In historical fiction research, authors are always coming across an interesting tidbit to share with the public in their next novel or blog post, and this one is no different.
While doing research, not for my next novel, but for famous reviews from other reviewers throughout history, I came across this exceptional article that I am republishing with
approval from Humanities magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Did you know that Edgar Allen Poe was an editorial reviewer?
If so, then you will know exactly the reason for this post; and if not, then this will be a newsworthy item for all historical fiction authors and readers out there. So often, authors wonder about the difference is just a regular customer review and an editorial review. I think this article about Poe strikes a chord about the seriousness of such reviews and the part they play in helping boost author's confidence in their own writing, but also helping them to strive for and push harder in their writing when under the microscope. So often, as an editorial reviewer, we are faced with the possibility of having to write a constructively critical review, which, to be honest, is a hard thing to do from this side of the desk. After all, just like Poe, who was a writer, himself, I understand the effects such a review might have but, also like Poe, see the merit in helping an author reach beyond their comfort zone. We must push the boundaries of our writing... and even I feel I have not reached that maximum depth as yet.
Mr. Poe came to the attention of the literary world, first as a magazine editor and a critic, writing nearly one thousand essays, reviews, articles, columns, and critical notices which appeared in a plethora of magazines, annuals, and newspapers across the world. He was the first to propose setting a standard by which to judge literary works, and created his own vision of what constituted good literature by studying other writers ranging from Plato, Aristotle, Milton, and Coleridge. His influential theory of "unity of effect" states that the author of a short story should construct a tale to fit one overall purpose or effect. And I add, so should a historical novel... or any novel, for that matter.
Poe believed in exposing poor writing and he demanded a higher standard for American writers as judged against the long-standing high quality of acclaimed British and European writers during and before his time. Often, Poe included detailed technical examinations of the work under review, and his notations included everything from grammatical errors to illogical reasoning.
And the way he presented his reviews in a witty fashion led to a wider and wider circulation of the magazines which he worked for, even though his harsher reviews created enemies and earned him the nickname "the man with the tomahawk".
Want an example?
Here is a sample form Poe's review of Cheever's book: “He is much better known, however, as the editor of ‘The Commonplace Book of American Poetry,’ a work which has at least the merit of not belying its title, and is exceedingly commonplace.”
Poe's idea of literary criticism held to the belief that a work should be reviewed for its own worth, and that non-literary criteria including a writer's background or social status should be irrelevant. We at The Historical Fiction Company strive to uphold those same standards.
And so, I present the article about Edgar Allen Poe, the reviewer, and the reasons behind his own critical eye over some of his contemporaries; such as Tennyson, Dickens, and Hawthorne.'
Edgar Allan Poe's Hatchet Jobs
Originally published as 'Edgar Allan Poe's Hatchet Jobs' in the Fall 2017 issue of Humanities magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
In October 1845, a short-lived New York magazine called the Aristidean published a review of Edgar Allan Poe’s story collection Tales. The article spouted praise like a dancing fountain. Poe’s detective story “The Gold-Bug” “perfectly succeeded in his perfect aim.” “The Fall of the House of Usher” was “grand and impressive.” “Murders in the Rue Morgue” was marked by “profound and searching analysis.”
And, overall, Poe wielded the kind of literary power that “can only be possessed by a man of high genius,” according to the anonymous reviewer—who was almost certainly Edgar Allan Poe himself.
Poe’s reputation as a major American writer is unassailable. He invented the modern detective story, successfully transported the gothic tale across the Atlantic, and wrote classic dark poems like “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Bells.” But, during Poe’s lifetime, such high points were intermittent, hard-fought, and rarely financial successes. More often, Poe made his living by toiling at now-forgotten magazines like the Southern Literary Messenger, Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, and Graham’s Magazine.
This struggle to make art amid his struggles—he was an orphan, an alcoholic, an academic bust at the University of Virginia and West Point, and often on the run from creditors—is the crux of the American Masters documentary Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive, which airs on PBS October 30. Through dramatic readings of Poe’s work and a moody performance of Poe himself by Denis O’Hare, the film captures an author scrabbling for a place in the literary world. His gloom, the film suggests, became a kind of asset for Poe, providing a tone for his stories and poetry as well as a means of attack against the “puffing” of American authors that defined much literary criticism at the time.
