Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living (Icons) (6 page)

He was not part of that center yet. Poe had made his name as a Southern critic, insulting some of the very authors he dined with that evening, and he remained so unknown that he did not appear in exhaustive newspaper articles about the dinner—indeed, he was only there as a guest of his new housemate, the antiquarian bookseller William Gowans. Yet Poe had good reason to be there that night, for among the publishers present was James Harper. Edgar had taken the advice of Harper’s rejection letter and was now writing a novel for them.

When the first two chapters of
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
ran that year in
Southern Literary Messenger
, they scarcely read like a novel; the first chapter was essentially a lad’s adventure of a hairbreadth’s escape, the second a
Blackwood’s
-style predicament story about a stowaway trapped in a pitch-black cargo hold. But now Poe became serious about writing a novel, inspiring possibly the most disciplined stretch of his life since his time in the army. Holed up in a Greenwich Village boarding house with Maria, Virginia, and Gowans, Poe stopped drinking and wrote
Pym
at a breakneck pace. “I must say I never saw him the least affected with liquor,” Gowans recalled of these months. He found that Poe kept “good hours” working away at his book, tended to by his protective wife and aunt. At the end of June, Harper’s filed for copyright; only an economic crash kept it waiting until 1838 to arrive in stores.

What readers found was an account that purported to be collected by Poe, but as the “true” narrative of Pym, the survivor
of an extraordinary stowaway voyage to the South Pole. Or, as the subtitle exhaustively explained:
Comprising the Details of a Mutiny and Atrocious Butchery on Board the American Brig Grampus, on Her Way to the South Seas, in the Month of June 1827. With an Account of the Recapture of the Vessel by the Survivors; Their Shipwreck and Subsequent Horrible Sufferings from Famine; Their Deliverance by the Means of the British Schooner Jane Guy; the Brief Cruise of This Latter Vessel in the Antarctic Ocean; Her Capture, and the Massacre of her Crew Among a Group of Islands in the Eighty-Fourth Parallel of Southern Latitude; Together with the Incredible Adventures and Discoveries Still Further South to Which That Distressing Calamity Gave Rise
.

Pym
begins matter-of-factly and gradually descends into a nightmare of piracy, murder, cannibalism, ghost ships, and a fantastical voyage to the South Pole that terminates in a mass slaughter of natives and sailors alike. Unable to extricate his protagonist, Poe simply cuts the book short as they approach the Pole, with a haunting figure confronting Pym and his companion Peters as they see what may be a giant Antarctic hole into a hollow globe: “And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.”

It is a haunting ending; it is also a fudge, and the author knew it.

Novel writing was difficult for Poe. Although he’d blithely claimed in the
Southern Literary Messenger
that “We cannot bring ourselves to believe that less actual ability is required in the composition of a really good ‘brief article,’ than in a fashionable novel of the usual dimensions,” he was not speaking from experience, and had little idea of how to construct extended narrative. And while it’s a less obvious paste-up job than the
Folio Club
would have been,
Pym
is still essentially three novellas stuck together: a stowaway adventure, an endurance narrative, and a lost-world tale. Racing to finish his book, Poe stuffed the first two sections with plagiarisms that read like schoolboy reports on everything from cargo stowage technique to penguin rookeries. Once Poe begins the innovative proto–science fiction of the latter third of the book, the plagiarisms vanish as well—save for the cheeky reuse of hieroglyphics, which here become Antarctic runes. Writing about a land where the trees and “the very rocks are novel,” and where even the water is a viscous purple fluid veined “like the hues of a changeable silk,” Poe’s storytelling becomes wildly creative.

It was this part of
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
to which the reading public truly responded; one reviewer found it “a very clever extravaganza” while another announced that “Pym’s adventures have been infinitely more interesting than any before recorded.” Even if some dismissed it as a humbug—which it was, and a few readers were actually fooled—the public fascination with the recent expeditions to the Antarctic, and the wild hollow-earth theories then fashionable, meant that Poe’s novel attracted enough notice to be republished in Britain, if not enough to warrant a second printing back home.

