Edgar Allan Poe (8 page)

The story also marks a significant advance in Poe’s narrative technique. More than that, ‘Berenice’ marks an advance in the general history of narrative. The narrator of ‘The Visionary’ is an aloof traveller, a person who observes what was happening, not the titular visionary who is the story’s protagonist. Egaeus, the narrator of ‘Berenice’, tells his story from personal experience. Poe unites narrator and visionary in one individual. Suffering from monomania, Egaeus draws us into his world and lets us see things from his point of view. As the story of a diseased mind told from an inner perspective, ‘Berenice’ is Poe’s first great psychological tale.

Though Egaeus and his cousin Berenice had grown up together, they seem like opposites. Whereas he is ‘ill of health, and buried in gloom’, she is ‘agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy’.
¹²
Once illness overcomes her, she undergoes significant physical change, losing her athletic appearance. Her high forehead turns pale, and her temples become sunken. Her once golden hair turns raven black. (Poe would reverse the hair colour in a later revision.) Emaciated frame, high forehead, pale complexion, black hair: with the figure of Berenice, Poe created the Goth look.

Prior to her illness, Berenice’s monomaniacal cousin had never fixated his attention on her, but when she smiles at him one day, he becomes obsessed with her teeth. Her sickness apparently leads to her death. The day she is interred, Egaeus blacks out for several hours, finding himself in his library late that evening. Unaware precisely what has transpired, he hears the echo of a piercing shriek and sees a mysterious box atop the nearby table. Egaeus slowly realizes he has disinterred Berenice and extracted her teeth. Such actions are frightful enough, but Poe is not finished. Berenice had been buried prematurely: she was still alive. The shriek echoes the sound she had made as he extracted her teeth.

White’s misgivings about the denouement of ‘Berenice’ are understandable. Still, he recognized Poe’s extraordinary talent and encouraged him to keep contributing. For the April 1835 issue White accepted ‘Morella’, the second story in what can be called Poe’s Gothic woman trilogy. White also asked Poe to review several books for the April
Messenger
. The reviews display Poe’s rapidly burgeoning critical skills; ‘Morella’ shows him developing his feminine ideal.

Morella shares Berenice’s Gothic appearance. She has ‘wan fingers’, ‘melancholy eyes’ and a ‘pale forehead’. She also suffers a life-threatening illness that accentuates her features: the sicker she gets, the more blue veins pop out on her forehead. Despite their physical similarities, Morella possesses two qualities Berenice lacks: a mind and a voice. Though the story’s narrator does not love Morella, their intellectual life brings them together. They wed, and she becomes his mentor, sharing with him her passion for German mysticism. She has read deeply of John Locke and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose works concern the meaning of personal identity. Once sickness makes Morella hideous, the narrator reviles her.

With ‘Morella’, Poe breathed life into the biggest cliché of sentimental fiction: the tear-filled deathbed scene. Morella shows no emotion on her deathbed. Instead, she asserts her intellect, maintains her decorum and acknowledges her husband does not love her. As she dies, Morella gives birth to a daughter, who turns out to have her mother’s mind, manner and look. Her father even names the girl after her.

American literature had never seen anything like ‘Morella’. At a time when men occupied the public sphere and women were relegated to the private, domestic sphere, Poe brought husband and wife together in a shared intellectual world. He even made the wife intellectually superior to her husband. Because Morella dies the moment her daughter is born, Poe suggests that her soul has transmigrated, but this transfer of identity differs from the transmigration in ‘Metzengerstein’. Morella’s profound erudition, combined with her powerful will, assures her immortality. She is able to perpetuate her soul from one generation to the next because she has studied the meaning of identity and because her will is so strong it can transcend her physical existence.

