Poe

by Peter Ackroyd

  The book received what are generally known as “mixed” reviews and was not a financial success. Poe was in such straitened circumstances that he was forced to collude in a slightly shady piece of hack work. He agreed to supply his name, as author, to what was in fact an abbreviated version of a book already in print. The Conchologist's First Book, by Edgar A. Poe, was nothing more than a shortened version of Thomas Wyatt's Manual of Conchology; Wyatt had hired Poe for the job, because he could not persuade his original publisher to sell an abridgement. It is ironic that it is the only book under Poe's name that ever went into a second edition in his lifetime.

  In this year, too, he managed to publish a short story, “Ligeia,” in the American Museum of Literature and the Arts. It is a tale of metempsychotic horror in which the narrator is devoted to a wife, Ligeia, characterised by “gigantic volition” and “immense” erudition. He is preoccupied by her eyes, dark eyes, “large eyes;” in fact Poe claimed that the tale was inspired by a dream in which he saw nothing but female eyes. On Ligeia's death the narrator is besieged by “feelings of utter abandonment.” This is the leitmotif, if that is the word, of Poe's art. In this bereft state the narrator marries an Englishwoman for whom he has neither affection nor respect. His loathing materially affects the health of his second wife, and after her death Ligeia herself reemerges within the bandages and draperies of the corpse. So he cries aloud, “These are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes—of my lost love—of the lady— of the LADY LIGEIA.” The dead are never wholly dead, and Poe comforts himself with these dreams of the revenant. At a later date he described “Ligeia” as “my best tale,” its excellence lying in his belief that it most clearly and formally enshrined his purpose. He was the most calculating of authors, never to be confused with his disturbed and even psychotic narrators. Poe the writer strived carefully after the most extreme effects.

  • • •

  By the end of 1838 he professed himself once more to be desperately poor. Only “by making the most painful sacrifices,” by his own account, was he able to pay the rent of his previous lodgings. The Poe household had already moved to a smaller house on Sixteenth Street. Yet, in a life apparently governed by chance or haphazard fate, there was relief at hand. In the late spring of 1839 he proposed himself as an editorial assistant on the staff of the Gentleman's Magazine. The editor, William E. Burton, replied that “I wish to form some such engagement as that which you have proposed, and know of no one more likely to suit my views than yourself.” In his original letter Poe may have outlined his plans for an “ideal” literary journal that might spread its influence over the entire country. Burton then offered the not princely sum of ten dollars a week, assuring Poe that his duties would only consume two hours a day and leave him time for “any other light avocation” he might wish to pursue; “light avocation” may have referred to Poe's own writing. It was not a promising start. Burton himself was an unusual editor. He was an English comic actor, specialising in the Dickensian roles of Micawber and Captain Cuttle, who had travelled to the United States in order to acquire a reputation as a literary man. Poe was later to describe him as a “buffoon.”

  Poe began by writing for the Gentleman's Magazine (sometimes known as Burton's Magazine or, more clumsily, Burton's Gentleman's Magazine) an acid review of a Baltimore poet, Rufus Dawes, which Burton then refused to publish on the ground of its severity. Poe wrote to Burton in a state of some dejection, to which the editor replied that “the troubles of the world have given a morbid tone to your feelings which it is your duty to discourage.” Nevertheless in the following month, June 1839, Poe formally joined the periodical as assistant editor. Thomas Dunn English, a young poet who used to frequent the offices of the magazine, recalled Poe as always “clad in a plain and rather worn suit of black.” He noted, too, that “his eyes at that time were large, bright and piercing, his manner easy and refined, and his tone and conversation winning.”

  His prose was not so “winning,” at least to the contemporary writers whom he despised, and he declared that in his reviews “I intend to put up with nothing that I can put down.” He was aware of his own powers. He was aware of his own genius. To see others ranked before him, and praised where he was castigated, aroused all of his combative fury. He could not bear it. So by degrees he acquired a reputation as a querulous and acerbic critic. Undoubtedly this caused him injury among the literati of Boston and New York, but his defiance was another sign of his singularity. He knew, too, that he was disliked. “You speak of ‘enemies,’ ” he wrote to one Baltimore journalist, “—could you give me their names?”

  But he was also being praised. An article in the St. Louis Bulletin remarked that “there are few writers in this country—take Neal, Irving, and Willis away and we would say none—who can compete successfully, in many respects, with Poe.” Poe was always avid for approval, and liked to advertise the fact that he had been favourably mentioned. So he wrote to the then editor of the American Museum, Joseph Evans Snodgrass, asking him to include this notice in any review of the Gentleman's Magazine. On a later occasion he told Snodgrass that Washington Irving himself “has addressed me 2 letters, abounding in high passages of compliment.” One contemporary noted that “no man living loved the praises of others better than he did; whenever I happened to communicate to him anything touching his abilities as a writer, his bosom would heave like a troubled sea.” For all his apparent pride, he had a deep longing to be applauded and recognised. It might have been part of his orphan status in the world.

