The UNIVERSITYR E V I E W

A Publication ofTHE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT KANSAS CITY

(Formerly The University of Kansas City Review)

Spring Number, 1969

Short StoriesNORMA KLEIN THE GREY BUICKMYRON TAUBE SAULCARL MAYFIELD A FAMILIAR TALEMICHAEL RAFFERTY THE VOICE OF A YOUNG WOMAN

PoetryJUDITH LARUE LARRY RUBIN MELVILLE CANE

DOROTHY LEE RICHARDSON PHILIP ALLAN FRIEDMAN-

» ,. tArticlesWALTER R. MCDONALD . . WINESBURG OHIO.- TALES OF ISOLATIONALANBARR, . "G. B. S." THE SELF-CREATED PERSONAE. SAN JUAN JR JOYCE'S "THE BOARDING HOUSE"JOSEPH P. O'GRADY . CONGRESS AND ITS ABILITY TO DECLARE WARVICTOR STRANDBERG POE'S HOLLOW MENROBERT C. JOHNSON . RODERIGO, THAT "POOR TRASH OF VENICE"JEAN M. HUNT . . . DENISE LEVERTOV'S NEW GRIEF-LANGUAGE II

VOLUME XXXV MARCH, 1969 NUMBER 3

Poe's Hollow MenVICTOR STRANDBERG

MORE than most writers, EdgarAllan Poe has been many thingsto many people. To Joseph

Wood Krutch he was a neurotic whosestories are comprehensible only in thelight of their author's presumed sexualimpotence. To N. Bryllion Fagin thetales were merely the harmless subli-mations of a would-be actor, Poe hav-ing been thwarted in his desire for thestage by his foster father's bourgeoismoralism. Poe's works are, in fact, emi-nently actable—Boris Karloff evenmade a movie of "The Raven" in 1935.

To D. H. Lawrence, Poe was pri-marily a writer of macabre love storieswhich Lawrence considered fearsomeexcursions into "the horrible under-ground passages of the human soul."To Baudelaire, Poe was a beloved fel-low dabbler in Satanism, a lonelyAmerican nurturing his own flowersof evil with admirable mockery of thephilistine moral code during thosegreat heydays of Henry WadsworthLongfellow. To any number of gen-eral readers, moreover, Edgar AllanPoe stands out as the Alfred Hitchcockof his day, a master Gothicist with noserious purpose beyond the entertain-er's desire to weave a perfect spell.

Perhaps Poe was all of these thingsand more, depending upon which ofhis works one is reading, but I believethe most pertinent assessment to datehas been Allen Tate's "Our Cousin,Mr. Poe," in which Mr. Tate arguesthat Poe's work is peculiarly modern(making him our cousin) because ofhis lack of a moral center and becauseof his fear of "inevitable annihilation,"implicit in the tales and explicit in his

last philosophical essay, Eureka. WhatMr. Tate's essay implies, in fact, iswhat I should like to establish moredefinitely in this paper—that EdgarAllan Poe was America's first full-fledged hollow man.

I chose T. S. Eliot's phrase quite de-liberately, because the parallels betweenPoe's and Eliot's thought are surpris-ingly precise and extensive. As we re-member, the reasons why Eliot's menare hollow are twofold: moral deprav-ity and metaphysical despair, as evi-denced in the animal sexuality or "theprofit and the loss" in The WasteLand and the atheism of The HollowMen. With the Christian past extantonly in Eliot's sense of damnation andwith a classical antiquity useful onlyto provide mock-heroic satire on Pru-frock and Sweeney, the two traditionalsources of spiritual strength had, forEliot, come to ruin. The same is true ofPoe.

