Poe

by Peter Ackroyd

  As a result of Poe's unasked-for advice on editorial matters, White wrote to him in June, 1835, offering him a post on the journal. His acceptance would mean that he would be obliged to move to Richmond. But the prospect of work, and money, triumphed over any local inconvenience. Poe replied at once, promising his services to the Southern Literary Messenger and professing that he was “anxious to settle myself” in his hometown. So in the summer of 1835 Poe returned to the scenes of his childhood.

  He rented a room in a boarding house and, after a period of prevarication in which he applied unsuccessfully for a post as a schoolteacher at Richmond Academy, he joined White's periodical at a salary of sixty dollars per month. It was his first prospect of prolonged paid employment. Quite by chance the headquarters of the Messenger were beside the offices of Ellis and Allan, John Allan's erstwhile business, so he was offered daily reminders of his change of status or what he used to call “caste.” He was engaged, after all, in what was essentially hack work. With White abroad gathering subscriptions, Poe was obliged to write most of the periodical himself. He contributed book reviews and squibs and heterogeneous “copy,” all against an advancing deadline; he was also engaged in binding up and addressing the numbers of each edition. Printer's ink was the air he breathed. The periodical came out monthly, at a subscription price of five dollars a year, and comprised some thirty-two double-columned octavo pages. There was a great deal of space to fill.

  • • •

  In August, however, the delicate balance of his nature was entirely overthrown. Maria Clemm wrote to inform him that his cousin Neilson Poe was ready to take in and educate her daughter Virginia at his own expense. There was already some presumption that Poe would one day marry Virginia, and he replied with an hysterical communication which opened “I am blinded with tears while writing this letter.” In the course of it he declared that “I have no desire to live and will not,” while adding that “you know I love Virginia passionately devotedly.” The prospect of losing another young female, just as he had lost his mother and Jane Stanard, rendered him almost helpless with grief. “Oh God have mercy on me. What have I to live for? Among strangers with not one soul to love me.” He also enclosed a letter to Virginia in which he called her “my own sweetest Sissy, my darling little wifey” and implored her not to “break the heart of your cousin. Eddy.”

  He invited Mrs. Clemm and her daughter to leave Baltimore in order to live with him in Richmond, and lied that he had “procured a sweet little house in a retired situation.” The house's “situation” was only in his imagination. He had the propensity of believing that anything he wrote down somehow became true.

  There was no immediate resolution to this crisis, and in the following month Poe became deeply melancholic. In a letter from Richmond he told Kennedy that “I am wretched, and know not why.” This is an odd admission, since he knew that the reason for his depression lay in the possibility of losing Virginia forever. It can only be attributed to the fact that he was constantly demanding the sympathy of others; he was always desperately in need of love and attention. But he also began drinking heavily. White wrote to one friend that Poe “is unfortunately rather dissipated, and therefore I can place very little reliance upon him.” One of the printers in the office of the Messenger recalled that “Mr. Poe was a fine gentleman when he was sober. He was ever kind and courtly, and at such times everyone liked him. But when he was drinking he was about one of the most disagreeable men I have ever met.”

  • • •

  In September Poe suddenly vacated his desk. He “flew the track,” as White put it; he added that “I should not be at all astonished to hear that he has been guilty of suicide.” Poe did not kill himself, however. He returned to Baltimore, where it is surmised that he secretly married Virginia. The evidence for this is uncertain, but it is clear that some arrangement was reached. Marriage may have been the only way of retaining Virginia for himself. Since she was only thirteen years old, some element of secrecy was obviously considered desirable.

  At the end of that month he wrote to White, asking to be reinstated at the Messenger. White consented on the understanding that Poe would refrain from drinking. “No man is safe who drinks before breakfast,” he told him. “No man can do so, and attend to business properly.” So Poe had been drinking very deeply indeed. Two or three of his tales from this time, among them “Shadow” and “King Pest,” offer visions of men sitting around a table drinking even as death is a guest among them. Their drinking parlours are enclosed and shrouded from view, lit by lamps or torches: it is the nightmare vision of a tavern, where drink and death are part of the same lurid and fitfully lit reality. He had seen such taverns, in New York as well as in Richmond, where a flight of steps from the street led down to a room with a packed dirt floor. It was little more than a converted cellar, with a wooden counter and wooden benches. Poe knew these leprous places very well.

