Edgar Allan Poe (3 page)

The idea that American authors must use American themes and settings for their work was a parochial notion, Poe recognized. All they really needed to do was write well: they should feel free to use whatever themes and settings they wished. While Poe chose a Gothic setting for ‘Metzengerstein’ – the castles of eastern Europe – he experimented with different modes of discourse, contrasting narrative strategies, multiple voices and innovative visual imagery. ‘Metzengerstein’ was a deliberately difficult work. Psychical researcher Theodore Besterman called it ‘a farrago in which no precise meaning can be found’.
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Poe’s daring experiments testify to his confidence. A more conservative approach could have made a more likely contest winner.

In ‘Letter to Mr —’, written the same year as ‘Metzengerstein’, Poe outlined his groundbreaking poetic theory. He observed, ‘A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having, for its
immediate
object, pleasure, not truth.’
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When Poe switched from poetry to tales, he applied his poetic principles to fiction. Besides maximizing the delightful aspects of literature and minimizing its instructive purpose, he sought to give each work a ‘unity of effect’. ‘Metzengerstein’ embodies such unity.
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Never before had anyone approached fiction with the consummate level of artistry Poe brought to it. Never before had anyone suggested a tale need have no other purpose than to delight. Abandoning the delight-and-instruct paradigm, Poe created a new aesthetic and paved the way for modern fiction.

‘Metzengerstein’ is also daring in its details. For example, the mysterious, witch-like old crone was a staple of Gothic fiction, but Poe gave this traditional motif new life. After introducing the Berlifitzings and the Metzengersteins – two feuding Hungarian families – the narrator illustrates their differences: ‘It was remarked by an old crone of haggard, and sinister appearance, that fire and water might sooner mingle, than a Berlifitzing clasp the hand of a Metzengerstein.’
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These words reinforce the tale’s innovativeness. This early in the story, even before the narrator has fully established his narrative control, he temporarily relinquishes it to give voice to an evil woman.

The old woman’s image contributes to the tale’s visual complexity as well, creating the effect of a cinematic cutaway shot. Poe’s imagery frequently anticipates a visual aesthetic that would not emerge until the invention of motion pictures – mainly because his writing profoundly influenced cinema’s development. Poe’s short fiction gave pioneering filmmakers a structural model. One early screenwriting manual recommends reading ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ to understand how to combine setting and action into a unified whole.
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Sergei Eisenstein said that ‘The Sphinx’, in which Poe juxtaposes a nearby insect with a faraway landscape to make it resemble a distant monster, greatly influenced his foreground composition.
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‘Metzengerstein’ relates the rivalry between the last surviving members of both families, Wilhelm, Count Berlifitzing, and Frederick, Baron Metzengerstein. Berlifitzing, a doting old man, spends his time with his horses. The teenaged Metzengerstein lives a life of debauchery, lavishly indulging his passions and his cruelties. One night at the young baron’s instigation the count’s stables catch fire. Berlifitzing perishes in the blaze, from which emerges a demonic horse – his soul reincarnated in equine form.

Baron Metzengerstein’s attachment to the horse seems perverse. Neighbours cannot understand why he spends so much time riding the animal. But the baron does not choose to ride the horse. Rather, this supernatural beast compels him to ride. As Metzengerstein shrieks his final shriek, the scene switches from long shot to extreme close up: ‘The agony of his countenance, the convulsive struggling of his frame gave evidence of superhuman exertion; but no sound, save a solitary shriek, escaped from his lacerated lips, which were bitten through and through, in the intensity of terror.’
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The vivid imagery, the tension-filled terror, the exciting conclusion: ‘Metzengerstein’ hardly reads like a young author’s first published tale. It is the work of a master storyteller.

Jane Fonda as Comtesse Fréderique Metzengerstein in Roger Vadim’s ‘Metzengerstein’, the first segment of the omnibus film
Histoires extraordinaires
(1968).

Poe’s other entries to the
Courier
contest include ‘The Bargain Lost’, a parody of Gothic fiction patterned on the Faust legend; ‘A Decided Loss’, which spoofs the extravagant fiction in
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine;
‘The Duke de L’Omelette’, a story of a supercilious French duke who dies in disgust at the sight of an improperly prepared ortolan and ends up playing cards with the Devil; and ‘A Tale of Jerusalem’, a humorous historical tale inspired by the erudite English novelist Horace Smith and involving a prank ancient Romans play on Jews defending Jerusalem.

Like ‘Metzengerstein’, these tales show their author experimenting with new techniques in terms of style, subject and narrative strategy. ‘A Decided Loss’ is the earliest known story Poe wrote in first person. Overall, his sophisticated manipulation of the first-person narrative may be his most important contribution to the history of fiction. This early in his career, he was already experimenting with the form. ‘A Decided Loss’ is a tale told by a dead man, a narrative strategy that would not achieve acceptance until the twentieth century.
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‘The Bargain Lost’ makes fun of the weighty descriptive passages from Gothic novels. ‘I hold minute attention to trifles unworthy the dignity of serious narrative’, the narrator says. ‘Otherwise I might here, following the example of the novelist, dilate on the subject of habiliment, and other mere matters of the outward man.’
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The narrator then presents an absurdly detailed account of what he might have said. To suit his satirical purpose, Poe mimicked the Gothic style, using the biggest novelistic cliché of all time: ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’ ‘The Bargain Lost’ also shows Poe developing his fine sense of humour. Speaking with Pedro Garcia, a Venetian metaphysician, the Devil surveys the culinary value of the souls he has eaten. The soul of the comic playwright Terence, for example, was ‘firm as an Esquimaux, and juicy as a German’.
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Imbibing copious amounts of Sauterne, Pedro loses his inhibitions and offers the Devil his soul, suggesting he cook it in a stew or, perhaps, a ragout. A discriminating gourmand, the Devil is incensed by Pedro’s culinary suggestions and indignantly lets him keep his soul.

