Poe Page 10

  While staying at the Brennans, earlier that year, Poe had once more been contemplating the prospect of a literary journal. He had been corresponding with such literary men as Charles Anthon, professor of Greek and Latin at Columbia University, on the merits of the scheme. To Anthon he outlined his plan to publish his collected stories in five volumes. He volunteered the fact that “I have reached a crisis of my life, in which I sadly stand in need of aid,” and lamented his “long & desperate struggle with the ills attendant upon orphanage, the total want of relatives etcetera.” All his old woes had come back, at this low point in his fortunes, but in truth they had never really gone away. He carried them with him everywhere. He might seem cheerful and persevering to his journalistic colleagues, but he harboured a morbid and melancholy mind. Yet even as he complained of “crisis,” there came a sudden and overwhelming success.

  The Bird

  At the beginning of 1845 Poe met a journalistic friend in a New York street and confided in him.

  “Wallace,” said Poe, “I have just written the greatest poem that ever was written.”

  “Have you?” replied Wallace. “That is a fine achievement.”

  “Would you like to hear it?” asked Poe.

  “Most certainly,” said Wallace.

  Thereupon Poe recited the verses of “The Raven.” He had been working on it during the period of retreat in the Brennan farmhouse, and he put the last touches to it in the apartment on Greenwich Street. On January 29 it was published in the Evening Mirror, and was reprinted in other New York periodicals. It became a sensation. It was his most celebrated poem, and indeed remains one of the most famous poems in American literature:

  Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

  Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—

  While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

  As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

  “ Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—

  Only this and nothing more.”

  So begins the poem that is a reverie and a lament, a threnody and a hymn, with its cadences so melodious and powerful that they still haunt the American poetic imagination. And there is, too, the plangency of the continual refrain of “Nevermore.” The narrator, mourning the death of a loved one, is visited by the bird of ill omen whose baleful presence increases his loneliness and desolation. The poem was extolled by one critic as “despair brooding over wisdom.” Poe described the black bird as an evocation of “Mournful and Neverending Remembrance.”The New York Express acclaimed it as surpassing “anything that has been done even by the best poets of the age,” while the Richmond Examiner proclaimed it to have “taken rank over the whole world of literature.” The New World, more plainly, described it as “wild and shivery.” It was reprinted ten times, and soon earned the tribute of numerous parodies.

  A contemporary noted that “soon the Raven became known everywhere, and everyone was saying ‘Nevermore.’ ” Actors introduced it into their dialogue. It became a catchword. Poe became known as “the Raven,” and his habitual appearance in black did not harm the impression. On one occasion he came back to his newspaper office in the company of a then-famous actor. Poe sat at his desk, brought out a manuscript of the poem, and then summoned the entire office to listen to a rendition of the verses by the actor. The office boy recorded that “I was entranced.” Poe was soon celebrated in the literary salons of the city, too, and at very little notice he could be prevailed upon to recite the poem in his own particular and mournful manner. He “would turn down the lamps till the room was almost dark,” one contemporary remembered, “then standing in the center of the apartment he would recite those wonderful lines in the most melodious of voices … So marvellous was his power as a reader that the auditors would be afraid to draw breath lest the enchanted spell be broken.”

  There are several accounts of his sudden prominence. “Everyone wants to know him,” one contemporary wrote, “but only a very few people seem to get well acquainted with him.” He appeared at the salons of Miss Lynch on Waverly Place and of Mrs. Smith in Greenwich Street. These literary ladies were known as the “starry sisterhood.” He was always neatly dressed, with “the bearing and manners of a gentleman.” He was never drunk. He was “polite and engaging … quiet and unaffected, unpretentious, in his manner.” Virginia Poe would sometimes accompany her husband to these conversaziones, as they were known, and demonstrated “the greatest admiration for her husband's genius, and fairly worshipped him.” She was not alone. Mrs. Smith revealed that Poe “did not affect the society of men, rather that of highly intellectual women … Men were intolerant of all this, but women fell under his fascination and listened in silence.” They recognised his need, perhaps, and his orphan's sense of privation. One specimen of his conversation has been preserved in the diary of Mrs. Smith:

  “Ah Mr. Poe, this country affords no arena for those

  who live to dream.”

  “Do you dream? I mean sleeping dream?”

  “Oh yes, I am a perfect Joseph in dreaming, except

  that my dreams are of the unknown, the spiritual.”

  “I knew it. I knew it by your eyes.”

  Poe was no doubt delighted by the acclaim and attention. He had always wished for fame and now, in a way he had found it. “No man lives,” he is once reported to have said, “unless he is famous.” He also enjoyed being praised. Nevertheless he contrived to be somewhat ironical about the poem's success. “The Raven has had a great ‘run,’ Thomas,” he wrote to Frederick Thomas, “—but I wrote it for the express purpose of running—just as I did the ‘Gold-Bug’ you know. The bird beat the bug, though, all hollow.” The tone of calculation here is thoroughly familiar. He was writing poetry exactly as most people perceived poetry to be. He was writing poetry for a specific market. He told a journalistic colleague that he wished “to see how near to the absurd I could come without overstepping the dividing line.”

