Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living (Icons)

by Paul Collins

  Increasingly, though, it was Poe who was not prepared for the people. His drinking aggravated his Broadway Journal partners, with Briggs complaining to James Lowell that “He has some good points, but taken altogether he is badly made up.” As if to prove the point, a few weeks later Poe inexplicably turned on Lowell in print, accusing his erstwhile ally and biographer of plagiarism—a bitter absurdity that left Lowell to muse, “I have made Poe my enemy by doing him a service.”

  That Poe was not entirely unaware of his idiosyncrasies was hinted at in that summer’s publication of his story “The Imp of the Perverse.” An essay with an almost perfunctory inclusion of a murder plot at the end, its real murder is that by the narrator upon himself. Poe glumly notes acts taken in the “spirit of the Perverse . . . We perpetrate them merely because we feel we should not.” More subtly, it is a meditation on losing control to irrational compulsion; fittingly, the essay has perhaps the first published description of a musical earworm—that is, “to be thus annoyed with the ringing in our ears, or rather in our memories, of the burthen of some ordinary song, or some un-impressive snatches from an opera.”

  Self-awareness, if that is what “Imp” was, does not seem to have helped Poe much. The praise for Tales was strong enough that Wiley & Putnam made him the first repeat author in their series by collecting a volume of his poetry; he was invited to read a new poem at the season premiere of the Boston Lyceum in October 1845. But Poe found himself unable to versify; by the time he reached the stage in Boston’s Odeon Theatre, he’d stayed sober, but still had no poem ready.

  The crowd’s patience was exhausted even before Poe opened his mouth, as a previous speaker had droned on for over two hours already. When Poe departed from the advertised poem to give an impromptu twenty-minute speech on American poetry, it drove out many patrons. Among those who stayed were Emily Dickinson’s future preceptor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who recalled how Poe then “abruptly began the recitation of his rather perplexing poem, [and] the audience looked thoroughly mystified.” Well they might, for Poe had resorted to a poem that was decidedly not new at all: it was his obscure 1829 farrago “Al Aaraaf.” While Higginson was won over by it (“walking back to Cambridge my comrades and I felt that we had been under the spell of some wizard”), the few left by the end were only mollified by a recitation of “The Raven.” Boston newspapers did not fondly recall Poe afterwards, and the feeling was mutual.

  Returning home, he found the Broadway Journal in such dire straits that he bought out his partner for fifty dollars—though even that was borrowed—and promptly used its pages to jeer at his Boston audience. He claimed, not quite convincingly, that the reading was another of his delightful hoaxes, this time on the fools in Boston’s literary establishment.

  “The Bostonians are well in their way,” Poe wrote mockingly. “Their hotels are bad. Their pumpkin pies are delicious. Their poetry is not so good.” Just to rub it in, he added that “Al-Aaraaf” was written at the age of ten. After scolding half the Boston audience for rudely leaving during the lecture, he mocked the remainder for being hoaxed by a juvenile production, and “applauding, all those knotty passages which we ourselves have not yet been able to understand.”

  That did not keep Poe from including “Al Aaraaf” in The Raven and Other Poems when it arrived in bookstores several weeks later. While self-deprecation was the norm in prefaces of the time, Poe’s went further than most: “I think nothing in this volume of much value to the public,” he stated flatly. The claim is only half true; a volume containing “The Raven” and “The Valley of Unrest” is hardly valueless. But to goose the manuscript up to book length, Poe had indeed resorted to larding in juvenilia like “Tamerlane” and “Al Aaraaf” and failed experiments like “Scenes from Politian”; he had given so little thought to saving the latter production that he had to borrow back issues of Southern Literary Messenger just to transcribe it.

  The volume was received politely enough, though with much puzzlement over the juvenilia. Margaret Fuller, as ever, was one of the first out of the gate, with an assertion that “The Raven” alone was a masterpiece, while the other poems showed an unrealized potential—“the productions in this volume indicate a power to do something far better.”

