by Paul Collins
Poe now had plenty of catching up to do at the Messenger. Starved for material after his absence, in December 1835 and January 1836 the Messenger published the first installments of Poe’s unfinished play Politian, which clumsily transposed an infamous 1820s Kentucky love triangle to sixteenth-century Rome, and rendered it all in blank verse:
LALAGE. A deed is to be done—
Castiglione lives!
POLITIAN. And he shall die! (exit.)
LALAGE. (after a pause.) And—he—shall—die!—alas!
Castiglione die? Who spoke the words?
Where am I?—what was it he said?—Politian!
Thou art not gone—thou are not gone, Politian!
I feel thou art not gone—yet dare not look,
Lest I behold thee not; thou couldst not go
With those words upon thy lips—O, speak to me!
It flopped: in fact, the Messenger never finished the installments, and Politian went unproduced on stage until 1923. Like “Al Aaraaf,” the play is widely cited as one of Poe’s misfires, and like “Al Aaraaf,” that is both true and beside the point. Writing drama forced Poe to think in scenes—a critical requirement in playwriting. Droll narrative musings and endlessly digressive scholarship quickly wither in scripts, or at least they must be credibly placed in a character’s mouth.
Poe’s early work indulged in rhetorical and comical extravagances that interrupted the plot and kept it from being believably sustained—a weakness his mentor saw through instantly. “You are strong enough now to be criticized,” Kennedy wrote to Poe shortly after Politian ran. “Your fault is your love of the extravagant. Pray beware of it. You find a hundred intense writers for one natural one.” Writing Politian, and mercilessly editing the work of Messenger contributors, were just the correctives Poe needed. With his genius at haunting narrators and an emerging commitment to plot structure, Poe now was growing closer to a mastery of his art.
First, though, he had to earn a living—and get married.
Edgar Allan Poe’s marriage is an awkward matter for biographers; it is either obsessed about as if it provided some great insight into his tortured narrators, or glossed over as a bit of a family embarrassment. The long and careful development of Poe’s voice from his earlier work belies the first notion; state law disproves the second.
Poe’s cousin Virginia Clemm was thirteen years old when he married her in May 1836; Edgar was twenty-seven. To a modern reader, the arrangement seems shocking and illegal, not least because Virginia’s age is listed on the marriage certificate as twenty-one. Edgar had known her since she was a small child, so this was an unequivocal lie. But it may not have been an entirely necessary lie. In 1836, such marriages were legal: cousins could wed, and Virginia statutes allowed women under twenty-one to be married with their parents’ approval plus two witnesses; provisions of the law show it was applied as early as age twelve. Poe’s aunt Maria approved his marriage to Virginia, which merely left the matter of the two witnesses. Poe’s certificate has one witness, so the simplest explanation may be that the second didn’t show up—and they fudged Virginia’s age on an over-twenty-one form, which only required one witness. It was certainly not a secret ceremony; writing to John Pendleton Kennedy a few weeks later, Poe breezily comments, “I presume you have heard of my marriage.”
Still: why marry a thirteen-year-old?
Legal or not, the idea is disturbing—although Poe later hinted that years passed before any consummation, and there is no hint that Virginia was ever pregnant. There may have been financial reasons to marry early, though. A scheme with his aunt Maria to run a boarding house had almost instantly fallen apart, leaving Poe in debt, but the family still had long-term prospects. He held a quixotic notion that the state of Virginia would reimburse the small fortune he believed was owed to his late grandfather, David Poe Sr.; by marrying a cousin from his father’s side and becoming the beneficiary of her mother, he would effectively net a triple share of any future legal settlement.
But, unsettling as it may be today, Poe seems to have believed that Virginia was the person he was meant to be with—and sooner rather than later. Accounts of the couple are unequivocal about their deep affection for each other. “Poe was very proud and very fond of her,” one visitor later recalled, “and used to delight in the round, childlike face and plump little figure, which he contrasted with himself, so thin and half-melancholy-looking, and she in turn idolized him.” Poe spent much of his salary to procure her tutors, and a harp and piano; stopping by that spring, editor Lambert Wilmer found him “engaged, on a certain Sunday, in giving Virginia lessons in Algebra.”
