Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living (Icons) (5 page)

Inevitably, Poe’s own writing suffered. “Having no time upon my hands, from my editorial duties, I can write nothing worth reading,” he admitted to one correspondent. But the professional experience he was gaining was priceless, and his own writing had not been entirely rewarding lately anyway; just before coming onboard the
Messenger
’s staff, the magazine had run his comical hoax “Hans Pfaall”—the purported account of how a Dutch bellows mender escaped his creditors by flying a fantastical new hot-air balloon all the way to the moon. It was inventive, but also too absurd to take seriously. Poe was miffed when, just two months later, a far more elaborate and focused lunar hoax was perpetrated by Richard Adams Locke of the
New York Sun
.

“I am convinced that the idea was stolen from myself,” Poe snapped.

It was his first fling in a long, unfortunate love affair with plagiarism accusations; though this time, at least, Poe had the sense to quickly let it drop. Locke’s immensely successful account of telescope sightings of lunar man-bats and bipedal beavers cavorting around giant sapphire pyramids briefly had the
Sun
’s circulation exceeding that of the
Times
of London; eventually, even Poe admitted that Locke’s work was so ingenious that “not one person in ten” suspected a fraud.

Moving to Richmond, though, brought Poe no end of more earthly concerns. Leaving his aunt Maria and cousin Virginia behind in Baltimore made Poe moderately successful—and instantly regretful. Writing to Kennedy, he admitted that even his unprecedented salary of $520 a year was no solace: “I am suffering under a depression . . . I am miserable in spite of the great improvements in my circumstances.” White saw his assistant’s melancholy dissolving into drinking; writing in alarm to
a friend, he noted Poe “was unfortunately rather dissipated. . . . I should not be at all astonished to hear that he has been guilty of suicide.” He briefly fired Poe altogether—and then, after his magazine instantly ground to a halt, hired him back.

“No man is safe who drinks before breakfast!” White admonished his wayward assistant. “No man can do so, and attend to business properly.”

Poe’s family history did not bode well, as both his birth father and brother had been alcoholics. Edgar drank when he was anxious or distressed, and like his father, he was prone to then turning moody and argumentative. “Mr. Poe was a fine gentleman when he was sober . . .” an office boy at the
Messenger
recalled. “But when he was drinking he was about one of the most disagreeable men I have ever met.” While the rhetoric of the day cast drinking as a moral failure, Edgar rarely did; when he acknowledged it at all, it was as his “illness.” But it was an illness that perhaps he could recover from—and upon Edgar’s return to work, his boss found him newly sober, and his nerves calmed by an assurance from his aunt and cousin that they’d move to Richmond.

Poe now had plenty of catching up to do at the
Messenger
. Starved for material after his absence, in December 1835 and January 1836 the
Messenger
published the first installments of Poe’s unfinished play
Politian
, which clumsily transposed an infamous 1820s Kentucky love triangle to sixteenth-century Rome, and rendered it all in blank verse:

LALAGE
.
A deed is to be done—

Castiglione lives!

POLITIAN
.
And he shall die! (exit.)

LALAGE
.
(after a pause.) And—he—shall—die!—alas!

Castiglione die? Who spoke the words?

Where am I?—what was it he said?—Politian!

Thou art not gone—thou are not gone, Politian!

I feel thou art not gone—yet dare not look
,

Lest I behold thee not; thou couldst not go

With those words upon thy lips—O, speak to me!

It flopped: in fact, the
Messenger
never finished the installments, and
Politian
went unproduced on stage until 1923. Like “Al Aaraaf,” the play is widely cited as one of Poe’s misfires, and like “Al Aaraaf,” that is both true and beside the point. Writing drama forced Poe to
think in scenes
—a critical requirement in playwriting. Droll narrative musings and endlessly digressive scholarship quickly wither in scripts, or at least they must be credibly placed in a character’s mouth.

