Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Raven,’ As Poe’s Creature Offers an Unexpected Answer)

Dr. Craven [played by Vincent Price, center] [to The Raven]: “Who sent you to me?”

[The Raven stares at him silently]

Dr. Craven: “Are you some dark-winged messenger from beyond?”

[Still no answer]

Dr. Craven:” Answer me, monster, tell me truly!”

[sadly]

Dr. Craven: “Shall I ever hold again that radiant maiden whom the angels call Lenore?”

Dr. Bedloe [played by Peter Lorre, left] [as The Raven] “How the hell should I know? What am I, a fortune teller?”—The Raven (1963), screenplay by Richard Matheson, very, very loosely suggested by the Edgar Allan Poe poem, directed by Roger Corman

As soon as I heard this exchange, I burst out laughing, at the sheer surprise over Edgar Allan Poe being sent up. That line from The Raven was ad libbed by Peter Lorre during production of the film.

The actor’s penchant for improvisation deeply annoyed co-star Boris Karloff (right). In a post-film question-and-answer session at the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, NJ last week, Sara Karloff and Victoria Price, daughters of the two horror icons, related this and other anecdotes about their fathers, holding forth in as entertaining a fashion as what the audience had just witnessed on screen.

Accustomed to English theatrical tradition of learning his lines cold, Karloff was constantly made uncomfortable by Lorre, who was more used to improvisation from his time with continental European troupes. It fell to Vincent Price, who had trained in both styles in London and American stages, to become the go-between for his two co-stars. (This was the fifth and last film together for Price and Lorre, who died a year after its release.)

Among the other anecdotes shared by Ms. Karloff and Ms. Price:

*Karloff, still under contract for a couple of days for producer-director Roger Corman, found himself acting in a hastily created film for rookie director Peter Bogdanovich, Targets.

*Jack Nicholson, in one of his earliest roles, did not turn in one of the more impressive performances of his career.

*The beautiful cinematography for the movie was created by Floyd Crosby, father of rock ‘n’ roller David Crosby.

*Karloff made 80 films after coming to Hollywood in the silent era, but people forgot all of them until his 81st, Frankenstein, he told his daughter.

*Price came to London in the mid-Thirties to study art history, but he enjoyed the theater so much that he eventually tried out for a play, and began his acting career there. Nevertheless, Ms. Price observed, he never lost his love for art--not only being an avid collector himself and serving on the board of museums, but even staying at cheaper hotels and buying lower-price tickets to spend on paintings.

*Price credited his first notable horror success, House of Wax (1953), for keeping his name before the public, at a time when Hollywood had "graylisted" him for past political activity--i.e., not subjecting him to the full ban that blacklisting represented, but ensuring he would only get lesser roles.

Quote of the Day (Edgar Allan Poe, on What We See As ‘A Dream Within a Dream’)

“All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep.” —American short-story writer, poet, literary critic, and editor Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), “A Dream Within a Dream,” first published in The Flag of Our Union, March 1849, reprinted in Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, edited by Patrick Quinn (1984)

Quote of the Day (Edgar Allan Poe, With Unexpected Fodder for a Controversial Film)

“Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,
And tempted her out of her gloom—
And conquered her scruples and gloom;
And we passed to the end of the vista,
But were stopped by the door of a tomb—
By the door of a legended tomb;
And I said: ‘What is written, sweet sister,
On the door of this legended tomb?’
She replied: ‘Ulalume -Ulalume—
'Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!’"—American poet and short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), “Ulalume”

It’s possible that I read this poem a very long time ago, but I forgot about it until it was used, to very sly effect, in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita.

This poem does not appear in the novel, but Edgar Allan Poe is very much present. What Nabokov uses as his point of reference is the poet’s “Annabel Lee.”

I’m not sure why Kubrick substituted “Ulalume” for “Annabel Lee,” but I’ll hazard a guess. In the novel, Lolita reminds Humbert Humbert of his long-lost love, Annabel Leigh.

Kubrick had to run a legendary censorship gauntlet to get Lolita released at all. (Indeed, its poster featured the memorable tagline, “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?”) 

A couple of the most memorable lines from “Annabel Lee”—"I was a child and she was a child,/In this kingdom by the sea”—would only have reinforced the qualms of anyone asked to okay for general release a film featuring an unnatural relationship between an older man and a child.

Instead, in the film, the Poe allusion functions simultaneously as satiric and tragic.

The satire comes at the expense of Humbert, who offers a literary lesson to the vulgar American girl who has caught his gaze, Lolita. (James Mason and Sue Lyon, in the accompanying picture, played the two.)

The visiting European professor can’t help but reveal his pretentiousness by identifying the poem’s author as “the divine Edgar”—no last name needed!—and by pointing out how “my favorite poet” “emphasizes” and “twists” certain words.

It’s all a bit much for Lolita: “Well, I think it's a little corny, to tell you the truth.”

At the same time, the first four lines quoted above parallel what the deviant Humbert hopes to do with Lolita as his own goddess of beauty, particularly in the seduction verbs chosen: “pacified,” “kissed,” “tempted,” and “conquered”—all moving through “the end of the vista,” or the cross-country trip in which he kidnaps her.

