Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio

by David Standish

  Unfortunately for Reynolds, these “gentlemen” had the final say. Before the sailing date, he was dismissed from the post, and did not accompany the expedition that was largely his creation. It had partly to do with an ongoing antipathy on the part of the Navy to having civilians of any stripe aboard their ships; also, as delay began to follow delay, with the appropriation rapidly dwindling, Reynolds had been making his opinions known a little too loudly, and got on the wrong side of Secretary of the Navy Mahlon Dickerson. But the dismissal also showed the hand of Charles Wilkes, the expedition’s eventual leader, who had been clashing with Reynolds ever since the aborted 1828 effort.28 From here on, perhaps understandably after such disappointment as a reward for such prolonged effort, Reynolds’ interests shifted away from the sea. He continued to write about earlier adventures—two such pieces appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger, in 1839 and 1843, and “Mocha Dick” in Knickerbocker in 1839—but he devoted the rest of his life to law and politics.

  In 1840 he hit the boards in Connecticut as a campaign speaker for the Whigs, and in 1841 began a law firm on Wall Street, where he worked primarily on maritime law. In 1848, ever entrepreneurial, he organized a stock company for a mining operation in Leon, Mexico. The sketch of Reynolds in The History of Clinton County Ohio concludes: “He was elected president of the company, and, after a few years of persistent effort, he made quite a success in the field; but his health soon failed, and he died near New York City in 1858, aged fifty-nine years. He was buried in that city.”

  Poe liked Reynolds and the address so much that he stole parts of it for The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, whose opening chapters were published serially in the January and February 1837 issues of the Southern Literary Messenger. Poe also lifted details from Reynolds’s earlier Voyage of the Potomac. Reynolds wasn’t alone in the honor. Poe ransacked existing seagoing literature for his tale about Pym, appropriating left and right, and returned to Symmes’ Hole for his big finale.29

  Poe’s timing in writing Pym showed his good commercial instincts—he was a magazine editor, after all. The voyage had captured the national imagination and was just under way when Poe’s novel came out, which left him free to cook up the grisly possibilities he envisioned for his own Antarctic excursion. Even so, the book didn’t sell very well, and Poe returned to the shorter work at which he was far more accomplished.

  Literary historian Alexander Cowie summed up Pym as “a plotless, nightmare-ridden book.” Right on both counts, but it nonetheless holds a certain fascination, however morbid. For all its faults, which are many, it is a lot of gruesome fun. A seeker of extreme sensation in life, it makes sense that Poe would push every boundary he could think of in his writing. One literary form of pushing limits is parody, and Pym is arguably that as well, a ghastly gothic send-up of that literary staple, the journal of a polar voyage. It bears an uncanny resemblance to one polar voyage in particular—Symzonia. A number of scholars have pointed to Symzonia as a likely model. In Pilgrims Through Space and Time, J. O. Bailey, citing a long list of parallels, suggests that it might have been called Pymzonia. But with all its debts to Symzonia—and Poe truly seems to have used it as a template for his own tale—Pym takes these elements to the outer limits. And it’s all done deadpan, with a straight face. Poe admired Robinson Crusoe for its seeming verisimilitude, and all that ransacking of marine literature, with the occasional outright theft for good measure, at first gives the book the superficial aspect of being just another voyager’s account of his travels; the realistic, matter-of-fact journalistic tone continues as events get more and more outrageous. Poe loved hoaxes, and he does his damnedest in Pym to carry it off.

  But there are hints early on. Before the voyage is under way, the young narrator rhapsodizes about his hopes for the trip: “For the bright side of the painting I had a limited sympathy. My visions were of shipwreck and famine; of death and captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some grey and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown.” Mind you, this is what he hopes will happen. And does he ever get his wish!

  Pym is sneaked onboard by his friend Augustus, deposited as a stowaway in a dark claustrophobic hold, from which he soon finds he cannot get out, beginning the voyage in a sort of burial alive, one of Poe’s favorite terrors. While he’s stuck in this fetid compartment, up on deck the crew is mutinying. For days he nearly starves and goes mad, and is threatened by man’s best friend, a dog trapped in there with him. Finally Augustus springs him. Joined by thuggish-looking half-breed Dirk Peters, the three kill all the mutineers but one and retake the vessel. But, wouldn’t you know it, a protracted gale reduces the ship to a floating wreck, kept from sinking by its buoyant cargo of oil. They can’t get at the food in the hold, so it’s either death by starvation or being washed overboard.

