Text: N. B. Fagin, “Chapter 06,” The Histrionic Mr. Poe, 1949, pp. 217-240 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 217:]

THE NUMBER of writers who have attempted to exploit Poe as a fictional and dramatic character has been legion. Perhaps “exploit” is too strong and ungracious a word; perhaps in many cases the authors have been misled by their admiration of the poet or by their sympathy with his tragic life into believing that they could build around him a memorable novel or play. Their efforts have been fruitless. Not one piece of literature of any importance — except half a dozen fine lyrics — has been the result. Somehow this most tantalizing of romantic figures in literary history has proved singularly uninteresting as the hero in a novel or on the stage.

It may be argued that so far no first-rate novelist or dramatist has undertaken the task. This is a fact, but it proves only that first-rate novelists and dramatists know better than to expend their creative energy on unpromising material. On the other hand, merely competent novelists and playwrights have done very well with Shelley, Byron, George Sand, Zola, Oscar Wilde, the Bronte sisters, the Brownings, and even the recluse Emily Dickinson. The lives of these writers provide material which can be shaped into plots; the characters [page 218:] of these writers can be recreated into living personalities. Poe's life, in spite of its hectic succession of incidents or events, remains static and his character emerges as pallid as that of one of his own heroes.

There is meaning in the fact that while his life and personality dramatize but poorly or not at all, his work when enlarged and reshaped into a novel, a play, a radio script, or a motion picture scenario often has both strength and beauty. Plays especially, when based on Poe's life, have been unrewarding; when based on his short stories and poems, they have been generally successful. This interesting phenomenon, it seems to me, is an important part of the “mystery” that is Poe. It points to a significant relationship between his literary work and his personality and helps to define the nature and meaning of both.

No complete chronological list of novels and short stories in which Edgar Allan Poe figures either as protagonist or subsidiary character has ever been compiled. Most of the early attempts at fictionized biography of him have died, and — judging by the few that survive mercifully. What was wrong with them can be surmised from a perusal of Mary Newton Stanard's The Dreamer, first published in 1909 and reissued in 1925.

This novel evidently had a fairly popular reception, for its author tells us in a foreword to the reissue that “Home papers praised it, favorable press notices from all parts of the country flowed in, people bought and read it and sent it off in various directions as birthday and Christmas presents.” Apparently, interest in Poe was as great in the earlier decades of our century as it is today. Readers, however, got only what the author claimed her work was meant to offer: “a romantic rendering” of [page 219:] Poe's life-story. To the serious student the book could offer little that he did not already know and much that contradicted what he knew. For even in 1909 scholars knew that Elizabeth Arnold Poe had not “lately lost a dearly loved and loving husband,” that it was highly questionable that Eliza White, “for all her beauty and charm, and many suitors,” had remained a spinster because she had remained in love with the poet, and that it was more than questionable that “The Raven “was written in Philadelphia, where Poe read it to Mr. Graham's office force.

To the general reader, the novel offered what he — or more likely she — expected: a sentimental story about a handsome unhappy genius who composed great poems and stories and who, despite poverty, ill health, and many temptations, remained constant to his only love, the pathetic little Virginia, the “lost Lenore.” According to Mrs. Stanard there were always two Poes: Edgar Goodfellow, an outgiving, lovable chap, and Edgar the Dreamer, who lived in an invisible world of mystery. All of the troubles that came upon the handsome hero arose from the clash of these two personalities: Edgar Goodfellow would have got along nicely in the world, but Edgar the Dreamer would not let him. Of course, there were also jealousy, envy, and villainy — in the person of the wicked Doctor Griswold — which the genius had to contend with. Long before Mrs. Stanard's novel it had been known that Rufus Wilmot Griswold was not a very scrupulous antagonist, and Professor Quinn's recent researches have confirmed this knowledge; but there is still not the slightest shred of evidence to justify Mrs. Stanard in portraying him as the villain who did not “permit “the publication of “The Raven” [page 220:] in Graham's Magazine. Of this particular wickedness he was not, and could not have been, guilty.

