on account of, its scholarly pretensions, Volume 11, devoted to Baudelaire’s “intellectual encounter” with Poe, is a thor- oughly execrable job.

That a man who labels himself a “Baudelairien” should allow the reader’s eye to meet what for Baudelaire was the ultimate eyesore (Edgard spelled with a d ) o n the front page is stunning enough, but when we have excused this printer’s error, we stumble upon a most fantastic chronology: it includes, for instance, the date of Elizabeth Arnold’s immigration in America, but neglects to mention Tamerlane and Oth,or Poems, A1 Aaradf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems, Poems, 1831, T h e Narrative of Arthur Gor- don P y m . . . . Among useless and legendary anecdotes (an actor inserting the “Nevermore” in his text when he recognized Poe in the audience) we discover that: Allan “forced” Poe to enlist in the army in 1827, that Poe receiv- ed “un prix de poesie” in 1811, that the “wealth” brought by the Broadway Journal was of short duration and that among the “various angels” Poe flirted with in 1848 were Sarah Royster and Mrs. Shelton.

Having thus reached page xiii, my firmly entrenched distrust turned into disbelief as I examined the abundant and pretentious notes. In the first paragraph of the com- mentary on “The Raven” and “The Philosophy of Compo- sition,” I was crushed by the brazen show of incompe- tence. I learned that Virginia was dying in Fordham in 1843-1844, that “The Raven” appeared “no less than three times in three months” (January, February, March 1845), and I was told most peremptorily that “Ingram- not Griswold-must be considered as Poe’s most faithful biographer” (if I am not misled by the beautifully am- biguous sentence, this most reliable biographer seems to have offered his lucid commentary in 1845). After such a show of assurance, nothing really surprised me, neither the statement that “King Pest” had never been published when it appeared in the Tales of the Grotesque and Ara- besqzce, nor the statement that the first printing of “Lion- izing” was in the SLM for May 7, 1855.

T h e number of inaccuracies is so stunning that the one natural question to ask is: has Jeremy ever seen an edition of Poe? The thing is really a fierce orgy of mis- spelling (“The systkrne of Doctor Tarr and professeur Feather” is worthy of Poe’s burlesque gibberish in “The DLIC de I’Omelette”), misdating ( the first printing. of “Epimanes” was in March 1819; the first printing of “Shadow” was in Griswold’s edition), misprinting (what a delightful shop Graham’r Magazin must have been! ) , mistitling (“Life and Death”) , elementary errors (Poe will “come back” to the “hyacinth hair” in “To Helen,” which thus follows “Ligeia”; POC took u p his position at SLM in 1837) , and peremptory decisions on controversial points (“Thc Purloined Letter” appeared for the first time in Chamber’s Jozmzal: “A Descent into the Maelstrom” was submitted to the Baltimore Satzcrdny Visitor; Poe got the prize for “The Coliseum”).

I am still wondering at the utility of the fatuous appen- dix: the editor (who prints extracts from the various readings of Poc’s t a l a and some early translations into French) seems to intend to demonstrate the high quality of Baudelaire’s translation by inviting a comparison with Isabelle Meunier’s and Borghers’ less successful one. No one in France (except Lemonnier) seems to realize that the

A Poe Source for Faulkner? “To Helen” and “A Rose for Emily”

James Stronks

The University of Illinois at Chicago Circle

I n “A Rose for Emily,” William Faulkner three times describes his heroine in terms that recall Poe’s central image in “To Helen”: “Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche/ How statue-like I see thee stand.” On the first occasion, Faulkner places Emily Grierson stone-still in a lighted window after midnight, “her upright torso motionless as that of an idol” [The Portable Faulkner, ed. Malcolm Cowley ( 1954), p. 493). Later he describes her [p. 474) as having “a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows,” not unlike Poe’s “statue” in a “brilliant window-niche.’’ And once again [p. 4991, he poses her a t her window, “like the carven torso of an idol in a niche.”