  Then a ship approaches with what proves to be an ex-crew. “Twenty-five or thirty human bodies, among whom were several females, lay scattered about … in the last and most loathsome state of putrefaction.” On one sits a seagull, “busily gorging itself with the horrible flesh, its bill and talons deeply buried, and its white plumage spattered all over with blood.” A tip of the hat to Coleridge for that scene. Another vessel comes by but doesn’t see them.

  Dirk Peters, as imagined by artist René Clarke, looking cheerfully sinister and ready to rock with his bottle of rum and shiv on his belt, in a 1930 edition produced by Heritage Press for the Limited Editions Club. (© 1930 by The Limited Editions Club [George Macy Companies, Inc.])

  Now they’re really starving. They begin sizing each other up as possible entrees. They draw lots, and Parker, whose idea it was, gets the short straw. Dirk Peters, living up to his first name, stabs him. For the next four days the others nosh on Parker’s diminishing remains. Finally Pym figures out a way to cut a hole into the storeroom, which is filled with water, so they have to dive repeatedly to bring up whatever they can—a bottle of olives, a bottle of Madeira, and a live tortoise. Augustus has injured his arm, which begins turning black, and he wastes away, a mere forty-five pounds when he dies. When Peters tries to pick him up, one of Augustus’s legs comes off in his hands. Can things get worse? Of course. The hulk rolls over. But the three survivors manage to clamber up on it, and, in one of those ironies that made Poe smile, what do these starving men find on the hull? Plenty of nutritious barnacles. They catch rainwater in their shirts.

  It’s brutally hot, but they can’t cool off in the ocean because of the sharks endlessly cruising around them. They’re dying. But then another ship approaches, the Jane Guy, and this time they are saved—briefly. This whaler heads farther south, piercing the southern ice barrier into temperate seas. As the climate becomes increasingly warmer—just as it does in Symzonia—they come upon an island near the South Pole populated by seemingly friendly savages. But it turns out to be one of the strangest and most sinister islands in literature. Everything, every plant and creature, even the water, is black. The woolly-haired natives even have black teeth—and not from not brushing. White in any form is unknown to them, except for the strange white animal (with red teeth) they worship as a terrible totem. The natives come out to meet the Jane Guy in large sea canoes, greeting them with cries of Anamoo-moo and Lama-Lama. For a few days everything is swell. But then they set an ambush for the crew, killing them in a landslide; they head out in canoes to burn the Jane Guy, which proves a miscalculation when the gunpowder in the hold explodes, sending body parts flying. All the crew are dead but Pym and Peters, fortuitously semi-buried alive (again) in a rock chamber during the landslide. They manage to escape in a native canoe, abducting one Nu-Nu to accompany them as a guide, but he proves useless, lying in the canoe bottom writhing in fear and dying a few days later. A persistent current draws their little craft ever southward. A gray vapor is seen rising above the horizon.

  Boat adrift. “The wind had entirely ceased, but it was evident that we were still hurrying on to the southward, under the influence
of a powerful current.” (© 1930 by The Limited Editions Club [George Macy Companies, Inc.])

  The seawater becomes hot to the touch and takes on a milky hue. “A fine white powder, resembling ashes—but certainly not such—fell over the canoe and over a large surface of the water.” A day later, “the range of vapor to the southward had arisen prodigiously in the horizon, and began to assume more distinctness of form. I can liken it to nothing but a limitless cataract … we were evidently approaching it with a hideous velocity.” Not counting a short afterword, which Poe provides to continue the pose that this has been an actual nonfiction account, these are the final lines:

  Many gigantic and pallidly white birds flew continuously now from beyond the veil, and their scream was the eternal Tekeli-li! as they retreated from our vision … 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 its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.

  Go figure. He says in the afterword that the final two or three chapters have been lost, regrettable because they no doubt “contained matter relative to the Pole itself, or at least to regions in its very near proximity; and as, too, the statements of the author in relation to these regions may shortly be verified or contradicted by means of the governmental expedition now preparing for the Southern Ocean.”