We must remember, however, that — in spite of the author's claim that she made an attempt to conform her story “to the latest discoveries regarding Poe's life” — she was writing fiction. And it is as fiction that we must judge her performance. A few sentences selected almost at random are sufficient to indicate the literary tone of Mrs. Stanard's novel. Nat Howard, a boy at school who offensively reminds fourteen-year old Edgar that his mother had been a “common actress,” receives a lengthy reply, part of which reads:

We are told that during Poe's residence in Philadelphia he walked along the street and “passers-by whispered to one another, ‘There goes Mr. Poe. Did you notice his eyes? They say he has the most expressive eyes in Philadelphia.’ ” Or we get this description of Virginia dying: “in the bed-chamber upstairs, under the shelving walls of the low Dutch roof, The Dreamer's hearts-ease blossom lay broken and wan upon the white bed ... At the foot of the bed sat a silver-haired woman with saint like face uplifted in resignation and admiration.” Fortunately we are spared the soft music of the age of sound pictures. [page 221:]

What novelists and “biographers “like Mrs. Stanard represent is the tribe of ladies whom Arthur Hopkins had in mind when he referred to Poe's posthumous sweethearts. In his own day Poe attracted the adoring attention of many literary ladies; he accepted their sympathy, their lyrics to Israfel, their celebration of his magnetic eyes and magic voice,(1) until their jealousy of one another involved him in irksome situations and he was provoked to calling them “pestilential.” But, whether contemporary or posthumous, they helped to spread the legend of the ill-starred genius who battled manfully — albeit at times weakly, and therefore all the more deserving of sympathy — for wife and mother-in law and Art and the Ideal. When they came to write his life-story they approached him with pleasant trepidation and hearts full of sentiment. They have all been more or less like the lady whose lengthy account of a visit with Poe has recently come to light.[2] “I silently recalled The Raven,’ “the lady records, “by way of sobering my spirits to a proper degree of seriousness, being about to enter the presence of a grave and melancholy poet, as I imagined Poe to be.”

He has been approached “soberly “ever since. Even disciplined writers like Dorothy Dow and Laura Benét — neither of whom can be remotely connected with the tribe — have entered his presence with a proper degree [page 222:] of seriousness. Miss Dow's Dark Glory (1931) maintains the tone of her title; she manages to portray an always grave and melancholy poet, but her hero remains without light; and her novel remains shapeless. Miss Benet's more modest offering, Young Edgar Allan Poe (1941), is by all odds the best of the many Poe biographies which avowedly contain legendary material and imaginary conversation. Clearly intended as a boy's book, this “story of a great American artist “emphasizes the earlier years of Poe's life and tries valiantly to be both reasonably truthful and entertaining. In the end, it is no more successful than Miss Dow's Dark Glory.

Neither of the two estimable authors is to blame. The material they chose lacks excitement. Miss Dow finds it easier to convince her readers of her subject's darkness than of his glory. And Miss Benet, breaking off her narrative with Poe's more successful and relatively happy years in Philadelphia, finds herself obliged to look into the future when “the somber genius,” having early sealed a compact with a Shadow, or Fate, would continue to write “without the aid of riches or lasting peace of spirit,” hearing, as his reward, “the harsh croaking of a raven over his head.”

Those novelists who have made use of Poe as a minor character have fared much better. Anya Seton, whose Dragonwyck was a popular seller in 1943-1944 and served as the basis of a moving picture a short time later, was not troubled by the problem of fidelity to the known facts of Poe's life. Her hero, a Dutch patroon named Nicholas Van Ryn, and his wife Miranda accompany Mrs. Ellet on a visit to Poe at Fordham. It is a hot day in the summer of 1846. Nicholas brings with him a bottle of brandy and the poet proceeds to get himself [page 223:] unpleasantly drunk, in spite of the fact that Virginia's physician — the famous Dr. Francis — happens to be with him at the time. However, he is still able to read and he regales his guests with a rendition of “Ulalume,” accentuating each syllable with delicacy and rounding each word to the fullest melody. “From his actor parents,” Miss Seton informs us, “he had inherited the talent of communicating emotion to an audience.”[3] The novelist encounters no difficulty in “explaining” Poe's having written an elegy on the death of his wife many months before she died: it “foreshadowed” the event, we are told, “and the recurring defeat of his own soul.”

