Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe
by Daniel Hoffman
Reviewed by John Wright

This review is written in clarification of an opinion I recently expressed on a blog in a brief survey of several books on Poe. In the case of Hoffman’s book, I confined myself to saying that it was juvenile and uninformative. This elicited a startled and offended reply from someone who wondered on his own blog whether I had actually read it. I was surprised by his reaction, but since it had been several years since I had read the book, I decided to revisit it to be sure that I had not misjudged it.

In his preface, Hoffman states that he intends to judge Poe’s work by the effect it has on him; a welcome approach, for which a critic should be commended when he carries it out. Hoffman himself gives early signs of doing so. He recounts scrawling, in his childhood, I hate Poe on a volume by the same. And he accounts for his childhood hatred of Poe by saying that he was torn between “Indefinite Beauty and Moral Imperative.” (The capitalization is Hoffman’s.)

Unfortunately, literary appraisal is not judged only for its frankness of confession but also for its factual informativeness, critical insight and literary style.

The style is breezy and irregular. It begins:

What, another book on Poe!

Who needs it? Don’t we already have a book called Poe: A Critical Study, etc. . . .

At another point, Hoffman remembers his high school in this manner:

This ducal schoolhouse looms in my memories like the Gothic chateaux in Poe’s stories . . . perhaps above all in the House of Usher, with its air ‘of an excessive antiquity,’ on which ‘the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discerned a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.’ In dreams I have often confused that desolate manse with its secreted guilt and terrible doom—why did Roderick Usher put his sister living in the tomb?—with the architectural fantaisie in which my college preparation was performed.

This passage is not unusual in its hair-trigger quotation of Poe. The reader of a book on Poe is likely familiar with “The Fall of the House of Usher”, but if he is not, he may still wonder why so many words must be borrowed from it in order to say no more than My high school reminded me of Roderick Usher’s mansion? But Hoffman is unable or unwilling to control himself. The quotation from the story is not enough to enlighten the comparison between the two buildings. He must ask a parenthetical question, en route, which however interesting has no bearing on the comparison itself. And as though to provide the crowning ornament to irrelevance, he must point out that his time in high school was preparation for college.

But allowances are to be made for the book because of the plain advertisement of oddity in its title, and since what is obvious to me in my second reading of it cannot be obvious to the unfamiliar reader, let me cite more of the author’s mannerisms.

At times, Hoffman is hyperbolic:

Edgar Poe led the most luckless life of any writer. His only talent was for suffering.

At others, excited to yet another access of reflexive quotation, he is errant and misleading:

Poe’s portrait, like his name, haunted my dreams and waking dreams. How shall I describe his demeanor?

A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity;—these features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple, made up altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten. . . . I could not, even with effort, connect its Arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity.

How better to describe Poe’s demeanor than in his words, for Edgar Poe, too, had mused upon his image in a glass—with not the usual, or expected, vanity of an uninstructed self-flattery. [Hoffman goes on to discuss Poe’s instruction in phrenology.]

Hoffman’s error here is to confuse demeanor—how a person acts—with countenance—the appearance of a person’s face. I have, for example, no idea of Hoffman’s countenance, having never troubled to search for his picture; but I have a very clear idea of his literary demeanor.

He misleads by suggesting that Roderick Usher’s face is based on Poe’s own. It is an idea that has been bruited about elsewhere but has never, to my knowledge, been put forward with a similarly assumed air of factuality. But if we allow that the assumption is reasonable and that others have made it, is it also fair also to assume that the portrait was drawn in the spirit of “self-flattery”? And can the reader not expect that Hoffman make a more concerted attempt at his subject than tenuous assumptions and unhelpful recapitulation of his subject’s appearance and words? (I say unhelpful because we have pictures of Poe, which, incidentally, show his head clearly surmounted by hair of far less than weblike tenuity; also because we have his words everywhere available in print and there is no practical reason to quote them at random.)

In his quotations, alterations of tone, assumptions and distortions of fact, and carelessness of expression, Hoffman’s work is a continual striving for effect. Having quoted Russell Lowell’s description of Poe as “three fifths” genius and “two fifths” fudge, he returns to it repeatedly thereafter in a short span of pages, as though he were stupefied by the phrase:

We can’t get his genius without his fudge, or his fudge without his genius.

