THE HAUNTED PALACE, A LIFE OF EDGAR ALLAN POE (408 pp).—Frances Winwar—Harper ($6).
When a West Point court-martial decided that Plebe Edgar Allan Poe was not officer material, it rendered a sound judgment. It was not only that the overage (22) cadet had been a U.S. army private, that he drank, ran up heavy debts and asserted (falsely) that Benedict Arnold was his grandfather. Poe was a poet and a born soldier of misfortune —ill-armed against the world. Life was a bad dream to him; he is remembered today not for his success in coming to terms with it but for the fantasies and fictions that celebrated his defeat.
In the snug, overstuffed parlor of early 19th century optimism, Poe played Hamlet to his own ghost, and it is sometimes difficult to separate the poet from the poltergeist who tipped over the stuffed birds, broke the bric-a-brac and put the ladies into a flutter. It is the thesis of Veteran Biographer Frances Winwar (Coleridge, the Wordsworths, Byron, Shelley, Keats) that Poe's "ghoul-haunted" imagination has contemporary validity. For all its outmoded idiom (castles, princesses, etc.) Poe's death-obsessed verse speaks true today. In this admirable biography, Author Winwar lets a hundred well-informed witnesses speak for themselves and lets Poe rhyme where reason does not run. He wrote:
I was a child and she was a child In this kingdom by the sea . . .
Poe was right about himself: he was a child in mind as his wife (whom he married when he was 27 and she 13) was a child in fact. But it was no mythical kingdom by the sea in which he had to live, but a hard-headed republic of farmers and merchants.
Changeling Fantasies. For a man who aspired to be a gentleman and dandy, Poe made an unwise choice of parents. Unlike these thespidolatrous times, the U.S. of 150 years ago did not think much of actors, on the quaint ground that they tended to have loose morals. Poe's mother had been playing Boston when Edgar was born in 1809. By all accounts she was a fair Lady Teazle and a wistful Ophelia, but Poe's father David was no Prince Hamlet but an attendant, and an intemperate lord. He deserted his wife when she was pregnant, and before he was three, Poe was an orphan.
The good ladies of Richmond adopted Edgar and his illegitimate sister Rosalie. Edgar fell to the childless wife of a tobacco and drygoods merchant, part-time slave trader and fulltime hypocrite named John Allan. No wonder Poe was addicted to changeling fantasies of noble descent. From being a backstage baby practically weaned on gin, he became "Master Allan," was educated at school in England and sent to the University of Virginia (after less than a year he left, in disgrace and in debt.)