Still more fortunate have been the fictioneers who have used Poe's work rather than Poe to complicate or embellish their plots. Certainly a most readable murder yarn was invented by Amelia Reynolds Long in Death Looks Down (1944). Her novel is divided into a pro logue, five books, and an epilogue, and each of these divisions is headed by a title borrowed from Poe: “Ulalume,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “Metzengerstein,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “Eureka.” The various chapters in each division are headed by quotations taken from those works of Poe which have supplied their titles for the major divisions; thus under Book One, The Cask of Amontillado, Chapter I is headed by the phrase, “Into the inmost recesses of the catacombs,” and under Book Five, The Fall of the House of Usher, Chapter III is headed by the phrase, “... within view of the melancholy House of Usher.”

The author is an apt student of Poe. Her plot is as [page 224:] ingenious as the pattern in which she has cast it. The story is located in Philadelphia, with the action originating in the library of a university named after that city. The characters are mainly the students of Professor Patrick Rourke who is conducting a seminar in the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe. The plot begins when a member of the seminar finds in an old Graham's Magazine a handwritten copy of “Ulalume.” The university buys it from him for $10,000, but a wealthy private collector is willing to pay $15,000 for it. As the story progresses no less than four murders are committed and almost everybody is suspected of being the perpetrator of these bloody deeds. In the end, the murderer is discovered in a manner as theatrical as Poe himself might have staged it(2) and as full of ratiocination as M. Dupin might have enjoyed exhibiting.

3

If it seem remarkable that Poe's life and character should fictionize so indifferently, it is even more remarkable that they should dramatize so much less than indifferently. Almost anyone would guess that this fascinating personality would translate well on the stage and that the tragic story of his life would supply a surefire plot with plenty of complication, tension, romantic interest, and emotional appeal. In the course of a century many writers — and some of them men and women of considerable creative talent — have thus guessed, and lost. Only a few years ago Sophie Kerr hazarded the opinion that “Poe with a dark moustache and longish [page 225:] locks — Poe would have been a natural for films.”[4] Since Miss Kerr has been eminently successful in meeting the requirements of our large-circulation magazines one is tempted to credit her with shrewd judgment of public taste, yet Miss Kerr was mistaken in her opinion. Poe has proved far from “a natural “either for films or for the stage.

It is not conceivable that we shall ever know all the plays that have been written around Poe's life. Until comparatively recent years it was not the practice of playwrights to publish their work, and even now only a small number of the plays produced in any season find their way into print. The bulk of all scripts written remains, of course, unproduced and unprinted. The frequency with which one meets references to plays — long or short — on the life of Poe indicates that he has been used, again and again, as a subject in drama. If those that have survived, in published or manuscript form, can in any way be accepted as representative exhibits, then one is forced to shake his head with regret at this vain expenditure of effort.

Poe began to serve as a model for a character in a play as early as 1827, when he was not quite eighteen years old. In August and September of that year Lambert A. Wilmer serialized in the Baltimore North American a poetic drama in three acts entitled Merlin.[5] What little plot it contained revolved around two young lovers, Elmira and Alphonso, who had been separated by a cruel father (hers) and who were reunited by the benign magic of Merlin. One recognizes in this u complication” the early love story of Edgar Poe and Elmira Royster. Professor Mabbott's conjecture that Wilmer obtained the details of the story from Poe's brother, [page 226:] William Henry Leonard Poe, is highly plausible.[6] Henry had been in correspondence with Edgar, had met Elmira in Richmond, and had read Edgar's poetic rendering of his unhappy experience in Tamerlane.[7] His brother's romantic episode had impressed him strongly enough to stimulate his own creative imagination. The same periodical which published Wilmer's play on the subject, also published, a few months later, “The Pirate,” a short story in which the plot is obviously based on the Edgar-Elmira incident.[8]

Although Poe, the brilliant young critic of the Southern Literary Messenger, found portions of Merlin “full of the truest poetic fire,”[9] it is, as a whole, undistinguished as poetry and downright impossible as drama. The four major characters are as misty as the numerous sprites and furies that drift in and out as messengers, terpsichoreans, and singers. More important, young Alphonso reveals himself as a whining, self pitying puppet of fate; he lacks even a modicum of the dignity which might qualify him for a hero undergoing what has come to be known as romantic agony. Wilmer's play marks the beginning of Poe's long career as an imaginary being — and it was not an auspicious be ginning.

