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Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809–1849.
|Tales. Selections|
Selected tales / edited with an introduction and notes by David Van Leer,
p. em.—(Oxford world’s classics)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Horror tales, American. I. Van Leer, David, 1949–
II. Title. III. Series; Oxford world’s classics (Oxford University Press)
PS2612.A3 1998 813′.3—dc21 97–39648
ISBN–13: 978–0–19–283224–5
13
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
EDGAR ALLAN POE
Selected Tales
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
DAVID VAN LEER
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
SELECTED TALES
EDGAR ALLAN POE. was born in Boston in 1809, the son of travelling actors. Deserted by his father, Poe was on his mother’s death in 1181 taken in by the Richmond merchant John Allan. He entered the University of Virginia in 1826 but despite scholastic success was expelled for gambling debts after one year. To heal the widening breach with Allan, over the next three years Poe served unsuccessfully in the army. In 1831, irrevocably alienated from Allan, Poe left the army and moved to Baltimore. Having already published two small volumes of poems, he there began his publishing career in earnest with a third volume of poems and his first tales. In Baltimore Poe set up house with his paternal aunt Maria Clemm, whose daughter Virginia he married five years later. In 1835 he returned with the Clemms to Richmond to edit the Southern Literary Messenger. Despite the success of the journal, Poe left at the end of 1836 to pursue his writing career unsuccessfully in New York and more successfully in Philadelphia. In 1838 Harper and Brothers published Poe’s first book of fiction, the novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Over the next five years Poe wrote the tales for which he is best known today—among them ‘Ligeia’, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, and his detective fiction. In 1839 he collected his first stories as Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. In 1844 he moved his family to New York, where the next January he achieved overnight fame with the publication of ‘The Raven’. But success came too late. Plagued by unrewarding editorial work, Poe was further tormented by the prolonged illness of his wife, who finally succumbed to tuberculosis in 1847. Devastated, Poe seems to have been worn down by his struggles. He courted a number of women, tried without success to found a literary journal, and in 1848 completed Eureka and ‘The Poetic Principle’. Shortly before his planned marriage to a former childhood sweetheart, he collapsed in Baltimore, where he died in October 1849.
DAVID VAN LEER has taught at Cornell and Princeton Universities, and is currently Professor of English and American Literature at University of California, Davis. A regular contributor to The New Republic on American culture from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, he is the author of Emerson’s Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays (1986) and The Queening of America: Gay Culture in Straight Society (1995).
CONTENTS
Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Edgar Allan Poe
SELECTED TALES
MS. Found in a Bottle
Berenicë
Morella
Ligeia
The Man that was Used Up
The Fall of the House of Usher
William Wilson
The Man of the Crowd
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
Eleonora
The Masque of the Red Death
The Pit and the Pendulum
The Mystery of Marie Rogêt
The Tell-Tale Heart
The Gold-Bug
The Black Cat
A Tale of the Ragged Mountains
The Purloined Letter
The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether
The Imp of the Perverse
The Cask of Amontillado
The Domain of Arnheim
Hop-Frog
Von Kempelen and his Discovery
Explanatory Notes
INTRODUCTION
EDGAR ALLAN POE is about as famous as an American writer gets. Children encounter him in elementary school, and his stories about mutilated bodies and walled-up corpses are familiar even to those who never read. He long ago passed into US popular imagination as part of the cultural heritage. Classic horror movies spin off from ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’; every October that inveterate illiterate Bart Simpson retells ‘The Raven’ for his Hallowe’en special; and Poe’s gloomy portrait broods over a Manhattan coffee bar on the spot where he composed the poem.
Yet Poe is a problem to those who study American literature. Fellow writers turn from him
in contempt. Late in life, a forgetful Emerson remembered him as the ‘jingle man’. The essayist Paul Elmer More dismissed him as the poet of ‘unripe boys and unsound men’. The novelist Henry James, himself incapable of levity, warned that ‘to take [Poe] with more than a certain degree of seriousness is to lack seriousness one’s self. The anxiety underlying these rejections was best expressed by the expatriate poet T. S. Eliot. Convinced that Poe’s intellect was merely that ‘of a highly gifted young person before puberty’, Eliot quipped that Poe affected no poet except perhaps the limerick-writer Edward Lear. Immediately afterward, however, regretting his harshness, Eliot confessed, ‘And yet one cannot be sure that one’s own writing has not been influenced by Poe.’
