Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe
by . New York: George H.Doran Co. Doran Co. 1926. 8vo. 2 vols. xx+408+486 pp. Illus. $10.00.
BIOGRAPHY seems to be becoming more and more a matter of background. We see eminent men, not so much as errant examples of genius or individuality, but as the product of their surroundings and of their time, influenced, in their strength and in their weakness both, by the numerous and complicated currents of thought and feeling that manifest themselves in the general movement of the age.
It is in this spirit that Mr. Allen has dealt with the life of Poe, and has endeavored to make it clear that not only much of his achievement but much of his limitation and erratic failure was connected with the conditions under which he lived and worked. The early background of Richmond and the complicated relations with the Allans are developed to a point far beyond anything possible hitherto, since Mr. Allen has had access to documents not used by previous biographers. The life at the University, in the army, at West Point, and the confused goings and comings between Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, are all elucidated with extraordinary patience and clarity. Poe’s varied feminine relations, from Frances Allan to Helen Whitman, are all studied and analyzed in their delicate comparative significance, and foremost among them all stand the pathetically contrasted figures of the mother and daughter, Maria Clemm and Virginia Poe, one of whom made the poet’s material life possible, if not tolerable, while the other played the chief rôle in his fantastic world of dreams. And everywhere there is the underlying element of dire, insistent, unescapable poverty, the bitter need of snatching bare subsistence from every sort of shift and expedient, which more than anything else drove a sensitive temperament and a high-wrought imagination to the fatal refuges of alcohol and opium.
The thoroughness and patience of Mr. Allen’s research and effort in all this investigation of background cannot be too much commended. Only those who know the enormous difficulty of the subject can appreciate what he has accomplished. Yet, after all this vast research, there is still an almost pathetic incompleteness, which appears in the constant reiteration of ‘probably’ and ‘ we may then imagine.’ In this close study of the past even plain matter of fact so frequently eludes us. And when it comes to the portrayal of the soul, the complication is far greater. What makes the study of souls the most fascinating in the world is at once its difficulty and its necessity. We can never really know the souls of others, or even our own. Yet no knowledge is so absolutely essential to us, and we must pursue it unfailingly, so long as we think at all. Mr. Allen recognizes this difficulty and complexity to the full, appreciates the subtlety of the general problem, and above all the extreme remoteness and involved intricacy of the soul of Edgar Poe. ‘ All the evidence about Poe is like this, paradoxical, contradictory, and true.’ Mr. Allen applies all his delicate skill of analysis, all the resources of modern psychology, all the sexual conjecture of the Freudians, which I for one could sometimes spare. And still the author of The Raven keeps skillfully, elusively, evasively out of reach. The utmost, inner secrets of the spirit are almost beyond our probing. But surely no one has yet supplied, or probably ever will supply, richer material for such research than Mr. Allen furnishes in this biography.
GAMALIEL BRADFORD