Poe Page 8

  After Poe's death, Graham wrote a tribute to him in which he described him as “punctual and unwearied in his industry—and the soul of honor, in all his transactions … He kept his accounts, small as they were, with the accuracy of a banker.” He also extolled him as a “polished gentleman” and a “devoted husband,” even in “his high-hearted struggle with adverse fate.” Graham left a small detail that helps to explain the nature of the Poe household: “What he received from me in regular monthly instalments, went di-rectly into the hands of his mother-in-law …”

  Poe believed now that he had written enough new tales, in Graham's Magazine and elsewhere, to offer an expanded volume of them to Lea and Blanchard. He wished it to be called Phantasy Pieces and would include the tales already published by that firm under the title of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, as well as eight more recently written tales. Lea and Blanchard refused the offer, on the grounds that they still had unsold stock of the previous publication.

  Among the rejected tales was “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which in later years was hailed as the harbinger of the modern detective story. It was fashioned around the character of C. Auguste Dupin, the French detective who resolves the most grotesque or ambiguous crimes with the keen logic of calculation. Dupin might be a version of his author. Poe prided himself on his intimacy with the secrets of cryptography, and successfully resolved the most apparently insoluble or enigmatic codes. He even started a series of papers in Graham's Magazine in which he challenged all exponents of “secret messages.” He loved the idea of unravelling secret writings, of saying the un-sayable. Could the idea of the secret also be related to the mystery of his father's disappearance and of his mother's supposed disgrace? He boasted to a friend that “nothing intelligible can be written which, with time, I cannot decipher.” And so it proved.

  He said that “the highest order of the imaginative intellect is always pre-eminently mathematical” and that genius itself consisted of “method.” But the assumption of analysis and calculation was in part artificial: he confessed that the power of his studies lay in their “air of method.”

  Poe evinced another form of calculation, too. He was often very sly, or subtle, in his dealing with other people. He was a great calculator in human relationships, ever watchful of himself and of others. He strove after certain effects with the brilliant ease of a born manipulator. In one letter he confessed that “the peevishness was all ‘put on’ as a part of my argument—of my plan:—so was the ‘indignation’ with which I wound up.” Yet there is something almost childlike about this trait in his character. He suffered agonies after any drinking bout, in part because he hated the sensation of losing all sense of calculation.

  Many of his most successful stories are, therefore, “tales of ratiocination.” The word “detective” was not coined until 1843. Dupin is, perhaps, the first. As such he is the forerunner of such diverse “ratiocinators” as Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown. As Arthur Conan Doyle put it, Poe “was father of the detective tale, and covered its limits so completely I fail to see how his followers can find ground to call their own.” Dupin is a bachelor, with an amanuensis who records the details of his investigation; he has only a provisional contact with the police, who come to solicit his help with the crimes they cannot solve. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” these concern the gruesome murders of a mother and young daughter. But Dupin subjects these events to impersonal and objective analysis. He is the Newton of the criminal world. Through a process of deduction and elimination Dupin comes to the conclusion that the perpetrator was not a human being at all. So he sets a trap. Poe described the story as “something in a new key.”

  One of the other stories of this period, “Eleanora,” has a curious resonance in Poe's life. The narrator, Pyrros, has married his fifteen-year-old cousin. “We lived all alone, knowing nothing of the world without the valley—I, and my cousin, and her mother.” This is an image of Poe's own existence, of course, but in his imagination events take a fatal turn. The young bride dies of consumption. Before her death she wrings a promise from Pyrros that he will never love another woman. But, in that, he proves false to her. The rest of the story is not important, with its maladroit “happy ending,” but there was another and more immediate parallel. A few months after this story was composed, Virginia herself succumbed to the first stages of consumption.

  The Man

  Who Never Smiled

  In the middle of January 1842, Virginia Poe had been singing at the piano, one of her favourite pastimes, when she stopped suddenly; she began coughing up blood. Poe considered it to be the rupture of a blood vessel, but the effusion is more likely to have been from her weakened lungs.

