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. ("The City in the amid the sarcastic advice of "How to Sea") Write a Blackwood Article": "[Main- tain] the tone transcendental . . . Put Probably "The City in the Sea" in something about the Supernal One- shows Poe—if he was not merely mock- ness. Don't say a syllable about the ing Christianity here—in a more dour Infernal Twoness." mood than usual. Normally he looked This "Infernal Twoness," which ex- to death not with the fear of Hell, but plains much of Poe's ridicule of his with the atheist's hope of eternal ob- Transcendental contemporaries, was livion at last; like Eliot's Phlebas, en- fundamental to Poe's conception of hu- viably dead and out of the waste land man nature. Again, it makes Poe our in "Death by Water," Poe's speaker— cousin, paralleling Eliot's various modes a corpse—in the following poem wel- of internal schism—animal fornication comed death as the only deliverer, the as against "an infinitely gentle, infinite- best physician after all: ly suffering thing," "dung and death" as against epiphanies in the rose gar- Thank Heaven! the crisis— den. Poe's Infernal Twoness is evi- The danger is past, And the lingering illness denced above all in his striking series Is over at last— of criminal heroes who, against their And the fever called "Living" own will, succumb helplessly to a blind, 206 THE UNIVERSITY REVIEW—KANSAS CITY irrational evil rising from within the one of the "indivisible primary faculties self, almost as if to provide case stud- . . . which give direction to the charac- ies for Sigmund Freud's conclusion that ter of Man." So, "with the tears stream- "the primitive, savage, and evil im- ing" from his eyes, and "with the bit- pulses of mankind have not vanished terest remorse," the speaker nonethe- in any individual, but continue their less hanged the cat, then killed his wife, existence, although in a repressed state, and—the spirit of perverseness having and . . . wait for opportunities to dis- no other victim to turn upon at last— play their activity," or for Carl Gustav finally doomed himself (like the speak- Jung's assertion that "we are always, er in "The Tell-Tale Heart") by dis- thanks to our human nature, potential closing his secret crime in the end. criminals."1 Even stronger in its editorial com- ment is "The Imp of the Perverse." "I Many of Poe's best tales take the am one of the many uncounted victims form of confessionals in which a crimi- of the Imp of the Perverse," says the nal speaker admits his crime—itself a speaker in this tale, who ascribes his perverse act against his own interests— act of murder to "that paradoxical and tries to justify himself by ascribing something, which we may call perverse- his own criminal potentiality (as Freud ness," which causes men to "act with- and Jung do above) to all humanity. out comprehensible object"—exactly as At first Poe's criminal hero is likely to in "The Tell-Tale Heart." As against be incredulous and baffled concerning the Christian and Transcendentalist his misdeed. The speaker in "The Tell- doctrine of the freedom of the will, Tale Heart," for example, cannot un- Poe's speaker insists that perverseness, derstand why he murdered the old man "under certain conditions . . . becomes —"Object there was none. Passion there absolutely irresistible. I am not more was none. I loved the old man. He certain that I breathe, than that the had never wronged me. He had never assurance of the wrong or error of any given me insult. For his gold I had no action is often the one unconquerable desire." force which impels us, and alone im- But the speaker in "The Black Cat" pels us to its prosecution. Nor will this offers vicarious explanation applicable overwhelming tendency to do wrong to all of Poe's bewildered criminals. for the wrong's sake, admit of analysis, This speaker—"noted for docility and or resolution into ulterior elements. It humanity ... of disposition," for "ten- is a radical, a primitive impulse—ele- derness of heart," and for being "es- mentary." pecially fond of animals" — suddenly Having made his victim a murderer, grasps the cat and cuts an eye from its the Imp of the Perverse cannibalisti- socket because "the fury of a demon cally turns upon his servant, who—but instantly possessed me." This demon he for the Imp's sadistic treachery—could named the "Spirit of Perverseness,"2 have safely rejoiced in the perfect ijung's statement appears in his book The crime. "It is inconceivable how rich a Undiscovered Self (New York, 1959), page 108. Freud's comment is taken from a letter dated De- sentiment of satisfaction arose in my cember 28, 1914, which appears in Ernest Jones's verseness" in Poe were stimulated by Mr. Joseph The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New M. Garrison Jr.'s fine article, "The Function of York, 1953-1957), II, 368. Terror in the Work of Edgar Allan Poe," Amer- 2Some of my comments on the "Spirit of Per- ican Quarterly (Summer, 1966), pp. 136-150. POE'S HOLLOW MEN 207 bosom as I reflected upon my absolute I was," the murderer tells his prospec- security," says the speaker in describ- tive victim. In thus showing forth the ing the years that passed before his spirit of sadistic revenge triumphant, abrupt conversion into a Raskolnikov: perhaps Poe himself was being perverse "One day, while sauntering along the with respect to conventional morality, streets, I arrested myself in the act of for these tales do clearly thumb their murmuring ... 