Psychic Impotence

NONFICTION

One of the most miserable and mystifying celebrities in all literary history is now subjected to the probes of advanced psychology. His life and works are considered, as never so thoroughly before, in an inextricable interrelation. The finding, less surprising for its nature than its seemingly complete demonstrability, is this: Edgar Allan Poe's whole life "was a struggle, conducted with all the cunning of the unconscious, against a realization of the psychic impotence of his sexual nature."

Poe's childhood is a crystal ball wherein the seer discovers an im- placable inferiority feeling fastened upon the sensitive orphan son of an itinerant actress and a disinherited Baltimore mooncalf. The child was sheltered, not adopted, by hardheaded John Allan of Richmond. He was insecure in a town of lordly livers. And what went deeper, at home and at school his mother's calling was made his shame. Psychoanalysis calls his loyal passion for her dead purity a "fixation." Another woman once laid a kind hand upon his head, and upon her too he "fixed" after her death.

The obtrusion of these two dead women upon Poe's subliminal nature is seen in the self-frustration of incipient amours before his marriage with a "consumptive angel" of 13, Virginia Clemm. She afforded him a public and private refuge from erotic impulses that he could not consummate. He called her "sister" and could pretend to himself that he had married for purity. Illness during her adolescence and a full stop in her mental development made this "purity" permanent. Her naive mother supplied the one other element--devoted care--essential to a little world where Poe's abnormality might hide from itself.

This pitiful, crazy world lasted eleven years, until Virginia died. Poe then rushed from one "soulful" woman to another, vainly seeking fresh refuge. He soon died insane, bigamously engaged but still carnally innocent. Convulsive fits of drinking throughout his life had been not a cause but a secondary symptom of his deep malady. The operation of this malady, the astonishing dexterity of his subconscious defensive tactics, are traced through all phases of Poe's life in startling fashion--his braggadacio debts at the roystering University of Virginia, his self- inflicted infantry career, his self-arranged expulsion from West Point, his early ecstasies of mendacity, including the lie that during several months spent in obscurity at Baltimore he had experienced morbid adventures in Russia and published a novel (actually a French author's) in Paris.

Casual but successful experimenting had suggested writing to him as the means to wrest acclaim from the world he despised. When he feared that his only veins were sadistic horror and morbid, sexless romance, he wriggled out of admitting to limitations by translating them into, esthetic ideals. He propounded that perversity is a natural human appetite; that "there is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in its proportions."

He discovered his truly phenomenal powers of ratiocination--his true genius--and forthwith announced, with as many self-contra-dictions as examples, that all his artistic effects were achieved by sheerly logical processes. He jabbered glib pseudo-science and pseudo-erudition. He excoriated plagiarism at the very moment of committing it. He estranged admiration as fast as he won renown. His last dodge, as his mind fluttered out of sanity, was to transcend his ingenious detective stories, his moaning poetry, his caustic, self-glorifying criticism, with the inane outburst, "Eureka," reducing matter to nothingness, proclaiming himself God's peer.

The Significance of this penetrating diagnosis is that it definitely removes the sick Poe ego from America's creative literary tradition. Of another world, unearthly, he had no artistic ancestors. His only true descendants were the French neurotics, notably Charles Baudelaire. Conan Doyle inherited the form of the detective story; Jules Verne, the idea of pseudo-scientific romance. In criticism, his rationalizing method can be shown to have left its deep mark. But the legend that he was "father of the short story" is about what Lowell said his poetry was--"two-fifths sheer fudge."

The Author. Joseph Wood Krutch is a 33-year-old Tennesseean who abandoned science and mathematics to take a doctor's degree in literature at Columbia University. During the War he served as a psychological expert. He started contributing to magazines in 1920 and was soon executing the Nation's chief fiction reviews, most ably. Two years ago he joined that organ's staff as dramatic critic and associate edi- tor. He teaches, too, at Vassar.

