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THE MAN OF THE CROWD: Edgar Allan Poe and the City
By Scott Peeples
ISBN 978-0-691-18240-7
William Carlos Williams, quoted towards the close of this study,
believed Poe invented American literature by sweeping away the
colonial inheritance. He is also, of course, widely viewed as the
originator of the detective story: Hitchcock claimed it was his
liking for Poe’s tales which inspired his films. The details of his
life are well known and perhaps Julian Symons’ The Tell-Tale
Heart remains the seminal guide, but Peeples has set out to do
something different: to relate his life and work to the cities he
inhabited. It’s a fascinating approach and one which Peeples carries
out with aplomb. The book is impeccably researched, satisfyingly
structured and written in a clear, robust, jargon-free style.
Peeples recognizes that the city was the locale of change during
Poe’s lifetime. The transformation, simply in terms of population
growth, was extraordinary. What it meant for human relations is
unconscionable. The key cities in the writer’s life were Richmond,
Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, though he was born in Boston,
spent time as a child in London and inhabited others for a while.
Ironically, Poe wasn’t particularly fond of the city. It wasn’t by
natural inclination he was drawn to it as a place to live, but
rather because of his determination to be a writer, which meant not
just getting the stuff down on paper, but earning a living from it.
Peeples has made a wise and clever choice: by relating Poe’s life to
the cities he lived in, usually for a fairly short spell, he focuses
on Poe the writer, which is what is of interest.
Poe harboured a long-standing ambition to edit a magazine. He gave
it two potential titles: The Stylus and The Penn, but
he never launched it. Poe’s instinct was correct: there was a
multitude of magazines in existence in the early years of the
nineteenth century in the US, most short-lived, but nonetheless, an
exciting phenomenon. Why not throw in your lot ? Though his own
journal never came to fruition, he was a magazine man, meeting
Thomas H White of the Southern Literary Messenger where he
published, and becoming assistant editor of Burton’s Gentleman’s
Magazine. If he was going to live by writing, he needed outlets,
but he was trying something never done before. No American author
had subsisted solely on literary earnings. Poe almost made it, but
it was perilous and he was often in debt.
Poe’s parents were actors, his mother Eliza the more talented and
feted. His father abandoned the family and his mother died when he
was three. Poe was fostered by the Allans. His foster father was a
wealthy man who became much wealthier in 1825 when he inherited a
fortune from an uncle. Had the relations between the two been
sweeter, perhaps Allan might have subsidised his foster son’s
literary enthusiasm; he could certainly have afforded to. After
leaving home aged eighteen, Poe did appeal to his guardian for
money, but Allan was disdainful of Poe’s instability – heavy
drinking, debt – and finally cut him loose. It could be that Poe
engineered this, more or less unconsciously, out of a desire to be a
professional writer, but he was up against it: the absence of
international copyright laws meant American publishers could pirate
English works. Perhaps Poe was aware of how the literary culture
needed to change to give writers a chance and set out to be the
catalyst.
His first publication at 18 was a chapbook : Tamerlane and other
poems. Only 50 copies were printed. It attracted hardly any
attention. A copy today will cost you over half a million dollars.
Such are the vagaries of literary fortune in the market. Poe didn’t
garner much praise or interest until he published The Raven
in 1845, when he became a sensation. Eliot, commenting on the
subsequent essay in which Poe explained his mode of composition,
made a sniffy comment but the poem has retained its power, even if
Eliot may be right about its structure here and there.
Poe was proud of Eureka: a prose poem (1848) in which he
offered what is claimed to be the first convincing explanation of
Olber’s paradox. Poe was no genius scientist, however. His
intuition, that the universe must be expanding and of finite age and
therefore the light from distant stars hadn’t reached us, was just
that. Much of the “science” in the book is apparently decidedly cod.
Poe was known to be uncomfortable with the transcendentalists,
understandably given his inclination to tales of death, mystery, the
bizarre, the extreme. Emerson, equally understandably, found nothing
in The Raven. The transcendentalists were attracted to the
light, they were daytime thinkers and writers who loved reason and
balance. Poe wasn’t like that at all. The portraits of him are
always slightly reminiscent of Chaplin and of Baudelaire (whose
translations account for much of his popularity in France). He has a
somewhat chétif look, though in his youth he was an astonishing
athlete. Perhaps his face, though, betrays the inner conflict which
drove him to drink and may have caused his early death. Was it the
early loss of his mother which unsettled his mind? He seems to have
been obsessed by the death of beautiful women. Was it the death of
his child and cousin bride Virginia from tuberculosis? Poe certainly
experienced more than his share of trauma. Individuals always deal
with that in their own way, some more successfully than others. What
is sure is that a remarkable talent was taken when it had much more
to accomplish.
Peebles sites his book in the cities of Poe’s life, yet his subject
was essentially peripatetic. It is one of the great strengths of
this study that it embraces that paradox comfortably. Peebles brings
to life the era and locale of Poe’s efforts to make himself a
literary man. He succeeded, posthumously. Peebles book will endure
too.
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