The Portable Edgar Allan Poe Read online

  Poe reached Richmond too late to attend Mrs. Allan’s burial, but he achieved a temporary truce with Allan, who replenished Poe’s wardrobe and on his behalf contacted several men of political influence. After hiring a replacement and securing a military release on April 15, Poe carried letters from Allan to Washington and then traveled on to Baltimore, there conferring with former Richmond acquaintance William Wirt, the U.S. attorney general, who assessed his poetry and offered cautionary advice. Undaunted, Poe tracked down publishers and editors, submitting his poems to periodicals and negotiating publication of a new volume of verse. He pursued his appointment to West Point while living in cheap hotels or lodging with impoverished relatives. In late 1829, a Baltimore publisher issued Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, attributed to “Edgar A. Poe.” With a touch of drama Poe declared himself “irrecoverably a poet,” savoring a favorable review from the irascible New England critic John Neal.

  By 1830 Poe had secured a place in the entering class at West Point. Initially he flourished at the academy; his scholastic efforts earned commendations in mathematics and French, and he played occasional pranks while regaling classmates with clandestine “doggerel” about cadet life. But again he lacked adequate funds to meet living expenses. When Allan journeyed to New York City in October to remarry, he departed without contacting his foster son, and then refused further communication with him, the cadet grasped that he had been permanently disowned. Without an allowance or inheritance, Poe knew that he could never properly sustain himself as an officer, and resentment of Allan provoked his subsequent drinking and neglect of duty. He later claimed that he had no love of “dissipation” but had been victimized by Allan’s “parsimony.” After several weeks of missed roll calls, parades, and inspections, Poe faced a court-martial and was dismissed from the academy on February 18, 1831. But appreciative of Poe’s literary talents, the cadets subsidized the New York publication of Poems by Edgar A. Poe, which included “To Helen” and “Israfel.”

  Sick and discouraged, Poe lingered in New York for several weeks, but finding no work he returned to Baltimore, residing with his grandmother, his aunt Maria Clemm, and her daughter Virginia. Poe also rejoined his older brother, Henry, a poet and former sailor then in the last stages of tuberculosis. Surrounded by illness and poverty, Poe replied to an announcement in a Philadelphia newspaper of a hundred-dollar premium for the “best American tale” by composing that summer and fall a handful of clever narratives set in the Old World, mostly satirical imitations of magazine fiction—a Gothic tale of revenge, a pseudobiblical farce, a spoof about the indignities of dying, and two separate fantasies about men bargaining with the devil for their souls. Poe reinvented himself as a magazinist under depressing circumstances: His brother died in August, and soon thereafter a cholera epidemic gripped Baltimore. That fall poor health and abject poverty impelled Poe’s penitent appeal to John Allan in which he acknowledged his “flagrant ingratitude”—an apology that Allan, then celebrating the birth of a legitimate male heir, rewarded with monetary assistance.

  The new year brought some encouragement: Although Poe did not win the coveted literary prize, the Saturday Courier in January 1832 published his first prose tale, “Metzengerstein,” and four other stories subsequently appeared in print, perhaps bringing him a few dollars. In the same playful, parodic vein, Poe added several new tales to his portfolio and in August showed them to Lambert Wilmer, a Baltimore writer and editor. Still unable to find regular employment, though, Poe apparently tried his hand as a school-teacher, an editorial assistant, and a manual laborer at a brick kiln. He also began tutoring his young cousin, Virginia, a girl of sweetly sentimental temperament to whom he became emotionally attached. By May 1833 his accumulating cache of stories—now conceived as “Tales of the Arabesque” told by members of a literary club—numbered eleven, and in June, when the Baltimore Saturday Visiter announced prizes of fifty dollars in both fiction and poetry, Poe submitted six new pieces from a collection he rechristened “Tales of the Folio Club.” The selection committee found itself “wholly unprepared” for their wild novelty and selected “MS. Found in a Bottle” for the prize in fiction. Through this competition Poe met two influential men of letters, J. H. B. Latrobe and John Pendleton Kennedy, and in November, Kennedy himself delivered Poe’s manuscript collection to publisher Henry C. Carey in Philadelphia. One of Poe’s best “Folio Club” tales, a piece later titled “The Assignation,” soon appeared in Godey’s Lady’s Book, the first large-circulation periodical to feature his work.

