In Rough Country Read Free Page A

not because they are “politically correct” or adhere in any way to shifting political/cultural sentiments.
    Poe suffuses my fiction, in particular my “Gothic” fiction,in the way that Lewis Carroll suffuses my fiction, as a kind of distant model, not an immediate predecessor. Once in a playful/surreal mood, I wrote a story titled “The White Cat,” included in my Gothic fiction collection Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1994)—the very obverse of Poe’s famous story “The Black Cat”—for in my story, the female triumphs over the male; in Poe’s story, the male triumphs over the female, at least temporarily. And how appropriate it seemed to me, when writing my long quasi-historical novel My Heart Laid Bare (1998), a post-Modernist Gothic saga about a purely American family of confidence-men and-women, to preface it with this enigmatic quote from Poe, in 1848:
    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 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 …. No man 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.
    Has any writer succeeded in writing such a book? I think so, yes—many writers have since Poe’s time, especially in the twentieth century when the taboo against “naturalism” in literature, as in society, began to dissolve. To name just one: James Joyce’s Ulysses , a masterly amalgam of the symbolic, the allegoric,the “realistic” and the “naturalistic.” Poe would have been astonished—and perhaps appalled.
    Another curious absence in Poe is “history”—any hint in his prose fiction of a recognizable time, place, “real people.” No reader would ever guess that the author was an ambitious writer/editor steeped in the cultural and political turbulence of his time, determined to be a successful magazine editor of such popular magazines as Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Graham’s Magazine as well as a best-selling writer with a worldwide audience of readers; that, as one associated with the Old South, he scorned mere “regional” writing, and never dealt with a single “southern” issue (like slavery) in his work. One could never guess from the frenetic obsessions of Poe’s poetry and prose that here was a thoroughly “professional”—if not a “hack”—writer who’d written hundreds of reviews of mediocre and long-forgotten books for such journals as the Southern Literary Messenger and essays with such pedantic titles as “The Poetic Principle” and “The Philosophy of Composition” (“Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem”—“Melancholy is…the most legitimate of all the poetical tones”). Except in surreal distorted forms Poe’s actual, autobiographical life is missing from his work, along with what might be called “historical context”—though Poe lived in New York City, Philadelphia, and Richmond, Virginia, during the Mexican War (1846–1848), the rise of the virulent “patriotic” movement called the Know-Nothings (whose anti-Catholic/anti-immigrant platform in 1844 featured proposals to ban all naturalized citizens from public office and to extend the waiting time for citizenship to twenty-one years), and theimperialist incursions of Manifest Destiny, not to mention the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of abducted Africans in the southern states, there isn’t a glimmer of any of these issues in his