Poe

by Peter Ackroyd

  From his sickroom, two days after his arrival, Poe told Allan that “I have no money—no friends … I shall never rise from my bed.” Allan did not reply to this distressing letter, but he did preserve it. At a later date he wrote upon it, “it is now upwards of 2 years since I received the above precious relict of the Blackest Heart & deepest ingratitude alike destitute of honour & principle every day of his life has only served to confirm his debased nature.” He was not, in other words, to be reconciled to Poe, however miserable the young man's circumstances. In the absence of any reply, Poe became desperate. He even wrote to the superintendent of West Point, from which he had just been dishonourably discharged, and asked for a reference. He professed a wish to join the Polish army. The superintendent, Colonel Thayer, did not reply.

  Poe remained in New York for only three months. His finances were, to say the least, uncertain. He had taken up a subscription among his fellow cadets at West Point, for the publication of a book of poems. They expected a volume of satires, in the style with which he had entertained them before, but they were to be disappointed. In April 1831, Poems by Edgar A. Poe was published, dedicated to “The U.S. Corps of Cadets.” But it was not written with young soldiers in mind. Poe included new poems, such as “Israfel,” “To Helen,” and “The Doomed City,” poems that confirmed his imaginative interest in forlorn and mournful introspection; it was as if he sensed that he would never be happy on this earth. There is a tendency to apostrophise death as a place of repose and consolation. There are other passages of poetry which also offer remarkable intimations of his future writing:

  Be silent in that solitude

  Which is not loneliness, for then

  The spirits of the dead who stood

  In life before thee are again

  In death around thee, and their will

  Shall overshadow thee: be still.

  This is fine writing, at once forceful and melodic with a sure sense of cadence and an unforced immediacy of meaning. It is one aspect of Poe's misfortune on earth that the quality of his poetry was never recognised in his lifetime He was in a literal sense doomed to be misunderstood. He would not publish another volume of poetry for fourteen years.

  He wrote a preface for the volume, entitled “Letter to Mr.—,” in which he stated the poetic creed by which he would be guided for the rest of his life. “A poem in my opinion,” he wrote, “is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance by having, for its object, an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure.” He went on to claim that poetry is concerned “with indefinite sensations, to which end music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception.” This is one of the first statements of the belief in art for art's sake that, through Poe's agency, would have such a profound effect upon the course of nineteenth-century French poetry; his connection of poetry and music here predates Walter Pater's similar sentiments by forty-six years.

  • • •

  Since life in New York had become insupportable, in May he travelled back to his Baltimore relations. Life in Mechanics Row was no less poor and disorderly than before, but the situation was rendered even more hopeless by the spectacle of his brother dying of consumption. It was the family disease. Poe shared the rear attic room with the invalid, where, in August, Henry Poe died of “intemperance” at the age of twenty-four. In a letter written two years earlier, Poe had confessed that “there can be no tie more strong than that of brother for brother—it is not so much that they love one another as that they both love the same parent.” The singular parent here can only mean his mother. In the death of Henry, another part of Eliza Poe had also died.

  His aunt, Maria Clemm, an ambiguous figure, was the one who tried to sustain the household throughout this difficult period. She was adept at eking out small means, whether in terms of stitching and sewing or in terms of food and cooking; she kept her family, of which Poe soon became an integral part, together at all costs. Poe came to depend upon her wholly, for all the necessities of his life. But she inevitably gained a reputation as something of a beggar or cadger. She was forty-one when Poe joined the household and was considered to be somewhat masculine in appearance, with a large forehead and a firm chin. And, for obscure reasons, she was given the nickname of “Muddy.”

  Maria Clemm's daughter, Virginia, was nine years old when Poe came back to Baltimore. Poe called her “Sis” or “Sissie.” She was childlike, or doll-like, with a very pale complexion. She was a little plump, but had the large eyes and raven hair to which Poe was instinctively attracted.

  He called her “Sissie” even after he married her.