  A lawyer and novelist, Kennedy also became a mentor: He hired Poe to do odd jobs, gave professional advice, furnished new clothes, and provided occasional meals. He encouraged the younger writer to send his work to Thomas W. White, a Richmond editor who had just launched the Southern Literary Messenger. Poe needed a fresh start: John Allan’s death in March 1834 had ended any possibility of reconciliation, and his will contained no mention of his impoverished former ward. Moreover, despite Kennedy’s intervention, Carey seemed politely reluctant to publish the “Folio Club” tales. How Poe sustained himself during this period remains unclear; by 1835 his appearance was so “humiliating” that he declined a dinner invitation from Kennedy. But an important literary connection was already in the making: Poe’s shocking new tale, “Berenice,” had appeared in the March issue of the Messenger. Though chastened by White about the story’s grisly finale, Poe supplied another mystical tale, “Morella,” for the April issue, along with several critical notices. By May he was a regular contributor, and by June he was advising White about promotional strategies. Two months later he ventured to Richmond, ostensibly to pursue a teaching position but actually to negotiate employment with White. Arriving in Richmond—and curiously affected by his separation from Mrs. Clemm and Virginia—Poe became overwhelmed by a paralyzing melancholy and sought respite in drink. The dubious White judged Poe “rather dissipated” upon arrival and chose to hire him “not as Editor” but as an untitled assistant.

  With a new job and an annual salary of $520, Poe nevertheless suffered from depression, and in late August contemplated suicide. Within a month he bolted from the Messenger office, returning to Baltimore perhaps to wed his cousin in secret and certainly to beg her and Mrs. Clemm to join him in Richmond. He then asked White for reinstatement, which the editor reluctantly granted. With his aunt and cousin installed in Richmond, Poe threw himself into the task of making the Messenger a leading national periodical. He did so less by featuring his own tales and poems—which in 1836 consisted mostly of reprinted pieces—than by begging contributions from respected authors, eliciting favorable notices of the Messenger in other publications, and composing pungent critical notices. He gradually expanded the journal’s circulation—though not so greatly as he later claimed. Defiantly he attacked the “misapplied patriotism” of nationalistic critics “puffing” inferior books by American authors. He also performed journalistic stunts, concocting an exposé about a chess-playing automaton as well as a pseudoscientific exercise in handwriting analysis. In May, perhaps to quash local rumors, he publicly married his cousin (then not quite fourteen) before a handful of witnesses that included his employer. Although White recognized his assistant’s brilliance, he nevertheless refused to name him the editor, struggled to restrain Poe’s literary attacks, and deplored his recurrent insobriety.

  Meanwhile, Poe renewed his efforts to publish his “Folio Club” tales, approaching Harper & Brothers in New York through James Kirke Paulding; when the Harpers declined the volume, advising Poe to write a novel instead, he offered the collection—without avail—to Philadelphia and London publishers. But he also began an American novel about a Nantucket youth who revolts against his family by going to sea in quest of romantic adventures. The opening chapters of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym appeared in the Messenger in early 1837, just as White, beset by financial woes and exasperated by Poe’s instability, dismissed his mercurial assistant.

  An outcast once more, P
oe moved to New York just as an economic panic portended a long national depression. For more than a year he floundered in Manhattan without employment, writing little and publishing less, toiling mainly on the novel that Harper & Brothers agreed to print but postponed because the book market had collapsed. Desperate for work, Poe relocated to Philadelphia in early 1838, appealing unsuccessfully to Paulding (then secretary of the navy) for a clerkship. When The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym finally appeared that summer, it probably brought scant remuneration, and reviews were mixed. Poe called it “a silly book” and concluded that the only narratives worth writing were those readable at one sitting. Soon after the novel appeared, Poe earned ten dollars for his most brilliant tale to date, “Ligeia,” composed for the Baltimore American Museum. That journal subsequently carried the twin parody now known as “How to Write a Blackwood Article” and “A Predicament,” in which a mordant Poe satirized literary sensationalism and the palpable hazards of authorship.

