cadet had been one of several who had gangraped Landor’s daughter, an act that drove her to suicide. Instead, Landor misleads, telling everyone he meets and us, the readers, directly, that his daughter has left him. This is left as vague as possible: perhaps she ran off with a man, perhaps she died… somehow. Landor’s own tuberculosis offers the reader a red herring by association. His tragic backstory, when it is alluded to, is only a tragic backstory, presented with no apparent connection to the events at the Academy because Landor never gives any specifics regrading what happened to his daughter.

The point is that, until Landor explains precisely what happened in the final pages of the book, the reader could never have guessed at these relationships or events. Even when, about halfway through, I first darkly suspected that Landor was involved in the first murder I told myself it couldn’t be—there was nothing to base that suspicion on. Once Landor confesses to Poe and the reader, it recasts not only the meaning of every event in the book like a good twist should, but the very premise of the story itself. It just doesn’t work. The reader rejects it. The revelation is meant to be a tragic surprise but feels like a betrayal, a betrayal compounded in the last few pages by absurdity as Landor, somehow, narrates throwing himself over the same cliffs where his daughter killed herself.

As I mentioned last time, rules are made to be broken, and I didn’t look up Knox’s rules to hold The Pale Blue Eye accountable for some minor breach of protocol. I despise that use of rules for fiction. (Here’s the worst offender, an utterly arbitrary and stupid measure that many readers take as gospel.) But rules like Knox’s exist for a reason. Think of them less as an imposition of external standards on how to tell a story and more an empirical record of what doesn’t work.

A master, fully cognizant of the rules and of the risks he runs in purposefully breaking one, might get away with it. I’ve mentioned Agatha Christie in this connection before. But more often you will get a novel like this one.

The Pale Blue Eye is a case study in taking such risks and failing. It is brilliantly and often poetically written, full of well-realized characters, spooky gothic atmosphere, evocative and realistic Jacksonian-era period details, and a striking portrait of a real person at a formative moment in his life. But its final twist undermines the entire novel up to that point, making the reader doubt whether it was worth the investigation at all.

Two notes on craft from Poe

Or, perhaps, one note on convincing storytelling or believability from two different but overlapping angles.

Having read last year about Poe and science and a few weeks ago about Poe and American cities, right now I’m reading a pretty straightforward short biography called Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living, by Paul Collins. Despite its brisk pace and short length (107 pages), the book takes care to track Poe’s development as a craftsman—of poetry first, then fiction and journalism. Two early passages that caught my eye:

First, from a passage on Poe’s famously savage book reviews:

Poe could also lavish praise; indeed, his appreciations feature some of his most careful thinking about craft. In a generally positive review of Robert Bird’s satirical identity-shifting novel Sheppard Lee, Poe explained that a fantastical narrator must speak “as if the author were firmly impressed with the truth, yet astonished with the immensity of the wonders he relates, and for which, professedly, he neither claims nor anticipates credence.” The author must commit to his conceit, in other words—and yet must also perform a sleight of hand, and not overexplain or make the reader conscious of when the story has shifted into the improbable. Poe was, in fact, airing a central tenet of his own fiction: “The attention of the author, who does not depend upon explaining away his incredibilities, is directed to giving them the character and the luminousness of truth, and thus are brought about, unwittingly, some of the most vivid creations of human intellect. The reader, too, readily perceives and falls in with the writer’s humor, and suffers himself to be borne on thereby.”

Second, on one of the short stories that marks Poe’s maturity as a writer:

“Ligeia” returns to two of Poe’s signature themes—liminal states of life and death, and the fluidity of identity—and continues a brilliant use of gothic settings that were curiously old-fashioned even by 1838. Yet Poe does not jest with or even acknowledge these as fictional conventions . . . Instead, “Ligeia” was Poe’s first story to absolutely sustain the voice of the narrator and a belief in the conceit. He never breaks character—not to slip in an ostentatious scholarly joke, not for a sly nudge to the reader, not for grotesque description for its own sake. This disciplined internal logic would become a hallmark of Poe’s craft, and the defining characteristic of the stories that we still read today.

This latter is in contrast to some of Poe’s early stories, which were stylistically accomplished but inconsistent, narrated by nonentities or full of sly asides, wink-wink-nudge-nudge allusions, or showoffy jokes. They do not, in Collins’s words, commit fully to their conceits, and their narrators do not sustain the fevered, convincing voice Poe describes in the first passage because they step back from the dream they’ve created in the mind of the reader to gesture, comment on, or joke about it. The result is inconsistency and a lack of believability.

Consider the intensity of the Poe narrator par excellence, the anonymous narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” or even a more sane, ordinary character like Arthur Gordon Pym. Both describe outlandish, shocking events and horrible violence with a matter-of-factness that makes them instantly convincing, and Poe, master of tone and pacing, does not pull away or relax his narrators’ hold on the reader. Now compare these to any of the recent Marvel movies—an extreme and probably unfair comparison, but I’m sticking with it. Jokey, unserious, pandering, self-aware and self-deprecating, their drama and emotion diluted by a steady drip of flippancy, their stories are weak as a result.

