Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living (Icons) (9 page)

Poe successfully repeated the lecture in other cities, but by the spring of 1844, he’d cycled through many nearby mid-Atlantic venues; going further would take him far from his aunt and his ailing wife, and his disastrous lost week in Washington had already shown him how dangerous that was. Instead, that spring saw Poe revealing to editors what would be the most polished of his detective stories: “The Purloined Letter.”

After the creative landmark of “Rue Morgue” and the unexpected
dead end of “Marie Roget,” Poe’s latest story represented a perfecting of the form—a demonstration that the detective story was not only repeatable, but wonderfully adaptable. In telling the story of a devious government minister who hides a stolen document, Poe finally mastered the characters
around
his protagonist of Dupin. Here the police prefect so airily dismissed in “Rue Morgue” becomes that sturdy archetype of the detective genre: the by-the-book police chief. The sidekick, though still unnamed, is at long last given real dialogue—including a questioning of the visiting prefect that shows Dupin and his sidekick developing the easy rapport of a true detective duo:

“Proceed,” said I.

“Or not,” said Dupin.

Poe had learned much from the failed plotting of “Marie Roget” and the successful characterizations of “The Gold-Bug”; now the entire story leads inexorably to the ending, and Dupin only lectures through
some
of it—after the prefect and the sidekick have appeared in scene with him. Poe himself was aware of just what he had achieved. Writing to James Lowell soon afterwards, he admitted that “ ‘The Purloined Letter,’ forthcoming in
The Gift
, is, perhaps, the best of my tales of ratiocination.”

For what Poe terms
ratiocination
—that is, deductive analysis and puzzle-solving—does indeed remain at the center of “The Purloined Letter.” For those who had simply associated Poe’s stories with sensational gore and insanity, this was a key revelation. While it was true that “Rue Morgue” featured a double-murder with a victim nearly shoved straight up a chimney, that was not an essential feature of the story. There is no direct violence at all in “The Purloined Letter”—nothing but the faint threat of it, perhaps, and the distraction of a blank pistol fired
outside. The action of the story, such as it is, involves shuffling a couple of pieces of paper.

Dupin’s deductive process—which, as in “Rue Morgue,” the story compares at length to puzzles and gameplay—proves to be one of the most simple and powerful motives in fiction. That motive, curiously, has very little to do with violence or sensation at all. It is the bringing of order to disorder, and causality to the seemingly inexplicable. This is why, whether it features a mere document or a ghastly corpse, mystery readers ever since have associated the genre’s classic form with a curious sort of comfort; it is the same satisfaction as in solving a crossword.

Had Poe never written another line, his place in history would still be assured. With “The Purloined Letter,” he had demonstrated that the detective story was no fluke, but a wondrously flexible and compelling mode of storytelling—a genre that could grow into one of the most popular forms of literature in the world. And like many authors at the height of their powers, Poe saw where his path would inevitably lead next: New York City.

4

The Shakespeare of America

I
T IS NOT OFTEN
that we can imagine ourselves in the place of Edgar Allan Poe, but there is one day we can conjure rather well: that of April 7, 1844. It was a sleepy morning in Greenwich Village, with the latest papers reporting “Nothing of the slightest consequence in the legislative proceedings yesterday”; the only excitement to be found was from the P. T. Barnum’s American Museum & Perpetual Fair a few blocks over, which advertised “
MR. AND MRS. RANDALL
, the largest
GIANT
!
AND GIANTESS
!! in the world.”

Poe was contentedly recovering from a hearty boarding-house breakfast—“excellent-flavored coffee, hot & strong—not very clear & no great deal of cream—veal cutlets, elegant ham & eggs & nice bread and butter”—as his wife, Virginia, mended his pants from where he’d caught them on a nail. With some time to kill, he wrote a letter to his aunt Maria about the wondrous metropolis; the letter is perhaps the chattiest and warmest he ever wrote. It is a glimpse of the man, rather than the icon.

“When we got to the wharf, it was raining hard,” he wrote of their arrival in Manhattan. “I left her on board the boat, after putting the trunks in the Ladies’ cabin, and set off to buy an umbrella and look for a boarding house. I met a man selling umbrellas, and bought one for 62 cents. Then I went up Greenwich St. and soon found a boarding house. . . . The house is old & looks buggy—the landlady is a nice chatty old soul. . . . Her husband is living with her—a fat, good-natured old soul.”

He hadn’t forgotten the cat, Catterina, they’d left back home—“I wish Kate could see it—she would faint”—and marveled at the cheap rent (“cheapest board I ever knew, taking into consideration the central situation”) and mountainous servings of cake provided by the landlady (“no fear of starving here”). It was a promising start for an ambitious writer’s great move to New York City, and he cheerily assured his aunt Maria that until they could afford to pay for her to move up to Manhattan and join them, he and Virginia would keep well.