  At the beginning of October Poe returned from Baltimore to Richmond. With him he brought Maria Clemm and Virginia. They took rooms in a boarding house, rather than the “sweet little house” he had promised to them. The three of them maintained the appearance of a bachelor cousin, and a mother, caring for a girl. Almost as soon as they arrived Maria Clemm wrote to a relation that “we are entirely dependent on Edgar. He is, indeed, a son to me & has always been so …”

  White appointed Poe editor of the Messenger, retaining his own role as proprietor, and at first he prospered in his new role. He gave up drinking, now that the cause of his unhappiness had been removed, and told Kennedy in a letter that he had “fought the enemy manfully.” He went on to state that “my health is better than for years past, my mind is fully occupied, my pecuniary difficulties have vanished, I have a fair prospect of future success …”

  He had also been writing steadily. Ever since the Southern Literary Messengerhad published “Berenice,” he had contributed other tales and essays to the periodical. The December number, for example, contained “MS Found in a Bottle,” an uncompleted drama entitled “Politian,” two or three “fillers” and critical reviews of no less than nineteen books. In the previous nine months he had published six new stories, among them “Hans Phaall—A Tale,” “Morella,” and “King Pest.”

  His reviews provoked immediate attention, since he brought to them a fine critical mind tempered with satire and mordant wit. The reputations of some of the most fashionable writers of the time did not emerge unscathed from the inflictions of Poe's pen. He was irritable and even savage in his criticisms. His dissatisfaction with the world was part of his dissatisfaction with himself. Jung's remarks about Paracelsus are apposite here: “… when one unconsciously works against oneself, the result is impatience, irritability, and an impotent longing to get one's opponent down whatever the means.” Poe certainly enjoyed causing trouble, or what he called “kicking up a bobbery,” especially when it was at the expense of New York or New England writers. He was already a defiantly Southern writer, or Southern journalist, not at all ready to bow to the literary claims of his Northern neighbours. He also wanted reputation; he wanted fame; he needed to make an impression, at whatever cost.

  The journalism has passed, but the stories survive. “Berenice” in a sense sets the tone for many that followed. It is both morbid and macabre, with more than a dash of sensationalism to season the characteristic mixture of death and perverse passion. The melodies of Poe's prose linger, too, with his consummate control of cadence and of open vowel sounds. His is the lingering prose of extremity. The opening tolls like a funereal bell—“Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform”—and in the succeeding pages we learn that the unhappy and unfortunate narrator, Egaeus, will marry his cousin, Berenice, who in the interim becomes emaciated and infirm through the affliction of some unknown disease. They marry, but Egaeus falls victim to an even more insidious disorder. He becomes obsessed with her teeth. In one of Poe's standard motifs, Berenice is buried prematurely. Egaeus wakes from his delirium of
sorrow at her apparent death, and then realises that he has torn out the teeth of his bride, while she was yet palpitating in the grave. So the story ends. Poe relied largely upon brevity for effect. All of his endings are abrupt and inconclusive, thus prolonging a mood of uncertainty and even of anxiety. There is always some undertow of meaning, which the reader shares with the author; they are both in the same condition of growing awareness.

  It is of course a tale in the Gothic mode, but one that is striated by Poe's own preoccupations. Poe reinvigorated the Gothic tradition of horror and morbid sensationalism by centering it upon the human frame. The image of teeth, perhaps derived from those of his own wasted and emaciated mother, plays some part in his other fictions; the notion of premature burial can be interpreted as a denial of death or as a necrophiliac longing for the moulderings of the grave. Somewhere, among these conflicting interests, Poe's imagination is to be found. In his work death and beauty are powerfully aligned. He was drawn instinctively to the macabre; but for him it was a holy place full of strange scents and echoes. He, of course, might have scorned any such inferences. Poe nicely calculated his effects, and always maintained tight technical control over his narrative. It is significant that he revised continually, making detailed as well as general changes; it may also be worth noting that his handwriting was a model of calligraphy, transcribed on neatly rolled manuscripts, as if all were brought into exquisite order.

