Tanizaki's Seven Japanese Tales - Maybe you think I’m just being perverse, but I’ve never been more serious

Seven Japanese Tales (1970, tr. Howard Hibbett) by Juichiro Tanizaki.  Four of the “tales” are short stories from the 1910s and 1920s, pretty obviously newspaper pieces, although heaven forbid an editor mentions where anything is from.  Three tales, two from the 1930s and one from 1959 – impressive career! – are more like novellas.

I thought this would be a good place to get to know Tanizaki, who I had not read at all.  Poking around, I found a review or two saying it was not the place to start.  I suppose I did not think anything in this book was world-class, but I know Tanizaki wrote other books.  And much is visible right here.

The oldest story, “The Tattooer” (1910), made Tanizaki famous.  That is worth seeing.  A sadistic tattooer dreams of creating the perfect tattoo (“a huge black-widow spider,” 167) on the perfect woman.  He does so, but somehow in the process transfers his creative strength to the woman:

“All of my fears have been swept away – and you are my first victim!”  She darted a glance at him as bright as a sword.  A song of triumph was ringing in her ears.  (169)

Sure, why not.  I had picked up somewhere that Tanizaki was a fan of Edgar Allan Poe, and in these early stories I can see it, not so much in the Gothic giant spider but in the extreme, self-destructive psychology of the men, who all succumb to Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse.”  I noted Theodore Dreiser borrowing the same idea in The American Tragedy (1925), contemporary to Tanizaki’s early stories, although Dreiser also borrows Poe’s distinctive, bizarre language, Tanizaki much less so, at least in this translation.  But in the character who has a phobia about riding on a train (“Terror,” 1913), or the kleptomaniac who can’t bring himself to tell a lie (“The Thief,” 1921), I can see the shadow of Poe.  “’Maybe you think I’m just being perverse, but I’ve never been more serious’” (184).

Also immediately visible was Tanizaki’s interest in another aspect of the word “perverse.”  Five of the seven stories feature dominant / submissive relationships with a woman in the dominant and a man in the submissive role.  “The Tattooer” is the only one where the man is dominant but becomes submissive.  Some of these relationships are sexual, some not, but the psychology is repeated.  Theme and variation.

The most interesting variation was in “A Portrait of Shunkin” (1933), where the woman is a blind music prodigy and the man is first her servant, then pupil, then lover – husband, really.  She is a tyrant, willful and capricious; he is perfectly devoted.  At one key point, his devotion goes way, way too far, in a way I do not want to describe.  Yikes!  Ick!  Tanizaki seems to like extreme cases.

I thought “Shunkin” was the best-written story, too, in the sense that the sentences were the most interesting.  More phrases and clauses, more rhetorical variation.  In some of the stories, the prose got pretty flat.  The recurrent symbolic songbird theme was blatant but effective:

Nightingales are often long-lived if properly cared for, but they require constant attention.  Left to an inexperienced person, they soon die.  (51)

The Japanese Literature Challenge, now in its 13th year, is ongoing, so I read this book and hope to read another Tanizaki or two.

Interesting Dreiser - its ouphe and barghest cry - the weirdness of it

Two pro-Dreiser notes.

First: roughly the first third of An American Tragedy is our hero Clyde as a rootless teen from an odd background, rooting around. In the second third, he becomes more settled, meets a nice girl, and begins to think hard about how to murder her.  The last third is briefly a detective novel, then a courtroom novel, then a prison novel – Death Row.  Dreiser, in a surprising bow to good taste, does not show us Clyde in the electric chair, but he gets as close as he dares.

Dreiser is working through a complex performance of novelistic sympathy, a fundamental task of the novel as a form.  Can I sympathize with Clyde’s various early troubles – presumably not with the idea of murder – and also with at least certain aspects of his time in prison?  Do I forget his victim?  Can I sympathize with this but not with that?  What if, more strongly, I spent the first part of the novel identifying with Clyde, whatever that means?  How shocked am I when his sociopathy emerges?  I hope I am shocked.

That first third has, by my standard, the most bad sentences per page, and is in some sense mostly background, and I wish Dreiser had cut a lot of it.  The last third, the trial and prison and so on, are presented in a strong plain style but are extremely detailed.  The entire prosecution is presented, for example.  A faithful film adaptation just of Clyde’s trial would take many hours.  A friendly commenter yesterday wanted much of this stuff to be cut – “he could not stop belaboring the point.”

But we are both wrong in that Dreiser can’t start with the crime if he wants to work on the possibility of sympathy.  I have to live with Clyde for a while to even to lose sympathy.  And then I have to grind through the tedium of his encounter with the courts and prison to build it back.  It is the difference between watching a two-hour film of the story, in one sitting, or a 22-episode season of television spread over nine months.

On the other hand, we are both right.  If we can’t stand the prose or the tedium, we are not reading with the intensity of the reader who is really gripped by poor dumb Clyde.

Here’s where I started reading with more intensity – I’m moving to my second point.  Look at this beauty (Clyde is in the woods in upstate New York, with murder on his mind):

And at one point it was that a weir weir, one of the solitary water-birds of this region, uttered its ouphe and barghest cry, flying from somewhere near into some darker recess within the woods.  (II.44)

Every word in that sentence is a legitimate English word, but this time the weird ones are not fussy Latinates but good Germanic antiques, known mostly to readers who owned the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual II (1983).  Now we’re right in the murder chapter:

[The lake] was black or dark like tar, and sentineled to the east and north by tall, dark pines – the serried spears of armed and watchful giants, as they now seemed to him – ogres almost – so gloomy, suspicious and fantastically erratic was his own mood in regard to all this.  But still there were too many people – as many as ten on the lake.

The weirdness of it.

The difficulty.  (II.47)

It’s those little floating sentences that I find especially weird.

Dreiser, looking for an expert on criminal psychology, has turned to Edgar Allan Poe and his Imp of the Perverse, which Dreiser turns into the clumsier “Efrit of his own darker self.”  I was tipped off by the word “tarn” for lake, since the most famous tarn in American literature is the one the House of Usher falls into.  It’s not just Poe’s psychology, but Poe’s language that is borrowed, as if the one is tangled in the other.

These elements –  the weir-weir bird and the Efrit and dark tarns and trees like spears – recur often and add some strange colors to the novel that are at least interesting if not good.  Maybe good is overrated.

Warble warble squashed blackberry - Dino Campana sings a love song

I think Charles Wright’s translation of Campana is better than the older I. L. Salomon translation.  If there is still such a thing as a great American poet, he is one of them, and his translations strike me as superior poems.  I am glad I read Salomon’s book, though; first, it has more poems and second it has the Italian.  I don’t know Italian.  Sometimes that does not matter.

from Serenade: Bitter False Melodramatic

The comedian with serious and deep voice
With a goat’s profile and a hollow
Infernal eye flashing
Sings a song of love:
Warble warble squashed blackberry
Dawn comes soon, the dawn’s awake.

