EDGAR
ALLAN POE & OUR VIOLENT AGE
THOM NICKELS
The legacy
of Edgar Allan Poe has become big business in Philly. Proof of this was evident
during the Inaugural Poe Arts Festival at the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic
Site and the German Society this past October. For a mere $10 participants got
to sample beer, food, watch performances and listen to talks about Poe.
Most
readers will recognize Poe, along with Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) and Bram Stoker (Dracula,
which was written in Philly), as one of the progenitors of horror fiction. Poe
lived in Philly for about six years and spent the last 18 months of his time
here with his wife Virginia, his mother-in-law Muddy and his cat, Catterina, in
the (now) historic home at 7th and Spring Garden. While in the city
Poe worked for a number of magazines although his journalistic run was
sometimes rough because he liked to drink in the afternoon. This habit caused
him to be fired from one publication although he was given a second chance when
a man named George Graham made him editor of Graham’s Magazine.
When Poe aficionado Herb Moskovitz asked
me to read adapted sections from Poe’s story, Murders in the Rue Morgue, to Poe house visitors during the
Inaugural festival I was more than willing to oblige.
On the night of the readings, Herb and I were stationed in Poe’s old
kitchen, a fairly small room that barely held the groups ushered in by a guide
to hear us read. In the dark room we took turns reading the adapted story, the
only light a small flashlight clipped on the corner of our scripts. The interest (and appreciation) expressed by
the various groups that crammed into that small space was impressive and
contagious, and made me wonder just what it was about Poe that attracted such a
diverse array of people. While it’s possible that some in the groups that came
to hear us read were well read literary types, I felt that most were actually
general readers with an interest in Halloween horror as it related to a scary
story by Poe they may have remembered from childhood, even though there’s
nothing especially scary about Poe’s fiction.
The gore in Poe’s horror fiction, the rolling heads, the stab wounds,
the walled up victims unable to breathe, all of this is too outlandishly gothic
to arouse genuine fright among most readers. Standing in dark kitchen, it
became obvious to me that none of the visitors were really frightened but were
more interested in hearing how Poe’s gothic sentences rolled off a reader’s
lips on Halloween. The idea, after all, was to create an atmosphere where Poe
seemed to be in every particle of dust floating in the house, even if the
really frightening experiences would have to wait until everyone at the
festival went home and caught up on the latest world and local news, where the
real horror resides.
The numbers of people who crowded the Poe
house that night got me wondering if Poe’s writing somehow speaks to our age
more than it did to previous generations. Is the increased violence in the
world, from ISIS to the killings in streets of Chicago ,
the catalyst that helps drive some to bask, with minimal discomfort, in the
lamplight of B-movie gothic horror? Or
is something else going on? Only a one act play written by Poe’s friend, George
Lippard, captured the sense of true horror when it ended on the festival stage
with one man slitting another man’s throat. Here, I thought, is an authentic
contemporary link.
There’s no doubt that Poe, and the
manufacture of his legacy, has become big business, but would Poe appreciate
this fact were he able to come back to life?
Several years ago there was a Poe war
of the corpses when Philly Poe scholar Ed Pettit challenged the curator of Baltimore ’s
Poe House, Jeff Jerome, when Pettit suggested in a City Paper article that Poe’s body should be moved from Baltimore ,
where it is buried, to Philadelphia ,
where Poe wrote many of his noteworthy stories. The implication here of course
is that Poe’s Philadelphia
experience was richer and more substantial than the experiences he gathered in Baltimore .
Poe actually considered himself to be a Virginian, so in theory Richmond ,
Virginia Baltimore
does have a foreboding feel to it—I even want to call it a creep element-- that
Philly does not have. For this reason it
is a more fitting city than Philly for Poe’s earthly remains.
Poe’s skyrocketing popularity has a kind of
boardwalk quality to it, reminiscent of mass produced knick knacks and mugs
sold in T shirt novelty shops. When a writer becomes so popular that his/her
image winds up on jars of Nescafe and breakfast jam, the tendency for some is
to not bother with the writer at all. Picture 10,000 people reading Harry
Potter in a football stadium and you might understand why some readers would
opt never to go to that stadium. You might describe over saturation like this as the ‘drink the Kool Aid’ literary
equivalent of the celebrity-loving sheep that follow every bit of news about
the Kardasians.
Heavily gothic literature with lots of
blood spilling is often equated with teenage angst. Writing only about dark
things is a little like dressing up 24/7 in dark Goth clothing, which used to
be the fashion among teenagers. As in fashion, so in literature, it helps to
accessorize and diversify.
Yet the mystique of Poe is
powerful enough to seduce even the most resistant reader. This is why while in
Poe’s kitchen I found myself running my fingers along the walls as if forcing a
spiritual communion between myself and the writer. Standing in the dark knowing
that this was once the room where Poe lounged, chatted or argued with his wife
or mother-in-law, scolded the cat, suffered multiple hangovers or dreamed up a new story ideas while running
his fingers along the wall, was for me a Halloween bonus. After all, the
kitchen in any house is where the most dramatic family events occur, and this
was almost certainly true for the family Poe.
At some point during my time in Poe’s
kitchen, I thought of the Walt Whitman house in Camden ,
New Jersey DNA expert could comb the
place and discover, even at this late date, “pieces” of old Walt in the walls
and floors. In fact, the unglamorous Whitman house comes close to replicating
the standard small Fishtown row home.
It’s an understatement to say that Poe’s work is not universally
appreciated. There are some critics, for instance, who say that it is vastly
overrated.
A poetry site, Poetry Snark, lists the ten most overrated poets of all time.
Included in the list are Charles Bukowski, Ted Hughes, Alfred Lord Tennyson and
Edgar Allan Poe.
The famed English poet T.S. Eliot once wrote: “Poe as a man who dabbled in verse and in
kinds of prose, without settling down to make a thoroughly good job of any one
genre”
But all of this is ultimately in the
eye of the beholder. To appreciate Poe doesn’t mean having to get stuck forever in Poe at the risk of
ignoring other writers of greater or lesser importance, even if his mystique,
however self indulgent in its dark gothic imagery, is far more seductive than
the lives of most scribes.