  He had indeed deserved praise. Some of his finest tales were even now being reproduced in the Gentleman's Magazine, among them “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “William Wilson.” These stories, together with twenty-three others, were published by Lea and Blanchard at the end of 1839 in two volumes entitled Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. In a short preface to the collection Poe replied to those critics who accused him of “Germanism” or “gloom.” “If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis,” he wrote, “I maintain that terror is not of Germany but of the soul.”

  The story of the soul's “terror” that gained most attention, of course, was “The Fall of the House of Usher.” It has become one of the classics of the short story or, rather, of the prose poem. It is one of the reasons why Poe was venerated as a master by writers as diverse as Baudelaire and Maeterlinck. It is a story of unnameable perversities in a house of the mind, a place not of this earth. It is a setting for blood and darkness and mystery.

  Roderick Usher is the remnant of a dark and decayed race, living within a mansion imbued with “a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.” He lives there, in fear and trembling, together with a sister, the Lady Madeline, who suffers from a “severe and long-continued illness” that no physician can remedy. She expires, even while the narrator of the story remains in the house, and Roderick Usher determines to preserve her corpse for two weeks in one of the vaults within the walls of the ancient mansion. There then follow scenes of turbulence and clangour, in which can be discerned a “most unusual screaming or grating sound.” It is the Lady Madeline rising from her interment, emaciated and bloody in her shroud. She has been prematurely buried, but, on seeing her brother, she dies and pulls him down with her on the floor. Thereupon the narrator flees. The house itself is riven and falls into a dark tarn or meer pool beside it, organic and inorganic life dissolving one with another. The morbid and obsessional material here, worked over with infinite finesse, is susceptible to various interpretations, psychic or psychotic. That is why it has endured.

  There were many reviewers who derided the material of Tales as “slipshod” or “trash,” but there were also others who noticed the uniqueness of Poe's prose writing. The commentator in the American Museum, for example, believed that the “impress of genius is marked upon them all,” and the reviewer of Alexander's Weekly Messenger concluded that Poe “has placed himself in the foremost rank of American writer
s;” the Saturday Courier compared him to Coleridge. It is sometimes asserted that Poe was isolated and neglected throughout his writing career. But that is emphatically not the case. He was praised, and celebrated, in many quarters. He was in his own lifetime considered to be one of the most important American writers. That recognition, however, did not mean that he was to be spared a life of poverty and deprivation.

  He was given no payment for the newly published Tales, for example, and had to be content with a few copies for his own distribution. Nor did the two volumes sell well, and the publishers, two years later, informed Poe that they had not yet “got through” the edition of 750 copies.

  Poverty obliged the Poe household once more to move, but in the right direction. They decamped from Sixteenth Street to a three-storey brick house close to the Schuylkill River. It was at the other end of the town, and was a cheaper rent. But Poe felt freer by rivers; he could still swim, and he enjoyed boating expeditions. He often floated on the river, in a small craft, lost within a waking dream. Mrs. Clemm was busy about the housework, and Virginia tended to the garden.

  But if this was a refuge from the world, it was not an inviolable one. Thomas Dunn English recalled that “I was passing along the street one night on my way homeward, when I saw someone struggling in a vain attempt to raise himself from the gutter. Supposing the person had tripped and fallen, I bent forward and assisted him to arise. I found it was Poe.” English volunteered to assist him home, a wayward progress as a result of Poe's “apparent desire to survey the sidewalk by a series of triangles.” Charles Dickens described Philadelphia as “a handsome city, but distractingly regular. After walking about it for an hour or two, I felt that I would have given the world for a crooked street.” Poe found his own way of making straight roads crooked.

  When eventually Poe and English arrived, Maria Clemm opened the door and cried out, “You make Eddie drunk, and then you bring him home.” Poe did not return to the office for two or three days and, when next he saw English, “he was heartily ashamed of the matter.” He assured English that it was an “unusual thing” and would never occur again. Several weeks later, however, English learned that Poe had been “found gloriously drunk in the street after nightfall.” He did not drink regularly, in other words, but, when he did, he could not stop. The red mist fell upon him. There are reports, too, that he was getting into “bad company.” These were no doubt the printers and hack journalists and poetasters who frequented the offices of the local journals. Poe's employer, William Burton, was becoming steadily disenchanted with his assistant editor, and complained to anyone who would listen that Poe had been getting drunk when he should have been working.

  Burton was in any case losing interest in the magazine. He was engaged in the construction in Philadelphia of a grandly named National Theatre, and in May 1840 he advertised the Gentleman's Magazine for sale. Poe, learning of his intentions, decided to announce the imminent arrival of his own journal under his own editorship.

  The separation of owner and assistant editor was inevitable. At the end of the month Poe was dismissed from the Gentleman's Magazine; or, rather, he claimed that he had retired “in uncontrollable disgust” at Burton's “chicanery, arrogance, ignorance and brutality.” He had been writing a serial of adventure for the magazine, “The Journal of Julius Rodman,” but he broke it off practically in mid-sentence. It remained unfinished. In the pages of the Gentleman's Magazine itself Burton retaliated by printing an apologetic letter to a subscriber whose name had been “erased from our list by the person whose ‘infirmities’ have caused us much annoyance.” In turn Poe described Burton as a “felon” as well as a “buffoon.” A brief partnership had once more ended in disaster.

