Edgar Allan Poe (19 page)
Authors: Kevin J. Hayes
Evert A. Duyckinck,
c
. 1875.
The appearance of ‘The Raven’ in the
American Review
, a magazine published by Wiley and Putnam, closely coincided with the firm’s decision to launch an exciting new series, the Library of American Books. Evert Duyckinck, who conceived the series, struck a deal with Wiley and Putnam this February. He would serve the firm as literary advisor, choosing titles, soliciting contributors, and promoting the series.
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Duyckinck’s keen literary sensibilities let him recognize some of the finest authors in the nation; the series would ultimately include works by Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, William Gilmore Simms and Edgar Allan Poe.
Given the notoriety ‘The Raven’ established for its author, Duyckinck approached Poe, asking him to contribute a volume to the series. Duyckinck’s idea for a one-volume collection of tales was not exactly what Poe had in mind. Poe still hoped to see a collected edition of all his tales, which would now fill five volumes, he estimated. Ultimately, two Poe titles appeared in the series, a collection of short fiction and a collection of verse. By the end of March,
Tales
was in press. Duyckinck himself chose twelve stories to include. Poe disagreed with his selections but carefully revised the contents to make them mesh as a whole. If twelve literary works are gathered into a collection, Poe believed, the thirteenth work is the collection itself. Though Poe grumbled about Duyckinck’s selection, he had little room to complain. Reviewers warmly received the volume, and Poe even made a modest profit from it. Duyckinck’s decision to emphasize the tales of ratiocination prompted French enthusiasts to notice Poe and start translating his tales.
The Raven and Other Poems
, Poe’s next title in the series, solidified his reputation as the most original voice in American literature.
Poe and his family remained with the Brennans into February 1845, but the journey between the farm and the
Evening Mirror
office in lower Manhattan – about five miles – became increasingly irksome. Seldom able to afford the omnibus, Poe often walked both ways. The notoriety of ‘The Raven’ was making more demands on his time, both socially and professionally. He decided to move his family downtown to a house on Greenwich Street.
While working for the
Evening Mirror
, Poe started contributing to the weekly
Broadway Journal
. This February he signed a contract with its proprietor to co-edit the magazine. Willis was fond of Poe and sorry to see him leave the
Evening Mirror
but understood that the new position represented an advance in his professional career. During his time with the
Broadway Journal
, Poe went from co-editor to editor and co-owner to editor and sole proprietor, borrowing heavily to acquire the magazine. As a weekly, the
Broadway Journal
was not his ideal magazine, but it was the first over which he exercised full control. Predictably, editorial responsibilities sapped his energy and prevented him from writing many new stories.
Instead, he republished most of his older tales in the magazine. Poe had two reasons why he republished so much of his earlier fiction. Unable to pay contributors, he refused to compromise his standards by accepting amateurish contributions. Better to reprint his own carefully crafted tales than to publish the uneven tales of others. As a storyteller, Poe prided himself on his versatility but realized that such versatility was lost on contemporary readers because his stories had appeared in so many different magazines over the previous decade and a half. They had been published too diffusely to make an overall impression. The five-volume edition he projected could have given that impression. In its absence, the
Broadway Journal
was the next best thing. Separate issues comprising one or two volumes of the magazine could be bound together to attract investors and subscribers to the ideal magazine Poe envisioned. He always saw the
Broadway Journal
as an intermediary, a stepping stone to
The Stylus
.
Week after week, old Poe stories reappeared in the pages of the
Broadway Journal
. He went all the way back to the Philadelphia
Saturday Courier
tales for source material. Ever the perfectionist, he revised these stories for republication, sometimes significantly. It is heartbreaking to consider how much of his energy went into altering these already excellent tales and cobbling together this mediocre hodgepodge of a magazine when he was near the peak of his creative powers, when he could have been writing new short stories.
Thomas Holley Chivers came up from Oaky Grove this year to see his newest collection of poetry through the press. While in New York, he took the opportunity to meet his idol in person, visiting the boarding-house at 195 East Broadway where Poe and his family had relocated on Moving Day. Already planning to write a life of Poe, Chivers recorded their meeting in great detail. Even allowing for some creative reshaping on Chivers’s part, his transcript of their conversations forms an invaluable documentary record of Poe’s personal behaviour and manner of speaking.