Poe churned out reams of puff-free reviews—the Library of America’s collection of his reviews and essays fills nearly 1,500 dense pages. Few outside of Poe scholarship circles bother reading them now, though; in a discipline that’s had its share of so-called takedown artists, Poe was an especially unlovable literary critic. He occasionally celebrated authors he admired, such as Charles Dickens and Nathaniel Hawthorne. But, from 1835 until his death in 1849, the typical Poe book review sloshed with invective.
Tackling a collection of poems by William W. Lord in 1845, Poe opined that “the only remarkable things about Mr. Lord’s compositions are their remarkable conceit, ignorance, impudence, platitude, stupidity, and bombast.” He opened his review of Susan Rigby Morgan’s 1836 novel, The Swiss Heiress, by proclaiming that it “should be read by all who have nothing better to do.” The prose of Theodore S. Fay’s 1835 novel, Norman Leslie, was “unworthy of a school-boy.” A year later, Poe doomed Morris Mattson’s novel Paul Ulric by pushing Fay under the bus yet again, writing, “When we called Norman Leslie the silliest book in the world we had certainly never seen Paul Ulric.”
Such candor did Poe’s career no favors. Fay was the editor of the New York Mirror, where Poe would later go begging for a job in 1844, landing only a low-level copyediting gig. Three years earlier Poe had declared H. T. Tuckerman, editor of the Boston Miscellany, an “insufferably tedious and dull writer,” a statement that haunted Poe a year later when he submitted “The Tell-Tale Heart” to Tuckerman for publication. “If Mr. Poe would condescend to furnish more quiet articles,” Tuckerman wrote in his icy rejection letter, “he would be a most desirable correspondent.” Upon Poe’s death, critic Rufus Griswold wrote an obituary for the New York Tribune of surprising meanness. Griswold claimed that Poe “had few or no friends” and that “few will be grieved” by his passing—perhaps an act of revenge for Poe’s own cruelties toward Griswold as a rival critic. Poe once dismissed him as a “toady” destined to “sink into oblivion.”
For some writers, such salvos might be a badge of honor of a sort, examples of a nervy truth-teller unafraid to call out bad books and overrated writers. No doubt, Poe was moved to puncture what he saw as the overinflated literary egos of the East Coast. He spent years writing harsh sketches of them for a series called “The Literati of New York City”—a supremely bad move for a writer hoping to make a living there. The twist, though, is that as a critic Poe often treated ethics as disposably as we do coffee filters. That self-dealing rave review is just one example. Poe plagiarized multiple times early in his career (most notably in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and “Usher”), but still spent much of 1845 leveling plagiarism accusations against Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Poe delivered his attacks under his own name, but also anonymously, and through an imaginary interlocutor named “Outis.” But for all of Poe’s bluster, evidence of Longfellow’s thievery was thin, and the poet, wisely, didn’t respond. “Poe’s Longfellow war,” said publisher Charles Briggs, who’d hired Poe at the Broadway Journal, “is all on one side.”
Poe’s obscurity as a critic is the reward of the hatchet-job man, some might say—conducting ill-tempered attacks on writers is an ugly and karmically inadvisable practice. (Just ask the ones who’ve been stung by a negative review.) But if the proper fate of the so-called hatchet job is to be banished to the memory hole, why are there so many enduring examples of the form? To highlight just a handful: In 1865, Henry James declared Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps “an offense against art.” In 1895, Mark Twain savaged James Fenimore Cooper, stating that his work “has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality.” In 1959, Norman Mailer swung at his contemporaries in an essay titled “Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room,” aiming at the likes of J. D. Salinger (“the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school”) and Jack Kerouac (“pretentious as a rich whore, as sentimental as a lollypop”). Dale Peck opened his 2002 review of a Rick Moody book by writing, “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.” It went downhill from there.
Such pieces come quickly to mind to critics like myself, because the truth is—and it was a truth often lost on Poe—the critic who’s accused of flinging hatchets is usually wielding a scalpel. The critic’s job, in one regard, is to bring a sense of order to a chaotic literary world. Thousands of books are published every year, and somebody must do the job of sifting, sorting, and judging them with authority but without an agenda. That task has democratized in recent years, as readers on sites like Amazon and Goodreads hasten to champion a book or one-star it into the ether. But the old-fashioned critic has stuck around: A front-page rave on the cover of the New York Times Book Review can vault a book into the cultural conversation, and the literary prizes that critics are often called upon to judge can elevate a writer’s reputation or cement it.