  Poe was serious, however, about the alternative journal under his own editorship. He had been contemplating the idea for some time, and in June he composed a prospectus for what he entitled the Penn Magazine; the name was a pun on “pen” and the abbreviation of Pennsylvania. He anticipated the “versatility, originality and pungency” of its contributions; he declared that it would soon become known as a periodical “where may be found, at all times, and upon all subjects, an honest and a fearless opinion;” it would belong “to the loftiest regions of literature.” And it would cost five dollars per annum. He was convinced that it would make his fortune, and at one stroke remove him from the importunities of any employer. He was sure of his ability to reshape or to reformulate American letters.

  Almost at once he began to write to editors, publishers, and journalists in the hope of acquiring a subscription list. He wanted to gather five hundred names by the beginning of December, thus putting his enterprise on a secure foundation. He even wrote to other members of the Poe family in search of financial contributions. He was also gathering material for the first number, which he confidently predicted would be ready by the beginning of 1841. Yet his ambitions, at this stage, outran his achievement. He found the preliminary work “difficult and most arduous,” and towards the end of the year he contracted some unspecified ailment that consigned him to bed for a month. This “severe illness,” as he called it, effectively delayed his plans for publication. He altered the date of the first issue from January to March 1841. But then in February there was another financial crash or panic in which the major banks in Philadelphia, and the South, were forced to close their doors. It was the worst possible moment for Poe's venture. It collapsed. It was a part of the ill fortune that followed him everywhere.

  So how was he now to live? In a life of unrest and poverty he depended upon the merest chance to rescue his family from devastation. That chance returned in the shape of the erstwhile Gentleman's Magazine. William Burton had sold the journal to a young lawyer from Philadelphia, George Rex Graham. Graham promptly changed the title to Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, but, with little journalistic or literary experience, he needed someone to assist him. Burton himself might have recommended the assistant editor whom he had fired eight months previously. Animosities, in this world, rarely endured for long. And so, in the spring of 1841, Graham offered Poe a salary of eight hundred dollars a year as editor of the book reviews. Poe accepted immediately—with “great pleasure,” as he put it—and once more set to work on another's behalf.

  A somewhat sentimental and saccharine affair, with well-meaning verses and tame “thrillers” and illustrations of pets and children, it was not the ideal literary journal of his prospectus. Yet Poe dismissed any misgivings he might have felt, and over the next two years published in its pages some nine new stories, fifty-one reviews, and fifteen essays. Here appeared, for example, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “A Descent into the Maelstrom.”

  He considered it a temporary appointment, however, designed to shield him from immediate hardship. Just five months after accepting the post he was actively seeking a clerkship in a political office in Washington. The intermediary was Frederick W. Thomas, whom he had met a year before at a convention in Philadelphia. Thomas was a novelist and journalist who had known Poe's brother, Henry; he also drank a great deal, and had aspirations to literary fame. So a friendship was formed. Thomas was in fact one of the few close friends Poe ever made. Thomas had acquired a sinecure in Washington, sifting through applications to the department of the Treasury, and he held out to Poe the prospect of similar employment. Poe wrote back enthusiastically. He was “really serious about the office.” He confided to Thomas that “notwithstanding Graham's unceasing civility, and real kindness, I feel more & more disgusted with my situation.” He was a hired hand on a mediocre publication.

  Yet he was earning the largest income he had so far enjoyed. He told one acquaintance that “I am temperate even to rigor,” and for the first time in his adult life he was free of debt. He purchased some unaccustomed luxuries, including a four-poster bed, a porcelain dinner service, and, for Virginia, a piano and a harp. He attended literary dinners, mingling with other authors and other publishers, and was also a frequent visitor at Graham's own table.
It is reported that Maria Clemm would wait in Graham's kitchen, with the express purpose of keeping Poe from excessive drinking and of accompanying him home.

  The hope of a Washington post, like all of Poe's aspirations, came to nothing. But, in the autumn of 1841, he reached an agreement with Graham to stay at his editorial post through the following year. There is every reason why Graham would wish him to continue. The circulation of the periodical had climbed from five thousand to twenty-five thousand, and that rise had more than a little to do with the publication of Poe's tales and reviews. Through his agency Graham's Magazine, as it was universally called, would soon become the largest selling monthly magazine in America.

  Poe once described himself as “essentially a Magazinist,” and, in certain respects, he did have the sensibility of a journalist. He had an eye for effect, a predilection for novelty, an interest in contemporary crazes such as phrenology and ballooning, and a shrewd notion of the public taste for “sensation.” He wrote to one correspondent that the whole tendency of the age was towards magazine literature—“to the curt, the terse, the well timed, and the readily diffused, in preference to the old forms of the verbose and ponderous …” It might almost be a definition of his fiction. He was always in the marketplace.