BiographyI have, on my bookshelf at home, a small, ancient hardback copy of Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination, a volume I liberated from my grandmother's house in Ballylongford, Co Kerry, when I was 12 years old, "liberated" being one of those wonderful words that can apply equally to slaves freed from bondage and the sack of Constantinople.
To be honest, I didn't fully appreciate Poe's stories upon that first reading, and, to be even more honest, I'm not sure I fully appreciate them now. "Original and peculiar" was how one contemporary reviewer described a collection of his tales in 1845, and that is as accurate and concise a summation of Poe's singular gifts as anyone is likely to compose. For an author who, in his comparatively short lifetime, managed to sow the seeds of the detective novel, the science fiction genre, and the admittedly more specialised offshoot of psychosexual horror, it is hard to find his obvious imitators, even if Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot both carry something of the DNA of Poe's detective, Dupin.
Why this should be the case is harder to pinpoint. It may be due, in large part, to the contradictions inherent in his prose work. Poe was one of the first truly professional writers of short stories, although he earned only $300 from them in his lifetime, a small sum even by the standards of the day. (Poe was nearly always broke. For a time, he and his family survived on turnips, and dandelion salads.) Yet he regarded the stories as beneath him and yearned always for recognition as a poet, which came late in life with the publication of The Raven.
Nevertheless, he knew his audience. He wrote his "hoaxes" to titillate readers, and so some of his tales, while timeless in subject matter, can appear to the modern reader to verge on the hysterical.
Take, for example, Berenice, one of the stories that I found particularly perturbing as a 12-year-old boy encountering Poe for the first time. It begins: "Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform." Well, quite. But this opening is an apt harbinger of what is to come. Egaeus, obsessed with his prematurely buried beloved, Berenice, and, in particular, her dental work, wakes from a grief-stricken delirium to find that he has torn out all of her teeth while his betrothed was, presumably, still in the process of expiring.
One might accuse Poe of merely pandering to his audience with such details, but he was not quite so cynical, and what makes his voice so unique, so difficult to mimic, is the real pain he drew upon to create his work. As a writer, and as a man, Poe was haunted by dead and dying women. His mother, Eliza, died of consumption at the age of 24, when Poe was only two years old. His stepmother, Frances Allan, died of the same disease when Poe was 20, as did Jane Stannard, the mother of a friend for whom Poe evinced a first, early devotion. Finally, the disease took Poe's wife, Virginia, in 1847.
AGAIN AND AGAIN, in stories such as Berenice, The Fall of the House of Usher, and Ligeia, we encounter women dead and half-dead. In an essay, The Philosophy of Composition, Poe observed that "the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the world", but the disengagement from the reality of grief and loss that this suggests is misleading. Poe was an extremely disciplined writer, and he found a way to channel his sufferings into his work, even if one suspects he did not fully understand what lay behind his own confused feelings towards women.
He was always searching for females who would comfort him, who would, in essence, mother him. Virginia was 13 years Poe's junior, and she was only nine when he first met her. He called her "Sis", or "Sissie", even after they were married, and it is debatable whether their union was ever consummated.
Virginia's mother, Maria Clemm, became, in turn, a surrogate mother to Poe, feeding him, managing his precarious finances, and nursing him until his death. She called him her "Eddy", even when he was regularly carried back to her door, intoxicated to the point of collapse.
Poe was a binge drinker, an irrational, sometimes disagreeable man when in his cups. In 1842, he paid a visit to a former sweetheart, Mary Devereaux, in Jersey City. As Peter Ackroyd describes it in the book under consideration:
He reproached his hostess for her marriage, saying that in truth she loved him only. This is an odd remark, from a man whose own wife was fatally ill. He asked Mary to sing and play the piano, meanwhile becoming 'excited in conversation'. Poe then minced up some radishes with such fury that pieces of them flew about the room. He drank a cup of tea, and departed.
Curiously, it is that detail of the radishes that is particularly troubling.
Even sober, he could be difficult. He feuded with his fellow writers, using his position as a critic to tear apart the reputations of those whom he considered his competitors, as though by dragging them down he could elevate himself in turn. One of the objects of his ire was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, accused by Poe of plagiarism.
Longfellow never responded in print, but he later commented perceptively that Poe's accusations were the consequence of a "sensitive nature chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong".
ULTIMATELY, ALCOHOL KILLED him. He was found intoxicated in Baltimore in 1849, wearing clothes that were not his own, and a battered straw hat. He may have been earning money through voter impersonation. His final words were "Lord help my poor soul". Only four people attended his funeral.
Ackroyd, an apt biographer for Poe, given their shared fascination for buildings and architecture, as well as the sense of the gothic that infuses the best work of both writers, has done an admirable job of condensing the facts of Poe's life into this short volume, but its very brevity is almost its undoing. There is not enough space in which to give Poe's stories the consideration they deserve, and some, like William Wilson, that great tale of the doppelgänger, are barely mentioned at all.
The stink of the alcohol that devoured him pervades the pages, and something of Poe's strange genius is lost in the process. This, after all, was a man who pioneered at least three genres; who connected poetry and music half a century before Walter Pater; whose views on art would have a profound influence on French 19th-century writers; and who, in the almost unreadable prose poem Eureka, touched, however accidentally, upon the Big Bang, parallel universes, the structure of the atom, particle physics, and the theory of relativity, all long before the birth of Einstein.
Perhaps the most appropriate tribute to Poe's enduring legacy is the "Poe toaster", a figure not mentioned in Ackroyd's book. For many years, a visitor wearing a wide- brimmed hat and a black scarf has left three red roses and a half-filled bottle of cognac on Poe's grave in Baltimore on the anniversary of his death. This year, despite the presence of 150 people at the cemetery, he once again succeeded in paying his respects without being seen.
Poe, it is safe to say, would have been flattered by the attention.
John Connolly's new novel, The Reapers, will be published in May by Hodder & Stoughton
Poe: A Life Cut Short Peter Ackroyd Chatto & Windus, 170pp. £15.99