by Paul Collins
He continued writing and revising his poems, even appearing surreptitiously in magazines. His brother, Henry Poe, having landed some poems of his own in the short-lived North American magazine, quietly slipped in two of Edgar’s poems under his own “W.H.P.” byline—a necessary disguise, as Edgar was still on the run from creditors. A brief prose piece titled “A Fragment” also ran under Henry’s byline in the November 3, 1827, issue, though it was an uncharacteristically fevered first-person account by a despairing man about to shoot himself in the head: “Heavens! my hand does tremble—No! tis only the flickering of the lamp. . . . No more—the pistol—I have loaded it—the balls are new—quite bright—they will soon be in my heart—Incomprehensible death—what art thou? . . .” It’s quite unlike anything else published by Henry Poe. It is, though, remarkably similar to the mad, insistent narrators of Edgar’s later work. Hidden for centuries under Henry’s name, “A Fragment” might instead be among the eighteen-year-old Edgar Allan Poe’s first published works of fiction.
As 1828 came to a close, Poe chafed at a five-year enlistment that offered no further advancement; his best hope lay in petitioning for a paid substitute to take his place so that he could attend West Point for officer training. Breaking a long silence to write to John Allan, Edgar contritely revealed his ruse and asked for help—“I am altered from what you knew [of] me, & am no longer a boy tossing about on the world without aim or consistency.” Though Allan ignored him at first, the death of his wife, Frances, that February softened him; in the days after her funeral, the adoptive father and son warily reconciled. With a grudging letter from Allan and sterling recommendations from his commanding officers (“His habits are good and interly [sic] free from drinking,” one added rather hopefully), Edgar A. Perry was honorably discharged in April 1829.
Poe spent much of that year with blood relatives in Baltimore, killing time while angling for an acceptance to West Point. The pleasure of reuniting with his brother, Henry, was tempered by their dire situation. Edgar wrote to John Allan that he was “without one cent of money—in a strange place. . . . My grandmother is extremely poor and paralytic. My aunt Maria if possible still worse & Henry entirely given up to drink & unable to help himself, much less me—”
Amid this squalor, Poe spent his scarce pennies to mail poems to magazines, though to limited effect; the prominent editor N. P. Willis informed American Monthly readers that he took pleasure in burning one unnamed submission (“It is quite exciting to lean over eagerly as the flame eats in upon the letters”) and then mortifyingly quoted lines from Poe’s “Fairy-Land.” Yankee magazine editor John Neal, while not ready to publish Poe, at least encouraged him; if Poe could sustain his best lines across an entire poem, he wrote, “he will deserve to stand high—very high—in the estimation of the shining brotherhood” of poets.
Poe was determined to try. At the end of 1829 he issued a small run of a new volume: Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems. This time, perhaps thanks to reluctant financial help from John Allan, he no longer needed to hide himself: “BY EDGAR A. POE,” the cheap paper cover proudly proclaimed.
Inside, his handful of readers found greatly revised poems from his first volume, along with the unfinished first half of his title opus, “Al Aaraaf.” A 264-line reverie that muddles astronomical discoveries by Tycho Brahe with vague invocations of the Koran, “Al Aaraaf” is the archetypal artistic sophomore slump, a pretentiously footnoted mess whose reach far exceeds its grasp. But it was the right kind of mess for an artist to have. To grow as a writer requires ambition—and “Al Aaraaf” was certainly ambitious. But above all, an author must write passionately and edit dispassionately. Poe’s willingness to ruthlessly strip down and rebuild his old poems showed a dedication to craft that a professional must have, one that quickly wilts most amateurs.
His professionalism did not extend to his work at West Point. Poe enrolled in June 1830, expecting to breeze through officer training, and was shocked to find his enlisted experience of little use. Subjected to a strict routine—up at sunrise, classes until four, then drills, supper, and more classes until bedtime—he began to drink again, and seethed through his courses.
“He is thought a fellow of talent here,” one fellow Virginia cadet wrote back home, “but is too mad a poet to like Mathematics.”