That, you say, is the song of love sung by the Goat Comic.  Let’s glance at the original of the last two lines:

Trilla trilla mora pesta
Presto è l’alba, presto è desta.

Why, this is songful, with rhymes and assonance and all that poetical stuff.  This may even be, dare I say, beautiful, comparable to the most beautiful poem in English (Italian verse’s sad burden is that it is too easily beautiful).

Campana is a weird writer, but Salomon maybe plays up his weirdness.  If the alternative is flatness, all too common in poetic translation, the kind that makes a reader wonder what the big deal is, then Salomon made the right choice.  Still, there must be something better than “Warble warble squashed blackberry.”

Part of Campana’s genuine weirdness is that he read with deep appreciation not just Walt Whitman but Edgar Allan Poe.  Much of Orphic Songs is in prose; much of the prose sounds like:

I was in the shadow of an arcade which dripped drop after drop of blood-gorged light through the fog of a December night.  Without warning a door was flung open in a splendor of light.  In the foreground of the far end of the room in the luminescence of a red ottoman an older woman was lying up on one elbow, her head resting in her hand, her brown eyes like brown fire, her breasts enormous…  (“The Night,” tr. Wright)

Campana has read “The Philosophy of Furniture.”  Campana’s women are not Poe’s women, although they are similarly idealized.  Poe was not so interested in prostitutes.

The Poe-effect merges with another resemblance that everyone mentions, so I will, too, since I felt it first and then went looking for it:

I remember an old city, red walls and red battlements, on the immense plain burnt out from the August heat, with the far-away spongy cold comfort of green hills in the background… I raised my eyes unconsciously to the barbarous tower which dominated the long avenue of plane trees…  A Deserted little piazza, broken hovels like old bruises, dead windows: to one side in an enormous wash of light, the tower, eight-pointed arid impenetrably red and unadorned; a dried up 16th-century fountain kept silent, its stone shattered in the middle of its own Latin commentary.  (“The Night,” still, italics all mine)

I read this passage, and several others, trying to remember exactly which Giorgio de Chirico painting it was copying.  Several and none, presumably.  The Red Tower, above, is from 1913; Campana did not know De Chirico but could have seen his work in magazines.  Who knows.  Silent fountains, blue mountains, a woman off in the far distance, while “[f]rom among the twilit rocks a black horned immobile shape watches me I too immobile with its golden eyes” (“La Verna”)

A lot of fine weirdness.  Perhaps the next time I read Campana I will try to make some sense of it.  This time, I did not.

Bierce comes up with cool stuff - flying men and killer chess robots

Ambrose Bierce’s stories are the traditional link between the weird tales of Edgar Allan Poe and the Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft and his successors and imitators.  Bierce is a better prose writer than either Lovecraft or Poe, but I doubt many readers carry away from Bierce any images or scenes as striking as the collapse of the House of Usher or the climax of the masque of the Red Death.  I would give Poe the prize for imaginative power, meaning Poe came up with more cool stuff.  Lovecraft survives almost entirely as a creator of cool stuff.

Not that Bierce lacked imaginative power.  Today I will not worry about Bierce’s best writing so much as linger over some of his cool stuff.  Like flying men:

He passed above [the branch], and from my point of view was sharply outlined against the blue.  At this distance of many years I can distinctly recall that image of a man in the sky, its head erect, its feet close together, its hands – I do not see its hands.  All at once, with astonishing suddenness and rapidity, it turns clear over and pitches downward.  (“George Thurston”)

The description of the Union officer who has launched himself into the air is much longer than this, as is the explanation of how he ended up where he did, and the story as a whole has a good psychological answer to why.  But I suspect Bierce was most interested in the image itself, the strange imaginative power of this impossible event and impossible death (“Death has taken an unfair advantage; he has struck with an unfamiliar weapon; he has executed a new and disquieting stratagem”).

George Thurston is the second flying man to be found in the war stories of In the Midst of Life.  The other is the title character in the first story in the book, “A Horseman in the Sky”:

Straight upright sat the rider, in military fashion, with a firm seat in the saddle, a strong clutch upon the rein to hold his charger from too impetuous a plunge.  From his bare head his long hair streamed upward, waving like a plume.  His hands were concealed in the cloud of the horse's lifted mane.  The animal's body was as level as if every hoof-stroke encountered the resistant earth.

The horse and rider have gone off a cliff; the view is from below.  In both stories, the reactions of the observers are as interesting as the apparition.  True for many of Bierce’s ghost stories, too, come to think of it.  The image is so strange that Bierce gives the reader company, someone else who can confirm that you really saw what you think you saw.

Another example, one that requires some background.  Poe’s 1836 “Maelzel’s Chess Player” is a brilliantly observed and argued debunking and dismantling of a supposed chess-playing automaton.  Bierce’s “Moxon’s Master” is a Poe parody that begins with several pages of argument about thinking plants and thinking crystals.  The important thing is that the inventor Moxon has built a genuine chess-playing robot.  Watch the inventor and robot play chess:

I observed a shrug of the thing's great shoulders, as if it were irritated:  and so natural was this – so entirely human – that in my new view of the matter it startled me.   Nor was that all, for a moment later it struck the table sharply with its clenched hand.   At that gesture Moxon seemed even more startled than I:  he pushed his chair a little backward, as in alarm.

The robot, defeated at chess, grinds itself into a killing rage.  Bierce in this story created a murderous chess-playing robot whose grievance against his creator and the world is that it is bad at chess.  This concept is not, on its own, a significant contribution to civilization, but it is hilarious, and imaginative, and something I had not seen before. Pretty cool.

A kind Brazilian wrote a mystery novel for me

The author is the Brazilian Luis Fernando Verissimo, the novel is Borges and the Eternal Orangutans (2000), the translator is the omnipresent Margaret Jull Costa, the page count is 129, the genre is ratiocinative mystery, the detective is Jorge Luis Borges, in the year before his death, and not Borges Luis Jorge or the poet Juan Carlos Borges, author of “botanical poems,” also characters in the novel.

That’s half of the title.  The orangutans invoke Edgar Allan Poe, and the novel is in fact a locked room mystery, like “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” except this time a famous Poe specialist is murdered in his hotel room at an international Poe conference in Buenos Aires.  Our narrator, Vogelstein, is a Brazilian translator who has been keen to meet Borges.  Because of the murder, he gets his wish.

“Borges will like the fact that there were three knives,” I said.

“Yes, Borges will,” sighed Cuervo, as if that were a further reason for his probable migraine. (78)

Verissimo was unable to squeeze a reference to H. P. Lovecraft into the title, even though Lovecraft plays a role in the novel, along with the magician John Dee and the usual esoteric nonsense associated with Borges: cryptography and the Kabbala and mirrors and such.

For some time now, Cuervo had been squirming in his armchair.

“Really, Jorge!” he said at last.  “Gozatoth, Soga-Tog…  You don’t believe in all that!”

