The only son of J. H. Ingraham, Prentiss went on to become even more prolific with his pen (and handier with his six-gun) than his father. He is credited with the authorship of some 600 novels and 400 novellas under as many as fifteen pen-names – written, it should be added, in his retirement, and, unable to use the typewriter, written in longhand. Prentiss left medical school to fight in the Confederate cause in the Civil War. He was wounded, reached the rank of Colonel, survived, and in love with soldiering went off to fight for Juárez against the French in Mexico. A soldier of fortune, he also fought for the Greeks against the Turks and for the Cubans against the Spanish. As a Colonel with the Cuban army (and a captain in their navy) he was captured and narrowly escaped execution.
In the 1870s, Ingraham settled down in New York, marrying and starting a family. Having lived adventure, he now resolved to write about it and became a lead author in Beadle and Adams’s bestselling ‘dime novel’ series (also giving them many of his father’s copyrights, some of whose novels he rewrote). He had a strong line in ‘Buffalo Bill’ stories – and was, for a while, the buckskin-clad showman’s press agent – as well as material drawn from his own military past. Like his father, he was fond of piracy as a subject. Title pages proclaimed him ‘Col. Prentiss Ingraham’. Given his speed of production, he could as well have been called ‘Machine Gun Prentiss’ – the Beadle and Adams steam presses could barely keep up with his production.
He died of Bright’s disease, supposedly originating in one of his Civil War wounds, aged only sixty, in the Beauvoir Confederate Soldiers Home, Biloxi.
FN
Prentiss Ingraham
MRT
anything with ‘Buffalo Bill’ or ‘Pirate’ in the title
Biog
ANB (Randall C. Davis)
34. Edgar Allan Poe 1809–1849
To take Poe with more than a certain degree of seriousness is to lack seriousness oneself. Henry James
No writing life has been lived at such speed as was Poe’s. Like the hero of ‘The Premature Burial’ he was morbidly aware of death hurtling towards him. In a short life he wrote – other than one chronically bitty novel – short stories and short poems. A long poem, he liked to assert, was a ‘contradiction in terms’. Why? Because ‘all excitements are, through a psychal [sic] necessity, transient’. Life is too short for Paradise Lost. The poem on the Underground, snatched between stations, is quintessentially Poevian. Some of Poe’s stories – ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ or ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, for example – are, indeed, sufficiently terse to qualify as the ‘condensed novels’ (or fictional haikus) that J. G. Ballard, a distant literary offspring, toyed with. No poem or narrative, Poe estimated, could excite ‘for more than an hour’. Most of his finest stories can be read in Andy Warhol’s talismanic fifteen minutes. It was a fortunate coincidence that Poe’s career coincided with the rise of the popular magazine, marketed for an ever-hurrying American population with no hours to waste.
All paths, however, not merely those of glory, led – for Poe – to the grave, and his path was faster than most. It is a challenge to find a story where untimely death is not central – whether premature ‘inhumation’, the ‘red’ plague (an allegory, it is suggested, of his child-mother’s, child-wife’s and his own incipient, blood-spitting, tuberculosis) or murder. In his one so-called novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (in fact a bundle of disconnected narratives), there is a veritable holocaust of some twenty-five mariners disposed of (one consumed cannibalistically by the survivors, none granted easeful deaths) before the yarn proper even gets underway. Death, inevitably, awaits Pym, still not twenty years old. The skull on the desk, that standard Ignatian aid to meditation, is common enough in literature. With Poe, the warm flesh is still slithering off the shining bone. Another of his early tales, ‘Berenice’, has a hero prone – as are many of Poe’s heroes – to cataleptic trance. Berenice, the love of his life, wastes away from consumption. On the morning after her funeral he comes round after a long amnesia sitting in his library. His clothes are ‘muddy and clotted with gore’. A servant rushes in and points to a spade in the corner:
With a shriek I bounded to the table, and grasped the box that lay upon it. But I could not force it open; and, in my tremor, it slipped from my hands, and fell heavily, and burst into pieces; and from it, with a rattling sound, there rolled out some instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with thirty-two small, white, and ivory-looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor.
