Edgar Allan Poe

I recently plowed through the Bantam edition of The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings.  I have to say that I absolutely do not get it.  I understand that Poe was a pioneer of the American short story.  I also get that he is credited with the invention of the detective story.  But I don’t think he’s all that great.

As far as the detective stories are concerned – Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Purloined Letter, etc. – I found the smug, self-satisfied tone of narration to be a little hard to swallow.  Sure, Monsieur Dupin must be some kind of analytical genius or something, but he also seems to enjoy his superiority to a nauseating extent.  And the bit with the monkey was neat, but I would have been a good deal more impressed if he had chosen a less improbably exotic solution to the problem.

I will say one thing in his favor, regarding some nine out of ten of his stories.  Poe has a fascinating aptitude for disposing of corpses into various portions of gothic architecture.  I’ve gotta hand it to him – he really pushed that point.  Dead people in the walls, in the chimneys, in the floor, and even live people,  too!  What a lark!  The obsessive repetition of the premature interment theme really struck me, too – as a bit monotonous.

The collection finished out with his poetry.  I can’t critique poetry – I generally dislike it on the whole.  This is a personal problem.  I figure that we’ve got the whole spectrum of the English language at our fingertips, so I can’t understand why  anyone feel the need to force it to stumble and stutter through some preordained iambic obstacle course?  I’d much rather have a naturally well-turned phrase, un-crippled and free of the arbitrary restraints of rhyme and rhythm.

I did genuinely like the sea adventure stories.  I think that his Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym was the highlight of the collection.  I don’t see why the literary world spends so much time goggling over the rest of his work.  The Pym Narrative sits right up with Conrad, Verne and R.L. Stevensen, in my opinion.

So, good adventures, dead and soon-to-be-dead people everywhere, and a snotty amateur detective.  I don’t doubt that it all could have worked out to my personal satisfaction if Poe would have shown a little more insight into human character, but he seemed to focus solely on isolated cases of paranoia and madness.  It gave me the impression of a very limited, egocentric world-view.  And even his discourses on the madness are incomplete – not much development, and no analysis.  It just happens, and then ten pages later the story is over.  I’m extremely skeptical about Poe’s lasting literary value.  A morbid literary curiosity, and no more.

Bibliophilia: The Beginning

It’s 1997.  I am twelve years old.  And, like all middle-class twelve-year-old girls in 1997, I have had Jewel’s “Pieces of You” album repeating through my boombox for six months without interruption – unless, that is, for a necessary pause to watch “Titanic” for the zillionth time.

I don’t know it, but one little line in the unceasing stream of those dozen tracks will stick in my subconscious, and one day change my life forever.

*

Almost ten years have passed.  It’s 2006.  I am three months pregnant, and I am miserable.  I have been unfailingly ill every day for six weeks.  I cannot work, and I cannot move.  I just read books all day long.  I’ve been perusing the book reviews in Vogue and picking up copies of anything that seems remotely entertaining.  I know next to nothing about quality literature.  Another Nicholas Sparks novel has been shelved, and I  found it to be just as vapid as the last one.  I have only the dimmest inkling that A Christmas Carol was ever anything but a movie, and am firmly convinced in all respects that Watership Down is a novel about shipwrecked bunnies.

I’m wandering, lost, through the aisles of the bookstore.  I have no idea what I want.  And then my subconscious kicks in with a suggestion:  “…Henry Miller…you can be Henry Miller…Henry Miller and I’ll be…”  And there he is, directly in front of me.  I absently pick up a copy of Tropic of Capricorn and head home.

*

I loved the book at the time.  If I had picked it up today, I doubt I would have esteemed it so highly – but I’ve learned a lot since then, and have developed a hell of a lot of crotchety and snobby opinions about literature.  Today, I’ll tell you that in the days of the Tropics, Henry Miller was something of a pig, without conscience, discipline, or tact, and that these early works seem to have been born out of some bizarre alchemical whim which endowed the swine with an extraordinary self-confidence and articulateness that borders on diarrhetic.  He did mellow out in his later years, and his work became a good deal more palatable as he grew older.

The book did contain a few gems of priceless worth, though.  It is peppered with references to other books.  I wrote them down and began reading some of them.  I developed the habit of always making a note of any author’s reference to another.  I now have a list of hundreds and hundreds, a great branching tree of a map moving from one book to another and yet another.  I never expect to make it through all of them – but I’m trying pretty damned hard, and I’m making progress.

Thus began my journey into the world of respectable literature.  It’s the best thing that ever happened to me, in spite of the fact that I no longer have any social life to speak of.

*

So, thank you, Jewel, for singing that silly little song over and over and over throughout my pre-adolescence.  You mispronounced Anais Nin’s name, and your reference to her and Henry Miller was largely irrelevant for all practical purposes, but all the same, you planted the seed.