  Poe even wrote an essay, “The Philosophy of Composition,” in which he outlined the principles of his art and provided an anatomy of the poem stanza by stanza. He set down the proper length of a poem, and the most appropriate tone of “sadness;” he elucidated the required “effects,” and the importance of a significant refrain. He stated that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem. “It was a thoroughly methodical and technical handbook for the writing of a great poem. In the course of this supposedly objective analysis he announced that “the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the world” without revealing his reasons for the choice. He set down, in order, his tricks and devices; it was a need for orderliness, similar to that which had sent him into the Army and West Point.

  This apparently cynical and impersonal account, however, should be placed beside the confession to a friend that reciting the poem “set his brain on fire.” What remains is not its technical audacity, or its melodic control, but the horror of its morbid despair. Poe's impersonality resembles the apparent calmness of the frenzied narrators of his stories.

  • • •

  In the flush of success he left his post as “para-graphist” on the Evening Mirror and joined the rival Broadway Journal, where he began to reprint some of his earlier published tales and poems. He also continued a round of literary hostilities, initiated in the Evening Mirror, in which he attacked the poetry and reputation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow was at this time one of the senior poetic figures in America, but his status was only likely to excite Poe's wrath. Poe reviewed an anthology edited by Longfellow, The Waif, and accused the older poet of excluding any poets deemed to rival Longfellow himself; he also accused him of gross and obvious plagiarism. He described him as a “determined imitator and a dexterous adapter of the ideas of other people,” and denounced him for plagiarism of Tennyson that was “too pa
lpable to be mistaken … [and] which belongs to the most barbarous class of literary robbery.”

  It was in part a means of providing “copy” for his new journal. But it was also a ploy to provoke public attention; he even went so far as to compose an imaginary riposte to his own charges, under the name of “Outis,” or “Nobody,” simply to continue the public debate for a little longer. He succeeded in that, at least, and the onesided battle between Poe and Longfellow rendered it one of the most famous literary feuds in American literary history. Poe's writing on the subject amounted to one hundred pages. He compounded the offence by lecturing at the New York Society Library on “Poets and Poetry of America.” This had been the title he had given to his lecture a year before, but on this occasion he broadened his assault by including Longfellow and in particular his “fatal alacrity at imitation.” Longfellow never deigned to reply to his accuser's charges in public, but he commented later that Poe's attacks upon him had been provoked by “the irritation of a sensitive nature chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong.” In that diagnosis he was probably correct.

  Poe was not only executioner in chief on the Broadway Journal. He was also its theatrical critic. He was not a benign one, and one theatrical manager withdrew Poe's name from the free list of critics after a particularly vicious review of his company's Antigone.

  The office boy, Alexander Crane, remembered that Poe was “a quiet man about the office, but was uniformly kind and courteous to everyone, and, with congenial company, he would grow cheerful and even playful.” He arrived at nine each morning, and worked “steadily and methodically” until three or four in the afternoon. On one occasion Crane fainted in the heat, and revived to discover Poe “bending over me bathing my wrists and temples in cold water.” So he was considerate as well as courteous.

  • • •

  But the move from the relative seclusion of the farmhouse, and the excitement derived from the reception of “The Raven,” once more propelled him towards drink. Alexander Crane recalled that, the morning after one of his lectures had been cancelled as a result of bad weather, he came into the office “leaning on the arm of a friend, intoxicated with wine.” He had obviously been drinking all night. A New York magazine presented a fictitious list of forthcoming books, with one entitled “A treatise on Aqua Pura,’ its uses and abuses, by Edgar A Poe.” So his drinking habits were well known.

  He had been asked to prepare a poem for recitation at a society of New York University, but found that he could not perform the task. He became worried about this failure and, according to Thomas Dunn English, “as he always does when troubled—drank until intoxicated; and remained in a state of intoxication during the week.” The records of his drunken “sprees,” as he used to call them, suggest that New York was not the proper place for him. He informed one acquaintance that he was about to recite “The Raven” to Queen Victoria and the royal family. He told him, also, that other writers were conspiring against him. So the over-indulgence in alcohol could lead him perilously close to madness.

  A colleague, Thomas Holley Chivers, walking down Nassau Street, recognised him “tottering from side to side, as drunk as an Indian.” When Poe saw Chivers he cried out, “By God! Here is my friend now! Where are you going? Come, you must go home with me.” He became generally over-excited and, seeing a rival editor across the street a few minutes later, was barely restrained by Chivers from attacking him. Chivers then escorted him home. When Virginia saw them from an upstairs window, she retreated into her room and locked the door. Maria Clemm greeted her errant son-in-law, according to Chivers, with a refrain of “Oh! Eddy! Eddy! Eddy! Come here, my dear boy. Let me put you to bed.” She also apparently confided to Chivers, “I do believe that the poor boy is deranged!” It is clear enough that Virginia, wasting from day to day, could not bear to see her husband in this condition. She may even have believed that Poe's despair at her illness helped to provoke his heavy drinking. She may just have been too frail to cope with her husband's frantic and tiresome behaviour. According to Chivers, Maria Clemm lamented the illness of her daughter, with the claim that “the Doctors can do her no good. But if they could, seeing this continually in poor Eddy, would kill her … would to God that she had died before she had ever seen him.” The memory of Maria Clemm's words may not be altogether accurate, but she was clearly blaming Poe in part for Virginia's suffering. Another colleague wrote in a diary entry at this time, “There is Poe with coolness, immaculate personal cleanliness, sensitiveness, the gentleman, continually putting himself on a level with the lowest blackguard through a combination of moral, mental and physical drunkenness.”

