Poe and Wolfe
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Building off of my post about modern Frogpondians yesterday, at the same time that I started studying Poe’s life more deeply—especially his letters and criticism—I also read more of the late great Tom Wolfe’s journalistic monographs. These include From Bauhaus to Our House, a takedown of modern architecture; The Painted Word, a similar treatment of modern art; and Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, a brilliant pair of essays about high-minded leftwing activism and its distance from grungy reality.
With all of these assorted things floating around in my mind I realized one day that Poe and Wolfe took a similar glee in identifying and attacking cliques. Both objected to the self-identified, self-satisfied, and self-righteous cognoscenti who have found a way to dominate a particular field and enforce an orthodoxy, all while feathering their nests and basking in a success lauded primarily by its members, whom they treat as the only people that count. Poe had Longfellow and Emerson, Wolfe had Mailer, Updike, and Irving. And Leonard Bernstein. And Le Corbusier. And…
And once I noticed this similarity, I noticed others. I’ve kicked this idea around with a few of y’all in conversation, but wanted to get some of this down in writing. Consider the following notes toward a comparative study of Poe and Wolfe:
Both were Southerners
Both were Virginians specifically—Wolfe by birth, Poe by rearing and explicit self-identification
Both worked primarily in big northeastern cities
Both were accounted personally charming and gentlemanly despite their acid literary criticism
Both worked in journalism and fiction—Poe considering himself a poet who worked for magazines to (barely) make ends meet while Wolfe was a successful journalist who moved into fiction mid-career
Both, in rejecting and attacking the dominant literary cliques, made themselves political outsiders, though neither was particularly interested in politics except as an epiphenomenon of something more important
Both had an intense concern for authenticity in fiction
Both developed immediately identifiable styles intended to convey something more truthful than the dominant style at the time
Both were mocked for their style
I’ve returned to this and thought about it a lot, especially since realizing that the similarities are not just biographical but thematic.
The regional dimension, especially in Poe’s case, is too easily overlooked, but I think it’s fundamental to understanding both men. Back in the spring I watched Radical Wolfe, an excellent recent documentary on Wolfe’s life and career that I meant to review here but never found the time to. I recommend it. It doesn’t cover Wolfe’s youth and education in detail, but the sense of Wolfe as a Southerner amused by the unquestioned pretensions of the Yankees in the society he was forced to keep from Yale onwards comes through clearly. It certainly resonated with me.
And now, after mentally connecting Wolfe with Poe, I have to wonder whether the man in black, whom we are so used to imagining with a far-off gaze and a tired frown, used to wander the streets of New York and Philadelphia with a small, wry smile on his face the way the man in white did.
Speaking of Wolfe, Joel Miller recently posted about the delicate art of book cover design, beginning with the recent news that Picador is reprinting thirteen of Wolfe’s books with new matching covers. I’m not crazy about the cover art, personally, but my Wolfe shelf is a jumble of different trim sizes and if I can someday tidy that up and Wolfe can experience a much-deserved posthumous resurgence, all the better.
