POE – A LIFE CUT SHORT
Peter Ackroyd Chatto & Windus NZ$50

I reviewed this on Radio NZ National this morning but we ran out of time for me to say all I wanted toi say so here are my full notes for your interest.

Edgar Allan Poe had a short and decidedly grim life and Ackroyd begins his quite brief biography with his death and the mystery surrounding it. In September 1849 Poe left Richmond for Baltimore and was found six days later slumped in a semi-coma in a Baltimore tavern. He died shortly after in a local hospital. He was just 40 years of age.

First though I should say a little about both the author and his subject.

Peter Ackroyd was born in 1949,100 years after the death of Edgar Allan Poe, and he has a formidable reputation as a writer of both fiction and non-fiction. You’d call him a literary historian perhaps.
He has written biographies of Chaucer, Dickens, Shakespeare and TS Elliot, among others, as well as the city of London and the Thames; he has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (Chatterton), he has won the Guardian Fiction Prize (Hawksmoor), the Whitbread Award for both fiction (Hawksmoor) and biography (TS Elliot).
So he is a hugely successful, major contemporary British writer with 300,000 plus Google entries. One should say his success has been from both commercial and critical points of view.

Edgar Allan Poe on the other hand was an American poet, short-story writer, editor and literary critic who was writing in the first half of the 19th century, really before there was a market of any significance there for professional writers. He is best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, the supernatural, and some people see similarities between his writing and that of Stephen King. He is also credited with having invented the detective-fiction genre and having contributed to the development of the science fiction genre. He was one of America’s first professional writers.

But he mostly had a miserable old life. He was born Edgar Poe in 1809. His parents were travelling actors, his father deserted his mother soon after Poe’s birth, and his mother died from tuberculosis when he was two at which time he was taken into the home of John & Frances Allan. This is where his second Christian name came from. His foster mother also died from tuberculosis and thereafter the relationship between Poe and his foster father was a tumultuous one.

He was sent off to school in England when he was seven years of age. Later he went to the University of Virginia, but dropped out before completing a degree, he then joined the army briefly, before attempting to earn a living from his writing. He married a young cousin, Virginia Clemm, which brought some stability to his life. She eventually died, also of tuberculosis, two years before he did.

As I said at the outset it was a pretty grim sort of life not helped by his bouts of alcohol binging, and use of drugs. He worked in various cities on the eastern seaboard, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Boston among them. He seemed to spend his life moving on, seeking work and a better life,

He published poetry and short stories, his poem The Raven brought him some literary success, he worked on a number of magazines both literary and mainstream being both admired and reviled for his literary criticism with tended to be on the mordant side.
This made him quite controversial and earned him speaking engagements but sadly he never earned enough to lift him out of his almost always dire financial circumstances. Someone estimated that in 20 years he earned less than $400 from his writing.

So this biography is a somewhat bleak story, it has to be of course in order to reflect the subject’s life, but it is well told apart from a couple of small pieces of rather purple prose which somehow escaped the editor’s pencil.
I guess you would enjoy this book if you are an admirer of Poe’s writing, it will also be of interest to authors and to publishers, especially those who publish literary magazines. But I wouldn’t be rushing out to buy a copy otherwise. This is one to borrow from the library.