Images courtesy Catherine Baab-Muguira
Edgar Allan Poe merely wanted to be loved, and is that so wrong? Except he made getting to know him difficult and living with him nearly impossible. And in his problematic personality, contends Richmond author and journalist Catherine Baab-Muguira, can be found keys to his success, and perhaps yours, too. In her lively “Poe for Your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History’s Least Likely Self-Help Guru,” (Running Press, $18), Baab-Muguira parodies a genre while giving Poe healthy credit for his unhealthy lifestyle. The book is vigorously illustrated by Javier Olivares with a blending of humor and the macabre.
The release of the unlikely guide is from 6 to 8 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 7, presented by Fountain Bookstore at The Poe Museum. The festivities will include the New Orleans-flavored musical stylings of The Ham Biscuits.
With us, Baab-Muguira discussed Poe’s looking for love in all the wrong places and his ability to create across many forms of writing despite (or out of spite toward) almost everything otherwise going wrong.
Richmond magazine: You give a list of some of the worst criticisms lobbed at Poe, past and present. Why all the hate?
Catherine Baab-Muguira: High academia sneers at Poe. … He’s an incredibly complex writer with an amazing range. The people who put down his work, I think, miss a big point. He’s satirizing gothic literature and journalists of the day and satirizing his own heroes. His stories use satire, but all the pain is real. He’s not only making a joke but presenting irreducible psychological truth that rings years later.
RM: Poe was not "born into the vast material worth" he felt he deserved. Thus, he wrote like his life depended on it — because it did. If, say, John Allan had left him some kind of nest egg, what do you suspect that Eddie would've done with the rest of his life?
Baab-Muguira: Growing up as he did, an orphan and ward of the Allans, being somewhat of an outsider, he wanted to be a genius gentleman scholar who never had to bow and scrape to the demands of the marketplace. His juvenilia is pretentious nonsense; he’s fopping around all over the place, but then he started writing for [the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond]. When you adapt your work for the market, sometimes it becomes much better. If he’d managed not to have worked for a living, I don’t think we’d remember much of what he wrote.
He became a pro at the Messenger. He learned how to meet crushing deadlines and developed writing discipline. His critical judgments have held up, especially his assessments of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Charles Dickens. The stuff he lambasted hasn’t lived on except that he lambasted it. Goes to show that trolling is nothing new.
RM: You confront how Poe, a white man from the pre-Civil War South, didn't broach the subject of slavery, nor, it would appear, did he think much of representative democracy.
Baab-Muguira: He grew up with the Allans, who owned slaves. He lived most of his professional life, though, in the North. We don’t really know what Poe thought about slavery, and with that I side with Terence Whalen. As a working writer, Poe couldn’t wade into the greatest controversy of his day at the risk of alienating himself [even more to] the editors and public. Poe was a genius in a rare sense, yet the greatest horror of his time isn’t in his writing. What can we say about our capacity to contend with the moral atrocities of our own age? The easiest thing it’s probably accurate to say about Poe is that he was not an abolitionist but also that he wasn’t upholding the institution single-handedly.
The more you poke into the issue of political graft in his day, the worse it gets. The government was incredibly corrupt. And even some of Poe’s friends were aggrieved that they didn’t get on the government gravy train.
RM: You contextualize events between his life and literary output and in particular how he came out of the death of his cousin and wife, Virginia. Between her long illness and decease, probably from tuberculosis, that's what finally put Eddie over the edge.
Baab-Muguira: Friends recalled theirs as a warm and loving, doting relationship. It’s horrendous what happened to them. She dies in January 1847 and he in the fall of 1849, which is maybe 20 months, and oh, what a train wreck.
About the marriage, it’s a misconception that Poe, who’s 27 marrying a 13-year-old, was not unusual at the time. It was. He fudged her age to friends, said she was 15. Yet as a matter of course he was not a rapacious guy who preyed on young women. Not motivated by some dark desire there.
He never recovered from Virginia’s death, though he tried starting other romantic relationships with people who were possibly crazier than him. Or maybe he deliberately sought women who were unavailable. And his own health was beginning to fail.
RM: Yet out of this despond, he writes “Eureka!” in which he assures us that there are parallel universes, among other physic insights offered by a 19th-century poet and essayist.
Baab-Muguira: I love “Eureka!” It’s a galaxy-brained space opera that he wrote in the depths of a nervous breakdown. He thinks he now understands every particle of creation through revelation. He interrogates the entire universe to explain his grief. His grasp on science is much more questionable than some believe. That he’s discussing the theory of the multiverse is, in my opinion, overblown. The metaphysics in the last pages, though, are beautiful.
RM: Poe was an "imp of the perverse," a calculating jokester, a proto-troll, a lover of puzzles and promoter of mysteries. He changed his biography and outright lied. And he allowed fiction to be published as, well, fake news. Yet people love their Poe. Is there something, in all that, after all, which is admirable?
Baab-Muguira: My reaction is, what’s not to love? That sort of behavior is way more common with writers. And even with nonwriters, we present the most curated aspect of ourselves on social media. And self-promotion is necessary if you’re trying to gain the status Poe sought. You and I and everybody else knows he really was a hero. Yes, his instincts were as perverse as it gets. Yet it worked for him. He was a man who successfully generated PR for himself. The scale of his achievements and persistence in the face of his own flaws and his contributions to the culture, though, outweigh his perceived defects.