Thanatos alone was Poe's true God.At the end of "The Masque of the RedDeath," it is not Christ but Deathwhose coming is compared to that ofa thief in the night, and not God butDeath who is the final sovereign lordof all: "And now was acknowledgedthe presence of the Red Death. He hadcome like a thief in the night . . . AndDarkness and Decay and the Red Deathheld illimitable dominion over all." Incase we should think these Biblicalechoes unintended, a look at one ofPoe's poems "The Coliseum" confirmsmore explicitly the relative promi-nence of Christ and Nada in Poe'sthinking:

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Silence! and Desolation! and dim Night!I feel ye now—I feel ye in your strength—O spells more sure than e'er Judaean kingTaught in the gardens of Gethsemane!

The possible Shakespearean echoesin "The Masque of the Red Death" are,like the Biblical, ironic. The Prince'sname, Prospero, and his flight to apleasure dome away from the pesti-lence may evoke memories of TheTempest, but quite clearly Poe's imag-ination of what it is like to be dead in-volves more of the grisly undergroundthan the magic undersea, the fatten-ing worm taking precedence in hismind's eye over any pearls that oncewere eyes. Thus, in a romantic elegycalled "The Sleeper," Poe jars one withan unromantic realism:

My love, she sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,As it is lasting, so be deep!Soft may the worms about her creep!

The Conqueror Worm makes Godhis food in a more famous poem, where-in "Mimes, in the form of God onhigh," (Stanza 2) succumb to theworm as quickly as human flesh does:

But see, amid the mimic rout,A crawling shape intrude!

It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangsThe mimes become its food . . . (Stanza 4,

"The Conqueror Worm")

If the form of God on high must suffersuch indignity, little wonder that hu-man life, "that motley drama" whichends when "the curtain, a funeral pall, /Comes down with the rush of a storm,"is at best "the tragedy, 'Man,' " at worsta source of food for worms.

The few times when the human willdoes undertake what Hemingway wasto call a rebellion against death, the

results are so grotesque as to suggestmockery of either the Christian hope ofresurrection or the Transcendental be-lief in the infinite magnitude of thehuman will. Ligeia probably ridiculesthe latter notion, since it begins with atypically Emersonian affirmation as itsheadnote: "Who knoweth the mysteriesof the will, with its vigor? For God isbut a great will pervading all things bynature of its intentness. Man does notyield himself to the angels, nor untodeath utterly, save only through theweakness of his feeble will."

The dying Ligeia decides to put thisTranscendental doctrine into practiceafter her husband quotes "The Conqu-eror Worm" to her—"O God! O Di-vine Father! [perhaps Poe mocks Chris-tianity as well as Transcendentalismhere}—shall these things be undeviat-ingly so?—shall this Conqueror be notonce conquered?" The resurrection,when it comes, is so ghastly that evenher pining husband calls it "a hideousdrama of revivication," a demon vam-pirism by which Ligeia's spirit returnsto occupy the cadaver of another wo-man. And in Madeline Usher's casethe return from the tomb serves onlyto widen death's embrace to brother,house, and all. Rather than reawakento such a dubious afterlife, one mightthink better of resigning one's will tothe Conqueror Worm after all, as Poe'sprayer in "The Sleeper" supplicates:

I pray to God that she may lieForever with unopened eye,While the pale sheeted ghosts go by!

Like Eliot after him, Poe foundChristianity a source not of strength,but of damnation. Poe's various narra-tors, nearly all of them criminals andsinners, seem to share the unease of thecriminal hero of "The Black Cat," who

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states that he hanged the cat "becauseI knew that in so doing I was commit-ting a sin—a deadly sin that would sojeopardize my immortal soul as to placeit ... even beyond the reach of theinfinite mercy of the Most Mercifuland Most Terrible God." So the "trag-edy, 'Man,'" as Poe called it in "TheConqueror Worm," having "Much ofMadness, and More of Sin, / And Hor-ror the soul of the plot," is not endedwhen the funeral pall rings down thecurtain after all; an unpleasant surprisemay yet be in store for the puppets act-ing out the "motley drama." Hence, inPoe's version of death's kingdom, theCity in the Sea, the dead are awakenedfrom their funeral sleep to receive afuller and final damnation:

But lo! a stir is in the air!The wave—there is a movement there!