'I am safe—I am safe nose at the Christian ethic of forgive- —yes—if I be not fool enough to make ness as well as proffer a caricature of open confession!'" poetic justice. Baudelaire would have Given the power of the Imp of Per- enjoyed this. versity, this bit of autosuggestion is Far and away the most hollow of enough to send the speaker to the gal- Poe's characters are the main figures lows, as, surrounded by a curious and in "William Wilson" and "The Man puzzled crowd of passers-by, he suffers of the Crowd," two of his most serious an irresistible compulsion to confess: and most craftsmanlike studies in per- "Could I have torn out my tongue, I verse psychology. The Man of the would have done it, but . . . then, some Crowd stands apart from Poe's other invisible fiend, I thought, struck me criminal heroes in that his crime—we with his broad palm upon the back. are never told what it is—is so un- The long-imprisoned secret burst forth speakably foul that he cannot even from my soul." Confession, tradition- seek the meager comfort of confession. ally thought good for the soul, sends "Now and then, alas, the conscience of Poe's sinners not only to death but also man takes up a burden so heavy in to damnation. "Consigned ... to the horror that it can be thrown down only hangman and to hell," Poe's speaker into the grave," Poe says at the outset ends his tale with a look into the abyss: of this tale. "And thus the essence of "Today I wear these chains, and am all crime is undivulged." here! Tomorrow I shall be fetterless!— The figure who embodies this es- but where?" sence of all crime, like one of Haw- In "The Cask of Amontillado" and thorne's morality play villains, mani- "Hop-Frog," the spirit of perverseness fests his depraved nature in a face ex- is more generous to its agent, in that it pressive of Satanic evil—"Retsch, had allows both Montresor and Hop-Frog he viewed it, would have greatly pre- to gain revenge with impunity. But to ferred it to his own pictural incarnations the victims of such revenge, the spirit of the fiend.... [It evoked] ideas of vast of perverseness is even less charitable mental power, of caution, of penurious- than usual, causing both the offending ness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, king and seven innocent counselors to of blood-thirstiness ... of intense—of be roasted alive by Hop-Frog's grand extreme despair." Like one of Haw- jest, and condemning Fortunate to a thorne's lost souls whose secret sin hideous death by starvation. The irony leads to total isolation, the Man of the is compounded by Fortunato's probable Crowd cannot communicate his ghastly innocence, Montresor's real motive be- secret; thus, his vain longing for human ing not justifiable revenge so much as communion becomes an incessant com- jealousy: "You are rich, respected, ad- pulsion to be with crowds, no matter mired, beloved; you are happy, as once how execrable in character. Proceeding 208 THE UNIVERSITY REVIEW—KANSAS CITY into viler and viler company with the narrator is very much the clinical an- deepening of the night—from clerks alyst, disappointed only that the crimi- and businessmen in the evening to nal king whom he follows—this "type gamblers, whores, and pickpockets in and genius of deep crime"—cannot the night hours—the man of the crowd yield up his secret to the dissector's scal- prefers any fellowship in any setting to pel. Whether the man of the crowd's the horror of solitude, to the sleuth- perversity or the narrator's is greater is narrator's wonderment: hard to tell. But in any case, we have It was the most noisome quarter of Lon- here a portrait of two hollow men, the don, where everything wore the worst im- one a lonely figure flitting from crowd press of the most deplorable poverty, and of to crowd in vain search for human con- the most desperate crime. By the dim light tact and the other, Poe's narrator, in of an accidental lamp, tall, antique, worm- somewhat the same role as Hawthorne's eaten, wooden tenements were seen totter- ing to their fall, in directions so many and seekers after the unpardonable sin. capricious that scarce the semblance of a passage was discernible between them . . . "William Wilson" is the culminat- Horrible filth festered in the dammed-up ing portrait of a hollow man, and one gutters. The whole atmosphere teemed with that is especially interesting for its auto- desolation. Yet, as we proceeded, the sounds of human life revived by sure degrees, and biographical overtones.3 