by Norman Lock
“Have they settled in?”
Seems so.
I looked at the fresh boards caulked with tar, the chicken wire, where wisps of down clung, the planked floor carpeted with manure, and the nesting boxes waiting for offspring. In May of the following year, I’d take the pigeons on the first of their trips away from home and, that fall, consign the wicker hampers to the Burlington and Bristol Railway freight agent to load onto a wagon car. The birds would be released at ever-more distant towns, whence they’d fly back to their roost. However Mütter would cover their eyes with falconry hoods or their nostrils with paraffin to disable perception, they still found their way to the coop again. Only a few were ever lost to storms or exhaustion, to hawks or hunters mistaking them for passenger pigeons, which are delicious roasted.
No . . . it wasn’t those birds; they ended badly. Other pigeons would take their place, multiply, and row home through the ether. All during 1845, Mütter tried to discover how they navigated, unerringly, back to the college roof, as if by nostalgia for their mates, their young, the smell of pine boards and creosote, the stink of their own dung, the pattern of grit and dried corn scattered on the floor, for the familiar images mirrored by their tiny brains, for their phantom selves milling peevishly inside the coop while their real selves circled the sky, waiting to feel their way home. Home, Moran. I doubt you feel about home even so much as a pigeon does—not for the Brooklyn tenement where you scrabbled for light and air and affection till you were old enough to escape. Nostalgia is a sickness whose cause is time and whose remedy is death; your unhappy childhood is proof against it.
Mütter studied the brains of numerous pigeons after I had wrung their necks—the most humane method of dispatching them—but he could find nothing to account for their navigational ability. To call it “instinctual” would have been as unsatisfactory as “ethereal.” I suppose that he’d hoped to discover an organ of free will. Poe—incurable fantasist!—called him “the Martin Luther of medicine,” in that he wanted to remove God from His heaven and put Him in one of the heart’s small rooms. Mütter published his disappointing conclusions in The Zoist: A Journal of Cerebral Physiology and Mesmerism.
“It must be as Newton thought,” he wrote. “Affinity acts at a distance on unseen particles inherent in objects by a transmission of influence analogous to rings spreading across the surface of a pond. Homing pigeons must ‘sense,’ in the imponderable fluid within the hollows of their bones, the magnetic attraction of home and be irresistibly drawn to it.”
Edgar had reached the same conclusion without needing to slaughter birds. He relished the fantastic obverse of the doctor’s conjecture: The pigeon coop’s magnetic particles answered to the birds’ own. Had it not been ponderous and anchored to the roof, it might have moved, albeit slowly, like an inchworm through a field, toward them. I know Poe to have been at work on a revenger’s tale in which a corpse, left in a shallow grave, did, after many years, make its way finally to the murderer of its flesh and blood self and strangle him with its bony fingers.
Dr. Mütter concluded his article with an admission: “While I cannot accept Mesmer’s magnetic cures, his ‘artificial tides,’ or the mysterious grant of hypnotic power given to ‘operatives,’ I acknowledge the existence of a transmitting energy, a gravitational attraction among all animate and inanimate objects. One might almost say that each thing in the universe possesses a will that exerts its influence on every other thing, successfully or not according to its strength.”
By his book and by his pigeons, Mütter had hoped to refute the mesmerists and win for our kind a freedom from outside interference, from predestination and its hell, but he had failed. There would be healing but no magic
reformation or personal redemption in the pit. In universal terms, we would continue to be in the hands of circumstances beyond human control. Beaten, he renounced metaphysics and devoted himself once more to medical science and its monsters.
TWO OR THREE DAYS LATER, I received a note from Edgar Poe, sent in care of Dr. Mütter, asking me to visit him at home at six o’clock that night. I could think of no good reason to decline, except my own unease, and, at the end of the workday, I took a car to the city’s Spring Garden district. The weary horses hauled us through the whirling streets, flakes of new snow like St. Elmo’s fire luminous in the lamplight, snow drifting on windward pavements, the windows of commercial establishments dead in their sashes, except for an occasional flicker of candles where a lawyer, an accountant, or a merchant still sat at his desk. The meal we shared was a meager one. Edgar had not been paid for his story “The Black Cat,” published in August. Mrs. Clemm had yet to receive her widow’s pension for the month. The house was dark and cold. The parrot’s cage was covered against the drafts; the silent bird dreaming, perhaps, of Cuba or Africa. I wished I had not come. By now, my brother would have had the hearth fire blazing for the sake of my mother, who suffered from rheumatism.