The waves have now a redder glow—The hours are breathing faint and low—And when, amid no earthly moans,Down, down that town shall settle hence,Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,Shall do it reverence. ("The City in the

Sea")

Probably "The City in the Sea"shows Poe—if he was not merely mock-ing Christianity here—in a more dourmood than usual. Normally he lookedto death not with the fear of Hell, butwith the atheist's hope of eternal ob-livion at last; like Eliot's Phlebas, en-viably dead and out of the waste landin "Death by Water," Poe's speaker—a corpse—in the following poem wel-comed death as the only deliverer, thebest physician after all:

Thank Heaven! the crisis—The danger is past,

And the lingering illnessIs over at last—

And the fever called "Living"

Is conquered at last.

And no muscle I moveAs I lie at full length—

But no matter!—I feelI am better at length. ("For Annie")

If Poe's hollow men are truly better"at length," suggesting parallels withEliot's metaphysical despair, anotherreason for despair might be Poe's senseof internal depravity, his fear of anoverwhelming beast within the self. Ifeven Thoreau, who proclaimed the hu-man will to have godlike infinitude,could admit to "an animal in us, whichis ... reptile and sensual, and perhapscannot be wholly expelled" (Wolden,Chapter XI, "Higher Laws"), weshould not be surprised that Poe wouldsee this animal self looming morelargely—an animal self that, battlingagainst the recoil of the conscience, de-livers Poe's characters to self-betrayaland destruction in tale after tale of thePoe canon. Perhaps Poe's most succinctdescription of this divided self appearsamid the sarcastic advice of "How toWrite a Blackwood Article": "[Main-tain] the tone transcendental . . . Putin something about the Supernal One-ness. Don't say a syllable about theInfernal Twoness."

This "Infernal Twoness," which ex-plains much of Poe's ridicule of hisTranscendental contemporaries, wasfundamental to Poe's conception of hu-man nature. Again, it makes Poe ourcousin, paralleling Eliot's various modesof internal schism—animal fornicationas against "an infinitely gentle, infinite-ly suffering thing," "dung and death"as against epiphanies in the rose gar-den. Poe's Infernal Twoness is evi-denced above all in his striking seriesof criminal heroes who, against theirown will, succumb helplessly to a blind,

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irrational evil rising from within theself, almost as if to provide case stud-ies for Sigmund Freud's conclusion that"the primitive, savage, and evil im-pulses of mankind have not vanishedin any individual, but continue theirexistence, although in a repressed state,and . . . wait for opportunities to dis-play their activity," or for Carl GustavJung's assertion that "we are always,thanks to our human nature, potentialcriminals."1

Many of Poe's best tales take theform of confessionals in which a crimi-nal speaker admits his crime—itself aperverse act against his own interests—and tries to justify himself by ascribinghis own criminal potentiality (as Freudand Jung do above) to all humanity.At first Poe's criminal hero is likely tobe incredulous and baffled concerninghis misdeed. The speaker in "The Tell-Tale Heart," for example, cannot un-derstand why he murdered the old man—"Object there was none. Passion therewas none. I loved the old man. Hehad never wronged me. He had nevergiven me insult. For his gold I had nodesire."

But the speaker in "The Black Cat"offers vicarious explanation applicableto all of Poe's bewildered criminals.This speaker—"noted for docility andhumanity . . . of disposition," for "ten-derness of heart," and for being "es-pecially fond of animals" — suddenlygrasps the cat and cuts an eye from itssocket because "the fury of a demoninstantly possessed me." This demon henamed the "Spirit of Perverseness,"2

ijung's statement appears in his book TheUndiscovered Self (New York, 1959), page 108.Freud's comment is taken from a letter dated De-cember 28, 1914, which appears in Ernest Jones'sThe Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (NewYork, 1953-1957), II, 368.