  After the irruption she required the utmost attention, but circumstances were far from ideal for the care of an invalid. One neighbour reported that she was obliged to lie in a narrow bed, in a tiny bedroom with a ceiling so low that her head almost touched it; here she suffered, hardly able to breathe. But no one dared to mention the cramped surroundings to Poe, who had become “oversensitive and irritable;” “quick as steel and flint” said one who knew him in those days. Graham recalled that he would hover about his wife's bed, alert to every tremor and cough with “a shudder, a heart-chill that was visible.” And he would not allow a word about the danger of her dying—“the mention of it drove him wild.”

  Yet he still wrote about death endlessly. In “Life in Death,” a painter wishes to portray his young bride; but, in the turret room which is his studio, she pines and sickens to death. By painting her, he kills her. In the same year Poe wrote “The Masque of the Red Death,” a story of death and pestilence in which “blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood.” He wrote “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” in which a young girl is murdered by person or persons unknown. He wrote “The Tell-Tale Heart,” a story of intolerable intensity told by a maniac; this close and almost suffocating narrative concludes with a cry of terror, “here, here! it is the beating of his hideous heart!” In this same year, too, he wrote “Lenore,” an encomium upon a young woman and “A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.”

  He wandered about the streets for hours, in despair, until Mrs. Clemm became so alarmed by his absence that she would leave the house in search of him. At this time, too, he began once more to drink. In periods of the utmost distress and anxiety, it was for him the natural course. No force on earth could have prevented him. Of Virginia he wrote that “at each accession of the disorder I loved her more dearly and clung to her life with more desperate pertinacity.” But then “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness, I drank—God only knows how often or how much.” He related the drink to the insanity, but it is more likely that the temporary insanity emerged from the drink. He had an unusually nervous constitution, and any assault upon it had dangerous consequences.

  In the spring of 1842 he resigned from Graham's, on the apparent grounds of his “disgust with the namby-pamby character of the Magazine … I allude to the contemptible pictures, fashion-plates, music and love tales.” But the real reasons lie deeper. He had once more become “irregular” in his editorial habits. He and a colleague had quarrelled violently, no doubt when Poe was in drink. Then, after one forced absence of some days, he returned to the office only to find someone else occupying his chair. He had no choice but to leave. He would not willingly have forfeited an annual income of eight hundred dollars.

  He told one acquaintance in a letter that in any case “the state of my mind” had forced him to abandon “all mental exertion.” His wife's illness, his own ill health and poverty “have nearly driven me to distraction. My only hope of relief is the ‘Bankrupt Act’… but the struggle to keep up has, at length, entirely ruined me.” In the last sentences of this letter he wrote that “Mrs. Poe is again dangerously ill with haemorrhage from the lungs. It is folly to hope.” It seemed that the world was closing in around h
im; nothing but darkness lay ahead of him. It was in this period that he wrote “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Yet, against all the odds, he did hope. He hoped to obtain a clerkship in the Customs House at Philadelphia, again through the agency of Thomas. He hoped to revive the plans for his own journal, the Penn Magazine.

  There was one curious incident, however, in the early summer of 1842 that throws a different light upon his high expectations. Poe had decided to travel to New York in order to find journalistic work, and to contact publishers likely to look favourably upon a new collection of his stories. But he drank himself into a state of inanition. He decided, in that condition, to call upon the old friend or “sweetheart” he had known in Baltimore eleven years before; Mary Devereaux, or “Baltimore Mary” as he called her in memory of happier times, had now become Mrs. Jennings. He had forgotten where she lived in Jersey City, and spent many hours crossing and recrossing the Hudson River on the ferry, accosting strangers and asking for her address. Eventually, by some miracle, he obtained it. He was fleeing from a sick wife to a young woman, one to whom he may once have been unofficially engaged. He was seeking some comfort, some recompense, in the memory of an earlier affection.