“Don’t confuse the author with the characters,” you replied.  “I don’t believe in anything.  The important thing is that they do.”  (105)

“You” is Borges – the narrator actually addresses the novel to Borges, all of which is explained in the end when the “I” switches to Borges himself as he presents his ingenious and original solution to the crime, the clues to which have been slyly distributed through the novel.  The one truly ingenious thing about the book, actually, is that the complex solution perfectly coexists with a simple solution that is never mentioned.  Borges is surely aware of the easier answer, but rejects it as insufficiently interesting.  He also faults the entire novel, in its last line, for lacking “a minimum of verisimilitude,” where we find the actual author's actual name.

I have no clue what the reader unschooled in Borges and Lovecraft and Poe, the sane and settled reader who has of course read “The Gold-Bug” and “The Purloined Letter” but has not neurotically read through the Library of America Poe all the way to “’X-ing the Paragrab’” – which is obscure enough that Verissimo explains the reference – what this reader will get out of Borges and the Eternal Orangutans.   I fear it is a tad specialized.

For specialists, though, what fun.  Thanks, V!

Verissimo does not count for the Portuguese Reading Provocação.

I visited the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site

Wuthering Expectations is back from its peripatetic, baby-centric American vacation. Babies have little to do with 19th century literature, unfortunately. I did make one stop, though, that I am compelled to mention here, at the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site in Philadelphia.

The site, a few blocks north of the core of 18th century buildings around Independence Hall, is in a plain house of the 1820s, the only survivor of several houses Poe and his wife (and mother-in-law) inhabited in Philadelphia. The house itself is nothing too special,* aside from the orangutans in the closet, presumably a prop for the guided tour. Don't miss the "Black Cat" basement.

The materials - the short film, the photos and testimonials, the interactive displays - do their best with a difficult job. An impossible job. How many ways are there to experience Poe, really? One can read his work, or listen to someone else read it. Everything else is peripheral. The Poe site has to find some way to include the visitor with only the vaguest sense of who Poe was along with enthusiastic amateurs and real experts, the person who knows "The Raven" from The Simpsons and the American literature professor and me. Hopeless.

Still, it's a struggle worth some effort, and I have no suggestions for improvements. I learned a few new things and enjoyed immersing myself in Poe's real world (meaning family life, changing houses, badly paying publishers, and so on) for a bit. And it could be worse. Heaven knows what goes on at the Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site in Danville, California. Visitors staggering about in sleveless tee-shirts yelling "Stella! Stella!", polite park rangers calmly suggesting that they might be thinking of someone else.

One room was a surprise. Earlier this year I wrote about Poe's story or sketch or curiosity "The Philosophy of Furniture" (1840/1845), the climax of which is a detailed description of the ideal room, including every painting, decoration, and stick of furniture, down to Poe's friend asleep on the sofa. The reading room, left, reproduces that room. I mean, to the limited extent possible. The original is much larger, and oval, and as you can see the sofa is unoccupied. Readers of Roberto Bolaño will remember that one of the writers in Nazi Literature in the Americas also reproduces the room, and that Bolaño simply plagiarizes Poe in his description. So it was great fun to see an attempt at the same thing. Ridiculous, hilarious, inspired. Too bad they couldn't really do up the whole thing. My photo gives no sense of how beautifully crimson the room is, just like the story specifies.

Poe Calendar Rob used to work here. Rob, I mentioned to the two genial, informative rangers that I read your blog. They said nice things about you. The link, by the way, goes to a nice bit of enthusiasm that Rob mischaracterizes as "gushy." No, spot on.

* The rooms are unfurnished, the walls stripped. As a result, wandering through the empty rooms, one is presented with fantastic abstract masterpieces that could serve as illustrations to Eureka.

Crime is by origin natural. Virtue is artificial - Baudelaire and Modern Life

"Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation. Crime, which the human animal took a fancy to in his mother's womb, is by origin natural. Virtue, on the other hand, is artificial, supernatural, since in every age and nation gods and prophets have been necessary to teach it to bestialized humanity, and since man by himself would have been powerless to discover it." Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life," 1862.

I find it hard to know when to take Charles Baudelaire's pronouncements, of which there are many, seriously and when to try to tamp down his hyperbole. This passage I take as something close to a true vision of the world for the poet. It's hidden in section XI of his influential essay "The Painter of Modern Life." The section is titled "In Praise of Make-up," and Baudelaire means that, too.

It seems unlikely that the real Baudelaire, whatever that might mean, is on display in a piece of writing praising make-up. Quite the reverse, really. The Penguin Classics collection Selected Writings on Art and Literature I read contains Baudelaire essays on Edgar Allan Poe, Théophile Gautier, Madame Bovary, Richard Wagner, and many visual artists, especially Eugène Delacroix.

Every piece is about its subject - Baudelaire's reputation as a critic is deserved, and his writing, if rhetorically quite different than modern critical writing, is insightful - but also about Baudelaire, and the poet's views on the proper functioning of and approach to art. In this way, his appreciation of the epic works of Wagner is not so different than his enthusiasm for Poe, his poetic soulmate ("And then - believe me if you will - I found poems and short stories that I had thought of, but in a vague, confused, disorderly way and that Poe had been able to bring together to perfection," letter to Armand Fraisse, 18 Feb 1860).

"The Painter of Modern Life" is nominally about the artist Constantin Guys, now best known as the subject of this essay, but at the time an illustrator for the Illustrated London News. "Illustrator" is not quite right, since he was more like a photojournalist in water colors - some of his best known pictures are from his coverage of the Crimean War for that magazine.

Ma femme warned me that Guys's work may not be what I expected, following Baudelaire's praise. See left and judge for yourself; I also found an old volume titled The Painter of Victorian Life, 1930, that consists of Baudelaire's essay interspersed with dozens of black and white reproductions of Guys. I see what she means. Guys is deft and likable, but is not the neglected rival of Édouard Manet. Baudelaire praise Guys for being what he says in the title - not Modernist, which did not exist, but modern. He sees the details of dresses, carriages, uniforms, makeup, and mustaches and gets them right. Other painters in other times did the same thing. Baudelaire's aesthetic program is more important than his particular esteem for Guys.

I'm not sure I've gotten any closer to Baudelaire here, to his poetry or to Paris Spleen. Ah well, I'll try again some time. Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, who knows. The whole nerve-wracking crew.

I've found the French Poe - the Cruel Tales of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

And he's not Charles Baudelaire. He's Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, Count of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, a genuine impoverished French nobleman turned Bohemian writer. I just finished reading his collection Cruel Tales (1883), which I enjoyed a lot, even though its contents might not be quite as good as its title.

I'm just beginning to understand the extent of Baudelaire's role in creating the French Poe - he translated Poe, yes, but also championed him, privately and publicly. Baudelaire, by the time he discovered Poe, was already a mature artist. "I've found an American author who has aroused in me a sense of immense sympathy," Baudelaire wrote to his mother (Mar. 27, 1852). But it's hard to say that Baudelaire was much influenced by Poe. It was too late for that.

