The real godfather of Gothic

The great American writer Edgar Allan Poe’s tales are spine-chillingly scary and his death is still shrouded in pathos and mystery – suitably horrifying stuff for Halloween

“. . .I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over all and continually increased. It grew louder – louder – louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly and smiled. Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God! – no, no! They heard! – they suspected! – they knew! – they were making a mockery of my horror! – this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! – and now – again! hark! louder! louder! louder! louder! – ‘Villains!’ I shrieked, ‘dissemble no more! I admit the deed! – tear up the planks! –here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart.”

Feeling nervous? A bit unsettled? As well you might. What exactly is down there under those floor boards? Why is the narrator hysterical? What has he done? As today is Halloween, who better to evoke an atmosphere of chill terror than the incomparable American Gothic master, Edgar Allan Poe, whose classic story The Tell-Tale Heartends in the above paragraph.

Perhaps it would be good to read the rest of the story; particularly should you be planning to spend the evening in the deserted house or ancient churchyard of your choice. Any stay, however brief, in a building known to be haunted possibly by a jilted young girl, or a murdered millionaire, or perhaps a person buried alive, always passes more interestingly should you be well primed by reading Poe, whose poem The Raven, which was published in 1845, continues to make each tiny creak on a dark night sound that bit more menacing.

Just as the speaker considers Nevermore, the ancient bird whose "eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming", Poe's work lingers in the imagination. His presence is there to be seen in Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Dostoevsky and Kafka, as well as Conan Doyle, must have read him.

In life, Poe was the tormented child of a sickly actress mother whose actor husband had abandoned her shortly before her death from tuberculosis. Psychological horror was the element he inhabited, yet he is also a pioneering force in the thriller genre as is evident from The Murders in the Rue Morguein which Auguste Dupin summons powers of deduction when faced with a mystery.

Edgar Poe was born in Boston on January 19th, 1809. Adopted at the age of four by the Allans – hence his middle name — a good-intentioned couple from Virginia, who didn’t know what they were letting themselves in for with a disturbed, obsessive child, Poe faced the added complication of being raised a Southerner without actually being one.

Still, it caused him to absorb that wonderful feel for the grotesque that belongs to that region’s prevailing sensibility. Flash forward 200 years to Baltimore, Maryland, earlier this month when a funeral procession led by a horse-drawn carriage carrying a coffin containing a life-sized recreation of his body retraced his final journey to the Westminster burying ground. There appears to have been close on 1,000 mourners. In 1849 only 10 people attended his first funeral and the brief ceremony, devoid of a sermon, lasted three minutes.

For all his fame in life as a writer, he died destitute on October 7th, in a hospital bed, having been found wandering the Baltimore streets, dressed in someone else’s clothes. Raving incoherently, it was suspected that he had been robbed and beaten. He was only 40, but looked much older. His inherited ill-health had been compounded by heavy drinking and opium, as well as the associated psychological pressure of gambling debts.

His life should not have gone so wrong. Having been unofficially adopted and brought to live in the South, he moved at the age of six with his foster parents who had also taken on his sister, to London, and spent two years at a boarding school. However the business venture which had brought John Allan to England failed and the family returned to Richmond. There, Poe continued his education and was tutored in the classics. In 1826, Poe, then 17, enrolled at the University of Virginia to study Latin and French. Academically he did well but his gambling led to a serious rift with his foster father, who had lost faith in him.

Poe left college and joined the army; he had by then begun writing poetry. At first he did well and rose in the ranks, eventually transferring in 1830 to West Point, where the disciplined life seemed to help him until yet again, his drinking resulted in disgrace and a court martial. Even worse was the discovery that John Allan had removed him from his will. All the while, however, Poe the poet was continuing to develop.

It is ironic that he saw poetry as his art, and treated his prose work as merely a quick income. The French poets Baudelaire and Mallarmé revered him as did Strindberg, Shaw and Yeats. Poe was not upset about having an ignoble departure from West Point; he welcomed it and continued to wear his regulation greatcoat. He moved in with his aunt and her daughter Virginia, whom he married, although she was only 13 years old.

Their family life was content and Poe had been appointed an editor of a local literary journal, the Southern Literary Messengerin which he was able to first publish Berenice. Grief struck in 1847, when Virginia, after several years of illness died from tuberculosis, aged 24. Poe's response was predictable, more binges. His fiction had begun to acquire a following but it also found critics, namely in his employers, who were uneasy about the dark content of his work. Establishing himself as a good critic, he also wrote some of his best stories including The Fall of the House of Usher in which he demonstrated his flair for evoking demented terror.

His life is a litany of disasters, dominated by alcohol, mental instability and scenes, including stalking various women after his wife’s death. It is interesting that although his work was never conventionally autobiographical, he certainly drew on its chaos and his own vivid experience of mental trauma. He understood turmoil.

Tonight, on this night of nights, when readers expect to be terrified, Edgar Allan Poe, an American artist possessed of European flourish, is an ideal companion; his bold surreal imagery, crazed narrative voices, pallid, haunted faces, dramatic use of repetition and his invariably, complex if plausible plots, set his apart. It is chilling to balance the sophistication of his work with the squalor of his death.

“Thy soul shall find itself alone

’Mid dark thoughts of the grey tomb-stone;

Not one, of all the crowd, to pry

Into thine hour of secrecy.”

(From Spirits of the Dead, 1829)

Think of his many narrators caught in a world of fear and menace, and then consider his own lonely journey through paranoia. So tonight is the time to sit down and read The Tell-Tale Heart which begins:

“True! –nervous –very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am: but why will you say that I am mad? The disease has sharpened my senses – not destroyed – not dulled them….I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?”

And so unfolds not the story of a perfect crime, but a sonata of realised Gothic horror.