On the evening of Tuesday 6 January 2009, the New York Review of Science Fiction Readings Series featured a special 200th Birthday Tribute to Edgar Allan Poe. (It was a premature unburial, as Poe was born on 19 January 1809.) The event (“Lo! A gala night!”), produced by the Series’ executive curator Jim Freund (host of WBAI-FM’s Hour of the Wolf radio program on sf and fantasy), was presented at the NYRSF Readings Series’ new venue (through at least April), the main building of the South Street Seaport Museum, at 12 Fulton Street. (The location was especially fitting for a tribute to Poe, as it is said to be haunted. As Freund related, two stone walls away, in the 1870s, when it was the Schermerhorn Hotel, someone was murdered, though probably not by an orangutan.)
In opening remarks before the audience of more than 50, Freund observed that “Poe’s writings have become ingrained in our culture, even when we don’t realize it.” Who hasn’t heard of “The Raven” and its archaic refrain “Nevermore”? Over 200 films and tv productions have been based nominally on or alluded to his poems and stories.
First in the evening’s line-up, Veronica Schanoes, an assistant professor of English at Queens College, CUNY, and herself a writer of fantastic fiction, provided a perspective on the history and impact of Poe and American gothic writing. She spoke initially on his “brief and miserable life” (he died at 40—”doubly dead in that [he] died so young,” to paraphrase “Lenore”—in bizarre circumstances on the streets of Baltimore, apparently drunk and wearing someone else’s clothes), then on his “copious and miserable work,” and finally on his place in American literature. “The Raven” was a great success, she noted, and made him something of a household name, then and evermore (sorry). The motif of the child-woman too beautiful to live (“the wingèd seraphs of heaven coveted her” from “Annabel Lee”) is reflected in much of his poetry; he married his first cousin when she was 13 (he was 27), and her death in 1847 from tuberculosis devastated him—he died two years later. His career was tragically unfulfilled, a combination of self-destructiveness and plain bad luck.
His place in the American literary canon has always been problematic, she continued, and “lit crit” has successively revised it. Most of his grotesque tales were set in Europe (though “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” was loosely based on a sensational New York murder that occurred nor far from where we were) and had no apparent relevance to American themes. Newer criticism, however, has repositioned him alongside other American gothics, linking his theme of blackness to the central themes of 19th-century American literature, racism, and slavery. (In what seems a stretch, “The Black Cat” for example, is linked to the racial crime of lynching.) In a concluding aside, Prof. Schanoes remarked that, in addition to Poe’s horror, fantasy, and science-fictional works, he was the father of the detective story, and of the use of “ratiocination” or analytical faculties to solve mysteries. (Poe, the creator of C. Auguste Dupin, the deductive predecessor of Sherlock Holmes, is a natural choice for historical mystery sleuth, and several authors—Marc Olden, Harold Schechter, and Matthew Pearl among them—have so borrowed him; and in comic-book stories, Poe has been teamed in crime-solving with a time-traveling Atom and a contemporary alternate reality Batman.) On a personal note, as someone whose grad work was in 19th-century American literature (Hawthorne), I think that it should be mentioned, in fairness, that while Poe’s reputation for morbidity is well-deserved, like his poetic bells, he was not one-note; he also wrote cheery poems, satire, and even perpetrated a hoax.
Next, after briefly making a case for New York’s claim to Poe—he was born in Boston, and lived and worked in Richmond, Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore, where he died—Simon Loekle, Freund’s fellow WBAI producer/host, gave a sepulchral and spellbinding reading of “A Cask of Amontillado”, enhanced by a cavernous microphonic reverb. (A minor quibble: Loekle pronounced the double-L, though as a Spanish sherry, perhaps it should be rendered as a Y-sound.) At the back of the room, among the refreshments, it should be noted, were two bottles of Amontillado, it not being the middle of Carnival; and one audience member located an alcove of the right size… (There were no tell-tale heartbeats, happily.) WBAI’s own birthday tribute to Poe will be on Saturday 17 January on Freund’s and Loekle’s shows, between 5AM and 8AM (“as the night is senescent and star-dials [point] to morn”).
The evening was also the occasion of a book launch party for a new Poe-inspired anthology celebrating his bicentennial, Poe: 19 New Tales of Suspense, Dark Fantasy, and Horror Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe (published by Solaris Books), and, after a short break, Freund turned things over to its much-honored editor, Ellen Datlow. She recounted how the collection came to be, and introduced the evening’s readers, Delia Sherman, Barbara Roden, and John Langan, whose stories appear in the “quaint and curious volume”. (A fourth scheduled reader, Gregory Frost, was, regrettably, unable to attend due to a back injury.)
Sherman’s (contrary to appearances, she did go home after her NYRSF reading last month) story, “The Red Piano”, about a specter-haunted piano and a captivating infatuation, was charming, but more than bordered on pastiche. In her offering, “The Brink of Eternity”, Roden combined her interests in Poe, in Arctic exploration (she is, by the way, Canadian), and in the once-popular crackpot theory of the Hollow Earth (with its entrances in the polar regions). Langan, the concluding reader, excerpted a section near the end of his submission, “Technicolor”, which took the form of a lecture to an English class (not coincidentally, he teaches literature and creative writing at SUNY New Paltz) on “The Masque of the Red Death” and a horrific speculation on the grief-stricken last week of Poe’s life.
Though the night was bleak, the evening within was anything but dreary. The audience included Richard Bowes, Kris Dikeman, Harold Garber, Justin Howe, Derrick Hussey, Ellen Kushner, Gordon Linzner, Jon Messinger, Fred and Dee Phillips, and Robert Rodriguez. Afterward, as customary, more than 30 guests and audience members adjourned to a nearby pub for dinner and conversation. (It is hoped, “for the love of God, Montressor,” that all survived their taste of Amontillado.)
Ellen Datlow offers her own commentary on the evening here and has photos of the evening’s festivities in this Flickr set.