  Certainly Poe’s fiction continued from strength to strength; even as reviews of his poetry came in, the American Review carried his minor science fiction hoax “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” a sly account of hypnotic suspended animation that was gullibly reprinted as a fact in both America and Britain. But as gratifying as the poetry reviews and the Valdemar reprints were, Poe had little time to take notice; for over at the Broadway Journal offices, his business was taking on water.

  It was a cruel irony. After years of trying to start Penn and The Stylus, living the dream of having his own publication entirely overwhelmed Poe: underfunded and lacking copy, he desperately heaved in book excerpts and uncredited repeats of his own more obscure short stories. A young Walt Whitman visited the office and found Poe “very kindly and human, but subdued, perhaps a little jaded”—and happy to run Whitman’s piece on music in the November 29 issue. Poe praised it in print by announcing “we agree with our correspondent throughout,” some of the first praise that Whitman received from a major literary figure.

  But what Poe needed above all was money. A scant five weeks into his ownership, he sold off half the publication to a partner. Poe drank through the holidays and left the next issue with an entire column blank—the editor’s equivalent of giving up on life. By January 3, 1846, his partner had enough and declared the paper over.

  That day found Poe at home—two books, one famous poem, and a wrecked magazine away from where he’d been a year earlier. He was famous, jobless, drunk. Musing over a letter that had come in with yet another cryptogram—readers still tormented Poe with them—he turned from the sodden puzzle of his own life to the one on the page before him. As he worked out the cipher, the mocking words emerged: “And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him, they have no wine . . .”

  Dispatch boys scurried through Manhattan streets, bearing sacks of valentines—the post office had hired a hundred extra letter carriers just for the day—and Virginia Poe sat up from her sickbed, picked up a pen, and carefully wrote a romantic acrostic poem to her husband:

  Ever with thee I wish to roam—

  Dearest my life is thine.

  Give me a cottage for my home

  And a rich old cypress vine,

  Removed from the world with its sin and care

  And the tattling of many tongues.

  Love alone shall guide us when we are there—

  Love shall heal my weakened lungs;

  And Oh, the tranquil hours we’ll spend,

  Never wishing that others may see!

  Perfect ease we’ll enjoy, without thinking to lend

  Ourselves to the world and its glee—

  Ever peaceful and blissful we’ll be.

  Saturday, February 14, 1846.

  It is the only surviving note we have from her, and a heartbreakingly earnest and tender one. Amid Edgar’s drinking and the loss of his magazine, Virginia’s “weakened lungs” had continued their decline. The little family that Edgar had built around his wife and aunt drew ever closer around one another.

  They had suffered “tattling tongues” of late, too: a few weeks earlier, after historian Elizabeth Ellet came to regret some unreciprocated letters she sent to Edgar, her quick-tempered brother threatened to thrash the author. Poe drunkenly blundered into the home of his colleague and sometime friend Thomas Dunn English to borrow a pistol to defend himself. When English refused, the two broke into fisticuffs, with Poe getting the worse of it as English socked him across the face with a signet ring; as they were separated, the bloodied Poe sputtered, “Let him alone. I’ve got him just where I want him.”

  It was as well that he didn’t get the pistol; even drunk, Poe was still one of the few men of letters in his generation
with army training. But the whole affair left Poe shunned from that year’s Valentine’s Day literary salons, and rather joining his wife in longing to leave the downtown “world and its sin and care.” Aunt Maria owned a small lot in Baltimore, but was so far behind on taxes that the city announced its seizure. Instead, short of money and good will alike, that May the Poe household moved to the sleepy Bronx suburb of Fordham.

  Their new neighborhood was no literary hub; its greatest recent fame was for hosting a field-plowing competition. Fittingly, the approach to Poe’s house was, one visitor observed, “half buried with fruit trees.” Author Mary Gove Nicholls visited to find a diminutive farmhouse amid a rolling lawn; the cherry groves attracted birds, and Edgar was outside, trying to train a bobolink that he had caught.

  “He had put him in a cage, which he had hung on a nail driven into the trunk of a cherry tree,” Nicholls mused. “The poor bird was as unfit to live in a cage as his captor was to live in the world.”

