The View from the Cheap Seats (28 page)

“Having a place the story starts and a place it's going: that's important.

Telling your story, as honestly as you can, and leaving out the things you don't need, that's vital.”

W
e are gathered here together so that I may tell you, and myself, several matters concerning Edgar A. Poe, “Edgar, a poet to a T,” as he once described himself, and the strange tales and poems by him that are here assembled.

I met Poe first in an anthology with a title like
Fifty Stories for Boys
. I was eleven, and the story was “Hop-Frog,” that remarkable tale of terrible revenge, which sat incongruously beside the tales of boys having adventures on desert islands or discovering secret plans hidden inside hollowed-out vegetables. As the king and his seven courtiers, tarred and chained, were hauled upwards, as the jester they had called Hop-Frog clambered up the chain, holding his burning torch, I found myself astonished and elated by the appropriateness of his monstrous revenge. I do not believe there were any other murders in
Fifty Stories for Boys
and certainly none with such a colorful and satisfactory cast, nor such terrible and appropriate cruelty.

Suddenly it seemed like Poe was everywhere. I discovered the Sherlock Holmes stories, and in the first tale, “A Study in Scarlet,” Holmes is found decrying Poe's detective Auguste Dupin—but decrying him in a way that made it very obvious that Dupin was Holmes's literary progenitor. Ray Bradbury's
story “Usher II” solidified my fascination; it's a short story (a hybrid, from Bradbury's
Fahrenheit 451
future set on the Mars of
The Martian Chronicles
) in which a set of bloodless critics and reformers of fiction, of fantasy, of horror, are walked around a house filled with tableaus of Poe's stories, and watch themselves murdered—by Pit and Pendulum, by murderous robotic orangutan, and so on.

And so, for my thirteenth birthday, I asked for and received a copy of
Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
. I have no idea whether Poe is an author appropriate for thirteen-year-old boys. But I still remember the deliciousness of the final bodily death of M. Valdemar, as he came out of his trance; I remember the thrill I took the first time I read “The Masque of the Red Death,” and Prospero's doomed attempt to continue the party, and that final, perfect sentence; I remember the tingle of delighted horror that prickled the back of my neck when I encountered the first words of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” as the narrator assures us that he is not mad, and I knew that he was lying; I remember wondering—as I still wonder—what insult Fortunato gave to Montresor that demanded that damp journey through the catacombs, in search of a cask of amontillado . . . That was thirty years ago.

Even today I return, time and again, to Poe: an audiobook of Poe's stories and poems read by Vincent Price and Basil Rathbone recently kept me company on a long drive from the Midwest to Florida. I found myself experiencing them in a way I never had before, treasuring the experience of driving through the darkness listening to the narratives of people suffering from morbid acutenesses of the senses, or the groaning of people “neither brute nor human, they are ghouls” and the throbbing of the bells they were tolling . . . “I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia,” said the velvet voice of the late Vincent Price, as I drove into Tennessee mountain country at
midnight, and I worried immediately for the sanity of our narrator, obsessed by a dead wife who was almost his mother, and who would return in the shroud-wrapped corpse of his second wife and in so doing cause me to miss my highway turnoff . . .

Edgar Allan Poe wrote poems, stories, criticism, journalism. He was a working writer who kept himself alive with his words, for much of his life supporting, as best he could, his wife, who was his cousin Virginia (he married her when she was thirteen; she died aged twenty-five, having spent much of her time with him dying), and her mother, Muddy. He was vain, envious, good-hearted, morbid, troubled and a dreamer. He invented the form we now see as the detective story. He wrote tales of horror and of dread which even the critics admit were art. He had trouble with money and with drink for much of his life. He died in poverty and in hospital, in 1849, after a final week in which we have no knowledge of his movements—in all probability a lonely drunken week.

While he lived he was America's finest writer, a poet and a craftsman whose work made him very little money, even as his poems, such as “The Raven,” were widely quoted, adored, parodied and reviled, while writers he envied, such as Longfellow, were far more successful, commercially. Still, Poe, for all his short life and unfulfilled potential, remains read today, his finest stories as successful, as readable, as contemporary as anyone could desire. Fashions in dead authors come and go, but Poe is, I would wager, beyond fashion.

He wrote about death. He wrote about many things, but death, and the return from death, and the voices and remembrances of the dead pervade Poe's work—like dramatist John Webster in Eliot's poem, Poe “was much obsessed with death. He saw the skull beneath the skin.” Unlike Webster, though, Poe also saw the skull, and could not forget the skin that had once covered it.

(“The death of a beautiful woman,” Poe wrote in an essay
on the writing of “The Raven,” “is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”)

People today still examine Poe's life, trying to use his life to illuminate his work: his actor parents—his father vanished, his mother dead by the time he was three; his strained relationship with John Allan, his foster father; Poe's child bride and her tuberculosis; his troubles with the bottle; his mysterious and early death (he was forty). The life, short, tangled, strange, becomes a frame for the work, giving it context, and supplying both unanswerable mysteries and a shape in which the stories and the poems wait for each new generation of readers to discover them.

