Spring Number, 1969
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The UNIVERSITY REVIEW A Publication of THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT KANSAS CITY (Formerly The University of Kansas City Review) Spring Number, 1969 Short Stories NORMA KLEIN THE GREY BUICK MYRON TAUBE SAUL CARL MAYFIELD A FAMILIAR TALE MICHAEL RAFFERTY THE VOICE OF A YOUNG WOMAN Poetry JUDITH LARUE LARRY RUBIN MELVILLE CANE DOROTHY LEE RICHARDSON PHILIP ALLAN FRIEDMAN - Articles» ,. t WALTER R. MCDONALD . WINESBURG OHIO.- TALES OF ISOLATION ALANBARR, . "G. B. S." THE SELF-CREATED PERSONA E. SAN JUAN JR JOYCE'S "THE BOARDING HOUSE" JOSEPH P. O'GRADY . CONGRESS AND ITS ABILITY TO DECLARE WAR VICTOR STRANDBERG POE'S HOLLOW MEN ROBERT C. JOHNSON . RODERIGO, THAT "POOR TRASH OF VENICE" JEAN M. HUNT . DENISE LEVERTOV'S NEW GRIEF-LANGUAGE II VOLUME XXXV MARCH, 1969 NUMBER 3 Poe's Hollow Men VICTOR STRANDBERG ORE than most writers, Edgar last philosophical essay, Eureka. What Allan Poe has been many things Mr. Tate's essay implies, in fact, is M to many people. To Joseph what I should like to establish more Wood Krutch he was a neurotic whose definitely in this paper—that Edgar stories are comprehensible only in the Allan Poe was America's first full- light of their author's presumed sexual fledged hollow man. impotence. To N. Bryllion Fagin the I chose T. S. Eliot's phrase quite de- tales were merely the harmless subli- liberately, because the parallels between mations of a would-be actor, Poe hav- Poe's and Eliot's thought are surpris- ing been thwarted in his desire for the ingly precise and extensive. As we re- stage by his foster father's bourgeois member, the reasons why Eliot's men moralism. Poe's works are, in fact, emi- are hollow are twofold: moral deprav- nently actable—Boris Karloff even ity and metaphysical despair, as evi- made a movie of "The Raven" in 1935. denced in the animal sexuality or "the To D. H. Lawrence, Poe was pri- profit and the loss" in The Waste marily a writer of macabre love stories Land and the atheism of The Hollow which Lawrence considered fearsome Men. With the Christian past extant excursions into "the horrible under- only in Eliot's sense of damnation and ground passages of the human soul." with a classical antiquity useful only To Baudelaire, Poe was a beloved fel- to provide mock-heroic satire on Pru- low dabbler in Satanism, a lonely frock and Sweeney, the two traditional American nurturing his own flowers sources of spiritual strength had, for of evil with admirable mockery of the Eliot, come to ruin. The same is true of philistine moral code during those Poe. great heydays of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. To any number of gen- Thanatos alone was Poe's true God. eral readers, moreover, Edgar Allan At the end of "The Masque of the Red Poe stands out as the Alfred Hitchcock Death," it is not Christ but Death of his day, a master Gothicist with no whose coming is compared to that of serious purpose beyond the entertain- a thief in the night, and not God but er's desire to weave a perfect spell. Death who is the final sovereign lord Perhaps Poe was all of these things of all: "And now was acknowledged and more, depending upon which of the presence of the Red Death. He had his works one is reading, but I believe come like a thief in the night . And the most pertinent assessment to date Darkness and Decay and the Red Death has been Allen Tate's "Our Cousin, held illimitable dominion over all." In Mr. Poe," in which Mr. Tate argues case we should think these Biblical that Poe's work is peculiarly modern echoes unintended, a look at one of (making him our cousin) because of Poe's poems "The Coliseum" confirms his lack of a moral center and because more explicitly the relative promi- of his fear of "inevitable annihilation," nence of Christ and Nada in Poe's implicit in the tales and explicit in his thinking: 204 THE UNIVERSITY REVIEW—KANSAS CITY Silence! and Desolation! and dim Night! results are so grotesque as to suggest I feel ye now—I feel ye in your strength— mockery of either the Christian hope of O spells more sure than e'er Judaean king Taught in the gardens of Gethsemane! resurrection or the Transcendental be- lief in the infinite magnitude of the The possible Shakespearean echoes human will. Ligeia probably ridicules in "The Masque of the Red Death" are, the latter notion, since it begins with a like the Biblical, ironic. The Prince's typically Emersonian affirmation as its name, Prospero, and his