3.
Anyone reading West en toto knows that his descriptions of women are less than pleasant. In point of fact, they’re brutal. Cast most often as shrews, temptresses, succubi and jades, the women of his novels are a distaff chorus of predatory energy, poised to strike. Though he was clearly a lover of the beauty and sensuality of women—again and again in his novels, women are described using striking tropes and phrases; some of his most ardent lyric sparkles are strewn at their feet—West seemed to fear their emotionality and power and rarely missed an opportunity to pour scorn on their intimacy with men: “She thanked him by offering herself in a series of formal, impersonal gestures. She was wearing a tight, shiny dress that was like glass-covered steel and there was something cleanly mechanical in her pantomime.”
Sex, in his books, is always an agon—either primitive and animalistic or the product of a killing combat between men and women: “Her invitation wasn’t to pleasure, but to struggle, hard and sharp, closer to murder than to love. If you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing yourself from the parapet of a skyscraper. You would do it with a scream. You couldn’t expect to rise again. Your teeth would be driven into your skull like nails into a pine board and your back would be broken. You wouldn’t even have time to sweat or close your eyes.”
In the following famous scene, West, who so often sketched women through the shorthand of an outstanding physical attribute, here achieves a reduction of woman to the pure immanence of the marine: “He smoked a cigarette standing in the dark and listening to her undress. She made sea sounds; something flapped like a sail; there was the creak of ropes; then he heard the wave-against-a-wharf smack of rubber on flesh. Her call for him to hurry was a sea-moan, and when he lay beside her, she heaved, tidal, moon-driven. … Some fifteen minutes later he crawled out of bed like an exhausted swimmer leaving the surf, and dropped down into a large armchair near the window.”
4.
An overmothered child, West eventually developed a gentleman-farmer persona composed of equal parts Ronald Firbank and Buffalo Bill Cody. This calculated public front concealed a fierce ambition: he burned to be successful. He wanted very much to be a big-time novelist, a kind of mitteleuropisch John O’Hara. This being the case, the indifferent popular reaction to his books was a crushing disappointment. After Miss Lonelyhearts, he tried his hand at A Cool Million, a burlesque of the Horatio Alger myth, and the book, not to put too fine a point on it, was a hash. Told in mock-heroic style, its satire was deflected by the jarring period diction and its story slowed by a mass of picaresque improbabilities. West had written it quickly, to capitalize on the very positive critical reaction to Miss Lonelyhearts (fans of which included Edmund Wilson, Dorothy Parker and Thornton Wilder). Chastened by the scathing reviews of A Cool Million, he tried to write some glossy magazine stories to make money and reestablish himself. These were rejected. With F. Scott Fitzgerald’s help, he applied for a Guggenheim, and was again rejected. Disgusted, he pulled up roots, moved to Hollywood and began working sporadically as a screenwriter, limning such classics of the genre as Five Came Back, I Stole a Million and Spirit of Culver. In the meantime, having long associated himself in a vague way with leftist causes, he continued to dabble in fellow-traveling. He published a Marxist poem in Contempo. He worked for the Loyalist cause in Spain. Gradually, he began the process of capillary absorption of the Hollywood milieu which would be parodied with such Westian verve in his next novel, The Day of the Locust.
Unlike Miss Lonelyhearts, The Day of the Locust is not a perfect book. A brilliantly acid portrait of 1930s Hollywood, it suffers from an ambivalence on the part of its author as to the extent of his own self-projection in its narrator, Todd Hackett. The character, a scene painter, remains too emotionally circumspect ever to come entirely alive. And though West’s studies of the human fauna of Hollywood are superbly drawn, the cast of the book lacks the deeper motivational wellsprings of those in Miss Lonelyhearts. They flicker slightly, like country lightbulbs. Nonetheless, West manages scenes of astonishing power. His honest depiction of what William Carlos Williams called “the real, incredibly dead life of the people” is balanced, as usual, with a kind of gloating interest in the vanities and cupidities of human desire and with a morbid fascination and disgust with sex and bodily functions, the essential venality of American life and the human cost of the dream factory called Hollywood. His gallery of Tinseltown grotesques speaks with voices which, in the words of Edmund Wilson, have “been distilled with a sense of the flavorsome and the characteristic which makes John O’Hara seem precious.”
