The life of Edgar Allan Poe

Press, 19 August 1978, Page 17

The life of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe. By David Sinclair. J. M. Dent. 272 pp. $19.10. (Reviewed by John Wilson) Poe’s name is well-know today as the author of often macabre stories that are gripping reading (and make good television), and of poetry that, for all its seeming sometimes affected and strained, is compelling. But rather less is known about his life than the lives of other writers of the period, except for a vague impression that ft was a chaotic and disreputable life. The great virtue of this biography is that it dispels that impression. The author does not pretend that Poe had no faults — indigence, for instance, made him often whining and importunate which gives some of his letters a most disagreeable character — but his virtues are given due recognition and the faults are exonerated to the extent that this is possible. Tn many respects' Poe was the archetype of the poor artist. Tormented by a strahge, dark vision of life, living often on the edge of •£ in privation, scantily recognised or acknowledged in his lifetime as the great writer he was, he died a bizarre and tragic death only to achieve a later apotheosis, first in Europe, more recently in his native America, through his writings. The biography presented by David Sinclair is conventional in following Poe’s life chronologically — starting with his parents and their early deaths, following on to Poe’s adoption into the Allan household and his period of residence in England, to his brief spell at the University of Virginia and longer spell under an

Army, and on into his not always successful career as an editor of successful career as an editor of literary journals and as a literary critic. His marriage to his relation, Virginia Clemm, was apparently entirely successful. Through all this he emerges as often incompetent in managing his affairs and emotions, but as something far different from the drunken wastrel of legend and popular impression.

Among the more interesting parts of the book, for those who have a passing acquaintance with Poe’s short stories and poems but were unaware of his activities as literary critic, will be the discovery of what a brilliant, provocative and devastating critic he was.

Poe, perhaps, deserved a biographer with more imagination and flair than Sinclair. This life, is an adequate, but often pedestrian affair. Its limitations are evident in the excessive use of long quotations which should have been integrated into the text more carefully. Sometimes, too, the author is too dogmatic. He assets that things must have happened or been thought (when the evidence is not available) to fit in with his particular interpretations of episodes in Poe’s life. This is particularly irritating when he discusses Poe’s relations with his adoptive father, John Allan. The final rupture remains something of an enigma, in spite of Mr Sinclair’s strenuous efforts to make it explicable. Had his imagination been up to the task he might have been able to make the parts played by each man more convincing and understandable, even in the absence of “hard” evidence. But a practical turn of mind and careful, examination of the evidence available has prompted Sinclair to make one plausible suggestion rather less dogmatically. This is that Poe suffered from diabetes. Finding medical causes for the erratic or unusual behaviour of great men is something of a fad at the moment, but in this case the suggestion provides a reasonably convincing explanation for certain hitherto puzzling features of Poe’s behaviour.