In The Shadow Of The Master: Classic Tales by Edgar Allan Poe

He bore aloft a drawn dagger, and had approached, in rapid impetuosity, to within three or four feet of the retreating figure, when the latter, having attained the extremity of the velvet apartment, turned suddenly and confronted his pursuer. There was a sharp cry-and the dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet, upon which, instantly afterward, fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero. Then, summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of the revellers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and, seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and corpse-like mask, which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form.

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, and Me BY S. J. ROZAN

When I was twelve, I had pneumonia, complicated by a bad case of strep. I wasn’t hospitalized, but I was confined to my room to keep me from causing havoc among my sibs. My mother heroically ferried chicken soup and ice cream from downstairs. Other than that, I was pretty much on my own-for two weeks. Luckily, we had a complete set of Mark Twain, and a complete set of Edgar Allan Poe. My mom deposited them in my room in a couple of tall piles, and they made me what I am today.

From Twain I learned about character and narrative structure. And humor. Poe didn’t have a lot of that. But from Poe I learned about language. The beauty of Poe’s language still shines-I defy anyone to find a story more perfect in rhythm, cadence, and sound, sentence by sentence, than “The Tell-Tale Heart.” (Twain’s language, of course, is also gorgeous, but more subtle. I was twelve. I didn’t want subtle. I wanted my socks knocked off.) And I also found in Poe something less tangible, but which resonated with me and still does: inevitability, and the laughable nature of human intention.

This thread runs all through Poe’s work-for example, in poems like “Conqueror Worm”-including the above- mentioned “Tell-Tale Heart.” It’s not the still-beating heart of the dead man that gives the killer away, after all; it’s his own fearful, guilty heart that does. But the example I remember most vividly is “The Masque of the Red Death.” In the middle of a plague, an array of wealthy citizens lock themselves away and throw a party, a big masked ball. The danger outside doesn’t matter; they congratulate one another on how cleverly they’ve isolated themselves from it. Except, of course, they haven’t. They’ve made it worse. One of the “guests,” dressed as the Red Death (everyone laughs and applauds, he’s so-o-o-o amusing), really is the Red Death. And far from being locked away from him, they’re locked in with him. He dances with them all, and they all die.

This is “the best laid plans / gang aft agley,” this is “man proposes, God disposes.” It ain’t news. But it was to me, at twelve. Or, no, it wasn’t. It was better than that. It was the first time someone had said, out loud as it were, something I’d suspected but, as a member of a rational, hardworking, optimistic family and society, not been allowed to think. It’s what much, much later, in a review of the movie Chinatown , I saw referred to as “the disastrous consequences of good intentions.” Was I a bleak twelve-year-old? Sure I was. But I had always been like that. What reading Poe for two solid weeks gave me was the relief of knowing I wasn’t alone. I don’t think I’ve ever felt closer to a writer than I did to Poe those two weeks.

But I was luckier than Poe. I had Mark Twain, right beside us, showing at least one of us how to laugh despite, or at, it all.

Bless both their beating hearts.

***

S. J. Rozan grew up in the Bronx and as a child visited the Poe Cottage many times, where she looked for but never found the Tell-Tale Heart. The author of ten novels and dozens of short stories, she’s won most of crime writing’s major awards, including two Edgars that make the cat-sitter so nervous he puts hats over their faces whenever S.J.’s out of town.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.

– SIR THOMAS BROWNE

THE MENTAL FEATURES discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment. As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talent into play. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension praeternatural. His results, brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition.

The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence, analysis. Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyse. A chess-player, for example, does the one, without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex, is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed, resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold, but involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten, it is the more concentrative rather than the more acute player who conquers. In draughts, on the contrary, where the moves are unique and have but little variation, the probabilities of inadvertence are diminished, and the mere attention being left comparatively unemployed, what advantages are obtained by either party are obtained by superior acumen. To be less abstract, let us suppose a game of draughts where the pieces are reduced to four kings, and where, of course, no oversight is to be expected. It is obvious that here the victory can be decided (the players being at all equal) only by some recherche movement, the result of some strong exertion of the intellect.

Deprived of ordinary resources, the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent, identifies himself therewith, and not unfrequently sees thus, at a glance, the sole methods (sometimes indeed absurdly simple ones) by which he may seduce into error or hurry into miscalculation.

Whist has long been noted for its influence upon what is termed the calculating power; and men of the highest