When Chivers arrived, he found Poe sick in bed. They talked at length, Poe remaining in bed the entire time. Maria Clemm later admitted to Chivers that Poe was not really sick. Rather, he remained in bed feigning illness to escape a commitment to write and recite a new poem before the Philomathean and Eucleian Societies at New York University.
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Anxious to hear Poe’s views about the Romantic poets, Chivers did not let Poe’s bedridden condition hinder their discussion. Anxious to obtain a financial commitment from Chivers for
The Stylus
, Poe kept the conversation lively and ingratiating. Chivers steered the conversation toward poetry; Poe steered it back to publishing. Eventually Poe indulged Chivers, and the two discussed the verse of the British Romantics at length.
26
‘How do you like Shelley?’ Poe asked.
‘I consider him one of the greatest Poets that ever lived,’ said Chivers, favourably comparing Shelley to Shakespeare.
‘In passion he was supreme,’ Poe responded, ‘but it was an unfettered enthusiasm ungoverned by the amenities of Art.’
‘But it was the clairvoyant fortuitousness of intuition,’ Chivers replied in his characteristically flamboyant manner. ‘Like St John on the Island of Patmos he beheld his celestial Visions of the coming of the New Jerusalem of Man with the couched eyes of one of God’s Holiest Prophets.’
‘His principal forte was powerful abandon of rhythmical conception,’ Poe countered. ‘But he lacked just that Tennysonian Art necessary to the creation of a perfect Poem. You are mistaken in supposing that passion is the primum mobile of the true Poet, for it is just the reverse. A pure Poem proper is one that is wholly destitute of a particle of passion.’
‘Then you admire Tennyson?’ Chivers asked incredulously.
‘Yes, I consider him one of the greatest Poets that ever lived!’
‘My God! Poe! how can you say that?’ Chivers exclaimed. ‘Why, his Poems are as effeminate as a phlegmatic fat baby. He is the most perfectly Greek statuesque, if you please – in his conceptions of any man that ever lived since the days of Pericles.’
Back and forth they debated the merits of Tennyson before switching to a different poet.
‘What do you think of Keats?’ Chivers asked.
‘He was the greatest of any of the English Poets of the same age, if not at any age,’ Poe answered. ‘He was far in advance of the best of them, with the exception of Shelley, in the study of his themes. His principal fault is the grotesqueness of his abandon.’ Chivers brought up the names of a few minor poets before bringing the conversation to a close.
Throughout the summer of 1845, the
Broadway Journal
often required Poe to work fifteen hours a day, yet all his hard work provided little income. He did manage to scrape together sufficient funds to move his family from the East Broadway boarding-house to 85 Amity Street (now West Third Street), a more fashionable address near Washington Square. An invitation from the Boston Lyceum offered some much needed income: fifty dollars for writing and reciting a new poem at its anniversary celebration on Thursday, 16 October. Poe accepted the invitation. His commitment to the Boston Lyceum resembled the one he had failed to fulfil at New York University. Once again, he found himself unable to write a new poem, but this time he had no intention of feigning illness. Confiding to Thomas Dunn English, Poe explained that he would ‘cook up something’.
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Instead of writing a new poem, Poe decided to take one of his old poems and rename it. ‘Al Aaraaf’, the poem he chose to recite, would now be called ‘The Messenger Star’. On such occasions, two speakers typically participated. The evening opened with an orator whose speech provided the meat and potatoes, so to speak, and closed with a poet, whose verse provided the dessert. A large crowd gathered at Boston’s Odeon Theatre that Thursday evening. Caleb Cushing spoke first, delivering an oration on the subject of Great Britain that ran for two and a half hours. Poe was not obligated to do anything more beyond recite his poem, but he prefaced ‘The Messenger Star’ by articulating his literary aesthetic, which took around fifteen minutes. After this prosy preface, he began reading his poem.
‘The Messenger Star’ proved more than many Bostonians could fathom. Before Poe completed his recitation, many people left their seats for home. A few sensitive souls stayed for the complete performance. Joseph Buckingham, the editor who had neglected ‘Epimanes’ so many years before, greatly enjoyed ‘The Messenger Star’, calling it ‘an elegant and classic production’ containing ‘the essence of
true
poetry, mingled with a gorgeous imagination, exquisite painting, every charm of metre, and a graceful delivery’.