  Yet Poe had left a great many miseries of the city behind, amusing himself with long walks to the woods and to St. John’s College, the future Fordham University. He had certainly not traded urban life for more indoor space; his home had just three rooms for as many inhabitants, with a kitchen, a parlor, and an upstairs bedroom crammed under the eaves. To Nicholls—a reform writer on everything from water cures to free love, not long back from visiting Fourierist colonies in the Midwest—the home was simplicity itself, if too spartan even for an idealist like herself.

  “So neat, so poor, so unfurnished, and yet so charming a dwelling I never saw,” Nicholls recalled. “The sitting-room floor was laid with check matting; four chairs, a light stand, and a hanging bookshelf completed its furniture. There were pretty presentation copies of books on the little shelves, and the Brownings had posts of honor on the stand.” When writing, Poe had a table between two windows that he would repair to, and his cat, Catterina, would leap up onto his shoulders and watch.

  Poe had not lost all touch with the outside world; with Tales and The Raven and Other Poems promptly pirated in London, he saw reviews filtering back from abroad. But his most notable appreciation that spring was a Graham’s essay by Poe himself, “The Philosophy of Composition.” In it, Poe claimed to have written “The Raven” through a doggedly logical process that appeared to demonstrate how anyone seeking to write a great poem was fated to write “The Raven.”

  While obviously rooted in Poe’s literary criticism, the more subtle origin of “Philosophy” lay in Poe’s cryptogram columns and his detective stories, and their great show made of logical elimination and deduction leading to an inevitable result. Of course a poem’s topic must be beauty and death intermixed (“the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world”); indubitably about one hundred lines is an ideal length (“It is, in fact, 108”); surely only “Nevermore” could work as the poem’s refrain (“In fact, it was the very first which presented itself”). If Poe’s poker-faced claim of a logical formula for poetry was about as believable as his balloon hoaxes, the essay still admirably summarized his notion of working backwards from a story’s conclusion for a “unity of effect,” as well as his concept that the fleeting, ineffable state of poetry dictates working within “a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of literary art—the limit of a single sitting.”

  “The Philosophy of Composition” occasioned little comment that spring, but his absence from downtown did. Newspaper rumors began that he was committed to the Insane Retreat at Utica. He wasn’t, but it only fueled curiosity over the announcement by Godey’s Magazine days later that Poe was to write a series of profiles on “The Literati of New York City.” Featuring bewilderingly frank descriptions of New York editors and authors, its May 1846 issue quickly sold out. Amid Poe’s usual mingled praise and stabbing criticism, startling personal descriptions revealed his old business partner Charles Briggs as “not a person to be disliked, though very apt to irritate and annoy” while he “pretends to a knowledge of French”; the travel writer William Gillespie “walks irregularly, mutters to himself”; of N. P. Willis, Poe judged: “His face is somewhat too full, or rather heavy . . . neither his nose nor his forehead can be defended.”

  Willis, mind you, was a friend of his.

  Poe had been led terribly astray—for while he was not averse to settling old scores, many of the most tactless descriptions in his profiles originated in a belief in phrenology. Clinical descriptions of weak faces and eccentric mannerisms seem to have been just that to him: descriptions falling within the scientific realm. To anyone else, they were monumental insults. It was, one sympathetic newspaper editor warned, “the maddest kind of honesty.” Before the summer was out, Poe’s series had goaded his old sparring partner Thomas Dunn English into revealing their fight and Poe’s alcoholism to New York newspapers, with Dunn claiming that “a merchant of this city had accused [Poe] of committing forgery.” Infuriated by the charge, Poe sued for libel.

  Clearly, matters had gotten out of hand. Fellow Southern writer William Gilmore Simms pleaded with Poe: “Suffer me to tell you frankly, taking the privilege of a true friend, that you are now perhaps in the most perilous period of your career.” The series was cut short in October, but the damage was done. Thomas Dunn English published a satire of Poe as “Marmaduke Hammerhead,” the drunk and impoverished critic and author of “The Black Crow”:

  “Did—did—did you ever read my review of L—L—Longfellow?”

