Remembering Poe

I have been invit­ed to an inter­na­tion­al con­fer­ence on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. It is to be held next April in Boston, the place of Poe’s birth. The rea­son I have been invit­ed is that I wrote a nov­el called The Man Who Was Poe. Next week I am about to get a call to dis­cuss my book and what role I might play in the con­fer­ence. The prob­lem is, I wrote that book thir­ty years ago and while it is still in print and read­ers con­tin­ue to enjoy it, I don’t remem­ber the book very well. I am sure some writ­ers recall every­thing they have writ­ten. But after more than eighty works, I’m not one of them. 

Indeed, when I meet with read­ers it is not unusu­al for some­one to ask me a fair­ly detailed ques­tion about a book I wrote—like The Man Who Was Poe—and are aston­ished that I don’t recall that moment in the book. Of course, it is one of the won­der­ful things about lit­er­a­ture that for the per­son who reads a work for the first time it is always a new expe­ri­ence. Per­haps you are read­ing the Epic of Gil­gamesh, which is said to be a work cre­at­ed by Sume­ri­ans some­time around 2100 BC and con­sid­ered the first work in the West­ern canon. But if you are read­ing it today for the first time it is new and maybe expe­ri­enced as such. 

The truth is I don’t usu­al­ly enjoy read­ing my old work. It’s a frus­trat­ing process inso­far as I always dis­cov­er some­thing I wrote that could have been—in retrospect—better. It might be a word, a sentence—or even a whole passage—that could have been cut. It can even be a whole sec­tion that should have been added. My notion of pur­ga­to­ry is to be locked away—for my writ­ing sins—in a room with only books I have written. 

There have been a few times that I’ve been allowed to rewrite a pre­vi­ous­ly pub­lished book. My very first pub­lished book, Things That Some­times Hap­pen, was revised and reis­sued, with new art, but with the same title. In one sense, then, it’s been around for fifty-two years, Snail Tale (my sec­ond book) became The End of the Begin­ning. Most recent­ly, Rag­weed (part of the Pop­py series) was revised and made into a bet­ter book. But I have no doubt that if, in a cou­ple of years from now, I read that edi­tion I will find things that could have been better. 

Of course, this is one of the rea­sons that good writ­ing is hard to achieve.  There is no such thing as a per­fect book. Close, per­haps, but sure­ly nev­er. Folks often men­tion how hard it is to start a book. Some­times it’s just as hard to stop writ­ing it. 

As for the Poe con­fer­ence, and The Man Who Was Poe, I’m about to re-read my book. I hope I like it.