  Pym’s abrupt ending has puzzled and annoyed readers and critics alike. Did Poe simply weary of a bad business, as many have suggested? Could be. But its very abruptness adds a final element of ambiguity missing from the rest of the book. Toward the end Poe begins toying with the symbolic possibilities of whiteness and, less happily, blackness. Critic Leslie Fiedler has argued persuasively that taking his white characters way down south to the all-black island represents southern racist dreaming, nightmare division, a macabre South Seas rendering of that deepest slaveholder dread—a slave insurrection. “The book projects his personal resentment and fear,” says Fiedler, “as well as the guilty terror of a whole society in the face of those whom they can never quite believe they have the right to enslave.”

  Whiteness doesn’t fare too well either. In The Power of Blackness, Harry Levin sees in that final whiteness “a mother-image.” Levin says “the milky water is more redolent of birth than of death; and the opening in the earth may seem to be a regression wombward.” But Fiedler finds in the engulfing womblike whiteness of the cataract a perverse twist on the great mother symbol. Clearly, despite the postscript, Pym and Peters are sucked down to their deaths, and Fiedler sees this final and fatal embracing whiteness as “the Great Mother as vagina dentata.” Ouch! And Poe uses Symmes’ Hole to chew up his hapless hero! “From the beginning,” Fiedler says, “a perceptive reader of Gordon Pym is aware that every current sentimental platitude, every cliché of the fable of the holy marriage of males is being ironically exposed.”

  I would suggest an even wider reading—that Pym is also a send-up of the mania for polar exploration and the bright sunny possibilities being trumpeted by Reynolds & Co. Was Poe among the enthusiasts? Yes. Could he help seeing the dark humor in all this optimism? Or resist sticking it to the whole bunch, even though he admired Reynolds and thought the expedition was cool? It would seem not. The book’s commercial failure may have had less to do with its gory excesses and/or artistic deficiencies (it really is better and more fun to read than it’s supposed to be) than its naked subversiveness regarding this particular scene in the American Dream.

  Interestingly, Poe found an ally in Henry David Thoreau, who also had something to say about the national enthusiasm Reynolds generated for exploration of the South Pole and about Symmes’ Hole too, though his comments in the concluding chapter of Walden (1854) were typically contrarian and transcendental, making metaphysics of it all:

  What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone … It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you can do better, and you may perhaps find some “Symmes’ Hole” by which to get at the inside at last.

  Good old Henry, ever marching along to that different drummer. Explore the Symmes’ Hole within you—it is more mysterious and profound.

  Deluxe edition of Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Center of the Earth, published by Scribner, Armstrong in 1874. (Courtesy of Sumner & Stillman, Booksellers)

  4

  JULES VERNE: A JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF GEOLOGY

  FROM HERE, THE HOLLOW EARTH IS A CAROM SHOT—from Poe to Baudelaire to Verne.

  Poe died slowly, horribly, in Baltimore during the first week of October 1849. He had stopped there on his way from Richmond to Philadelphia, where he was to be paid $100 for editing a book of poems by Mrs. St. Leon Loud, such were his financial straits. Why he stopped in Baltimore isn’t known, nor what he did for five days between leaving the packet boat until he was found by his friend Dr. J. E. Snodgrass in a barroom, a wreck collapsed in an armchair. “His face was haggard,” Snodgrass later wrote, “not to say bloated, and unwashed, his hair unkempt and his whole physique repulsive.” Snodgrass took him to the Washington College Hospital, unconscious. Poe woke in the middle of the night to a pitiless swarm of DT symptoms, sweating, quaking, gibbering in a “busy but not violent or active delirium, the whole chamber seethed for him, and with vacant converse he talked to the spectres that withered and loomed on the walls.”30 He lingered thus for days. Biographer Hervey Allen writes of his final hours:

  On that last night, as the shadow fell across him, it must have been the horrors of shipwreck, of thirst, and of drifting away into unknown seas of darkness that troubled his last dreams, for, by some trick of his ruined brain, it was scenes of Arthur Gordon Pym that rose in his imagination, and the man who was connected most intimately with them.