What he did like was writing mocking verses upon his instructors, much to the delight of classmates. “He would often write some of the most vicious doggerel,” his roommate recalled, adding, “I have never seen a man whose hatred was so intense.”
After deliberately not showing up for roll calls and classes, Poe was expelled in January 1831—but his obvious brilliance still commanded enough regard that the academy’s superintendent allowed him to take up a collection from classmates. Though he certainly could use the money himself—leaving West Point with a balance of just twenty-four cents—what Poe promised his classmates was a new volume: Poems, by Edgar A. Poe. Of the class of 232, 131 cadets paid $1.25 each to raise the money for it.
They did not quite get what they’d bargained for. Dedicated “to the U.S. Corps of Cadets,” Poems revised a number of his extravagantly Romantic verses and included about a half-dozen new shorter poems. Poe considered one of them, “The Sleeper,” to be among his finest work. A first hint of his fascination with the liminal states of life and death, the poem clip-clops through a standard Romantic musing on the death of a beautiful woman, before turning to a surprisingly poignant final stanza worthy of Gray or Moore:
Some sepulchre, remote, alone,
Against whose portal she hath thrown,
In childhood, many an idle stone—
Some tomb from out whose sounding door
She ne’er shall force an echo more,
Thrilling to think, poor child of sin!
It was the dead who groaned within.
What Poems did not have, alas, was the satire that Poe’s classmates expected for their buck twenty-five. It arrived poorly printed on coarse paper with the widest of margins—“a miserable production mechanically,” Poe’s roommate wrote later, “bound in green boards and printed on inferior paper, evidently gotten up on the cheapest scale.” Finding one brings a small fortune today, but a very different valuation survives in what one classmate scribbled onto his copy.
“This book,” he wrote, “is a damned cheat.”
Broke and ill, Poe drifted to Baltimore that spring and moved back in with his relatives. They were no better off than when he’d left them a year before, and soon turned far worse: his brother, Henry, died that summer at the age of twenty-four, amid a raging cholera outbreak. Yet there were some small consolations among these miseries. Poe grew close to his aunt, Maria Clemm; she was becoming the doggedly steadfast mother he’d never had. Her young daughter, Virginia, too, increasingly came under cousin Edgar’s notice.
But they remained crushingly poor. By the end of 1831, Poe was facing debtor’s jail again, and writing his father to cover an eighty-dollar debt he’d contracted to help out his late brother. Allan wrote out a check—and then dithered through nearly a month of increasingly frantic letters from Edgar before finally sending it.
“What little share I had of your affection is long since forfeited,” his wayward son wrote piteously, “but, for the sake of what once was dear to you, for the sake of the love you bore me when I sat upon your knee and called you father, do not forsake this only time . . .”
Along with John Allan’s check, hope arrived in January 1832 in the form of a contest by the Philadelphia Saturday Courier. This time Poe sent prose—not poems. Although he lost, the pieces attracted enough admiration that the Courier ran them anyway.
Poe’s early prose often reads as tired, ostentatiously learned satire. It is not for lack of craft, though: the horror satire “Metzengerstein” begins with just as portentous an invocation as in any later work, and in the dialogue of “Bon-Bon,” one can already see Poe’s comic mastery of rendering spasmodic conversation: “Why, sir, to speak
sincerely—I believe you are—upon my word—the d—dest—that is to say I think—I imagine—I have some faint—some very faint idea—of the remarkable honor——.” But Poe would not commit to actual horror, and still lacked a compelling narrator. In particular, a charismatic, manic first-person presence was needed to bring alive Poe’s use of dread and terrified sensation.
The first glimmerings of that talent can be seen in “A Decided Loss,” whose comically unfortunate narrator proceeds to partially asphyxiate, get autopsied alive, have his nose chewed off by cats, be hung at the gallows, and then get autopsied alive again. It spoofed the “predicament tales” of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, wild first-person fantasies of people buried alive, caught under a ringing church bell, or accidentally boiled alive in a brewery tank. Sensational art, then as now, depends on the author caring more about the sensations they are invoking than about the characters themselves—and though Poe could mock the form, he hadn’t learned how to transcend it.