Poe had become something of a student again himself; handling nearly all of the book reviewing that year at the Southern Literary Messenger, he crammed on everything from phrenology (“no longer to be laughed at”) to maritime navigation manuals (“attention to numerical correctness seems to pervade the work”) to floral classification (“deserves the good will of all sensible persons”). When necessary, he cribbed from Rees’s Cyclopedia and the local library to keep up the magisterial tone of editorial expertise; there was also plenty of padding provided by long excerpts.
But incoming volumes of fiction and poetry received his much closer and not always friendly attention. Along with their sensational fiction, Poe had also imbibed the Blackwood’s ethos of reviewing: namely, to take no prisoners. He often let British works off rather lightly, but pounced on shortcomings in American literature—particularly for the misplaced nationalism, he scoffed, of “liking a stupid book the better, because, sure enough, its stupidity is American.” Among those savaged by Poe for flimsy plotting, bad grammar, and weak meter were the authors of Paul Ulric (“despicable in every respect”), Ups and Downs of a Distressed Gentleman (“a public imposition”), and The Confessions of a Poet (“The most remarkable feature in this production is the bad paper on which it is printed”).
Poe could also lavish praise; indeed, his appreciations feature some of his most careful thinking about craft. In a generally positive review of Robert Bird’s satirical identity-shifting novel Sheppard Lee, Poe explained that a fantastical narrator must speak “as if the author were firmly impressed with the truth, yet astonished with the immensity of the wonders he relates, and for which, professedly, he neither claims nor anticipates credence.” The author must commit to his conceit, in other words—and yet must also perform a sleight of hand, and not over-explain or make the reader conscious of when the story has shifted into the improbable. Poe was, in fact, airing a central tenet of his own fiction: “The attention of the author, who does not depend upon explaining away his incredibilities, is directed to giving them to the character and the luminousness of truth, and thus are brought about, unwittingly, some of the most vivid creations of human intellect. The reader, too, readily perceives and falls in with the writer’s humor, and suffers himself to be borne on thereby.”
But it was the hatchet jobs that readers noticed—and Poe’s most savage assault was on Theodore Fay’s 1835 book Norman Leslie. A mediocre novel from the editor of the New York Mirror, logrolled by his paper and its friends, it represented everything about New York publishing that the upstart Poe resented. His scathing review singled out lines to correct their grammar and assailed the mistakes as “unworthy of a schoolboy.” To Poe, the attack represented “a new era in our critical literature.” Others were not so sure—he was, one New York magazine suggested, “like the Indian, who cannot realize that an enemy is conquered till he is scalped.”
Poe would have occasion, if not the willingness, to regret his reviews. The careers of the author and the reviewer mix with deceptive and dangerous ease. Reviews are quick but paltry money, distracting from the work that makes a writer’s reputation; they are transient in their effect on readers, but lasting in their damage to a writer’s professional relations. After a month, the magazine and the memory of the review is gone, but for the man whose work is labeled “the most inestimable piece of balderdash with whic
h the common sense of the good people of America was ever so openly and or villainously insulted”—as Poe described Fay’s novel—the enmity is likely permanent.
And Poe certainly needed friends in New York. In June 1836 his manuscript for Tales of the Folio Club came back with another crushing rejection, this time from Harper & Brothers. Too much of his collection had already been published in magazines, they explained, and what was more, “they consisted of detached tales and pieces; and our long experience has taught us that both these are very serious objections to the success of any publication. . . . republications of magazine articles, known to be such, are the most unsalable of all literary performances.”
Poe was in good company: that same year, a similar rejection of Twice-Told Tales devastated Nathaniel Hawthorne. But what is striking is that authors receive precisely the same rejections from publishers even today. Short fiction sells poorly and is an extravagance barely tolerated even in established writers; editors are not fooled, if they ever were, by the transparent device of pawning off a collection as a singular work by contriving to frame the stories together. And an unsuccessful first work at a major publisher, then as now, is often quietly deemed the death of a career—if not the author’s, then of the editor who knowingly buys a second work from them.