2Some of my comments on the "Spirit of Per-

one of the "indivisible primary faculties. . . which give direction to the charac-ter of Man." So, "with the tears stream-ing" from his eyes, and "with the bit-terest remorse," the speaker nonethe-less hanged the cat, then killed his wife,and—the spirit of perverseness havingno other victim to turn upon at last—finally doomed himself (like the speak-er in "The Tell-Tale Heart") by dis-closing his secret crime in the end.

Even stronger in its editorial com-ment is "The Imp of the Perverse." "Iam one of the many uncounted victimsof the Imp of the Perverse," says thespeaker in this tale, who ascribes hisact of murder to "that paradoxicalsomething, which we may call perverse-ness," which causes men to "act with-out comprehensible object"—exactly asin "The Tell-Tale Heart." As againstthe Christian and Transcendentalistdoctrine of the freedom of the will,Poe's speaker insists that perverseness,"under certain conditions . . . becomesabsolutely irresistible. I am not morecertain that I breathe, than that theassurance of the wrong or error of anyaction is often the one unconquerableforce which impels us, and alone im-pels us to its prosecution. Nor will thisoverwhelming tendency to do wrongfor the wrong's sake, admit of analysis,or resolution into ulterior elements. Itis a radical, a primitive impulse—ele-mentary."

Having made his victim a murderer,the Imp of the Perverse cannibalisti-cally turns upon his servant, who—butfor the Imp's sadistic treachery—couldhave safely rejoiced in the perfectcrime. "It is inconceivable how rich asentiment of satisfaction arose in myverseness" in Poe were stimulated by Mr. JosephM. Garrison Jr.'s fine article, "The Function ofTerror in the Work of Edgar Allan Poe," Amer-ican Quarterly (Summer, 1966), pp. 136-150.

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bosom as I reflected upon my absolutesecurity," says the speaker in describ-ing the years that passed before hisabrupt conversion into a Raskolnikov:"One day, while sauntering along thestreets, I arrested myself in the act ofmurmuring . . . 'I am safe—I am safe—yes—if I be not fool enough to makeopen confession!'"

Given the power of the Imp of Per-versity, this bit of autosuggestion isenough to send the speaker to the gal-lows, as, surrounded by a curious andpuzzled crowd of passers-by, he suffersan irresistible compulsion to confess:"Could I have torn out my tongue, Iwould have done it, but . . . then, someinvisible fiend, I thought, struck mewith his broad palm upon the back.The long-imprisoned secret burst forthfrom my soul." Confession, tradition-ally thought good for the soul, sendsPoe's sinners not only to death but alsoto damnation. "Consigned . . . to thehangman and to hell," Poe's speakerends his tale with a look into the abyss:"Today I wear these chains, and amhere! Tomorrow I shall be fetterless!—but where?"

In "The Cask of Amontillado" and"Hop-Frog," the spirit of perversenessis more generous to its agent, in that itallows both Montresor and Hop-Frogto gain revenge with impunity. But tothe victims of such revenge, the spiritof perverseness is even less charitablethan usual, causing both the offendingking and seven innocent counselors tobe roasted alive by Hop-Frog's grandjest, and condemning Fortunate to ahideous death by starvation. The ironyis compounded by Fortunato's probableinnocence, Montresor's real motive be-ing not justifiable revenge so much asjealousy: "You are rich, respected, ad-mired, beloved; you are happy, as once

I was," the murderer tells his prospec-tive victim. In thus showing forth thespirit of sadistic revenge triumphant,perhaps Poe himself was being perversewith respect to conventional morality,for these tales do clearly thumb theirnose at the Christian ethic of forgive-ness as well as proffer a caricature ofpoetic justice. Baudelaire would haveenjoyed this.

Far and away the most hollow ofPoe's characters are the main figuresin "William Wilson" and "The Manof the Crowd," two of his most seriousand most craftsmanlike studies in per-verse psychology. The Man of theCrowd stands apart from Poe's othercriminal heroes in that his crime—weare never told what it is—is so un-speakably foul that he cannot evenseek the meager comfort of confession."Now and then, alas, the conscience ofman takes up a burden so heavy inhorror that it can be thrown down onlyinto the grave," Poe says at the outsetof this tale. "And thus the essence ofall crime is undivulged."