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam is sixteen years younger, and would have read Baudelaire's Poe in his teens. The impact was obviously profound. "The Sign," for example, about a premonitory vision of death, includes specific references to "The Fall of the House of Usher" ("Was this really the house I had just seen? What antiquity was revealed to me now by the long cracks between the pale leaves?").

More curious, more surprising, are the signs of the influence of Comic Poe on Villiers, seen most strongly in his tales of new inventions: "The Apparatus for the Cehmical Analysis of the Last Breath," "The Glory Machine" (designed for the theater, it includes not just a clapping machine, but "other tubes, containing laughing-ga and tear-gas"), and the brilliant "Celestial Publicity," about the Lampascope, a device that projects advertising slogans ("Heavens, how delicious!," "Are corsets necessary?") onto the constellations, or the moon. The author predicts that candidates for office will be particularly interested: "One might even add that, without [this] discovery, universal suffrage is a mockery."

A year or two ago, I did not even know that Comic Poe existed. His influence on English-language writers seems non-existent. But here he is in Villiers, alongside ghost stories, paradoxes, and weirdnesses that contain their own flavors of Poe. Villiers does have a strain or two that is not indebted to Poe. I don't want to exaggerate any of this, but I'd never seen such a thing.

If the Cruel Tales are not quite entirely original, that does not bother me much; they were easily worth reading. I hope to read more Villiers, in fact. Certainly his novel Tomorrow's Eve (1886), which is a Pygmalion story starring Thomas Edison, not even forty at the time of the novel's publication. The robot woman speaks by means of the phonograph. Also, at some point I put 2 and 7 together and got 16, as happens in Weird France, and realized that Villiers's play Axël (1890?) supplied the title to Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle, so now Axël's on my list.

More on Villiers tomorrow, more of his own strengths. Many thanks to commenter tcheni for recommending Villiers.

Quotations from the Oxford World's Classics edition (1985), translated by Robert Baldick.

A strong hand had written, 'I hate Poe' - Daniel Hoffman's Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe

At some point in the middle of my two week Poe festival, I felt an anxious spasm - I really should have read Daniel Hoffman's Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (1971) first. I think that's it - seven Poes. Well, now I've read it. It's kind of a great book.

Poe x 7 is an attempt to interpret Poe as a whole, meaning that Hoffman is going to pull every aspect of Poe into one interpretation. So we have Poe the horror writer, Poe the scientician, Poe the hoaxer, Poe the ratiocinator, and so on. In other words, Hoffman did exactly what I did, at least to begin. He breaks Poe into pieces before he recombines him. Reading Poe Poe... Poe was good for my self-esteem - I was on the right track.

Hoffman's book does have the advantage over what I wrote of being immeasurably more considered, comprehensive, intelligent, and complete. He doesn't have a graph, though!

This is a book of Poe criticism, primarily, so it's a little hard to recommend it to anyone not in the market for such a thing. It's excellent as such - I found the chapters on "Ligeia" and "The Fall of the House of Usher," for example, to be highly instructive, well written, and completely convincing. But it has such an odd organization and tone that I could imagination any number of people with only a passing familiarity with Poe being won over by the book.

Hoffman mixes Poe's biography into the criticism, to the extent that his book functions well as a strange attempt at a Poe biography. But he also inserts himself into the book in some curious ways. For example.

Poe has a story, which I may have mentioned, that the Library of America calls "How to Write a Blackwood Article," the second half of which has its own title, "A Predicament." The gag is that a woman is writing an account of her own grisly death - she is slowly beheaded by the minute hand of a steeple clock. It's one of Poe's comedies.

Hoffman says that he read the story when he was in high school, and soon began having recurring nightmares which ended with his own beheading, by the minute hand of a clock, in a tower atop his own high school. These were real cold-sweat nightmares, not remotely comic. Hoffman knew that the dream had its origin in Poe, but he somehow could not remember which story. It took him a decade to re-discover "A Predicament." After rereading it, the nightmare never returned. Twenty years later, he publishes the greatest single work of Poe criticism.

Is this hilarious, or creepy, or just bizarre? It's pure Poe, Poe brought to life. The first couple of lines of Chapter 1:

"Across the flyleaf of my old Commemorative Edition of the Works of Edgar Allan Poe in Ten Volumes, Volume I (the only one I owned), a strong hand had written, 'I hate Poe,' and signed my name. That hand was mine."

Young America demands genuine American literature

The magazine writers of New York City in the 1840s, the people Perry Miller chronicles in The Raven and the Whale, were obsessed with the supposed problem of American literature. Where were the great American writers - the American Milton, the American Shakespeare, the American Dickens? The American Walter Scott was James Fenimore Cooper, but that did not seem to help much.

One theme Miller traces is the obsession with this idea of the creation of a truly American literature, one that was simultaneously independent from European models, popular enough for writers to make a living, and as good as anyone else's literature. The way they went about creating this literature was to write editorials advocating it, describing it - Niagara Falls, for example, would be a good subject for an American poem* - and claiming that whatever books were around at the moment were definitely not it, not yet.

I found the whole exercise hilarious, and central to the failure of the New York writers to create any lasting work (the New England Dial writers seem to have been just as bad, and the main cause, don't get me wrong, was a lack of talent). It reminded me of a certain strain of litblog writing, mostly directed at criticism, endless worry about how criticism should be done. When I see these sorts of pieces, I always think, what a waste of time - just go ahead and do it yourself.

Manifesto writers rarely seem to recognize the thing they're looking for. To return to Duyckink and Mathews and the other New York members of "Young America" - Emerson and the other transcendentalists did not count, since they were basically German, and possibly all crazy; Longfellow was a fine poet but too European; Washington Irving even preferred to live in Europe. Hawthorne and Poe were also criticized as too "German" - here we see one of the causes of the low status of 19th century German literature in the English-speaking world, an example of the New Yorkers winning the battle while losing the war.

The 1850s saw the publication of The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick and "Bartleby the Scrivener," Walden and Leaves of Grass. Whatever else these books may or may not be, they are unquestionably American. And only the Melville and Whitman books were even tangentially influenced by the manifesto writers. Melville, for example, knew all of the "Young America" writers, and read everything they wrote. When he finally produced Moby-Dick, almost no one understood it, and it was soon virtually forgotten. Worse, in a way, is the fact that Miller has no cause to mention Frederick Douglass and his Autobiography. It would have never have crossed these writers' minds that what they saw as an abolitionist tract was a genuine American masterpiece.

I know that my judgment is retrospective, and I'm ignoring a lot of complications (copyright, politics, the crushing popularity of Dickens), but Miller's account is enjoyably ridiculous. Let the artists do their work. Everything will work out somehow. There will always be good books to read. I look back at the 1840s and see Douglass and Emerson and the stories of Hawthorne and Poe, and think, hey, pretty good, but of course, my 1840s also include Gogol and Balzac, A Christmas Carol and Wuthering Heights and Vanity Fair, and Heine and Stifter. In my reading, I'm not much of a patriot.

