Free Poe by Peter Ackroyd

reviews provoked immediate attention, since he brought to them a fine critical mind tempered with satire and mordant wit. The reputations of some of the most fashionable writers of the time did not emerge unscathed from the inflictions of Poe's pen. He was irritable and even savage in his criticisms. His dissatisfaction with the world was part of his dissatisfaction with himself. Jung'sremarks about Paracelsus are apposite here: “… when one unconsciously works against oneself, the result is impatience, irritability, and an impotent longing to get one's opponent down whatever the means.” Poe certainly enjoyed causing trouble, or what he called “kicking up a bobbery,” especially when it was at the expense of New York or New England writers. He was already a defiantly Southern writer, or Southern journalist, not at all ready to bow to the literary claims of his Northern neighbours. He also wanted reputation; he wanted fame; he needed to make an impression, at whatever cost.
    The journalism has passed, but the stories survive. “Berenice” in a sense sets the tone for many that followed. It is both morbid and macabre, with more than a dash of sensationalism to season the characteristic mixture of death and perverse passion. The melodies of Poe's prose linger, too, with his consummate control of cadence and of open vowel sounds. His is the lingering prose of extremity. The opening tolls like a funereal bell—“Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform”—and in the succeeding pages we learn that the unhappy and unfortunate narrator, Egaeus, will marry his cousin, Berenice, who in the interim becomes emaciated and infirm through the affliction of some unknown disease. They marry, but Egaeus falls victim to an even more insidious disorder. He becomes obsessed with her teeth. In one of Poe's standard motifs, Berenice is buried prematurely. Egaeus wakes from his delirium of sorrow at her apparent death, and then realises that he has torn out the teeth ofhis bride, while she was yet palpitating in the grave. So the story ends. Poe relied largely upon brevity for effect. All of his endings are abrupt and inconclusive, thus prolonging a mood of uncertainty and even of anxiety. There is always some undertow of meaning, which the reader shares with the author; they are both in the same condition of growing awareness.
    It is of course a tale in the Gothic mode, but one that is striated by Poe's own preoccupations. Poe reinvigorated the Gothic tradition of horror and morbid sensationalism by centering it upon the human frame. The image of teeth, perhaps derived from those of his own wasted and emaciated mother, plays some part in his other fictions; the notion of premature burial can be interpreted as a denial of death or as a necrophiliac longing for the moulderings of the grave. Somewhere, among these conflicting interests, Poe's imagination is to be found. In his work death and beauty are powerfully aligned. He was drawn instinctively to the macabre; but for him it was a holy place full of strange scents and echoes. He, of course, might have scorned any such inferences. Poe nicely calculated his effects, and always maintained tight technical control over his narrative. It is significant that he revised continually, making detailed as well as general changes; it may also be worth noting that his handwriting was a model of calligraphy, transcribed on neatly rolled manuscripts, as if all were brought into exquisite order.
    There is a point where irony and decay meet, and it is not at all clear whether Poe is laughing or weeping at hisown inventions. But there is no necessary disparity between calculation and the expression of the deepest fears and obsessions. He had some intimate connection with his own unconscious anxieties—indeed they guided his life— so he was able instinctively to stir those of his readers. Yet only in disciplined circumstances can those fears be properly formulated. It is the