The figure who embodies this es-sence of all crime, like one of Haw-thorne's morality play villains, mani-fests his depraved nature in a face ex-pressive of Satanic evil—"Retsch, hadhe viewed it, would have greatly pre-ferred it to his own pictural incarnationsof the fiend.... [It evoked] ideas of vastmental power, of caution, of penurious-ness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice,of blood-thirstiness . . . of intense—ofextreme despair." Like one of Haw-thorne's lost souls whose secret sinleads to total isolation, the Man of theCrowd cannot communicate his ghastlysecret; thus, his vain longing for humancommunion becomes an incessant com-pulsion to be with crowds, no matterhow execrable in character. Proceeding

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into viler and viler company with thedeepening of the night—from clerksand businessmen in the evening togamblers, whores, and pickpockets inthe night hours—the man of the crowdprefers any fellowship in any setting tothe horror of solitude, to the sleuth-narrator's wonderment:

It was the most noisome quarter of Lon-don, where everything wore the worst im-press of the most deplorable poverty, and ofthe most desperate crime. By the dim lightof an accidental lamp, tall, antique, worm-eaten, wooden tenements were seen totter-ing to their fall, in directions so many andcapricious that scarce the semblance of apassage was discernible between them . . .Horrible filth festered in the dammed-upgutters. The whole atmosphere teemed withdesolation. Yet, as we proceeded, the soundsof human life revived by sure degrees, andat length large bands of the most aban-doned of a London populace were seen reel-ing to and fro. The spirits of the old manflickered up ... Once more he strode on-ward with elastic tread.

In a soul so lost and damned as this,so utterly alienated, we can readily seewhy Foe admired Hawthorne—especi-ally the dark side of Hawthorne thatcould create a Chillingworth or EthanBrand; we might also see in such a por-trait the shape of things to come, suchas the alienated, solitary wretches ofKafka or the speaker in The WasteLand who feels locked in solitary con-finement: "I have heard the key/Turnin the door once and turn once only/We think of the key, each in hisprison." To Eliot the missing key thatcould set the self free from its cell wassympathy; but Poe would not havebeen interested.

It is typical of Poe's own perversitythat, unlike Eliot or Hawthorne, he wasinterested only in the psychological,not the moral situation of his protagon-ist. In "The Man of the Crowd," Poe's

narrator is very much the clinical an-alyst, disappointed only that the crimi-nal king whom he follows—this "typeand genius of deep crime"—cannotyield up his secret to the dissector's scal-pel. Whether the man of the crowd'sperversity or the narrator's is greater ishard to tell. But in any case, we havehere a portrait of two hollow men, theone a lonely figure flitting from crowdto crowd in vain search for human con-tact and the other, Poe's narrator, insomewhat the same role as Hawthorne'sseekers after the unpardonable sin.

"William Wilson" is the culminat-ing portrait of a hollow man, and onethat is especially interesting for its auto-biographical overtones.3 To a strikingextent, Poe's own psychology seemsmanifest in this study in schizophrenia,in which a beastly id (the narrator)battles the superego-conscience (theother William Wilson) for mastery ofthe self. In his lengthy confessional, thenarrator reveals a set of values not byany means remote from Poe's own per-sonality. He displays a ludicrous snob-bery, for example, in expressing an"aversion to my uncourtly patronymic,and its very common, praenomen" (Poealso affected to be a high-born gentle-man ), and an authorial fantasy of wish-fulfillment may well be present in Wil-son's privilege of enrolling at Eton andOxford, two of the finest sanctuariesof aristocratic breeding in the world.

Wilson confesses, moreover, an ut-terly amoral self-indulgence ("rooted

3Poe scholars do not agree as to whether hiswas really a life of dissipation. But even if Poe'salleged vices—drug addiction, gambling, drunk-enness, and the like—are viewed more as Byronicmyth than as biographical reality, it still seemsfair to say that some part of his personality wassympathetically represented in certain of hiscriminal heroes. The evidence I have advancedtoward such a reading of "William Wilson" is,I believe, mostly beyond dispute.

