Edgar Allan Poe, the American fabulist, was a ferocious malcontent, who freewheeled towards self-destruction with the help of bourbon and doses of opium. From skid row to bedlam and back, it was a Faustian dissipation, but the heebie-jeebies got the better of him. He died in 1849 at 40, possibly from cholera or rabies, or a surfeit of peach brandy (his death, like his fiction, is murky).

Poe’s reputation rests on a handful of short stories that, for their supernatural grotesquerie and graveyard doom, foreshadow Stephen King and the “southern gothic” of Truman Capote. Compared to that of the blockbusting novelists of our age, Poe’s output was meagre. Yet his work continues to enthral. His greatest tales (The Fall of the House of Usher, The TellTale Heart, The Pit and the Pendulum) radiate a dark humour and mockery that strike an oddly modern note.

Poe is an ideal biographical subject for Peter Ackroyd, whose own fiction has a tinge of morbidity. He writes well on the supernatural chill in Poe and the alcoholic wreckage of his life. Poe is a difficult quarry for biographers. Not only could he make the wildest nonsense about himself credible, he encouraged others to add to it. (The first life of Poe, by John Henry Ingram, appeared in 1880 and was a hodgepodge of hearsay and fabrication.) Wisely, in Poe, Ackroyd has chosen to stick to the verifiable facts.

Poe was born in 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of travelling actors. At the age of one he became an orphan and was taken into the household of a Virginia-based tobacco exporter, John Allan. Poe’s nauseated vision of our mortality and his later, wild bouts of drinking are attributed here (not implausibly) to his orphan status and childhood experiences of “abandonment and loneliness”. For much of his brief life he was rude and excoriating about his foster father, and lashed out at others who extended a charitable hand; even close friends felt the acid bite of his ingratitude.

In 1817, aged seven, “Eddie” Poe was sent to boarding school in England. Sallow-faced and often miserable, he was a pupil at Manor House in Stoke Newington, then in the village-like boondocks of north London. (Years later, Poe evoked his Stoke Newington days in his doppelgänger story William Wilson, published in 1839.) At the University of Virginia, afterwards, he cultivated the air of a southern gentleman; debonair, floridly drunk and staunchly proslavery. He ran up immense gambling debts.

When Poe arrived in New York in 1831, after serving briefly in the US army, the city teemed with rat-infested rookeries and was known as the Big Onion for its reek of horse urine. Morphine, later used as a battlefield anaesthetic in the civil war, was obtainable, and Poe may have used it. He saw a holiness in going down the drain and, in sordid digs off Madison Square, lived on scrimpy pittances from journalism.

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1839), Poe’s first collection, revealed a Dürer-like imagination and gallows humour that thrilled readers. His necromantic imagination extended to stories of advanced neurasthenia, catalepsy and premature burial. However, he could be frightful in quite another sense of the word. The book was chock-full of flamboyant morbidity and embarrassing whimsy. Only when The Raven appeared in 1845 was Poe properly lionised as a writer. The poem, exuding a moony ghostliness and extraordinary musicality, became a salon favourite, whose dirge-like refrain “Nevermore” was uttered even by schoolchildren. Poe, the virtuoso taleteller, meanwhile lied that Queen Victoria had asked him to recite the poem before the royal family.

Poe’s young wife, Virginia Clemm, brought a degree of happiness into his blasted life. Indeed, Ackroyd surmises that the sexually timorous Poe may have found a mother-substitute in her. She became his long-suffering amanuensis and doting admirer and conceivably had some insight into his dipsomaniac self-delusions. Wretchedly, Virginia predeceased him by two years; tuberculosis carried her off in 1847.

Poe now seemed hellbent on self-destruction. And in October 1849, after attempting to board a train to New York, he was found slumped in a semi-coma in a Baltimore tavern; he died soon afterwards in a local hospital. His posthumous influence was enormous. In fin-de-siècle France he was seen as a displaced European whose writing aspired to a mystique of decadence and art for art’s sake. Baudelaire translated him into French and hailed him as the great “anti-American”. Baudelaire was wrong. Poe’s fictional detective, C Auguste Dupin (The Murders in the Rue Morgue), may have been French, but in other respects he was a thoroughly Yankee writer. His fiction hums with allusions to daguerreotypes, electrotele-graphs and calculating machines. European? Poe was a true heir of Benjamin Franklin.

Poe: A Life Cut Short is marred by passages of overheated prose (“His fate was heavy, his life all but insupportable”) and a dandified, purple tone. Otherwise, the biography admirably captures the heady mix of the esoteric, grotesque and thoroughly modern in Poe, America’s first poet of wormy circumstance and prince of morticians.

POE: A Life Cut Short by Peter Ackroyd
Chatto £15.99 pp170

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