Ocker J. W. - Poe-Land: the hallowed haunts of Edgar Allan Poe

Poe-Land

The Hallowed Haunts of Edgar Allan Poe

J. W. Ocker

Copyright 2015 by J. W. Ocker

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages.

Interior photographs by the author unless otherwise specified

Book design by Eugenie S. Delaney

Cover illustration and design by Brian Weaver

Published by The Countryman Press, P.O. Box 748, Woodstock, VT 05091

Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available

Poe-Land

978-1-58157-221-6

978-1-58157-676-4 (e-book)

To Hazel Lenore
You have been part of a very weird year.

You lived, sir, and wrote during an earlier, simpler moment of darkness when a drunken Fortunato had to be bricked into a wall by an individually skilled artisan. Now we immure whole neighborhoods in one days urban renewal. You must realize, The Fall of the House of Usher only cleared the way for another highrise. The Descent into the Maelstrom is the daily ride to work. The Pit is one of our two major political parties, the Pendulum the other. The Masque of the Red Death is held annually for combined interfaith charities. The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether has been medically approved. Though we are more hesitant now about rushing the Tell-Tale Heart to transplant. The MS. is Found in a non-returnable bottle. The Purloined Letter is junk mail. The Bells are recorded. The Black Cat has been fixed.

The Late Great Creature

Brock Brower

Contents

George Julian Zolnay bust of Edgar Allan Poe, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville

E DGAR ALLAN POE WAS AN ODDITY. His life was odd, his literature is odd, his legacy is odd.

He was an author of unique genius, and if its lazy for me to use that shorthand, then he was one of unique ability, unique vision, unique expression. He didnt so much write words as weave them together into strange fabrics that compel you to either tapestry them onto a wall and marvel or smother someone to death with them and marvel.

He had a vision so insistent that he had to invent or evolve entire genres of literature just to express it. With The Murders in the Rue Morgue, he created the modern detective story, meaning he made possible about 80 percent of contemporary literature and television programming. No Poe, no Poirot, no Magnum, P.I. And thats three mustaches the world would be impoverished without.

He sent a man to the moon thirty years before Jules Verne did and more than half a century before H. G. Wells did. He destroyed our planet in a comet-born apocalypse, a trope of the science fiction genre that were still troping today. And horror storieswell, if Hell is a hall of fame for earths horrors, then Poe has his own demon wing there.

And that latter bit really doesnt fit. His dexterity with words could have floated him among the loftiest of poets for sheer beauty and craft, and he was a poet, for sure, as that was where his passions settled naturally. But he could have been the American Shakespeare. The American Shelley. The American Slick Rick. Yet, he turned that genius to stories and poems of horror. Or at least, thats where his genius refracted the most light. In death. In gloom. In despair.

He focused that high ability on what has traditionally been considered low literature and what today has been neatly circumscribed as the horror genre, and which is still often kept at a safe distance from its playmates. By doing so, Poe elevated the genre and forced many to take it more seriously than they otherwise would have while inspiring many others to pursue it as worthwhile. His genius is so inescapable that we find it necessary to introduce stories of madmen, of murder, of exotic torture and obsession with death to our children in school just because we need to show them what great literature is or else fail in our roles as educators, decent people, and apex predators.

And yet, despite the fact that his horrors have granted him eternal life as far as we can bestow it, most of his work is comedic, silly, full of puns and trivialities. I think if he had been barred from claiming the mantel of poet, he would have claimed that of satirist or humorist, a film negative of Mark Twain.

But if humor was all hed written, nobody would have cared about Edgar Allan Poe. His comedies are trifles. His horrors are exquisite.

Another odd aspect of his work is that when Poe wrote well, he wrote like the English language was newfound. When he was bad, he wrote with a dull axe in both fists. I dont know if I can ever read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym again. And, honestly, if threatened with living entombment, I could probably make a longer list of his bad and mediocre works than one of his good and great works. Plus there were his plagiarisms, which were frequent and blatant enough to relegate him to one of the laughingstocks of literary history, yet we brush them aside like its okay for a guy like Poe to have that kind of body beneath his boards.

Certainly, the inconsistent quality issue might not be Poes fault. Every author has levels of quality that range throughout his or her career. Its just that those with a larger body of work can better hide or context the juvenilia, the paycheck work, and the bad decisions (or can afford to at least destroy them in a fire, as Ray Bradbury is supposed to have done). Poes base of work is small, and he was forced to pad it just to have something to stick silverware into. And it doesnt help that his work is held in such high regard that we lust after every scrap of paper that he so much as poked with a quill.

But all that still doesnt plumb the depth of this angel of the odd.

His work is heralded by the dustiest of scholars. The most ivory towered of academics. Even when various critical tides turned against him over the years or when he was ravaged by those prominent literary voices who were somehow born without a Poe gene, his work still bore the showy stamp of approval of the most cultured culturati.

And yet he is just as much a part of pop culture as the latest dance song or Internet meme or reality television show. Everybody knows Poe. And, sure, there is a pantheon of writers and artists that everyone can recognize by name and signature work, but those men and women arent held with the same passion. From the teenagers who have barely existed long enough to have sampled anything in life to the elder librarians who have read every word printed on silverfish food, an astounding number of people of an astounding variety of tastes and lifestyles love Poe. Or identify with him. Or recognize him as some kind of symbol.