In going over ground likely to be familiar to the general reader, biographers often feel the need to buttress their presumption with a theory; if that theory can hint, no matter how vaguely, at some kind of 'reassessment', then all the better. The nervousness is understandable, but rarely can it have resulted in so eccentric a presentation of the material as in Symons's book on Edgar Allan Poe [The Tell-Tale Heart]. What we get is not so much a reassessment as a rearrangement, the manuscript being presented in two sections; first the life, then the works. Symons reasons that in few literary case histories has there been so marked a contrast between the bread-and-butter journalistic labours on the one hand, and the real creative achievement on the other, and that if we are to proceed in the conventional style, by taking a period of the life together with the works which appeared during it, we are likely to end up with a most misleading portrait; as Symons writes, it is the unconscious Poe who chiefly interests the twentieth century, but this was not the man his contemporaries saw.
I doubt the validity of the argument…. In any case, there is only ever one valid excuse for a biographer, and that is his ability to write well. This Symons does. I find his narrative as charming as his theory justifying it is specious. For those who know nothing of Poe apart from his development of the honourable trade of curdling the blood, much of the text will come as a surprise, especially an astonishing letter written by Poe in 1844, astonishing because it discusses such unUsheresque themes as umbrellas, veal cutlets and carpet slippers.
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