He has torn out her teeth. As a superfluous frisson Berenice was, it transpires, buried alive, and screamed under the dental operation. She is now, however, well dead and perfectly toothless.
Poe’s mother was an actress born in England who made her debut on the American stage, aged nine – a prematurity not even Edgar could match. Eliza Arnold was a veteran trouper before she was out of her teens. She was married at fifteen and widowed at eighteen. She promptly made a second marriage with fellow actor, David Poe, by whom she had three children – while touring the length and breadth of America. Edgar, the second child, was born in Boston. It pleased him in later life to proclaim himself on title-pages ‘a Bostonian’. The truth is no writer was more rootless – he could as well have called himself a New Yorker, or a Philadelphian, or a Flying Dutchman.
David Poe abandoned his wife and children two years after Edgar’s birth to be heard of no more. He leaves no echo in his son’s later fiction, where fathers are wholly invisible. Eliza then succumbed to consumption in 1811, aged twenty-three. Her husband did not stay to watch her die. Edgar, of necessity, did, barely weaned when she left him. The dying (and not-dying) woman would be a central element in his early work, notably in his majestic fantasia about witches, castles and corpses, ‘Ligeia’. The three orphaned Poe children were taken on, but not wholly adopted, by well-wishers in Richmond, Virginia, where Eliza had gone to die. Edgar was taken into the Allan family, whose name was inserted into his own. There ensued a textbook Oedipal relationship with his wealthy, alternately generous and skin-flint, ‘father’, John Allan, a prosperous merchant (among the other wares he dealt in were tombstones). The Allan family spent five years in Britain where Allan had attempted, unsuccessfully, to set up a branch of his business. It was here that Edgar got his early school education, and with it a lifelong penchant for English settings in his stories and poems – drawn (he was the most light-fingered of writers) from the Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott, then all the rage.
Edgar embarked on his adolescence as a child of privilege. But gambling debts – and a disinclination to own up to them – led to his being kicked out of the University of Virginia and having his allowance withdrawn. He was already exhibiting early signs of dipsomania – something which, like all mind-transforming conditions, fascinated him. He was, as his French admirer Baudelaire insisted, an explorer not an addict –and no territory was more interesting than the darker places of the human mind.
Aged eighteen, lying about his age, and under a fake name, Poe enlisted in the US Army, on a salary of $5 a month. In the same year, 1827, he published at his own expense his first volume: Tamerlane and Other Poems. It was universally ignored – despite the clear evidence of talent which hindsight can detect. A brief reconciliation with John Allan enabled Poe (who had risen in the ranks) to buy himself out, and buy himself into the US military academy, West Point. Here again he excelled before, in his last year, engineering his own court-martial and dismissal. It was the last straw for John Allan and Edgar was disinherited. All he had by way of legacy from his now obscenely rich guardian was his middle name (routinely misspelled). He was not, when one weighs everything up, that bad a foster-son. Despite Baudelaire’s admiration, no writer is less the flâneur or congenital wastrel than Edgar Allan Poe. It was the pattern of his life to succeed brilliantly, then move on before getting bogged down in the consequences of his own brilliance. If necessary he would drink himself out of the sinecures friends were willing to set up for him.
So, too, with his career as an author. He went from journal to journal, dashing off poems, savage reviews, and stories like a writing Gatling gun. He routinely broke contracts, confecting grievances to do so. His heyday as a writer-editor was with Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine, which he joined in 1841. His pieces raised the circulation fourfold to an astonishing 40,000 copies per issue. Aged twenty-six, he married a thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm. True to her name, she probably remained virginal. There is little evidence that Poe had interest (or time) for carnal relationships – although he liked women. His closest bond was with his widowed mother-in-law, ‘Muddy’ Clemm. Scurrilous accusations of incest were, inevitably, circulated after his death.