After dinner, Edgar and I smoked long clay pipes like Dutchmen, while Virginia and Mrs. Clemm kept to the kitchen, near the woodstove. I told him of my car ride through the snowy night, and he was reminded of what Francis Bacon had written: “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” He talked about his favorite subjects: hate, which he said was a purer emotion than love, having only a single cause; murder, which was what passed for intimacy in those who could not love; and damnation, in his opinion, the only apt theme for an American writer. He liked, he said, to write about people at the end of their rope, stretched to the breaking point, who must necessarily die or else go mad with the strain. As if to illustrate his point, he ground his teeth on his pipe’s clay stem, making a noise like chalk screeching against a slate.
“Life is best seen in extremis,” he said, knocking the bowl of his pipe on the cast-iron fender to rid it of ash; “just as a tree is more easily measured when it’s down.”
I told him, in my turn, about Dr. Mütter’s pigeons and about Mesmer and Deleuze. Poe already knew, of course, about pneuma and spiritus and acknowledged their importance.
“How else, except by a universal and diffuse atmosphere, can one divine the nature of other people, receive intimations of an unseen world, sense the presence of the dead, dowse for water, or feel another’s pain and sorrow? The genuine medium or spiritualist—God knows, Edward, there are abundant fakers and frauds—is simply a person whose mesmerist faculty is more highly developed than it is in ordinary men and women. I sometimes think it is so in me. It’s difficult to explain otherwise how I write—the almost trancelike state that comes over me in the heat of composition. My hand moves at the behest of some other’s intelligence—I can’t say whose. At such times, I’m no more than an amanuensis taking dictation.” He went to the desk and opened a newspaper. “A mesmerist is in town this week at the Athenaeum on Sixth Street, near St. James Place. Karl Menz, one of Elliotson’s disciples. I’m thinking of reporting on the demonstration for The American Whig Review. You ought to go, as well, Edward. Perhaps Dr. Mütter will pay for your admission. My means, as you know, are slender.”
Poe grew thoughtful, and, in a silence punctuated by the detonations of a log alive with sap, the fitful scratching of a tree branch against the front room’s window, and, from the kitchen, the low voices of the women, which sounded, at a distance, like whispering, I fell into a stupor. Poe took up his pen and began to write on a piece of foolscap. The room was warm, and I closed my eyes, listening to his pen, like a crochet hook, turn the strands of his thought into something new.
Mütter not only paid for my ticket to Menz’s “Magnetic Salon” but he also accompanied Poe and me there. In return, I provided both men with evidence, if not of the mesmerist’s power to entrance, then of my own susceptibility to another’s will. Two hundred people or so turned out for the spectacle. How many were serious in their interest, how many had come to gawk at subjects pitting their wills against the mesmerist’s, as though the séance were a wrestling match or a cockf
ight, I couldn’t have said. Edgar and Mütter were in earnest, of course, although their interests in the contest of minds fought in the garish limelight of the Athenaeum’s stage were different: Mütter sought a truth about the human mind; Poe, about his fictional characters. I didn’t know then that the doctor’s truth and that of the artist might be different, perhaps even opposed.
Menz began his performance with a learned introduction to Franz Anton Mesmer and his science, which was, I felt, merely a justification for the spectacle—the magic show—itself. The spectators could flatter themselves that they were improving their minds, and I noticed only an occasional restlessness betraying their impatience. The evening was like an illustrated book on the Fiji Islanders, purporting to be a scholarly work of ethnology, while its real intent was to purvey to gentlemen the sight of the naked breasts of island girls. There were a number of “acts,” differing hardly at all from those of a variety or vaudeville show. I performed in two.