Poe’s early work indulged in rhetorical and comical extravagances that interrupted the plot and kept it from being believably sustained—a weakness his mentor saw through instantly. “You are strong enough now to be criticized,” Kennedy wrote to Poe shortly after
Politian
ran. “Your fault is your love of the extravagant. Pray beware of it. You find a hundred intense writers for one
natural
one.” Writing
Politian
, and mercilessly editing the work of
Messenger
contributors, were just the correctives Poe needed. With his genius at haunting narrators and an emerging commitment to plot structure, Poe now was growing closer to a mastery of his art.

First, though, he had to earn a living—and get married.

Edgar Allan Poe’s marriage is an awkward matter for biographers; it is either obsessed about as if it provided some great insight into his tortured narrators, or glossed over as a bit of a family embarrassment. The long and careful development of Poe’s voice from his earlier work belies the first notion; state law disproves the second.

Poe’s cousin Virginia Clemm was thirteen years old when he married her in May 1836; Edgar was twenty-seven. To a modern reader, the arrangement seems shocking and illegal, not
least because Virginia’s age is listed on the marriage certificate as twenty-one. Edgar had known her since she was a small child, so this was an unequivocal lie. But it may not have been an entirely necessary lie. In 1836, such marriages were legal: cousins could wed, and Virginia statutes allowed women under twenty-one to be married with their parents’ approval plus two witnesses; provisions of the law show it was applied as early as age twelve. Poe’s aunt Maria approved his marriage to Virginia, which merely left the matter of the two witnesses. Poe’s certificate has
one
witness, so the simplest explanation may be that the second didn’t show up—and they fudged Virginia’s age on an over-twenty-one form, which only required one witness. It was certainly not a secret ceremony; writing to John Pendleton Kennedy a few weeks later, Poe breezily comments, “I presume you have heard of my marriage.”

Still: why marry a thirteen-year-old?

Legal or not, the idea is disturbing—although Poe later hinted that years passed before any consummation, and there is no hint that Virginia was ever pregnant. There may have been financial reasons to marry early, though. A scheme with his aunt Maria to run a boarding house had almost instantly fallen apart, leaving Poe in debt, but the family still had long-term prospects. He held a quixotic notion that the state of Virginia would reimburse the small fortune he believed was owed to his late grandfather, David Poe Sr.; by marrying a cousin from his father’s side and becoming the beneficiary of her mother, he would effectively net a triple share of any future legal settlement.

But, unsettling as it may be today, Poe seems to have believed that Virginia was the person he was meant to be with—and sooner rather than later. Accounts of the couple are unequivocal about their deep affection for each other. “Poe was very proud and very fond of her,” one visitor later recalled, “and used to delight in the round, childlike face and plump little figure, which he contrasted with himself, so thin and half-melancholy-looking,
and she in turn idolized him.” Poe spent much of his salary to procure her tutors, and a harp and piano; stopping by that spring, editor Lambert Wilmer found him “engaged, on a certain Sunday, in giving Virginia lessons in Algebra.”

Poe had become something of a student again himself; handling nearly all of the book reviewing that year at the
Southern Literary Messenger
, he crammed on everything from phrenology (“no longer to be laughed at”) to maritime navigation manuals (“attention to numerical correctness seems to pervade the work”) to floral classification (“deserves the good will of all sensible persons”). When necessary, he cribbed from Rees’s
Cyclopedia
and the local library to keep up the magisterial tone of editorial expertise; there was also plenty of padding provided by long excerpts.

But incoming volumes of fiction and poetry received his much closer and not always friendly attention. Along with their sensational fiction, Poe had also imbibed the
Blackwood’s
ethos of reviewing: namely, to take no prisoners. He often let British works off rather lightly, but pounced on shortcomings in American literature—particularly for the misplaced nationalism, he scoffed, of “liking a stupid book the better, because, sure enough, its stupidity is American.” Among those savaged by Poe for flimsy plotting, bad grammar, and weak meter were the authors of
Paul Ulric
(“despicable in every respect”),
Ups and Downs of a Distressed Gentleman
(“a public imposition”), and
The Confessions of a Poet
(“The most remarkable feature in this production is the bad paper on which it is printed”).