And discover them we do.

The best of Poe doesn't date. “The Cask of Amontillado” is as perfect a tale of vengeance as ever was crafted. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a clear-eyed look through the eyes of madness. “The Masque of the Red Death” seems more relevant with every year that passes. The stories still delight. I suspect they always will.

Poe isn't for everyone. He's too heady a draught for that. He may not be for you. But there are secrets to appreciating Poe, and I shall let you in on one of the most important ones: read him aloud.

Read the poems aloud. Read the stories aloud. Feel the way the words work in your mouth, the way the syllables bounce and roll and drive and repeat, or almost repeat. Poe's poems would be beautiful if you spoke no English (indeed, a poem like “Ulalume” remains opaque even if you do understand English—it implies a host of meanings, but does not provide any solutions). Lines which, when read on paper, seem overwrought or needlessly repetitive or even mawkish, when spoken aloud reshape and reconfigure.

(You may feel peculiar, or embarrassed, reading aloud; if you would rather read aloud in solitude I suggest you find a secret place; or if you would like an audience, find someone who likes to be read to, and read to him or to her.)

For a long time, one of my favorite books-as-an-object has been a copy of
Tales of Mystery and Imagination,
illustrated by the Irish stained-glass artist Harry Clarke, with a passion and a madness and an intense sense of shadows and of the wrongnesses of angle and form that seem perfectly suited to Poe's nightmarish tales.

But then, Poe's stories will always cry out to be illustrated. They contain central and primary images, blasts of color, and maddening visual shapes (imagine: a black raven on the pale bust of Pallas Athena; the rooms of all colors but one in Prospero's doomed palace; the bottles and the bones in Montresor's catacombs; a single black cat in a wall, on the head of a dead woman; a heart beating beneath the floorboards—a tell-tale heart . . .). Pictures come unbidden as you read the tales; you craft them in your head.

Poe's stories—even his humorous tales, even his detective stories—are populated by amnesiacs and obsessives, by people doomed to remember what they desire only to forget, and are told by madmen and liars and lovers and ghosts. They are powered by what remains untold as much as by what Poe tells us, each of them split and shivered by a crack as deep and as dangerous as the fissure that runs from top to bottom of the gloomy house inhabited by Roderick and Madeline Usher.

For some of you this will be the first encounter with Poe, while others of you will be here because you already appreciate Poe's work, or because you treasure beautiful books, and beautiful poems. And still, and still,
“There is no exquisite beauty,”
as Poe reminds us, in “Ligeia,”
“without some strangeness in the proportion . . .”

From the introduction to the 2004 Barnes & Noble Deluxe Edition of
Selected Poems and Tales
by Edgar Allan Poe, illustrated by Mark Summers.

A
few days ago there was an article in the English newspapers which purported to show how badly history was being taught these days, or perhaps display the state of ignorance of history in Britain. In it we learned that many British teenagers believe that Winston Churchill and Richard the Lionheart were mythical or fictional, while over half of them were sure that Sherlock Holmes was a real person, just as they believe in King Arthur. Nothing was said in the article about Dracula, however—perhaps because he was not British, although the adventure that brought him to public consciousness was certainly British, even though the chronicler was an Irishman.

I wonder what people would have said if they had been asked, how many of them would have believed that there really was a Dracula. (Not the historical Dracula, mind, Vlad Dracula, the son of the Dragon, the impaler. He existed all right, although whether he shares anything more than a name with the real, as opposed to the historical, Dracula is debatable.)

I think they would have believed in him.

I do.

I first read Bram Stoker's book
Dracula
when I was about seven, having found it on a friend's father's bookshelf, although my encounter with Dracula at that point consisted of reading the first part of the story, Jonathan Harker's unfortunate visit to
Castle Dracula, and then immediately turning to the end of the book, where I read enough of it to be certain that Dracula died and could not get out of the book to harm me. Having established this, I put it back on the shelf, and did not pick up another copy of the book until I was a teenager, impelled by Stephen King's vampire novel
'Salem's Lot
and by
Danse Macabre,
King's examination of the horror genre.

(I watched the film
Son of Dracula
as an eight-year-old, though, wondering whether young Quincey Harker had, as I expected, grown up to be a vampire, and was disappointed to discover that the son was only Dracula himself, in the bayou, calling himself “Count Alucard,” a name that seemed fairly transparent even then. But I digress.)

Every so often, other books would send me back to reread
Dracula:
Fred Saberhagen's
The Dracula Tape;
Kim Newman's
Anno Dracula
. Books which would, by reimagining the events or the results of the novel, cast enough light on it to make me want to revisit the castle, the madhouse, the graveyard for myself, to lose myself in the letters and the newspaper clippings, the diary entries, and to wonder once more about Dracula's actions and his motives. To wonder about the things in the book that are, ultimately, unknowable. The characters do not know them, so neither do we.