It is tempting to dismiss such rejections as simple jealousy, the inevitable fate of those who achieve ‘popular’ success in unprestigious literary genres. Yet most adult readers share these writers’ discomfort. The first real author Americans read, Poe is the one we most wish to outgrow. Acknowledging the appropriateness of the poet Allan Tate’s naming Poe ‘our cousin’, literary scholars still have trouble tracing the bloodlines. Poe finds no place in the literary history of mid-nineteenth-century American Romanticism, but is buried in a footnote, with only glancing allusions to ‘the twins story’ or ‘the one with the cat’. His success with young readers is assumed to signal the immaturity of his work. Like other talents not conforming to traditional literary paradigms—Cooper, Stevenson, and (formerly) Hawthorne, Twain, and the Brontës—Poe is conveniently pigeon-holed as a children’s author, skilful enough but not central to the ‘great tradition’ in American literature.
Much of our difficulty with Poe begins with his distasteful life. Never a good judge of character, Poe had the misfortune to choose as his literary executor and first biographer a man who vilified him as a charlatan and profligate. Although no one continues to credit Griswold’s calumnies, biographers must still admit that Poe’s life was something of a mess. Orphaned at three, Poe never subsequently felt at home anywhere, and spent much of his life searching for a kind of parental approval. His futile attempts to impress his remote foster-father John Allan set the pattern for his lifelong wooings and renunciations of powerful men. His hyperbolic attempts to earn Allan’s love—through academic and military achievement—inevitably ended in disaster. Repeatedly Allan’s failure to respond led the disgruntled Poe to disgrace himself more thoroughly than he had initially succeeded. As a result, history remembers his college gambling but not his prizes; his West Point court martial for neglect of duty and disobedience of orders, but not his rapid rise through the military ranks.
Poe’s search in his career for masculine approval was matched in his private life by a yearning after familial affection. Recoiling from the untimely deaths of both his birth mother Eliza Poe and his foster-mother ‘Fanny’ Allan, Poe sought in women less life-partners than surrogate mothers or sisters. The longest of his female relationships—the sixteen-year ménage with his aunt Maria Clemm and her pre-pubescent daughter Virginia—epitomized the idiosyncrasies of Poe’s emotional life. It is impossible to agree with those early ill-wishers who read the situation as sexually degenerate. As an economic and living unit, the household was quite successful, and Poe was adored by both his aunt and the cousin he eventually married. Yet the sexual reticence of the arrangement remains disconcerting. Far from degenerate, the relationship was apparently sexless, with the childlike, childless Virginia remaining ill for much of their eleven-year marriage. The emotional aimlessness and the repetitive circularity of his personal relations found a fitting end in Poe’s death while travelling to bring his former mother-in-law to his new marriage with a long-lost love from childhood.
Poe’s professional life was as untidy as his private one. Although not the habitual dissolute that later writers made of him, Poe did over-indulge occasionally in laudanum and more frequently in alcohol, for which his system had little tolerance. His addictions did not, however, affect his professional accomplishments. He remained a tireless journalist and a canny editor who, in addition to his creative work, produced large quantities of reviews and occasional prose while increasing the circulation of his periodicals as much as fivefold. If anything, his intensity impeded his career more than alcohol did. As exhausting a friend as he was a foe, his enthusiasms for James Russell Lowell and Thomas Chivers were only slightly less discomforting to these patrician poets than was the venom he directed at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Margaret Fuller. However engaging, his energy and optimism were seldom grounded in a mature assessment of the literary market-place. Poe’s repeated failures to find backing for his collection of interconnected stories ‘Tales of the Folio Club’ or his literary journal The Stylus may mark merely the short-sightedness of mid-century publishing. Yet one can only stand bemused before his final enthusiasm—the foolish belief that Eureka, his dense and obscure lecture on Newtonian physics, would be a crowd-pleaser.