Poe himself was neither satisfied nor enriched. Editor Evert Duyckinck recalled that he “did not appear in his conversation to pride himself much upon it.” Yet Poe was too quick to write off an admittedly flawed work, for
Pym
contains some of his most extraordinary writing. Take for instance, the apparent arrival in chapter 10 of a Dutch brig to “save” the castaway Pym—its sailors leaning over the railings to nod encouragingly as they approach—which proves to be an entire ship of corpses struck dead by an unknown disaster, their erect corpses only animated by the writhing and tearing of seagulls in their innards. It is a scene of horror that rivals the best of Poe’s short fiction.

And yet
Pym
could not sustain him; before the book came
out, the author had moved his family yet again, this time to Philadelphia, where he desperately sought a civil service clerkship—“Intemperance, with me, has never amounted to a habit,” he pleaded in one letter, adding that he had “abandoned the vice altogether, and without a struggle.” When that didn’t work, he haplessly trained in lithographer’s work. One friend, visiting Poe’s home, found the author “literally suffering for want of food.”

To the extent that Poe was earning a living at all, it seems to have been from newspaper hackwork that denied him even the dignity of a byline; to this day, we scarcely know what he wrote during these months. It was disheartening and humiliating. It was also the beginning of one of the most extraordinary periods of literary genius that America has seen before or since.

3

The Glorious Prospect

B
Y
1838,
POE HAD BEEN
writing for publication for at least eleven years—or about as long as a traditional guild artisan takes to ascend from apprentice to journeyman to master. With his latest story, Poe himself sensed the maturation of his ability. “ ‘Ligeia,’ ” he would tell editor Evert Duyckinck a decade later, “is undoubtedly the best story I have written.” While he wrote many other contenders for that honor, “Ligeia” was indeed the end of his journeyman days—his first unequivocal masterpiece. Its appearance in the September 1838 issue of the
American Museum
, more than any other work, marked the arrival of Edgar Allan Poe as a great American writer.

“I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia,” begins his tale, and the line is a telling one. In recounting a ghostly, strong-willed first wife who entirely overtakes the body of a dying, passive second wife, “Ligeia” makes a masterly use of Poe’s invocation of the vague and inexpressible to haunt the reader. “Long years have elapsed” since the events, but we do not know how many; they met in “some large, old, decaying city near the Rhine,” but he does not recall which; incredibly, the narrator—himself unnamed—admits that he never knew Lady Ligeia’s last name. What
is
sharply rendered is a wild phantasmagoria of settings—rooms with writhing, animate curtains; arabesque carpets; Egyptian sarcophagi; grotesque wood carvings—and an obsessive detail over the faintest and possibly
hallucinatory noises and hints of color in the dying woman’s cheeks.

“Ligeia” returns to two of Poe’s signature themes—liminal states of life and death, and the fluidity of identity—and continues a brilliant use of gothic settings that were curiously old-fashioned even by 1838. Yet Poe does not jest with or even acknowledge these as fictional conventions; he waited until a couple of months later, in his satirical “How to Write a
Blackwood’s
Article,” to indulge in that. Instead, “Ligeia” was Poe’s first story to absolutely sustain the voice of the narrator and a belief in the conceit. He never breaks character—not to slip in an ostentatious scholarly joke, not for a sly nudge to the reader, not for grotesque description for its own sake. This disciplined internal logic would become a hallmark of Poe’s craft, and the defining characteristic of the stories that we still read today.

Not everything he wrote that autumn would pass on to such fame. That season also saw him toiling over the least-known and most confoundingly odd book in the Poe canon:
The Conchologist’s First Book
.

Despite his breakthrough effort in “Ligeia,” Poe lacked steady work, and his
Pym
money was long spent. However, his friend Thomas Wyatt needed a nominal author for a cheap schoolroom edition of his own
Manual of Conchology
, which his publisher Harper & Brothers had insisted on only selling in an expensive version. For fifty dollars, Wyatt bought Poe’s name on the cover—and apparently some editing work inside—to retool the
Manual
into a “new” book, neatly circumventing Harper. Much as Poe needed the money, it was an unwise scheme—not least because Harper was also Poe’s publisher. Any chance of his working with them again had now been squandered.