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habits of vice," "soulless dissipation,""delirious extravagance") which leadsto his expulsion from Oxford for cheat-ing at gambling. (Foe himself had beendismissed from the University of Vir-ginia in December, 1826, for not pay-ing gambling debts.) Then, too, thereis Wilson's supreme arrogance andwillfulness: "As I advanced in years. . . I grew self-willed, addicted to thewildest caprices, and a prey to the mostungovernable passions . . . Thencefor-ward my voice was a household law."(This state of bliss was in actuality ac-corded Foe only within the privilegedsanctuary of his life with the twoClemms, his wife and mother-in-law,whose idolizing devotion greatly salvedthe injustices of his public experience.)

Foe's literary enemies knew very wellthe kind of caprice and ungovernablepassions which Foe attributed to Wil-liam Wilson. Foe further gave WilliamWilson the life of romantic odyssey—in Paris, Rome, Vienna, Moscow, Egypt—that he sometimes claimed as thetruth of his own experience, perhaps inhis fervent imagination really believingthat he had, as he stated, fought inGreece and been jailed in Russia. Fi-nally Foe even saw fit to bestow on thetwo William Wilsons his own birthday,January 19, and a birth year, 1813,that in later years he claimed as hisown, apparently unwilling to admit thetruth of advancing age. Foe was actu-ally born in 1809-

What makes "William Wilson" par-ticularly absorbing as a story is its in-terior point of view; no longer is a mas-ter in evil—like the Man of the Crowdor Prince Prospero in "The Masque ofthe Red Death"—viewed and describedby an outside observer. Here, througha sympathetic act of imagination, Foehas occupied the inner mind of the

criminal hero, and so can report on thewar within the self in a most convinc-ing way.

The imp of the perverse clearlyholds the upper hand in this persona,as witnessed in his confession of "myambition at Rome, my revenge at Paris,my passionate love at Naples, [and}. . . my avarice in Egypt," but yet theimp must work against the power ofsome mysterious opposition, as Foe'sheadnote admonishes—"What say {of]CONSCIENCE grim,/That spectre inmy path?" Although the other WilliamWilson may have initially been an ac-tually separate character, quite clearlythe double becomes an emanation ofthe narrator's self as the tale winds on,and realism gives way to surrealism, therealm of psychic hallucinations. Re-sentment at "his frequent officious in-terference with my will" back in board-ing school, coupled with the awarenessthat "his moral sense . . . was far keenerthan my own," was the first identifica-tion of the other William Wilson withthe speaker's own conscience, and theother's voice, congenitally reduced to a"very low whisper," sufficed to ap-proximate the still small voice of con-science.

By the time the double arrives on thescene to interrupt first the narrator'sdrinking orgy, then his cheating atcards, and ultimately his cuckolding ofthe Duke DiBroglio, it is clear that theother William Wilson is a product ofthe narrator's diseased mind, a figmentof his tortured conscience perverselyconspiring to divulge his machinations.Realistically, there can be no suchstranger as the narrator describes, hav-ing super powers of divination; surreal-istically, however, the intruding strang-er could be any chance passer-by uponwhom the narrator—usually "wildly ex-

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cited with wine" at this point—mightproject his own ungovernable compul-sion to confess his secret guilt.

The outcome of this war within theself is self-destruction. Looking into "alarge mirror"—a traditional gesture ofintrospection—the narrator sees that inhis frenzied effort to plunge his swordrepeatedly into the breast of the hateddouble, he has actually bloodied hisown features, and he hears his adver-sary say, no longer in a whisper but inthe narrator's own voice, "bow utterlythou hast murdered thyself." Here Poeimplies what Freud would later state,that the true way to heal a split per-sonality like William Wilson's is notthrough suppression or destruction ofeither of the warring elements, forneither the id on one side nor the con-science on the other can be simply re-nounced out of existence; the claims ofeach will be pressed and heard. Theonly adequate resolution of the split isthrough compromise, the precarioustension and balance between contend-ing parts of the self by which a day today survival of both may continue.

