Poe Biographer Wins Creative Nonfiction Award
If you find the horror stories of Edgar Allan Poe outdated or tame by today’s standards, a new biography of the author may change your mind.
UVA English professor Emily Ogden is taking an intimate look at the author’s mind and explores the power it has to help us meet some of life’s darkest challenges in Frailties: How Poe Helps Us Live with Ourselves, a biography of Poe she’s writing that’s presented in a series of essays. The much-anticipated book, due to be published by Viking Penguin, recently won Ogden a grant from the Whiting Foundation which provides emerging authors with $40,000 to complete works of ambitious and deeply researched creative nonfiction.
Poe’s student room on the West Range from his short time at the University of Virginia remains a pilgrimage stop for admirers of the 19th-century writer widely recognized as one of the originators of horror and modern detective fiction.
The Whiting Foundation award’s judges said Ogden’s book on Poe is written by an author “so fully in control of her material and form that she is able to work as a great novelist does, lighting up points of contact for the reader, both intellectual and emotional. She binds us to Poe at his wildest and most terrifying, where he has the most to teach us.”
From Frailties: How Poe Helps Us Live with Ourselves
When I am tired of Poe, or when I am embarrassed to be spending so much time on him, he appears stunted and puerile, an egomaniac who could not represent anyone in his art because no one but himself counted for him in life. But I also know that to think this way is to apply the wrong standards. Poe was not trying to represent people in his art; that is not what his characters were for. Some fiction writers offer us interiority granted all around, the social world fully and fairly unfolded. We call that realism. Poe was not a realist. It isn’t that his characters are poor models of people; it’s that they are not models of people at all. They are more like voices in the head, or figures in a dream.
With each character, Poe models not a single person but a single drive; just one impulsion a person might feel rising up from within. The drive might be to obliterate a source of shame, or to get to the bottom of things, or to take revenge. Or it might be more elemental: in “The Premature Burial” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the drive is simply to live, as an infant or an animal feels compelled to live. The living thing must get back up out of the grave. In Poe’s stories, we return to that part of ourselves that would, like a fox, gnaw off its leg to escape a trap; or that did, as an infant, wail for succor from the abyss of helplessness.
Poe is trying to describe what it is like to be prey to one’s wishes; what it is like to be driven into motion. If his subject could be described as life, it is life experienced as the infliction of activity; only life itself, and not yet life as a social or ethical or political matter. It is not always pleasant to wish to live. Wishing to live can be a horror. That is why Poe is also so interested in what it would be like to die.
