Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living (Icons) (10 page)

“Fine?” Poe scoffed. “Is that all you can say for this poem? I tell you it’s the greatest poem ever written.”

New York could not have been better prepared for its arrival. “The Purloined Letter” had finally run in
The Gift
, where it attracted some warm notice; and a few weeks later, a new issue of
Graham’s
featured a generous profile of Poe by James Russell Lowell, along with an engraved portrait of the author looking oddly placid—hopeful, even. When “The Raven” first appeared in print in the January 29, 1845, issue of the New York
Evening Mirror
, it was the culmination of all that Poe had moved to Manhattan for: a recognition of his genius.

“We are permitted to copy (in advance of publication) from the 2d number of the
American Review
, the following remarkable poem by
EDGAR POE
,” the newspaper’s notice by editor N. P. Willis began. “In our opinion, it is the most effective single example of ‘fugitive poetry’ ever published in this country. . . . It will stick in the memory of everybody who reads it.”

Willis was right—more than he or Poe or anyone else could have imagined. “The Raven” sprouted in newspapers across the nation; one fellow poet in New York marveled how “Soon ‘The Raven’ became known everywhere, and everyone was saying ‘Nevermore.’ ” Perhaps the clearest sign of its currency was parodies appeared ranging from “The Owl” (“But the owl he looked so lonely, saying that word and that only / That a thimble-ful of whiskey I did speedily outpour”), to “The Veto” (“Once upon an evening dreary, the Council pondered weak and weary / Over many a long petition which was voted down a bore”), to a spoof that Abraham Lincoln laughed over titled “The Polecat.” Newspaper advertisements promptly took up the idea, and before the season was out an elocution book included the poem among its exercises. “The Raven” was literally a textbook example of American poetry, an honor it has held ever since.

The poem eclipsed even “The Gold-Bug” in popularity—
“the bird beat the bug,” Poe mused that spring. But for all its success, it was but a poem: something that always netted less money than fiction, and which brought in nothing at all when pirated. “The Raven” earned Poe even less money than “The Gold-Bug”—just nine dollars, in fact. Yet its fame brought opportunity, for three weeks after “The Raven” appeared, the
Broadway Journal
announced that Poe was joining its masthead as an equal partner. Poe was to furnish one multicolumn page a week to the paper—a perfect bully pulpit.

The critic’s pen invariably brought out Poe’s worst impulses, most notably a baffling vendetta against the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Poe had written solicitously to him in the past to seek poems for
Penn
and
Graham’s
. But now—first anonymously, and then under his byline—he let fly at a poet who he considered unmusical and “infected with a moral taint,” cardinal sins in Poe’s view of poetry. And he had a worse accusation: that Longfellow’s “Midnight Mass for the Dying Year” was plagiarized from Tennyson.

“[It] belongs to the most barbarous class of literary piracy,” Poe insisted, “that class in which, while the words of the wronged author are avoided, his most intangible, and therefore his least defensible and least reclaimable property, is appropriated.”

The charge was ludicrous, particularly coming from the sticky-fingered Poe, and Longfellow wisely chose not to respond. But a reader took up Longfellow’s defense under the pen name “Outis,” and Poe responded at endless length throughout his March 1845 columns. In fact, Outis may well have been Poe himself, and their “argument” a grandstanding monologue. Publisher Charles Briggs privately admitted that “Poe is a monomaniac on the subject of plagiarism,” and later added, “Poe’s Longfellow war, which, by the way, is all on one side, has annoyed a good deal.”

A calculated attack on a respected writer is an old ploy; it
quickly yields a splendid borrowed heat and leaves a cold ash of ill will. But for the moment, Poe was hot—and capitalizing upon that meant lecturing. It began well enough; three hundred showed up to hear Poe declaim upon “Poets and Poetry of America,” where he dissected the leading poets in Rufus Griswold’s recent anthology of the same name, and he inevitably admired and damned Longfellow in equal measure. But when a second lecture scheduled for April 17 fell apart, Poe was caught off-balance.