  • • •

  In his first months in Baltimore he tried to gain work as an usher in a local school, but was turned down. In his financial distress he decided as a last resort to live by his pen. He began writing stories, and may even have tried his hand at “penny a line” journalism in the provincial newspapers. But he was always desperately poor. In November he wrote to Allan telling him that “I was arrested eleven days ago for a debt which I never expected to have to pay” and asked for money. Two weeks later Maria Clemm seconded his appeal with a letter of her own, in which she claimed that “he is extremely distressed at your refusal to assist him.” There is, however, no record of Poe's arrest or imprisonment at this time. If it were in fact an elaborate subterfuge to acquire funds from Allan, then it is clear that Mrs. Clemm was deep in Poe's confidence. He wrote two further letters to his erstwhile guardian at the end of the year. In the first he stated that “sickness and misfortune have left me not a shadow of pride. I own that I am miserable and unworthy of notice, but do not leave me to perish without leaving me still one resource.” Two weeks later he wrote again to Allan, imploring him for aid, “for the sake of the love you bore me when I sat upon your knee and called you father.” At the beginning of the following year, Poe received a belated gift of twenty dollars from his guardian. It would keep him from starving. There are some reports that Poe travelled back to Richmond in the summer of this year, either to confront or to placate Allan. But there is no firm evidence for such a visit.

  • • •

  In January 1832, the Saturday Courier of Philadelphia had the distinction of printing Poe's first published tale. It was entitled “Metzengerstein,” and was written in the style of a Germanic tale of horror. During that year the same magazine would print four other stories by Poe, “Duke de L'Omelette,” “A Tale of Jerusalem,” “A Decided Loss,” and “The Bargain Lost.” Although these are tales of the horrid or of the supernatural, they are couched in a satirical or parodic vein. He had been reading journals such as Blackwood's Magazine, and had quickly learned how to couch a tale of “sensation.” But this was not for him the serious work of poetry; it was a way of earning a living, and something of his scorn is conveyed in these adept but deeply ironic exercises in the flesh-creeping genre. Yet, in the garret in Mechanics Row, he had found his true vocation.

  We may take the first published of them, “Metzengerstein,” as representative. It is a high-spirited and engaging, and at the same time a well-calculated, story of horror and metempsychosis set in Hungary. It concerns the young Baron Metzengerstein who, having lost both of his parents in quick succession, enters upon a stupendous inheritance; here we may, if we wish, see the stirrings of wish fulfilment. In his dissipated career, however, it seems that there are already hints “of morbid melancholy, and hereditary illhealth.” The baron burns down the stables of a particular enemy but then, apparently in retribution, a horse stitched within a tapestry of his apartments comes alive with its “sepulchral and disgusting teeth.” Eventually the baron rides upon it to his doom. It is all very strident and colourful, and of course not to be taken seriously—except for the fact that its purpose was to thrill and to surprise a large audience of somewhat credulous readers. This was to become the central paradox of Poe's literary career.

  • • •

  Poe'
s life in Baltimore is relatively well documented. He attended the Baltimore Library, where he continued what was essentially a course in self-education, and frequented a bookstore on Calvert Street and an oyster parlour on Pratt Street. He courted a young lady who lived in his neighbourhood, Mary Devereaux, who has left a short description of her young beau. Poe “didn't like trifling and small talk. He didn't like dark-skinned people … He had a quick, passionate temper, and was very jealous. His feelings were intense, and he had but little control of them. He was not well balanced; he had too much brain. He scoffed at everything sacred and never went to church … He said often that there was a mystery hanging over him he never could fathom.” For all its ingenuousness, this sounds like an accurate remembrance. He would quote Burns to her on their rambles through the city and its adjacent hills. “The only thing I had against him,” she added, “was that he held his head so high. He was proud and looked down on my uncle whose business did not suit him.”