Ever since, the approach to Poe as a possible protagonist in drama has been solemn and lugubrious. To come closer to our own age, there was Edgar Allan Poe, or The Raven, a five-act prose opus by George Hazelton, Jr., which opened, appropriately enough, in Baltimore on October 11, 1895. The leading part was interpreted by no less an actor than Creston Clarke, grandson of Junius Brutus Booth and nephew of the great Edwin Booth. Yet since Mr. Hazelton undertook [page 227:] his task — as he informed an interviewer — because he had been attracted by “the sadly romantic career of the most interesting figure in American literature,”[10] his play turned out to be only an unimpressive melodrama about “a person with a wild, sombre, morbid imagination, a pale intellectual face, and an expression almost habitually sad.”[11] Having been an actor himself(3) — before taking up the practice of law — Mr. Hazelton foresaw the unrelieved gloom of his play and proceeded to supply comic relief by creating a few farcical characters and scenes. His intentions were undoubtedly praiseworthy but his achievement was severely condemned by the Baltimore dramatic critics of the day. The Sun reviewer resented the “boorish people whose coarse wit was entirely out of keeping with the innate refinement of Poe and whose presence upon the stage amounted to positive irreverence when they interrupted the poet as he was kneeling beside the grave of his dead wife.” And the American reviewer found the scenes “intended to lighten up the sombre story “in atrocious taste; they had the effect of “desecration.”[13] Evidently Mr. Hazelton had chosen the wrong moments in which to indulge his humor. Evidently, also, the Baltimore reviewers and no doubt the Washington and Richmond reviewers as well (for the play was featured in all three cities) wished to take their Poe straight. Levity, in their opinion, did not become Israfel.

The action of Edgar Allan Poe is a weird mixture of fact and fancy. The first act takes place in the Allan home in Richmond just after Edgar's return from the University of Virginia. According to Mr. Hazelton, Edgar was even then wildly in love with his cousin [page 228:] Virginia Clemm, but the course of his love was blocked by Roscoe Pelham, A. M., Mr. Allan's secretary; and it was this villainous individual, himself in love with Virginia, who disclosed Edgar's gambling debts to Mr. Allan. The second act shifts the action to the Poe cottage at Fordham. Mr. Pelham arrives while Poe is out selling or trying to sell some of his manuscripts and seizes the opportunity to force his love upon Virginia. She fights him off until Poe returns; but she does not tell her husband of Pelham's love making, for fear that the impetuous poet might challenge the villain to a duel and be killed. However, the excitement of her encounter has exhausted her and she dies in Edgar's arms. The third act —. But perhaps the synopses of the two acts are enough to indicate the nature of Mr. Hazelton's inventiveness. Eight years later Mr. Hazelton published a revised version of the play under the title The Raven; A Play in Four Acts and a Tableau, and six years still later he rewrote the whole thing in the form of a lengthy novel, The Raven; The Love Story of Edgar Allan Poe.

It is interesting to note that although playwrights like Mr. Hazelton usually profess to have made a detailed “study “of Poe's life they nevertheless feel free to violate all the known facts. This is more than indulgence in so called poetic license; this is, in the case of a subject like Poe, a psychological phenomenon. Mr. Hazelton, for instance, felt no need to account for the presence of Virginia in Richmond at the time of Edgar's return from Charlottesville, nor for Mrs. Whitman's presence at Fordham and in Baltimore. But what is perhaps more significant still is that a playwright who was, not so many years later, to turn out such a workmanlike dramaturgic product as Yellow Jacket (in collaboration with [page 229:] Benrimo, to be sure) could permit himself to write the kind of dialogue ascribed to Poe. In one love scene young Edgar is insistent that Virginia give him another kiss. When she playfully refuses he is made to say:

This apparently was meant to be “language a poet would use.

