Seven in One
Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe.
by Daniel Hoffman.
Doubleday. 339 pp. $7.95
The long-standing quarrel between Edgar Allan Poe’s disparagers and adulators no longer hinges on his alleged moral and psychological infirmities. Industrious scholars have refuted the slanders and insinuations first broadcast by his literary executor, Rufus Griswold. Separating facts from gossip and invention, they have contested the portrait of the manic-depressed, impotent, necrophiliac, syphilitic dope fiend and translated the damned soul into the solid citizen. The Poe of current scholarly consensus seems to have little in common with the exotic and tormented “Edgarpoe” of the French cult—aristocrat and anti-utilitarian, despiser of steam-engines and democracy—who intoxicated a generation of poets after Baudelaire translated Poe’s works (“When first I opened one of his books I saw with fear and delight not only themes of which I had dreamt but phrases which I had shaped in my mind and which he had written twenty years before”).
Mr. Hoffman’s multiple Poe resembles Baudelaire’s spiritual brother and Paul Valéry’s “demon of lucidity” more than he does the scrubbed Rotarian featured in Arthur Hobson Quinn’s “definitive” biography (for Hoffman, Poe is presumably impotent and a necrophiliac of sorts), but he isn’t concerned with the claims and counter-claims of the cultists and detects substantial amounts of fudge in the genius of his subject. The poet who perpetrated “walloping bloopers,” “resounding clichés,” “lines of tawdry vulgarity,” he concedes, wasn’t “always in as full control of his language” as he was of his vision. Hoffman concentrates on the explorer of the soul who in struggling to express the inexpressible or “to speak of certain truths at the dead center of his own psychic life,” opened up (as one of Poe’s contemporaries put it) “the black gulfs and charms of our spiritual nature.” He affirms, against the denials of Henry James and T.S. Eliot, that Poe is both a serious and a coherent artist.
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Since these notions are not strikingly original, why “still another book on Poe”? Because a recounting of his own rediscovery of Poe’s deeper import, Hoffman says, might induce others who once put themselves “in the way of Poe’s vision” but who discarded him along with other childish infatuations, to recognize “the miraculous paradoxes of his art.” He offers a new approach to Poe, part autobiography (the author’s adventures while mapping the heart and intellect of Poe), part literary exegesis, by a scholar and poet thoroughly familiar with (and indebted to) the best Poe commentary. It is a recording of an intense literary experience, unmagisterial, confessedly personal (“Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, the name resounded, soon becoming not a name at all, but a note, a tone struck upon some inward anvil of my being”) and abounding with fresh perceptions.
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The incantatory title not only “resounds” like a note. It also suggests the histrionic poet of many masks: “Eddie Poe,” the pitiful orphan boy and “son” of Mrs. Clemm; “Edgarpoe,” a character out of Huysmans, lonely prisoner in Philistine America; “Analyst Poe,” the ratiocinative genius who combines imagination and reason to solve the unsolvable; “Hoaxie Poe,” whose letters from the moon, balloon voyages, and mesmerical revelations aren’t put-ons but allegories of deadly serious intent; “Horror-haunted” or “Idgar Poe,” tuned to the terrors from the subliminal self; “Disinherited aristocrat Poe,” despising hoi polloi, bitter at the denial of his “proper prerogatives,” yet solaced by the consciousness of his fancied royalty; “Funny Edgar” of the Grotesques, tiresomely comical and facetious; and “Edgar the Metaphysician,” concocter of cosmogenic poems. These and other seemingly disparate poses are all interrelated and compose the single Poe “always about to explode into the pieces of his anguished and divided self” but unified by a single impulse.
Read as allegories of his unspoken thoughts, Poe’s poems and tales and sketches coalesce into a single plot: the Poet-Narrator contrives all manner of stratagems to escape from materiality into ideality, from Time into Timelessness. In their efforts “to cross the barriers between the perceptible sensual world and that which lies beyond it” and seeking reabsorption into the original Unity, Poe’s protagonists
undertake hazardous voyages either into the stratosphere or to the moon; or by descending into dungeons and vaults in the earth; or down maelstroms in the sea toward the center of the very world. Others cross the bourne between our life and another by breaking through the barrier of silence and speaking from beyond the grave. Some achieve this posthumous eloquence as the result of a mesmerical suspension of mortality; some, consuming inordinate amounts of laudanum, take the trip on drugs. Still others have already arrived at the desired condition of immaterial existence and speak to one another, in “Colloquies” and “Conventions,” as disembodied shades.
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Some years ago Richard Wilbur published a brilliant essay mentioning the various means by which Poe’s rootless adventurers catapulted themselves out of space and time, but Hoffman’s interest in the theory of “reintegrative unification” (for Wilbur a primarily aesthetic and philosophical consideration) is finally if not exclusively psychoanalytic. Poe’s uncontrollable desire to merge with the One and his contempt for the body, he thinks, spring from a common source. Beset by private terrors and wracked by “the endless war between conscience and impulse,” Poe’s exercises in symbolic action dramatize his yearning for, and fear of, re-entering his mother’s womb. Hoffman is no more beguiled than Marie Bonaparte, from whose relentlessly Freudian work on Poe he selectively borrows, by Poe’s repressions and sublimations; they plainly reveal to him an “obsessive longing to be reborn in the womb.” He sees as identical the dream of uterine bliss and that “primary unity toward which the soul tends, for which it agonizingly pines.”
As psychoanalytical interpretations go, Hoffman’s probe is more lucid and suggestive than most; for Hoffman, Poe is always a writer, never a “case.” But his illustrative commentary and un-casual asides are more arresting than his thesis. Although his confidential manner can be arch and his autobiographical intrusions distracting (he is likely to be most academic when strenuously attempting not to be), he sustains his role of detective-critic or scholar-cryptographer cracking the code of cryptic Poe. No one to my knowledge has better analyzed particular poems and tales or examined more subtly Poe-Dupin’s disentangling imagination (poetical, intuitive, mathematical), or defined more usefully the distinctions between Poe’s terms, “grotesque” and “arabesque” (“a grotesque is a satire, an arabesque a prose equivalent of a poem”). His guess that the explanation for Poe’s “anonymous and unfamilied heroes,” studiedly vague about their ancestors, may have less to do with Poe’s orphaned state than with his obsession to divest them of earthly materiality is buttressed by an apposite quotation from Porphyry’s On the Life of Plotinus. Dr. Karl Menninger’s Man against Himself furnishes him with an extended analogy between Houdini’s pain-accompanied escapes and Poe’s “horror-struck fantasies.” Houdini’s stunts and Poe’s predicaments he likens to pseudo-suicides. “Such fantasies,” he quotes from Menninger, “may be accompanied by a strong sense of guilt and there is a well-known (concomitant) conception of the womb, or entry into the womb, as being something terrible.”
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Not all of Hoffman’s claims for Poe entirely convince (was Poe really his own alienist? does the manipulation of symbolic objects and actions necessarily signify self-knowledge?), and the omission of that tomahawking critic, “Book-Reviewer Poe,” among his various Poe personae is disappointing. But there aren’t many good books on Poe, and this one, a work of devotion and a rebuke to snobbery, most decidedly is. It handsomely introduces the American Ariel “of no time and no place” (I quote from Walter de la Mare’s fine essay) “who had hob-anobbed—a little too intimately for his own peace—with Caliban.”
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