“It stormed incessantly, with mingled rain and hail and sleet,” recalled an office boy from the
Broadway Journal
. “In consequence there were scarcely a dozen persons there, when Poe came upon the platform [to cancel the lecture]. . . . The next morning he came to the office, leaning on the arm of a friend, intoxicated with wine.”

It should have been merely a disappointing evening for Poe; instead, it was about to become a disaster.

It is a mark of how serious Poe had been in the literary ambitions of his move to New York that, until that evening, he had stayed sober for over a year, sticking instead to his much happier love of strong coffee. It had served his art well, not least by allowing him to keep a steady day job; in his editorial work he had been, as
Mirror
editor Nathaniel Parker Willis commented, “punctual and industriously reliable.”

But now Poe fell back into drinking, and he fell hard. A week after his canceled lecture, a local paper archly announced publication of “A treatise on ‘Aqua Pura,’ its uses and abuses, by Edgar Allan Poe”; a month later, James Lowell finally met Poe in person, only to find him “tipsy . . . & with that over-solemnity with which men in such cases try to convince you of their sobriety.” Even that pretense couldn’t hold up; Poe canceled a July 1st NYU lecture on account of his being “dreadfully unwell,” though his mentor and fellow poet Thomas Chivers
found him staggering outside a Nassau Street bar, monumentally drunk and “tottering from side to side,” while a bar patron yelled out that he was “the Shakespeare of America.”

Poe’s literary reputation had indeed never been better. That week brought the release of
Tales
, his first new book since 1839. Selected by publisher Evert Duyckinck, it included all of Poe’s detective stories—presented in succession, they take nearly half its pages—plus every major Poe story except for “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “Ligeia.” But almost as important was its title page: “
WILEY
&
PUTNAM
’
S LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BOOKS. NO II
.” Designed by Duyckinck to outclass cheap pirated British books, the series would place Poe alongside later entries by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, and a promising newcomer named Herman Melville—a mark of both Duyckinck’s extraordinarily good taste, and of just how far “The Gold-Bug” and “The Raven” raised the profile of the rest of Poe’s work.

It was also a vindication of Poe’s move to New York. He lived scarcely a block from Wiley & Putnam’s office on Broadway; even when he moved downtown to Amity Lane later that summer, he was only a block from both Margaret Fuller and bookseller John Bartlett. The bookshop’s location was fortuitous, as Bartlett invited Poe to author salons—and knew the writing life well enough to pile the table with bread, butter, and coffee. Along with Poe, James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving were frequent and even daily customers in his shop, as were poets William Cullen Bryant and William Gilmore Simms.

With the publication of
Tales
, they truly welcomed Poe as one of their own. Fuller praised
Tales
on the front page of the
New York Tribune
, and Simms wondered aloud whether Poe was “too original, perhaps, to be a highly successful writer. The people are not prepared for him yet.”

Increasingly, though, it was Poe who was not prepared for the people. His drinking aggravated his
Broadway Journal
partners, with Briggs complaining to James Lowell that “He has
some good points, but taken altogether he is badly made up.” As if to prove the point, a few weeks later Poe inexplicably turned on Lowell in print, accusing his erstwhile ally and biographer of plagiarism—a bitter absurdity that left Lowell to muse, “I have made Poe my enemy by doing him a service.”

That Poe was not entirely unaware of his idiosyncrasies was hinted at in that summer’s publication of his story “The Imp of the Perverse.” An essay with an almost perfunctory inclusion of a murder plot at the end, its real murder is that by the narrator upon himself. Poe glumly notes acts taken in the “spirit of the
Perverse
. . . We perpetrate them merely because we feel we should
not
.” More subtly, it is a meditation on losing control to irrational compulsion; fittingly, the essay has perhaps the first published description of a musical earworm—that is, “to be thus annoyed with the ringing in our ears, or rather in our memories, of the burthen of some ordinary song, or some un-impressive snatches from an opera.”

Self-awareness, if that is what “Imp” was, does not seem to have helped Poe much. The praise for
Tales
was strong enough that Wiley & Putnam made him the first repeat author in their series by collecting a volume of his poetry; he was invited to read a new poem at the season premiere of the Boston Lyceum in October 1845. But Poe found himself unable to versify; by the time he reached the stage in Boston’s Odeon Theatre, he’d stayed sober, but still had no poem ready.