Dracula
the novel spawned Dracula the cultural meme—all the various Nosferati, the movie Draculas, Bela Lugosi and the fanged throngs who followed him. Over 160 films, according to Wikipedia, feature Dracula in a major role (“Second only to Sherlock Holmes”), while the number of novels that feature Dracula himself, or Dracula-inspired characters, is impossible to guess at. And then there are novels that lead into or lead out of Dracula. Even poor, mad, bug-devouring Renfield has two prose novels named after him, by two different authors, not to mention a graphic novel, all telling the story from his point of view.

In the twenty-first century any encounter with vampire lit
erature or vampire tales is like hearing a million variations on a musical theme, and the theme began, not with
Varney the Vampire,
nor even with
Carmilla,
but with Bram Stoker and with
Dracula
.

Even so, I suspect that the reasons why
Dracula
lives on, why it succeeds as art, why it lends itself to annotation and to elaboration, is, paradoxically, because of its weaknesses as a novel.

Dracula
is a Victorian high-tech thriller, at the cutting edge of science, filled with concepts like dictation to phonographic cylinders, blood transfusions, shorthand and trepanning. It features a cast of stout heroes and beautiful, doomed, women. And it is told entirely in letters, telegrams, press cuttings and the like. None of the people who are telling us the story knows the entirety of what is actually going on. This means that
Dracula
is a book that forces the reader to fill in the blanks, to hypothesize, to imagine, to presume. We know only what the characters know, and the characters neither write down all they know, nor know the significance of what they do tell.

So it's up to the reader to decide what's happening in Whitby; to connect Renfield's rants and behavior in the asylum with the events that happen in the house next door; to decide what Dracula's true motives are. It's also up to the reader to decide whether Van Helsing knows anything about medicine, whether Dracula crumbles to dust at the end, or even, given the combination of
kukri
knife and bowie knife that, unconvincingly, finishes the vampire off, whether he simply transmutes into fog and vanishes . . .

The story is built up in broad strokes, allowing us to build up our picture of what's happening. The story spiderwebs, and we begin to wonder what occurs in the interstices. Personally, I have my doubts about Quincey Morris's motives. (The possibility that he is Dracula's stooge—or even Dracula himself—cannot, I am convinced, entirely be discounted. I would write a novel to prove it, but that way lies madness.)

Dracula
is a book that cries out for annotation. The world it describes is no longer our world. The geography it describes is often not of our world. It is a book that it's good to traverse with someone informed and informative by your side.

Les Klinger is both of those things. I first met Les Klinger, who is, in his daily life, a lawyer, at the annual dinner of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of people who, like 58 percent of British teenagers, are pleased to believe that Sherlock Holmes was indeed a real person. Mr. Klinger is best known for his work annotating the Sherlock Holmes stories: his knowledge of Victoriana, of crime, of travel, is remarkable. His enthusiasm is delightful and contagious; his convictions and discoveries are, of course, uniquely his own.

One of the remarkable things about Mr. Klinger's annotations is that they are illuminating whether or not you subscribe to the theories you will encounter here, of whether or not Dracula actually exists or existed, of whether Bram Stoker compiled and edited this book or whether he wrote it. Whatever you choose to believe, you will learn about Carpathian geography and Victorian medical theories. You will learn about the differences between the hardback and paperback editions of
Dracula
. You will be alerted to the wandering location of Shooter's Hill.

One of the drawbacks to reading editions of
Dracula
is they come, like this one, with introductions, and the introductions tell you how
Dracula
should be read. They tell you what it is about. Or rather, what it is “about.” It is “about” Victorian sexuality. It is “about” Stoker's presumed repressed homosexuality, or his relationship with Henry Irving, or his rivalry with Oscar Wilde for the hand of Florence Balcombe. Such introductions will comment ironically on Stoker's writing against pornographic books when there is so much that is sexual seething in
Dracula,
barely under the surface, text, not subtext.

This introduction does not presume to tell you what
Dracula
is about. (It is about Dracula, of course, but we see so little of him, less than we would like. He does not wear out his welcome. It is not about Van Helsing and we would happily see so much less of him. It might be about lust or desire or fear or death. It might be about a lot of things.)

Instead of telling you what the book you are holding is about, this introduction merely cautions you:
Beware.
Dracula
can be a flypaper-trap. First you read it, casually, and then, once you've put it away, you might find yourself, almost against your will, wondering about things in the crevices of the novel, things hinted at, things implied. And once you begin to wonder it is only a matter of time before you will find yourself waking in the moonlight unable to resist the urge to begin writing novels or stories about the minor characters and offstage events—or worse, like mad Renfield forever classifying and sorting his spiders and his flies, before, finally, consuming them, you might even find yourself annotating it . . .

My introduction to
The New Annotated Dracula,
annotated by Leslie S. Klinger, 2008.