flight to a headnote: "Who knoweth the mysteries pleasure dome away from the pesti- of the will, with its vigor? For God is lence may evoke memories of The but a great will pervading all things by Tempest, but quite clearly Poe's imag- nature of its intentness. Man does not ination of what it is like to be dead in- yield himself to the angels, nor unto volves more of the grisly underground death utterly, save only through the than the magic undersea, the fatten- weakness of his feeble will." ing worm taking precedence in his The dying Ligeia decides to put this mind's eye over any pearls that once Transcendental doctrine into practice were eyes. Thus, in a romantic elegy after her husband quotes "The Conqu- called "The Sleeper," Poe jars one with eror Worm" to her—"O God! O Di- an unromantic realism: vine Father! [perhaps Poe mocks Chris- tianity as well as Transcendentalism My love, she sleeps! Oh, may her sleep, here}—shall these things be undeviat- As it is lasting, so be deep! Soft may the worms about her creep! ingly so?—shall this Conqueror be not once conquered?" The resurrection, The Conqueror Worm makes God when it comes, is so ghastly that even his food in a more famous poem, where- her pining husband calls it "a hideous in "Mimes, in the form of God on drama of revivication," a demon vam- high," (Stanza 2) succumb to the pirism by which Ligeia's spirit returns worm as quickly as human flesh does: to occupy the cadaver of another wo- man. And in Madeline Usher's case But see, amid the mimic rout, the return from the tomb serves only A crawling shape intrude! to widen death's embrace to brother, It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs house, and all. Rather than reawaken The mimes become its food . (Stanza 4, to such a dubious afterlife, one might "The Conqueror Worm") think better of resigning one's will to the Conqueror Worm after all, as Poe's If the form of God on high must suffer prayer in "The Sleeper" supplicates: such indignity, little wonder that hu- man life, "that motley drama" which I pray to God that she may lie ends when "the curtain, a funeral pall, / Forever with unopened eye, Comes down with the rush of a storm," While the pale sheeted ghosts go by! is at best "the tragedy, 'Man,' " at worst Like Eliot after him, Poe found a source of food for worms. Christianity a source not of strength, but of damnation. Poe's various narra- The few times when the human will tors, nearly all of them criminals and does undertake what Hemingway was sinners, seem to share the unease of the to call a rebellion against death, the criminal hero of "The Black Cat," who POE'S HOLLOW MEN 205 states that he hanged the cat "because Is conquered at last. I knew that in so doing I was commit- And no muscle I move ting a sin—a deadly sin that would so As I lie at full length— jeopardize my immortal soul as to place But no matter!—I feel it ... even beyond the reach of the I am better at length. ("For Annie") infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God." So the "trag- If Poe's hollow men are truly better edy, 'Man,'" as Poe called it in "The "at length," suggesting parallels with Conqueror Worm," having "Much of Eliot's metaphysical despair, another Madness, and More of Sin, / And Hor- reason for despair might be Poe's sense ror the soul of the plot," is not ended of internal depravity, his fear of an when the funeral pall rings down the overwhelming beast within the self. If curtain after all; an unpleasant surprise even Thoreau, who proclaimed the hu- may yet be in store for the puppets act- man will to have godlike infinitude, ing out the "motley drama." Hence, in could admit to "an animal in us, which Poe's version of death's kingdom, the is ... reptile and sensual, and perhaps City in the Sea, the dead are awakened cannot be wholly expelled" (Wolden, from their funeral sleep to receive a Chapter XI, "Higher Laws"), we fuller and final damnation: should not be surprised that Poe would see this animal self looming more But lo! a stir is in the air! largely—an animal self that, battling The wave—there is a movement there! against the recoil of the conscience, de- The waves have now a redder glow— livers Poe's characters to self-betrayal The hours are breathing faint and low— and destruction in tale after tale of the And when, amid no earthly moans, Poe canon. Perhaps Poe's most succinct Down, down that town shall settle hence, description of this divided self appears Hell, rising from a thousand thrones, Shall do it reverence.