* E.g., "Roar, raging torrent! and thou, mighty river, \ Pour thy white foam on the valley below;" - "Niagara", Joseph Rodman Drake. I can't believe anyone wanted more of that.

Eliza, my dear - The Raven!

I mentioned Perry Miller's 1956 The Raven and the Whale (1956) yesterday. It's a marvelous account of the literary luminaries of New York City in the 1830s and 1840s. You might guess from the title that Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville are central figures in the book, but that's actually a trick.

This is really the story of sad sack Evert Augustus Duyckink, and smug blowhard Lewis Gaylord Clark, and nationalist monomaniac Cornelius Mathews, and lovelorn hack William Alfred Jones, all New York editors and authors. In other words, literary history's losers. They were big shots at the time, more or less, but their work is dead now. Readers of The Raven and the Whale will not add many books to their reading lists. These writers crossed paths, briefly, with Poe and Melville, and did have a real effect on the writing of those two geniuses, and perhaps on an obscure young Brooklynite named Walter Whitman, so that's part of the interest of the book.

But most of the fun of Miller's book, which is witty and well written, is that it is almost like an existentialist novel. These hapless third-raters strive and fail and strive some more. They do the best they can. Is it their problem that we don't care? Melville and Poe did the same thing, but now we care a lot about them.

I'll direct the interested reader to Prof. Myer's actual review of the book - that's where I read about it. As good as the book is, it's of specialized interest, so I can't exactly recommend it to anyone who is not already curious about the literature of the period. I'll excerpt a good bit about Poe's, let's say, complicated reception in New York, and then mention one more thing tomorrow:
"About this time the Doctor was giving a dinner when the doorbell rang; his guests, assuming him summoned by a patient, went one eating and drinking. Soon the Doctor returned with 'a pale, thin, and most grave-looking man, whose dark dress and solemn air' brought the hilarity to an abrupt stop; leading the apparition to his wife, Francis waved his hand helplessly and said, 'Eliza, my dear - The Raven!'" (134)

Poe's Hoaxes - this most despicable and cowardly practice

Let's see, how else did Poe spend his time, besides writing his own poems and tomahawking those of others? Coming up with hoaxes, of course.

I suppose "The Ballon-Hoax" is his most famous. Poe moved to New York City in 1844, and in lieu of a calling card he published, in the New York Sun, an account of the first successful transatlantic crossing, from England to America, no less, in a balloon. It was fitted with a propellor, see. In the newspaper, the story was not titled "The Balloon-Hoax" - might have given the game away, I wouldn't doubt. Readers become hysterical; there's a run on the paper; unveiled, Poe becomes (more) famous.*

He spent the next couple of years spreading chaos throughout American literature. The strangest episode (I don't understand it well, at least) was the "Longfellow War," when Poe accused Henry Longfellow of plagiarism while reviewing one of his books, and then stretched the controversy out for a couple of months. One way he kept it going was to write indignant protests, under assumed names, against his own review, which Poe could then demolish over the course of many issues of his own magazine.

Maybe scholarship has advanced on this subject, and we know that the reply was genuine. But see Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale (1956), p. 130 - Prof. Miller agrees with me. Poe's action is pure controversialism. Longfellow was, or was becoming, the most famous poet in America, too inviting a target to resist, regardless of whether, in other reviews, Poe dealt with Longfellow quite judiciously.

How amusing to read, soon before Poe's death in 1849:

"We need reform at this point of our Literary Morality: - very sorely, too, at another - the system of anonymous reviewing. Not one respectable word can be said in defence of this most unfair - this most despicable and cowardly practice." (LOA, 1448)

I wish the Library of America Essays and Reviews specified whether or not each article was anonymous. More than once, Poe's name suddenly appears within the piece, as when he reviewed his own stories ("he has perfectly succeeded in his perfect aim," etc). Poe would have been a master of the internet - the fake websites, the sock puppets, the faux hit-generating controversies. I can't say that I admire this side of Poe, exactly, but he certainly keeps my attention. And in fairness, Poe was also a debunker - see his 1836 article "Maelzel's Chess-Player," in which he reasons out the functioning of a supposed chess-playing robot. This was how Poe's imagination worked - always building and dismantling tricky machinery.

* An earlier hoax is "The Unparalled Adventure of One Hans Pfall" (1835), about a balloon trip to the moon(!). Unfortunately, Poe abandoned it without finishing it, because he was beaten to the punch by another author's moon hoax, involving man-bats seen through a telescope. See the "Richard Adams Locke" entry in "The Literati of New York City" (LOA, 1214-22) for the ridiculous details.

Update: See here for PoeCalendar Rob's illuminating summary of the Longfellow War.

Poe and his Tomahawk - His qualifications are too well known to need comment.

Mr. Poe, sharpen that tomahawk. It's time for a round of Poe's Greatest Hatchet Hits.

From a review of The Coming of the Mammoth - The Funeral of Time, and Other Poems, by Henry B. Hirst:

"We are not extravagant in saying (are we?) that the 'Coming of the Mammoth' which might as well have been called the 'Coming and the Going of the Mammoth' is the most preposterous of all the preposterous poems ever deliberately printed by a gentleman arrived at the years of discretion. Nor has it one individual point of redeeming merit. Had Mr. Hirst written only this we should have thrown his book to the pigs without comment." (596)

This is a good place to start, because there is little doubt that Poe is entirely correct. In this poem, at some distant time in the past, a herd of killer mammoths appears: "We saw them hunt the buffalo, \ And crush them with their tusks of steel." The Native Americans who survive the initial mammoth attack invoke their storm god, who kills the mammoths with lightning, all but one, who is driven across the Missisippi, then up a Rocky Mountain peak, then, with a leap, into the Pacific Ocean. This is what Poe is up against.

All right, more chopping. A whack at the Brook Farm Utopians:

"'The Harbinger - Edited by the Brook-Farm Phalanx' - is, beyond doubt, the most reputable organ of the Crazyites. We sincerely respect it - odd as this assertion may appear. It is conducted by an assemblage of well-read persons who mean no harm - and who, perhaps, can do less." (1100)

Mr. Hudson, deliverer of a "Lecture on Lear", has "an elocution that would disgrace a pig, and an odd species of gesticulation of which a baboon would have excellent reason to be ashamed." There's another pig. This isn't even funny, is it? Just an insult.

This joke, at the expense of William Ellery Channing, may be worse than not funny. This is Edgar Poe, math geek:

"To speak algebraically: - Mr. M. is execrable, but Mr. C. is x plus 1-ecrable." (818)

Poe's always merciless about prosody, but he usually does not say the poet can't count:

"In a word, judging by his rhythm, we might suppose that the poet could neither, see, hear, nor make use of his fingers. We do not know, in America, a versifier so utterly wretched and contemptible." (807)

That's from a review of the Poems of William W. Lord.