The first, which caused my two friends much amusement, was a comic production of the miracle play of Noah and his ark, in which I took the part of an ass desperate to find its mate in the aftermath of the Flood. During a late supper after Menz’s demonstration, they told me that I had brayed forlornly and most convincingly.
“Your metamorphosis was not the result of the hypnotist’s animal magnetism,” said Mütter, his patrician nose inside a brandy snifter, “but the strength of your imagination. He merely led you by suggestion to your excellent impersonation.”
He still had hopes of exalting the human will, of giving it preeminence over external forces—call them fate, accident, gratuitous election, or astrological tyranny.
“It made me think of Bottom’s dream,” said Poe, ever the man of letters.
Mütter smiled appreciatively.
My face and neck grew warm in embarrassment. I felt a pricking on my cheek. I hadn’t read A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but I knew I was an object of ridicule. I concentrated on my plate of oysters, as if I’d never seen their like before.
“Mockery aside, I paid you a compliment, Edward,” said Mütter in a voice that never failed to appease the envy of his colleagues or comfort the uncertainty of his patients. I’d heard him use that same honeyed tone in the pit when, beside himself with his terror of the surgeons’ instruments, a patient had shivered uncontrollably and wept.
“How’s that?” asked Edgar.
“An unimaginative man would not have been receptive to Menz’s hypnotic suggestions . . . his willpower. You cannot hypnotize a stone. I’ll leave it to you, Edgar, to decide which is stronger: will or imagination.”
“Imagination, of course!”
“I’d have wagered on your answer,” said Mütter.
Fiddling with my fork, I pretended not to follow the conversation.
“Art is one of the few things in this world that will not bend to the will—one’s own or another’s,” said Edgar. “Only the imagination, our most sovereign faculty, can move the hand to paint, to write, to compose. The muse is deaf to all else. In my case, my fancy is rich, my wallet poor.”
He pulled on his coat sleeves to hide his worn cuffs.
“Bravo!” cheered Mütter, lifting his glass in recognition of Poe’s artistry, which, as he’d told me more than once, he admired. “Tonight is my treat,” he said, self-satisfied as a man with the wherewithal to be generous in company. “And you, Edward, how would you have answered the question?”
“The imagination, as far as I can see,” I said, glancing at Poe, “does a man little good—or his poor wife, either.”
I was thinking of Virginia, sitting by the kitchen stove, with a wool shawl around her frail shoulders.
Poe gave me a secret look, partly shame, partly resentment. Mütter grinned devilishly. Incapable of meeting Edgar’s chilly stare, I studied the palm of my hand, as if I expected to see my future written there.
A suave diplomat, Mütter changed the subject. “The business with the mirror I found even more intriguing.”
At Menz’s command, I had succeeded in making an ass of myself a second time that night.
Yes, I was still in a trance. I had fallen into a deep sleep at the start of the comedy. Dr. Mütter’s compliment aside, I’d been an easy prey to the mesmerist’s harrying gaze, the pendulum of his gold watch and chain, his thought as it traveled through the magnetic fluid and rooted in the organ of my imagination.
I laid my fork noisily on the pewter plate, by now heaped with empty oyster shells. “What mirror?” I was very much annoyed.
“You don’t remember?” asked Poe.
“Of course he doesn’t,” said Mütter.
I didn’t recall anything of my performance on the Athenaeum’s stage. I had awakened at Menz’s command, my mind a blank, as is usual for a mesmerist’s subject. I know what happened to me only because Poe and Mütter told me afterward.
“Ordered to fall in love with the next person you saw, you fell in love with yourself—your image reflected in the cheval glass that had been hidden behind a velvet drape.”
“You were ‘enamored of an ass’!” cried Poe, pleased with himself.
He was, I noted with satisfaction, barely sober. I hoped he would disgrace himself, and promised myself I’d have nothing further to do with him. I was angry at them both, but of the two men, Mütter offered the better chance for advancement. I was an opportunist then, as all ambitious young men are.
“You could almost say that the person in the mirror mesmerized you, Edward,” said Mütter, becoming serious.
“Doppelgänger,” said Poe, guzzling another neat whiskey.
I watched in fascination the motions of his throat and pictured it encircled by a noose or sliced with a razor.