It didn’t help that the Philadelphia Saturday Courier was no Blackwood’s in its editing or its pay; it probably paid little or no money. Nor would his foster family help support his efforts; John Allan had remarried and no longer bothered to reply to his letters. Poe, who at best appears to have found some work at a local brickyard, was living on next to nothing. One could easily imagine his reaction when a local Baltimore magazine, the Saturday Visiter, announced in June 1833 that it was “desirous of encouraging literature” and thus running a contest with “a premium of 50 dollars for the best Tale.”
Even more easily imagined was his reaction to the contest’s result: he won.
Amid the many single short-story entries sent in, Poe submitted an entire collection, and the judges singled out “Ms. Found in a Bottle.” A haunting maritime tale of a shipwrecked man’s voyage on a ghost ship, sailing to the very edge of the polar world, it purports to be a document preserved in a desperately thrown bottle as the writer teeters on an Antarctic abyss. It was Poe’s first true effort to create a believable narrator, one that carries the reader ever further into a weird and nightmarish world.
When Saturday Visiter editor John Latrobe visited their prize winner, he quickly realized just how much the fifty-dollar award meant. “He carried himself erect and well, as one who had been trained to it,” he recalled. “He was dressed in black . . . not a particle of white was visible. Coat, hat, boots and gloves had evidently seen their best days, but so far as mending and brushing go, everything had been done apparently, to make them presentable. On most men his clothes would have been shabby and seedy, but there was something about this man that prevented one from criticizing his garments.
“The impression made, however,” Latrobe drily added, “was that the award in Poe’s favor was not inopportune.”
It also brought Poe something more precious: the regard of an established writer, not just as a promising talent, but as a colleague. One of the contest judges was the prominent Southern novelist John Pendleton Kennedy, a respected lawyer who took a brotherly interest in their unsteady winner and encouraged him to work on a fiction collection that Poe had conceived, Tales of the Folio Club. A subscription plan to publish it was briefly floated in the Saturday Visiter in late 1833, but soon dropped; though Kennedy urged Philadelphia publisher Henry Carey to consider the manuscript, Carey kept vacillating over it.
Poe at least landed some editorial hackwork in the magazine, which was just as well: after an ailing John Allan died in March 1834, his will proved not to contain a single mention of Edgar. Of the wealthy merchant’s vast estate, of his eight homes and shares in banks and gold mines, Poe would receive—nothing.
The year that followed was among the darkest and most obscure of Edgar Allan Poe’s life. Henry Carey dithered endlessly over Poe’s collection before finally rejecting it; meanwhile, Poe tried and failed to land a job as a teacher. “I found him in Baltimore in a state of starvation,” John Pendleton Kennedy recalled, and indeed Poe once turned down a dinner invitation from Kennedy, writing back that it was “for reasons of the most humiliating nature [in] my personal appearance.” Kennedy loaned him clothes and let him borrow his horse, but he couldn’t give Poe a career. The first hints of that would come, though, in this simple newspaper headline that year: “PROSPECTUS of a Literary Paper to be published in Richmond, VA., by Thomas W. White, to be entitled THE SOUTHERN LITERARY MESSENGER.”
America’s nascent magazine industry was expanding rapidly in the 1830s; both steam-powered presses and the rise of rail and steamboat delivery meant that print runs of thousands of copies could now readily reach subscribers around the country. Amid a rush of new titles, at first blush White’s was not so different: the last decade had seen both a Southern Literary Register and a Southern Literary Gazette appear and then wink out. But White assiduously cultivated contacts with respected writers, not least of which was John Pendleton Kennedy. After Kennedy successfully encouraged Poe to submit the grisly tales “Berenice” and “Morella,” he wrote to White in April 1835 to strongly hint at hiring the starving author: “He is very clever with his pen—classical and scholar-like. He wants experience and direction, but I have no doubt he can be made very useful to you. And, poor fellow! He is very poor.”