Is this repeated similarity a coincidence, or were Poe’s lines in Faulkner’s mind? Consider that symbolically the two heroines are somewhat similar. Helen’s beauty and statue-like serenity in her window remind Poe of the glory and grandeur of Greece and Rome; Faulkner’s Emily, “sort of tragic and serene” [p. 474) and repeatedly posed before a window, is an immobile idol respected as repre- sentative of the glory and grandeur of the Old South. In her dark house--“in that region above stairs” [p. 500) as Faulkner words it (compare Poe’s words “from :he regions which/Are Holy Land”) --lies the corpse of Emily’s lover, Homer. Let us not call his name a classic touch. Faulkner’s insisted-upon image of Emily as an idol in a window seems likely to have been suggested by Poe’s celebrated image of Helen in her window.

Raising the Wind; or, The French Editions of the Works of Edgar Allan Poe

1. Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres ComplPtes, Editioir itablie d a m un ordre nouueau prkseiitie et ani~otde par Yves Flnreiine. 3 vols. Paris: Le Club Francais du Livre, 1966.

Since the world began there have been two Jeremys. The one wrote a Jeremiad about Baudelaire and was called Yves Florenne. H e has been very much admired by Pierre Henri Simon and was a very small editor in a small way. The other gave name to the most important of the Exact Sciences and was entitled the Book Club. Diddling is the most exact of French sciences: what constitutes thc essence, the ware, the principle of diddling is, in fact, peculiar to the class that handles pens and quills: the French editors and printers of the works of Poe. A be-Monded Norman Leslie-like edition of the Complete Workr of Baudelaire has been recently published by the Club Fraizcais du Livre: my incompetence prevents niy commenting on the two volumes ( I and 111) devoted to Baudelaire, but I think it imperative to declare bluntly that in spite of, or rather

best way of judging Baudelaire’s work is to compare the translations with the original. To my knowledge, none of the hagiographers who have declared Baudelaire’s translations “superior” to Poe’s text have supported their assertion: the notes invariably list the unimportant errors and the variant readings, which only reveal that Baudelaire’s knowledge of English improved constantly.

What is a translation that is “superior” to the original? A translation is accurate or inaccurate, awkward or smooth. Baudelaire’s translation of the so-called “dark tales” is both accurate (in the final version) and smooth. His transla- tion of Ezreku is inaccurate and awkward. Baudelaire’s translation had better be forgotten or redone and readers who are interested in Poe’s thought ( i t is not the case for most of Baudelaire’s editors) might do what Valery did; get an easily available copy of Wiley and Putnam’s edition or a paperback American reprint. As for the so-called humor- ous pieces that are puzzling enough in English, the only sound attitude is to return to the pun-sprinkled, coded intricacies of the text, to the “jest with a sad brow” style in which the wit is conveyed in English, if one does not want to give UP in bewildered disappointment as Baude- laire did. Most French notes on “Mellonta Tauta,” “The Duc de I’Omelettc” and “Lionizing” are unwittingly hilari- ous, much more so than the cryptic jokes of “Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences,” “The Angel of the Odd,” or “A Tale of Jerusalem,” in which Poe’s pur- pose was preeminently burlesque and critical. Before any Frenchman attempts a commentary on Poe’s “humor,” he had better get familiar with the works of Henry T. Tucker- man, William Lord, John Neal, Cornelius Mathews, Lewis Gaylord Clark, and Rufus Wilmor Griswold, to say nothing of Simms, Disraeli, Bulwer-Lytton, Horne, and Ainsworth.

In one word, this careless, pretentious and expensive edition lays bare the traditional flaw of French studies of Poe: a total neglect of his American background. Students of Baudelaire seem to take it for granted that Poe was “created” by Baudelaire. No one will deny that Poe’s repu- tation in France is almost entirely creditable to his trans- lator. But if we, the French, are ever to reassert Poe’s permanent value, it will require what seems to be too much for our ticklish historical pride: Poe must be studied ogtside his French context or, as Patrick F. Quinn has magnificently demonstrated, beyond his French context.

Claude Richard

2. Oeuvrec Imaginajives e~ Poktiques Compl&es n’Edgdr Allan Poe. 6 vols. Paris: Editions Vialatay, 1966. Limited to 2500 copies.

