Interview with J. Gerald Kennedy: October 11, 2016, Baltimore, Maryland

barbara cantalupo:

I'd like to begin with a question most people ask when you say you're a Poe scholar: what first drew you to Poe's work, and why are you still interested?

j. gerald kennedy:

Well, that's a complicated question and probably goes back to my early years. For some reason, in about seventh grade, I ordered a paperback of Poe's tales; it was one of the offerings from the Tab Book Club.

bc:

The Tab Book Club?

jgk:

Well, at one time, the Tab Book Club was a widespread operation to sell paperback books to junior high and high school students. They called it a club, but it was basically a flyer that listed new books each month; they were really cheap. The teacher would say, "On Friday, you can make your choices for the Tab Book Club." I chose a book of Poe stories. I bought it, and I was really hooked.

You know, I picked that book up at quite a difficult moment in my life. It was that winter that my grandfather came back from Florida; he had been diagnosed with cancer, and it turned out it was terminal, and he was going pretty fast. And so, I had to wrestle with this enormous thing that I hadn't confronted before.

I went over to visit him, and here's my grandfather lying in bed, and there's a funny smell. I experienced a kind of convergence—I'm kind of embarrassed to relate this—but it occurred to me that my grandfather might be amused by reading Poe. So, I passed on to him my volume of Poe stories, and it included, of course, "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar"—the great sensitivity of the seventh grader! (Laughter.)

bc:

Yes . . . I know . . .

jgk:

After he died—he died in August, I think—I got that book back. I still have it at home; it's part of my collection.

In college, I took a course that focused a lot on Poe, and I read Arthur Gordon Pym during that time. Then in grad school at Duke, I kept coming back to Poe. In my American lit classes I realized that I wanted to work on Poe. And then I wrote my dissertation on Poe, and the rest is history, or at least my history . . .

bc:

Well, I admit, I didn't read your dissertation to prepare for this interview.

jgk:

(Laughter.) Well, you're in a very large population group there!

bc:

Would you tell us a bit about your dissertation?

jgk:

Well, essentially it was an exploration of Poe's use of realistic techniques. I was looking at how verisimilitude works in Poe and how it relates to the fantastic element. Those are two pretty incompatible ideas, and yet we find them used intentionally in Poe's writing. That idea pushed me into a project, as dissertation ideas do, and then within a couple of years, I realized that wasn't even a book I'd want to rewrite. (Laughter.)

bc:

Well, we'll keep that in mind.

jgk:

I mean I did come back to some of the ideas that I touched on in that dissertation. I started publishing on Poe in the '70s, about the time I was finishing the Ph.D. There were some things percolating, but I wasn't ready to write that yet; I wasn't ready to write a book on Poe. It took a year in France to bring me to the point where I really understood what I had to say.

Curiously enough, it was the impact of sitting in on course by Ronald Barthes at the Collège de France that helped me understand what I had to say about Poe. It was the next to last year of Barthes's life, and he was going through a crisis himself. The title of the course was called La préparation du roman (The Preparation of the Novel), but really the whole class was an unpacking of...