Desperate as he was, Poe presented himself as a confident professional to White. His writing had already made an impression on the rather staid Messenger; in “Berenice,” a grieving narrator yanks the teeth out of his prematurely buried wife, while in “Morella,” a deceased wife’s identity takes over that of their nameless daughter. Premature burial and fluid identities were thematic obsessions for Poe, but not reflexive or unthinking ones. Writing to his new and slightly scandalized editor, he explained to White that he’d thought very carefully about the market for such stories:
The ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical. You may say all this is bad taste. I have my doubts about it. . . . But whether the articles of which I speak are, or are not in bad taste is little to the purpose. To be appreciated you must be read, and these things are invariably sought after with avidity.
Poe was keenly aware of the difference between what the public claims to value versus what it actually buys—something, he noted crisply, that “will be estimated better by the circulation of the Magazine than by any comments upon its contents.” And yet his philosophy was not entirely mercenary. There could be artistry in such work, after all: he pointedly noted that some of Britain’s finest writers were behind the sensational tales in Blackwood’s. What was more, when White offered to pay Poe to praise the Messenger in other publications, he tactfully refused. He was a writer, in short, who couldn’t be bought and who couldn’t be shamed.
White was impressed, and in August 1835 Poe landed his first steady literary job. Though the publisher carefully skirted around an exact job title—Edgar thought himself an editor, while Thomas was not so sure—he made the young writer his right-hand man. Poe served as his personal secretary on correspondence, wrangled articles from contributors, and pounded out column after column of reviews, commentaries, and other editorial stuffing for the Messenger.
Inevitably, Poe’s own writing suffered. “Having no time upon my hands, from my editorial duties, I can write nothing worth reading,” he admitted to one correspondent. But the professional experience he was gaining was priceless, and his own writing had not been entirely rewarding lately anyway; just before coming onboard the Messenger’s staff, the magazine had run his comical hoax “Hans Pfaall”—the purported account of how a Dutch bellows mender escaped his creditors by flying a fantastical new hot-air balloon all the way to the moon. It was inventive, but also too absurd to take seriously. Poe was miffed when, just two months later, a far more elaborate and focused lunar hoax was perpetrated by Richard Adams Locke of the New York Sun.
“I am convinced that the idea was stolen from myself,” Poe snapped.
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br /> It was his first fling in a long, unfortunate love affair with plagiarism accusations; though this time, at least, Poe had the sense to quickly let it drop. Locke’s immensely successful account of telescope sightings of lunar man-bats and bipedal beavers cavorting around giant sapphire pyramids briefly had the Sun’s circulation exceeding that of the Times of London; eventually, even Poe admitted that Locke’s work was so ingenious that “not one person in ten” suspected a fraud.
Moving to Richmond, though, brought Poe no end of more earthly concerns. Leaving his aunt Maria and cousin Virginia behind in Baltimore made Poe moderately successful—and instantly regretful. Writing to Kennedy, he admitted that even his unprecedented salary of $520 a year was no solace: “I am suffering under a depression . . . I am miserable in spite of the great improvements in my circumstances.” White saw his assistant’s melancholy dissolving into drinking; writing in alarm to a friend, he noted Poe “was unfortunately rather dissipated. . . . I should not be at all astonished to hear that he has been guilty of suicide.” He briefly fired Poe altogether—and then, after his magazine instantly ground to a halt, hired him back.
“No man is safe who drinks before breakfast!” White admonished his wayward assistant. “No man can do so, and attend to business properly.”
Poe’s family history did not bode well, as both his birth father and brother had been alcoholics. Edgar drank when he was anxious or distressed, and like his father, he was prone to then turning moody and argumentative. “Mr. Poe was a fine gentleman when he was sober . . .” an office boy at the Messenger recalled. “But when he was drinking he was about one of the most disagreeable men I have ever met.” While the rhetoric of the day cast drinking as a moral failure, Edgar rarely did; when he acknowledged it at all, it was as his “illness.” But it was an illness that perhaps he could recover from—and upon Edgar’s return to work, his boss found him newly sober, and his nerves calmed by an assurance from his aunt and cousin that they’d move to Richmond.