To a striking at length large bands of the most aban- extent, Poe's own psychology seems doned of a London populace were seen reel- manifest in this study in schizophrenia, ing to and fro. The spirits of the old man in which a beastly id (the narrator) flickered up ... Once more he strode on- ward with elastic tread. battles the superego-conscience (the other William Wilson) for mastery of In a soul so lost and damned as this, the self. In his lengthy confessional, the so utterly alienated, we can readily see narrator reveals a set of values not by why Foe admired Hawthorne—especi- any means remote from Poe's own per- ally the dark side of Hawthorne that sonality. He displays a ludicrous snob- could create a Chillingworth or Ethan bery, for example, in expressing an Brand; we might also see in such a por- "aversion to my uncourtly patronymic, trait the shape of things to come, such and its very common, praenomen" (Poe as the alienated, solitary wretches of also affected to be a high-born gentle- Kafka or the speaker in The Waste man ), and an authorial fantasy of wish- Land who feels locked in solitary con- fulfillment may well be present in Wil- finement: "I have heard the key/Turn son's privilege of enrolling at Eton and in the door once and turn once only/ Oxford, two of the finest sanctuaries We think of the key, each in his of aristocratic breeding in the world. prison." To Eliot the missing key that Wilson confesses, moreover, an ut- could set the self free from its cell was terly amoral self-indulgence ("rooted sympathy; but Poe would not have 3Poe scholars do not agree as to whether his been interested. was really a life of dissipation. But even if Poe's alleged vices—drug addiction, gambling, drunk- It is typical of Poe's own perversity enness, and the like—are viewed more as Byronic that, unlike Eliot or Hawthorne, he was myth than as biographical reality, it still seems fair to say that some part of his personality was interested only in the psychological, sympathetically represented in certain of his not the moral situation of his protagon- criminal heroes. The evidence I have advanced toward such a reading of "William Wilson" is, ist. In "The Man of the Crowd," Poe's I believe, mostly beyond dispute. FOE'S HOLLOW MEN 209 habits of vice," "soulless dissipation," criminal hero, and so can report on the "delirious extravagance") which leads war within the self in a most convinc- to his expulsion from Oxford for cheat- ing way. ing at gambling. (Foe himself had been The imp of the perverse clearly dismissed from the University of Vir- holds the upper hand in this persona, ginia in December, 1826, for not pay- as witnessed in his confession of "my ing gambling debts.) Then, too, there ambition at Rome, my revenge at Paris, is Wilson's supreme arrogance and my passionate love at Naples, [and} willfulness: "As I advanced in years . . . my avarice in Egypt," but yet the ... I grew self-willed, addicted to the imp must work against the power of wildest caprices, and a prey to the most some mysterious opposition, as Foe's ungovernable passions . . . Thencefor- headnote admonishes—"What say {of] ward my voice was a household law." CONSCIENCE grim,/That spectre in (This state of bliss was in actuality ac- my path?" Although the other William corded Foe only within the privileged Wilson may have initially been an ac- sanctuary of his life with the two tually separate character, quite clearly Clemms, his wife and mother-in-law, the double becomes an emanation of whose idolizing devotion greatly salved the narrator's self as the tale winds on, the injustices of his public experience.) and realism gives way to surrealism, the Foe's literary enemies knew very well realm of psychic hallucinations. Re- the kind of caprice and ungovernable sentment at "his frequent officious in- passions which Foe attributed to Wil- terference with my will" back in board- liam Wilson. Foe further gave William ing school, coupled with the awareness Wilson the life of romantic odyssey— that "his moral sense . . . was far keener in Paris, Rome, Vienna, Moscow, Egypt than my own," was the first identifica- —that he sometimes claimed as the tion of the other William Wilson with truth of his own experience, perhaps in the speaker's own conscience, and the his fervent imagination really believing other's voice, congenitally reduced to a that he had, as he stated, fought in "very low whisper," sufficed to ap- Greece and been jailed in Russia. Fi- proximate the still small voice of con- nally Foe even saw fit to bestow on the science. two William Wilsons his own birthday, By the time the double arrives on the January 19, and a birth year, 1813, scene to interrupt first the narrator's that in later years he claimed as his drinking orgy, then his cheating at own, apparently unwilling to admit the cards, and ultimately his cuckolding of truth of advancing age. Foe was actu- the Duke DiBroglio, it is clear that the ally born in 1809- other William Wilson is a product