But it doesn’t follow that a negative review is the opposite of a rave, at least from the perspective of that literary ordering; it’s simply an inverted way of accomplishing the same task. That is, so long as it’s done well, and to a purpose. Mailer’s pronunciamentos in “Talent in the Room” were indisputably condescending and macho; absurdly, he found no women writers worth his attention. But there was no mistaking that he was tub-thumping for an American literature that took risks and emphasized hard realities underneath America’s postwar largesse. Twain’s takedown of Cooper, in both its content and form, was a pleading for American fiction to find its sense of humor and lose its clichéd ideas about wilderness writing, or writing in general. James disapproved of a poet who aspired to national stature via what James saw as Whitman’s narcissism; Peck resented a writer so seduced by metaphor that it smothered intellectual precision.
And Poe—what mission stoked the fire of his negative reviews? Had he lived to read it, Poe might have appreciated Elizabeth Hardwick’s 1959 attack on the timidity of book reviews at the time: “Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene; a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns,” she wrote. But the urge to fearlessly criticize is not the same thing as having strong ideas about what makes for good literature, and the frustrating thing about reading Poe’s criticism is how often it is a closed circuit, concerned only with itself. The idea that a review might be a launchpad for broader statements was foreign if not offensive to him. “Criticism is not, we think, an essay, nor a sermon, nor an oration, nor a chapter in history, nor a philosophical speculation, nor a prose-poem, nor an art novel, nor a dialogue,” he wrote in 1843. “In fact, it can be nothing in the world but—a criticism.”
A number of his reviews open with a complaint that American writers were overly praised so as to distinguish them from the British colonizers from whose rule they had been free for only a few decades. Poe bemoaned “the gross paradox of liking a stupid book the better, because, sure enough, its stupidity is American.” But thoughts about what would make for a distinct American literature didn’t flow from Poe’s busy pen. In the context of his reviews, such statements were usually throat-clearing before what he saw as the matter at hand: nit-picking about meter and rhyme in poetry, plot points in fiction, and word choice and grammar in both. Critics make arguments; Poe registered complaints. An extended 1837 essay on William Cullen Bryant’s poetry finds Poe counting syllables and fussing over whether he might have better used the word “tomb” instead of “womb.” Poe’s own assessment of James Fenimore Cooper in 1843 turned literary criticism into a variant of an autopsy, assessing the sentence structure of one page of the book’s preface, line by tediously palpated line. Where Twain was witty, Poe was charmless. Where other critics might look for themes and innovations in poetry, Poe assigned himself the job of America’s toughest spondee cop.
Poe, in private, may have had a sense that this approach to criticism was fruitless. In an unfinished essay titled “A Reviewer Reviewed,” one Walter G. Bowen, a pseudonym for Poe, critiqued Poe’s reviewing style. “[His reviews] seem to me bitter in the extreme, captious, fault-finding, and unnecessarily severe,” he wrote. “Real, honest, heartfelt praise is a thing not to be looked for in a criticism by Mr. Poe.” Poe never finished the essay: It was found in a trunk among his possessions after his death. Perhaps a completed version would have revealed this display of self-loathing as just a performance, yet another example of Poe's piercing sarcasm. Yet it’s hard not to think of Poe’s classic story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” where the narrator’s urge to suppress the evidence of a violent past wars with his urge to confess it.
About the author
Mark Athitakis is a Phoenix-based journalist and critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, and numerous other publications.
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With all this being duly noted, and as CEO of The Historical Fiction Company, we will continue to push forward and grow our editorial review board for historical fiction with each year that passes. In just a month, I will celebrate the one year anniversary of starting this company dedicated to historical fiction authors and readers and I will continue to reach for the stars when promoting the genre which is close to my heart... all with the ultimate goal of paying forward all the support this community has shown me through the years. Our goal for this next year is to make our editorial reviews even stronger in the same sense that Mr. Poe strove for in his reviews - rich, complex, informative, and most of all, encouraging and constructive.
For anyone interested in joining our editorial board of reviewers, please notify me at thehistoricalfictioncompany@gmail.com
For anyone interested in acquiring an editorial review, please visit here: www.thehistoricalfictioncompany.com/award-submission
For any questions, you may contact us at the website.
Thank you for your support!
Dee Marley
HFC CEO