  Poe knew as much himself, and in the summer of 1845 Graham's Magazine published his “The Imp of the Perverse.” It was a narrative of rueful contemplation in which the narrator muses upon the human capacity to act in a contrary manner “for the reason that we should not.” To do that which is forbidden—to do that which goes against all our instincts of self-love and self-preservation—therein lies the power of the imp. Never to stay long in any employment; to be drawn towards young women who were dying; to quarrel continually with friends; to drink excessively, even when told that the indulgence would kill him. Therein dwells the imp.

  • • •

  James Russell Lowell, a young poet of considerable gifts, visited the Poe household during this spring and summer of 1845. Some months before, Lowell had written a long and favourable criticism of Poe's work for Graham's Magazine, in which he gave the opinion that “we know of none who has displayed more varied and more striking abilities.” It was the first long article about Poe that had not been deliberately engineered by Poe himself. There had been a correspondence between the two writers, and Lowell already considered Poe to be a “dear friend.” But their encounter was not altogether a success. Poe was “a little tipsy, as if he were recovering from a fit of drunkenness.” He seemed to Lowell to be in an unhappy and sarcastic mood. His manner was “rather formal, even pompous.” He was not at his best. Lowell noticed, too, that Poe's ailing wife had an “anxious expression.” (Five years later Maria Clemm wrote to apologise to Lowell, informing him that “the day you saw him in New York he was not himself.”) But then Poe attacked Lowell's poetry in print, and even accused him of plagiarising material from Wordsworth. Lowell retaliated by suggesting that Poe was bereft of “that element of manhood which, for want of a better name, we call character.” Poe was weak, in other words.

  But what was his character, in the most general sense? He has alternately been described as ambitious and unworldly, jealous and restrained, childlike and theatrical, fearful and vicious, self-confident and wayward, defiant and self-pitying. He was all of these, and more. One acquaintance described him as “unstable as water,” and another as a “characterless character.” To one who became his enemy he was “the merest shell of a man.”

  Like the salamander he could only live in fire. But the fire was often started by himself. He stumbled from one passionate outburst to the next. He hardly seemed to know himself at all, but relied upon the power of impassioned words to create his identity. He would sometimes tear at himself, heaping misery upon himself, estranging others even while realising that it was wrong to do so. He moved from disaster to calamity and back again. His entire life was a series of mistakes and setbacks, of disappointed hopes and thwarted ambitions. He proceeded as if he were the only one in the world—hence the spitefulness of his criticism. He drew attention to his solitary state in defiance and celebration, even as he lamented it in his letters. Thus, at the centre of his work, was anger against the world. He had a heart always about to break.

  There was a curious incident in the summer of 1845 that justified the bad opinions that some held of him. A young poet, R.H. Stoddard, had submitted a poem for the Broadway Journal. Having received no reply, he sought out Poe at his lodgings. Poe then assured him that the poem would appear in the next number of the periodical, but it did not. Instead there was a notice: “To the author of the line
s on the ‘Grecian Flute.’ We fear that we have mislaid the poem.” Then, in the following month, another “notice” appeared, to Stoddard's astonishment, remarking that “we doubt the originality of the ‘Grecian Flute,’ for the reason that it is too good at some points to be so bad at others.” This is the authentic Poe tone. In dismay Stoddard visited the offices of the Journal, to encounter Poe “irascible, surly and in his cups.” Poe stared up “wildly” at the unfortunate young poet, and then accused him of plagiarism. “You never wrote the Ode to which I lately referred.” He abused Stoddard and, in the young man's words, threatened him “with condign personal chastisement”—that is, a thrashing—and ordered him to leave the office.

  In this period Poe was professing himself once more to be depressed and “dreadfully unwell, and fear that I shall be very seriously ill.” The household had been regularly moving lodgings—from Greenwich Street to East Broadway and from East Broadway to Amity Street near Washington Square. But now Poe resolved to return to the countryside, in order to regain his health and his composure, and as a result wished to give up his post on the Broadway Journal. He was trying to sell his “interest” in the newspaper. His partner, Charles Frederick Briggs, was not unhappy to see him leave. Poe's drinking had made him unreliable. “I shall haul down Poe's name,” he wrote. “He has lately got into his old habits and I fear will injure himself irretrievably.” But then Poe changed his mind. He had told Thomas Dunn English that the “comparative failure” of the Journal was a consequence of “the fact that he had it not all in his own hands.” He is reported to have said, “Give me the entire control, and it will be the great literary journal of the future.” So he had transferred his hopes for an ideal literary magazine to the Broadway Journalitself.