Poe Book

Poe looms over the American literary scene, like a raven perched atop a bust of Pallas Athena; and therefore it is appropriate and suitable that James M. Hutchisson, in 2005, made his own contribution to the field of Poe biography, with a book titled simply Poe.

Hutchisson is a professor of both American literature and Southern U.S. culture at The Citadel, the historic military college of Charleston, South Carolina; and this biography was published by the University Press of Mississippi, a university press that is particularly well-known for publishing studies of Southern culture. Accordingly, it should not be surprising that Hutchisson, in his introduction to this biography, sets forth his intention of presenting a "portrait of the writer [that] emphasizes Poe's southern identity" (p. xiii).

And this biography indeed stands out in its focus on Poe as a Southerner and a Southern writer. While Poe did not make the American South the central focus of his work, in the way that later Southern writers like William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor would do, he came from a prominent Baltimore family, grew up in a slaveholding family in Richmond, studied at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, served as a young soldier at Fort Moultrie on the South Carolina coast, began his literary career in Baltimore, achieved some of his most noteworthy literary success as an editor for the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, and died and was buried in Baltimore.

It makes sense, therefore, that Hutchisson emphasizes what another Poe scholar has called "the Southern face of Edgar Allan Poe," as when Hutchisson writes that "In fact…when Poe wrote he was very often writing as a southerner, speaking for the South….[A]lthough he rarely employed southern locales or character types, he did often weigh in on the issues of slavery, southern autonomy and separatism, and the obstinate oils and waters of northern and southern political attitudes" (p. 99).

Sometimes, this Southern dimension of Poe's work can be something subtle and hidden; Hutchisson suggests, for example, that Poe's most famous short story, "The Fall of the House of Usher", "might also be a symbolic depiction of the dying out of the southern aristocracy, since the mansion and its landscape evoke plantation images. In the tale, Poe employs the Gothic formula to construct a kind of jeremiad about the destruction of a culture….Poe's house of Usher may symbolize opposition and fear of a world that he felt threatened the southern pastoral ideal and, possibly, the ideal of southern womanhood as well" (p. 98).

At other times, the Southern dimension of Poe's writing comes through in ways that are more direct and more troubling. "It is possible to read several of Poe's stories as covert allegories endorsing the ethos of the antebellum South, particularly in their infrequent but obvious stereotyped characterizations of African Americans" (p. 99). In that connection, Hutchisson brings up Poe's delineation of the character of Jupiter from Poe's short story "The Gold-Bug" (1843), as well as Poe's characterization of a black cook in the novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838).

Of course, Hutchisson also explores other dimensions of Poe's work besides literary regionalism. Looking at how Poe engaged Gothic archetypes in a richer and deeper manner than had Gothic writers before him, Hutchisson suggests that Poe's Gothicism, as set forth in early stories like "Berenice" and "Morella," was not just there to shock. Rather, it was rooted in Poe's careful and perceptive observation of the world around him:

Some elements of the tales…were…rooted in a tragic reality - that of women dying far too young, and of primitive medicine that could not accurately identify the state of death. Nineteenth-century science was sometimes unable to tell the difference between someone who was dead and someone who had instead lapsed into coma or catatonic shock resulting from injury or illness - undetectable by the crude and uneven medical examination procedure of the time. Thus there was a high frequency in Poe's life of actual instances of premature burials….The fallibility of the diagnosis of death was one of Poe's recurrent themes. His stories are thus not so macabre when one considers them in this context. (pp. 51-52)

Any biographer of Poe faces the painful task of chronicling how self-destructively this great author often behaved. In considering Poe's time in New York City in the mid-1840's, for example, Hutchisson describes how "Poe's greatest success upon arriving in New York seems to have created a backlash against him" (p. 153), as his 1844 story that has come to be known as "The Balloon-Hoax" was accepted as fact when it was first published in the New York Sun; readers were not amused when they learned that they had been duped.

It is a sad thing to hear Hutchisson describe how closely Poe's life in New York reflected the unhappiness he had experienced in prior places of residence: "Life in New York very quickly turned out to be no more rewarding or profitable than it had been in Philadelphia. Poe had come to Gotham expecting to find luscious fruit ripe for the picking; instead, all he had managed to gather were a few dry twigs" (pp. 155-56). The poor pay that Poe received for what editorial work was available, coupled with Poe's reputation for being an inconsistent and sometimes inebriated employee, dogged him in New York as it had in previous places of residence like Baltimore, Richmond, and Philadelphia.

Whenever I am reading biographies of Poe - Arthur Hobson Quinn's Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (1941), Kenneth Silverman's Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance (1991), Jeffrey Meyers's Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy (1992) - I look to the biographer not only to recount the facts of Poe's life, but also to comment on how the literature that Poe wrote reflects his life experience as well.

Hutchisson's Poe succeeds in that regard as well,. For example, Hutchisson looks to Poe's story "The Imp of the Perverse" (1846) as an example of tales that "reveal attempts to gain the upper hand (over enemies, perceived or real, and/or fate) and attempts to impose order on chaos" (p. 200). It does seem telling that Poe would write this story about self-destructive drives within the human psyche at a time "when Poe was drunk, paranoid about plagiarism, and confined in bed for days on end" (p. 201) - and when he was involved in a long series of pointless, career-wrecking literary quarrels with fellow writers including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

As any biographer must, Hutchisson traces the long, slow, grim trajectory of Poe's final years - the protracted illness and lingering death of his beloved wife Virginia in 1847; a series of failed love affairs and equally unsuccessful attempts to jump-start his literary career over the last two years of his life; and finally, his mysterious 1849 death in Baltimore, when he was just 40 years old.

Yet Hutchisson concludes by emphasizing Poe's iconic place and enduring place in both American literature and American culture. Recounting the story of the "Poe Toaster," a mysterious figure who used to pay midnight visits to Poe's Baltimore grave every January 19th (Poe's birthday) to leave a tribute of roses and cognac, Hutchisson notes rightly that "Poe's grave has become talismanic" (p. 250). As a Marylander who lived for some years in the Baltimore area, I have visited Poe's grave in the Westminster Presbyterian churchyard; there is always someone else visiting there, including many travellers from other countries. And Hutchisson is likewise correct when he writes that Poe's position among the most read and studied American writers "not only seems entrenched, but shows little sign of ever eroding" (p. 257).

Overall, Hutchisson's Poe constitutes a useful addition to the ever-more-crowded field of Poe studies - particularly in the way in which this book emphasizes the Southern cultural elements in Edgar Allan Poe's life and work.