  There is a point where irony and decay meet, and it is not at all clear whether Poe is laughing or weeping at his own inventions. But there is no necessary disparity between calculation and the expression of the deepest fears and obsessions. He had some intimate connection with his own unconscious anxieties—indeed they guided his life— so he was able instinctively to stir those of his readers. Yet only in disciplined circumstances can those fears be properly formulated. It is the difference between an inchoate wail and a threnody.

  • • •

  In the spring of 1836 Poe married Virginia in a formal ceremony; presumably he made no reference to a former secret marriage, if such a union ever in fact took place. A witness to the formal marriage, Thomas W. Cleland, declared on oath that the girl was “of the full age of twenty one years.” Since Cleland was a pious Presbyterian, he is hardly likely to have sullied the marriage service with an outright fabrication. So Poe lied to him about Virginia's age. Maria Clemm, the mother, must also have lied. Virginia was seven years younger than her stated age, and was in any case regarded as being small for her years. It was a most unlikely union. It was not exactly illegal, but it was unusual.

  The newly married Poes seem to have ventured on a short honeymoon, in Petersburg, Virginia, although it is unlikely that their marriage was consummated at the time. He characteristically regarded his relationships with his chosen women as ideal or spiritual in temper. As a result it has been surmised that he was averse to sexual relations of any kind, and even that he was impotent. We can only speculate that physical intimacy with his child bride, if it occurred at all, came at a subsequent date. Some years later, he declared that “I married for another's happiness, when I knew that no possibility of my own existed.” This, however, was the self-pity of hindsight.

  • • •

  In this relatively peaceful period, he grew ever more ambitious for his writing. He dispatched a manuscript of Tales of the Folio Club to a New York publisher, but then was advised by a literary friend “to undertake a Tale in a couple of volumes, for that is the magical number.” And that is what Poe promptly decided to do. If there was a market, he would address it. He began writing a novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the first instalment of which was published in the Southern Literary Messenger for January 1837. Even before it appeared, however, he had been removed from the staff of the periodical. The problem once more arose from his drinking. In September 1836, White had given him notice but was persuaded to reemploy him on certain “conditions”—which conditions, in December, “he has again forfeited.” A contemporary in Richmond reported that “when occasionally drinking (the habit was not constant) he was incapacitated for work.” He went on “binges,” in other words, in the course of which he became incapable. On his own admission he would then be obliged to spend several days in bed, recovering from what was inevitably described as an indisposition.

  So Poe “retired” at the beginning of 1837. Three weeks later White wrote to a friend that the Messenger “shall outlive all the injury it has sustained from Mr. Poe's management.” But it had not sustained any injury at all. Under Poe's direction the magazine attracted more notice, and more praise, than at any time in its subsequent history. Under his management, too, its circulation had risen from 700 to 3,500 subscribers. In addition it had published some of the finest American stories ever written. Poe was already the greatest prose writer in the country. But only a few critics noticed at the time.

  Poe remained in Richmond for the rest of January, and wearied White with his importunity. “He is continually after me for money,” White wrote. “I am as sick of his writings, as I am of him.” And so, at the end of February, Poe and his little household left for New York. He had spent a few months in that city, six years before, but his experience of poverty and misery there had not dissuaded him from returning. It should have done. The opening of “Siope” is suggestive. “ ‘Listen to me,’ said the Demon, as he placed his hand upon my head.”

