504
PAUL
ZIETlOW
the condescending nicknames, the self-indulgent confessions, the corn–
ball phrasemaking: "We'll meet
him
as Hoaxiepoe, as Inimitable Edgar
the Variety Artist, as Horror-Haunted Edgar, as ... but I'm getting
ahead of myself here"; "He was after all an acolyte of the Mistress of
Words, not a thane of the Master of Numbers"; "Poor, poor Eddie
Poe." In the spirit of Poe's fascination with doubles, the book has two
heroes, Poe the writer and Hoffman his critic, and the reader is expect–
ed to recognize the mysterious interpenetration of their spiritual destinies.
In Hoffman's words, "Edgarpoe wormed his way into my guts and
gizzard and haunted my brain and laid a spell upon my soul which this
long harangue is an attempt to exorcise." Hoffman presents Roderick
Usher's description as Poe's verbal self-portait, and tells us that "Poe,
too, had mused upon his image in a glass." Who else has seen his own
image as in a mirror? The dust jacket gives it all away. On the cover are
seven pictures of Poe (one for each Poe in the title), and on the back
is a single, larger portrait of Hoffman, a Poe without a moustache, the
same broad forehead and fine nose, the same peaks of hair over ears
and crown. Poe's height, writes Hoffman, was "my own stature exactly."
The reader may be put off by all this, and yet Hoffman comes very
close to earning the right to his audacious posturing. In preparing for
his climactic discussion of "The Fall of the House of Usher" by asking
repeatedly, at
key
moments in the book, "Why did Roderick Usher put
his sister living in the tomb?" Hoffman shows some of Poe's ability, here
adapted idiosyncratically to a critical work, to create effects of omi–
nousness and suspense. Hoffman asserts that the ingenious crimes of Poe's
tales can be solved only by people capable of committing them ; criminal
and detective are doubles. Discussing "The Gold Bug" in these terms,
he explicates the scene in which the treasure is recovered as a mirror
image of the scene in which it is buried, with Legrand and Captain
Kidd as spiritual and intellectual twins distinguished precariously from
one another by only a fragile difference in "moral equipment." He
speculates brilliantly and logically on the relationship in "The Purloined
Letter" between Dupin, the detective, and D- --, the criminal, and
comes to a chilling conclusion which transforms the story into a vision of
"hopeless love and savory horror and suicide." Flashes of insight such
as these tend
to
justify Hoffman's egotism: only a reader who is "Poe's
stature exactly" can uncover the concealed horror and threatening viol–
ence in these tales of "ratiocination." These are high moments in the
book, when the opposed but reciprocal imaginations of critic and author