of What makes "William Wilson" par- the narrator's diseased mind, a figment ticularly absorbing as a story is its in- of his tortured conscience perversely terior point of view; no longer is a mas- conspiring to divulge his machinations. ter in evil—like the Man of the Crowd Realistically, there can be no such or Prince Prospero in "The Masque of stranger as the narrator describes, hav- the Red Death"—viewed and described ing super powers of divination; surreal- by an outside observer. Here, through istically, however, the intruding strang- a sympathetic act of imagination, Foe er could be any chance passer-by upon has occupied the inner mind of the whom the narrator—usually "wildly ex- 210 THE UNIVERSITY REVIEW—KANSAS CITY cited with wine" at this point—might self, Poe's characters were the true hol- project his own ungovernable compul- low men of their time, bespeaking, it sion to confess his secret guilt. seems reasonable to say, a parallel spir- itual condition in their creator.4 The outcome of this war within the If anything, Poe was more of a hol- self is self-destruction. Looking into "a low man than Eliot, since he never large mirror"—a traditional gesture of experienced the development toward introspection—the narrator sees that in Christianity detectable even in Eliot's his frenzied effort to plunge his sword earliest poems. The pining for "an repeatedly into the breast of the hated infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering double, he has actually bloodied his thing" that is wiped away with a scorn- own features, and he hears his adver- ful laugh in Eliot's "Preludes"; the sary say, no longer in a whisper but in mixed scorn and envy that Gerontion the narrator's own voice, "bow utterly feels towards Christians taking com- thou hast murdered thyself." Here Poe munion in various countries ("to be implies what Freud would later state, eaten ... to be drunk/Among whis- that the true way to heal a split per- pers; by Mr. Silvero/With caressing sonality like William Wilson's is not hands, at Limoges . . . By Hakagawa through suppression or destruction of ... by Fraulein von Kulp"); the Chris- either of the warring elements, for tian commandment to give, sympathize, neither the id on one side nor the con- and control which Eliot smuggled into science on the other can be simply re- the Waste Land via the back route of nounced out of existence; the claims of Buddhism; the lips that "Trembling each will be pressed and heard. The with tenderness . . . would kiss/Form only adequate resolution of the split is prayers" in "The Hollow Men"— all through compromise, the precarious these foreshadowings of "Ash-Wednes- tension and balance between contend- day" have no parallel in Poe's world of ing parts of the self by which a day to unrelieved madness and anxiety. day survival of both may continue. Probably for this reason Poe shows This seems a modern psychology in- the two directions Eliot's work would deed, especially for an American swell- have taken if Christianity had not en- ing with Transcendental pride in what tered the picture. Without Christian Emerson called "the infinitude of the moral and metaphysical order, Eliot private man." But it is quite clear that would (like Poe) have evinced an in- Poe, with his psychotics and criminal creasing sense of mental breakdown, heroes, his maddened and fear-ridden such as we see in the form and sub- cripples of the soul, had little inter- stance of "The Waste Land" and "The course with the popular thinking of his Hollow Men," and likewise he would own time. Though rooted technically in (like Poe) have turned inward to the the Gothic tradition, his work looked 4The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (a name ahead to the bleak and bleary world of whose sound and rhythm suspiciously resembles Kafka and Beckett and the early Eliot. that of Edgar Allan Poe) provides a novel-length study of Poe's hollow man. As James W. Cox Hagridden by metaphysical despair points out in "Edgar Poe: Style as Pose" (Vir- concerning the outer universe and ginia Quarterly Review, Winter, 1968), the name driven to depravity by the spirit of per- "Pym" is an anagram for "Imp"—the Imp of the Perverse, who motivates Pym's mutiny, treach- verseness within the inner sanctuary of ery, murder, and cannibalism. POE'S HOLLOW MEN 211 relatively modest consolations afforded ranged by the despair and dissipation by the palace of art and the pretensions that followed the death of Virginia of snobbery. Clemm in 1847. Eureka seems in any Because Poe never had access to case a curiously contradictory docu- Eliot's genuinely first-rate education, he ment, insisting on the fact of "inevit- could not, like Eliot, demonstrate true able annihilation" (as Allen Tate ob- erudition in esoteric languages and cul- served) while yet maintaining that "all tures, but Poe staunchly faked a bril- is Life" in the end. liant education all the same, quoting Whatever Eureka may mean, the Poe (or inventing) obscure