  Desperation alone explains Poe’s willingness in 1839 to allow his name to be used in connection with A Conchologist’s First Book, a plagiarized textbook on seashells. That spring he composed for The Gift another extraordinary tale, “William Wilson,” about a remorseless cardsharp whose adversary proves at last to be his own conscience. About then Poe also sought work with William E. Burton, a Philadelphia actor and theater manager who had just purchased a journal. The crassly ambitious Burton welcomed Poe’s collaboration in publishing Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and paid him ten dollars per week. Although Burton suppressed a few stinging reviews, Poe again indulged in the occasional “using up” of mediocre writers, a tactic that attracted publicity. But he also contributed original tales, including his satire of an American Indian fighter, “The Man That Was Used Up,” and his incomparable “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Praised by critics and fellow writers (such as Washington Irving), the latter tale confirmed Poe’s emerging importance as a writer of fiction, and perhaps convinced Lea and Blanchard of Philadelphia to publish a two-volume edition in 1840 called Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. A reviewer in Alexander’s Weekly Messenger declared that Poe had “placed himself in the foremost rank of American writers” with his Tales. Poe reciprocated by contributing short articles to the Philadelphia newspaper and by promising, as an intellectual exhibition, to solve any cryptograms sent to him. He simultaneously prepared for Burton’s a serialized (and heavily plagiarized) narrative about Western exploration called The Journal of Julius Rodman. As a writer enamored of “the foreign subject” Poe must have resented Burton’s announcement of a $1000 literary contest that included $250 for five tales illustrating different eras in American history or portraying U.S. regional differences. His contempt for Burton prompted him to tell a friend: “As soon as Fate allows I will have a magazine of my own—and will endeavor to kick up a dust.”

  That idea became increasingly irresistible. In 1840, as Rodman’s apocryphal journal was unfolding in monthly installments and as Poe unscrambled cryptograms for Alexander’s, he also devised a plan to start his own periodical. In Burton’s he decided to play the literary sleuth by accusing Harvard professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarizing from Tennyson. Poe also published a fine new poem of his own, “Sonnet—To Silence,” as well as “Peter Pendulum, the Business Man,” a biting satire perhaps aimed obliquely at Burton but more obviously targeting American commercial greed. In March, Burton lamely reneged on the announced premiums for original works, and two months later, intent on building a new theater, he prepared to sell his journal. Poe seized the moment to print a prospectus for his own periodical, to be called the Penn Magazine, but when Burton saw the circular, he accused Poe of disloyalty, fired him, and demanded repayment of money already advanced. The dismissal provoked a blazing reply in which Poe warned Burton, “If by accident you have taken it into your head that I am to be insulted with impunity I can only assume that you are an ass.”

  Out of work, Poe enlisted contributors and subscribers for his proposed journal, which he envisioned as having a “lasting effect upon the growing literature of the country.” He found a new ally in Frederick W. Thomas, a Cincinnati novelist and Whig partisan who campaigned in Philadelphia for presidential candidate William Henry Harrison. Another sympathetic figure was George Graham, who edited the Saturday Evening Post, owned The Casket, and in October acquired Burton’s. Graham generously lauded Poe’s plans for the Penn, and when illness forced Poe to postpone the project, Graham solicited his work for his amalgamated monthly, Graham’s Magazine. In the first issue, Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” signaled the beginning of an important connection with Graham, for when a bank crisis in early 1841 forced another delay in the Penn, Poe gratefully assumed responsibility for book reviews in Graham’s at an annual salary of eight hundred dollars. But the monthly also provided a venue for new tales: developing the city mysteries premise of “The Man of the Crowd,” he invented the modern detective story in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in April, and the following month published “A Descent into the Maelström.” Poe also contributed a series on cryptography, “A Few Words on Secret Writing,” that grew from his writing for Alexander’s.