“Indeed,” said Mütter.
And then Poe recited a paragraph from his story “William Wilson” that ended “‘From his inscrutable tyranny did I at length flee, panic-stricken, as from a pestilence; and to the very ends of the earth I fled in vain.’ Doppelgänger; there’s no getting away from it.”
From the tavern’s four corners, patrons craned their necks to discover the source of the disturbance. Embarrassed, Mütter bid Poe hush; the doctor was one of the city’s illustrious, who, by his dress and deportment, had pledged himself to respectability despite a keen interest in medical rarities and freaks.
“I don’t believe in your ‘miracle,’ Dr. Mütter,” said Poe with a spitefulness distilled of too many malt whiskeys. “For us, there’s no wriggling off the hook—not once we bite. And we all do bite. The bait dangled before our eyes is too delectable to resist. Our wills are weak, our imaginations too alive.”
“It’s time to go,” said Mütter. “Edgar, can I give you a ride home in my carriage? I’ve arranged for Edward to spend the night, what’s left of it, at my house.”
His urbanity amazed me, but I understood that he wanted to remove “the unpleasantness” from the genteel precincts, where his reputation preceded him, with as much alacrity and poise as he could manage. He wanted to bundle the drunkard into his buggy and fly.
“I’d be honored, sir,” replied Poe, pronouncing the final word with a southern drawl and bowing like a gentleman at a cotillion and not a besotted poet in a Philadelphia tavern.
At that, we scraped back our chairs and, having paid the bill and a little more besides to lessen the landlord’s displeasure, went outside into the cold, sobering air.
Philadelphia, February 1844
“You and Edgar are more alike than you suppose,” said Mütter while his wife, Mary, a shy, pious woman, quietly poured us tea.
Are the wives of great men always this demure? I asked myself. I wouldn’t care to be married to a tyrant and a shrew. I was weak-willed—last night’s farce at the Magnetic Salon had shown me how weak. A bad wife would devour me. Even then, I wanted a “peaceable kingdom” of my own, but I knew that a woman like Mary or Ida would soon weary me with her goodness. I didn’t want to make a bad marriage, Moran, so I made none at all.<
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I looked at the sumptuous room: the cheerful, generous fire, the bright andirons and screen, the luster of polished Regency furniture, the elegant plates and accessories of the table—so very different from the Poes’ mismatched and dilapidated furnishings. I wouldn’t have been able then to judge such things, but nonetheless I had the impression, unformed by experience as it must have been, that this fine home on Delancey Street was a world apart from that other on North Seventh. I envied Dr. Mütter and wanted to be like him. I thought that one day I might. Hadn’t he promised that I would enter medical school if I worked hard and continued to show an aptitude? Eagerness—that’s what the doctor liked to see in his students. I was bent on showing him how eagerly I wanted the life of a medical man, not to mention the rewards it would bring me. On that sunny winter morning, I let my mind drift among the golden motes of wishful thinking.
Mütter wanted to talk about Edgar Poe. “He has all the afflictions of his type,” he said, spreading mulberry preserves on a piece of toast. “Melancholia, obsessiveness, destructiveness, intense self-regard, an addictive nature, a weakness of will coupled with a powerful, outlandish imagination.”
“And you think I am like him?” I asked, having to control a sudden resentment.
“In kind, but nothing at all like him in degree. You will suffer a little; he will suffer much. Mary, what do you say to a face like my young friend’s here?”
She blushed and replied, “He has a pleasant face and a kind one, I think.”
“And what would the tea leaves say of him?”
“That he will live long and happily.”
“There!” said Mütter, with his most winning smile. “Mary’s instincts are infallible. You have nothing to worry about, Edward.” He drank his tea, set the cup on its saucer, and went on. “But, like it or not, you and our Mr. Poe have an affinity. What was it he recited to us? ‘From his inscrutable tyranny did I at length flee, panic-stricken, as from a pestilence; and to the very ends of the earth I fled in vain’ You cannot escape him, Edward. He is your doppelgänger. Why, even your Christian names reveal your fraternity! Edward, Edgar.”