Having laid this groundwork, Poe went on to catalogue some of the “bizarre attempts at explanation” by earlier commentators, including a prevalent theory that the Turk’s cabinet was designed to conceal a dwarf or small child, which Poe dismissed as “too obviously absurd to require comment.” Poe’s own explanation, however, was not a significant departure from this notion. “Some person is concealed in the box during the whole time of exhibiting the interior,” Poe allowed, but he discounted the notion that this human operator must be undersized. The dimensions of the cabinet, he insisted, were larger than they seemed and “fully sufficient for the accommodation of a man very much above the normal size.” He went on to describe the manner in which it would be possible for Maelzel to open and shut the doors of the cabinet, apparently displaying a solid mass of interior workings, while a human operator inside shifted his position and manipulated a series of cleverly designed clockwork panels, creating the illusion of a cabinet jammed full of complicated machinery.
Poe bolstered his argument by identifying a man named Schlumberger, a member of Maelzel’s entourage who “attends him wherever he goes,” but was always found to be mysteriously absent during the Turk’s performances. On one occasion, Poe observed, “Schlumberger was suddenly taken ill, and during his illness there was no exhibition of the Chess-Player.…The inferences from all this we leave, without farther comment, to the reader.”
“Maelzel’s Chess-Player” offers a clear template for the deductive thinking that Poe would shortly use to great effect: a careful elaboration of the background of the case, a step-by-step recitation of the known facts, and a cunning conclusion based on an imaginative leap. Of more immediate importance for the struggling young editor, the piece received widespread attention and was reprinted many times, helping to establish Poe’s reputation as a rising figure in the world of letters.
The success of Poe’s essay formed a rare bright spot in a period of almost constant struggle. The appearance of a third collection of his poems in 1831 had failed to “cut out a path to reputation” as he had hoped. In the aftermath of his break with his foster father, Poe had washed up in Baltimore and sought out his aunt, Maria Clemm, one of the few remaining links to the family of his father, David Poe. Although Maria’s husband, William Clemm, had been prominent in Baltimore society, his death five years earlier had left the family in financial straits. Aunt Maria had been reduced to taking in sewing and boarders to augment a modest pension drawn by her elderly mother, Edgar’s grandmother, Elizabeth Poe.
Aunt Maria, known to the family as “Muddy,” was a sturdy and sweet-natured woman who bore her hardships with “martyr-like fortitude,” according to Poe. In addition to her bedridden mother, she cared for her two children—thirteen-year-old Henry and nine-year-old Virginia—as well as a steady stream of more peripheral relations who were down on their luck. Even so, Aunt Maria welcomed Edgar with open arms. Coming to the household after the unhappiness of Richmond, Poe formed an intense attachment to his aunt and would later describe her as “dearer than the mother I knew.”
Eager to provide for his new family, Poe tried his hand at short stories. A friend would describe him as “constantly occupied by his literary labors,” inspired at least in part by a one-hundred-dollar prize on offer in a Philadelphia newspaper contest. Although he failed to win, Poe’s work impressed the editors greatly. Five of his stories would appear in the newspaper in 1832, including “Metzengerstein,” which tells of a noble orphan who exacts a supernatural vengeance on those who have wronged him.
Although Poe had turned to writing short stories out of necessity, it was a form in which he would show uncommon ability. A later essay, a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, showed that he had given a great deal of thought to the “short prose narrative.” Poe believed that the success of these shorter tales depended on brevity—“requiring from a half-hour to one or two hours in its perusal”—to permit the necessary “unity of effect or impression,” and he laid down a famous dictum that would inspire generations to come: “In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one preestablished design.”