Representing different literary styles while simultaneously burlesquing them, Poe’s early tales demonstrate his command of contemporary fiction. He may be best known as a Gothic writer, but the stylistic virtuosity of his early fiction shows he did not want to be identified with any particular literary movement. Once he made up his mind to write short stories, he embraced nearly every form of prose fiction and invented original modes of discourse, new narrative approaches, and different ways of telling tales no one had used previously. Edgar Allan Poe is the greatest innovator in American literature.

There was another reason why he took so many different approaches in his early tales: he conceived them as part of a unified story cycle, which he planned to call
Tales of the Folio Club
. Though the
Courier
contest provided the impetus for him to shift from poet to storyteller, he was dissatisfied with leaving his tales as fugitive pieces, that is, separately published articles. The Folio Club framework let him intersperse tales with burlesque criticism, which would bind the collection together, enhancing his parody of contemporary fiction and spoofing current trends in literary criticism.

A. G. Learned,
Mrs Maria Poe Clemm
, 1916.

Through 1831 he continued living with Maria Clemm. Edgar and his brother Henry shared the attic. Henry, who also shared an interest in poetry, was failing fast, a victim of consumption and dissipation. Whatever late night literary conversation the Poe brothers had was punctuated by the sound of Henry’s blood-and-sputum cough, a cough that sounded like a death rattle. Henry Poe died on 1 August 1831. Poe would pay homage to his brother in
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
, having Augustus, the title character’s best friend, die the same day.

That same year Poe fell in love with Mary Starr, a pretty teenaged girl with auburn hair who lived just around the corner from the Clemms. Mary’s recollection of ‘Eddie’, though double-filtered through the passage of fifty years and the creative reshaping of a kinsman, rings true. Her physical description of him is precise. ‘About five feet eight inches tall’, he had ‘dark, almost black hair, which he wore long and brushed back in student style over his ears. It was as fine as silk. His eyes were large and full, gray and piercing.’ He was ‘entirely clean-shaven. His nose was long and straight, and his features finely cut. The expression about his mouth was beautiful. He was pale, and had no colour. His skin was of clear, beautiful olive.’
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Mary and Eddie started seeing each other almost daily. Poe admired the poetry of Robert Burns, which he quoted often. Poe made Burns’s Mary suit his own:

Occasionally Mary and Eddie would spend their evenings seated on the stoop of her uncle’s home. At other times they would go out walking beyond the city limits to the surrounding hills. As their relationship grew serious, her family warned Mary away from this poet without prospects.

On his part Poe began feeling as if the two had plighted their troth. Like anyone with ambition, he had a jealous streak. One time, when Mary played their song – Thomas Moore’s ‘Come Rest in This Bosom’ – for someone else, he flew into a rage, snatching the music from the piano and dashing it to the floor: an early indication of his mercurial temper. A quarrel ensued, but Mary and Eddie later patched up their differences.

One evening when they planned to meet, Eddie did not show. Mary waited at the parlour window until ten o’clock. When Mrs Starr saw her daughter crying, she told her to go upstairs to bed. Mary hesitated to abandon her vigil.

Poe soon showed up at her window. He was drunk. She had known him for months now, but this was the first time she had seen him after a cup too much. One time was enough. This incident proved the cause that would part them. Poe had an extremely low tolerance for alcohol. His habit of drinking on an empty stomach exacerbated the problem. A single glass of champagne, Mayne Reid observed, affected him so much ‘that he was hardly any longer responsible for his actions’.
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Just a few drinks gave him an insatiable craving for more. At Poe’s insistence, Mary came outside and sat on the stoop with him.

As they talked, Poe either said something or did something that spooked her. She jumped off the stoop, ran through the alleyway to the back of their house, and rushed inside to her mother.

‘Mary! Mary!’ Mrs Starr exclaimed. ‘What’s the matter?’

Before her daughter could answer, Poe entered the room. Mrs Starr told Mary to go upstairs to her room. She went.

‘I want to talk to your daughter,’ Poe said. ‘If you don’t tell her to come downstairs, I will go after her. I have a right to.’

‘You have no right to,’ Mrs Starr told him as she blocked the way upstairs. ‘You cannot go upstairs.’

‘I have a right,’ Poe insisted. ‘She is my wife now in the sight of Heaven.’

Mrs Starr told him he had better go home and go to bed. He went.

Since Mary’s recollection forms the only source for this episode, Poe’s side of the story has gone unrecorded. Based on similar episodes, his reaction is not hard to fathom. Severe hangovers confined him to bed for days. Once a hangover subsided, deep remorse and profound self-loathing persisted. He made several attempts to contact Mary, but her family prevented him from seeing her.