Poe could also lavish praise; indeed, his appreciations feature some of his most careful thinking about craft. In a generally positive review of Robert Bird’s satirical identity-shifting novel
Sheppard Lee
, Poe explained that a fantastical narrator must speak “as if the author were firmly impressed with the truth, yet astonished with the immensity of the wonders he relates, and for which, professedly, he neither claims nor anticipates credence.”
The author must commit to his conceit, in other words—and yet must also perform a sleight of hand, and not over-explain or make the reader conscious of when the story has shifted into the improbable. Poe was, in fact, airing a central tenet of his own fiction: “The attention of the author, who does not depend upon explaining away his incredibilities, is directed to giving them to the character and the luminousness of truth, and thus are brought about, unwittingly, some of the most vivid creations of human intellect. The reader, too, readily perceives and falls in with the writer’s humor, and suffers himself to be borne on thereby.”

But it was the hatchet jobs that readers noticed—and Poe’s most savage assault was on Theodore Fay’s 1835 book
Norman Leslie
. A mediocre novel from the editor of the
New York Mirror
, logrolled by his paper and its friends, it represented everything about New York publishing that the upstart Poe resented. His scathing review singled out lines to correct their grammar and assailed the mistakes as “unworthy of a schoolboy.” To Poe, the attack represented “a new era in our critical literature.” Others were not so sure—he was, one New York magazine suggested, “like the Indian, who cannot realize that an enemy is conquered till he is scalped.”

Poe would have occasion, if not the willingness, to regret his reviews. The careers of the author and the reviewer mix with deceptive and dangerous ease. Reviews are quick but paltry money, distracting from the work that makes a writer’s reputation; they are transient in their effect on readers, but lasting in their damage to a writer’s professional relations. After a month, the magazine and the memory of the review is gone, but for the man whose work is labeled “the most inestimable piece of balderdash with which the common sense of the good people of America was ever so openly and or villainously insulted”—as Poe described Fay’s novel—the enmity is likely permanent.

And Poe certainly needed friends in New York. In June 1836
his manuscript for
Tales of the Folio Club
came back with another crushing rejection, this time from Harper & Brothers. Too much of his collection had already been published in magazines, they explained, and what was more, “they consisted of detached tales and pieces; and our long experience has taught us that both these are very serious objections to the success of any publication. . . . republications of magazine articles, known to be such, are the most unsalable of all literary performances.”

Poe was in good company: that same year, a similar rejection of
Twice-Told Tales
devastated Nathaniel Hawthorne. But what is striking is that authors receive precisely the same rejections from publishers even today. Short fiction sells poorly and is an extravagance barely tolerated even in established writers; editors are not fooled, if they ever were, by the transparent device of pawning off a collection as a singular work by contriving to frame the stories together. And an unsuccessful first work at a major publisher, then as now, is often quietly deemed the death of a career—if not the author’s, then of the editor who knowingly buys a second work from them.

Poe refused to believe this at first and tried unsuccessfully to sell his collection to another publisher. But by the end of 1836, the hard truth of the Harper’s rejection was obvious: his career as an author had led him to a dead end. Worse still, so had his career as an editor. Exasperated by Poe’s drinking and his constant indebtedness, the publisher of the
Southern Literary Messenger
finally fired his brilliant, troublesome employee—and this time would not take him back.

Three months later, Poe stood up before a packed Manhattan hall of authors, editors, and booksellers and announced a toast. “To the monthlies of Gotham!” he called out. “Their distinguished editors, and their vigorous collaborators!”

It was one of innumerable toasts at the city’s first Bookseller’s Dinner; gathered together in Manhattan’s stately City Hotel
on March 30, 1837, authors from Washington Irving to James Fenimore Cooper were in attendance, and even an elderly Noah Webster raised a glass in the hope that “may good books
find or make
good readers.” For Poe, the occasion was a dazzling introduction to his peers; having left his Richmond career in tatters, he moved his household to Manhattan to seek his fortune, and immediately found himself at the epicenter of American publishing.