But it can’t end well for Lolita, who is fated, like Ulalume, to end up in “this legended tomb”—leaving the seducer and abuser Humbert desolate in knowing that, in robbing her of innocence, he has played an inexpungible part in her tragedy.

(For a fascinating take on how Kubrick and producer James B. Harris edited down Nabokov's 400-page long adapted screenplay until only 20 percent was left, see Koraljka Suton's October 2022 post from the blog "Cinephilia and Beyond.")

Quote of the Day (Edgar Allan Poe, With Verses Used by Bruce Wayne to Woo Catwoman)

“And all my days are trances,
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy grey eye glances,

And where thy footstep gleams—
In what ethereal dances,
By what eternal streams.”—American short-story writer, poet, literary critic, and editor Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), “To One in Paradise” (1833)

Amid all the “POWS!!,” Robin’s “Holy…” exclamations, and cruising around the Batmobile, cultural references like this slyly inserted into the Sixties “Batman” franchise flew right over my head when I was a little kid.

Even now, more than five decades later (including college courses where I had to read poems, horror, sci-fi, and detective fiction by Mr. Poe), I came across this material entirely by accident, while researching actress Lee Meriwether. As a youthful fan of the TV show, I had caught Eartha Kitt and Julie Newmar as Catwoman, but had missed the former Miss America (whom I saw onstage, decades later, in Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music!) slipping into the slinky catsuit in Batman The Movie.

In the same film, the actress had even more fun putting on a Russian accent as “Miss Kitka,” a “reporter” for The Moscow Bugle (!!!!) exotic enough to lead Adam West’s Bruce Wayne to recite spontaneously this bit of Poe-try, as seen in this YouTube clip. 

Well, I guess it was a way to get Sixties audiences to view the writer as a romantic—rather different from the tortured soul whose more chilling tales were adapted into seven Roger Corman flicks that permanently endeared Vincent Price to horror fans.

Quote of the Day (Edgar Allan Poe, on a Jesting Dwarf’s Revenge on a Sadistic Leader)

[Hop-Frog the dwarf-jester said to the king]: “ ‘Just after your majesty, had struck the girl and thrown the wine in her face…there came into my mind a capital diversion—one of my own country frolics—often enacted among us, at our masquerades: but here it will be new altogether….I will equip you as ourang-outangs…. The resemblance shall be so striking, that the company of masqueraders will take you [the king and his seven advisers] for real beasts—and of course, they will be as much terrified as astonished…’.

“And now, while the whole assembly (the apes included) were convulsed with laughter, the jester suddenly uttered a shrill whistle; when the chain flew violently up for about thirty feet— dragging with it the dismayed and struggling ourang-outangs, and leaving them suspended in mid-air between the sky-light and the floor….

" ‘Ah, ha!’; said at length the infuriated jester. ‘Ah, ha! I begin to see who these people are now!’ Here, pretending to scrutinize the king more closely, he held the flambeau to the flaxen coat which enveloped him, and which instantly burst into a sheet of vivid flame. In less than half a minute the whole eight ourang-outangs were blazing fiercely, amid the shrieks of the multitude who gazed at them from below, horror-stricken, and without the power to render them the slightest assistance….

“The dwarf seized his opportunity, and once more spoke:

“ ‘I now see distinctly,’ he said, ‘what manner of people these maskers are. They are a great king and his seven privy-councillors,—a king who does not scruple to strike a defenseless girl and his seven councillors who abet him in the outrage. As for myself, I am simply Hop-Frog, the jester--and this is my last jest.’

“Owing to the high combustibility of both the flax and the tar to which it adhered, the dwarf had scarcely made an end of his brief speech before the work of vengeance was complete. The eight corpses swung in their chains, a fetid, blackened, hideous, and indistinguishable mass. The cripple hurled his torch at them, clambered leisurely to the ceiling, and disappeared through the sky-light.”—American short-story writer, poet, and essayist Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), “Hop-Frog” (1849)

Years ago, I read numerous tales by Edgar Allan Poe for my high school and college English classes. But I had never focused on this late story until I read an essay on the horror and suspense maven in Neil Gaiman’s nonfiction collection, The View From the Cheap Seats (2016)

Gaiman hailed this story’s “terrible and appropriate cruelty,” and it has taken on other implications than those suggested when it first appeared in print. (Some critics believed at the time that this was Poe’s vicarious vengeance on those who questioned his courtship of a couple of women; others thought it arose from the revolts that had occurred in several European countries in 1848.)

Contemporary readers might point to other elements of the central characterization here: a leader who is caustic, abusive towards women, and mocking the disabled, who at length goes too far, triggering a spontaneous retaliation against himself and his corrupt toadies.

A chain, once used to facilitate oppression, becomes a means of liberation. The king’s counselors, who enable his sadism and abuses of power by cheering him on, share in his downfall.

Their fate also mirrors their relationship to the king and to each other while they were alive: “a fetid, blackened, hideous, and indistinguishable mass”—a warning that retribution, though coming late to men who exploit the marginalized and defenseless and to the circle that excuses these crimes, will surely arrive nonetheless.