The same type of language appears in Olive Tilford Dargan's The Poet, another five-act drama on the life of Poe.[14] Here again fact and fantasy unite to produce a story which is not quite either. Mrs. Dargan creates a Helen whose beauty haunts the poet from the first moment he meets her, at her father's home in New York, to the last moment of his life when he is thrown out of a barroom in Baltimore, presumably to die in the gutter. In between he marries Virginia, suffers poverty, yields to his weakness for drink, and talks, talks, talks. The glamor in which he walks is such that Helen, when she first meets him, tells her mother, Mrs. Truelord, “We know angels at first sight, mamma,” and Helen's aunt, who is herself smitten with the angel, exclaims, “Why, you couldn’t hand him a cup of tea without feeling the planet quake! “But it is Poe's own talk which is most memorable — in a way which Mrs. [page 230:] Dargan, who in more recent years, under the name of “Fielding Burke/’ was to write such bravely realistic novels as Call Home the Heart and A Stone Came Rolling — did not anticipate. Poe proposes to Virginia in these words: “Virginia, you who have the face of a houri, the form of a sylph, and the heart of an angel, will you be my wife? “In a later act, when Mrs. Clemm reprimands her son-in-law for having walked in the snow without a coat, he replies: “Could I take the least warmth from yon shivering angel? “One wonders what happens to otherwise talented writers when they undertake to deal with Poe.

Charity forbids prolonging the list of bad plays which have been written as a result of the mistaken notion that Poe is a “natural “for drama. A mere catalogue of all the Ravens alone, not to mention the Lenores (mostly one acters and radio scripts), would make a sizeable book. Three of the most recent exhibits deserve to conclude this record because of the ambition that inspired them and the ability that went into their creation. A mere mention is enough for a fourth one, the Edgar Allan Poe by B. Iden Payne and Thomas Wood Stevens — two experienced theatre men — which had its world premiere, for five performances, at the University of South Carolina in 1933.[15]

Without question the most ambitious play on the life of Poe ever written and produced has been Sophie Treadwell's Plumes in the Dust. Miss Treadwell is a gifted playwright, as her Machinal once proved; Arthur Hopkins is a justly famous producer; and no one would dispute Henry Hull's histrionic flair and experience. Yet with a combination such as this it was clear at the opening performance of Plumes in the Dust, on November [page 231:] 2, 1936, in Baltimore, that the play was doomed. In summarizing the failure of the Broadway production, less than two weeks later, Brooks Atkinson wrote in the New York Times[16]: “If it were possible to translate the life of Edgar Allan Poe into a drama, Sophie Treadwell, Henry Hull and Arthur Hopkins could do it.” They did not do it because “it is impossible to write of Poe on the stage without turning him into an actor.” The main facts of his life were chronicled with respect but they did not add up to an exciting drama. Mr. Atkinson was right in his belief that if Poe “had not been a writer of genius the queer, insane squalor of his life would not be a matter of much importance.” He was wrong in implying that because Poe had been a writer of genius a play merely recounting the squalor of his life would be a matter of much importance. It takes more than squalor to make up a dramatic life. What had evidently fetched Miss Treadwell and Mr. Hopkins to Poe was what they tried to make the public see, in a program note: “the climatic [sic!] turns, the infinite drama which pursued him all his days.”[17] The “infinite drama” proved monotonous and inert.

The second exhibit of interest is Edgar Poe by Valentin Bulgakov, written in Russian in Prague in 1938 and published in the same language in Tientsin, China, in 1940. This dramatist was evidently not so well informed as Miss Treadwell about the facts of Poe's biography — or he chose to ignore them — but he was wise enough to confine himself to the last seven years of his protagonist's life, so that his play does not thin out into a mere chronicle piece, and he was skilful enough to endow him with some humor and a sense of the joy of life. Wrong as Mr. Bulgakov was about many things that [page 232:] actually happened, his play is rather unique in that it attempts to present a Poe with more than one tone in his voice. Yet, its merits notwithstanding, this drama, too, falls far short of artistic achievement.

