Poe

by Peter Ackroyd

  In the summer of 1845, too, there appeared a volume of twelve stories by Poe. Tales was published by the New York firm of Wiley and Putnam, and included “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Black Cat.” If it was an attempt to capitalise on the fame Poe had achieved with “The Raven,” it succeeded in part. The small volume was praised by the American Review as “one of the most original and peculiar ever published in the United States,” and by Graham's Magazine as “among the most original and characteristic compositions in American letters.” Of all the books published in Poe's lifetime, it was the most successful. Four months after publication, according to his own estimate, it had sold approximately fifteen hundred copies, thus earning Poe a royalty of over one hundred dollars. It was not munificent, but it was gratefully received.

  • • •

  In July he made an unexpected trip to Providence, Rhode Island, for which he had to borrow ten dollars from a friend. It was a secret journey, which he could not finance with the help of Maria Clemm. Poe had in mind a form of assignation.

  In one of his drunken fits he had divulged that he was involved “in the damnedst amour.” His wife, of course, was not to be told. The lady in question was Mrs. Frances Osgood, a literary “blue-stocking” (or “blue,” as the race was known), who composed verses and tales for New York periodicals. Poe had praised “Fanny” Osgood in his lecture on American poets, and eventually met her in the drawing room of the Astor Hotel in New York. She recalled the meeting at a later date with all the enhanced recollection of hindsight. “With his proud and beautiful head erect,” she said, “his dark eyes flashing with the elective light of feeling and thought, a peculiar, an inimitable blend of sweetness and hauteur in his expression and manner, he greeted me calmly, gravely, almost coldly …”

  The coldness must soon have vanished, however. They exchanged verses, and Poe printed several of her poems in the Broadway Journal. It was a highly public and publicised romance, if romance it was. It is more likely to have been a fussy and excitable literary friendship, lent added fervour by Poe's desperate need for the comfort and protection of women. They exchanged letters as well as verses, but the correspondence has since been lost. Poe's poems to her were not necessarily inspired by passionate devotion. One poem, “To F———S O———D,” had in fact been written for Virginia eleven years before; another tribute, “To F,” had been written in 1835 at which stage it was composed “To Mary.” He was not averse to recycling his emotions.

  Frances Osgood's New York publisher recalled that “when she was with my family, Poe called every day and generally spent the evening remaining invariably until midnight.” She was often present at the literary parties to which Poe was now a frequent visitor. Another writer recalled “the child-like face of Fannie Osgood suffused with tears under his [Poe's] wizard spell.” Thomas Dunn English also described “little Mrs. Osgood doing the infantile act… her face upturned to Poe.” She clearly had an advanced case of literary hero-worship, a form of adoration that Poe did his best to maintain. He courted her a little too ardently, however, and Mrs. Osgood described at a later date how “I went to Albany, and afterwards to Boston and Providence to avoid him.” She added that “he followed me to each of these places and wrote to me, imploring me to love him.” It sounds very much like a long pursued affair except for the fact that Mrs. Osgood's husband, the painter Samuel Osgood, was well aware of their association. Possibly it was an innocent, or unthreatening, dalliance. Adultery was not then generally acceptable, even in New York.

  • • •

  When Fanny Osgood visited the Poe household in New York, she found him working on a series of papers entitled “The Literati of New York.” He always wrote on narrow strips of paper, pasted into long rolls, and on this occasion he showed the various lengths of them to Fanny. His wife was present at the time. “Come, Virginia,” Mrs. Osgood remembered him saying, “help me!” Together they unrolled each piece until “at last they came to one which seemed interminable. Virginia laughingly ran to one corner of the room with one end and her husband to the opposite with the other.” Mrs. Osgood asked about whom this effusion was written. “Hear her,” he said, “just as if that little vain heart didn't tell her it's herself!” It is a mawkish episode, not relieved by the fact that Poe did indeed compose rather nauseous tributes to Mrs. Osgood's poetry. He had no steadiness in critical matters. He was swayed by private passion and personal rivalry. The fact that Fanny Osgood visited husband and wife, however, reinforces the impression that Fanny and Poe were not engaged in any sexual relationship. It seems that Mrs. Poe even asked Mrs. Osgood to continue her correspondence with Poe, on the grounds that their friendship helped to keep him sober. He found comfort in Fanny Osgood.