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Thomas Wentworth Higginson – later Emily Dickinson’s editor but currently a student at Harvard – had been looking forward to Poe’s performance. The Wiley and Putnam
Tales
turned out to be a great favourite among Harvard undergrads, and Higginson and his classmates were eager to see Poe in person. They were not disappointed. Poe started reciting ‘The Messenger Star’ slowly, but partway through
his voice seemed attenuated to the finest golden thread; the audience became hushed, and, as it were, breathless; there seemed no life in the hall but his; and every syllable was accentuated with such delicacy, and sustained with such sweetness as I never heard equaled by other lips … I remember nothing more, except that in walking back to Cambridge my comrades and I felt that we had been under the spell of some wizard.
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Those who endured ‘The Messenger Star’ were treated with a reading of ‘The Raven’ afterwards. Once the formal programme finished, Poe went out with Cushing and some others. Over a bottle of champagne, Poe let slip that he had tricked the Bostonians by reciting a poem he had written in his youth. Word of Poe’s trick soon went round the Boston literary circles. Save for the editor of the
Boston Evening Transcript
, few seemed ruffled by it. The readers of the
Boston Evening Transcript
, who, as T. S. Eliot would say, swayed in the wind ‘like a field of ripe corn’, would have forgotten their editor’s rant in a few days and let the matter pass. But Poe would not.
Returning to New York, he used the
Broadway Journal
to chastise the Bostonians for their ignorance and naivety. Telling the story of his visit to Boston, he depicted his choice of ‘Al Aaraaf’ as a deliberate hoax, an effort to expose the Bostonians’ ignorance of poetry by showing how they appreciated this greenhorn poem as a polished work of a renowned poet. Poe’s deprecation of the Bostonians – the Frogpondians he called them, after the pond on Boston Common – was too much for them to take. The Frogpondians lashed back. Poe emerged from this controversy looking petty and vindictive.
‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, one of the few tales Poe completed since joining the staff of the
Broadway Journal
, forms the final work in his mesmerist trilogy. He published it in the December issue of the
American Review
and republished it in the
Broadway Journal
the same month. It, too, captured the popular imagination and reappeared in countless newspapers and magazines across the
USA
and Great Britain. One London publisher issued it the following year as a separate pamphlet,
Mesmerism ‘in articulo mortis’: An Astounding and Horrifying Narrative, Shewing the Extraordinary Power of Mesmerism in Arresting the Progress of Death
.
Possibly the most gruesome tale Poe ever wrote, this story relates a case history of mesmerism. P—, the practising mesmerist who narrates the story, is contacted by his friend Valdemar, who is near death. Valdemar offers himself to P—as the subject of a mesmeric experiment. P— intends to hypnotize Valdemar shortly before death to see what happens once he dies. Perishing under hypnosis, Valdemar relates the moment he dies. From his hypnotic state, Valdemar identifies the precise moment of death. He maintains his mesmeric state for months, though his body shows obvious signs of decay. After seven months he manages to speak again, imploring P— to take him from his mesmeric state. P— motions for Valdemar to awake, and ‘his whole frame at once – within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk – crumbled – absolutely
rotted
away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome – of detestable putridity.’
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Read in relation to Poe’s life, ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ presents an allegory of the
Broadway Journal
. The magazine died at some point in 1845, but Poe managed to keep it functioning into the following year – just barely. Poe published the final issue on 3 January 1846. In the story, Valdemar’s last words are: ‘I say to you that I am dead!’ In the
Broadway Journal
, Poe’s last words appear under the title ‘Valedictory’: ‘Unexpected engagements demanding my whole attention, and the objects being fulfilled, so far as regards myself personally, for which
The Broadway Journal
was established, I now, as its editor, bid farewell – as cordially to foes as to friends.’ Poe had kept the
Broadway Journal
alive long enough to republish nearly all his earlier tales. He had nothing more to fill its pages. His showcase was built. It was time to put down his tools and look toward
The Stylus
, which he still thought would be his greatest work.
