POE'S LETTERS AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY
sympathetic but sometimes impertinent biographers and critics equipped
with straws from the "new knowledge." To parody
I.
A. Richards on
psychological studies: In 10,000 years, if all goes well, we might expect
t
at this level) to know a good deal about Poe.
Fortunateiy, Dr. Ostrom's splendidly
edited
and elegantly printed
edition
of Poe's letters has reduced the term of
waiting.
Few general
readers
will,
perhaps, have been familiar
with
the old edition of the
letters emanating from the University of Virginia
in
1902, but Mr.
Arthur Hobson Quinn
in
his authoritative but critically inept biography
of Poe, published in 1941, incorporated a large number of Poe's letters
in his text, and therefore the figure of Poe which emerges from Dr.
Ostrom's two volumes will not be altogether a surprise to anyone who is
likely to read them. But Poe speaking for himself entirely (with the
exception of the useful little explanatory notes with
which
Dr. Ostrom
follows each of the 333 letters
included
here) is surprisingly revealing.
The contrapuntal development of skilled wiliness and naivete that runs
through these letters as a whole, leaving a thousand vulnerable gaps
to any unfriendly
critic
willing to accept such advantages, is aston,ish–
ing. Offhand I can think of no parallel among the letters of
American
or English writers, although there are a few of Poe's letters (the group
to John Allan, for example) whose tone evokes in the reader some–
thing of that pain he must feel on reading Baudelaire's letters to his
mother. In certain respects both men seem to have h ad an unhatched in–
telligence and sensibility, grown to remarkable maturity
in
a shell too
strong to be cracked from the inside, and which could be broken from
the outside only with fatal results. Such personalities are not likely to
be pleasant, and only by indirection can they be helpful
in
anyone else's
human development. But their indirections are often powerful in their
suggestiveness, and the,ir unpleasantness is seldom deliberate.
Letter 48 (as numbered by Dr. Ostrom) is to Poe's aunt, Maria
Clemm, and begins: "My dearest Aunty, I am blinded with tears while
writing this letter-I have no wish to live another hour ... you well
know how little I am able to bear up under the pressure of grief. My
bitterest enemy would pity me could he now read my heart-my last
my only hold on life is cruelly torn away-I have no desire to live and
will
not."
A few weeks later, the mood intensified, he writes to the
amiable John P. Kennedy, who had been kind to him (letter 50): "I
am wretched and know not why. Console me-for you can. But let
it
be
quickly-or it will be too late. Write me immediately. Convince me that
it
is
worth one's while-that it is at all necessary to live, and you will
prove yourself
indeed
my friend. Persuade me to do what is right. I do
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