The Open-Heart-Surgery Theory of Writing

For Halloween last week, in their contribution to the weekly around-the-Web Poetry Friday, the folks at the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog offered up Poe’s weird — and kind of forced — “Ulalume” (full title “To — — –. Ulalume: A Ballad”).

The ensuing discussion got me thinking once more about Poe — “once more” because it seems to be a topic my thoughts revisit every few years. (My favorite book about Poe is Daniel Hoffman’s Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (yes, seven Poes); the picture at the right is by Anita Kunz, from the cover of the cover of the 1985 paperback Vintage Books edition.)

Here’s Poe laying out a challenge for writers, in a passage often quoted — especially by writers:

If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own — the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple — a few plain words — “My Heart Laid Bare.” But — this little book must be true to its title.

(This is from “Marginalia — Part X,” in the January 1848 issue of Graham’s Magazine. Poe was 38 at the time, verging on 39.)

Note the (dripping with irony, if not blood) echo of this passage in Red Smith‘s popular “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein,” and likewise Gene Fowler‘s similar but less often quoted, “Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”*

Less often quoted is the follow-up paragraph:

Now, is it not very singular that, with the rabid thirst for notoriety which distinguishes so many of mankind — so many, too, who care not a fig what is thought of them after death, there should not be found one man having sufficient hardihood to write this little book? To write, I say. There are ten thousand men who, if the book were once written, would laugh at the notion of being disturbed by its publication during their life, and who could not even conceive why they should object to its being published after their death. But to write it — there is the rub. No man dare write it. No man ever will dare write it. No man could write it, even if he dared. The paper would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery pen.

Like much of Poe, this is at once thrilling and ho-hum stuff. Bunkum, but of a peculiarly Poe-esque sort, capable of stirring the pulse of ambition in a writer’s (especially a young writer’s) soul.

It’s bunkum because it seems to imply something like I don’t know about YOU, o reader-who-aspires-to-authorhood. But I myself write with these principles in mind all the time. I may fail, but I am always baring my heart. It’s tempting to read this passage and think, “Baring your heart, eh? Sure you are, Eddie. Sure you are. Your pages may not shrivel and burn but yeah, okay, they’re smokin’. They smolder. Whatever you say.”

Then you point to Poe’s three major bodies of work — his poetry (which he gave up fairly early), his short stories, his criticism — and you notice that above all, Poe’s books are weird, sui generis things.

So is Poe saying that he himself is weird, uniquely weird at that?

No. Poe isn’t saying that at all.

His work may be twisted but I can’t believe Poe ever wanted us to think of him that way. He’s a man of reason, damn it! He argues furiously, rationally, sometimes faux-rationally. He writes not just tales of terror but of “ratiocination” — detective stories, featuring the genius Dupin. He composes page after page of complex theories of writing. He wants us to think of him as anything but weird, creepy, tortured.

But the point is:

He is weird and creepy. He does writhe on the page, working out on paper the torments of… well, not of his life’s actual events, but of his heart. Maybe he never sealed anyone up in a crypt in a wine cellar. Maybe he himself never lay down by the side of a dead lover, let alone did so every night. But he almost certainly knew, without “knowing” it, the ways in which such godawful personalities’ minds must work, because he himself suffered staggering blows to his soul throughout his life.

His work was twisted, without his meaning it to be, because Poe himself had gone through the wringer and come out twisted.

Somewhere in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I think, there’s a line which goes something like, “You want to know how to paint like Picasso? Just live Picasso’s life — and then paint naturally, without trying.”

(Jorge Luis Borges’s story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” tells of a fictional French author who tries to do this with Cervantes — to duplicate his the great man’s experiences exactly, sit down to write a novel and then… out would come a perfectly translation into French of Don Quixote. Didn’t work for him, either — not entirely, although he does manage a couple of chapters.)

That’s what I believe was going on with Poe. He had all these daring theories about letting the heart and soul run free in one’s writing, fiery, explosive, blasting the readership into wonder. He may even have tried — and succeeded, sometimes — to do this consciously in his own work.

But in the background when he picked up pen and ink and set them to paper, working the marionette strings, there was no Dupin; there was no sober clear-eyed interpreter of other authors’ (let alone his own) work.

There was instead an older and quite invisible version of the boy abandoned by his actor father, who watched his mother and step-mother die of consumption; the teenager whose stepfather — suddenly wealthy from an inheritance — treacherously disinherited Eddie, despite the latter’s reports of living homeless and hungry on the streets; the young man who — after being booted from West Point for certain features of his dissolute lifestyle — married his thirteen-year-old cousin and watched her, too, die spitting blood; the older man whose work was frequently rejected, who could not get paid adequately, who fought with critics and editors, who sneered at fellow writers, who, who, who…**

Poe was a glorious wreck. Other than in disguised form, you won’t find details of his life in his stories and poems. But oh yeah: there, all right, there beneath the floorboards, echoing still in our ears a century and a half later, lay bare his beating arrhythmic heart.

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* Sheesh. All this about opening your chest and baring your heart, blood-letting, blood-sweating — if these guys were right, who’d bother ever writing more than a few words?

** Don’t believe all you think you know about Poe’s lifestyle — the addictions and drunkenness, for example. Much of that was fabricated and spread about by the wicked Rufus Wilmot Griswold, a former “friend” of Poe’s and a magazine editor and anthologist. In a final painful twist of the knife in Poe’s painful life, upon the latter’s death Griswold claimed to be his literary executor. Unchallenged in this assertion, he proceeded to do what we’d now call a character-assassination job on the deceased — using forged documents and the like to back up his claims. Nice, eh?