NONFICTION - Oct. 18, 1992

EDGAR ALLAN POE: His Life and Legacy by Jeffrey Meyers (Charles Scribner’s Sons: $30; 349pp.). When a cousin to Edgar Allan Poe ordered a tombstone for the writer’s grave some years after Poe’s death in 1849, the memorial was demolished by a derailed train before it could be erected. Poe would have appreciated this macabre coincidence, and it’s impossible not to wonder how he might have incorporated the event into his work: A cautious young woman finally decides to accept a suitor’s marriage proposal, but while traveling to tell him the good news her train jumps the track and she is thrown, unconscious, to the ground. She awakes to find herself beside a slab of marble and begins to trace the lettering beneath her fingers, only to find a familiar name chiseled into the cool surface. . . . Jeffrey Meyers, author of nearly a score of books on literary figures and their work, has produced in “Edgar Allan Poe” a biography made interesting less by the author’s style or analysis, which is routine, than by the exceptionally tormented life of his subject. From the opium-and-alcohol sedative given him as an infant, to his being orphaned before the age of 3, to lifelong penury despite the wealth of his foster father, it’s clear that Poe was fated to an existence filled with pain and pestilence--a fate he dramatically worsened through alcoholism, belligerence and an unfailing compulsion to bite the hands that fed him. Although Meyers doesn’t shy away from Poe’s many faults--his plagiarism, his self-pitying nature, his wasteful use of talent--the book is essentially an even-handed attempt to elevate Poe’s reputation both as a writer and as a precursor to novelists as diverse as Baudelaire, Fitzgerald, Joyce and Nabokov. Meyers is generally successful, in large measure because Poe’s troubled life was as significant to later writers as his published work.