Edgar Allan Poe (15 page)

Poe used a painting as a motif in another tourist tale he published in
Graham’s
, ‘Life in Death’, better known in revised form as ‘The Oval Portrait’. Though Niagara Falls attracted many tourists in Poe’s day, the social elite remained strongly attached to Italy and the Mediterranean. Taking his narrator to the Apennines in ‘The Oval Portrait’, Poe marked him as a tourist. The ‘mass of English’, according to a contemporary, ‘swarmed over the Continent, century after century, trampling the snows of Alps and Apennines’.
⁹
Such diction portrays tourists as pests. ‘The Oval Portrait’ presents a similar impression. Encountering a vacant chateau, the narrator breaks down the door and stays the night. His behaviour suggests that the picturesque exists for the tourist’s consumption.

Alfred Kubin,
The Oval Portrait
, reprinted from
Hans Pfaalls Mondreise und Andere Novellen
.

The narrator retires to a bedroom filled with paintings. Settling himself in bed, he reads for awhile, pausing at one point to adjust the candles. Repositioned, they illuminate a painting of a beautiful woman. He spends time contemplating the portrait but ultimately readjusts the light to cast the painting in shadow. He then picks up a nearby guidebook, which explains that the sitter died just as the artist finished the painting.

Like ‘A Descent into the Maelström’, ‘The Oval Portrait’ is a frame tale without a closing frame. The guidebook text forms the inside narration and ends the tale. This structure has much the same effect in both stories. Traditionally, travellers hired guides, but Baedekers and other guidebooks had recently emerged to suit the growing number of European tourists.
¹⁰
Giving one of his tourist-narrators a personal guide and another a written one, Poe suggested that there was essentially no difference between the two. In both cases, tourists let others interpret for them. Sightseeing prevents them from sight-imagining. The tourist in ‘A Descent into the Maelström’ sacrifices his imagination as he lets the old fisherman tell the story. Instead of contemplating the portrait and letting it take his imagination where it will, the narrator of ‘The Oval Portrait’ deliberately cloaks it in shadow.

In April 1842, the same month ‘Life in Death’ appeared, Poe resigned from
Graham’s
disgusted ‘with the namby-pamby character of the Magazine’: the ‘contemptible pictures, fashion-plates, music and love tales’.
¹¹
Poe also felt unappreciated.
Graham’s
flourished during his tenure with the magazine, but Poe received little remuneration or recognition for the magazine’s burgeoning success. He and Graham parted on amicable terms; Poe would keep contributing to the magazine. In retrospect his decision to quit seems impulsive and ill-considered. He may not have liked the magazine’s general character, but Graham had given him a regular salary, the freedom to voice his critical opinions and encouragement to publish groundbreaking tales.

Poe’s fascination with the tourist may be the most consistent thread running though his tales of the early 1840s, but he experimented with other themes. ‘The Colloquy of Monos and Una’ presents a celestial dialogue between two lovers reunited after death who lament the state of civilization. ‘Never Bet the Devil Your Head’ satirizes the nascent cult of celebrity, as Federico Fellini realized when he updated the tale for the cinema as ‘Toby Dammit’. ‘Eleonora’, a love story inspired by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s
Paul et Virginie
, captured the attention of contemporary readers and was widely reprinted in the
US
and the
UK
. The
Great Western Magazine
, to take an unrecorded London reprint for example, included ‘Eleonora’ in its April 1842 issue.
¹²
And ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ is a
tour de force
, complex in its visual imagery and symbolic resonance.

Graham hired Rufus Griswold to succeed Poe. Having worked a series of minor editorial positions in New England, Griswold established his reputation with
The Poets and Poetry of America
, which brought him to Graham’s attention. Poe had met Griswold in Philadelphia the previous year, when they ‘had a long conversation about literature and literary men’.
¹³
After reading
The Poets and Poetry of America
, Jesse Dow sized up Griswold and found him wanting. Hearing Griswold had replaced Poe, Dow editorialized, ‘We would give more for Edgar A. Poe’s toe nail, than we would for Rueful Grizzle’s soul, unless we wanted a milk-strainer. Them’s our sentiments.’
¹⁴

Out of work Poe had to hustle to survive. He began preparing a multi-volume collected edition of his tales, to be called
Phantasy-Pieces
. His devotion to his
oeuvre
is admirable, but his plans show surprisingly little awareness of the literary marketplace. Book-buyers were no more anxious to buy collections of previously published short stories now than they had been the previous decade. They were even more reluctant to buy expensive multivolume collections.

A manuscript note on the proposed table of contents instructs the printer to preserve the order of the listed stories. Poe obviously devoted much thought to his organization, though an organizational scheme is not readily apparent. The placement of ‘The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion’ as the final story makes sense. An apocalyptic tale depicting events leading to earth’s destruction by a comet, this story would make the end of the world and the end of the book coterminous, transforming the entire collection into an apocalypic vision. Other aspects of Poe’s organization are difficult to discern. Twenty-nine tales separate ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, the first work listed, from its sequel, ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’. Poe obviously did not want to clump together his detective stories. But how did he organize the collection?

His principles of organization anticipate the thought of Sergei Eisenstein. Montage, the primary idea underlying Eisenstein’s cinematic work, occurs when a new concept arises from the juxta-position of two separate texts. In Poe’s table of contents, ‘Lionizing’ directly follows ‘A Descent into the Maelström’. This juxtaposition encourages readers to compare how people react to the ‘natural lions of the land’ and how they react to the lions of society. Implicitly, those who lionize celebrities are no different from the bug-eyed tourists who gawk at Niagara Falls with mouths agape. Poe organized his tales to give readers new ways of seeing, to see beyond the texts of individual stories and recognize the connections between them.