The crowd’s patience was exhausted even before Poe opened his mouth, as a previous speaker had droned on for over two hours already. When Poe departed from the advertised poem to give an impromptu twenty-minute speech on American poetry, it drove out many patrons. Among those who stayed were Emily Dickinson’s future preceptor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who recalled how Poe then “abruptly began the recitation of his rather perplexing poem, [and] the audience looked thoroughly mystified.” Well they might, for Poe had resorted to a poem that
was decidedly not new at all: it was his obscure 1829 farrago “Al Aaraaf.” While Higginson was won over by it (“walking back to Cambridge my comrades and I felt that we had been under the spell of some wizard”), the few left by the end were only mollified by a recitation of “The Raven.” Boston newspapers did not fondly recall Poe afterwards, and the feeling was mutual.

Returning home, he found the
Broadway Journal
in such dire straits that he bought out his partner for fifty dollars—though even that was borrowed—and promptly used its pages to jeer at his Boston audience. He claimed, not quite convincingly, that the reading was another of his delightful hoaxes, this time on the fools in Boston’s literary establishment.

“The Bostonians are well in their way,” Poe wrote mockingly. “Their hotels are bad. Their pumpkin pies are delicious. Their poetry is not so good.” Just to rub it in, he added that “Al-Aaraaf” was written at the age of ten. After scolding half the Boston audience for rudely leaving during the lecture, he mocked the remainder for being hoaxed by a juvenile production, and “applauding, all those knotty passages which we ourselves have not yet been able to understand.”

That did not keep Poe from including “Al Aaraaf” in
The Raven and Other Poems
when it arrived in bookstores several weeks later. While self-deprecation was the norm in prefaces of the time, Poe’s went further than most: “I think nothing in this volume of much value to the public,” he stated flatly. The claim is only half true; a volume containing “The Raven” and “The Valley of Unrest” is hardly valueless. But to goose the manuscript up to book length, Poe had indeed resorted to larding in juvenilia like “Tamerlane” and “Al Aaraaf” and failed experiments like “Scenes from
Politian
”; he had given so little thought to saving the latter production that he had to borrow back issues of
Southern Literary Messenger
just to transcribe it.

The volume was received politely enough, though with much puzzlement over the juvenilia. Margaret Fuller, as ever,
was one of the first out of the gate, with an assertion that “The Raven” alone was a masterpiece, while the other poems showed an unrealized potential—“the productions in this volume indicate a power to do something far better.”

Certainly Poe’s fiction continued from strength to strength; even as reviews of his poetry came in, the
American Review
carried his minor science fiction hoax “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” a sly account of hypnotic suspended animation that was gullibly reprinted as a fact in both America and Britain. But as gratifying as the poetry reviews and the Valdemar reprints were, Poe had little time to take notice; for over at the
Broadway Journal
offices, his business was taking on water.

It was a cruel irony. After years of trying to start
Penn
and
The Stylus
, living the dream of having his own publication entirely overwhelmed Poe: underfunded and lacking copy, he desperately heaved in book excerpts and uncredited repeats of his own more obscure short stories. A young Walt Whitman visited the office and found Poe “very kindly and human, but subdued, perhaps a little jaded”—and happy to run Whitman’s piece on music in the November 29 issue. Poe praised it in print by announcing “we agree with our correspondent throughout,” some of the first praise that Whitman received from a major literary figure.

But what Poe needed above all was money. A scant five weeks into his ownership, he sold off half the publication to a partner. Poe drank through the holidays and left the next issue with an entire column blank—the editor’s equivalent of giving up on life. By January 3, 1846, his partner had enough and declared the paper over.

That day found Poe at home—two books, one famous poem, and a wrecked magazine away from where he’d been a year earlier. He was famous, jobless, drunk. Musing over a letter that had come in with yet another cryptogram—readers still tormented Poe with them—he turned from the sodden puzzle
of his own life to the one on the page before him. As he worked out the cipher, the mocking words emerged: “
And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him, they have no wine
. . .”