Though ‘Berenice’ and ‘Morella’ incorporated elements of Gothic and sentimental fiction, both stories were too daring to achieve widespread contemporary acceptance. ‘Lionizing’, the next story Poe published in the
Southern Literary Messenger
, satirized, as Poe said later, ‘the rage for Lions and facility of becoming one’.
¹³
Poe had written it as part of
Tales of the Folio Club
, but the spoof had a broad appeal. It tells the story of a young man with a large nose, which makes him the object of everyone’s admiration. But when he shoots the nose off another in a duel, the newly noseless man assumes his place as the darling of society. Poe would carefully revise and republish this tale several times; he continually marvelled at how fickle the public could be. ‘Hans Phaall’, the pioneering work of science fiction Poe had drafted before ‘Morella’, appeared in the June
Messenger
.

On Tuesday, 7 July 1835, a real-life deathbed scene occurred in Maria Clemm’s house as her seventy-nine-year-old mother breathed her last. The death evoked mixed emotions: sadness, relief, uncertainty. Caring for her paralytic mother had been a burden, but the old woman’s government pension had allowed Maria to keep the household together. Without it, she could no longer afford to maintain the residence. Edgar would have to venture out on his own, and she and Virginia would have to move in with another relative, likely Edgar’s second cousin Neilson Poe (pronounced Nelson). Edgar disliked this option, for he had fallen in love with his teenaged cousin. Frustrated with his inability to find a position in Baltimore, he relocated to Richmond.

A possible teaching job fell through, but White soon hired him to work at the
Messenger
full time. Though Poe considered himself the editor, White never assigned him that job title. Regardless, Poe performed an editor’s work. He corresponded with contributors, prepared copy, proofread and wrote most of the reviews. Finally, he was on his way to being a journalist. The following month, however, he would almost destroy his budding career. Precisely what Poe said and did has escaped history, but the letters of White and Kennedy, combined with some general remarks by Lambert Wilmer, permit a conjectural account. Poe’s alcoholism formed the root of the problem. ‘On some rare occasions’, Wilmer observed, Poe ‘was led astray by jovial companions and induced to join in their revels; and from the best information I can obtain, I judge that the use of intoxicating liquor had a maddening effect on him, inciting him to the most terrific acts of frenzy.’
¹⁴
One morning in mid-September 1835 proved to be such an occasion.

William James Bennet,
Richmond, from the Hill above the Waterworks
, 1834, engraved aquatint print based on a painting by George Cooke.

That morning Poe showed up at the
Messenger
office, scandalously drunk and ready to confront White. Precisely when Poe confronted his employer is uncertain, but morning makes a good conjecture. Afterwards, White admonished Poe: ‘No man is safe who drinks before breakfast!’
¹⁵
Though Poe had only been with the
Messenger
for a few weeks, he had been reading it since White founded it the previous year. He had a good idea how to run the magazine, which was not how White was running it. In a drunken frenzy, Poe told White what he was doing wrong. Wilmer observed: ‘It was one of his unfortunate tricks, when intoxicated, to insult his employer; or rather to make a statement of his grievances, which the employer was apt to think insulting.’
¹⁶
Shocked by this tirade, White dismissed him. Poe fled Richmond and returned to Baltimore.

Filled with remorse, he entered a state of profound melancholy. As White told a correspondent, ‘I should not be at all astonished to hear that he has been guilty of suicide.’
¹⁷
According to Kennedy’s correspondence, Poe did threaten to kill himself. After receiving a dark and despondent letter from Poe, Kennedy wrote back, urging him to put those ‘villainous blue devils’ behind him.
¹⁸

Before the end of September, Poe wrote to White, pleading for another chance, insisting he had quit drinking for good. White was unconvinced. ‘When you once again tread these streets’, he responded, ‘I have my fears that your resolves would fall through – and that you would again sip the juice, even till it stole away your senses.’ Though hurt by Poe’s angry remarks, White was generally fond of him and willing to help. He even offered Poe a room in his home: ‘If you could make yourself contented to take up your quarters in my family, or in any other private family where liquor is not used, I should think there were hopes of you. – But, if you go to a tavern, or to any other place where it is used at table, you are not safe.’
¹⁹
White tentatively agreed to rehire Poe but promised to fire him if he ever got drunk again. Poe returned to Richmond ready to stay. Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia joined him there. Initially, the three boarded with Mrs James Yarrington, but eventually Maria Clemm established a boarding-house of her own.