While Poe bent to his labors, Maria Clemm took it upon herself to act as an intermediary between her nephew and local publishers. “I attended to his literary business,” she later recalled, “for he, poor fellow, knew nothing about money transactions. How should he, brought up in luxury and extravagance?” Poe literally could not afford to be discouraged. The following year, when Baltimore’s Sunday Visiter offered a fifty-dollar award for the best prose tale submitted, he fired off six submissions, claiming the prize with the now-famous “MS. Found in a Bottle,” the haunting story of a ghostly ship and its spectral crew who find themselves at the brink of a terrifying abyss. The prospect of passing into an unknown realm both horrifies and stimulates the unnamed narrator: “It is evident that we are hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge,” he declares, “some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction.”
Poe, who was living in fear of debtor’s prison, desperately needed the Visiter prize. “The impression made,” noted one of the magazine’s judges with considerable understatement, “was that the award in Mr. Poe’s favor was not inopportune.” In spite of his gratitude and relief, however, Poe also felt a stinging sense of injustice, believing that he should also have won a twenty-five-dollar prize offered for poetry. He became so incensed when he discovered that the prize had gone to one of the paper’s editors, who had submitted under a pseudonym, that the two men came to blows in the street. Though only twenty-three, Poe had already cultivated a lifelong habit of quarreling with editors.
Soon enough, Poe was forced to swallow his pride and appeal to John Allan for assistance. He sent several letters in an effort to repair the breach, declaring himself “ready to curse the day when I was born,” and describing conditions of abject poverty. “I know that I have no longer any hopes of being again received into your favour,” he wrote, “but, for the sake of Christ, do not let me perish for a sum of money which you would never miss.” Well aware that Allan had become hardened to his pleas, Poe also had Aunt Maria write on his behalf, describing him as a worthy soul who had fallen into temporary difficulty. In time Allan relented, asking a Baltimore friend to inquire into Poe’s debts and offering twenty dollars “to keep him out of further difficulties.”
In February of 1834, Poe learned that Allan was seriously ill. Fearing the worst, he traveled to Richmond in hopes of a final reconciliation. According to one account, Allan’s second wife, Louisa, answered Poe’s knock, but did not recognize the shabby and haggard figure who stood before her. Upon being told that Allan was too ill to receive callers, Poe forced his way past and burst into the sickroom. At the sight of Poe, Allan brandished his walking stick and threatened to strike if he came within reach. For a long moment the old man simply glared at his foster son; then he ordered him from the house.
Six weeks later, John Allan was dead. Any hopes Poe might have had for reconciliation, or even a token bequest in deference to the wishes of Frances Allan, were dashed. Poe received nothing: Allan had made good on his oft-stated threat to cast Poe out “without a shilling.” In one of his last letters, Poe had written that “when I think of the long twenty-one years that I have called you father, and you have called me son, I cry like a child to think that it should all end in this.”
Returning to Baltimore, Poe sank still further into destitution. At one stage he was reported to be laboring in a brickyard. When a friend, John Pendleton Kennedy, invited him to Sunday dinner one evening, Poe found himself in the embarrassing position of having to refuse “for reasons of the most humiliating nature”: His clothes were simply too threadbare. The sympathetic Kennedy resolved to lend assistance, and recommended Poe as “very clever with his pen” to Thomas Willis White, the publisher of Richmond’s Southern Literary Messenger. In time White offered Poe an editorial position at a salary of fifte
en dollars a week, and held out a tentative prospect of advancement.
As desperate as he was, Poe had mixed feelings about trading the warmth of Aunt Maria’s household in Baltimore for the painful associations of Richmond. He knew that life as a hired hand on the Messenger would mark a considerable decline from the life he had known when he lived in the Allan household. He would no longer be able to move about in Richmond society, or mix freely with the friends of his youth. Worse yet, he knew that there were still whispers about him and his past behavior, both real and imagined. One story even had him stealing silver and linens after the funeral of Frances Allan.
