By now he is acknowledged as one of the foremost writers of the 19th century - creator of the detective genre, brilliant critic and satirist, master of the uncanny and the unconscious half a century before Freud - and even as a worthy cosmologist. But when Edgar Allen Poe was found, delirious and almost frozen to death, outdoors in Baltimore on an October morning in 1849, he was days from the end of a life for which few would pen elegies. His poem 'The Raven' and his short stories had brought him a certain degree of fame, but in the years following his death in mysterious circumstances - most probably a combination of exposure and alcohol, although there have been suggestions of something more sinister - the artistic significance of his work would be overshadowed by an epidemic of hysterical rumours. His literary executor, one Reverend Griswold, was unimpressed by the faithless, amoral universe of Poe's stories and set out to defame him; Victorian readers were only too keen to listen.
Citing the plots of the stories as evidence, they gradually built up a picture of Poe as a depraved character out to corrupt the young with tales of murder, incest and opium dreams. That he had married his cousin Virginia Clemm just days short of her 14th birthday hardly helped matters.
Now the Earagail Arts Festival brings to Ireland a play which gives Poe the chance to tell things his way. Written by Paul de Clemens and Ron Magrid, Edgar Allen Poe: Once Upon A Midnight places Poe centre stage in a fusion of autobiography, history and drama, all bathed in the light of the supernatural, endeavouring to give the fullest, starkest picture of Poe's short life and his enduring legacies. It's a one-man-show; the one man in question is the actor John Astin, known for his role as Gomez Addams in the original television run of The Addams Family. A Poe fanatic since childhood, Astin was thrilled to find two playwright friends developing the same idea which he had been carrying around in his head for months. Now, before every show, he spends some time reading through Poe's writings, inching his way into the man's strange and disturbing perspective on the world. "It's about gradually drifting into the circumstances, the era, and the compulsion to have the truth be there," he says of his preparations. "And it's not something that I imagine and then imitate. It's something that I try to become, to do".
Astin believes that the play provides an opportunity to demythologise, a forum for redemption, "Poe appears to set the record straight," he explains, "and the only way he can do this is to lay his heart bare. However difficult it may be, he has to do it. He begins defiantly, complaining about his reputation. But then, recalling his mission, he proceeds to take the audience on what he calls a journey of the soul, out of space, out of time. They have to join him, abandon any form of limited thinking and travel with him through his life."
And that life was a troubled one from the beginning. Abandoned soon after birth by an alcoholic father, Poe saw his mother die of consumption when he was three years old. The same fate awaited his stepmother - the wife of a man who fostered but eventually disowned Poe, leaving him penniless in early manhood - and the teenage cousin he made his bride.
When they married, he took upon himself the responsibility to support what remained of her family, including her mother and her bedridden grandmother. But the income from Poe's journalism was infrequent and paltry, and often dented by his propensity for drinking binges; by the winter of 1846, he could not even afford to heat the room in which his young wife was dying. Her death was undoubtedly the undoing of Poe - two years later, he was buried beside her. He was 30 years old.
Yet Virginia's death was also Poe's greatest artistic inspiration. His earlier essay, 'The Philosophy of Composition,' had argued that the death of the beautiful woman was of all themes, the "most poetic", and Once Upon A Midnight sees Poe confront this phenomenon of the dying woman, which so enraptured him as an artist and so tormented him as a man.
Frequently the audience will find themselves transported from an account of Poe's actual grief to a vision of one of his characters in her death throes.
Uncannily like his male protagonists, Poe never managed to resolve the ambiguity of his relation to the women in his life; biographers agree that he idealised them as spiritual, almost supernatural, beings, somehow desperate to avoid the entanglements of real, physical relationships.
This is also the predicament of his male characters, and their downfall; the conflict between the longing to be loved and nurtured and the desire to control the unknowable truths represented by woman, to force order on the contours of her femininity with the tools of art or reason. So just what is this favourite poetic subject of Poe's - the poignancy of lost love or the triumph of the surviving male? It is both, Astin insists, and the play will not limit Poe to either dimension. Neither does he fear that Poe's art might be compromised by being read strictly in terms of the life of its creator. "Poe revealed himself completely in his work," he says. "His work is his life, is his autobiography. In the last analysis, what he wrote was what he lived." Having lived through the shattering experience of Virginia's death, Poe produced undoubtedly his most astounding piece of writing, the unwieldy treatise Eureka, which charts his vision of the intricate workings of the universe. Though it is a largely spiritual, almost mystical enterprise, amazingly it anticipates the time-space continuum of Einstein and puts forward the theory of black holes at the centre of the universe. Because it was in terms of this concept of the universe, with its themes of attraction and repulsion, of infinite dissolution and collapse towards final unity, that Poe viewed his world and those of his characters, the spirit of Eureka informs the play.
It was because of this philosophy, Astin believes, that Poe wrote literature of an ultimately timeless quality, despite its extremities of vision. "Shaw said that writers always have some locale for their stories," he explains. "For Poe, the locale was the universe. In the long run, he's trying to explain life and death...through the experience of his hopes, his regrets, his fears, his demons, his dreams." Ultimately, he argues, these deeper implications of Poe's work were what his 19th century accusers failed to grasp.
"I think if one is an assiduous reader of Poe that person can only come to a different conclusion about Poe," he says. "He wrote of dark characters and strange, mysterious people because of his mission to try to comprehend life. Life has both areas of light and dark, you have to understand that."
He feels confident that an Irish audience will relate to the Poe of Once Upon A Midnight, this lone artist staring out from the undefined space of an empty stage, courting light and darkness. "Because he wasn't bound by time and space, I think that what he wrote was not just for his period but for us now, today." What's not well known about Poe, Astin points out, is that, despite the hardships with which he met, he saw plenty to laugh about in the world.
"He had a wonderful sense of humour and a great wit, and we try to infuse the play with some of that." But the play does not attempt to pin down this complicated personality, or to define his genius. "Each day was different," says Astin. "One day he was a sincere artist, the next he was trying to fake something to develop a reputation. He was a complex fellow, and it's incumbent upon us to show that in the play. We can't just settle on one idea and show nothing but. We have to show the complete human being."
And so, they move beyond the cliched images - the confines of gloomy bridal chambers, the oppressive darkness of burial vaults - out to Poe's vision of an infinite universe expanding and contracting in perfect attunement to the clumsy gestures of humankind. Astin wants to revive the wider reaches of a fascinating imagination. "There's that great section in Eureka where he talks about moving a speck of dust on the point of his finger," he says. "And that little move changes everything in the universe. It's a great thrill to be able to share that idea with others."
The Earagail Arts Festival continues until July 22nd at venues throughout Donegal. Once Upon a Midnight is being performed in the An Grianβn Theatre, Letterkenny. Bookings: 074-20777; and then at the Galway Arts Festival.
