Poltergeist in the Parlor

THE HAUNTED PALACE, A LIFE OF EDGAR ALLAN POE (408 pp).--Frances Winwar--Harper ($6).

When a West Point court-martial decided that Plebe Edgar Allan Poe was not officer material, it rendered a sound judgment. It was not only that the overage (22) cadet had been a U.S. army private, that he drank, ran up heavy debts and asserted (falsely) that Benedict Arnold was his grandfather. Poe was a poet and a born soldier of misfortune --ill-armed against the world. Life was a bad dream to him; he is remembered today not for his success in coming to terms with it but for the fantasies and fictions that celebrated his defeat.

In the snug, overstuffed parlor of early 19th century optimism, Poe played Hamlet to his own ghost, and it is sometimes difficult to separate the poet from the poltergeist who tipped over the stuffed birds, broke the bric-a-brac and put the ladies into a flutter. It is the thesis of Veteran Biographer Frances Winwar (Coleridge, the Wordsworths, Byron, Shelley, Keats) that Poe's "ghoul-haunted" imagination has contemporary validity. For all its outmoded idiom (castles, princesses, etc.) Poe's death-obsessed verse speaks true today. In this admirable biography, Author Winwar lets a hundred well-informed witnesses speak for themselves and lets Poe rhyme where reason does not run. He wrote:

I was a child and she was a child In this kingdom by the sea . . .

Poe was right about himself: he was a child in mind as his wife (whom he married when he was 27 and she 13) was a child in fact. But it was no mythical kingdom by the sea in which he had to live, but a hard-headed republic of farmers and merchants.

Changeling Fantasies. For a man who aspired to be a gentleman and dandy, Poe made an unwise choice of parents. Unlike these thespidolatrous times, the U.S. of 150 years ago did not think much of actors, on the quaint ground that they tended to have loose morals. Poe's mother had been playing Boston when Edgar was born in 1809. By all accounts she was a fair Lady Teazle and a wistful Ophelia, but Poe's father David was no Prince Hamlet but an attendant, and an intemperate lord. He deserted his wife when she was pregnant, and before he was three, Poe was an orphan.

The good ladies of Richmond adopted Edgar and his illegitimate sister Rosalie. Edgar fell to the childless wife of a tobacco and drygoods merchant, part-time slave trader and fulltime hypocrite named John Allan. No wonder Poe was addicted to changeling fantasies of noble descent. From being a backstage baby practically weaned on gin, he became "Master Allan," was educated at school in England and sent to the University of Virginia (after less than a year he left, in disgrace and in debt.)

Chained Lion. Poe was in the grip of Byronism, but as a Childe Harold he was handicapped. In his defiance of society, Byron had the backing of Newstead Abbey and of a hard, aristocratic realism. Poe fought blind. The search for identity was complicated in Poe's case by multiple miscasting. The gentleman, the lover, the adventurer, all cut absurd figures behind the back of Poe the poet. His sense of vocation as poet and fabulist never deserted him. It did not fail him even when Allan had him measuring yard-goods in the store, when he "ran away to sea," served as a private, and it survived the debacle at West Point. "Lion ambition is chained down," he wrote in his Tamerlane, which was run off by a printer pal while Poe was doing duty in the quartermaster's office in Boston.

When Poe left the house of "Old Swell-Foot" Allan, poems were literally a penny each.*His death-haunted spirit could not long function in the field of pure poetry, but Poe carried heavy weapons in journalism, which, to him, was a corpse-littered no man's land between art and business. By peddling and shamelessly pushing his articles and stories, by the needlework of his aunt and his grandmother's minuscule pension ($240 a year derived from Grandfather Poe's services during the Revolution), Edgar kept alive in the "literary snake pit" of 19th century U.S. letters.

Wifey's Buddy. Poe was one of those drinkers to whom one jigger was the same as a jug. He enriched Thomas White, the "illiterate, vulgar although well-meaning" editor of the Messenger, but White was forced to record: "Poe has flew the track." Another time he wrote Poe, fearing "that you would again sip the juice," adding the wisdom of a spacious age: "No man is safe who drinks before breakfast." As if drink were not bad enough, Poe almost certainly was a drug addict; more than one of his fictional characters confessed to being "a bonden slave to the trammels of opium."

If Poe and alcohol made an impossible couple, it was nothing to his bizarre relations with women. The poet's broken-field running in the sexual arena would baffle a convention of psychiatrists. Author Winwar gallantly charts the whole painful performance, beginning with Edgar's first sonnets smuggled by his sister into an exclusive young ladies' seminary (although poetry was then acceptable currency in "date-patterns," his frenzies must have startled the girls out of their wits). There followed an ocean of vows and verses to members of what he learned bitterly to call "the pestilential society of literary women."

For years he lived in "complex sentimental incestuousness" with his aunt Maria Clemm, that "tireless minister to genius," and her "sylphlike" daughter Virginia. One day 13-year-old Virginia was playing on the swings at school; the next, after some fakery with the Richmond register, she was Mrs. Edgar Allan Poe. He wore a wedding ring of entwined hoops--one for Virginia and one for Aunt Maria. Until she suitably expired at 24 of consumption in Poe's cottage at Fordham, Virginia adored her "Buddy," but as to whether his "darling little wifey" was ever truly his wife, Biographer Winwar has her doubts. Nor does she believe in accusations of "criminal relations" between Poe and the faithful Mrs. Clemm, whose cry, "Eddie, my dear boy! Let me put you to bed," was often the last word in Poe's addled ears.

Whip of Scorpions. None of Poe's admirers like to dwell on the time when, at 39, he took up with Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman. This Massachusetts lawyer's widow was a small, shapely poetess who wore flowing draperies, lived in a perpetual jag from an ether-soaked handkerchief but pledged Poe to teetotalism. She called him "A God-Peer" (an anagram of Edgar Poe), wore a little carved wooden coffin round her neck on a black velvet ribbon, and Poe proposed to her in a graveyard. Poe's own reason seemed to tell him that his demon had betrayed him; he wrote desperate love letters to another woman, tried suicide. Finally he went home to Baltimore for his last bat.

"Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge." said James Russell Lowell. Said Poe's friend George R. Graham of Graham's Magazine: "Literature with [Poe] was a religion; and he, its high priest, with a whip of scorpions scourged the money-changers from the temple . . . Could he have stepped down and . . . made himself the shifting toady of the hour ... he would have been feted alive, and perhaps, been praised when dead."

It is all sad and true, except that if Edgar Allan Poe had been a better poet --less steeped in the idiom of a sentimental age--he might well have had an even worse time of it.

*Poe's The Raven and Other Poems contained 31 poems and sold at 31-c-, the best buy in verse until the appearance of James Joyce's Pomes Penyeach.

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