BOOKS OF THE DAY
Mixed Feelings on Poe
IT is tantalisingly difficult to make up one's mind about Poe ; his work is such an odd combination of crudity, sometimes almost of vulgarity, and something which is on the edge of being fiercely illuminating, and is at least intellectually exciting. But anything more than intellectually ? That is really the question: ohe is astonished, one admires, but it is difficult to arrive at any profound emotion with either his verse or his prose. Yet one is conscious of a kind of persistent nagging trying to persuade one that there really is some- thing there, some valuable experience. So one goes back, one tries again. But no! Once more it all just fails—but only just.
And it would seem, surprisingly enough in a man who thought so much about his art as he did, that the fault lies mainly in his use of language. In his colloquy The Power of Words, written "in the mad pride of intellectuality," the following exchange occurs: " Agathos : I have spoken to you Oinos . .. of impulses upon the atmosphere of the Earth.
Oinos : You did. Agathos : And while I thus spoke, did there not cross your mind some thought of the physical power of words? Is not every word an impulse on the air ? " Agathos, indeed, had spoken a world into birth with a few passionate sentences! And it is as though Poe, in his deeper pieces, where he really is exploring the horror and the hell (" He was an adventurer into vaults and cellars and horrible underground passages of the human soul," D. H. Lawrence told us), or where he is pursuing the phantom of Beauty which he regarded as his aim, he seems to be trying with all possible urgency to make the words do physical work. It is a pity ; for amid the flow of sentences constructed from poly- syllables, combined with a fair modicum of cliché, he could strike out some admirable phrases, which the mature remember from their boyhood reading: "all the elaborate frivolity of chess," or the words of the terrifying Case of Mr. Valdemar: "Upon the bed, before the whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loath- some—of detestable putrescence." A noble example of his studied use of the dash.
But let us be grateful for what he did, and be a little sorry that the centenary of his death should be overshadowed by the bicen- tenary of Goethe's birth. We should therefore thank Mr. Slater and the Bodlcy Head for their timely selection which gives us generous samples of every kind of Poe's work, omitting nothing essential except, possibly, "The Haunted Palace." Mr. Slater pro- vides an admirably " central " essay by way of introduction, though it is unlikely that everybody will accept his plausibly sinister picture of a possessive Maria Clemm. The portrait of Poe is vivid enough to help us not only to sympathise with the man, but also to understand the variety of his writings. These indeed serve happily enough to illustrate Mr. Fagin's critical biography, which, as the title suggests, is a specialised study, built around such a thesis as would properly appeal to an Associate Pro- fessor of English and Drama in the famous University at Baltimore. Mr. Fagin persuades us that a good deal of the explanation of Poe is to be found in his parentage ; he was by nature a son of th.>. theatre. Certainly there is something histrionic about the man, his career, and certain aspects of his writing, his completest failure, oddly enough, being in the drama itself and in fictional dialogue, though he was no mean dramatic critic. But that he dramatised himself more than most of us do (which is saying a good deal) seems to be indubitable, and up to a point he played his parts well, enjoy- ing the playing of them, even those that would seem most to call for pity. Mr. Fagin makes his case ; indeed be makes it again and again (he could well shorten the book) by quotations from memoirs, letters and so on (there are some 475 references for 240 pages). The driving force in Poe would indeed seem to have been his vision of himself.
There might be worse. "It is no small tribute to Edgar Allan Poe that he was master of a certain type of literature: and precisely because his own face and mood haunt his creatures." But there arc better driving forces, the main defect of Poe's being a distinct lack of humour. Still, he was big enough to make this drive amazingly productive, as shown by Mr. Fagin, whose book, besides being psycho-analytical—in the broad, not its cant, sense—is an excellent piece of criticism. As both he and Mr. Slater remind us, Poe was an astonishing inventor, not of the horror story, of course, though he gave it a new dimension, but of the scientific romance, the detec- tive novel, and of a peculiar kind of poetry which bewitched Mallarme and Baudelaire—so who are we to cavil ? Perhaps Mr. Fagin makes too great claims for originality, since he seems deliberately to ignore precursors. It is, for instance, a little disturb- ing to read that "in his stories he anticipated Freud or Jung or Lombroso," for example, as a footnote informs us, in "his suggestion, in Eleonora,' that madness and genius are related." Shades of Dryden! we exclaim. (and Poe, as his very interesting epigraphs show, was acquainted with many seventeenth-century side-alleys) or, indeed, Shades of Plato! But if there is a certain naiveté in the book, this does not detract from its real value, for the blemish after all is a small one, resulting from the warm admiration which gives
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