  His unexpected arrival caused something of a commotion, and Mary recalled that “we saw he was on one of his sprees, and he had been away from home for several days.” He was, in other words, disoriented and dirty and dishevelled. He reproached his hostess for her marriage, saying that in truth she loved him only. This is an odd remark, from a man whose own wife was fatally ill. He asked Mary to sing and play the piano, meanwhile becoming “excited in conversation.” Poe then minced up some radishes with such fury that pieces of them flew about the room. He drank a cup of tea, and departed.

  Several days later Maria Clemm arrived at the same house, desperately looking for “Eddie dear.” According to Mary, “a search was made, and he was finally found in the woods on the outskirts of Jersey City, wandering about like a crazy man.” The story may have been elaborated, but the gist seems authentic enough. No one could have made up the detail about the radishes.

  • • •

  He visited New York on another occasion, when again he became incapacitated by drink. He wrote an apologetic letter to a friend there, asking him to be “kind enough to put the best possible interpretation upon my behaviour while in N-York? You must have conceived a queer idea of me—but the simple truth is that Wallace [a poet] would insist upon the juleps, and I knew not what I was either doing or saying.” It was his habit to blame others for the extent of his drinking. It was, perhaps, the only way he could make sense of it.

  By the following year the news of his drinking had become part of the gossip of Philadelphia. An acquaintance of his from Baltimore days, Lambert Wilmer, told a mutual friend that “he is going headlong to destruction, moral, physical and intellectual.” Poe was in such straitened circumstances that he was offering his latest tale, “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” at a low price to both the Boston Notion and the Baltimore Saturday Visiter. The loss of any regular income had consigned the Poe household to a state of real distress. They moved to a smaller house on the outskirts of Philadelphia, where Frederick Thomas visited them in the autumn of 1842. He noticed that “everything about the place wore an air of pecuniary want” and that “there was delay and evident difficulty in procuring the meal.” Maria Clemm and Virginia expressed the wish to Thomas that “Eddie” might obtain some kind of steady work, but “I was not long in observing with deep regret that he had fallen again into habits of intemperance.” They made an arrangement to meet the following day, but Poe did not keep the appointment; he wrote later to say that he had fallen ill. It was his usual excuse.

  He was still actively pursuing the position of clerk in the Customs House at Philadelphia. He believed the post to be assured but, as so often in his life, his hopes were raised “only to be dashed to the ground.” That was the phrase he used in a letter to Thomas, in which he detailed the insolence and hauteur of the petty official in whom he had placed his trust. It was always his fate to be thwarted. It cannot be said, however, that he had any interest in any form of government administration. He was wholly out of sympathy with American politics and questioned once “Is it or is it not a fact that the air of a Democracy agrees better with mere Talent than with Genius?” He was a proponent of slavery, and a believer in what he called “caste.” He had no faith in progress, or in democracy, and so was in a real sense divorced from the life of America—or at least of that spirit embodied by the Northern states.

  Yet he had been hoping for the appointment, too, as a means of continuing his scheme for a literary journal under his direction. He had been confidently planning for the publication of the first number at the beginning of 1843; but in this, as in so many of the affairs of his life, he was disappointed. Even as he was dogged with ill luck, however, someone else turned up to rescue him. He became acquainted with the editor of the Philadelphia Saturday Museum, Thomas C. Clarke, who was the perfect partner in the enterprise. Poe had decided to rename the prospective journal, changing it from the Penn to the Stylus. Clarke had agreed to finance the venture, while allowing Poe a half-interest in it. At last Poe had achieved “the great object—a partner possessing ample capital, and, at the same time, so little self-esteem, as to allow me entire control of the editorial conduct.” Was it too good to be true? Armed with a signed agreement, Poe distributed a new prospectus on the merits of a magazine that would be established upon “the purest rules of Art” and would “far surpass all American journals of its kind.” He wished it to be “the great literary journal of the future,” as he told one acquaintance. He also embarked upon a course of self-advertisement by arranging for a sketch of his life to be printed in the Saturday Museum itself. It was little more than a “puff,” but he believed that it would materially assist the fortunes of the Stylus. He provided the material himself, of course, but it did not err on the side of veracity. It was revealed that Poe had travelled to Greece and to Russia, and that he had somehow returned from Europe on the night of Frances Allan's funeral. He was described as “somewhat slender, about five feet, eight inches in height, and well proportioned; his complexion is rather fair, his eyes are grey and restless, exhibiting a marked nervousness; while the mouth indicates great decision of character …”

