Into the abyss.(Poe: A Life Cut Short)(Book review)

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Poe: A Life Cut Short, by Peter Ackroyd (Nan A. Talese, 224 pp., $21.95)

EMERSON and the New England Transcendentalists loftily professed to know nothing much about evil, that hoary idea from the childhood of the race. But a noted contemporary of the "Frog-Pondians" (as he called them), Edgar Allan Poe, knew much about evil in man and in nature: the labyrinthine passages of self-deception, the human capacity for tormenting others, the horror of death, and the greater horror of the dead who yet walk.

Among the great imaginative writers of the 19th century, it is Poe (1809-49) and Nathaniel Hawthorne, with their knowledge of man's mixed nature and deepest fears, whose works often reach the modern reader most effectively. Even today, students read and (more important) remember such stories as "The TellTale Heart," "The Cask of Amontillado," and "The Fall of the House of Usher," as well as the poem most closely associated with Poe (to the point that it became the poet's sobriquet), "The Raven." "He is the greatest exponent of fantasy fiction in the English language, because he manages to touch upon the most universal or deeply rooted fears," claims Peter Ackroyd in the most recent biography of the Raven, published to coincide with the bicentennial of his birth.

Biographer of (among others) Shakespeare, Newton, and T. S. Eliot, Ackroyd has chosen a challenging subject in Poe. For while Poe the writer is renowned as the founder of the modern detective story (with "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter") and father of the literary Gothic in America, Poe the man is often viewed in a less favorable light. He is widely perceived as a creepy mad genius, not terribly different from the over-the-edge narrators of his stories. This reputation is largely the result of two things: Poe's physical appearance as captured in a small number of portraits--those burning eyes, the enormous brow, the slightly out-of-balance face--as well as a calculated smear campaign instigated by Poe's literary executor, an ambitious minor poet named Rufus Wilmot Griswold.

Much of the history of Poe's reputation for the past century and a half has involved acts of shaking off these distractions to reveal the man within; as late as 1923, three-quarters of a century after Poe's death, H. L. Mencken claimed that Poe had never had a competent biographer. Several solid works have appeared in the years since, the best being Kenneth Silverman's magisterial Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (1991). Ackroyd's Poe: A Life Cut Short seeks to present in shorter form a straightforward account of Poe. In doing so Ackroyd attempts to put some distance between the facts of Poe's life and Griswold's assertions (which he calls "the most lethal character assassination in the history of American literature"), to provide a clear picture of the man and how he became one of the most widely influential American authors of his era.

Ackroyd's work is intended as a pocket guide to the chronological facts of Poe's life, the mystery of his death, and the nature of his literary genius. The biographer is quite successful in reaching the first two goals, less so with the third. For at the end of the book, the reader comes away wondering how on earth Poe--stumbling from one drunken binge to the next, cadging money from friends, squandering what little money fell into his hands, moving his place of lodging repeatedly and into ever-lower circumstances--found time to write the myriad short stories, poems, and critical reviews he completed, and to do so with such brilliance and bursts of wisdom.