  It is significant that, in one character portrait of her, Poe described her “hair black and glossy: eyes a clear, luminous gray, large, and with singular capacity for expression.” This might be a description of one of the doomed women of his tales. It might almost be a description of his mother. Four years later, Fanny Osgood did indeed die of consumption. Could he have already noticed the signs of it upon her—he was preternaturally sensitive to such things—and thus have been drawn to her?

  Margaret Fuller, the most dispassionate and most intelligent of his observers, believed that his love affairs were in truth part of a “passionate illusion, which he amused himself by inducing, than of sympathy.” She believed that he had no friends, and that he was “shrouded in an assumed character.” It is possible that he was indeed playing a part, taking on a Byronic aspect for the sake of his female admirers, but was at the same time desperate and unbalanced. He became the part, living it with an intensity that belied its artificial nature.

  • • •

  Throughout the summer of 1845 he was working sporadically upon a book of poems. The Raven and Other Poems would be the first such collection since 1831. It was a significant publication, therefore, not least because he believed that he would earn five hundred dollars from its sales. His hopes were, as always, unfulfilled. He chose some thirty poems for the collection, among them such early works as “Tamerlane” and “Al Aaraaf.” In a preface he declared that “events not to be controlled have prevented me from making, at any time, any serious effort in what, under happier circumstances, would have been the field of my choice. With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion.” Unfortunately, the critics were not as well disposed towards the poems as to the tales. And the volume did not sell. It would be the last collection of Poe's poetry in his lifetime.

  He professed to be abstaining from alcohol, or “the ashes” as he called it, but by the autumn he was drinking again. He was always prone to spectacular miscalculations about the effect of his behaviour, and a reading in Boston proved to be what one critic has described as the beginning of his “downfall.” He had been invited to read at the event, in order to celebrate a new series of lectures in the Boston Lyceum. He was called upon to recite a new work at the end of a lecture by a Massachusetts politician, Caleb Cushing, but spent “some fifteen minutes with an apology for not delivering, as is usual in such cases, a didactic poem.” Poe did not write didactic poems; for him poetry and didacticism were antithetical. Poetry was concerned with the pursuit of the “beautiful” only—what was for him “supernal beauty” or “the beauty above.”

  This was the stirring message he delivered to the Bostonians. One Harvard student, present at the occasion, recalled that “he stood with a sort of shrinking before the audience and then began in a thin, tremulous, hardly musical voice, an apology for his poem, and a deprecation of the expected criticism of a Boston audience.” The student also noticed his “look of oversensitiveness which when uncontrolled may prove more debasing than coarseness.” Poe was, in other words, nervous and expecting the worst from a difficult group. Then he proceeded to recite “Al Aaraaf,” a poem that he had written sixteen years previously. Some of his auditors grew restive under the strain of understanding this juvenile performance, and so Poe
was prevailed upon to read “The Raven” at the close of the proceedings. Members of the audience, however, were already leaving with much noisy vacating of seats.

  It was not a particularly glorious night, but then Poe, over “a bottle of champagne,” compounded the offence by revealing to some Bostonian writers and journalists that “Al Aaraaf” was indeed a poem of his youth. They were not pleased by the intelligence, assuming it to be an insult both to Boston and to the Lyceum. The editor of the Boston Evening Transcript, Cornelia Wells Walter, disclosed that the poem had been composed “before its author was twelve years old.” Poe, in one of his flights of fancy, may even have stated this improbable fact. Miss Walter continued in a vein of thinly concealed sarcasm, “a poem delivered before a literary association of adults, as written by a boy! Only think of it! Poh! Poh!” He retaliated in kind. “Well, upon the whole we must forgive her,” he wrote, “—and do. Say no more about it, you little darling!” The last expression was considered to be unwholesome.