Nevertheless, by the summer of 1835 Poe had reestablished himself in Richmond, intending to help the Southern Literary Messenger make good on its stated intention “to stimulate the pride and genius of the South.” Poe soon made his mark, impressing Thomas White with his talent and editorial ability. Over the course of his tenure Poe would oversee every aspect of production—dealing with printers, editing copy, soliciting submissions, and writing reviews, poetry, and editorial filler. From the first Poe demonstrated a shrewd grasp of the principles that would distinguish his own fiction. When White objected to a macabre story Poe had submitted, the young assistant wrote of the value to be found in “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.” He allowed as how White “may say all this is bad taste,” but, he insisted, “to be appreciated you must be read, and these things are invariably sought after with avidity.”
Almost immediately, however, Poe felt an overpowering sense of loneliness at his separation from his Aunt Maria and cousin Virginia, whom he hoped would join him in Richmond. When word reached him that another cousin, Neilson Poe, had offered to become Virginia’s guardian, and perhaps bring Maria into his home as well, Poe fell into despair. In his view Neilson’s offer threatened to cut him off from the only true family he had ever known, isolating him not only from Aunt Maria but also Virginia, whom he now intended to make his “darling little wifey.”
It is difficult to track the stages by which Poe developed romantic feelings for his young cousin, who was barely nine years old when he began living under Aunt Maria’s roof He is thought to have looked elsewhere for companionship when he first arrived in Baltimore—and one account has the young Virginia acting as a courier for his love letters—but the penniless and unemployed suitor did not find favor with the families of the young ladies he courted. Although it was fairly common for close cousins to wed, Virginia had only recently turned thirteen when Poe began at the Messenger, and her extreme youth placed the idea of marriage outside the conventions of the time. Neilson Poe’s offer of guardianship may well have been an expression of his discomfort over the suitability of the match.
Although Maria Clemm had made no decision about accepting Neilson’s offer, Poe responded to the possibility in terms of devastating loss and betrayal. He wrote an anguished (and likely drunken) letter to his aunt, begging her to refuse. “Oh, Aunty, Aunty you loved me once,” he wrote, “how can you be so cruel now?” Writing as he had once done with John Allan, he dangled the prospect of suicide—“I have no desire to live and will not”—and he finished the letter with a direct appeal to Virginia: “My love, my own sweetest Sissy…think well before you break the heart of your cousin.”
With this distress weighing him down, Poe threw himself into a round of heavy drinking, much to the alarm of Thomas White, who had founded his magazine on principles of moral rectitude and the “chaste empress” of temperance. White had become fond of Poe and tried to show compassion. For a time Poe was assigned to lighter duties in the hopes that he would recover his “more amiable” nature. When this failed, White discharged him amid grave misgivings about Poe’s mental state. “I should not be at all astonished,” he admitted, “to hear that he had been guilty of suicide.”
In desperation Poe returned to Baltimore in September of 1835 and managed to persuade the Clemms to reject the comfort and stability of Neilson Poe’s offer in favor of a decidedly less certain future with him. According to some accounts, Poe put the seal on his obligation by taking out a marriage license at the Baltimore County courthouse.
The following month Poe brought Virginia and Maria to Richmond, and took pride in having the family “residing under my protection.” Poe’s departure had left the Messenger short-staffed, so Thomas White readily agreed to give him a second chance, but with the understanding that Poe would give up the bottle. “No man is safe who drinks before breakfast!” White cautioned. Determined to mend his ways, Poe threw himself into the work of reviewing and editing. By the end of December, White had increased his responsibilities, noting with satisfaction that Poe “still keeps from the Bottle.” The editorial burden was heavy. Although Poe reprinted some of his own early stories, he had little time to write new ones. Significantly, one of the few original efforts he wrote during this period was based on a true crime, anticipating his interest in the Mary Rogers saga.
The Beauchamp-Sharp murder case, more widely known as “The Kentucky Tragedy,” unfolded in 1825 when a young woman named Ann Cooke was seduced and cast aside by Colonel Solomon P. Sharp, the Kentucky solicitor general. After giving birth to Sharp’s child, the aggrieved Cooke turned to another suitor, an attorney named Jeroboam O. Beauchamp, and promised that she would marry him if he agreed to avenge her honor. When Sharp refused Beauchamp’s challenge to a duel, the attorney donned a mask and stabbed his rival to death. After a lengthy and sensational trial, Beauchamp received a death sentence. On the eve of his execution, Cooke joined him in his cell and the star-crossed lovers attempted suicide with both laudanum and self-inflicted stab wounds. Cooke died that night, but Beauchamp survived long enough to be hanged the next day.
