Edgar Allan Poe lived a century before his time. He died in 1849, at the age of 40, in a Baltimore hospital — from dementia, alcohol or perhaps sheer Gothic exhaustion.
Eighty years later, he was acclaimed in D.H. Lawrence’s rhetorical essays on the writers of the American Renaissance: “The furthest frenzies of French modernism or futurism have not yet reached the pitch of extreme consciousness that Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman reached.”
And as Peter Ackroyd points out in the final chapter of his elegant, brief life of the poet-writer, Poe’s influence pervades the late-19th- and early-20th centuries, from Baudelaire and Symbolism to Conan Doyle and the detective story; from the science fiction of Jules Verne to the philosophy of Nietzsche.
The Surrealists deified him: hence Rene Magritte’s portrait of the back of Edward James’s head reflected in a mirror in which there is only one other object visible — a French edition of Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, lying on the mantelpiece.
Precocious maturity
But who was Poe? Bookended by grief, his fiendish, frenzied life has ever been obscured by its brevity and his own legend. Born Edgar Poe in Boston in 1809 to theatrical parents and orphaned by the age of 3, he was adopted by a family friend, John Allan, whose altruism seemed to evaporate with his charge’s precocious maturity.
Young Poe was already writing poetry in his early teens. At 18, he enlisted in the army, lying about his age. He is surely one of the few soldiers who successfully sought subscriptions from his peers to publish his own verse.
learly, Poe was not cut out for a military life — although he would ever after wear his black army frockcoat along with his habitual ink-black stock and waistcoat, cutting a Gothic figure.
He was, as Ackroyd proves, only ever-fitted to be a writer; but he also, as Lawrence wrote, “had a pretty bitter doom … absolutely concerned with the disintegration process of his own psyche”.
Poe was fatally attracted to fated women — an echo, Ackroyd discerns, of his mother’s early death from consumption. He met and fell in love with his cousin, Virginia Clemm, then just 13 years old. She too would die of tuberculosis, a fate hardly helped by the incessant moving of their household.
In pursuit of Poe’s fitful and highly argumentative career as a journalist, critic and magazine editor, they moved from Baltimore to Richmond and New York and back, seldom staying in the same place for more than a month.
Even as he wrote his dark, bizarre and murderous tales — on rolls of paper which seemed to emphasise the obsessiveness of his art — Poe was drinking himself into oblivion.
He was not an alcoholic, as Ackroyd points out. Poe drank as a symptom of his own peculiar madness. It is tempting, in hindsight, to diagnose a bipolarity in his mood swings.
A regular drama king, Poe was forever announcing his own doom, greeting everything from the death of his wife to the emptiness of his pockets with the same high-octane laments: “For God’s sake, pity me, and save me from destruction ... Oh God, have mercy on me. What have I to live for?”
When the widower Poe proposed to the poetess Helen Whitman — a woman given to trailing muslin scarves and dosing herself with ether when emotion grew too strong — his wooing consisted of a promise to “go down with you into the night of the Grave”.
Not for the first time, one has the steady suspicion that the writer was attempting to live out his own works.
Such a Hammer-horror biography — a veritable car crash of a life — is tailor-made for a writer such as Ackroyd. He sustains its intensity in the pages; but he is best, perhaps, when writing about the work itself. “He hardly seemed to know himself at all,” says Ackroyd, in stories such as The Pit and the Pendulum, Berenice and Ligeia.
It was almost as if they were composed by automatic writing (little wonder that the Surrealists loved him).
Precursor of genres
Deeply creepy tales such as The Fall of the House of Usher were “susceptible to various interpretations, psychic or psychotic. That is why [they have] endured.”
The Murders in the Rue Morgue, which did indeed invent the notion of the modern detective, solving crimes through “ratiocination” generations before Sherlock Holmes arrived on the scene.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, in which a whale ship is wrecked and its survivors end up in a science fiction Antarctica full of ice bears with blood-red eyes and murderous natives with black teeth, was so convincing that newspapers ran extracts as serious travelogue. Poe even prefigured Einstein in Eureka, his eccentric account of the universe’s origins, which seemed to have predicted the discovery of black holes.
“What I have propounded will [in good time] revolutionise the world of physical and metaphysical science,” he wrote. “I say this calmly — but I say it.”
But it was his extended poem The Raven that defined Poe in the public consciousness — so successfully that he could barely appear in public without being asked to recite it. It is, says Ackroyd, “a reverie and a lament, a threnody and a hymn, with its cadences so melodious and powerful that they still haunt the American poetic imagination”.
So, too, do we live with them. The pity is that Poe himself could not.