  The Spirit of the Times, another Philadelphian journal, noticed the biographical sketch and applauded Poe as one “of the most powerful, chaste and erudite writers of the day.” The Museum in turn announced that Poe was to become its associate editor and that his fame “shall be placed beyond the reach of conjecture.” It was a joint enterprise in log-rolling that no doubt appealed to Poe's vanity. In fact he never did join the staff of the Museum. It was another of the convenient fictions by which he chose to live.

  His hopes for the Stylus, however, sent him to Washington in search of subscribers. He was also planning to renew his endless quest for a clerkship, and even entertained a fantasy of meeting President Tyler himself in order to plead for his cause. It was not, however, an auspicious journey. Almost as soon as he had taken a room at Fuller's City Hotel, he began to drink. On the first evening, according to an acquaintance, he was “over-persuaded to take some Port wine” and became “somewhat excited.” Two days later he met a fellow journalist on the street who reported him to be “seedy in appearance and woebegone.” He begged fifty cents, complaining that “he had not had a mouthful of food since the day previous.” On the following day Poe himself wrote to his new partner, Thomas Clarke, with the news that “I believe that I am making a sensation which will tend to the benefit of the Magazine.”

  This was sheer self-delusion on his part, although he was perhaps creating a “sensation” in quite a different sense. He was once more drinking to excess. The editor of the Washington Index, Jesse Dow, had known Poe four years before. They had worked together on Burton's magazine in Philadelphia. Now he had the unenviable job of escorting Poe through the city. Dow tried to escape t
he responsibility by writing a solemn letter to Clarke, telling him that “I think it advisable for you to come on and see him safely back to his home.” Dow added that “Mrs. Poe is in a bad state of health, and I charge you, as you have a soul to be saved, to say not one word to her about him until he arrives with you.” Three days later Poe boarded the train from Washington to Philadelphia, where he found Maria Clemm anxiously waiting for him at the station. That evening he visited Clarke, no doubt in order to dispel any unfortunate impressions Clarke might have derived from Dow's letter. “He received me, therefore, very cordially & made light of the matter,” he wrote to Thomas and Dow jointly. “I told him what had been agreed upon—that I was a little sick & that Dow, knowing I had been, in times past, given to spreeing upon an extensive scale, had become unduly alarmed etcetera …” So he had agreed upon a story with his intimates to cover his excesses.

  But there is no doubt that he was once again mortified by his behaviour under the influence of drink. To Dow he wrote “thank you a thousand times for your kindness & great forbearance, & don't say a word about the cloak turned inside out, or other peccadilloes of that nature. Also, express to your wife my deep regret for the vexation I must have occasioned her.” Then he asked Thomas to send his compliments “to the Don, whose mustachios I do admire after all… express my regret to Mr. Fuller for making such a fool of myself in his house …” So he had paraded through the streets wearing his cloak inside out, and had made fun of a Spaniard's moustache. He had also behaved badly in someone's house. These are not hanging offences, and may have been a source of amusement to those around him. But he had a deep sense of pride, as well as an instinctive sense of formality and control. When these were abrogated and injured, he fell into sickness and grief. His illnesses were caused not by physical overindulgence but by guilty self-laceration.