  “Reynolds!” he called, “Reynolds! Oh, Reynolds!” The room rang with it. It echoed down the corridors hour after hour all that Saturday night. The last grains of sand uncovered themselves as he slipped away, during the Sunday morning of October 7, 1849. He was now too feeble to call out any more. It was three o’clock in the morning and the earth’s shadow was still undisturbed by dawn. He became quiet, and seemed to rest for a short time. Then, gently moving his head, he said, “Lord help my poor soul.”

  His tormented body had found rest, but his reputation lived on for continued abuse. It began with a savage obituary by Rufus Griswold, a former colleague at Graham’s magazine in the early 1840s whom Poe had unwisely chosen to be his literary executor. Griswold had been stewing over unkind things Poe had written in reviews of poetry anthologies Griswold had edited and began taking revenge in this New York Daily Tribune obituary published two days after Poe’s death—establishing the view of Poe as little more than a drug-ridden degenerate that would be the prevailing version of him in America for many years. During his lifetime his writing never attracted a large popular audience. To the general public he was known chiefly for “The Raven,” which was widely reprinted after it appeared in 1845. In a culture where “that d—-ed mob of scribbling women,” in Hawthorne’s famous frustrated phrase, sold the most books and stories, it is no wonder that Poe’s weird dark vision wasn’t welcome in the sunny optimistic America of the time, wormwood, not lemonade. And his scandalous personal habits made it even worse. For all his brilliance, he was an embarrassment, best forgotten.

  At least in his own country.

  But in France, Charles Baudelaire had discovered Poe in 1847—at the age of twenty-six—and found in him a kind
red spirit, a lost twin. They even looked a little alike, though Poe before the wreckage commenced was the more handsome. The only surviving pictures of Baudelaire show an older, ravaged landscape tinged with a soupçon of William Burroughs, but the two men shared bold, swelling foreheads and intense, glowing black eyes.

  Starting in 1848, Baudelaire began translating Poe’s tales into French. These translations became a life passion that provided most of his paying literary work for many years. In 1856 some of the stories were collected as Histoires extraordinaires, followed in 1857—the same year his own Les fleurs du mal was published—by Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires. (These titles for the collected Poe translations seem significant in regard to Jules Verne, since the overall title he gave his many novels was Voyages extraordinaires.) In 1857 too came Les Aventures d’Arthur Gordon Pym, followed by Eurêka (1864) and Histoires grotesques et sérieuses (1865). They were of such high caliber that they continue to be the standard Poe translations in the world’s French-speaking countries.

  Why such dedication? In a letter to a friend Baudelaire wrote, with a certain exasperation, “They accuse me, me, of imitating Edgar Poe! Do you know why I so patiently translated Poe?—Because he resembled me. The first time that I opened a book of his I saw, with awe and rapture, not only subjects dreamed by me, but sentences, thought by me, and written by him, twenty years before.”31

  The parallels are striking. Like Poe, Baudelaire suffered familial disruption at an early age. His father, sixty-one at his birth, died when he was six, and little Charles had Mommy all to himself for a couple of years. But then she spoiled everything by marrying a career soldier Baudelaire quickly came to despise. The family moved to Lyon in 1832, and his stepfather promptly dumped Baudelaire into a military boarding school. At fifteen he was permitted to transfer to a prestigious high school. Moody, melancholic, he was expelled in 1839 and then took up the study of law, which primarily meant tireless bohemian carousing in the Latin Quarter. His excesses kept him broke, and it was presumably at this time that he contracted syphilis from a prostitute. In 1841, his parents put him on a boat to India; maybe large doses of sea air and sunshine would bring him to his senses. They didn’t. Reaching the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, he refused to go any farther and returned to Paris. Given all this, it seems remarkable that his stepfather then gave him an inheritance of 100,000 francs, but he did. Baudelaire blew half of it in two years on fancy clothes, fine wines, expensive meals, the right books and paintings, and, the better to enjoy it all, plenty of opium and hashish. His alarmed parents put him on a financial leash with a legal guardian to control his money, which failed to alter his unregenerate habits but left him struggling to get along most of the time, a situation exacerbated by debts to moneylenders that became a pit he never could climb out of—his chronic poverty being something he also shared with Poe.