Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living (Icons)

by Paul Collins

  “Ligeia” returns to two of Poe’s signature themes—liminal states of life and death, and the fluidity of identity—and continues a brilliant use of gothic settings that were curiously old-fashioned even by 1838. Yet Poe does not jest with or even acknowledge these as fictional conventions; he waited until a couple of months later, in his satirical “How to Write a Blackwood’s Article,” to indulge in that. Instead, “Ligeia” was Poe’s first story to absolutely sustain the voice of the narrator and a belief in the conceit. He never breaks character—not to slip in an ostentatious scholarly joke, not for a sly nudge to the reader, not for grotesque description for its own sake. This disciplined internal logic would become a hallmark of Poe’s craft, and the defining characteristic of the stories that we still read today.

  Not everything he wrote that autumn would pass on to such fame. That season also saw him toiling over the least-known and most confoundingly odd book in the Poe canon: The Conchologist’s First Book.

  Despite his breakthrough effort in “Ligeia,” Poe lacked steady work, and his Pym money was long spent. However, his friend Thomas Wyatt needed a nominal author for a cheap schoolroom edition of his own Manual of Conchology, which his publisher Harper & Brothers had insisted on only selling in an expensive version. For fifty dollars, Wyatt bought Poe’s name on the cover—and apparently some editing work inside—to retool the Manual into a “new” book, neatly circumventing Harper. Much as Poe needed the money, it was an unwise scheme—not least because Harper was also Poe’s publisher. Any chance of his working with them again had now been squandered.

  For the moment, though, the commission seemed a stroke of luck, as did a letter that arrived just weeks after the April 1839 release of Poe’s would-be seashell textbook. William Burton, a comic actor with literary aspirations, had recently bought out the upstart local Gentleman’s Magazine and rechristened it Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine—and now, as Poe had hoped, he needed editorial help.

  “Shall we say ten dollars per week for the remaining portion of the year?” Burton proposed. “Two hours a day, except occasionally, will, I believe, be sufficient for all required, except in the production of any article of your own.”

  A comedian might believe a monthly magazine can be edited in two hours a day, but Poe was experienced enough to know better. He took the job anyway. He needed the salary, and the bold letters that now ran across the magazine—“EDITED BY WILLIAM E. BURTON AND EDGAR A. POE”—finally gave Poe the credit he so keenly desired. It also gave him a platform for his own work—too much of one, perhaps, as Burton quickly had Poe covering everything from proofreading and fillers to book reviews. It is typical that the same September 1839 issue that ran Poe’s enervating, sickly masterpiece “The Fall of the House of Usher” also ran an anonymous Poe piece on “Field Sports and Manly Pastimes,” that he bylined “By an Experienced Practitioner.”

  The boast may not be entirely fanciful; Poe implies he was familiar with nearby Barrett’s Gymnasium, which is in character with his youthful achievements in running and swimming. Sam Barrett was a boxer fond of the company of actors; there are accounts of Poe spending time in an actor’s drinking salon in Philadelphia, and certainly his own boss was a prominent thespian. Why not an after-work session with them on Barrett’s punching bags?

  Although Poe chafed against the low manners and cheapness of his employer (“Do not think of subscribing,” he snapped to a friend inquiring about Burton’s magazine), the association was helping him more than he cared to admit. The same month that “Usher” appeared, his allegorical masterpiece “William Wilson” ran in a local publisher’s gift annual—prosaically titled The Gift—in which Poe and Burton were the largest contributors. Heavily illustrated annuals were the sort of sentimental publisher’s ballast that Poe disdained, but their popularity among Victorians meant he was now reaching an ever-wider audience.

  He was also reaching them at the height of his powers. “The Fall of the House of Usher” is closely allied to “Ligeia” in its execution. There is the indistinct date and gothic setting; the wild and oversensitive intelligence of Roderick Usher; the terrifying confusion between living and dead; and the unsettling conviction that the very walls are alive. In “Usher,” though, we are also given a sympathetic narrator—the ordinary witness to extraordinary madness, a tradition that would continue through American literature from Moby-Dick to The Great Gatsby and On the Road.