The book, now considered a major American novel, was a flop at the time and, despite some good reviews, sold less than 1,500 copies. His publisher, Bennett Cerf, told West that The Day of the Locust was a failure for the simple reason that women readers—no doubt due to the violence with which they were depicted in the book—didn’t like it.
In 1939, West wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Somehow or another I seem to have slipped in between all the ‘schools.’ My books meet no needs except my own, their circulation is practically private and I’m lucky to be published. And yet, I only have a desire to remedy all that before sitting down to write, once begun I do it my way. I forget the broad sweep, the big canvas, the shot-gun adjectives, the important people, the significant ideas, the lessons to be taught, the epic Thomas Wolfe, the realistic James Farrell—and go on making what one critic called ‘private and unfunny jokes.’”
A little over a year later, while returning with his new wife from a hunting trip, West was killed in an automobile accident, leaving behind a single perfectly lit room in the house of American prose. He was thirty-seven.
Edgar Allan Poe. The Granger Collection, New York.
How to Tell a Lie, by Edgar Allan Poe
Joanna Scott
YOU WON’T BELIEVE IT! Remember those ladies who were massacred in an apartment in the Rue Morgue? Turns out they were killed by an orangutan! Yes, an orangutan, I swear, cross my heart! And speaking of hearts, that villain who murdered an innocent old man in his bed and buried him beneath the floorboards, he gave it all up because he thought he heard the muffled thumping of a beating heart drifting up through the planks! Which reminds me of the man who slaughtered his wife, walled up her corpse in the cellar and inadvertently sealed a live cat in with her! Wouldn’t you know, the cat started yowling, shrieking, wailing in triumph, in horror, right when the police were searching the cellar for evidence!
The things people do! The strange history of our species!
“So you say he overacts?” asks Angela Carter in her story “The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe.” “Very well; he overacts.” But who can blame him, given the family tendency toward histrionics? Edgar’s mother had “grease-paint in her bloodstream,” Carter writes. His father “was a bad actor who only ever carried a spear.” In Carter’s version, the infant Edgar napped in prop baskets and nursed in the green room and before he could speak learned about the secret mechanics of theatrical illusion—an intriguing explanation for Poe’s theatrical fiction.
But gee, he sure uses a lot of exclamation marks!
So what is the effect of Poe’s histrionics? What happens when an extreme predicament is punctuated with hyperbole, as in these lines near the end of “The Pit and the Pendulum”: “There was a discordant hum of human voices! There was a loud blast of many trumpets! There was a harsh grating as of a thousand thunders! The fiery walls rushed back!”
The more implausible the fictional claim the better, Poe seems to be proposing. His love of deception is apparent in the numerous accounts of visual disguise and verbal deceit that fill his fiction. But the most consequential deception in Poe’s lifetime might be found not in his fiction but in a newspaper article he penned. His famous Balloon Hoax of April 1844—a fraudulent account of a three-day balloon flight across the Atlantic Ocean—appeared anonymously in an extra edition of The New York Sun, and it was announced with a postscript filled with exclamations: “AST
OUNDING INTELLIGENCE BY PRIVATE EXPRESS FROM CHARLESTON VIA NORFOLK!—THE ATLANTIC OCEAN CROSSED IN THREE DAYS!!—ARRIVAL AT SULLIVAN’S ISLAND OF A STEERING BALLOON INVENTED BY MR. MONCK MASON!!”
Over 50,000 copies of the extra edition of The Sun were sold, thanks to Poe, who commented with obvious pleasure that the story caused an “intense sensation.” Describing the excitement in the square outside the Sun building, he included a revealing remark: “Of course there was a great discrepancy of opinion as regards the authenticity of the story; but I observed that the more intelligent believed, while the rabble, for the most part, rejected the whole with disdain.”