Poe refused to believe this at first and tried unsuccessfully to sell his collection to another publisher. But by the end of 1836, the hard truth of the Harper’s rejection was obvious: his career as an author had led him to a dead end. Worse still, so had his career as an editor. Exasperated by Poe’s drinking and his constant indebtedness, the publisher of the Southern Literary Messenger finally fired his brilliant, troublesome employee—and this time would not take him back.
Three months later, Poe stood up before a packed Manhattan hall of authors, editors, and booksellers and announced a toast. “To the monthlies of Gotham!” he called out. “Their distinguished editors, and their vigorous collaborators!”
It was one of innumerable toasts at the city’s first Bookseller’s Dinner; gathered together in Manhattan’s stately City Hotel on March 30, 1837, authors from Washington Irving to James Fenimore Cooper were in attendance, and even an elderly Noah Webster raised a glass in the hope that “may good books find or make good readers.” For Poe, the occasion was a dazzling introduction to his peers; having left his Richmond career in tatters, he moved his household to Manhattan to seek his fortune, and immediately found himself at the epicenter of American publishing.
He was not part of that center yet. Poe had made his name as a Southern critic, insulting some of the very authors he dined with that evening, and he remained so unknown that he did not appear in exhaustive newspaper articles about the dinner—indeed, he was only there as a guest of his new housemate, the antiquarian bookseller William Gowans. Yet Poe had good reason to be there that night, for among the publishers present was James Harper. Edgar had taken the advice of Harper’s rejection letter and was now writing a novel for them.
When the first two chapters of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket ran that year in Southern Literary Messenger, they scarcely read like a novel; the first chapter was essentially a lad’s adventure of a hairbreadth’s escape, the second a Blackwood’s-style predicament story about a stowaway trapped in a pitch-black cargo hold. But now Poe became serious about writing a novel, inspiring possibly the most disciplined stretch of his life since his time in the army. Holed up in a Greenwich Village boarding house with Maria, Virginia, and Gowans, Poe stopped drinking and wrote Pym at a breakneck pace. “I must say I never saw him the least affected with liquor,” Gowans recalled of these months. He found that Poe kept “good hours” working away at his book, tended to by his protective wife and aunt. At the end of June, Harper’s filed for copyright; only an economic crash kept it waiting until 1838 to arrive in stores.
What readers found was an account that purported to be collected by Poe, but as the “true” narrative of Pym, the survivor of an extraordinary stowaway voyage to the South Pole. Or, as the subtitle exhaustively explained: Comprising the Details of a Mutiny and Atrocious Butchery on Board the American Brig Grampus, on Her Way to the South Seas, in the Month of June 1827. With an Account of the Recapture of the Vessel by the Survivors; Their Shipwreck and Subsequent Horrible Sufferings from Famine; Their Deliverance by the Means of the British Schooner Jane Guy; the Brief Cruise of This Latter Vessel in the Antarctic Ocean; Her Capture, and the Massacre of her Crew Among a Group of Islands in the Eighty-Fourth Parallel of Southern Latitude; Together with the Incredible Adventures and Discoveries Still Further South to Which That Distressing Calamity Gave Rise.
Pym begins matter-of-factly and gradually descends into a nightmare of piracy, murder, cannibalism, ghost ships, and a fantastical voyage to the South Pole that terminates in a mass slaughter of natives and sailors alike. Unable to extricate his protagonist, Poe simply cuts the book short as they approach the Pole, with a haunting figure confronting Pym and his companion Peters as they see what may be a giant Antarctic hole into a hollow globe: “And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.”
It is a haunting ending; it is also a fudge, and the author knew it.
