January 19, 2009 marks the 200th birthday of Edgar Allen Poe.
His words continue to enthrall us and a definitive account of his life – and death – continues to elude us.
One possible explanation for this is a tantalizing one – that Poe deliberately obscured the truth and re-invented himself from time to time to manipulate situations to his advantage.
Another possibility, an equally intriguing one, is that he has been deliberately miscast by a succession of generations choosing to ascribe him an air of mystery and melancholia they deem consistent with his writings.
Alas, poor Poe was cast in the role of a depraved drunkard and drug-addled madman by the infamous Griswold obituary which stated that his death would “startle many, but few will be grieved by it.”
Rufus Wilmot Griswold was a critic, editor and anthologist who had a long-standing grudge against Poe. Griswold has faded into relative obscurity, but Poe’s literary reputation has grown and been enhanced with the passing of time.
Some consider Poe the first American literary critic. He was one of the first American crafters of short stories. Some identify him as a pioneer of the science fiction genre. Just about everyone agrees that he is the father of detective fiction.
According to the legendary H.R.F. Keating in the Crown Crime Companion, “When you look at the immense panorama of mystery fiction today … it is extraordinary to think that it all sprang from three short stories for magazines” in which, he adds, “… Poe laid down once and forever the rules and foundation for a new sort of fiction.”
Poe has himself been cast as a detective many times in mystery novels.
We meet Poe as a 10-year-old schoolboy in England in Andrew Taylor’s An Unpardonable Crime. Taylor describes Poe as “the boy who does not really belong anywhere, an actor who never learns the significance of his part.” He offers answers to two real-life mysteries: the disappearance of his actor-father when Poe was a small child and Poe's own unexplained disappearance just before his death. Taylor incorporates live burials, pits, and sinister doubles in the story, all of which became key elements in Poe’s own works.
In Louis Bayard’s The Pale Blue Eye Poe, described as “shadowy,” is a cadet at West Point. There is a gruesome murder on campus and Gus Landor, a Holmes-like figure, recruits Poe to assist him in the investigation. Poe lies about his past, boasts of his genius, and flaunts his eccentricity causing Landor to remark that ''nothing about him was quite right.'' Poe’s genius does prevail, however, and we also get a taste of his fledgling literary talents in his written reports to Landor.
Poe lived abroad with his foster family from 1815-1820 and did, indeed, attend West Point from 1830 to 1831, but was dismissed from the school for neglect of duty and disobedience of orders.
In John MacLachlan Gray’s Not Quite Dead Poe fakes his own death to escape the Irish mob and collaborates with Charles Dickens when the latter’s American publisher is murdered. Poe and Dickens did actually meet and The Raven was inspired in part by a talking raven in Dickens’ novel Barnaby Rudge.
The story begins with a first-person narrative by William Chivers, a Baltimore doctor who was in real-life one of Poe’s staunchest defenders against the Griswold attacks.
Harold Schechter has an entire series that offers us Poe as a detective in partnership with Davy Crockett in Nevermore, P.T. Barnum in The Hum Bug, Kit Carson in The Mask of Red Death and Louisa May Alcott in The Tell-Tale Corpse.
To be continued ...
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted – nevermore!
