{"id":8605,"date":"2020-10-26T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-10-26T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8605"},"modified":"2020-12-07T09:22:42","modified_gmt":"2020-12-07T14:22:42","slug":"for-spooky-edgar-allan-poe-has-staying-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8605","title":{"rendered":"For Spooky, Edgar Allan Poe Has Staying Power"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"The<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

One hundred seventy-one Octobers ago, Edgar Allan Poe died in Baltimore. Judging by the frequency with which cultural references to him and his works pop up\u2014Poe and Raven masks, the Edgar Awards, t-shirts, mugs, you-name-it\u2014it seems he haunts us still. Now, in 2020, perhaps his shade\u2019s message is, \u201cWhat didn\u2019t you get about \u2018The Masque of the Red Death\u2019?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The late mystery writer Julian Symons\u2019s Poe biography, The Tell-Tale Heart<\/a>, <\/em>is a painful journey. Time and again, Poe\u2019s precarious financial situation would start to brighten, and time and again, he would get in his own way, sabotaging his prospects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Poe\u2019s parents were itinerant actors. His heavy-drinking father deserted the family in Poe\u2019s first year, and his mother died of consumption when he was two. Certainly retrospective psychoanalysts of his personality make much of these early traumas. For his part, Symons believes a combination of predilection and early experience marked Poe, \u2018and his life can best be understood as a play in which he half-consciously cast himself as a tragic hero.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He dropped out of the University of Virginia, resentful of the aristocratic young men he met there, and moved to Maryland. In Baltimore, he connected with his aunt and later married her not-quite fourteen-year-old daughter. Having a family gave him a sense of purpose, but the problem then and ever after was earning money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today we know Poe best for his short stories, and that one poem. Yet Poe\u2019s greatest desire was to be a poet and literary critic, to have his own magazine. Unfortunately, the caustic reviews he wrote for literary journals cost him many friendships and connections with people who might have helped him. Eventually, Symons says, \u2018his drinking and critical quarrelsomeness were too well known for anybody to employ him.\u2019 A modern reader can\u2019t help but think Poe suffered from some psychiatric disorder that today might have been treated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His last, disastrous decision was to name Rufus Wilmot Griswold his literary executor. For reasons of his own, Griswold made false and scurrilous accusations about Poe\u2019s work and character that tarnished the author\u2019s reputation for nearly a century. To a degree, they persist today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the last couple of years, I\u2019ve written two short stories inspired by Poe\u2019s \u201cBerenice,\u201d in which a young man becomes obsessed with his wife\u2019s teeth. After she dies, he yanks them out before her body is relegated to the family crypt. Alas, (and you know this is coming), she isn\u2019t dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They appeared in an entertaining anthology of contemporary stories with roots in classic Poe called Quoth the Raven<\/a><\/em>, edited by Lyn Worthen; and in an anthology with the premise that Sherlock Holmes is called in to investigate the strange doings Poe set up. It\u2019s Sherlock Holmes: Adventures in the Realms of Edgar Allan Poe<\/a><\/em>, edited by Brian and Derrick Belanger. No doubt Poe would never have imagined that the stories he dismissed so casually just to put money in his pocket would continue to fire other writers\u2019 imaginations these many years later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo: c2.staticflickr.com<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One hundred seventy-one Octobers ago, Edgar Allan Poe died in Baltimore. Judging by the frequency with which cultural references to him and his works pop up\u2014Poe and Raven masks, the Edgar Awards, t-shirts, mugs, you-name-it\u2014it seems he haunts us still. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"For Spooky, Edgar Allan Poe Has Staying Power - A man who couldn't get out of his own way. We have drugs for that now. Tragedy.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[265,1160,120,104],"tags":[1757,1758,1448,1429],"class_list":["post-8605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biography","category-horror","category-short-story","category-the-morgue","tag-brian-belanger","tag-derrick-belanger","tag-edgar-allan-poe","tag-lyn-worthen"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2eN","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8605"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8605\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8606,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8605\/revisions\/8606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}