The third and final exhibit is Edgar Allan Poe, a screenplay by Samuel Hoffenstein and Tom Reed, released in 1942 as The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe. With all the research talent available to Hollywood, the truth, it would seem, need not have suffered as it did. Poe had no such weighty problem as having to choose between accepting an editorial offer from Mr. Graham of Philadelphia or Mr. White of Richmond; Griswold was never editor of the Broadway Journal and therefore Poe never had to undergo the humiliation of begging him to accept the “Raven” for that publication; and Elmira Royster Shelton never visited the Poes at Fordham cottage. ... If these and numerous other departures from the facts were meant to be concessions to popular appeal, they proved inadequate. The picture was one of the weakest Twentieth Century-Fox ever released and was received coolly. In our gallery of exhibits it merits an extra pause only because here for the first time almost all of Poe ‘s life — from the day of his mother's death to the moment of his own — was dramatized by two clever professional continuity writers, but the result was, once more, far from edifying. Even for a movie hero, Poe sounded too theatrical to be convincing, and his life unreeled as a string of squalid setbacks without color, heroism, or the breath of romance.

4

By way of contrast, I must return to the observation made at the beginning of this survey of Poe's fate in the [page 233:] theatre: that his literary creations have had a livelier fate. Almost as soon as his short stories appeared in print they were translated on the stage and were re ceived with pleasurable excitement. An actor, Robert B. Kegerries played one hundred times in his own adapta tion of “The Tell-Tale Heart” in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, “and elsewhere.”[18] Another actor playwright, Silas S. Steele, chose for his benefit night, August 8, 1843, at a Philadelphia theatre, his own dramatization of “The Gold Bug.”[19] In France, the famous Andre Antoine thrilled his rather select patrons, in 1889, with a one-acter by Ernest Laumann, Le Coeur révélateur, adapted from Baudelaire's translation of “The Tell-Tale Heart.”[20] “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Premature Burial,” “The Purloined Letter,” “The Assignation,” “Hop-Frog,” “Thou Art the Man,” “Three Sundays in a Week,” ... in fact, most of Poe's stories and not a few of his poems have been dramatized numerous times; they have been performed on the professional stages in the Americas, Europe, and Asia; they have played to acclaim in vaudeville, in art theatres, in little theatres; they have been turned into Grand Guignol thrillers, into psychological dramas, into grand operas, and into ballets;(4) they have been broadcast over all the radio networks; they have been filmed; and now they are being televised.

Any examination of this vast amount of drama which Poe's imaginative work has inspired discloses at once [page 234:] its superiority over the similarly vast amount of dramatic effort which his life has inspired. “The Raven” a motion picture released by the Universal Pictures Corporation in 1935, had an effective scenario by David Boehm[22] and featured Boris Karloff in the leading rôle; based on Poe's poem rather than on his life, it was, as drama, infinitely more rewarding to watch than the more ambitious offering of the Messrs. Hoffenstein and Reed. “The Fall of the House of Usher” served, a few decades ago, as a basis for a highly imaginative experiment in Expressionism on the screen; this European film is still shown in various museums over the country as an epoch-making chapter in the development of cinema as an art form. The same story has served countless playwrights and radio script writers.[23] Two dramatizations of “The Tell-Tale Heart” are in the catalogues of publishing houses[24] supplying plays to the thousands of non-professional acting groups which constitute a sort of people's theatre in the United States today. And one publishing-agency circulates widely thirteen radio scripts each based on a Poe short story.[25] These are all successful dramatic offerings, capable of attracting and holding mass audiences.

5

A century of evidence supports the conclusion that Poe the man — artist, lover, husband, dreamer — does not dramatize; Poe's work does. Perhaps Mr. Brooks Atkinson said it all: placed on the stage Poe turns actor. And the actor has little or nothing to offer an audience — except as actor. It is when he enters into other lives, speaks with their voices, walks with their measured steps, and suffers with their intensity of emotion that he [page 235:] acquires stature and creates empathy. As a private citizen, off the boards, his figure is slight, his voice is low, and there is no halo over his head; he may or may not be interesting, but only as a human being; and the standards of “interestingness “which we apply to persons whom we meet on our side of the proscenium arch are harder to meet, especially for men like Poe.

