Meyers's book is a quick read, not necessarily good or bad, but there it is. He also has a few quick jabs at his subject and I think he treats the alcohol part of Poe's life as the most important.
Silverman's literary analyses drive me nuts. Sometimes a double "L" is just a double "L" and not a reference to Allan! Autobiographical readings are sometimes great ("The Cask of Amontillado" is, I think, definitely a reference to Poe's literary battles) but the Freudian stuff is over the top. But, yes, I agree that there is some salvation in Silverman's book because it is so well organized (chapters even have date ranges in their headings for easy skimming) and the biographical details and facts are presented much more accessibly than Quinn.
Has anyone read Daniel Stashower's The Beautiful Cigar Girl? I've heard mixed reviews.
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It was night in the lonesome October, of my most immemorial year.
Well, I've only read two Poe biographies, so I'm not going to attempt to answer the question.
However, I did just finish Silverman's biography last week. I do agree that he doesn't seem to like Poe. (Or, at best, he is so eager to not appear worshipful to Poe or excuse any of his failings that it comes across as the same thing.) In fact, I got the impression that, while he thought Poe was a great editor, he didn't think he was much of a literary innovator. He seemed to save his highest praise for Poe's invention of the detective story with "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". At times, I wasn't sure why he even bothered to write the bio given that he didn't seem to think much of his subject or his work.
Because he did go to a lot of work. I thought he gave a lot of material -- especially on Poe's family -- in a very readable and organized style. I found it much more informative than Quinn's more sympathetic bio. (Though I agree that the footnotes are unusually horrible in Silverman's book.)
Granted, when he talked of Poe's works, he mostly was interested only in the alleged reflections of Poe's life, but I found some of that material interesting especially the similarity between Poe's early poems and those of his brother and the circumstances behind two of my favorite Poe works, "The Cask of Amontillado" and "The Domain of Arnheim". He restricts most of his Freudian readings to the appendixes and footnotes though he did have the silliness of trying to find scrambled versions of "Allan" in various character names and titles. (The key, you see, is those double a's and l's. Maybe Poe, particularly sensitive to sounds, just liked the sounds associated with those two letters.) The worst example of this was claiming that "Ulallume" was an example of this. While he likes "Rue Morgue" as starting a genre, he gives short shrift to "Melonta Taunta" and "The Case of M. Valdemar" as proto works of science fiction.
On the other hand, I think Silverman made a good argument for two great themes in Poe's works: fearing and honoring the memory of the dead and the frequent existence of characters who literally and symbolically cross and recross the boundary between death and life.
Admittedly, I only skimmed Meyers' book once, a couple of years back, but it struck me as just an abridged version of Silverman's, but thankfully with less of the psychoanalytic malarkey. Hardly the worst Poe book out there, but nothing very memorable.
Oh, and while we're on the subject of bad Poe bios, I realize I had forgotten to mention the queen of them all--Susan Talley Weiss' "Home Life of Poe." Mother of God.
When Weiss' book first came out, John H. Ingram published an anonymous review of it in a British magazine that nearly caused an international incident.
I agree: Silverman hated his subject, as did Krutch - who I think sincerely didn't understand why people fought against Griswold. Though I haven't read Bonaparte's book, I quickly put it aside because psychoanalytic readings are silly to begin with (and any scholar who uses that method has to admit that; I've written a paper using that style of reading and made sure to say that I don't think this, but psychanalytic criticism says so).
What do people think of Jeffrey Meyers's book, Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy?
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It was night in the lonesome October, of my most immemorial year.
My first instinct is to say "all of them," but if I have to narrow it down, I'd put Hervey Allen's "Israfel" at the top of the list. It's full of inaccuracies, crammed with some of the most lurid assertions this side of Rufus Griswold, and written in the style of a particularly half-witted potboiler. Plus, the blasted thing sold like hotcakes in the 1920s and 30s, so it was scarily influential.
Other particular stinkers are Wolf Mankowitz's "The Extraordinary Mr. Poe" (if read right before mealtimes, it makes for an excellent appetite suppressant,) Philip Lindsay's "The Haunted Man," Marie Bonaparte's "The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe," Joseph Krutch's "Edgar Allan Poe" (those last two are the ones who introduced to the world the notion that Virginia was retarded and Poe impotent,) and David Rein's "Edgar A. Poe: The Inner Pattern."
I didn't think much of Silverman's book, either. Too much dopey pop psychology, plus he had a lot of sloppy mistakes and misleading statements. Not to mention one of the worst footnote arrangements I've ever seen in a biography.
I think it may be the Silverman biography, because Silverman seems to hate his subject. Silverman describes Poe in the worst possible light and it's straight from the testimony of Mr. Dunn English (who hated Poe during this testimony) and Silverman simply footnotes it without providing any clue to the reader the source of the unflattering description. This is one thing I particularly remember. Silverman drips disdain for Poe.
In an effort to spark discussion and debate, I pose the open-ended question: What is the worst Poe biography? "Worst" could be due to inaccuracy, poor writing, negative influence, etc.
Consider, for example, Kenneth Silverman's book, Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance. For facts and figures and general biography, it's solid and packed full of information. However, Silverman - who earned the Pulitzer Prize in Biography prior to this book - makes some strange assessments of Poe's work, often linking everything to mommy and daddy issues ("Annabel Lee," he says, is a clear reference to "John Allan," for example) and often presents Poe in the most negative light he can, occasionally presenting his opinion of Poe's low merit as a human being as a categorical fact. It is still, however, a solid biography as far as dates, facts, figures, etc. But, keeping in mind this negative taint and that it has been in print continuously since 1991, it is incredibly influential as an "intro" to Poe. Because of this, could it be the worst Poe biography?
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It was night in the lonesome October, of my most immemorial year.
