Poor Soul

ISRAFEL Hervey Allen Farrar & Rinehart ($3.50).

EDGAR ALLAN POE Una Pope-Hennessy Macmillan ($4).

If a U. S. citizen were asked to name the greatest U. S. writer of the 19th Century, he would be apt to choose, according to his literary politics, Herman Melville, Mark Twain or Walt Whitman. But a European would probably name Edgar Allan Poe. Like Melville and Whitman, Poe was not recognized by the U. S. as a great writer until Europe had guaranteed his genius. Says Biographer Pope-Hennessy: "He has been claimed as the founder of the 'Surrealiste' school, and in his unusual mind French symbolists have found inspiration for poems, Maeterlinck suggestions for dream-dramas, Jules'Verne a model for the quasi-scientific narrative of adventure, R. L. Stevenson the source for the pirate story, and Conan Doyle the pattern for detective fiction. . . . Mallarme and Valery, not to speak of Baudelaire, have recognized Poe as their master in aesthetics."

U. S. readers to whom Poe is still a mistily mysterious figure will find in either of these biographies a straightforward, authoritative account of his tragic life. Author Hervey Allen's Israjel, originally published (1926) in two volumes, is generally regarded as the standard life of Poe. For a thoroughgoing, impartial but humane portrait, complete with all relevant details of background, Israjel gives the reader all he either desires or deserves to know.

Edgar Poe (1809-1849) was born in Boston, the second child of second-rate strolling players. His elder brother, William Henry Leonard, died at 24 of tuberculosis aggravated by drink; his sister Rosalie never developed mentally after adolescence. Edgar's mother died in Richmond, Va. when he was three, and he and his infant sister were adopted (though never legally) by kind-hearted Richmond families. Poe adored his foster-mother, Mrs. Allan, but never got along with his "Pa." Though he was brought up as a little Virginia gentleman, he soon ceased to conform. Tragedy visited him early and often, did nothing to thicken an already abnormally thin skin. At 15 he had his second bereavement, when an older woman whom he worshipped died insane. Always romantically attached to some woman, Poe was engaged to be married when he went to the University of Virginia. There he learned to drink but not how to hold his liquor: "One glass was literally too much." Because he gambled himself into debt his foster-father ignominiously removed him. Poe got home to find that his fiancee was promised to another.

A furious quarrel with "Pa" ended in Poe's leaving home forever in noble dudgeon but did not prevent him from darkening the door thereafter in appeals for help, which were rarely heeded. He enlisted in the army under an assumed name, served creditably two years in the artillery, then wangled an appointment to West Point. Though he stood well in his class he hated the restricting life there, got a discharge in less than a year by the simple expedient of refusing to obey any orders. Practically penniless, he gravitated to Baltimore, where he was taken in by his hard-pressed aunt, Mrs. Clemm. For the rest of his short life she looked after him, mended his clothes, helped him through melancholiac hangovers, fed him as well as the meager larder permitted. The household relationships were further simplified when Poe married her 13-year-old daughter Virginia though it is generally supposed that the marriage was never consummated.

When poverty turned Poe from full-time poetry to part-time journalism his fortunes, improved. As an editor, short-story writer and critic he made a national name for himself. Under his editing Graham's Magazine in a few months rose from a circulation of 5,000 to 37,000. Poe always wanted to edit his own paper. Said he : "To coin one's brain into silver, at the nod of a master, is, to my thinking, the hardest task in the world." But it was only as a subordinate editor that he made a success. Poe not only went on wild, unhappy sprees but sometimes took drugs. When his child-wife lay dying of tuberculosis he sometimes left home for days, unable to bear the misery of his surroundings. After her death he went rapidly down hill. His romantic attachments be came more unreal, more complicated. Shortly before his death he was paying court to two women at once. While he was awaiting an answer from one to whom he had just proposed he discovered he could not live without the second. In his despair he tried to commit suicide by drinking laudanum. Whether or not Poe was really impotent is a question, according to Biographer Allen, incapable of proof. Says he: Poe was certainly "psychically inhibited."

Few months before his death Poe met again his onetime fiancee, now7 a widow, proposed to her again and was accepted. But just before the wedding he was overtaken by one of his periodic fits of horror and disappeared. Days later a friendly doctor discovered him in Baltimore, destitute, dishevelled, dying.

Author Pope-Hennessy's biography is much shorter, crisper, more literary than Israfel. But Author Pope-Hennessy thinks Poe was an unAmerican accident, tries to explain his fantastic genius by suggesting a (purely conjectural) Jewish ancestry. She takes a woman's coldly realistic view of Mrs. Clemm, hints that Poe's aunt knew which side her bread was buttered on, even if it was only a crust. The difference between her version of Poe's last words and Author Allen's is typical of the difference between the two books. Pope-Hennessy: "He who arched the heavens and upholds the universe has his decrees legibly written upon the frontlet of every human being and upon demons incarnate." Allen: "Lord help my poor soul."

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