This is an ambitious edition. The editor, Charles Moulin, has Sithered together the translations of the tales made by Baudelaire and has added the rest of the tales which had not been translated by Baudelaire. These translations are taken from C0nte.r Grotesqzbes dEdgur Poe, traduction d’Emile Hennequin (Paris: Ollendorff, 1882) and from Derniers Conhes par Edgar Poe, traduction de F. Rabbe (Paris: Albert Savinne, 1886). [For a list of the tales translated by Hennequin and Rabbe, see Edgar Allan Poe,

Oeuvres en Prose, ed. Y. G. Le Dantec (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 1951), p. 158.l The poems are given in Leon Lemmonier’s translation, and the editor has added in an appendix some translations by Baudelaire, Mallermd, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus and Rollinat. It is an “edition de luxe,” as the price shows, and it is illustrated by an outstanding surrealist artist, Leonor Fini.

The illustrations made by Leonor Fini are remarkable; the work of the editor is not. He presents Poe in a light which is both traditional and absurd. Moulin’s introduction is a farrago of nonsense; he seems completely unfamiliar with the work done in Poe studies the last twenty-five years, for he indulges in errors which should not be made in the mid-1960’s. But to make a list of these factual errors would be fastidious and not to the point. We shall instead devote our attention to his manner of introducing the author. M. Moulin still sees Poe through Baudelaire’s translations, and his appreciation of Poe is typical of a certain kind of bad French criticism: he persists in regarding Foe as an inveterate drunkard and “dope-fiend” alienated from his country.

M. Moulin has undoubtedly summed up his ideas in the first sentence of his introduction: “Je placerai l ’ocwre d e Poe sozu le sign,e des ivresses: ivresses der paradis cmti- ficiels de l’ulcool et d e l‘opiurrz . . . .” Now it is astounding that a critic should write such a sentence in such a recent edition of Poe’s work. That Poe was not always sober has been admitted by the most responsible scholars; but that he was always drunk is false. Nor did he write any of his tales or poems while drunk: according to Professor Mabbott, an inspection of his literary Mss. shows a normal handwriting quite different from the one found in a letter written while he was on a spree. Poe’s use of opium has been denied by Thomas Dunn English, a physician, and, it will be remembered, a man who had no special reason to like Poe. Poe may have taken opium medicinally, but he was not a drug addict. It would seem that our editor indulges in deliberate confusion between Poe and his narrators. (Indeed, not so uncommon a confusion gen- erally.)

The editor is also wrong when he comes to the ques- tion of Poe’s relationship with women. Naturally, he thinks that Poe’s marriage to Virginia was not consummated, that i t was only “un geste,” but no evidence is given to support this statement. To explain Poe’s “morbid” love for dead women, M. Moulin quotes the famous “I could not love, except where Death/Was mingling his with Beauty’s breath . . . .” He then agrees with Marie Bonaparte who saw in these lines a candid avowal of necrophilia. If our editor had given the quotation in full, he would have made his readers understand that the meaning of these lines is slightly different:

I could not love except where Death Was mingling his with Beauty’s breath- Or Hymen, Time, and Destiny Were stalking between her and m e

In this introduction, the editor has repeated the most common and most erroneous thoughts about Poe withoLc even trying to verify them. H e does not make a single contribution to the advancement of Poe studies-and forces us to think of Dupin’s statement in “Marie Roget,”

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made i n reply to the narrator’s request for the detective’s opinion concerning an article in Le Soled: “That i t is a vast pity its inditer was not born a parrot-in which case he would have been the most illustrious parrot of his race.” M. Moulin has made the “gross but common” error of thinking that Foe was, once and for all, explained. But the Foe case is one of the most controversial. M. M o u h is but another of these critics who read Poe in French and regard Marie Bonaparte’s and M. LanvriGre’s books as definitive. It is a vast pity indeed that the French still d o not have a true perception of the real achievement of Poe. And we shall not, so long as we produce such editions as this.

Jean-Marie Bonnet

Arthur Gordon Pym: “A Journey to the End of the Page”?

Jean Ricardou. “Le Caractire singslier de cette eas,” Critiqlce ( AoGt-Septembre 1967), pp. 718-733.