There’s a view that’s quite coherent; only trouble is, it’s only about three-fifths true.

[Poe’s imaginative] power is evident to some degree in everything he wrote, but in much of the work—two fifths, I would guess—he can avail himself of only a fraction. . . .

I would like to point out that all that I have so far quoted and most of what will follow is derived from the five pages of preface and the first six pages of the first chapter. The reason for constraining the field of my examination so narrowly is that, as mentioned, I have read the book from end to end before and see no reason to repeat the rigors of the full experience. But I also wish to make plain how densely packed Hoffman’s verbal and narrative peculiarities are, and why, as a consequence, no reasonable allowance can be made to cover them.

He is fond of listing adjectives:

I have tried to render the full effect of the work of this wild, eccentric, audacious, tortured, horror-haunted, sorrowing, beauty-loving Edgar Allan Poe. . . .

[W]hatever else I should attempt of willed accomplishment or of the surrender of the will to the imperious seekings of the soul induced by seeming indolence, I would not rest until my own brain, of whatever power in my own thrusting temples, try to the comprehend the propensities of Poe’s intelligence, that is to say, to understand, as fully as I was moved by, his strange, haunted, tawdry, inexorable, remote yet inescapable Art.

My own brain’s own temples thrust with the effort to understand Hoffman’s meaning or the significance of his labored phrases.

Then there is this from the preface:

For these reasons [because he wishes to respond to Poe’s work as it affects him and as he believes it affects other readers], I’ve introduced, as a surrogate for all of Poe’s readers, an homme moyen sensuel, called ‘I,’ whose circumstances, however disparate from those of Poe, demonstrate the powers of Poe’s work, and its occasional failures of power, to stir the imagination, the passions, and the mind.

Here again, Hoffman has high praise for Poe’s literary power, together with a seemingly obligatory reminder of its inconsistency. Moreover, it is not at all evident from the reasons he gives why an homme moyen sensuel—an average unintellectual man—is necessary to convey his impressions or his idea of the impressions of others.

Nor is he done multiplying the machinery of his book. Having put on a suppositious ‘I’, he must now assume a precious and evidently objectless ‘You’:

Edgar Poe, however grotesque your tarns and castles, your spectral lovers and premature entombments, however ethereally lifeless the tintinnabulation of your rhymes. . . . [This paragraph continues for a third of a page.]

Because you succeeded, in your poems and tales. . . . [This paragraph continues nearly to the bottom of the page.]

Poe—I will apostrophize him no longer. . . .

Let it be known that this is no poetic envoy, no grand sendoff in the last chapter, no validictorian summing up after a long accumulation of insight and commentary. It is the first chapter, page 13. And Hoffman is revolving on his subject like a drunkard squinting at a keyhole.

Here is another specimen from page three:

[Usher’s] is the countenance which Poe—if we assume the narrator of Poe’s story to be a voice that speaks with Poe’s voice—‘could not, even with effort, connect its Arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity.’

Clutching at the phrase “simple humanity”, he continues:

Since Poe is not a piece of simple humanity the intellectual devices of his work are neither transparent nor commonplace. But I am wandering from the reveries induced by the repetition of his name . . .

The reader should have by now a glimmering of a suspicion about the character Hoffman attributes to his “average unintellectual man”, and more than a glimmering of the character of the author.

Having imagined that his old high school was Usher’s mansion, Hoffman also imagines himself seated in class and reading a story of which he is the hero:

For some reason he has ventured to climb a tower on which there is a huge clock—it is the clock tower of our high school—and he emerges from the clockworks to look out through a window in the face of the clock. As his head comes through this window, the minute hand of the clock lurches forward with the force of a scimitar, pinioning me by the neck. My one cheek is crushed against the face of the clock. The sword-edge of the minute-hand is biting into my neck. My eyes bulge out with the strain, the pain. Another minute strikes, the edge bites deeper. . . .

The imagining continues for a length equal to the part I have quoted. And since the scene is vividly described, the reader may well enjoy it. But he may also consider that the unsuspecting purchaser of Hoffman’s book expects a commentary on Poe or his work and not a disquisition on Hoffman’s high school reveries.

On page 20, Hoffman declares, not to the reader but to an imagined gathering of renaissance intellectuals, that he “cannot read the poems of EdgarPoe without feeling a sensation—of pain.”

