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Poe: A Life Cut Short

A great writer and drinker

Peter Ackroyd
Chatto, 170pp, £15.99,

Sam Leith

Wednesday, 23rd January 2008

Sam Leith on Peter Ackroyd's latest book

There was once an interesting, if rather anti-literary, essay written on John Berryman’s Dream Songs by an alcohol counsellor, in which he read the poems as the pathological emanations of an alcoholic consciousness: their content as, more or less, symptoms. So he pointed out, for example, that the ‘Song’ in which Henry wakes up convinced he’s murdered somebody (‘Nobody is ever missing’), is a classic alcoholic anxiety dream. I don’t doubt you could do something similar with Poe.

So much of Poe’s life is lost in the blackouts. The details of a row involving two of his female admirers are too plural and too obscure to be unravelled: ‘somewhere in the welter of claim and counter-claim there was a genuine imbroglio’. His final disappearance — a literary mystery most recently addressed in Matthew Pearl’s scholarly fiction The Poe Shadow — is unlikely ever to be explained.

In the end, though much-mythologised, Poe’s short and wretched life — he died at the age of 40 — is less interesting than his work. This deft, lively summary seems to me to dispatch it at exactly the right length. At damn near 10p a page, though, anyone whose finances resemble Poe’s would be best off waiting for the paperback.

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Rev. Garet Aldridge

January 25th, 2008 12:16pm

May I also strongly recommend "Private Perry and Mr. Poe" by the late and heroic Major William F. Hecker? This tome gives wonderful insights into the poet's West Point years and, perhaps, further explanation of the discipline with which he wrote.

James Jeffrey Paul

January 25th, 2008 5:55pm

Poe's genuis and influence on so many aspects of the literary arts can't possibly be overstated. I look forward to reading Mr. Ackroyd's book on Poe--he's a master of his own art (the biography).

Robert Coates

January 25th, 2008 7:43pm

The concluding paragraph seems to sum it up - if this is the most interesting fare on offer, best to stick to the work itself (which is hardly mentioned in this review at all)

Laurie

January 26th, 2008 3:38am

Extraordinary art comes as often from extraordinary lives as from extraordinary talent. It seems strained personal relationships, sexual oddity, substance abuse and financial desperation, in various combinations have powered a majority of literary talent from (at least) Swift, through Dostoevsky to Joyce and Behan. Perhaps that is why so much of the modern fiction produced by graduates of all those creative writing courses, while often interesting and well crafted, appears to lack something essential. The concept of suffering for your art is out of fashion (well in the West at least, pace Promoedya Ananta Toer et al.)