This seems a modern psychology in-deed, especially for an American swell-ing with Transcendental pride in whatEmerson called "the infinitude of theprivate man." But it is quite clear thatPoe, with his psychotics and criminalheroes, his maddened and fear-riddencripples of the soul, had little inter-course with the popular thinking of hisown time. Though rooted technically inthe Gothic tradition, his work lookedahead to the bleak and bleary world ofKafka and Beckett and the early Eliot.Hagridden by metaphysical despairconcerning the outer universe anddriven to depravity by the spirit of per-verseness within the inner sanctuary of

self, Poe's characters were the true hol-low men of their time, bespeaking, itseems reasonable to say, a parallel spir-itual condition in their creator.4

If anything, Poe was more of a hol-low man than Eliot, since he neverexperienced the development towardChristianity detectable even in Eliot'searliest poems. The pining for "aninfinitely gentle, infinitely sufferingthing" that is wiped away with a scorn-ful laugh in Eliot's "Preludes"; themixed scorn and envy that Gerontionfeels towards Christians taking com-munion in various countries ("to beeaten . . . to be drunk/Among whis-pers; by Mr. Silvero/With caressinghands, at Limoges . . . By Hakagawa. . . by Fraulein von Kulp"); the Chris-tian commandment to give, sympathize,and control which Eliot smuggled intothe Waste Land via the back route ofBuddhism; the lips that "Tremblingwith tenderness . . . would kiss/Formprayers" in "The Hollow Men"— allthese foreshadowings of "Ash-Wednes-day" have no parallel in Poe's world ofunrelieved madness and anxiety.

Probably for this reason Poe showsthe two directions Eliot's work wouldhave taken if Christianity had not en-tered the picture. Without Christianmoral and metaphysical order, Eliotwould (like Poe) have evinced an in-creasing sense of mental breakdown,such as we see in the form and sub-stance of "The Waste Land" and "TheHollow Men," and likewise he would(like Poe) have turned inward to the

4The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (a namewhose sound and rhythm suspiciously resemblesthat of Edgar Allan Poe) provides a novel-lengthstudy of Poe's hollow man. As James W. Coxpoints out in "Edgar Poe: Style as Pose" (Vir-ginia Quarterly Review, Winter, 1968), the name"Pym" is an anagram for "Imp"—the Imp of thePerverse, who motivates Pym's mutiny, treach-ery, murder, and cannibalism.

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relatively modest consolations affordedby the palace of art and the pretensionsof snobbery.

Because Poe never had access toEliot's genuinely first-rate education, hecould not, like Eliot, demonstrate trueerudition in esoteric languages and cul-tures, but Poe staunchly faked a bril-liant education all the same, quoting(or inventing) obscure Arabic writersof antiquity or instructing us in thelatest astrophysical breakthrough as theoccasion demanded. Similarly, Poe wastoo poor to enjoy the life of the wellborn gentry, as Eliot the Boston blueblood, in his ancestors could and did,but Poe nonetheless despised the greatAmerican rabble of Andrew Jackson'sascendancy with as lordly a contempt asEliot ever mustered against the Swee-neys and Bleisteins passing by hisbank's window. In short, Eliot and Poehad much in common—at least withrespect to psychology and theme—upto the time that Christianity reachedout to pluck Eliot from the burning.

Not believing in Christianity, thebest Poe could do to parallel Eliot's es-cape from the waste land was to in-voke, in his final work Eureka, a per-sonal endorsement of that Transcen-dental philosophy which he had spentmuch of his literary life attacking andmocking. "Bear in mind that all is Life—Life—Life within Life," says the con-cluding statement of Eureka, whichseems a strange affirmation indeedfrom the man who gave us such studiesin morbidity as "The Masque of theRed Death," "The Fall of the Houseof Usher," and "The City in the Sea."