What I find so interesting here is not that Poe took pride in his deceit but that he so readily acknowledged the skepticism of “the rabble.” And this makes me wonder about the disguises of his fiction: do the histrionics, the many exclamations, the swooning, the frequent shuddering, the implausible predicaments, invite skepticism? Must we suspend our suspension of disbelief? Are we really supposed to pant in sympathetic terror, or should we read with an eyebrow raised?
Poe seems to have found in theatrical melodrama, with its Jacobean plots and exaggerated behavior, a trove for his imagination. Melodramatic techniques could accommodate extremes of passion, while Victorian notions of verisimilitude demanded nuance and volumes of detail; melodrama could move beyond the border of the plausible; melodrama didn’t turn up its nose at the exclamation mark. But in Poe’s gothic tales, melodramatic passages tend to be fortified—and complicated—by his unique brand of verisimilitude. Shrieks and moans provoke richly ambivalent introspection; terror is given an elaborate physical and psychological context.
In one of the most allegorical of Poe’s tales, “The Masque of the Red Death,” he spends most of the narrative setting the scene. He describes the color of the walls in the chambers in Prince Prospero’s secluded abbey. He describes the masks, the movements of the dancers and the expressions on the faces of the musicians. Eventually, the detailed description becomes in itself a subject for inquiry.
There was no light of any kind emanating from lamp or candle within the suite of chambers. But in the corridors that followed the suite, there stood, opposite to each window, a heavy tripod, bearing a brazier of fire that projected its rays through the tinted glass and so glaringly illumined the room. And thus were produced a multitude of gaudy and fantastic appearances.
Appearances lead and mislead the characters toward their fate. Narrative suspense is intensified not by events or actions but by the increasing instability of the imagery—images take on the status of hallucinations, and the festive dreaminess turns increasingly nightmarish.
Such visual uncertainty is often matched by psychological uncertainty—mysterious settings have their equivalents in secretive characters. In Roderick Usher’s house, for example, the “general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene.” Though the setting is motionless, the objects are “instable,” the narrator tells us. Instability is signified by decay, which is mirrored in the cadaverous, mysterious Usher himself. But the narrator is the source of the most intriguing mystery. He describes his first impressions of the house as “superstitious” but admits that his self-consciousness only heightens the sensation of terror—“Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis.”
One of Poe’s recurrent mysteries, then, is the mystery of the paradoxical law behind terror. The material world of the fiction is dressed up in grotesque imagery, which provokes in the characters a sensation of horror infused with self-doubt. For Poe, heightened emotion—call it histrionics—is never a simple exaggeration; it is the expression of a complex ambivalence. Poe locks his narrators in terrifying situations and then puts them to work explaining the mysteries of the mind.
I’m reminded of Freud’s distinction between reflection and self-observation. The reflective man “makes use of his critical faculties, with the result that he rejects some of the thoughts which rise into consciousness after he has become aware of them.” The self-observant man, on the other hand, “has but one task—that of suppressing criticism; if he succeeds in doing this, an unlimited number of thoughts enter his consciousness which would otherwise have eluded his grasp.” Poe’s narrators fall into both categories—some are selectively reflective, some are acutely observant—but the fiction always succeeds in revealing, directly or ironically, the critical thoughts. Even when a character attempts to dismiss his impressions as a dream or superstition, he won’t be able to escape the implications of those impressions. The dream will be dreamt, the narrator will be swept up into it, and the fiction, filled with painstaking detail, invites us to sympathize, to recognize our own potential for extreme emotion, to feel overwhelmed, as Poe writes, “by a thousand conflicting sensations” and to understand the paradox of terror.