The problem of Poe began with his hapless life. Honest but wholly without luck, Poe was never able completely to master his environment or his emotions. Yet the difficulty did not end with his death. His supporters compounded the error by praising his foibles as virtues. Modern readers continue to resist taking Poe seriously in part because of what ‘taking him seriously’ has meant in the past. Early admirers celebrated the very unsociability that troubled everyone else. To authors as different as D. H. Lawrence, Algernon Swinburne, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edward Arlington Robinson, Vladimir Nabokov, and Sergei Rachmaninov, Poe’s failed life proved his refined sensibilities. Walt Whitman pictured him as a visionary lost in the stormy chaos of mid-century culture:
On the deck [of a foundering ship] was a slender, slight, beautiful figure, a dim man, apparently enjoying all the terror, the murk, and the dislocation of which he was the centre and the victim. That figure of my lurid dream might stand for Edgar Poe, his spirit, his fortunes, and his poems—themselves all lurid dreams.1
In the second half of the century, French symbolist poets like Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and (later) Paul Valéry expanded Whitman’s image of an American Cassandra to view Poe more globally as the poete maudit, the cursed truth-teller unwelcome wherever commercialism and bourgeois morality reigned. Such high aesthetic praise added considerably to Poe’s reputation. Even the sceptical William Butler Yeats could not dismiss a poet admired by Baudelaire. Yet his sponsors may have done Poe a disservice, promising depths and subtleties that his works could not deliver. As is apparent in Whitman’s description, Poe’s advocates praised in him what they most admired in themselves. The result was a mythic figure, created in their own image with little concern for historical accuracy. Poe was not a cosmic outcast. His demons were decidedly commonplace—a lack of drawing-room skills and a tendency to tipple. Had he been truly profligate we might enjoy him more. Nor was he, for all his negativity, really a social reformer. Hardly critical of the bourgeoisie, Poe venerated middle-class values. His odd household was not an act of cultural defiance but a measure of how greatly he longed for domesticity, and how little he knew about achieving it.
Later generations of admirers turned from mythic biography back to the works themselves without entirely resisting the temptation to project themselves onto Poe. In response to his preoccupation with extreme mental states, psychoanalytic readers used him to detail the labyrinthine splendours of the mind. Princess Marie Bonaparte and other students of Freud combed the tales for insights into the unconscious. Though stunning demonstrations of the range of dream symbolism, these readings were hard pressed to discover repression in the confessions of Poe’s all-too-talkative narrators. Seeking out a shadow plot of sexual misdoing hidden beneath the tales’ obvious gothicism, psychoanalytic critics recast the tales as explorations into, virtually creations of, a diseased mind. Even those readings that did not confuse Poe with his unhinged narrators had difficulty explaining why the author was so fixated on a single state of mind. Reducing Poe’s extravagances to by-products of mental illnes
s, these early psychologists made the narratives as predictably middle-class as their author.
The recent reinterpretation of psychoanalysis in terms of a more sophisticated understanding of the linguistic structure of the mental has taken Poe’s work as one of its major testing-grounds. In his ‘seminar’ on ‘The Purloined Letter’, maverick psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan used the story’s unread letter as a model for the ways in which meaning circulates in the mind and in society. Subsequently, aestheti-cians such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Stanley Cavell explicated semiological implications not only in the deductions of the detective fiction but also in the horror of ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘The Imp of the Perverse’. In their intellectual rigour and respect for Poe’s creations, these theoretical readings made it once again safe for grownups to think about Poe without feeling guilty.
Linguistic theory brought about a rebirth of scholarly interest in Poe. Yet even these post-modern critics explored his fiction to illustrate analytic paradigms derived from elsewhere. In over-praising Poe’s prescience, theorists called attention to how much he left for later generations to articulate. Although anticipating modern trends, Poe is hardly modern. ‘The Bells’ is not ‘Le Bateau ivre’, nor ratiocination, deconstruction; and any reader who goes to him looking for Mallarmé or Derrida is bound to be disappointed. The inability of such dazzling analyses to make Poe respectable suggests that perhaps we are trying to defend him in the wrong way. No author wishes to be a precursor—a literary way station on the road to somewhere else. Each aspires to be the word itself. And until we can respect Poe without regard for what his progeny have made of him, we will not be able to appreciate him at all.
Respect for Poe must begin with his ideas. Although his characters are forever burying themselves in ‘volumes of forgotten lore’, modern readers have trouble imagining Poe himself as an intellectual. Yet in fact Poe’s uniqueness rests more with his thought than with his craft. Despite Baudelaire’s assertion that he was a pure aesthete, an early proponent of ‘art for art’s sake’, Poe’s technical skills were uneven. His language in both the poetry and the prose could be swift and evocative; it could also be ungrammatical, overwrought, relentless. His supposedly innovative use of the outré and the perverse was unremarkable, roughly comparable to that in other Gothic fictions of the period. And although we remember the tales as having strong characters and plots, Poe was, as psychoanalytic criticism inadvertently demonstrated, not really very interested in either.
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