  His quick temper and ready passion were evident in one story Mary Devereaux recounted. She tells how, after a lovers’ quarrel, she had retreated to her house. Poe followed her, and peremptorily ordered her mother to allow him to see her. On another occasion he is supposed to have “cowhided” her uncle for the offence of sending him a “cutting” letter. This is all highly characteristic of Poe's later, and even more erratic, behaviour. A Baltimore contemporary provides a more objective account. Poe's “figure was remarkably good, and he carried himself erect and well, as one who had been trained to it. He was dressed in black, and his frockcoat was buttoned to the throat, where it met the black stock, then almost universally worn.” He would dress in black for the rest of his life. It was his colour.

  The publication of his early stories, and the composition of “hack work” which has yet to be discovered in the columns of now defunct local periodicals, did not materially affect his poverty. In April 1833, he wrote another despairing letter to John Allan in which he declared that he was “without friends, without any means, consequently of obtaining employment, I am perishing—absolutely perishing for want of aid … For God's sake pity me, and save me from destruction.” Allan did not reply. There was no further correspondence between them.

  But Poe had not been idle. In the following month he sent a short story to the New England Magazine, one of a sequence of narratives that he proposed to publish under the title of “Eleven Tales of the Arabesque.” He offered to send the complete works and added, in a postscript, “I am poor.”

  His fortunes improved in the autumn of 1833, however, after he had submitted various stories for a competition set up by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter. A prize of fifty dollars was to be awarded to the best story. The editorial committee of the Visiter unanimously decided that “MS Found in a Bottle” was “so far, so very far, superior to anything before us” that the prize had to be given to the young and unknown author. Poe had also submitted a poem, for the poetry prize of twenty-five dollars. He would have won that, too, if the committee had not thought that the benefaction of two prizes was excessive. The story, of a supernatural voyage complete with phantom crew and “chaos of formless water,” was published at the beginning of October. It is a variant of the “Flying Dutchman” legend but imbued with Poe's fascination with the maelstrom and the wild abyss.

  It was one of the few triumphant moments in Poe's literary career. For the first time he had been afforded recognition. His prospects of fame and fortune had been transformed. On the Sunday and Monday after the award had been announced in the journal, he called upon the members of the editorial committee. One of them, Mr. Latrobe, recalled that “his manner was easy and quiet, and although he came to return thanks for what he regarded as deserving them, there was nothing obsequious in what he said or did.” He noted that Poe's “forehead was high, and remarkable for the great development of the temple. This was the characteristic of his head, which you noticed at once, and which I have never forgotten.” This was a frequent remark about him—that there was something about his appearance that was indeed unforgettable. He went on to tell Latrobe that he was presently engaged on a story about a voyage by balloon to the moon, and in the course of his explanation “he clapped his hands and stamped with his foot by way of emphasis.” Afterwards he laughed and apologised for his “excitability.”

  One of the other editors whom he met on that Sunday, John P. Kennedy, became his unofficial patron. On a later occasion he recalled to Kennedy “those circumstances of absolute despair in which you found me” and “how great reason I have to be grateful to God and yourself.” In a diary written after Poe's death, Kennedy recorded that “I found him in Baltimore in a state of starvation.”

  Yet Poe now had some reason for hopefulness. In October the Visiter announced that “a volume of tales from the pen of Edgar A. Poe” was to be published by subscription. The intended book was to be entitled Tales of the Folio Club, and comprised some seventeen stories. Each of these stories was narrated by a member of the club, and there were general critical discussions among them after every contribution. It was a showcase, in other words, for Poe's heterogeneous talents. The stories were, in Poe's words, “of a bizarre and generally whimsical character;” more significantly they were largely designed as satires on a range of literary styles, from the Germanic sensationalism of Blackwood's Magazine to the snappy journalistic style currently fashionable. He caricatured writers as diverse as Walter Scott and Thomas Moore, Benjamin Disraeli and Washington Irving. The tales ranged from “The Spectacles,” a story in which the narrator falls in love with his own grandmother, to the necrophiliac “King Pest,” and the narrators themselves were given names such as Horribile Dictu and Convolvulus Gondola. It was indeed a convoluted humour, but it is important to note that Poe embarked upon his fictional career as a predominantly satirical writer. There was always a trace of vaudeville in his performance.