  Convincing Graham that they could together create a prestigious, high-quality monthly featuring American writers exclusively, Poe began in June 1841 to solicit contributions from notable authors—Irving, Kennedy, the poet Fitz-Greene Halleck, and even the much abused Longfellow. But privately he admitted to Thomas his growing irritation with Graham, and for the next two years pursued a clerkship in the administration of President John Tyler, successor to Harrison (who died soon after his inauguration). Poe was disillusioned by the absence of an international copyright law to protect the work of American authors and to prevent U.S. publishers from selling “pirated” English works. He was also appalled by the “namby-pamby” character of Graham’s, which added fashion plates and—at the end of 1841—two female editors to a staff that already included Charles Peterson. Poe nevertheless claimed responsibility for the journal’s commercial success and continued to write reviews, read proofs, and contribute tales (such as “Never Bet the Devil Your Head”) as well as a new series on handwriting called “Autography.” He also wrote an “Exordium to Critical Notices” questioning the campaign for “national literature” while warning of America’s “degrading imitation” of British culture. But in January 1842, a devastating event destroyed Poe’s tranquil home life: His young wife (then only nineteen) suffered a massive pulmonary hemorrhage while singing at the piano. “Dangerously ill” for weeks, she seemed to recover, yet relapses confirmed that Virginia, like Poe’s mother, had been stricken with consumption.

  Vacillating between denial and anger, Poe sought forgetfulness in drink; sometimes absent from work, he quarreled with Graham about money. He still pursued the dream of a magazine of his own, urging Thomas to propose to President Tyler a journal edited by Poe that might “play an important part in the politics of the day.” When not overwrought, he carried out assignments for Graham’s, interviewing Charles Dickens in Philadelphia in March and producing for the May issue the famous review of Hawthorne that enunciated Poe’s theory of the tale based on unity of effect. He also published two stories betraying domestic anxieties: “The Oval Portrait,” which depicts an artist too busy to notice that his wife is dying, and “The Masque of the Red Death,” which represents fatal contagion as an unexpected intruder.

  But another interloper, a fifth editorial associate added by Graham—Reverend Rufus W. Griswold—apparently precipitated Poe’s departure from the magazine staff. Griswold had included Poe’s work in his Poets and Poetry of America, the first comprehensive anthology of its kind, and Poe and Griswold expressed mutual cordiality but privately despised each other. At Griswold’s hiring, Poe abruptly resigned, claiming that the magazine’s feminized content—“the contemptible pictures, fashion-plates, music and love tales”—had motivated his departure, but he plainly refused to work with Griswold and saw his
arrival as a threat to his own editorial influence.

  Without steady income, Poe resumed old quests and cultivated new connections. Thomas spoke of an impending appointment at the Philadelphia Custom House, but Poe nevertheless visited New York seeking an editorial position—though inebriation undermined his efforts there. To Georgia planter and poet Thomas Holley Chivers, he proposed a lucrative partnership, still hoping to launch the Penn Magazine. Poe’s focus on the journal intensified in November, when hopes for a government position faded. Hearing that James Russell Lowell was founding a Boston magazine, Poe offered to become a contributor, forwarding a new poem, “Lenore,” and an essay, “Notes Upon English Verse.” Lowell also published “The Tell-Tale Heart” in his short-lived Pioneer, and upon its demise Poe announced to Lowell his own plan to create “the best journal in America.” He was soon contracting with a Philadelphia publisher of “ample capital” named Thomas Clarke to produce a high-quality magazine now titled The Stylus. In response to the “great question of International Copy-Right,” it would feature American writers exclusively, resisting “the dictation of Foreign Reviews.” Poe seemed once more on the verge of realizing his great dream, but again he destroyed his prospects for success.

  An administrative change at the Custom House persuaded Poe that he could secure a government job by appealing directly to the president in Washington. He had expected Thomas to arrange the necessary interview with Tyler, but Thomas was ill, and upon reaching Washington, Poe began drinking heavily. His boorish behavior offended his friends, the president’s son, and a visiting Philadelphia writer named Thomas Dunn English. In desperation, Poe’s ally Jesse Dow implored Clarke, a temperance man, to rescue Poe from humiliation. Poe returned to Philadelphia on his own steam, however, making an immediate, conciliatory visit to the publisher. But Clarke had seen enough and soon retracted his offer to publish The Stylus. In the wake of this misadventure, English included a derisive portrait of Poe in his temperance novel, The Doom of the Drinker, a work commissioned by Clarke.