A taste for Poe together with a certain savoir-faire in inter- preting his work-this has long been a French specialty, and it is now being evidenced under “structuralist” auspices. A recent instance is this essay by Ricard0u.l

Its unusual title alludes to a phrase that appears late in Arthur Gordon Pym, at the point when an exploring party from the Jane Guy is being guided by the native chieftain Too-wit across the bizarre terrain of Tsalal. A small stream is reached, and “Too-wit and his attendants halted to drink. [But) on account of the singular character of the water, we refused to taste it, supposing it to be polluted; and it was not until some time afterward we came to understand that such was the appearance of the streams throughout the whole group [of islands] .” Ricardou quotes this and the rest of the final paragraph of Chapter XVIII as a prime example of an enigmatic text. H e takes a critical look at several exegeses that this text has evoked, and he then proposes an interpretation of his own.

The earlier commentaries which are weighed and found wanting are those by Marie Bonaparte ( in Edgar Po,@, 1936), Gaston Bachelard ( in L’Eau et les rives, 1942), and Jorge Luis Borges ( in Discudn, 1957). W i t h each of these three commentaries Ricardou deals fairly and acutely. For instance: it is not because of their specifically psycho- analytic slant that Bonaparte and Bachelard go astray, but rather because of a more general notion they have as to the nature of imaginative literature, namely, that its goal or purpose is to point to something prior in time to itself, as when Bachelard premises a dream as necessarily antecedent to every literary work. The few remarks made by Borges are more precisely literary than, shall we say, psychological, in their bearing. But Ricardou shows that Borges tm has not accurately read the text he is com- menting on. Ricardou’s own position is unassailable: an exegesis should take into account all the details of the text under examination, and not isolate only the one or two details the commentator finds it convenient to em- broider on.

We are reminded, accordingly, that the water described by Pym in the final paragraph of Chapter XVIII had four characteristics: it appeared limpid only when falling rapid- ly, in cascades; when moving slowly, it resembled, in its consistency, “a thick infusion of gum arabic in common water”; it was variable in color but was mostly of purple hues; and structurally i t seems to be made u p of veins, with cohesive power along the vertical but not the hori- zontal axis. Fym provides another clue: seeing this water “excited as profound astonishment in the minds of our party as the mirror had done in the case of Too-wit,” who had nearly gone mad when, for the first time, he en- countered mirrors in the cabin of the Jane Guy. The essen- tial point is, Ricardou concludes, the Tsalalian water is non- reflecting. Its four attributes all coincide to negate the mirror-effect. And so, having never seen themselves in mirrors of either water or glass, the Tsalalians have no comprehension of a complementary relationship between what is same and what is other. Their world has been the totally dark one of their black archipelago, a world of undifferentiated sameness. Ricardou doesn’t put it this way, but he has in effect discovered an epistemological motive behind the attempt of Too-wit and company to d o away with the party from the Jane Guy.

Of greater importance for the exegesis, however, is the link between the strange water and the black hills of Tsalal: the roiites that serpentine through these hills were once beds of the torrents in which that water flowed; and the gorges made by these torrents form an immense hieroglyphic (diagrammed by Pym in Chapter XXIII). In close correspondence with this detail is what we are told about the “veiny” structure of the water. “ W e perceived,” to quote Pym’s account:

that the whole mass of liquid was made up of a number of dis- tinct veins, each of a distinct hue; that these veins did not commingle; and that their color was perfect in regard to their own particles among themselves, and imperfect in regard to neighboring veins. Upon passing the blade of a knife athwart the veins, the water closed over it immediately, as with us, and also, in withdrawing it , all traces of the passage of the knife were instantly obliterated. If, however, the blade was passed down accurately between the two veins, a perfect separation was effected, which the power of cohesion did not immediately rectify.

If in the above we read lines for veins we have a meta- phorical description of a written (or printed) text. In Ricardou’s paraphrase: ‘‘ . . . if an imaginary vertical were to divide a line of writing, the two separated parts would in principle remain as one because of the intense cohesive force of syntax; if on the other hand a horizontal divider were to cut between two lines, the broken connection, es- sentially spatial in nature, would manifest a much weaker tendency towards reunification.” One could quarrel with the way he has visualized the experiment of the knife-in- the-water; and surely the cohesive force of syntax operates through the whole length of a sentence, whether or not it is one line long. Ricardou does not stop to consider such objections; instead he pushes the analogy one step further: Just as the water appears limpid only when in rapid movement, so with the story itself. If read rapidly it presents n o difficulties. But if our reading rate slows down we d o become aware of opacities, which eventually can open out into multiple meanings. The water-text

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