Poe’s terrified characters become acutely aware of sensation, and often that intensified consciousness is thrown into confusion. The old man recounting his close encounter with death in “The Descent Into the Maelstrom” veers between vivid imagery and murky appearance. “The rays of the moon seemed to search the very bottom of the profound gulf,” he says, “but still I could make out nothing distinctly,” and in the description that follows he admits his confusion—he must have been delirious, he says. Yet in his delirium he attempted to calculate the velocity of the water as it rushed toward the foaming abyss. His language manages to be alternately precise and obscure, and the combination illuminates the complex force of consciousness as it struggles to control the predicament by making sense of it.
But the expression of confusion in Poe’s tales often has another effect: confusion undermines authority. If a narrator admits confusion, his whole account becomes doubtful. Narrative confusion provokes skepticism. “I fancied a ringing in my ears,” explains the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Fancied? This same narrator who asks “How, then, am I mad?” at the beginning of his tale demonstrates the answer as he boasts of his sanity. We don’t believe him when he assures us that he isn’t mad, and we’re left to piece together some sort of truth from his questionable version. His narrative begs for an incredulous reader.
We can learn something about distrust from Poe’s model reader, Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, proto-detective and inductive genius. Dupin is so dry, so polished, so skeptical, and yet he’s ready to believe anything, if necessary. He is the utterly rational, detached equivalent of Poe’s terrified narrators. Like the characters on the verge of death, he lets in the thoughts that the reflective mind has been conditioned to suppress. In “The Murders of the Rue Morgue,” he says of the investigating police that they have failed in their work because they are prepared only for an ordinary solution.
“They have fallen into the gross but common error of confounding the unusual with the abstruse. But it is by these deviations from the plane of the ordinary that reason feels its way, if at all, in its search for the true. In investigations such as we are now pursuing, it should not be so much asked ‘what has occurred,’ as ‘what has occurred that has never occurred before.’”
The extreme predicaments dramatized by Poe are just this: situations that have never occurred before. And their effect is to give rise to thoughts that have never occurred before, to stir the mind of the character, and ideally of the reader—and extend the potential of self-consciousness. Skepticism is useful to Dupin, but it takes an unusual form—he is skeptical of ordinary possibilities and so he can imagine beyond the ordinary, beyond plausible situations, and he can stretch his consciousness to solve an irrational crime.
There’s a passage in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym that provides us with a blueprint for Poe’s histrionics. Pym literally frightens someone to death. First he dresses up as the corpse of a dead sailor; he equips himself with a “false stomach” to mimic the swollen corpse; he puts on a pair of white woolen mittens and fills them wi
th rags; he has another sailor rub his face with white chalk, then he pricks his finger and splotches his face with the blood. When he gazes at himself in the mirror, he is so impressed with his disguise that he is “seized with a violent tremor” and has to look away.
But verisimilitude isn’t enough. What Pym needs, and gets, is a conjunction of circumstances, including a desperate group of mutineers, a storm and “an uncertain and wavering” cabin lantern. Without these details to enhance the disguise, Pym’s audience would likely retain, as he tells us, the remnant of suspicion. “Usually,” Pym reflects, “in cases of a similar nature, there is left in the mind of the spectator some glimmering of doubt as to the reality of the vision before his eyes; a degree of hope, however feeble, that he is the victim of chicanery, and that the apparition is not actually a visitant from the world of shadows.”
When Pym appears in his disguise to the mutineers, they don’t have the wherewithal to doubt what they see. The mate, in fact, takes one look at Pym and falls down dead. The others stare in “horror and utter despair.” Pym succeeds in evoking terror in its purest form, a triumph that necessarily eludes his author. Except for instances of his newspaper hoaxes, Poe’s deceptions fall one step short of Pym’s. Fiction necessarily falls short. Fiction is a masquerade, a trick, an illusion, and the more it asserts itself as fact, the more obvious the lie becomes—which is just what happens in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Poe casts Pym’s narrative as a factual history in disguise—Pym explains in his preface that he fears himself too coarse to write his own story, so he tells it to “Mr. Poe,” who writes and presents Pym’s story as fiction. And at the end of the narrative Poe offers one final twist, interrupting the fiction at its peak of terror because that’s where the unfortunate Pym supposedly left off his account.
Tributes Page 9