Poe was phenomenally successful, but never well off – particularly in the last phase of his life. It was a good year when he earned over $1,000. Regular use of alcohol and occasional indulgence in opium played a part. It is tempting to link this intoxication to the point of blackout with Poe’s fascination with epilepsy, catatonia and mesmeric trance. It features as a plot mechanism in many of his stories, most brilliantly in the late (1845) ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, a horrific voyage into the afterlife, which ends (as does M. Valdemar’s stay on this earth): ‘Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome – of detestable putridity.’
Despite the notoriety which attached to America’s poète maudit, surprisingly little is known about the details of Poe’s life. Myth has washed in to fill the vacuum and encourages such cultish bizarreries (a favourite Poe word) as the deranged spiritualist, Lizzie Doten, channelling a Poe poem, ‘Resurrexi’, from beyond the veil. The posthumous lies about Poe put into circulation by his self-appointed, venomously vindictive, ‘executor’ (‘executioner’ would be the more appropriate term), Rufus Griswold, have further tainted Poe’s image. Griswold’s Poe is less the poète maudit than a drug-crazed, sex-mad lunatic.
Typically clouded by enigma are the accounts of Poe’s death. On 3 October 1849, the forty-year-old was found wandering the streets of Baltimore, ranting deliriously, wearing someone else’s clothes. He seemed to be calling out ‘Reynolds’ (unidentified). One of his distant relatives who had been summoned took one look and refused to take charge of him. Poe was taken to the local hospital’s ward for drunks, where he died four days later. Since the death of Virginia a couple of years earlier, he had been chaotic in his personal life, proposing marriage to a series of women and embarking on pointless literary feuds – notably with Longfellow. His genius was, apparently, extinguished. His income, in his last year, had sunk to barely more than $150, largely raised from slurred public recitations of his signature poem, ‘The Raven’. ‘Nevermore’, rather than Longfellow’s ‘Excelsior’, would seem to have been his motto.
Newspapers, concerned that such a great man of American letters should be so destitute, raised subscriptions; friends intervened, without success. What destroyed Poe? Intoxication? Syphilis? Was it, as Baudelaire suggested, his chosen form of suicide? What happened in the missing days of that last week? Had he been drugged and robbed of his clothes in some squalid harbour bar? Had he been beaten up (as some suspected) by West Point cadets out on the razzle? Had he gone into the underworld, like M. Valdemar? Had he, like the hero of ‘Berenice’, committed some awful crime he could no longer remember? His medical records were lost, or were destroyed. Posterity will never for certain know what killed Edgar Allan Poe. Yet his work lives on. As a grateful Arthur Conan Doyle noted, each of Poe’s stories is a root ‘from which whole literatures develop’. It still grows.
FN
Edgar Allan Poe (born Edgar Poe)
MRT
‘Berenice’
Biog
K. Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (1991)
35. Mrs Gaskell 1810–1865
My heart burnt within me with indignation and grief.
Despite enlightened attempts to rebrand her as ‘Elizabeth Gaskell’, she remains, obdurately, ‘Mrs’. To call her anything else jars as painfully on the ear attuned to the Victorian world as would ‘the eminent author of Jane Eyre, Mrs Arthur Bell Nicholls’. There is a good reason for the title: wifeliness burns at the heart of Gaskell’s creativity. To console herself in the mourning period when her only son Willie died of scarlet fever in 1845, she wrote a story of industrial life, strife, suffering and death (no Victorian novelist, incidentally, introduces more deathbeds into her fiction), Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848). Her art was forged in the furnace of maternal grief.
Elizabeth Stevenson was born in Chelsea, London, of Unitarian parents. After quitting the Unitarian ministry her father took up the comfortable official position of Keeper of Records to the Treasury. Mr Stevenson’s ‘doubts’, and their impact on the females in his family, form the initial plot of North and South (1855). Her mother came from Cheshire, thus setting up from birth the cultural clash between North and South which was to preoccupy the future novelist. Mrs Stevenson died when her daughter was just over a year old, and the very young Elizabeth was effectively adopted by her aunt, Hannah Lumb, in Knutsford, Cheshire – the original of ‘Cranford’. She grew up in the small country town, with its outlying farms, whose life she was later to chronicle. It was, however, only sixteen miles from Manchester, the most advanced industrial city in the world. Polarities were everywhere: factory chimneys and tea-cosies.