In the fourth week of June 1842 Poe left Philadelphia for New York, where he hoped to find a publisher for
Phantasy-Pieces
and a position with one of the city’s magazines. He had at least two magazines in mind, the
Ladies’ Companion
and the
Democratic Review
. That Poe even considered approaching William Snowden’s namby-pamby
Ladies’ Companion
suggests he was having second thoughts about leaving
Graham’s
. The
Democratic Review
, alternatively, was a respected monthly published by James and Henry G. Langley. An editorial position on it could catapult Poe to the top of his profession.

Before seeing the Langleys, Poe ran into William Ross Wallace, a Kentucky native hoping to establish himself as a New York poet. Poe originally met him in Philadelphia, where Wallace spent time lollygagging around the
Graham’s
office.
¹⁵
The two became friends and sometimes read their unpublished work to each other. Another friend called Wallace ‘a delightful companion to meet if you met him at the right time’.
¹⁶
In a congenial mood when they met in New York, Wallace invited Poe for a mint julep. Beyond the watchful eyes of his wife and mother-in-law, Poe was more susceptible to such invitations. Typically served in a large bar glass with ‘a coquettish forest of mint’ sprouting from its top, the julep was well-nigh irresistible. Charles Fenno Hoffman called it ‘the drink of immortals’.
¹⁷

The two men apparently met in the late morning. As a somewhat astonished British visitor to New York commented, ‘The eleven-o’clock-in-the-morning julep with the lunch of the
café
is a received fact.’
¹⁸
Wallace and Poe finished their juleps with plenty of time left in the business day. In a drink-induced lapse in judgement, Poe called on Robert Hamilton, associate editor of the
Ladies’ Companion
. This same afternoon he also met the Langleys. Poe’s visit to them is known because of his subsequent letter of apology in which he admitted, ‘I knew not what I was either doing or saying.’
¹⁹
Needless to say, he did not get the job. This drinking spree continued beyond the bounds of Manhattan. Mary Starr, now married and living in Jersey City, remembered Poe crossing the ferry into New Jersey to see her. (Getting drunk and looking up old girlfriends is not a recent phenomenon.) After a brief stay, Eddie, as Mary told the story, ended up in the woods outside Jersey City, ‘wandering about like a crazy man’.
²⁰

Poe was not so embarrassed by his behaviour that he stopped seeking the Langleys’ help. In the third week of July he sent them his latest tale, ‘The Landscape Garden’. They politely returned it. Undaunted, he next sent it to the more open-minded Hamilton, who accepted it for the
Ladies’ Companion
, allowing Poe five dollars for the story. It appeared in October 1842. With this tale Poe continued exploring the relationship between the tourist and the lions of the land. If tourists insist on visiting famous sites of natural beauty, Poe suggested, then let’s not leave what they see solely to chance. ‘The Landscape Garden’ imagines the possibility of creating a major natural attraction. The story essentially asks the question: given unlimited funds and time, could someone create the most beautiful landscape ever, a landscape more beautiful than any nature created?

The question intrigued Poe, and he returned to it five years later when he revised ‘The Landscape Garden’ into ‘The Domain of Arnheim’. Whereas the earlier story presents the theory underlying the creation of an ideal landscape, the later one details precisely what a visit to that landscape would be like. Transforming one story into another, Poe was partly influenced by J. D. Harding’s
Principles and Practice of Art
, a copy of which passed through his hands around 1845.
²¹
Harding – John Ruskin’s drawing master – argued that art should celebrate the infinite variety of nature and that the spectator should be an active participant in aesthetic appreciation. ‘The Domain of Arnheim’ incorporates both ideas.

A boat takes the visitor to the middle of a lake, where he or she transfers to a canoe: ‘On its ermined floor reposes a single feathery paddle of satin-wood; but no oarsman or attendant is to be seen. The guest is bidden to be of good cheer – that the fates will take care of him.’
²²
Poe was speaking figuratively, of course. The Fates were not the ones moving that canoe. Poe did not explain precisely how it moved, but apparently a huge mechanical apparatus akin to an underwater railway track propelled it. Providing visitors with such an extravagant ride, Poe foresaw the modern-day theme park.
²³
But the theme to Poe’s proto-Disneyland is not popular amusement, but aesthetic pleasure. Visitors to Arnheimland enter an immense work of art.

The lavish descriptions in ‘The Landscape Garden’ and ‘The Domain of Arnheim’ show that Poe did not let his dire circumstances restrain his imagination. His ability to transcend personal squalor to create timeless works of art may be the most remarkable aspect of his life. Borges thought so. ‘Poe taught me how to use my imagination’, Borges admitted. ‘He taught me – though I was unaware of it, but I must have felt it strongly – that one may not be tied down by mere everyday circumstances: that being tied down to everyday circumstances stood for poverty, stood for dullness. I could be everywhere, and I could be, let’s say, in eternity. And I suppose Poe taught me that. He taught me the width, the vastness of freedom.’
²⁴

To supplement the meagre income he received from his tales, Poe also sought outlets for his critical work. Around the time he went to New York in July 1842, Griswold asked him to review
The Poets and Poetry of America
, promising to find a magazine that would accept the review and offering to pay Poe ahead of time. Griswold was essentially bribing him for a positive notice. Grateful for the money, Poe nonetheless refused to compromise his critical standards. He critiqued what needed to be critiqued, especially Griswold’s overt New England bias. Despite his criticism, Poe’s review was generally quite positive. He said Griswold had written
The Poets and Poetry of America
with judgment, dignity, and candour.
²⁵
In light of his negative comments, Poe was sure Griswold would not publish the review. Griswold did think Poe could have been more generous in his praise, but he did not suppress the review. He had promised to publish it, and he did. Griswold sent it to the
Boston Miscellany
, which slated the review for its November issue.