Many Poes

ManyPoes BARRIE HAYNE Daniel Hoffman. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1972. $7.95. 339 pp. "Many books, many Poes," Daniel Hoffman remarks in his preface to another one, PoePoePoe Poe PoePoe Poe.The truth of the statement is self-evident, calling to mind Harry Levin's witticism (in a book itself partly concerned with Poe) that the Moby-Dick industry had almost replacedwhaling as New England's preoccupation. Poe over the years has attracted a different kind of industry, the industry of critics (or poets) whorespond to Poe the man as they see him behind Poe the writer, and who tend to identify or violently quarrel with a personality often enough of their own making. Is it permissible to forecast the replacement of the practiceof psychoanalysis by the practice of studying Edgar Allan Poe? From Griswold's mythologizing valedictory tirade to the present work, however, much of the most suggestive, and even some of the best, work on Poe has been done by writers who did identify - judiciously - with their subject. There are notable and noble exceptions: A.H. Quinn's and EdwardH. Davidson's books, the one definitively biographical, and the other a determined attempt to bring all of Poe's work into a coherent philosophical design, culminating in the synthesis of Eureka, remain among the very best books written on Poe, books which contain very little evidence of such identification. But then one thinks of Marie Bonaparte , whose psychoanalytic biography of Poe is inextricably tied to her own theories of human bisexuality, or of Allen Tate, like Poe a Southerner , and the first commentator, after Baudelaire, to explicate what it meantto see in Poe truly a cousin or semblable, and to compel the reader's belief in Poe's universality by showing how he transfixes every reader assuch a cousin or semblable. One thinks of D. H. Lawrence, whose fury withPoe for his blurring of human identity in the life-in-death stories like "Ligeia" is made more pertinent (or impertinent) by his own contrary theories about the necessary boundaries between separate human identities. Many books, many Poes. Mr. Hoffman, himself a poet of some note, strikes the note of personal identification with his subject, even once notTHE CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES VOL. V, NO. 1, SPRING 1.974 ing their similarity of height and weight, and beginning with an anecdote, rich in suggestion, of having as an adolescent scrawled "I hate Poe" across the flyleaf of volume one of the works, so that in both direct and mirrored form the statement came through indelibly upon the forehead of the author's portrait. But Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, longer than Tate's or Lawrence's essays, shares with Davidson's monograph the will to see Poe's literary canon as an achieved synthetic body of thought. It must be allowed to take its rank among the most authoritative books we have on Poe, its authority that of one who has identified thoroughly, frankly, and for a very long time with his subject, yet extricated himself from him (as Baudelaire did not, quite), to see him in the end with objectivity . From the poet Edgarpoe, through his various incarnations, to the final testator of Eureka, Hoffman leads us to an understanding of the essential consistency, and even the completeness, of the whole ceuvre. The genius and the sheer fudge (which Hoffman refuses to suppress) are shown not only as complementary aspects of a tragically divided spirit, but as each necessary to an understanding of the other. If it is possible, in so rich a book, to say that its author casts Poe in two particular roles, they are the roles of Disinherited Aristocrat and Escaper from "Old Time." All his other roles derive from these two central ones, themselves inextricable one from the other. The first role goes far towards explaining the agonizing events of Poe's life, and the second offers a rational and coherent explanation of the nature, and indeed the aim, of his whole artistic career. Poe's life, as Hoffman notes, is a fairy tale with the happy ending missing. Born of wandering players who...