Revisiting the Nineteenth-Century Poe Controversies

R E V I E W Revisiting the Nineteenth-Century Poe Controversies Benjamin F. Fisher, ed. Poe in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of his Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates. Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 2010. xi, 310 pp. $27.95 paper. B enjamin Fisher’s recent contribution to the University of Iowa Press series titled Writers in Their Own Time raises once again the specter of the Rufus Griswold legacy and its effects on the enduring “Legend of Poe” (Fisher’s phrase) that has so often colored popular conceptions and biographical studies of Poe’s life and work. While the volume strives for diversity of opinion and a range of subject matter that might reveal the conflicting aspects of Poe’s personality, the perceptions of his contemporaries, and the reception of his work in the half century or so after his death, there is little doubt that the 1850 Griswold portrait, and the various responses to it, stands at the center of the collection. The “Ludwig” obituary and the much longer “Memoir” by Griswold occupy approximately 60 pages of the 300-page collection; and of the 66 or so total items, over a third of them are concerned with questions of Poe’s character and personality, as perceived by friends and enemies alike, while the remainder deal with various aspects of his biography, writing, lecturing, and public performances, apart from the analysis of character (more on these items later). To his credit, Fisher avoids the biographer’s impulse to interpret and manipulate his material into a single coherent narrative and instead offers the documentarian’s method of collection, collation, and careful presentation of primary source material. And yet, the decision to emphasize the Griswold legacy and the general editorial stance (apparent in the introduction and some of the headnotes) on the side of Poe’s defenders raises a larger question in Poe scholarship: Why do we still feel compelled either to defend or to attack Poe’s character anew with each generation? The fact that Griswold’s caricature has been largely debunked (in scholarly circles, if not in the popular mind) and competing images offered by biographers, critics, historians, documentary filmmakers, and other assorted Poe devotees might suggest that the time for rehashing the Griswold legacy is long past. Indeed, there are newer and more serious charges leveled against Poe than that he was an intemperate, hostile, and immoral “madman”—qualities C  2012 Washington State University 106 P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 44, 2011 R E V I E W which, whether fairly applied or not, seem rather to have endeared him to the popular imagination than otherwise. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, he has faced renewed attacks on the grounds of his presumed racism, sexism, classism, pedophilia, lack of artistic integrity, critical hypocrisies, nihilistic vision, or his imperfect scholarship or purposeful deceptions. These charges, more than Griswold’s caricature, deserve to be explored. But, of course, within many of these critiques are manifestations of a tendency that we see even in the earlier century—the insistence that the author’s character or personality can be directly related to artistic production, aesthetic quality, or the effects of that art on its readership. The examination of that argument, and its various permutations during the ongoing Griswold controversy, might prove instructive in addressing broader questions of biography, character, and literary assessment. One of the benefits of having all these personal portraits available in a single volume is that we quickly find that no two observers—whether critics or admirers of Poe—seem to share precisely the same view of either the man or his work. More particularly, the question of whether there are clues to Poe’s “true” character manifested in the work isn’t always divided along partisan lines in the way one might expect, having read only Griswold’s reflections. The latter asserts, with some certainty (in the “Ludwig” obituary), that “every genuine author in a greater or lesser degree leaves in his works, whatever their design, traces of his personal character” [78]. Moreover, he insists that this tendency in Poe was...