The life that Poe infused into his poems, stories, and critical essays is the only life that has color and romance and logic and reality. ... The showmanship that went into his work — whether superb artistic discipline or, as sometimes happened, mere surface effects intended to attract the attention of an audience engrossed with “elocutionists, travelers from the Holy Land and the freaks in Barnum's Museum”[26] — this showmanship is the stamp of his personality, his gait and voice and signature. All that Poe had to give to the world is in the collected edition of his works. It is in “The Raven” and “Ulalume,” in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Ligeia,” in “The Philosophy of Composition “and “The Poetic Principle.” It is this work which drained his life and contains all the drama that was in him. Perhaps it left nothing in the man, and perhaps it left much but the richness of his work prevents us from seeing it; his work obtrudes itself and confuses the fictioneers and playwrights.

It is noteworthy that every dramatist who has used him as a character has made him read his poems: they are so much more effective than his own dialogue. Invariably the tone of his work is used to set the tone of his own speech, as if it were habitual for a person of his creative nature to express himself in the imagery of his creations. Lowell may have been right to some [page 236:] extent when he introduced him, in The Fable for Critics, as one “Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters,” but for a playwright to assume that his hero always speaks in maundering poetic phrases is to create a cartoon, an unconscious take-off of a mad poet. Surely there must have been times, hours, moments, when even Israfel did not sing for the angels, when his lute was silent, and when he spoke quietly and temperately, in an idiom that mortals may recognize as their own. Poe the critic may have believed that the poet was above passion and that poetry had nothing to do with the heart,[27] but Poe the boy and man had a heart and what he did and said had much to do with it. Yet in the plays which we have examined he appears cold, aloof, and wrapped in an insubstantial haze. Very likely he was cautious in public, on his guard, posturing and exhibiting his superiority, rejecting beforehand any possible condescension toward the players’ offspring, any possible unbending toward the frustrated Virginia gentleman, but it is safe to suppose that he had his moments of privacy, when caution was no longer needed and he could afford to be relaxed, simple and natural and ordinary.

George Bernard Shaw is said to believe that what compels a man to go on the stage is a species of egoism which springs either from terrible vanity or fierce shy ness. Perhaps Poe's egoism comprehended both drives. He felt “happier “behind the illusory fourth wall, as it were, strong and famous and learned and clever. When he performed the world was at his feet, for he knew that he performed uncommonly well. It is regrettable that no novelist or playwright has so far been able to surprise him when he was not performing, when he was [page 237:] neither elocuting nor being bitter, tragic, or unhappy. And no one, a French critic has remarked, was more methodically unhappy than Poe.[28] That his unhappiness was a form of enjoyment, part of his dark exultation, is a plausible interpretation of its character. Walt Whitman caught this meaning in his memorable imagistic summary of Poe:

We have no choice but to leave him standing there, a beautiful figure and a dim man. He has eluded those who would find great tragedy, nobility, or romance in his private life. We have not been content with crediting him with a normal share of all three but have insisted on exaggerating that share to extravagant proportions. The world in which he acted so effectively has chosen to create a man whom it could attack, defend, admire, pity, exalt, and employ as a symbol of romantic attachment. A whole literature has been created around him which, though mostly mythical, we have no choice but to accept. Poe was no more the martyr crucified by an insensitive philistinism — as Baudelaire and Hanns Heinz Ewers imagined — than he was the unfortunate genius whose frailties needed the forgiveness of a wise [page 238:] mother — as the good lady novelists and playwrights have imagined. But with myth-makers sober facts have no value. The corrective scholarship of a man like Professor Taylor — (that “Poe could laugh not only at the Transcendentalists, but at himself as well”; that he was “a gaily irreverent wit who delighted in tossing darts of mockery among the heavy moralizers of his age and that he was always “ready to entertain his public with a roystering farce as well as a Gothic thriller”)[30] — can have no influence upon them. Legend has it that Poe sometimes smiled but that he never laughed. The kind of laughter this refers to is not, of course, the kind Mr. Taylor has in mind, yet the picture of Poe that objective scholarship yields would greatly modify the picture of the legendary Poe. The world's imagination, however, must be respected, for, as Brownell remarked long ago, “It is the people's imagination that has made him what popularly he seems — something quite other than reality.”[31]

