The tell-tale heart of a perverse genius

Published on Friday 22 February 2008 19:02

POE: A LIFE CUT SHORT

BY PETER ACKROYD

Chatto & Windus, 288pp, 15.99

PETER ACKROYD, MASTERFUL biographer of Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, Dickens, Blake and others, opens this sad story at its end. The last two weeks of the life of Edgar Allan Poe, America's most perverse genius, exemplify the muddle and mystery that characterised his existence.

As friends saw him on to a steamboat in Richmond, Virginia, bound for Baltimore, on 27 September 1849, he had seemed in good spirits, planning a two-week trip to New York on business. Yet he had no luggage besides a malacca sword stick which he had mistakenly appropriated from his doctor the evening before.

Six days later he was found raving in a tavern in Baltimore, wearing a tattered straw hat and badly fitting trousers (not his own). Wildly inebriated and penniless, neither he nor anyone he knew could account for his movements. Two relatives, arriving on the scene, coolly dispatched him to hospital where the alcoholic stupor gave way to delirium. Two days later, Poe died. As Ackroyd puts it, like one of his own narratives or fables, Poe's life story ended abruptly and inconclusively, "bedevilled by a mystery that has never been, and probably never can be, resolved".

For a novelist excited by mysteries, Poe is the ideal subject. The second son of itinerant actors, he started life, Ackroyd hazards, already traumatised by his constriction in the womb of his anxious and consumptive mother. At every turn his undoubted talents – as poet, short-story writer, critic, even sportsman – were sabotaged by a deep yet indefinable torment.

Adopted by the Allans after the early death of his mother, Poe saw their love and pride in him turn to rejection and disgust as he failed at every signal point to get a grip on life. From then on, the tale repeats of love, trust and financial support endlessly won – from family, friends and colleagues – only to be betrayed and lost by Poe's feverish incapacity for happiness.

Ackroyd pursues this appalling thread through all its sorry episodes. Brief spasms of happiness – his first taste of fame, in 1833, when he won $50 for his short story "MS Found in a Bottle"; cosy moments with his child bride, cousin Virginia, and her mother, "Muddy" Maria Clemm; the rapturous reception of his most famous poem, The Raven – are set against his almost constant struggles with poverty, drink and the looming death of loved ones. As Ackroyd comments, sardonically, of the invariable histrionic black Poe wore: "It was his colour."

With an adept ventriloquism, Ackroyd weaves together contemporary testimony and his own crisp narrative. He judiciously sifts the myths surrounding Poe, and cites just so much of the poems, stories and prose as will illuminate Poe's character and obsessions. His own elegant, even terse, prose mirrors his subject's best, while it is also shot through with poetic sympathy for Poe's anguish. He neatly nails the paradoxes that bedevilled Poe: the puzzle-loving master of the detective plot so often overwhelmed by the extremity of his own imagination; the pote maudit freighted with misery who yet "hardly seemed to know himself at all, but relied upon the power of impassioned words to create his identity".

This is not a literary biography. Ackroyd asserts rather than demonstrates the qualities that earned Poe Tennyson's great accolade, "the most original genius that America has produced". His lasting influence on modern literature, his place as a visionary precursor of Symbolism and Surrealism and a key influence on European Romanticism, are well documented.

What we have is a vivid recreation of the life and sensibility that lay behind Poe's literary output. For the secret of his life is the same secret that powers his best work – not its technical audacity, nor its melodic control but, as Ackroyd says of The Raven, "the horror of its morbid despair".