In sum: in writing a story, commit totally to selling what’s happening as true, and don’t blink or flinch—even once.

To paraphrase Chesterton, who was himself well familiar with Poe, fiction is a game of chicken which no man of honor should decline.

The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City

The life of Edgar Allan Poe seems made to be picked apart. Poe tried and failed at so much, crossed paths (and swords) with so many people, told so many different stories about himself and had so many different stories told about him, and wrote so much in so many genres that topical examination not only suggests itself as an approach but can prove unusually fruitful.

Last year I read John Tresch’s new book The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, which reexamines Poe’s life and work in the light of his deep interest in science and his connections to both the scientific establishment and popular perceptions of science in his day. It was a great read, one of my favorites of the year. This year I stumbled across a book I missed when it came out in 2020, The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City, by Scott Peeples. I read it with great interest.

The Man of the Crowd is both a short biography of Poe and an analysis of the urban contexts in which he lived almost his entire life and produced all of his work. Peeples divides the book into five chapters, each of which details one of the four cities in which he lived longest: Richmond, where he was fostered by the Allan family after the deaths of his parents; Baltimore, where he had family connections and got his first halting start in the publishing business; Philadelphia, where he came into his own, wrote a great deal of his fiction and poetry, and made a name for himself as a critic willing to start literary spats; and New York, his last stable long-term abode, where his wife died and his work and projects began to collapse around him.

The fifth and final chapter, “In Transit,” follows Poe’s last year and a half, a period spent almost entirely on the road between these cities—still writing, still publishing, still unsuccessfully striving to start his own monthly journal and now unsuccessfully courting a series of new brides.

In each chapter, Peeples captures not only the phases of Poe’s life—a complicated enough task, given its wild ups and downs—but the story of each city. Poe lived at a time of runaway urban expansion, of mass immigration and rapid industrialization, and Peeples succinctly charts how these cities had changed by the time Poe arrived and how they were changing while he lived there. Philadelphia, for example, had grown away from the Delaware River as it industrialized, shifting the city’s cultural and political center of gravity inland and outward, to the suburbs. Poe lived in both parts of the city at various times.

The Man of the Crowd balances this kind of sociological history with Poe’s personal and literary lives remarkably well. Peeples never allows his examinations of each city to overwhelm Poe and his family’s story, nor does he lose sight of the landscape in following Poe. This is the best kind of topical or analytical history, in that the big picture and small picture complement each other perfectly.

So, for example, when looking at how often Poe or the Poes moved (over thirty times in his short forty years), we see the interaction of artistic, commercial, and economic considerations with purely personal ones. Poe often moved his family from neighborhood to neighborhood to save on rent, or because they could not pay the rent, or to be nearer the offices of publishers or journals, but he also moved away from city centers to provide Virginia, his consumptive wife, a healthier environment.

It is the effect of the city on Poe’s personal and family life that proves most poignant. Peeples notes that at the time the Poes lived in Philadelphia and Poe, despite the quality of his work, struggled to hold down a job due to his alcoholic binges, “there were over nine hundred taverns” in the city, “including one [only] a block away” from the Poes’ house. For Poe, crime and disease were not the only hazards of walking across town. Unsurprisingly, he stayed sober longer when living on the outer edges of a city.

Peeples is also alive to the tragic symmetries of Poe’s urban life. Of Poe’s final business trip in 1849, a journey from which he never returned, Peeples writes:

The year before, Poe had tried to die in the city where he was born [Boston]; instead, he died in the city where he had found a career and family. But, in light of his peripatetic life, the location of his death seems less significant than the fact that he died “on the road.” Appropriately, the journey he had begun should have taken him to each of the four cities that shaped his career and where he lived most of that life: leaving Richmond, bound for New York by way of Baltimore and Philadelphia. Like so much of his life, though, this trip didn’t go as planned.

One of the charms of his relatively short study (180 pages not including notes, bibliography, and the like) is the wealth of telling detail Peeples includes. The familiar outlines of Poe’s life story are rounded out and given finer shading by the reminiscences of neighbors, friends, and would-be fiancées. The story of a young boy from one of Poe’s Philadelphia neighborhoods rowing him out to a quiet spot on the Schuylkill to shoot waterfowl was both unexpected and touching, as were details of Poe’s family life as observed by visitors. And, of course, the numerous little things that gave and give each city its unique tone and attitude are well integrated with Poe’s story. By the end you feel you know not only Poe, with all his good qualities as well as his tendency toward pride and self-sabotage, but four major cities as well.