  “No!” said the one addressed—a quiet, sober looking personage, “I dare say it’s very severe; but I never read it.”

  “Well,” said Hammerhead, “you lost a gr—gr—eat pleasure. You’re an ass!”

  If anything good came of their quarrel, it might be the November 1846 publication in Godey’s of Poe’s thinly veiled revenge fantasy, “The Cask of Amontillado”—a dark-humored masterpiece of reverse psychology and ironic dialogue, with its narrator gently leading his victim deeper into a fatal catacomb while insisting that he go no further. Like much of Poe’s gothic work, the story’s exact time and place are unclear, while the narrator is in sharp focus: it is the disconcertingly sane voice of someone recounting an insane act of murder. It is the victim’s pleas for mercy—beseeching, then crazed, then unsettlingly pensive—that are the key to the story being more than merely a masterly tale of sensation. When the narrator evinces the faintest hint of regret at the end, it is with the devastating sense that such glimmers of conscience are simply not enough; there can be no moral to his story, for he is not particularly sorry at all.

  Run in lieu of Poe’s next set of profiles, “The Cask of Amontillado” certainly did his reputation far more good than a new set of insultingly honest sketches. But instead of continuing to write fiction, Poe struggled with illness and squandered much of the rest of 1846 on a projected volume of profiles to be titled Literary America: Some Honest Opinion about our Authorial Merits and Demerits with Occasional Words of Personality.

  “I might make a hit and some profit, as well as proper fame, by extending the plan into that of a book on American letters generally, and keeping the publication in my own hands,” Poe explained to a friend. “I am now at this—body & soul.”

  It was a hopeless scheme; Poe lacked the funds to print it himself, and no sane publisher would acquire a book certain to anger half of their colleagues in the city. When visitors came to Poe’s farmhouse that December, they found a family shivering, ill, and without money—and for one of them, with time itself about to run out.

  Amid the usual appeals for the poor that Christmas season, the December 15, 1846, issue of the New York Morning Express had a particularly surprising one:

  ILLNESS OF EDGAR A. POE—We regret to learn that this gentleman and his wife are both dangerously ill with the consumption, and that the hand of misfortune lies heavy upon their temporal affairs. We are sorry to mention the fact that they are so far reduced as to be barely able to obtain the necessities of life .
. .

  The report was quickly picked up by other newspapers across the country—“Great God!” editorialized the Bostonian on Christmas Eve, “Is it possible, that the literary people of the Union, will let poor Poe perish by starvation and lean-faced beggary in New York?” Several editors loudly took up collections. Poe was mortified by the attention, if quietly grateful for the modest but desperately needed donations that poured in.

  “That my wife is ill, then, is true,” he admitted to N. P. Willis. Poe’s drinking, though, had proven nearly as devastating in the last year: “That I myself have been long and dangerously ill, and that my illness has been a understood thing among my brethren in the press, the best evidence is afforded by the innumerable paragraphs of personal and literary abuse with which I have been latterly assailed. This matter, however, will remedy itself. . . . I am getting better.”

  Poe had indeed sobered up and was throwing himself into his Literary America project. But, always just a room away in their little cottage, Virginia Poe was suffering every bit as badly as the editorials had claimed. A visitor found the household struggling even to keep her sickbed warm; Edgar held and rubbed her hands, Aunt Maria held her feet, and piled atop her was a thin blanket—Edgar’s old army overcoat—and Catterina the cat. Donated blankets and pillows soon arrived from friends, but Virginia’s condition remained beyond help. In late January 1847, their family friend and nurse Marie Louise Shew received a dire message from Aunt Maria: “But come—oh do come to-morrow!”

  She found Virginia propped up in an armchair in the last flush of her sufferings at the age of twenty-four—and desperately concerned that Edgar wasn’t left a lonely widower. Virginia grabbed his hand and Marie’s and pressed them together. “Marie, be a friend to Eddie, and don’t forsake him,” she pleaded. “He always loved you—didn’t you, Eddie?”