Missing the twists in Poe's story

Published on Saturday 2 February 2008 13:10

POE: A LIFE CUT SHORT Peter Ackroyd Chatto & Windus, £15.99

EDGAR Allan Poe's character – and death – is exactly the kind of conundrum that a character in an Edgar Allan Poe story would relish deciphering. Born in 1809 to travelling actors, he was orphaned by the age of four and adopted by the bourgeois Allan family. He left the University of Virginia after running up gambling debts and enrolled in the Army under the name Edgar Perry; left the army and enrolled at West Point Military Academy; was court-martialled and became a journalist, marrying his 14-year-old cousin.

His creative writings would found the genres of detective and science fiction, yet he barely earned a living from his pen. He left home on September 26, 1849, supposedly to go to New York, and turned up six days later in Baltimore, dead drunk, dying a week later. No death certificate gives an explanation for his demise, and everything from alcohol-induced diabetic shock to murder has been advanced.

Peter Ackroyd's biography of Poe at least gives a satisfying hypothesis for his death, even if the paradoxes of Poe's life remain obscure. In comparison with Ackroyd's lives of Dickens, Eliot and Blake this is a mere sketch of a book. There is a slight tendency to repetition – Ackroyd often parallels the balanced cadence of the writing with its hysterical subject matter. What makes this frustrating is that Ackroyd is clearly fascinated with his subject. He makes the reader want to re-read Poe, and indeed to read more of Ackroyd on Poe.

But there are inexplicable omissions in the story. Poe's final work, a poetic-philosophical treatise called Eureka, is glanced over; with no mention that in it Poe solved Olbers' paradox (why is it dark at night with all those stars?) and tentatively proposed the Big Bang Theory. Nor does he deal with Poe's remarkable "spoiling" of Dickens' Barnaby Rudge, where he logically deduced the correct ending before publication.

To treat Poe just as a doomed romancer – and to forgo his fierce analytical approach to criticism and physics – reduces him. His cryptanalysis is more interesting than his crypts. Poe lied all his life, and a good biography has to explain the choice of lies as well as the decision to lie. In a sense, this is not 'Poe: A Life Cut Short', but 'A Life Of Poe Cut Short'.