TRAGEDY OF POE

Evening Star, Issue 22106, 13 August 1935, Page 11

TRAGEDY OF POE

GENIUS BORN BEFORE HIS TIME “Here,” once said a hagiologisit, concluding bis narrative, V s all is known, and perhaps a little more than is known, of the life or St. bo-and-So.” I ‘do not apply these words to Mr Hervey Allen’s Life of Edgar Allan Poe,” of which a new edition has been published (writes Edward Shanks, m ‘John o Londons Weekly’). Its amplitude, however, calls them to mind. And it is true that successive generations have insistently wanted to know a little moie than is known about Poe. Several people, beginning with Poe himself, have supplied what has been demanded. Mr Allen’s book, whatever else there is to bo said of it, does at least contain all there is to be known. He has adopted the only correct method of dealing with a biographical nuizle. He has put in everything that he can find and left the reader to make what he can of it. The reader who studies the evidence here collected will find that the puzzle has been solved —or as nearly as the puzzle of a human being can be solved. Poe is as comprehensible a creature as any poet or bus conductor —that ever lived. .... The old mystifications with which he covered the story of some of his early years were cleared away before Mr Allen set to work. But they properly bewildered students for a good many years after his death. ~ He was the son of a pair of strolling players. No one knows what became of his father, who, so far as the records go, might be alive at tins moment. He was not_ with Mrs Poo when she, while an engagement in Richmond, Va., died of tuberculosis, and the young Edgar still not three years old, was adopted by the charitable and childless Mrs _ John Allan. The Allans brought him up as their own son, though not without some reservations on John Allan s part. They took him to England when his adopted father’s business interests (not at that time flourishing very much) led him thither. They sent him to a school at Stoke Newington. They took him back to America, and there, as Edgar grew up, the relations between him and John Allan grew more and more difficult. The boy was sent to the University of Virginia—but not with enough' money to support himself. Eventually there came what we call a first-class row. In 1827 Poe, in a passion of anger, left Allan’s house, and then wrote from a tavern in Richmond asking for his clothes, his books, and enough money to take him to Boston and to keep him there for a month. That was characteristic. So was Allan’s reply. Poe, he said, declared his independence and then asked for money. None was sent.

Here Poe goes into the mists from which he does not emerge until 1830, when Allan again assumes a limited responsibility and obtains for hini a cadetship at West Point. What happened in’ the interval? One of the earlier biographers, Ingram, says: “ Unless the poet’s most solemn word is to be doubted, he departed for Europe; and it is generally supposed, and by Poe was never contradicted, in order to offer his services to the Greeks against their Turkish tyrants.” There is an accent of doubt in that statement which grows stronger as Ingram proceeds with Poe’s narrative of his adventures. These included several romantic incidents, a duel in France, a scrape in St. Petersburg, and so forth. ROUGHING IT. One school of thought tries to show that there may be at least a grain of truth in this yarn, that Poe had just time to cross the Atlantic, sniff the air of some English port, and come straight back. What we do know for certain is that during the most of the missing years he was serving as an enlisted man in the United States army under the name of Edgar A. Perry, and (incredibly) rose to the station of regimental sergeant-major. We can take it as pretty certain that when he was to be a cadet at West Point he did not want it to be known that he had served in the ranks, and, having started romancing, made a thorough job of it.

His experience at West Point was a repetition of what lie had suffered at the University of His life