  It should be remembered that Poe was a Southerner. He was a Virginian, if not by birth, at least by inclination. He disliked the culture of New England in general, and of Boston in particular; he despised in equal measure Transcendentalism and Abolitionism. He was in spirit if not in practice a Southern gentleman. That accounts for the somewhat florid classicism, and the melodic intensity, of his prose. “It is high time,” he once wrote, “that the literary South took its own interests into its own charge.” So in Boston he had entered the den of his enemies.

  He retaliated to the resulting abuse by proudly claiming to have “quizzed,” or made fun of, the Bostonians. In the Broadway JournalPoe revealed that “we like Boston. We were born there—and perhaps it is just as well not to mention that we are heartily ashamed of the fact… the Bostonians have no soul.” He added salt to the wound, or fuel to the flame, by adding that “it could scarcely be supposed that we would put ourselves to the trouble of composing for the Bostonians anything in the shape of an original poem… it did well enough for a Boston audience.” This was, at the very least, ungracious.

  Cornelia Walter herself then returned to the attack by noting that “it must be confessed that he did out-Yankee the managers of the Lyceum since he not only emptied their pockets but emptied the house.” The general impression, assiduously spread by Miss Walter and others, was of Poe as unreliable and discourteous. He was not serious. He was a charlatan and a drunkard.

  • • •

  In this inauspicious month Poe also took charge of the Broadway Journal. In a series of negotiations and schemings he bought out his erstwhile partners. “By a flurry of manoeuvres almost incomprehensible to myself,” he wrote, “I have succeeded, one by one, in getting rid, one by one, of all my associates.” He also raised funds from friends and even issued an advertisement in the Journal itself proclaiming “A RARE OPPORTUNITY” for an investment in the enterprise. He begged money, he borrowed money, he promised money. Then, on 25 October 1845, Poe's name was blazoned on the masthead of the Journal as “Editor and Proprietor.” “I have to do everything myself” he wrote, “edit the paper—get it to press—and attend to the multitudinous business besides.”

  One of his erstwhile partners, Charles Frederick Briggs, was happy to relinquish any interest in the magazine. He regarded Poe as a liability, calling him “the merest shell of a man,” “a drunken sot,” and the “most purely selfish of human beings.” He added for good measure that Poe quoted from the German without being able to understand a word of the language. This is likely to have been true. Briggs also believed that, in retaliation, Poe was spreading lies about him in New York: “I cannot conceive of such wanton malice, as Poe has been guilty of towards me.”

  As sole proprietor, Poe was not a success. He curtailed the coverage of the Journal, for want of funds, and could not afford to pay any decent contributors. He republished his own work, and printed the poems of the “starry sisterhood” and other poetasters. The magazine's circulation was uneven, and its publication was fitful. Six weeks after acquiring the editorship he sold half of his interest to Thomas H. Lane, a Customs House employee he had met in Philadelphia. “For the first time during two months,” he told one acquaintance, “I find myself entirely myself— dreadfully sick and depressed, but still myself. I seem to have just awakened from some horrible dream… I really believe that I have been mad.” He had been “mad” at the Lyceum, “mad” in his pursuit of Mrs. Osgood, “mad” in his decision to take up the editorship of the Journal. The madness, if such it was, had come from the combined effects of drink and intolerable strain. A month after signing the agreement with Lane, according to English, Poe succumbed to “one of his drunken sprees.” Lane closed down the magazine on 3 January 1846. It was the last editorial position Poe would ever hold.

  The day before the Broadway Journal closed Poe witnessed an agreement by which Maria Clemm relinquished her claim to a piece of Baltimore property, worth twenty-five dollars; the family must have been desperate indeed to sign away their last piece of capital.