  The Editor

  The Poes and Maria Clemm went first to a lodging house at Waverly Place, in Greenwich Village, and then later in 1837 moved a few blocks to Carmine Street. A fellow lodger at Waverly Place described Poe as “one of the most courteous, gentlemanly, and intelligent companions I have ever met with;” he added that “I never saw him the least affected with liquor.” Yet it was a difficult time, compounded by the fact that in the spring there was a great financial collapse and subsequent panic. In these unpromising circumstances Poe tried to find work as an occasional journalist or reviewer. There is little evidence of any success. Only two of his tales, “Von Jung, the Mystific” and “Siope,” were published in this year. The Messenger had also given up the serialisation of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, after two instalments. It is not easy to see how Poe and his family survived. It is possible that Mrs. Clemm ran a small boarding house in Carmine Street—a print shows that it would have been just about large enough to accommodate paying guests— but no other sources of income are known. This was a period, after the “crash,” when many people literally starved to death. One of the few extant records concerning Poe reveals that, in the winter of 1837, he called at the Northern Dispensary in Greenwich Village to obtain medicine for a severe cold.

  It is not surprising, therefore, that at the beginning of 1838 the little family made its way to Philadelphia. Poe had a habit of moving on, wandering from one city to the next in search of good fortune. He never felt at home anywhere.

  Philadelphia was built in gridiron fashion and looked like a chessboard stretched out between the rivers Schuylkill and Delaware; it was one of the oldest, and was still the largest, city in the United States. It was booming. It was expanding. But it was not exhilarating. Poe may have considered himself to be a small piece on the board.

  The Poes and Maria Clemm lodged once more in a rooming house. They were poor. They may even have been desperate. The landlord reported that they were “literally suffering for want of food” and were “forced to live on bread and molasses for weeks together.” They moved to another lodging house a few weeks later, and then at the end of the year moved again. Poe's employment is not known, except for a reference in a letter to “the miserable life of literary drudgery to which I now, with breaking heart, submit.” He had obtained some work as a journalistic hack, writing paragraphs and criticisms to order. He was addressing the new Secretary of the Navy, from whom he begged an appointment as a clerk—“any thing, by sea or land,” but nothing was forthcoming.

  Yet he was writing. He may have moved to Philadelphia precisely because i
t was still the publishing centre of the country, with journals such as the Saturday Evening Post and the Gentleman's Magazine. The city also sustained seven daily morning papers and two daily evening papers. But he was not at first successful in finding employment. Some comfort may have been drawn from the publication by the New York firm of Harpers, that summer, of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in volume form. Yet he never seemed much impressed by his first, and last, novel. Two years after its publication he described it as “a very silly book.” That was too harsh a verdict. It was a story that certainly strained credulity, filled with what, on the title page, were called “incredible Adventures and Discoveries,” but it was possessed by the strange excitement that issued from Poe's own restless and morbid nature. He had also learned from Daniel Defoe's narratives: he tried to maintain the utmost verisimilitude in order to encompass the wildest improbabilities.

  The first chapters concern Arthur Gordon Pym's confinement in a crawl space of a ship, between decks, a subject that elicits all the intensity of Poe's own nature. He thrills to, and yet suffers from, the experience of enclosure. His is the poetry of extremity and of morbidity. In succeding chapters Arthur Gordon Pym is the victim of a callous mutiny, is shipwrecked, suffers from famine, is captured by cannibals and generally reduced to a parodic reen-actment of contemporary travellers’ adventures. Poe is an artist of the improbable. In one incident Pym attempts to lower himself down a steep precipice, but cannot resist glancing down into the abyss that attracts him; whereupon “my whole soul was pervaded with a longing to fall; a desire, a yearning, a passion utterly uncontrollable.” This is pure Poe; the unutterable nightmare becomes earnestly wished for. He is the greatest exponent of fantasy fiction in the English language, because he manages to touch upon the most universal or deeply rooted fears. The narrative ends as Pym's boat is drawn towards “the embraces of the cataract,” one of the central images of his art. But then there emerges a shrouded being, larger than any human form, whose skin “was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.” Poe is drawn to the wildness and mystery of desolation, but he puts no name to it at the end.