Like other Unitarian girls, Elizabeth was well educated at school, leaving at the age of seventeen with a working knowledge of modern and classical languages. In 1828 her brother, John Stevenson, a lieutenant in the merchant marine, disappeared at sea. His loss affected her strongly and the brother thought dead who returns to life appears as a motif frequently in her subsequent fiction. Around the same period her father married a woman whom Elizabeth – insofar as she was capable of ungenerous feelings – did not much like, a situation which is recalled as the central plot element in her last novel, Wives and Daughters. She nevertheless lived with her father until his death in 1829, after which she returned to Knutsford.
In 1832 Elizabeth married the Revd William Gaskell, a Unitarian assistant minister – and scholar – at the Cross Street Chapel in Manchester. The union was to be very happy. The first dozen years of her life were occupied in family and parochial matters, but she found time to write the odd piece of prose and verse. In 1837, for example, she embarked on a descriptive poem, in the style of Crabbe, called Sketches Among the Poor. But her first successful venture in authorship was Mary Barton. Initially it was to be called ‘John Barton’, with the intention of focusing on the miseries of textile mill workers in the trade depression of ‘the hungry forties’, and the near-revolutionary protest mobilised as Chartism, which demanded a total reform of England’s parliamentary system. It was an uncomfortable subject and Gaskell had difficulty finding a publisher for it. She was induced to sweeten the pill with a more romantic central plot and title and the revised novel was accepted in 1848 by Chapman and Hall, Dickens’s publishers, who paid her £100.
It was a canny purchase: Mary Barton was a hit. Carlyle (prominently quoted on the novel’s title-page – and not usually an admirer of the ‘novelwright’) approved and only the mill owners objected to the anonymous author’s depiction of the Lancashire working man’s hardships and superior nobility to those who exploited their labour and seduced their daughters. Gaskell’s identity was soon known and overnight she became a celebrity. Dickens, another admirer, invited her to contribute to his new weekly magazine, Household Words, and it was in its pages that Cranford – the saga of the genteel spinster ‘Amazons’ of Knutsford – first appeared. Gaskell’s second full-length novel, Ruth (1853), renewed her assault on the middle-class conscience by exposing another ‘social problem’ of the Victorian era – bastardy and the persecution of the ‘fallen woman’. Dickens, it may be noted, paid her considerably less than his star male serialists.
North and South (1855) marked a
new level of maturity in Gaskell’s art. The story of the complicated love affair of a well-bred Home Counties girl and a northern mill owner reflected many of the tensions of the author’s own life and her double cultural inheritance. Following hard on the Preston cotton strike – which Dickens was dealing with, simultaneously, in Hard Times – the novel was highly topical, if sentimental in its social recommendations (essentially that masters and men should behave in a more Christian way to each other – foregoing the capitalistic doctrines of ‘Political Economy’). Dickens’s analysis was sharper.
In the same year, 1855, Gaskell’s friend, Charlotte Brontë died. Charlotte’s father and her husband invited Gaskell to undertake a biography, so as to put down the wild rumours circulating about the Haworth sisters. The resulting Life of Charlotte Brontë is the best of Victorian literary biographies, although it aggrieved living acquaintances of the novelist and a retraction of parts of the book had to be published in The Times.
By the late 1850s Gaskell was earning up to £1,000 for her novels. Her next major work, Sylvia’s Lovers, was begun in 1859, with extensive research into eighteenth-century Whitby. But domestic worries distracted her from this historical tale of love, smuggling and press-gangs which eventually came out in 1863. It was followed by Cousin Phillis (1864), a gentler, idyllic (and shorter) work which is Gaskell’s masterpiece. Wives and Daughters was being serialised at the time of the author’s death, and is unfinished. An ‘everyday story’, it recapitulates in the experiences of its heroine Molly Gibson much of the author’s own early life. A mother to the end Mrs Gaskell died of a sudden heart attack while visiting the house she had just bought at Holybourne with the £1,600 proceeds from Wives and Daughters, surrounded by three of her daughters. She is buried at Knutsford.
Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives Page 16