On American historian George Jones:

"His qualifications are too well known to need comment. He has a pretty wife, a capital head of hair, and fine teeth." (642)

That's actually the nicest thing Poe says in that review, but the meaner stuff is harder to excerpt. Most of the review is about the illustrations on the title page. "The title-pages are to be cut out, we hope, and deposited in the British Museum." (644)

I'm enjoying myself, but I'm not sure I'm being fair to Poe, so how about a serious piece of criticism, from the "Literati of New York" entry on N. P. Willis:

"The Scriptural pieces are quite 'correct,' as the French have it, and are much admired by a certain set of readers, who judge of a poem, not by its effects on themselves, but by the effect which they imagine it might have upon themselves were they not unhappily soulless, and by the effect which they take it for granted it does have upon others." (1128)

This one hits me a bit, I'll admit. Pretty sharp.

More tomahawk chopping here, here, and here. Where else? A favorite.

Page references to Essays and Reviews, Library of America. A most enjoyable book, in its own scattershot way.

Poe's Eureka - angels should exercise caution in the vicinity of Jupiter

I have been organzing Poe's works by genre, I now see. My default is chronology, but that doesn't work for Poe. He's always doing more than one thing.

For example, Penguin Classics publishes a volume entitled The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, which overlaps his entire career. This book contains, I think, very little of Poe's best writing,* but Poe really was a pioneer in the genre, so I understand the book's use. And it includes the baffling Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848), so it's valuable for that alone.

Eureka is a hundred page essay or pamphlet or meditation about science. Gravitation, electricity, the diffusion of light, astronomy, the distribution of galaxies, the formation of the solar system. Some of it is jokey, especially the first twenty pages or so, with the philosophers Aries Tottle and Hog (Francis Bacon). Some of it is highly technical and, to me, dull; the sections on gravitation and light, in particular, completely lost me. But most of it is readable, more or less, and, conceptually, at least, quite interesting.

Poe uses Eureka to make sense of all the shocking scientific discoveries of his day, particularly in astronomy and physics. Neptune had only been discovered in 1846, for example, and at the time of Eureka's publication, the tenth asteroid had just been discovered. Eureka is an imaginative engagement with these ideas and novelties, a "mental gyration on the heel" (1262). I suspect Poe thought he was also making actual scientific contributions, but the Prose Poem subtitle gave him an escape route. Actual scientists also create and work within imaginative conceptions of their ideas, but that's as close as Poe gets to actual science.

The most accessible section, for me, was Poe's attempt to understand the changes in the scale of the universe, in it's size and age and parameters. Poe imagines, for example, an angel in the path of Jupiter:

“Not unfrequently we task our imagination in picturing the capacities of an angel. Let us fancy such a being at a distance of some hundred miles from Jupiter – a close eye-witness of this planet as it speeds on its annual revolution. Now can we, I demand, fashion for ourselves any conception so distinct of this ideal being’s spiritual exaltation, as that involved in the supposition that, even by this immeasurable mass of matter, whirled immediately before his eyes, with a velocity so unutterable, he – an angel – angelic though he be – is not at once struck into nothingness and overwhelmed?” (p. 1335)

In other words, splat. NASA informs me that the mean orbital veolcity of Jupiter is 13 km/second, which one must admit is pretty fast. An irony of this jab at medieval scholasticists is that Poe's own exercise here is not so different from theirs.

Eureka is one of many contemporary examples of literary writers attempting to comprehend science. Tennyson's In Memoriam was being written around the same time, and a number of passages in Emerson's journal show his interest in actual scientific discoveries. And this is before Darwin unleashes the deluge ten years later.

I don't think Poe's concerns are particularly religious, which does set him apart a bit from Tennyson or Arthur Hugh Clough** or the like. Poe's religious beliefs, whatever they are, do not seem to be threatened. God is simply a writer, a superior version of Edgar Allan Poe:

"The plots of God are perfect. The Universe is a plot of God." (1342)

Eureka is Poe's solution to God's tricky plot.

Page references to the Library of America Poetry and Tales. The Edgar Allan Poe society puts Eureka here. And please see Poe Calendar Rob for a clearer idea of what Poe was up to.

* But don't miss "The Descent into the Maelström," which has some of Poe's best descriptive writing, or "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," in which a dead man is kept alive through hypnotism, with horrible and bizarre results.

** Clough is more worried by historicist Biblical scholarship, but the idea is the same: "Matthew and Mark and Luke and holy John \ Evanished all and gone!", from "Epi-strauss-ism."

By the dismal tarns and pools / Where dwell the Ghouls - Poe the poet

Poe, in his reviews of poets' books, always included an enormous quantity of the verse he was reviewing. A ten page review might contain four full pages of poems. I don't know of anyone who reviews poetry like this today, and for all I know it would violate copyright. Then again, how many books of poems get ten page reviews now?

Poe would print an entire poem, or a selection of stanzas, and italicize the best parts. "Best" = most beautiful, and most original. For example:

By the lakes that thus outspread
Their lone waters, lone and dead,-
Their sad waters, sad and chilly
With the snows of the lolling lily,-
By the mountains - near the river
Murmuring lowly, murmuring ever,-
By the grey woods,- by the swamp
Where the toad and the newt encamp,-
By the dismal tarns and pools
Where dwell the Ghouls,-

That's from Poe's "Dream-Land," magnificent and ludicrous. The italics identify my notion of which bits are best. Yesterday, I emphasized Poe's concern for effect, but he was equally interested in originality, to an excessive degree, as we shall see next week when I brush against Poe's habit of flinging charges of plagiarism at other poets. As a result, Poe's verse is, in fact, highly original, sometimes to the point of incomprehensibility. In his best poems, though - "The City in the Sea," "Dream-Land," "Annabel Lee," "The Raven" - he created something that was truly new. Sometimes, as with "The Bells," one fervently hopes that the poem is and remains one of a kind ("Of the bells, bells, bells!-/ Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, / Bells, bells, bells-" and so on).

Poe never went so far as to pull out his favorite lines from other poems without the surrounding stanza. I don't know why not:

from The City in the Sea

Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.

from The Conqueror Worm

An angel throng, bewinged, bedight,
In veils, and drowned in tears,

Out - out are the lights - out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm

more from Dream-Land

From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE - out of TIME.

There the traveler meets, aghast,
Sheeted Memories of the Past -

from The Raven

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;

Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted -
On this home by Horror haunted - tell me truly, I implore -

Ah, I could include almost every line. No quibbles here with the fame of "The Raven." Would you believe that Poe first thought of the word "Nevermore," and then decided it should be repeated again and again. Who would be likely to obsessively repeat a single word. Logically, obviously, a parrot. This poem was almost "The Parrot." Or so says Poe. I can never quite tell when he is putting me on.

Since I have nowhere else to do it, I will use this space to recommend the excellent four part essay on Algernon Swinburne, one of Poe's poetic descendants, hosted by A Journey Round My Skull. It's long, but the various portraits of Swinburne are worth a click or four all by themselves.

There came forth in return only a jingling of the bells - "The Cask of Amontillado", Poe's finest story

"The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge."