I’ve barely even mentioned Poe’s work or any of The Man of the Crowd’s literary criticism, but that is not the book’s main focus. Peeples mostly avoids deep literary interpretation or speculation about the specific ways a given city or event may have influenced Poe’s work. Mostly. Where he does, he largely cites other scholars, almost as a formality. Was Poe’s later fiction is so violent because he grew up in a city with slave auctions? Or is “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” somehow racially coded because Philadelphia, where he wrote and published it, had a large population of free black barbers? These theories seem obviously silly, and while Peeples doesn’t say so he is also refreshingly non-dogmatic and even openly skeptical about this kind of interpretation. What is most interesting is to note what Poe was working and where and when, and how the disparate pieces of his work fit together in time and place.

Like The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, this study of Poe is a study of his context, and works as a striking dual character sketch: of urban America in the first half of the 19th century—striving, rumbustious, commercial, confidently opinionated, prone to both grandeur and petty strife, and not a little dingy even in its better quarters—and of Poe himself, with all of the same adjectives applying.

The Man of the Crowd is an absorbing and well-written study of a great writer from an unexpected and informative new angle. If you have any interest in Poe or in the history of the United States during Poe’s lifetime, I heartily recommend it.

Inadequacy of response

This week one James Harris published an incisive short essay entitled “Criticising the critics” at The Critic. Harris notes the hyper-ideological quality of most artistic criticism today: its obsession with politics and social justice, its “excessive critical emphasis on who is making an artwork,” its resulting attempts to game the system of quality and popularity in the interest of favored art and artists, and its jargon-laden, blinkered, grad school-educated, essentially elitist hivemind.

In 2022, it sometimes feels like all art reviewing has become the World Socialist Web Site—only in that case at least it had the honesty to make its politics explicit in its name. . . .

The whole thing is like encountering a slightly tortured undergraduate who, whilst having some interesting ideas, hasn’t quite worked out how to organize them, and is pretty much useless as a review to anyone who does not think it is the primary role of a Game of Thrones prequel to advance anti-colonialist discourse. It’s a show about dragons.

I recently read Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem, an interesting biography of the great Sumerian epic by Michael Schmidt. In charting modern responses to this 4000-year old story, Schmidt includes these from a British feminist poet: “I didn’t like [Gilgamesh], on the whole. I hate male Hero stories: the big axes, the (implied) big penises and the big egos: a big turn-off.” And: “I’d only read it again if a woman poet translated it, and, in doing so, radically ‘critiqued’ it.”

Because that’s what translators are supposed to do, of course.

More recently, I finally read Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, in which a young man stows away aboard a whaling ship, survives mutiny, shipwreck, starvation, and cannibalism, and finally penetrates beyond the Antarctic icefields and the terrifyingly alien natives of the South Pole almost to the Pole itself. It concludes with a genuinely nightmarish and haunting cliffhanger. In reading more about it, I dug up this clip from the otherwise excellent PBS documentary Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive, in which the narrator and interviewees summarize the novel as “a dark maritime adventure that ends in a violent battle between blacks and whites in the South Seas.”

Well, that is kind of what happens, though the “blacks” in the story are not Africans, as the narration implies.

The talking heads elaborate: “I think one thing that was very much on Poe’s mind was the explosiveness of the slavery debate that was going on in the United States at that time.” And: “That’s probably the thorniest text from Poe on the issues of race and slavery. The story can be read as a kind of racist allegory or as an allegory that is a cautionary tale against the imperialist mentality.”

What struck me most about these responses, beyond the dismissive cod Freudianism of the one and the knowing faculty lounge political deconstruction of the other, was their sheer inadequacy. They do not account for these stories in any substantial way. In both Gilgamesh and Arthur Gordon Pym we read stories told on a mythic scale, full of primal violence, prayers for deliverance, monsters in strange lands, and confrontations with the greatest of all mysteries, Death with a capital D, and… this is what you got out of it?

Years ago on a special Halloween podcast we talked about the “Twilight Zone” episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” in which William Shatner, having just recovered from a mental breakdown, tries to explain away the otherworldly things he’s seeing on his cross-country flight using the therapeutic psychological jargon of the sanitarium he has just checked out of. This unsuccessful attempt reminded me of one of the stories in Shelby Foote’s Shiloh, in which a young Union army private tries to explain why he ran away during the battle with a repeated refrain: he is not a coward, no, just “demoralized through loss of confidence.”

These are attempts to tame the mystery each has encountered—in both of these cases, fear. In the cases of Gilgamesh and Arthur Gordon Pym, they are much deeper and more complex, though fear plays a prominent part. Adventure, danger, the unknown, God or the gods, and the fear of death are what these stories are “about,” not “issues,” isms, critiques, or genitals.

I am all for interpretation and deep examination of good stories (and a good story can withstand good study indefinitely), but I think it has to begin with a proper response to the story the author is trying to tell. And that requires a kind of openness—a willingness to be overwhelmed by the force of a story running wild in its natural habitat, the imagination, rather than the taming, sorting, and caging instinct of ideological interpretation—that is in unfortunately short supply.