The drama would inspire works by several of Poe’s contemporaries—including Charles Fenno Hoffman, William Gilmore Simms, and Thomas Holley Chivers—and a century later it would provide inspiration for Robert Penn Warren’s World Enough and Time. With its Southern setting and tragic young heroine, the case would also seem to have been an ideal subject for Poe and the Messenger. Mysteriously, Poe chose to present it as “Politan,” an Italian-themed drama set in sixteenth-century Rome, written in blank verse. Even Poe’s admirers were baffled. When early portions of the work appeared in the Messenger, John Pendleton Kennedy, Poe’s early benefactor, gently suggested that he might find a more congenial form in French farce. Duly chastened, Poe left the drama unfinished.
Poe had better luck with the literary criticism he wrote for the Messenger. In addition to his other duties, he wrote nearly one hundred critical pieces over the course of some ten months. An especially notable review centered on a novel by Theodore Fay called Norman Leslie, which took its inspiration from a sensational New York murder case. Poe dismissed the work as “the most inestimable piece of balderdash with which the common sense of the good people of America was ever so openly or so villainously insulted.” In fact, the good people of America had rather liked the book, which had been a runaway bestseller, and it had enjoyed particular praise in the pages of the New York Mirror. As it happened, the author Theodore Fay was also one of the editors of the Mirror, a fact Poe lost no time in pointing out. Whatever justification Poe may have felt in exposing this self-aggrandizement, the ferocity of his review caused the literary establishment to rally to Fay’s side. Poe would be made to suffer for his impudence.
In May of 1836, after several months in Richmond, Poe and Virginia Clemm were officially married in a small ceremony performed at their boardinghouse. A witness would attest that the bride was twenty-one years of age, though in fact she was not yet fourteen. By all accounts, Virginia had a cherubic face, dark brown hair, and captivating violet eyes. Friends often spoke of her gentle manner and uncanny ability to bring out her moody groom’s better nature. In her presence, an admirer declared, “the character of Edgar Allan Poe appeared in its mo
st beautiful light.”
Mindful of his cousin Neilson’s promise of security and education, Poe made every effort to compensate. A friend recalled that he “devoted a large part of his salary to Virginia’s education, and she was instructed in every elegant accomplishment at his expense. He himself became her tutor at another time, when his income was not sufficient to provide for a more regular course of instruction. I remember once finding him engaged, on a certain Sunday, in giving Virginia lessons in Algebra.” On the rare occasions when finances allowed, Poe would provide her with a piano and a harp.
Whatever Virginia’s talents as a student and musician, Poe is reported to have felt considerable discomfort over her youth. One frequent visitor of the time recorded that “although he loved her with an undivided heart he could not think of her [at first] as his wife, as any other than his sister, and indeed he did not for two years assume the position of husband, still occupying his own chamber by himself.” It has been suggested that this arrangement persisted until the bride reached the age of sixteen.
Not surprisingly, elements of Poe’s unorthodox marriage would soon make themselves felt in his work. In “Eleonora,” the most unequivocally romantic story he ever wrote, the narrator speaks of his obsession with the beauty of “the sole daughter of the only sister of my mother long departed,” with whom he lived innocently for many years until, one fateful evening “at the close of the third lustrum of her life,” they fell into one another’s arms. In fact, Virginia was well short of completing her third lustrum, or five-year period, at the time of their marriage. Be that as it may, the awakening of love in Poe’s story is expressed as both a release and an imprisonment: “A change fell upon all things,” he wrote, as if “the God Eros” himself had conspired in “shutting us up, as if forever, within a magic prison-house of grandeur and of glory.”
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