Poe, in most of his fiction, in most of his poems, was concerned primarily with effect. Every element of the story was supposed to build to a single emotional state or image, like the collapse of the house of Usher, or the appearance of the Red Death. I suspect this is why Poe was not so interested in writing novels. Even in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, it's the individual episodes that stand out - the horrible death ship, for example. Rather than build continously, the novel surges and recedes.

"The man wore motley. He had on a tight-fitting parti-striped dress, and his head was surmounted by the conical cap and bells. I was so pleased to see him, that I thought I should never have done wringing his hand."

As a result, individual sentences, even entire passages, can be sacrificed to the final effect. They can be clumsy, or involute, or simply bizarre, but they're not necessarily meant to be considered on their own. The effect erases everything that came before.

"Here I knocked off the neck of a bottle which I drew from a long row of its fellows that lay upon the mould.

'Drink,' I said, presenting him the wine.

He raised it to his lips with a leer. He paused and nodded to me familiarly, while his bells jingled."

This striving for effect is not my ideal of the art of the short story. I prefer a succession of small touches and ironic details that, considered as a whole, amount to something more significant than their parts. I want the steps leading up to the coup de theatre to be good, too. Edgar Allan Poe did not care about what I want.

"It was in vain that Fortunato, uplifting his dull torch, endeavored to pry into the depth of the recess. Its termination the feeble light did not enable us to see."

Still, he did just what I wanted, once, at least, in "The Cask of Amontillado." How long had it been since I had last read this story? Decades, I think, and the effect was as I had remembered. But the artistry, that was an enjoyable surprise. It is not typical Poe. Look at the quotations I have included. The sentences are shorter than usual; even the words are shorter. Much of the dialogue is in fragments, just a phrase or an exclamation. The whole story is less than seven pages, one of Poe's shortest.

"No answer still. I thrust a torch through the remaining aperture and let it fall within. There came forth in return only a jingling of the bells."

For what it's worth, I pick "The Cask of Amontillado" as Poe's best story.

The Case of the Missing Mystery - a boring Poe detective story, and a good one

I had known for a long time that Poe had written three stories starring C. Auguste Dupin. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Mystery of Marie Rogët" (1842-3), and "The Purloined Letter" (1843): the first three detective stories in literary history, not counting a wide range of arguable predecessors.

Two of these stories are among Poe's most famous, and will be found in any Poe collection, as well as any number of short story and mystery anthologies. Not "Marie Rogët," though. Why not?

One reason is that it's a little long, fifty pages in the Library of America, compared to thirty-five pages of "Rue Morgue" and nineteen pages of "The Purloined Letter." Another is that it's boring, among the most boring things Poe ever wrote. It's a boring murder mystery!

Poe, smarter than everyone else, about everything (which more often than not was true), decided he was going to solve an actual unsolved murder, the death of Mary Rogers in New York City. "Marie Rogët" presents his solution to the actual crime, with everything transposed to Paris, allowing his newly minted Detective Dupin to take over. How does this work?:

"Three days elapsed, and nothing was heard of her. On the fourth the corpse was found floating in the Seine,* near the shore which is the opposite the Quartier of the Rue Saint Andreé, and at a point not very far distant from the secluded neighborhood of the Barrière du Roule.†

* The Hudson.
† Weehawken." (p. 509, LOA)

The footnotes were added after initial publication, in something called Snowden's Ladies' Companion, a true crime magazine, I guess. Maybe I should have filed this under the comedies. Weehawken! Dupin solves the case by reading all available newspaper articles and reconciling the discrepancies. That's why the story is dull - much of it is nothing but actual excerpts from actual newspapers.

The other Dupin stories are by no means my favorites, since Poe indulges their narrator in some of his most lugubrious prose. But they are genuinely important stories, cultural touchstones; everyone should know who the Rue Morgue murderer was, and where the purloined letter was hidden. And all three stories develop an idea that I think was original, that the detective can restore order through pure cognitive ability, some perfect mix of intuition, logic, and psychology. "Ratiocination," Poe called it. "Marie Rogët," the mystery solved by reading newspaper articles, is conceptually pure, maybe a little too pure.

Poe wrote one other detective story that is much less famous, rarely reprinted, and at least as good as the others - better than "Marie Rogët," certainly. It's called - note the irritating extra quotation marks - "'Thou Art the Man'" (1844), and is not a Dupin story. In a relatively efficient fifteen pages, we get a brief setup, a murder, clues and more clues, a revelation and confession, and an explanation. Almost classic, except that the revelation scene is completely insane, and Poe does have to resort to one cheap trick to make it work. "'Thou Art the Man'" strikes me as at least as effective a detective story as the Dupin tales, told in a more straightforward style.

We call "The Murder in the Rue Morgue" the first detective story retrospectively. A series of other detective stories followed, not right away, but eventually, that were clearly influenced by Poe, and clearly not influenced so much by some other candidates, so Poe stands at the beginning of the genre. I'd like to say something, though, for E. T. A. Hoffmann's Mademoiselle de Scudery (1819), a story that Poe certainly knew, which perhaps looks more like a detective story to us than it did even to Poe.

The "detective", the title character, is a writer of the 17th century, no longer read much but still well-known in Hoffmann's time. The villain is a serial killer. Mlle de Scudery does not catch the killer, but proves the innocence of the prime suspect. This story is the ancestor of the current boomlet of novels featuring Detective Jane Austen and Inspector Oscar Wilde and Special Agent Walt Whitman and so on, all of which are, I assume, hackwork. Not Hoffmann, though, and not Mademoiselle de Scudery.

Edgar Allan Poe's annual short story productivity - many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore

I'd had no idea, before plowing through the Library of America Poetry and Tales, how many comic stories Poe wrote. Of 68 tales and sketches, I identify 25, more than a third, as comic. "Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling." "The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq." "Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences."

What? I didn't say they were funny. They're supposed to be funny. Tastes may differ - and did they ever. How can I communicate how important these histoires were as une pièce of Poe's oeuvre? First, I should stop randomly using French in a Poe-like manner. Second, I should create a graph (click to enlarge):

The time runs from Poe's first five published stories in 1832 to his last six in 1849. Poems, essays, reviews, and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1837-8) are omitted. "Supposed to be funny" versus "not supposed to be funny" is my judgment. Please refer to Poetry and Tales, Library of America, pp. 1375-8, to check my data.

I put some signposts on the graph to help see what Poe was doing. There's "The Fall of the House of Usher" in 1839, which I would call Poe's first great story. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is from 1841. That's "The Gold-Bug" in 1843. There in 1845 - but not included in the totals - is "The Raven."

Like Hawthorne, Poe's fiction productivity was hugely uneven. But he was always writing, almost. In 1836, for example, he wrote eighty book reviews for the Southern Literary Messenger - this was the beginning of Poe the Hatchet Man. Then came Poe's one novel in early 1838. Poe was seriously ill in 1847, and hardly wrote anything. 1848 saw the publication of the bizarre Eureka: A Prose Poem, which I will write about later, if I can think of anything to say about it.

