The New Lifetime Reading Plan

objected also to my other notion (also not uniquely held) that Gogol in one of his moods—for he did not have a coherent sys­tem even of prejudices—was in this book expressing a certain dissatisfaction with the Russian feudal system. But it is also true—this is Nabokov's emphasis—that Dead Souls is a demonic book, as well as a funny one. It does have a night- mare, almost a surrealist, tone. Usually likened to Dickens [77], Gogol is even more akin to Poe [75]. That Dead Souls can please me as well as Nabokov may have exasperated Nabokov, but furnishes at least some slight evidence of the variety of GogoPs appeal.

At any rate, this is a fascinating, almost madly vivid, loosely composed yarn about a great, bland rogue and his traveis through what seems, to a mere American, a real, if heavily cari- catured, early-nineteenth-century Rъssia. Its laughter is min- gled with melancholy—the poet Pushkin, after listening to GogoPs reading of the first chapter, sighed, "Lord, how sad is our Rъssia."

I cannot command the original, but nonetheless dare to recommend one translation, and one only. It is by Bernard Guilbert Guerney. It just sounds right. The others have a stiff- ness foreign, I am told, to GogoPs spirit.

C.F.

75

EDGAR ALLAN POE

1809-1849

Short Stories and Other Works

Poe may not rank among the greatest writers, but he ranks among the unhappiest. He has become a symbol of unappreci- ated genius.

His life was made up of misfortunes, some caused by lack of understanding on the part of his contemporaries, and many caused by his own disastrous inheritance and weaknesses. The child of wandering actors, he was brought up as the ward of a prosperous merchant with whom he quarreled as soon as pos­sible. His education, at the University of Virginia and West Point, was interrupted by his talent for delinquency. He mar- ried his thirteen-year-old cousin, and her early death may have been the deciding factor in his ruin. His first volumes of poems were not noticed. He was a capable journalist but mismanaged what might have turned into a successful career. He engaged in desperate, immature, incomplete love affairs. Drugs, alco- hol, overwork, poverty became the staples of his life. He died in utter wretchedness. Of ali the writers we have met or shall meet, surely he was the most miserable. Even the bitter Swift [52] for a time enjoyed the company and praise of his equals. Poe never did.

Poe's verse has always been popular, and in France it was for a time much more than that. Probably ali that is worthwhile can be read in half an hour. The rest sounds thin and affected today, though Poe was better than "the jingle man" Emerson [69] called him.

But his tales, monologues, and some of his criticai essays, despite infuriating faults of style, retain their interest. His mind was neither powerful nor balanced—but it was original, running creatively counter to the rather insipid thought of most of his American contemporaries. James Russell LowelPs famous estimate may not be too far from the truth: "Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge."

What is most notable in Poe is that he either pioneered or originated half a dozen fields. With his three tales "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter," and "The Gold Bug," he not only invented the detective story but practically exhausted its possibilities. The critic Howard Haycraft credits him with laying the fornos complete founda­tion and then goes on to name ten elements of the modern detective story, ali to be found in Poe. Similarly Poe blazed the trail leading to what is now called science fiction. His theories of "pure poetry" influenced the important French symbolist movement of the latter part of the nineteenth century, and so affected the great modern poet Yeats [103]. Poe defined and illustrated the tale of single effect. In his strange and morbid stories we find many anticipations of modern psychology, including the motif of the death wish and that of the split per- sonality (see his remarkable "William Wilson"). Poe's prevail- ing moods of desolation and isolation set the tone for much writing of our own century. Finally, for ali his faults, he was our country's first important literary critic, generally making his judgments on a broad base of first principies.

Many of today's critics see in American writing two major strains that sometimes intermingle. The first is optimistic, practical, democratic. The second is pessimistic, guilt-laden, aristocratic, and deeply involved with the heart^ darker con- cerns. The latter tradition found its first notable figure in Poe, and that is why he is more than a mere writer of gruesome romantic tales.

C.F.

76

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

1811-1863 Vanity Fair