  The story bore an unexpected ethical resemblance to another recent work, though: The Conchologist’s First Book. Poe was becoming dangerously fond of borrowing from other authors. For the climax of “Usher”—a recitation from a fanciful old book that is uncannily matched by ghastly sounds outside Usher’s chamber—Poe quietly lifted the plot of the 1828 Blackwood’s story “The Robber’s Tower.” It is an irony befitting that piratical era that, perhaps unknown to Poe, both The Manual of Conchology and “The Robber’s Tower” also lifted, without attribution, from earlier works.

  With the publication of “Usher” and “William Wilson”—a doppelganger story worthy of Nathaniel Hawthorne, in which a dissolute protagonist slays his own conscience in the form of a namesake tormentor—Poe was emboldened to revisit the notion of publishing a collection. It helped that Washington Irving wrote to him that “I am much pleased with a tale called ‘The House of Usher,’ and should think that a collection of tales, equally well written, could not fail of being favorably received.” But when Poe approached Philadelphia publisher Lea & Blanchard, he met nearly the same response as before: short story collections don’t make money. The publisher would risk a run of only 1,750 copies—which they soon slashed to 750—and Poe’s entire payment would be twenty author copies.

  Small though its run was, it would still take Lea & Blanchard three years to unload their copies of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.

  As strident and absolute as Poe could be in critiquing poetry, his notions of fiction were far more flexible; his preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque gives little hint to what either term means, though one might hazard to define them as being palpable satire or absurdity, versus more subtle and earnest depictions of psychological terror. The clearest stance by Poe in his preface was, in fact, to remind readers of his disdain for nationalism. With one famous line, he brushed off reviewers applying the fashionable term of “Germanism” to his gothic work: “I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul.”

  His book, though, could not keep Poe afloat; indeed, since he paid to mail some of his author copies to friends, it actually cost him money. Even as Tales arrived in bookstores at the end of 1839, Poe took up anonymous hackwork in the least grotesque or arabesque venue possible: Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, “the largest and cheapest family newspaper in the world.” Its sister publications included the decidedly un-Germanic Silk Grower and Farmer’s Manual and Alexander’s Premium Holy Bible. In its pages, Poe regaled readers with the talents of his house cat—“one of the most remarkable black cats in the world—and this is saying much; for it will be remembered that black cats are all of them witches.” Her witchiness, it seems, primarily manifested itself in opening the latch on Poe’s kitchen door.

  Poe also unleashed a different sort of terror on Alexander’s readers: bad puns.

  Why does a lady in tight corsets never need comfort?

  Because she’s so laced—solaced.

  More to his taste, though, was the recent fondness in periodicals for puzzles and ciphers. Poe challenged Alexander’s readers to stump him with substitution ciphers, which were secret messages encoded into alternate letters, numbers, or symbols. “We pledge ourselves to read it forthwith however unusual or arbitrary may be the characters employed,” Poe boasted, and his dare brought in a flood of responses. Over the next six months, he unlocked nearly one hundred cryptograms, goading readers by declaring that “Human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher that human ingenuity cannot resolve.”

  His first reader entry would prove typical (“It gave u
s no trouble whatever,” he scoffed), and as a secret message that was itself a riddle, its final answer provided a dry irony that Poe could appreciate in anonymity:

  850;?9

  O 9? 9 2ad; as 385 n8338d– ?† sod–3 –86a5: –8x8537 95: 37od: o– h–8shn 3a sqd ?8d– ?† –og37 –8x8539 95: sod–3 o– 9 ?o–1708xah– 950?9n ?† 50537 –8x8537 95: sod–3 o– 378 n9338d– 858?† ?† 38537 –8x8537 95: sod–3 –h!!ads3– nos8 ?† sahd37 sos37 –8x8537 95: –og37 o– 9 sdho3 ?† sahd37 sos37 95: 80;737 o– 9 !a28dshn o?!n8?853 ?† 27an8 o5:otg38– 9 2038 ?95

  Poe’s decoded version reads:

  ENIGMA.