Back to my original point. Poe's most famous stories are almost all from the period 1839-46. Most great writers needed some time to find their own voice. Once they find it, they cultivate it, or test it out, or become formulaic. Poe found his voice, or what we think of as the Poe voice, with the writing of Arthur Gordon Pym in 1837; the first classic Poe short story, "The Fall of the House of Usher," came two years later. After that, he wrote one or two classics a year. But he also continued to write all sorts of other things, including comic tales, the green bars in the graph, and magazines continued to publish them. He never specialized.

Poe could be very funny - his reviews prove that. And there are funny moments in these stories. But his comic tales seem to me to be too much of his time. The references are obscure, or the satire has gone flat, or the sorts of jokes people like have changed. I don't know. But where his weird tales retain their creepy effect, in the face of thousands of imitators, the comic tales are genuine period pieces, instructive about their time, but without much to say to ours.

I will say, though, that at least two of the "funny" ones end with beheadings. Comic Poe is still Poe.

Merely on account of its retrograde operations - why did I read so much Edgar Allan Poe?

Just recently, I polished off both Library of America volumes of Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry and Tales, and Essays and Reviews, about 2,800 pages of Poe. Took me two years. Good Lord, I'd never added up the pages - what was I thinking? I'm going to spend the next two weeks on Poe, to do my part to make sure that no one makes the same mistake.

If I'm kidding, it's only to a degree. I remember reading, somewhere, Harold Bloom calling Poe the "worst major writer in the canon," meaning that even in some of his best stories, there are lines that make a sensitive reader like me wince, and there are a pile of stories that are best reserved for specialists, although not for insomniacs - even boring Poe may cause nightmares.

While reading the short fiction of Poe's exact contemporary, Nathaniel Hawthorne, I discovered again and again that the most famous stories were not necessarily the ones I though best. There were a lot of surprises. This was much less true with Poe, barely true at all. My favorites are the same as everyone else's:

"The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "A Descent into the Maelström," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Gold-Bug," "The Black Cat," "The Purloined Letter," "The Cask of Amontillado," "Hop-Frog."

Same with the poems: "The Raven," "Dream-Land," "The City in the Sea," "Annabel Lee." No surprises here. The Portable Edgar Allan Poe contains all of these and more, and looks like a great one-volume choice for non-neurotics.

Even the best stories are packed with exasperations like this, from "The Murders in the Rue Morgue":

"The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence, analysis."

This sentence should be taken with a sense of humor, and is directly connected to the themes of the story, so it's not an excrescence. But thank goodness it's imbedded in a story with a decent plot, a murder mystery. Too much writing in this vein drains one's spirits.

One can guess, just from this sentence, why Poe really does read better in French. The fussiness of the Latinate vocabulary simply disappears, or becomes normal. Poe's actual French phrases, one of his most irritating tics, become subsumed - no italics necessary.

But I'm stuck with Poe in English. Let's see what I can do with him.

Robert Bolaño and Edgar Allan Poe discuss interior decorating

The first story or sketch or whatnot in Nazi Literature in the Americas (available here via the Virginia Quarterly Review), describes, in twelve pages, the long life of the Argentinian poet Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce. She publishes poems, marries a rancher, tours Europe, founds a publishing house, becomes a "committed Hitlerite."

Many reviewers have described Bolaño's novel as a menagerie of obscurities and failures, which is not exactly correct. Edelmira, for example, has an "eminent place in the panorama of Argentinean and Hispanic letters." She achieves that status with "her finest work, Poe's Room (1944), which prefigured the nouveau roman and much subsequent avant-garde writing."

Poe's Room contains: a description of a room that Edelmira has had constructed, a "treatise on good taste and interior design," details about the construction of the room and the "search for the furniture, and so on. The room is an exact reproduction of the perfect room described by Edgar Allan Poe is his story or sketch or whatnot "The Philosophy of Furniture" (1840/1845).

In this actual story, available (semi-readably) here,* Poe describes the correct principles of interior decorating, and ends with a long single paragraph, nearly two pages of the six total in the Library of America edition, describing a room, an ideal room, built by a friend. The room is an oblong shape, the colors are gold and crimson, the paintings are large and lie flat against the wall. "Beyond these things, there is no furniture, if we except an Argand lamp, with a plain crimson-tinted ground glass shade, which depends from the lofty vaulted ceiling by a single slender gold chain, and throws a tranquil but magical radiance over all."

That's the last sentence. Really driving it home there, Ed. The Poe story is extremely tedious, although less so than two later pieces ("The Domain of Arnheim", 1847, and "Landor's Cottage", 1849) that do the exact same thing for landscapes. The one touch of weird Poe, just a bit of dreamy surrealism, is the brief mention, buried in the paragraph, that Poe's friend is all the while sleeping on the sofa.

What is Bolaño doing here? This is not a small thing. Bolaño spends four of the twelve pages of the story on this imagined book. More than half of that is directly plagiarized from Poe's story, except that where Poe has a single paragraph, Bolaño makes a list:

"- The frames broad but not deep, and richly carved, without being dulled or filigreed.

- The paintings lying flat on the walls, not hanging off with cords."

Two full pages of just this, straight from Poe, with just minor changes in wording and verb tense (e.g., Poe has "The frames are broad but not deep"). What does this have to do with fascism, or with anything?

Let's see. The point of this piece of conceptual art is that Edelmira actually builds Poe's ideal room; that she brings a fantasy into the real world. Perhaps the analogy is with totalitarian states enacting crackpot ideal rules about art and life.

Or possibly it's the artist - not just Edelmira, but Poe - who is covertly totalitarian. Maybe Poe is serious about his precepts of interior design, or landscaping, that there really is an ideal, he has identified it, and if he had the power that's the way things would be. Bolaño's novel might then be anti-idealistic, the artist presenting the world as it should not be.

This episode gave me one of my hints that Bolaño is going after Modernism. Edelmira reads "The Philosophy of Furniture" and is thrilled: "She felt that she had found a soul mate in Poe: their ideas about decoration coincided." The last clause is a joke; the first is an invocation of a founder of Modernism, Charles Baudelaire, who said the same sort of thing about Poe. If I were a Professional Reader I would find an exact quote of Baudelaire's. I hate to make too much of the absence of a name, but I think this reference is meant to be specific.

As I said, or meant to say, yesterday, I don't understand more than hints of Bolaño's undermining of Modernism, which is itself a Modernist sort of thing to do. Romantic, too, like Baudelaire's attack on Romanticism, hyper-Romantic; not like the Elegiac Poet in that Hugo play, who wants to be a "moderate Romantic."

Glub glub glub. I'm in over my head. I'm sure someone is at this moment writing a conference paper on this exact subject. Good luck with that.

* Please note the hilarious bracketed editorial comment at the bottom: "[It should be noted that Poe, in this article, has adopted an intentionally humorous tone.]" Intentional, you don't say? So noted.