Text: N. B. Fagin, “Preface,” The Histrionic Mr. Poe, 1949, pp. vii-xi (This material is protected by copyright)

[page vii:]

PREFACE

EDGAR ALLAN POE was a singer of songs and a teller of tales, and it is understandable that he should have inspired many rhapsodies in verse and prose. It is less understandable that he should have also inspired so many biographical and critical studies which are either unbearably heavy or merely thin air. To be sure, much of the patient and meticulous scholarship which, especially of late, has been expended on Poe has helped to destroy many of the myths and legends that had grown about his name, but even this mass of competent scholarship has not been able to dispel the weight of gloom, doom, and solemnity in which Israfel remains shrouded. Even the fanciful biographies, fictions, and scripts for stage, screen, and radio have been, for the most part, Condor-shadowed. It evidently was decided a long time ago that Poe's life was one of unrelieved tragedy and that anyone undertaking to write about him was therefore bound by the amenities to employ a tone of mournful seriousness.

Poe himself was, of course, largely responsible for this. He insisted on the tragic tone: in garb, word, voice, and exclamation point. But Poe, I have a notion, enjoyed his tone. Gravity and tragedy became him even more than mourning became Electra. One can almost see him laboring to achieve that tone, and glorying in the result of his labors. Poe was always, by his own testimony, a conscious artist. [page viii:]

Some years ago Edward Shanks justified his writing of a book on Poe on the ground that Poe was “the man through whom was made America's first great contribution to the literature of the world.” My own justification may be that Poe has himself become literature — myth, romance, poetry. To try to understand the nature of this myth, the personality of this romance, the texture of this poetry, seems to me an aim which needs no other justification.

The record of Poe's life and works is now fairly clear, thanks to the indefatigable labors of many scholars, to whom I am, of course, greatly indebted. Their contribution to this book is clearly indicated in the text, in the bibliography, and in the notes in the back of the book. I have also indicated what little known or, in some cases, completely unknown source material has fortunately come my way. Footnotes that are mere references to chapter and verse have been used sparingly, and even these I have thought it wise to separate from the text, because I am hopeful that at least some of my readers do not intend to write books on Poe. These readers, I am sure, will not resent the minor concession I have made to scholarship in the use of inconspicuous numbers to call attention to important documentation. Perhaps, after a while, they may come to feel about these numbers the way a Chinese theatre audience feels about the black-clad property men on the stage: they are presumed to be invisible and therefore they are.

One other hope I must express; it is that this book does not convey the impression that I have somehow succeeded in solving the riddle of Poe's personality and that, therefore, all other books on Poe henceforth become obsolete. All personality is complex and that of [page ix:] Poe was more than normally so. Biographers who have claimed that he did not “love” his wife may be right; and so may be those who have claimed that he did. Medical writers have “proved” that he was a congenital dipsomaniac or that he suffered from a brain lesion; literary historians have found his work “great,” morbid, adolescent, beautiful. Not one of these claims is the truth; all of them help us along toward it. They are the pieces that ultimately may fall into place to form the figure in the carpet.

Here, then, is one more piece. It presents another phase of Poe's personality, or a way of looking at it. The theatrical quality of much of his behavior in life has been casually noted by many writers on Poe, but it has not received the detailed attention it deserves. The numerous facets of its expression have never been brought together and placed under focus. I believe that greater recognition of this quality may to some extent dispel the almost intolerable gloom with which Poe has come to be associated in our minds. After all, the histrio may, like any mortal, suffer the slings and arrows of fate, but he has the gift of turning his suffering into a weapon of self-defense. By means of word and gesture and pose he achieves self-importance and exaltation. Seen thus, not a little of Poe's unhappiness appears to have been mere inflation, the swellings of high performance, in which art enlarged upon reality.

And if Poe's behavior in actual everyday life — cabbin’d, cribb’d, and confined — was not devoid of the compensations any artist derives from performing well, shall we overlook the even greater compensations derived from performing in the unconfined world of the imagination? For Poe's literary work was to a remarkable [page x:] extent an expression of the same histrionic impulse. Many of his poems, stories, and essays are quite clearly theatrical performances. To admit this is not to reflect on their value as works of the imagination: art has many faces and many moods. It is no small tribute to Edgar Allan Poe to say that he was the master of a certain type of literature: and precisely because his own face and mood haunt his creations. No matter that the face is sometimes a tragic mask and the mood the ingenious result of stage magic. In the end, what he has bequeathed to us is none the less art, and art of a high order.

No literary study based on scholarship is completely one's own. I have already indicated my indebtedness to the large body of Poe scholarship, of which I have felt free to avail myself according to my need and judgment. I now wish to express my appreciation of the American Philosophical Society which approved the plan and intention of this book to the extent of helping to finance my researches. To the librarians of the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia, the Library of Congress, the Valentine Museum of Richmond, the New York Public Library, the Enoch Pratt Free Library of Baltimore, and the Maryland Historical Society I owe a special debt for their courtesy and cooperation. Mr. William H. Koester of Baltimore deserves the gratitude of all Poe scholars for making his fine collection of Poe material available for study and use. Other individuals to whom I am greatly indebted are Dr. John C. French, Librarian Emeritus of the Johns Hopkins University; Mr. Richard Hart, Head of the Department of Literature, the Enoch [page xi:] Pratt Free Library; Dr. Thomas Ollive Mabbott of Hunter College; and Mr. H. L. Mencken. These gentlemen have read my manuscript, in whole or in part, and have been generous with wise counsel and constructive criticism. My thanks are also due to Mr. Gordon W. Wilson, of the Hopkins Library staff, for proof-reading and to Mr. Abraham Feldman, of Temple University, for the preparation of the index.

N. BRYLLION FAGIN

Baltimore, Maryland

March, 1949