  I am a word of ten letters. My first, second, seventh, and third is useful to farmers; my sixth, seventh, and first is a mischievous animal; my ninth, seventh, and first is the latter’s enemy; my tenth, seventh, and first supports life; my fourth, fifth, seventh and sixth is a fruit; my fourth, fifth, and eighth is a powerful implement; my whole indicates a wise man.

  The answer is “Temperance.”

  Poe had long shown a talent for logic games, including in an earlier essay for the Southern Literary Messenger, “Maezel’s Chess Player,” which methodically debunked a bogus chess-playing automaton. But soon the flood of puzzles grew too much even for Poe—“Do people really think that we have nothing in the world to do but read hieroglyphics?” he wrote mockingly in one column.

  He was indeed too busy for them: beginning in January 1840, Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine had begun running installments of a new novel by Poe, The Journal of Julius Rodman. An uninspired sort of “Pym Goes West,” Rodman deservedly ranks with Politian as Poe’s least-known major work. He never publicly took credit for Rodman’s journal, though Knickerbocker magazine immediately saw through the ruse: “We think we discover the clever hand of the resident editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine, MR. E. A. POE.”

  They would not have long to savor the work; after Poe heard Burton was planning to sell Gentleman’s Magazine, he began circulating a prospectus for his own magazine. Penn Magazine promised to be a monthly to be free of “any tincture of the buffoonery, scurrility, or profanity” of European titles—Poe made a point of apologizing for his past excesses as a reviewer—and whose “form will nearly resemble that of The Knickerbocker; the paper will be the equal of the North American Review.” These were the most accomplished magazines of New York and Boston, and to create their equal in Philadelphia would be a direct challenge to Gentleman’s Magazine. When Burton heard of Poe’s plan to start a rival publication, he fired him on the spot.

  After sharing the same office for over a year, the two men could scarcely contain their anger with each other. Burton called Poe a drunk, Poe called Burton a crook, and both charges had enough truth in them to draw blood.

  “Your attempts to bully me excite in my mind scarcely any sentiment other than mirth . . . ,” Poe jeered at Burton. “If by accident you have taken it into your head that I can be insulted with impunity I can only assume you are an ass.”

  Still, Poe’s impatience in proposing Penn Magazine had gotten the better of him. Burton’s didn’t find a buyer until October, so Poe could have squeezed out six more months of desperately needed editorial work before getting laid off. Instead, he spent much of 1840 with Penn’s launch endlessly deferred by insufficient funds and then by illness. Julius Rodman was stopped dead in its tracks by his firing and left forever abandoned. Nor did any other notable writing come from Poe that year, save for “The Man of the Crowd,” an allegorical voyeur’s tale haunted by urban loneliness and modern anonymity. As 1841 began, though, Poe’s luck seemed to change; he claimed he was one week from delivering the first issue to the printer.

  “You wish to know my prospects with the Penn,” he wrote to one contributor. “They are glorious.”

  They did not remain so. On February 4, a run on banks sent business credit crashing; any prospect of Penn coming out soon was instantly annihilated. Scarcely two weeks later, George Graham, the buyer from Burton of the redubbed Graham’s Magazine, broke the bittersweet news to his readers: Penn was over, but Poe was to come back as an editor at Graham’s. What readers did not know was that Poe also brought with him a remarkable story—“something in a new key,” as he put it, which he had perhaps planned to use to launch Penn. They were about to become the witnesses to literary history.

  “It is not improbable that a few farther steps in phrenological science will lead to a belief in the existence, if not the actual discovery and location, of an organ of analysis,” Poe’s article in the April 1841 Graham’s began, noting that a man notably endowed in his analytical organ “is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics—exhibiting in his solutions of each and all a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension praeternatural.”