Quote of the Day (Edgar Allan Poe, on ‘Those Who Dream by Day’)

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.” — Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), "Eleonora"

This Day in Literary History (‘The Raven’ Makes Poe A Household Name)

Jan. 29, 1845—“The Raven” first saw print in the New York Evening Mirror and was attributed to Edgar Allan Poe, a writer-editor of nomadic inclination and daemonic energy. It thrust its author squarely into the literary limelight, making him hot on the lecture circuit and enough wherewithal to buy out the owners of the Broadway Journal and achieve his dream of running his own magazine.

Unfortunately, Poe made little money off his newfound celebrity, and personal troubles led him to hit the road again, leading him to a squalid and controversial death four years later. While he anatomized the creation of his most popular poem in highly cerebral fashion after its publication, the mad descent of his love-haunted narrator has fed popular perceptions ever since that the verses resulted less from the critical acumen and more from the tortured psychology of the poet.

One of the first of Poe’s champions abroad, Charles Baudelaire, considered him a forerunner of the poete maudit, or “cursed poet,” a creator not undone by substance abuse and other personal problems but gifted beyond the ordinary precisely by these forces. Poe “did not drink like an ordinary toper,” Baudelaire wrote, “but like a savage, with an altogether American energy and fear of wasting a minute, as though he were accomplishing an act of murder, as though there was something inside him that he had to kill, ‘a worm that would not die.”

In a prior post, I discussed how James Russell Lowell began as a champion of Poe before the latter, in an arguably questionable and certainly career-damaging move, accused the Boston poet of plagiarism. What I did not realize at the time was how Lowell’s devastating counterpunch—that his accuser was “three-fifths genius and two-fifths fudge”—came about through an opening left by Poe himself.

In reviewing Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge, Poe took notice of the importance of a talking raven to the plot, but complained that the novelist had missed the opportunity to capitalize on the creature by giving it a more symbolic purpose. Poe’s later use of the babbling bird led Lowell and his circle to carp (not unreasonably, given his own recent charge) that the dark creature was not entirely an original product of its creator’s imagination.

Poe’s brazen habit of taking to task the subject of his reviews was demonstrated further in the weeks before publication of “The Raven” when he wrote about Elizabeth Barrett's poem "Lady Geraldine's Courtship." No sooner had he taken her to task for want of originality (while, admittedly, praising her for delicacy of expression) that he borrowed her complicated rhyme and rhythm scheme for the poem taking shape in his head even then.

No aspect of the poem was an accident, Poe claimed in his “Philosophy of Composition”: It was all based on total control by the author. More than a few readers, I think, will be suspicious of the relentless logic with which he described its making. The whole thing sounds as preposterous as the lengthy ratiocination employed by his fictional detective Auguste Dupin to explain how he solved a crime.

I admit to not being a fan of Poe’s poetry. Too often, in their use (or overuse) of repetition, they seem only one step removed from doggerel. (It was not always so with him: A poem revised by Poe later that year, “To Helen,” is, in keeping with its subjects, beautiful precisely because of the classical restraint and symmetry of its meter—for instance, “the Glory that was Greece,/And the Grandeur that was Rome”).

But there is no gainsaying the fact that this very repetition, not to mention the practically swooning nature of some of the imagery (“Then methought the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer”), has made "The Raven" easy to memorize and compulsively fascinating when read aloud. In addition, if horror involves a character’s drastically altered psychology state, then “The Raven” is the Poe poem that most closely approximates his pioneering tales of the supernatural.

The poem has lent itself to visual as well as auditory dimensions, most notably in the 1963 Roger Corman film starring Vincent Price, which—if you’ll pardon the expression—took flight from Poe’s account of the nocturnal bird. More recently, its mordant refrain, "Nevermore," has provided the title for a new musical in New York City. The poem has also lent itself to countless parodies and puns (my favorite among the latter: William Safire’s 1993 collection of his New York Times Magazine “On Language” columns, Quoth the Maven).

A restless spirit in search of a place in the world, Poe lived at various points up and down the Eastern Seaboard: Richmond, Va., West Point, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. One of these places—where, actually, he died in 1849, following an Election Day incident hyped by a frenemy—was Baltimore. The city repaid him for briefly making it his home by naming their football team the Baltimore Ravens in the 1990s.

Quote of the Day (Walter de La Mare, on ‘The Traveller’)

" 'Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grass

Of the forest's ferny floor;         

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller's head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,

Where he stood perplexed and still.”—Walter de la Mare, from “The Listeners” (1912)

The English poet, short-story writer, novelist and anthologist Walter de la Mare was born in London on this date in 1873. As a youngster, I encountered much of his work in anthologies of children’s verse, which didn’t impress me at the time. But “The Listeners” makes me wonder if, perhaps, I should widen my reading of his work.

This poem, one that Thomas Hardy particularly admired, has some of the same haunting quality as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”—and, like Poe, many of de la Mare’s short stories have a supernatural element. Many of these are ghost stories, with some of the best compared to those of Henry James.

(The image accompanying this post is a cropped version of a 1924 photograph by Lady Ottoline Morrell, now hanging in London’s National Portrait Gallery.)