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| Combine the names "Booth" & "Poe" - and you get..."Both" |
It started with the
idle late night plucking from my bookshelves Paul Metcalf's Both, one of
his many strange, imaginative, hybrid works. In this one, he documents the
unexpected, ostensible parallels between Edgar Allan Poe and John
Wilkes Booth, and not just in their appearances, signatures, and
melodramatic personalities. Metcalf's list of sources for Both
was so interesting that I began tracking them down, at least the
one's I could afford. Some were so obscure that, even if I could find
them on abebooks, I could never have afforded them. I really wanted
to pull the trigger on The Mad Booths of Maryland, but at over
$400, it'll just have to wait.
However, I could
afford The Raven and the Whale, Perry Miller's dissection of
the mid-19th Century American literary scene, especially in New York,
its cattiness, its brawling, its factionalism, the births and deaths
of its many journals, their great achievements and great failures,
all their explicit scheming for an American Literature
independent of English influence. How in service to this elusive
American ideal -- the country was only 60 years old, technically --
the editors, writers and intellectuals, especially in New York,
searched and begged and hedged and compromised, how they boosted any
old tripe if it seemed American and new. And how, when what Duyckink
and Matthews and their colleagues were looking for came, in the works
of Melville, Whitman and Poe, they just didn't see. To be sure, they published and honored
particularly Poe and Melville, and welcomed all three of them into
their factions when they could be useful.
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| This book will make you read Herman and Edgar anew |
But they were blind to the
fact that in their own time and city, the pillars of American literature had finally appeared. (Similarly, a couple of decades later, Col. Wigginson
was incredibly supportive of that fourth pillar, Emily Dickinson, was
a friend to Emily, but couldn't see the monumental achievement right
before his eyes.)
Another Metcalf
source I could find and afford was Frances Winwar's life of Poe, The
Haunted Palace. And so I spent a few days in stunned
contemplation of the abject sadness of Poe's existence. For years I
have been known to mutter, seemingly out of nowhere, "Poor
Herman," when suddenly comes to mind how poorly things ended up for Melville.
But Poe's life, the constant death and early loss, the bitter avarice
of his guardian, then the late death and loss, the addiction and the
final, deep mental illness, trump Herman's own unsatisfying fate.
Amazing how much Poe produced. How many magazines he catapulted to
success. But always in the end something would break. I guess it is
ironic, that his towering ambition was warranted, but often it was
what caused him to crash, to have so start again from literary,
financial and emotional scratch.
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| Metcalf, Winwar, Zagajewski, Poe (ed., Wilbur), Miller |
And so I opened
again the poems of Poe, including a volume edited, and with a helpful
introduction by the great American poet Richard Wilbur. One
particular poem, "Alone," stayed with me for awhile.
And
then, just as I was moving on to other things, while reading Adam Zagajewski's poem, "The Generation," I came
across these lines, which reminded me again of Poe's "Alone":
Two kinds of death
circle about us.
One puts our whole
group to sleep,
takes all of us, the
whole herd...
...the
other one is wild, illiterate,
it catches us alone,
strayed,
we animals, we
bodies, we the pain,
we careless and
uneducated...
We worship both of
them in two religions
broken by schism...
-Adam Zagajewski
"The Generation"
Here is the Poe
poem, also about two kinds of death. In its final image, it seems
like Poe is characterizing his entire life, his haunted mind, the
warp of his works. It's interesting about the warp of his stories and
characters; it lurked always in their depths, only slowly to be
revealed by the storyteller, often slowly to destroy him, as it did
Poe.
Winwar ends her
biography with a dream Walt Whitman described to a group of friends
after a memorial for Poe at his re-burial in 1875. Whitman had met
Poe a couple of times. Poe had been one the earliest publishers of
Whitman's poetry, pre-Leaves of Grass. In Whitman's vision, he
sees a "vessel on the sea, at midnight, in a storm... On the
deck was a slender, slight, beautiful figure, a dim man, apparently
enjoying all the terror, the murk and the dislocation of which he was
the center and the victim. The figure of my lurid dream might stand
for Edgar Poe, his spirit, his fortunes, and his poems..."
To Winwar, writing
in 1959, the figure was Poe, but also Poe as Modern Man, "conscious
of a new dimension: the world within, whose storms, terrible in their
revealing flashes, throw light, now more than ever, on the black,
hidden regions of the soul."
Makes sense to me.
Okay, here's Poe's poem, finally (note the italicized second "I" in line 8):
Alone
From childhood's
hour I have not been
As others were -- I
have not seen
As others saw -- I
could not bring
My passions from a
common spring --
From thw same source
I have not taken
My sorrow -- I could
not awaken
My heart to joy at
the same tone --
And all I lov'd -- I
loved alone --
Then -- in my
childhood -- in the dawn
Of a most stormy
life -- was drawn
From ev'ry depth of
good and ill
The mystery which
binds me still--
From the torrent, or
the fountain --
From the red cliff
of the mountain --
From the sun that
'round me roll'd
In its autumn tint
of gold --
From the lightning
in the sky
As it pass'd me
flying by --
From the thunder and
the storm--
And the cloud that
took the form
(When the rest of
Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my
view--
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