Novel writing was difficult for Poe. Although he’d blithely claimed in the Southern Literary Messenger that “We cannot bring ourselves to believe that less actual ability is required in the composition of a really good ‘brief article,’ than in a fashionable novel of the usual dimensions,” he was not speaking from experience, and had little idea of how to construct extended narrative. And while it’s a less obvious paste-up job than the Folio Club would have been, Pym is still essentially three novellas stuck together: a stowaway adventure, an endurance narrative, and a lost-world tale. Racing to finish his book, Poe stuffed the first two sections with plagiarisms that read like schoolboy reports on everything from cargo stowage technique to penguin rookeries. Once Poe begins the innovative proto–science fiction of the latter third of the book, the plagiarisms vanish as well—save for the cheeky reuse of hieroglyphics, which here become Antarctic runes. Writing about a land where the trees and “the very rocks are novel,” and where even the water is a viscous purple fluid veined “like the hues of a changeable silk,” Poe’s storytelling becomes wildly creative.
It was this part of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym to which the reading public truly responded; one reviewer found it “a very clever extravaganza” while another announced that “Pym’s adventures have been infinitely more interesting than any before recorded.” Even if some dismissed it as a humbug—which it was, and a few readers were actually fooled—the public fascination with the recent expeditions to the Antarctic, and the wild hollow-earth theories then fashionable, meant that Poe’s novel attracted enough notice to be republished in Britain, if not enough to warrant a second printing back home.
Poe himself was neither satisfied nor enriched. Editor Evert Duyckinck recalled that he “did not appear in his conversation to pride himself much upon it.” Yet Poe was too quick to write off an admittedly flawed work, for Pym contains some of his most extraordinary writing. Take for instance, the apparent arrival in chapter 10 of a Dutch brig to “save” the castaway Pym—its sailors leaning over the railings to nod encouragingly as they approach—which proves to be an entire ship of corpses struck dead by an unknown disaster, their erect corpses only animated by the writhing and tearing of seagulls in their innards. It is a scene of horror that rivals the best of Poe’s short fiction.
And yet Pym could not sustain him; before the book came out, the author had moved his family yet again, this time to Philadelphia, where he desperately sought a civil service clerkship—“Intemperance, with me, has never amounted to a habit,” he pleaded in one letter, adding that he had “abandoned the vice
altogether, and without a struggle.” When that didn’t work, he haplessly trained in lithographer’s work. One friend, visiting Poe’s home, found the author “literally suffering for want of food.”
To the extent that Poe was earning a living at all, it seems to have been from newspaper hackwork that denied him even the dignity of a byline; to this day, we scarcely know what he wrote during these months. It was disheartening and humiliating. It was also the beginning of one of the most extraordinary periods of literary genius that America has seen before or since.
3
The Glorious Prospect
BY 1838, POE HAD BEEN writing for publication for at least eleven years—or about as long as a traditional guild artisan takes to ascend from apprentice to journeyman to master. With his latest story, Poe himself sensed the maturation of his ability. “ ‘Ligeia,’ ” he would tell editor Evert Duyckinck a decade later, “is undoubtedly the best story I have written.” While he wrote many other contenders for that honor, “Ligeia” was indeed the end of his journeyman days—his first unequivocal masterpiece. Its appearance in the September 1838 issue of the American Museum, more than any other work, marked the arrival of Edgar Allan Poe as a great American writer.
“I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia,” begins his tale, and the line is a telling one. In recounting a ghostly, strong-willed first wife who entirely overtakes the body of a dying, passive second wife, “Ligeia” makes a masterly use of Poe’s invocation of the vague and inexpressible to haunt the reader. “Long years have elapsed” since the events, but we do not know how many; they met in “some large, old, decaying city near the Rhine,” but he does not recall which; incredibly, the narrator—himself unnamed—admits that he never knew Lady Ligeia’s last name. What is sharply rendered is a wild phantasmagoria of settings—rooms with writhing, animate curtains; arabesque carpets; Egyptian sarcophagi; grotesque wood carvings—and an obsessive detail over the faintest and possibly hallucinatory noises and hints of color in the dying woman’s cheeks.