The reader will have noticed that there is no space between Poe’s Christian and family names. It is not a typographical error. So absorbed is Hoffman in his revery, the assumption of his ‘I’ and the address to his ‘you’ that he steadily degenerates into a kind of baby-talk, referring to his subject here as EdgarPoe, there as HoaxiePoe, and elsewhere under some similarly childish formation.

The reader may also have noticed the gratuitousness of Hoffman’s phrasing: He cannot say that he is unable to read Poe’s poetry “without pain”; not even “without feeling pain” or “without a sensation of pain”, but must say without feeling a sensation—of pain, as though his opinion or its expression gained strength from tautology.

The elucidation of Hoffman’s faults, like the writing of many books, is endless. And if any reader is annoyed with the hyperbole of the foregoing statement, he will have formed the first idea of how I feel about Hoffman’s book—except that the reader must add the annoyance of the assumed ‘I’, ‘you’ and amphtheatre of scholars, and multiply it all by ceaseless repetition. Besides which, he must reckon the irritant of amateur psychologizing. In a commentary on “Ms. Found in a Bottle”, Hoffman writes:

The ship, ‘her’ bulk swelling like a living body in whose hold he secretes himself—what is ‘she’ but an image of the mother’s womb, wherein dwelt those other images of a past almost remembered, the spooky captain and his spirit-crew? For indeed the womb is the well-fount of our unconsciousness before we emerge into the pains of consciousness, and in the womb we are imbued with that instinctual knowledge of our own past, our own beginnings, the state of unity toward which we ever after yearn. But to attain that state after being banished from it by our birth—that is to court, to seek, to embrace destruction. The life in which we seek that unity is by its nature incompatible with the unity we seek, and to gain the one we must forfeit the other, either way. Life without unity, unity without our life.

This is Edgar Allan Poe’s revision of the books of Genesis and Revelation.

What should the reader make of this? Sailors have everywhere and since time immemorial referred to their ship as ‘her’, and the portentious enclosure of the word in apostrophes conveys nothing in either information or analysis. As for the “almost remembered” images of the womb, instinctual knowledge, and unity before birth and after death—it is unnecessary to deny or criticize any of those notions, or the sermon about them, to point out that they have been associated with Poe’s story quite arbitrarily. Yes, wombs swell; but there are many other objects that do the same and that, in combination with one or more of the story’s images, might be wrought up into another metaphor equally convincing. In fact, the present reviewer has no doubt that he can compound of any story similar analogies, no less persuasive than Hoffman’s. And he can produce them in such numbers and implied contradiction as to drive the most enthusiastic Freudian to despair.

Let me close by citing one more of Hoffman’s utterances, possibly more instructive than the rest:

The scoundrel’s [Rufus Griswold’s] punishment is this: he is now known everywhere, if known at all, as the maligner of a helpless genius; whereas had he done his job honestly, he’d have won his proper modest niche among the footnotes by which the nearly forgotten are saved from total oblivion.

Yes, it is important to do one’s job honestly. In criticism, one should comment on the matter to be criticized and not one’s past, real or imagined. One should address the reader, and do it in one’s own person, not as an amalgamated ‘I’ to a troop of spirits. One should not psychoanalyze from guesses, employ baby-talk, or vaunt inanities and commonplaces in bloated and vulgar phrases—should not, in short, do as Hoffman does, but what he prescribes for Rufus Griswold.

Hoffman’s book is a mass of wheedling theatricality. I have called it uninformative, not because it is absolutely void of information but because he demonstrates no pronounced interest in informing the reader, and does much to obscure what he presents. And I have called it juvenile, although I might have called it infantile, for reasons that I hope I have already made unmistakably clear.

The twentieth century produced legions of dishonest, irresponsible and juvenile critics, and Hoffman is only one. Perhaps, too, their works should be accounted in some measure a consequence of the general disorders of the age—the world wars, new technologies, unsettling revisions of knowledge, etc. In fact, all this can be taken into account, and Hoffman’s faults can certainly be forgiven.

But the honest job of a critic is to indicate strengths and weaknesses. And when a writer cannot decide whether he wants to criticize, soliloquize, sermonize or square-dance, and does none well, I think I have the right to summarize it as juvenile and uninformative.