  In the previous November Stoddard had passed Poe in the street. It was raining heavily, and for a moment Stoddard considered sharing his umbrella with him. But “something—certainly not unkindness—withheld me. I went on and left him there in the rain, pale, shivering, miserable … There I still see him, and always shall,— poor, penniless, but proud, reliant, dominant.” In the same month Poe wrote to a relation, George Poe, “I have perse-veringly struggled, against a thousand difficulties, and have succeeded, although not in making money, still in attaining a position in the world of Letters, of which, under the circumstances, I have no reason to be ashamed.”

  The Scandal

  Poe believed that he had many enemies. He blamed the failure of the Broadway Journal “on the part of one or two persons who are much imbit-tered against me,” and he declared that “there is a deliberate attempt now being made to involve me in ruin.” It is not clear who these “one or two persons” were, if they existed at all, but they may have been rival newspaper editors or writers unhappy about Poe's often scathing critical notices. But he was right to sense persecution. At the beginning of 1846, he was involved in unwelcome scandal. It came from an unexpected quarter.

  In his life there were certain literary females who vied for his attention. Principal among them were Elizabeth F. Ellet, Fanny Osgood, Margaret Fuller, and Anne Lynch. Fanny Osgood, the poetess of New York, was by now a family friend. Margaret Fuller was a writer and reviewer who, four years before, had edited a Transcendentalist quarterly the Dial; she had met Poe at a soirée in New York. Anne Lynch was a poetess and teacher, who hosted some of these soirées. Elizabeth Ellet was a poet and novelist whose work Poe had printed and praised in the Broadway Journal. Fanny Osgood, in perhaps not the most charitable spirit, remarked that Elizabeth Ellet “followed him everywhere.”

  Elizabeth Ellet and Fanny Osgood had written rapturous letters to Poe that, to a prurient reader, might have erred on the side of indiscretion. Expressions of poetic devotion, as he himself knew well enough, are not the same thing as true passion. Yet that is not how it seemed at the time, when the two women became incensed and then alarmed at the manner in which their missives were being treated.

  Early in 1846, Mrs. Ellet decided one day to call upon Poe at his home in Amity Street. When she came up to the house, she heard laughter, and on gaining entrance discovered Fanny Osgood in the parlour with Virginia Poe. It soon became evident that they were laughing at a letter. It was still in Fanny Osgood's hand, and it was Mrs. Ellet's letter to Poe. Mrs. Ellet snatched it up, and marched out. That is one version.

  There is another. Mrs. Ellet called at Amity Street and, in the course of her visit, Virginia read out to her a letter to Poe from Mrs. Osgood. (If this version of the story is true, it is difficult to know why Virginia was being indiscreet.) Mrs. Ellet professed to be somewhat alarmed by the tone of Mrs. Osgood's letter. No doubt aching with excitement, she went immediately to see Mrs. Osgood herself
to advise her to retrieve all her letters to Poe. The question was one of womanly modesty.

  The two other literary ladies now entered the scene. Margaret Fuller and Anne Lynch, dear friends from the soirées, visited Poe and formally demanded the return of Mrs. Osgood's letters. Poe was naturally resentful. He responded that Fanny Osgood was not alone. Elizabeth Ellet's letters were also open to misinterpretation.

  In the meantime Elizabeth Ellet had asked her brother to call upon Poe and demanded the return of her letters. Poe insisted to him that he had already sent them back to Mrs. Ellet. But the brother did not believe him and threatened to kill him if he did not produce them. Poe then visited Thomas Dunn English, and asked for the use of his pistol. English denied the request, and insinuated that Poe never did possess any letters from Mrs. Ellet in the first place. The two men engaged in some kind of tussle. It sounds like the most absurd fiction, but somewhere in the welter of claim and counter-claim there was a genuine imbroglio.

  Poe retreated to his bed after his encounter with English, and then persuaded his physician to deliver an apologetic letter to Mrs. Ellet. He denied making any improper claims about her correspondence but added that, if he did make any such remarks, he must have been suffering from temporary insanity. Mrs. Osgood was also incensed about the mockery of her own letters, and persuaded Virginia Poe to write her a letter confirming what she called “my innocence.”