Poe: A Life Cut Short

Miss Lemon was just browsing some reviews of Poe: A Life Cut Short (2008) by Peter Ackroyd, (after the fact of reading it, as she is often wont to do) and finds she must agree with at least one critic, who acidly observes that this could be resubtitled: A Book Cut Short.

Not that Miss Lemon intends any unkindness toward Mr. Ackroyd, whose tale  The Lambs of London, for instance, held her in utter thrall. It's just that she couldn't fight the feeling of disappointment that trailed her like a ball of lead as she slogged through the pages of this lithe and airy looking biography.

The problem, it seems, is that barely any life at all is breathed into the American poet and master of the macabre.

The biography begins promisingly enough -- and with Miss Lemon's favourite, a mystery:

On the evening of 26 September 1849, Edgar Allan Poe stopped in the office of a physician in Richmond, Virginia -- John Carter -- and obtained a palliative for the fever that had beset him. Then he went across the road and had supper at a local inn. He took with him, by mistake, Dr. Carter's malacca sword cane.

From there, Poe set out for a steamboat to Baltimore. It was the last time anyone would see him or officially account for his whereabouts. That is, until six days later, when he was about to meet his death.

With so much potential, it's a pity the biography doesn't continue in this arresting and mysterious vein. But what follows seem more like scattered vignettes and snippets of Poe's disappoinments and disgraces. What Miss Lemon longed for -- but did not find -- were the portraits of Poe as a writer. What, she wanted to know, fueled Poe's creative fire? How did he work?

Indeed, the way Mr. Ackroyd tells it, it's difficult to imagine Poe ever setting pen to paper at all, occupied as he was in getting himself dismissed from West Point, engaging in inappropriate love affairs, nursing his consumptive relations, running up debts, insulting his colleagues, getting sacked from various offices, and hitting up erstwhile friends and relations for the loan of $10 or more.

Poe's 1841 story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," credited as one of the first modern detective stories, is scarcely given a passing mention. But perhaps, this being a brief biography, there simply wasn't room. Even so, Miss Lemon noticed bits of repetition in the narrative -- one of her pet peeves, to be sure, and evidence of her notion that perhaps this biographical endeavor was put together in too much haste.

But all is not lost for Mr. Ackroyd's tribute to Poe. For what it did do was send Miss Lemon back to what she views as two of the greatest contributions to American lyric poetry: "The Raven"  and the stunningly onomatopoeic "The Bells." For that, she isn't sorry.

The Name of Annabel Lee

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we --
Of many far wiser than we --

Like that Old Bailey Hack, Horace Rumpole, Miss Lemon sometimes finds it restorative to quote a bit of poetry when faced with a puzzling set of circumstances. Certainly so must have Julian Symons, the creative mastermind behind a string of great whodunits, including The Plot Against Roger Rider, The Blackheath Poisonings and The Name of Annabel Lee.

For Mr. Symons's poetry professor turned sleuth (the excellently named Dudley Potter), however, the life and creative works of Edgar Allan Poe turn from a scholarly pursuit into something a bit more sinister.

Dudley Potter, like countless academics before him, had given up on love when he meets, seemingly by chance, the aptly named Annabel Lee Featherby. In a blink, the pair end up living together in their inevitable 'Kingdom by the Sea' ... and then things go terribly wrong.

Dudley wakes one morning to discover a vicious hangover and a note on the mantlepiece. His love envied by the angels above is gone. With nothing more than the clues in Poe's work to go by, Dudley tries to find her. His quest, not surprisingly, reveals more closeted skeletons than even Poe can lay claim to.

So, my dear readers, if you like poetry and mystery, and the two twined together, there's little doubt you shall like The Name of Annabel Lee.

Interestingly, Mr. Symons seems to have a bit in common with his protagonist. He was a poet and literary critic of some renown, as well as the founding editor of Twentieth Century Verse, a London-based poetry journal that rivaled New Verse in its heyday. He was also, like his fictional protege, a visiting professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts, and, not ironically, the 1961 and 1973 recipient of the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award. He was the 1982 MWA grandmaster.

Mr. Symons departed this earthly realm on 19 November 1994.