It could be, of course, that Poe actu-ally did get religion at the last mo-ment; or it could be, as some authoritieshave maintained, that Poe's last workwas the product of a mind seriously de-

ranged by the despair and dissipationthat followed the death of VirginiaClemm in 1847. Eureka seems in anycase a curiously contradictory docu-ment, insisting on the fact of "inevit-able annihilation" (as Allen Tate ob-served) while yet maintaining that "allis Life" in the end.

Whatever Eureka may mean, the Poethat has lived and endured, so as to gripthe imagination of men like D. H. Law-rence, Baudelaire, and Allen Tate, isnot the Poe of a belated Transcendentalaffirmation. Rather, it is the Poe who,during the great flush of the Transcen-dental era, gave America a literaturestructured upon the Infernal Twoness,its tone set by the Imp's sardonic grin,its mood by Death looking giganticallydown. Eight decades later T. S. Eliotwas to launch a similar attack upon thegenteel Victorianism that held sway inhis formative years, and his revolutionwould succeed partly because the timeswould prove Poe to be our cousin, hispessimism justified by what our scienceand history would divulge.

In his essay "From Poe to Valery,"Eliot said "one cannot be sure thatone's own writing has not been influ-enced by Poe," and it is true thatthrough Baudelaire, Mallarme, andValery, who all spoke of Poe as a liter-ary ancestor and who did influenceEliot considerably, some influence ofPoe may have descended to Eliot him-self, especially in the way of deployingmood and metrics.

But Eliot did not seem to recognizethe true intellectual affinity that makesPoe his spiritual ancestor; his most re-vealing paragraph dismisses Poe's in-tellect as a case of arrested develop-ment: "That Poe had a powerful intel-lect is undeniable: but it seems to methe intellect of a highly gifted young

212 THE UNIVERSITY REVIEW—KANSAS CITY

person before puberty. The forms whichhis lively curiosity takes are those inwhich a pre-adolescent mentality de-lights: wonders of nature and of me-chanics and of the supernatural, crypto-grams and cyphers, puzzles and laby-rinths, mechanical chess-players andwild flights of speculation . . . . There isjust that lacking which gives dignity tothe mature man: a consistent view oflife. An attitude can be mature and con-sistent, and yet be highly sceptical: butPoe was no sceptic."

Written when Eliot was sixty, thisparagraph focuses on the fun and gameselement of Poe's work, ignoring theserious ideas of the sort evidenced inthis paper. It is as though we were tojudge Eliot's intellect by the Possummask of his cat poetry. Certainly Eliot'sown well-known penchant for doingcrossword puzzles illustrates the factthat it is not only the preadolescentmentality which delights in crypto-grams and cyphers, puzzles, and laby-rinths, and Eliot's sober dignity aschurch warden and literary elder states-man did not prevent the Tom Sawyerin him from embarrassing his guestswith cushions that farted when sat

upon.In short, the infernal twoness in both

men posed a brighter side: as againstthe spiritual vacuum within, Poe andEliot each found strength in a sense ofhumor—something Eliot thought sadlylacking in D. H. Lawrence and ThomasHardy. But it is not just or useful toevaluate Poe's intellect or his beliefson the basis of the merely playful orcommercial pieces, especially since Poe'spoverty forced him to do a good dealof hack work.

In his core of serious writing, Poe'sintellect was no less developed thanEliot's own, no less mature, consistent,and sceptical (to use Eliot's terms)concerning the large and permanentissues of human nature and man's fate.Neither a Boris Karloff nor an AlfredHitchcock, Poe was quite seriously, asMr. Tate said, "our cousin." His hollowmen, consigned in their ultimate des-tiny to the Conqueror Worm and pre-cariously fending off the Imp of Per-versity in the here and now, have goodreason and excellent credentials forjoining voices with damned souls inthe works of Eliot, Kafka, and othersuch apostles of a modern inferno.