For the moment, though, the commission seemed a stroke of luck, as did a letter that arrived just weeks after the April 1839 release of Poe’s would-be seashell textbook. William Burton, a comic actor with literary aspirations, had recently bought out
the upstart local
Gentleman’s Magazine
and rechristened it
Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine
—and now, as Poe had hoped, he needed editorial help.

“Shall we say ten dollars per week for the remaining portion of the year?” Burton proposed. “Two hours a day, except occasionally, will, I believe, be sufficient for all required, except in the production of any article of your own.”

A comedian might believe a monthly magazine can be edited in two hours a day, but Poe was experienced enough to know better. He took the job anyway. He needed the salary, and the bold letters that now ran across the magazine—“
EDITED BY WILLIAM E. BURTON AND EDGAR A. POE
”—finally gave Poe the credit he so keenly desired. It also gave him a platform for his own work—too much of one, perhaps, as Burton quickly had Poe covering everything from proofreading and fillers to book reviews. It is typical that the same September 1839 issue that ran Poe’s enervating, sickly masterpiece “The Fall of the House of Usher” also ran an anonymous Poe piece on “Field Sports and Manly Pastimes,” that he bylined “By an Experienced Practitioner.”

The boast may not be entirely fanciful; Poe implies he was familiar with nearby Barrett’s Gymnasium, which is in character with his youthful achievements in running and swimming. Sam Barrett was a boxer fond of the company of actors; there are accounts of Poe spending time in an actor’s drinking salon in Philadelphia, and certainly his own boss was a prominent thespian. Why not an after-work session with them on Barrett’s punching bags?

Although Poe chafed against the low manners and cheapness of his employer (“Do not think of subscribing,” he snapped to a friend inquiring about Burton’s magazine), the association was helping him more than he cared to admit. The same month that “Usher” appeared, his allegorical masterpiece “William Wilson” ran in a local publisher’s gift annual—prosaically
titled
The Gift
—in which Poe and Burton were the largest contributors. Heavily illustrated annuals were the sort of sentimental publisher’s ballast that Poe disdained, but their popularity among Victorians meant he was now reaching an ever-wider audience.

He was also reaching them at the height of his powers. “The Fall of the House of Usher” is closely allied to “Ligeia” in its execution. There is the indistinct date and gothic setting; the wild and oversensitive intelligence of Roderick Usher; the terrifying confusion between living and dead; and the unsettling conviction that the very walls are alive. In “Usher,” though, we are also given a sympathetic narrator—the ordinary witness to extraordinary madness, a tradition that would continue through American literature from
Moby-Dick
to
The Great Gatsby
and
On the Road
.

The story bore an unexpected ethical resemblance to another recent work, though:
The Conchologist’s First Book
. Poe was becoming dangerously fond of borrowing from other authors. For the climax of “Usher”—a recitation from a fanciful old book that is uncannily matched by ghastly sounds outside Usher’s chamber—Poe quietly lifted the plot of the 1828
Blackwood’s
story “The Robber’s Tower.” It is an irony befitting that piratical era that, perhaps unknown to Poe, both
The Manual of Conchology
and “The Robber’s Tower”
also
lifted, without attribution, from earlier works.

With the publication of “Usher” and “William Wilson”—a doppelganger story worthy of Nathaniel Hawthorne, in which a dissolute protagonist slays his own conscience in the form of a namesake tormentor—Poe was emboldened to revisit the notion of publishing a collection. It helped that Washington Irving wrote to him that “I am much pleased with a tale called ‘The House of Usher,’ and should think that a collection of tales, equally well written, could not fail of being favorably received.” But when Poe approached Philadelphia publisher Lea
& Blanchard, he met nearly the same response as before: short story collections don’t make money. The publisher would risk a run of only 1,750 copies—which they soon slashed to 750—and Poe’s entire payment would be twenty author copies.