Arabic writers that has lived and endured, so as to grip of antiquity or instructing us in the the imagination of men like D. H. Law- latest astrophysical breakthrough as the rence, Baudelaire, and Allen Tate, is occasion demanded. Similarly, Poe was not the Poe of a belated Transcendental too poor to enjoy the life of the well affirmation. Rather, it is the Poe who, born gentry, as Eliot the Boston blue during the great flush of the Transcen- blood, in his ancestors could and did, dental era, gave America a literature but Poe nonetheless despised the great structured upon the Infernal Twoness, American rabble of Andrew Jackson's its tone set by the Imp's sardonic grin, ascendancy with as lordly a contempt as its mood by Death looking gigantically Eliot ever mustered against the Swee- down. Eight decades later T. S. Eliot neys and Bleisteins passing by his was to launch a similar attack upon the bank's window. In short, Eliot and Poe genteel Victorianism that held sway in had much in common—at least with his formative years, and his revolution respect to psychology and theme—up would succeed partly because the times to the time that Christianity reached would prove Poe to be our cousin, his out to pluck Eliot from the burning. pessimism justified by what our science Not believing in Christianity, the and history would divulge. best Poe could do to parallel Eliot's es- In his essay "From Poe to Valery," cape from the waste land was to in- Eliot said "one cannot be sure that voke, in his final work Eureka, a per- one's own writing has not been influ- sonal endorsement of that Transcen- enced by Poe," and it is true that dental philosophy which he had spent through Baudelaire, Mallarme, and much of his literary life attacking and Valery, who all spoke of Poe as a liter- mocking. "Bear in mind that all is Life ary ancestor and who did influence —Life—Life within Life," says the con- Eliot considerably, some influence of cluding statement of Eureka, which Poe may have descended to Eliot him- seems a strange affirmation indeed self, especially in the way of deploying from the man who gave us such studies mood and metrics. in morbidity as "The Masque of the But Eliot did not seem to recognize Red Death," "The Fall of the House the true intellectual affinity that makes of Usher," and "The City in the Sea." Poe his spiritual ancestor; his most re- It could be, of course, that Poe actu- vealing paragraph dismisses Poe's in- ally did get religion at the last mo- tellect as a case of arrested develop- ment; or it could be, as some authorities ment: "That Poe had a powerful intel- have maintained, that Poe's last work lect is undeniable: but it seems to me was the product of a mind seriously de- the intellect of a highly gifted young 212 THE UNIVERSITY REVIEW—KANSAS CITY person before puberty. The forms which upon. his lively curiosity takes are those in In short, the infernal twoness in both which a pre-adolescent mentality de- men posed a brighter side: as against lights: wonders of nature and of me- the spiritual vacuum within, Poe and chanics and of the supernatural, crypto- Eliot each found strength in a sense of grams and cyphers, puzzles and laby- humor—something Eliot thought sadly rinths, mechanical chess-players and lacking in D. H. Lawrence and Thomas wild flights of speculation .... There is Hardy. But it is not just or useful to just that lacking which gives dignity to evaluate Poe's intellect or his beliefs the mature man: a consistent view of on the basis of the merely playful or life. An attitude can be mature and con- commercial pieces, especially since Poe's sistent, and yet be highly sceptical: but poverty forced him to do a good deal Poe was no sceptic." of hack work. Written when Eliot was sixty, this In his core of serious writing, Poe's paragraph focuses on the fun and games intellect was no less developed than element of Poe's work, ignoring the Eliot's own, no less mature, consistent, serious ideas of the sort evidenced in and sceptical (to use Eliot's terms) this paper. It is as though we were to concerning the large and permanent judge Eliot's intellect by the Possum issues of human nature and man's fate. mask of his cat poetry. Certainly Eliot's Neither a Boris Karloff nor an Alfred own well-known penchant for doing Hitchcock, Poe was quite seriously, as crossword puzzles illustrates the fact Mr. Tate said, "our cousin." His hollow that it is not only the preadolescent men, consigned in their ultimate des- mentality which delights in crypto- tiny to the Conqueror Worm and pre- grams and cyphers, puzzles, and laby- cariously fending off the Imp of Per- rinths, and Eliot's sober dignity as versity in the here and now, have good church warden and literary elder states- reason and excellent credentials for man did not prevent the Tom Sawyer joining voices with damned souls in in him from embarrassing his guests the works of Eliot, Kafka, and other with cushions that farted when sat such apostles of a modern inferno.