  Poe's humour was, at the best of times, somewhat laboured. He often verged upon facetiousness, and delighted in what can only be called gallows humour. He only ever approached wit in his scathing reviews of other writers, where an almost Wildean note emerges. His principal gift was for sarcasm, an effortless tone of superiority not unmixed with contempt. He also enjoyed “hoaxing,” with accounts of imaginary voyages to the icy regions and of trips to the moon; there is in fact a serious argument that he was “hoaxing” in his tales of horror, deliberately piling the terror onto a gullible public. “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” are also exercises in burlesque.

  • • •

  In March 1834 John Allan died and, as Poe expected, left nothing in his will to his erstwhile foster child. Yet anticipation did not necessarily soften the blow. “I am thrown entirely upon my own resources,” he told Kennedy, “with no profession, and very few friends.” Throughout his life Poe continually complained about friendlessness, as if somehow it emphasised his orphan status. There had been a time when Poe had hoped, or even expected, to receive a large inheritance from his guardian. If Frances Allan had lived, he might have gained the entire estate. But in fact he was consigned to a life of penury and, as always, he harboured grief and resentment at being so unluckily and unnaturally cast away.

  In addition the publication of Tales of the Folio Club had come to nothing, foundering on the reluctance of publishers to take on a volume of short stories by an American writer. Indigenous writers were at a grave disadvantage during this period. They survived only by taking other professions, such as diplomacy and education, or by relying upon an independent income. The cultural palm was given to the English, but, more important, books from England could be pirated and reprinted at no cost at all. There was no copyright legislation in existence. To pay a native writer, for what could be appropriated free of charge from another country, seemed to many publishers to be an unnecessary expense. So Poe suffered. He was one of the first truly professional writers in American literary history, but he was in a marketplace where none came to buy. It has been estimated that the
total income from all of his books, over a period of twenty years, was approximately three hundred dollars.

  In the unhappy year of 1834, when Poe was twenty-five, there were reports of his suffering a heart attack, of his being incarcerated in a local jail, and of his being employed for a time as a bricklayer or as a lithographer. None of these stories can be substantiated. It can be confirmed, however, that he applied for a post as schoolteacher in the spring of 1835.

  A letter to Kennedy, asking for assistance, survives. Kennedy, still one of the editors of the Baltimore Saturday Visiter, invited Poe to dinner, after receiving his letter of solicitation, but Poe had to decline on the very good grounds that he had nothing suitable to wear. He only had the one shabby black suit that he donned on all occasions. Kennedy realised at once the extent of the young man's penury. He gave him clothing, afforded him free access to his table, and even lent him a horse for periodic exercise. He lifted him “from the very verge of despair.”

  Kennedy performed a further favour for Poe in the spring of 1835. He gave him what Poe called “my first start in the literary world,” without which “I should not at this moment be among the living.” Kennedy recommended him to the editor of the newly established Southern Literary Messenger, Thomas Willis White, whose offices were in Richmond. It was the best possible introduction for an aspiring writer. Kennedy advised White that Poe was “very poor,” and he counselled the editor to accept articles from the talented young man. Poe sent one of his tales of terror, “Berenice;” it was promptly accepted. Then he entered into a correspondence with White in which he advised the new editor on journalistic principles. He recommended changes in typeface, and also in style. “To be appreciated,” he told him, “you must be read.” White had criticised aspects of “Berenice” as “too horrible,” and Poe admitted the impeachment. But he went on to say that the most successful stories contained “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.” This was Poe's journalistic credo, the principles of which he followed for the rest of his writing career. He had an instinctive understanding of what would attract, and hold the attention of, a newly formed reading public. He understood the virtues of terseness and unity of effect; he realised the necessity of sensationalism and of the exploitation of contemporary “crazes.” In his lifetime he was sometimes condemned as a mere “Magazinist,” but that perilous and badly rewarded profession would be the cradle of his genius.