Poe’s literary output for the next several months affirms his commitment to the
Messenger
. Time-consuming editorial duties prevented him from writing any new tales. All the short stories he published in the
Messenger
after ‘Hans Phaall’ were revised versions of ones he had written earlier as part of
Tales of the Folio Club
. His reviews show where most of his energy was going. White gave him considerable latitude when it came to reviewing books, and Poe took advantage of it. During his time with the
Messenger
, he started developing his unique critical voice. His uncompromising standards prompted the nickname ‘Tomahawk Man’, but he praised literature that deserved it. Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s anonymously published
Georgia Scenes
, for example, Poe welcomed with open arms: ‘The author, whoever he is, is a clever fellow, imbued with a spirit of the truest humor, and endowed, moreover, with an exquisitely discriminative and penetrating understanding of
character
in general, and of Southern character in particular.’
²⁰

The most important review Poe published in the
Messenger
has become known as the ‘Drake–Halleck Review’, which appeared in the April 1836 issue. Examining the verse of two well-respected contemporary poets, Joseph Rodman Drake and Fitz Greene Halleck, Poe reversed popular opinion to put both men in their place. ‘The Culprit Fay’, Drake’s most well-known poem, depicts a forest full of fairies wearing acorn helmets, carrying shields made from ladybird shells, using blades of grass for swords – the kind of fanciful forest creatures the Silly Symphonies cartoons revitalized in the twentieth century. Poe found much of Drake’s description unintentionally humorous, especially the soldier crabs, the mailed shrimp and the spirits dressed in ‘snail-plate armor’. Lifting Drake’s description from its context, Poe lends it a surreal quality, a quality many of his short stories share. In fact, Salvador Dalí would call Poe ‘the very frame of Surrealist reference’. Remembering a lively dinner conversation, Dalí said the subject of Edgar Allan Poe made ‘a magnificent theme while savoring snails’.
²¹

Drake had not meant ‘The Culprit Fay’ to be either humorous or surreal. As a serious work, however, it fell far short of fairy poems like Shelley’s
Queen Mab
, as Poe recognized. Shelley enveloped his fairy in the ‘moral sentiments of grace, of color, of motion – of the beautiful, of the mystical, of the august – in short of
the ideal
’. ‘The Culprit Fay’, alternatively, lacks an ideality of a high order. It is largely an incongruous assemblage of miscellaneous objects. Poe concluded: ‘That we have among us poets of the loftiest order we believe – but we do not believe that these poets are Drake and Halleck.’
²²

Appearing in the same issue of the
Messenger
as the Drake–Halleck review, ‘Maelzel’s Chess-Player’ shows another side of Poe’s multifaceted talent. In this exposé, Poe revealed that Maelzel’s renowned chess-playing automaton was an elaborate hoax. It was no machine but a carefully crafted cabinet that held a diminutive but highly skilled chess player inside. In an extraordinary assertion, Jean Cocteau named Poe the inventor of mass journalism, citing ‘Maelzel’s Chess-Player’ as proof.
²³
Cocteau essentially paralleled the workings of the Maelzel’s pseudo-automaton with the mass media, hinting that what we read in our daily newspapers is controlled by invisible and unknown forces.

On Monday, 16 May 1836, Poe’s life achieved a new-found level of stability when he and Virginia Clemm married. The ceremony, which took place at Mrs Yarrington’s, was a quiet, understated affair. Besides the mother of the bride, only a few others attended. Thomas White and his daughter Eliza were there. So were Mr and Mrs Thomas W. Cleland. Beforehand Mr Cleland testified that Virginia was twenty-one years old. (Actually, she was not quite fourteen.) The Reverend Amasa Converse officiated. A transplanted Yankee who had studied at Dartmouth and Princeton before being ordained a Presbyterian minister and coming south, Converse found his true calling as a journalist. Poe knew him as the editor of the Richmond
Southern Religious Telegraph
.