  Graham’s readers might have fairly assumed Poe was talking about himself; he was indeed about to revive his cryptography challenge to them, boasting in one letter that “Nothing intelligible can be written which, with time, I cannot decipher.” Yet the opening lines in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” are not about himself, but his greatest literary creation: C. Auguste Dupin, amateur detective.

  So far as any literary genre can be said to have been invented by one author, Edgar Allan Poe is that author, and the detective story is that genre. True, ancestors may be claimed in everything from Voltaire to thirteenth-century Chinese literature, but in Poe’s story of the mysterious and horrific double murder of a Parisian pensioner and her daughter, the conventions of the modern detective were so immediately and perfectly realized as to almost defy belief. The haughtily brilliant and eccentric protagonist; the introductory vignette to show off his deductive powers to an earnest and easily amazed sidekick; the diligent but unimaginative police baffled by seemingly conflicting clues; the impossible “locked room” crime scene; the dramatic drawing-room confrontation of a suspect—it is all there, as fully formed as the grown Athena sprung forth from Zeus.

  The story had some earthly parentage, of course. Along with Poe’s beloved puzzle-solving, the previous decade had also seen the rise of true-crime reporting, both in James Curtis’s ground-breaking book The Murder of Maria Marten (1827) and James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald coverage in 1836 of the murder of Helen Jewett. But the story’s most direct influence was the world’s first actual private detective—Eugene Francois Vidocq, a French ex-con who parlayed his criminal expertise into a still rather larcenous career on the other side of the law. Poe was mindful enough of Vidocq’s fanciful Memoirs (1828) that he drew Dupin’s name from them—and then drolly had his own Parisian detective faintly praise Vidocq as “a good guesser.”

  In initiating the world’s most popular genre of fiction, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is literally the most influential short story of the nineteenth century. Poe himself knew he had written something special, though even he could hardly imagine to what degree. As he idly drew up plans for yet another story collection, this one to be called Phantasy-Pieces, he placed “Rue Morgue” as the lead story; yet that plan never went any further than his own desk. While the story received some warm praise upon its publication, its true importance would only slowly become apparent in the decades to follow.

  Instead, Poe was kept busy with his new editorial duties; though these were lighter under Graham than with Burton, he was again swamped with reviewing, puzzling over reader cryptograms, and gathering author signatures for a magazine spread on literary autographs. He soon had the opportunity to get one in person; when Charles Dickens came through Philadelphia in 1842, Poe leapt at the chance to meet him, sending copies of his books as a calling card to Dickens’s room two blocks away at the United States Hotel.

  The two met twice, with Dickens not only generously promising to try to find Poe a British publisher, but also offering up a curious anecdote when talk turned to the 1794 novel Caleb Williams: “Do you know that Godwin wrote it backwards—the last volume first,” Dickens mused to Poe, noting tha
t the author then “waited for months, casting about for a means of accounting for what he had done ?”

  This backward construction was an authorial slight of hand that Poe understood well. Pondering what he called “tales of ratiocination”—his own name for detective stories—Poe later remarked, “People think them more ingenious than they are—on account of their method and air of method. In the ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ for instance, where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven? The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the suppositious Dupin with that of the writer of the story.”

  Yet even Poe found himself unexpectedly stumped in writing his newly created genre. In the spring of 1842, he undertook writing a sequel to “Rue Morgue”—his first sequel ever, and his first use of a recurring character. As with Politian, his raw material was an actual crime—in this case, the mysterious death a year earlier of Mary Rogers, popularly dubbed the “beautiful cigar girl,” who clerked at a Manhattan shop frequented by writers and perhaps by Poe himself. Her disappearance, and the discovery of her body three days later in the Hudson River, occasioned paroxysms in the press about everything from gang violence to police ineptitude in failing to solve the crime. For “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” Poe transposed the case to Dupin’s Paris—and then, in a bizarre turn, acknowledged Mary Rogers in his story as a separate murder of “scarcely intelligible coincidences . . . recognized by all readers in the late murder of MARY CECILIA ROGERS, at New York.”