And perhaps — since we cannot dismiss him — there is much that can be said for the legendary Poe. It is an enormous tribute to any man to acknowledge that he has passed into the realm of myth. It is given to but few individuals to impress the world so powerfully that its imagination is stimulated to creative activity. Poe has inspired a vast literature of fable and fancy, with himself as hero. How much of the inspiration was generated by the poor orphan, the disinherited gentleman, the good swimmer and poor drinker, the lover and husband of the delicate Virginia Clemm, and how much by the literary histrio no one can tell. It is certain, however, that the largest part of Poe which has survived in the people's imagination is a composite of Politian and Usher and [page 239:] Dupin and Tamerlane and Israfel and the proud magazinist whose pen was mighty and fearless.

It matters little that the “real” Poe will probably never be known. A college-mate of his once wrote that no one could say he knew him.”[32] And now that all his extant letters have been published — three hundred and thirty-three of them[33] — the task of knowing him will become even harder. For Poe, like the myth making world, was a lusty romancer, and it is only by accepting his romancing about himself as part of the truth that we can form any picture of him at all. And in this picture the sad, tragic personality is not com pletely obliterated, but neither is the apparent enjoyment which Whitman perceived. Perhaps Poe really believed, at times, that he was the grandson of Benedict Arnold,[34] or that he had been arrested in far-off St. Petersburg: this was his way of riding in triumph through Persepolis. There is no “perhaps” about his having frequented Miss Lynch's salon in Waverly Place, in New York, where he read “The Raven,”

That, too, was a way of riding in triumph through Persepolis.

But the best, and no doubt most enjoyable, way was by losing himself in a world of his own creation. This is also the most enduring way, for it is the way of the artist, the type of artist that Poe was. We shall be wise to remember one of his cherished beliefs: that the work of the artist is more important than the artist himself. [page 240:] The popular imagination is not to blame for confusing the man with his work: it cannot be expected to differentiate between the intense subjectivity of the one and the rigid, almost mathematical objectivity of the other. Poe had the faculty of subjecting himself, as well as anything else that served his creative needs, to the discipline of his artistry. In this he was, of course, no different from other creative spirits. Who can tell where Melville disappears in Ahab or Dostoievsky in Raskolnikov? If Usher begins as Poe he ends up as an inhabitant of a world that has its own contours and climate, a world far different from the one which Edgar Allan Poe of the biographies knew. If Eleonora begins as a relative of Poe she ends up as a dweller in that same world which was the unique creation of Poe.

In the end, it is only as a creator that Poe endures and is real. All else is of minor importance. Whoever and whatever he was his other self, the creator, managed to tame, subdue, transform, and merge into the world he evolved. We may feel somewhat baffled and uncertain by his creation because it approaches the insubstantiality of pure form, but it exists: strange and weird, fitfully lighted, and peopled with dim figures that move fantastically and speak a haunting, cadenced language. It is a world almost wholly conjured up by the wizardry of his art; and if the wizardry is not entirely free from mere artifice, it is wizardry nevertheless, and can no more be exorcised than an obsessive dream. And it is the blackcloaked wizard, standing gracefully in the center of his world, who does not laugh, but the pleased smile on his pale face is unmistakable.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 221:]

1 The following episode — told by a lady who one day, in 1847, accompanied Poe and a group of admirers on a walk along the banks of the Bronx — characterizes the antics of the tribe and Israfel's acceptance of them: “In one of the pauses of this pleasant talk, one of the ladies placed on the head of the poet an oak-leaf wreath; and as he stood beneath the tree, half in the shade, the sun's rays glancing through the dark-green leaves, and lighting up his broad white forehead, with a pleasant gratified smile on his face, my memory recalls a charming picture of the poet. ...”[1]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 224:]

2 The sensational close of this mystery thriller is, in fact, not unlike that of Poe's “Thou Art the Man.” The quality of the writing — mood, style, tone — is of course different.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 227:]

3 He had played with Edwin Booth in Hamlet.[12]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 233:]

4 Claude Debussy transformed “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Devil in the Belfry” into operas and Lazare Saminsky made an opera-ballet out of “The Masque of the Red Death.”[21] These are but two of many composers who have seen possibilities in Poe's tales and poems.