there was made impossible by shortness of money, and be deliberately so conducted himself as to be expelled. From this on, John Allan was done with him. He had no resources but literature —and Mrs Clemm. Mrs Clemm was a humble and wellmeaning relative on the Poe side, who felt, not without reason (though her reasons for feeling it were probably all wrong), that Edgar was a credit to the family. He remained under her wing for the rest of his life, most or the°time as her son-in-law. He depended on her utterly, and called her “ Muddie.” To her Baudelaire dedicated his translation of the ‘ Histones Extraordinaries.’ One wonders what he and Mrs Clemm would have made of one another if they had ever met. She was in several households one of those humble, unobtrusive familiars who come with an empty bag, and take it away full. That was necessary, Poe earned little, and when he reflected how far his rewards fell below his deserts, he was apt to console himself with drink, a verv little of which went a terribly long Avay with him. And when he did that, his capacity for earning decreased. One of his employers addressed to him the memorable admonition that TVo man is safe who drinks before .breakfast.” , , All his employers took the view ot him which is suggested in these words, and he could not do without them. He had no way of making a living save as a magazine editor. The case of the American author in those days was almost hopeless. There _ was no need for the American publisher to pay royalties to native authors on whom' a snobbish public looked with a rather condescending eye. It was much easier for him simply to pirate the- works of English authors with established reputations. Poe could hope for nothing from the books which have since been sold, it is probably no exaggeration to say, by the million. He could hope only for very little from contributions to magazines. It was necessary for him to be employed as an editor, and American ideas of an editor’s proper remuneration were in those days very low. His weaknesses made an excuse for keeping them very low indeed. The same weaknesses made him take periodically a high and quarrelsome view of what was due to him. He was never properly paid. He was often out of a job. It was a miserable household, that of Edgar, Muddie, and the little Virginia, whom he married, with some traces of shame and clandestinity, when she was only 13. He inarried her, we are obliged to presume, as a sensible domestic arrangement, in one of those fantastic attempts at practicality with which he and Muddie were sometimes afflicted. The purpose was to knit the strange household more closely together. She was never.; in any sense of the word, a wife. _ She never grew up. Until the beginning of her fatal illness she was the little round-faced girl who went shopping with Mrs Clemm to carry the basket. Then she developed tuberculosis, and the doomed family had another drain on its resources _ and another reason for nerve-destroying anxiety. When she died iu 1847 the three of them were in the depths of poverty. Two years and tome months were left to Poo. DRINK AND DRUGS. He filled that time with delirious efforts to establish his fortunes, and was sometimes delirious in his belief that he was succeeding. He wanted to found a magazine from which he should draw the whole profits instead of a pittance given him by an ignorant and unsympathetic proprietor. He also wanted to marry again, and this time an adult and intellectual woman. He hurried to and fro all over the eastern seaboard of the United States in pursuit of these objects. Sometimes he was in wonderful form, sober and earning good opinions from everyone. _ Sometimes he was staying himself with drink, and probably drugs. On one journey he wrote from Richmond to Muddie iu New York:— I got here with 2do) over—of which I enclose you one. ()li, God, my Mother! shall vve ever meet again?.

If possible, oh, Come! My clothes are so horrible and I am so ill. . A few clays after this almost incredibly (though involuntarily) cruel letter, he was in great spirits and wooing again his first love, Elmira, who was now a widow and to whom he was engaged when he began his last journey home to Muddie. Mr Hervey Allen lends the indisputable weight of his authority to what seems in any case the most probable story of Poe’s end. _ Poo arrived in Baltimore, already incapable through liquor, when an election was in progress. The local politicians had a habit of picking up such stray scraps of humanity, giving them drink and drugs, and making them vote as often as possible. They did this to Poe and abandoned him when he had done what was wanted. He was picked up, taken to hospital, and died there in great agony, in the belief that he was a shipwrecked saiJor dying of thirst. . , . . . The man whom he had appointed ins literary executor, the loathsomely sanctimonious Rufus Griswold (whom Baudelaire called “ce pedagogue-vam-pire”), opened an obituary notice with these words: — Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it. Hie poet ivas well known, personally or by reputation, in all this country ; he had readers in England and in 'several of the States of _ Continental Europe, but he had no friends. Few now Jiving would ever have heard Rufus Griswold’s name if he had not had this opportunity of spitting on the face of the dead poet, who, with characteristic fatuity, had trusted him. But he said something very much to the point when he mentioned Poe’s reputation in America and his readers in England and Europe. Poe’s ’ work, as it must have been, from the conditions under which it was done, was flawed. But it has had a profound cfleet on the literature of all the Western nations. It was the real starting point of what we call the Symbolist or Decadent Movement —Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarme iu France, Wilde and the poets of the ’nineties in England, Dehmel, Georg Hofmannsthal in Germany, even Gustav Eroding as far away as Sweden, it has also influenced the writing of the short story down to our own time. From the great masters of the short story down to the slick commercial hacks there is not one who would write as he docs had Poe never written.

This has been the result of that short life of 40 years, full of disappointments and embarrassments, of odd loans of two dollars here and ton there, of drunken fits and disgraces and humiliations innumerable. Baudelaire and Mallarme exaggerated the absolute value of what Poe actually wrote — though it is indisputably great. Wo do not need to exaggerate the influence which it has had on the literature'of our contemporary world. Ho was crucified. One arm of the cross was his parentage and his upbringing, and the other was his own weakness, both temperamental and physical. The upright was the shocking economic conditions of American literature in his time. Had he lived to-day ife might very well have been a darling, first of the Book of the Month Club, and afterwards of Hollywood. At a guess, Mr Hervey Allen has made more money out of Poe than Poo ever made out of himself during the whole of his life. No shame to Mr Allen! Why should ho not?—and I wish him the good luck which he has deserved by a competent job of work. But when we think of Poe moodily and foolishly drinking in boozing dens in Richmond and Baltimore and Philadelphia and New York, we must think of him brooding with' good right upon the world which gave him so little for so much that ho brought it.