Timely, Stylish

A BOOK OF MODERN ESSAYS--Ed-ited by Bruce W. McCullough and Edwin Berry Burgum--Scribner's ($2). The all-important adjective in this title means: after 1920, American and English, chiefly conservative, more academic than professional, more literary than journalistic, more retiring than advertised. It means Van Wyck Brooks, Stuart P. Sherman, Olivia Howard Dunbar and Calvin Coolidge on aspects of national character and culture, and not (for example) H. L. Mencken or H. W. Van Loon or Zona Gale. It means Kenneth Grahame and Maurice Hewlett for fancy, not Christopher Morley; Edwin Grant Conklin on science-and-faith, not Henry F airfield Osborne; Dr. Frank Aydelotte on education, not Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler; Willa Gather on novels, not Fannie Hurst; Max Beerbohm's wit and Logan Pearsall Smith's, not Ernest Boyd's--or Michael Arlen's. The essays are all reprints by courtesy of publishers to whom style counted nearly as much as timeliness. Subjects are varied, and usually vivid. How Meredith Nicholson was admitted and William McFee overlooked is among the phenomena unexplained, yet it is an excellent collection withal for folk who either seldom see or dearly cherish the first-class monthly magazines of culture. Other essayists introduced by the thoughtful headnotes: Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles Merz, Henry Seidel Canby, Basil Thompson, Philip Guedalla, Alice Meynell, Hilaire Belloc, John Galsworthy, A. Glutton-Brock, Sir A. T. Quiller-Couch, Max Eastman, Paul Shorey, Arnold Bennett, George Santayana, Henry James, Sir Walter Raleigh, Alfred E. Zimmern, C. E. Montague.

Plots

A THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS OF OPERA--Frederick H. Martens-- Appleton ($3.50). Into a bulk no greater than that of an average novel, Mr. Martens has packed the plots and chief musical characteristics of some 1,550 operas and ballets. A very able packer, Mr. Martens; for when one opens the lid everything is seen to be arranged in a uniquely logical way, not an inch of space wasted, not a corner bent.

The book represents one of those rare instances where the foreword does not belie the pages that follow, where the author, not having chosen to attempt the impossible, has succeeded notably well in an ambitious undertaking, one that unquestionably demanded a vast amount of research. It is not an opera dictionary. "Out of a possible repertoire of 50,000 titles, perhaps, it aims to present the operas worth notice from early times to our own . . . for the general reader, the operagoer, the music student and members of music clubs in search of musical program illustrations for some historic period . . . the greater works of lesser masters and the lesser works of greater masters."

Mr. Martens has abandoned the alphabetical order for one of historic sequence, using such major heads as "The Orient", "The Glory that Was Greece", "The Grandeur that Was Rome" and so on through the Renaissance and the Reformation down to our own times. All this he prepares the reader for in his foreword. Being of a retiring nature, he neglects to say that his brisk, pertinent comments are unbiased, that he has the knack of 'making a tale, no matter how hackneyed, exceedingly vivid; that he has written a book which should prove invaluable for reference to amateurs or professionals.

Theatricks

TIMOTHEUS, OR THE FUTURE OF THE THEATRE--Bonamy Dobree--Button ($1). In far-future Utopia, will the theatre be nationalized, housed in domed stadia, where the audiences will recline in barber-chairs watching the action of shadows on the dome, inhaling gases physiologically suited to the action, hearing words broadcast from points of psychological vantage with emotional effect so scientifically adjusted to group reactions that on occasion the audiences can be made to rush forth and buy into a national bond issue? Will drama be studied by trained psychiatrists, taught by cunning art-engineers, acted by "young men and women remarkable for beauty, fine feeling and intelligence"? Will there be Cathartic Theatres to cure lovesickness, Hurry Theatres to jab emotional hypodermics into tired business men? Author Dobree but recently returned to our century after a twitch ahead from H. G. Wells' "time-machine." This contribution to the "Today and Tomorrow Series" is curt, clever, arresting.

* EDGAR ALLAN POE, A STUDY IN GENIUS--Joseph Wood Krutch--Knopf ($3).