“I feel in excellent spirits, & haven’t had a drop to drink,” he added.

With Virginia’s tuberculosis at bay for the moment (“she has coughed hardly any and had no night sweat”), they set about finding more permanent digs, settling on rooms in a farmhouse near 84th Street and Broadway—an inexpensive rural location, one so remote that two hundred acres of pasture surrounded it. Strolling through the future midtown and uptown of Manhattan, and boyishly paddling a skiff out onto the Hudson River, Poe saw that it would not remain rustic for long.

“I could not look on the magnificent cliffs, and stately trees, which at every moment met my view, without a sigh for their inevitable doom—inevitable and swift,” he predicted. “In twenty years, or thirty at farthest, we shall see nothing more romantic than shipping, warehouses, and wharves.”

In fact, the Hudson River had already turned busy with treasure hunters. In the wake of the immense popularity of “The Gold-Bug,” a salvage crew announced the discovery of Captain Kidd’s wreck in thirty feet of water at the bottom of the Hudson. “A spacious diving bell has been procured, suits of sub-marine armor provided for the workmen, and apparatus for digging, scraping, &c., has likewise been prepared,” announced one New York newspaper. Some half a million dollars in stock was issued to salvage investors, and though Poe was well aware of the venture, he was too poor to buy a stake in it himself. That was
just as well, as the company was run by swindlers; they planted artifacts in the river, “found” them, and ran off with a small fortune from gullible New Yorkers.

Poe, though, already had his own hoax in the works.

“
ASTOUNDING NEWS
! By Express, via Norfolk!
THE ATLANTIC CROSSED IN THREE DAYS
!
SIGNAL TRIUMPH OF MR. MONCK MASON
’
S FLYING MACHINE
!!!” roared the front page of the
Sun
on April 13, 1844. By their account, eight Englishmen—including well-known aeronaut Monck Mason and popular author Harrison Ainsworth—had crossed the ocean in an immense airship dubbed
The Victoria
. “The Great Problem is at length solved!” exulted the paper in its lengthy cover story. “The air, as well as the earth and the ocean, has been subdued by science, and will become a common and convenient highway for mankind.”

New Yorkers were stunned, but the feat had been a long time in coming. There were claims in New York newspapers as early as 1800 that “A whole fleet of balloons is soon to proceed to America” from France. By 1835, Manhattanites were informed that a balloonist planned to pilot an “Aerial Ship” from downtown Manhattan across the ocean, and in recent months the Pennsylvania balloonist John Wise had announced yet another attempt. Still, news of a successful flight—“unquestionably the most stupendous, the most interesting, and the most important undertaking, ever accomplished or even attempted by man”—excited enough New Yorkers that, at least by Poe’s account, “the whole square surrounding the ‘Sun’ building was literally besieged. . . . I never witnessed more intense excitement to get possession of a newspaper.”

It was, of course, a complete humbug.

New Yorkers did not stay duped for long: though Poe’s name appears nowhere in the story, having
The Victoria
land at Sullivan’s Island was a tip-off, as he’d used the same setting for “The Gold-Bug.” But coming just a week after his arrival in
the city, the hoax was a fine calling card, even if Poe was slightly irritated to still find himself a footnote to Richard Locke Adams’s “Moon Hoax” years earlier in the same paper. “The
success
of the hoax is usually attributed to its correctness,” he pointed out afterwards. “The ‘Balloon-Story,’ which had
no
error, and which related nothing that might not really have happened, was discredited on account of the frequent previous deceptions, of similar character, perpetrated by the
Sun
.”

It was newspapers and magazines, though, where Poe would have to earn his living in New York. For despite his hopes that Charles Dickens would find him a London publisher, none was forthcoming—and nor would there ever be, as they were free to simply pirate American work.

“The want of an International Copy-right Law, by rendering it nearly impossible from the booksellers in the way of remuneration for literary labor, has had the effect of forcing many of our very best writers into the service of Magazines and Reviews,” Poe complained in an editorial. Poe certainly had himself in mind; in the autumn of 1844 he’d landed work at the
New York Mirror
, editing copy and writing unsigned items. “It was rather a step downward” from editing
Graham’s
, his boss Nathaniel Parker Willis admitted later, but it was the best job they could offer.

Penning pieces with titles like “Try a Mineralized Pavement” was hardly what Poe had foreseen when he moved, though he could take a certain droll amusement in hackwork. Stopping by a tobacco shop one evening, he found employee Gabriel Harrison struggling to pen a campaign song for the local Democratic party, and offered his assistance. “While I was waiting upon a customer,” Harrison recalled later, “he had composed a song to the measure and time of the ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ ” The hastily penned lyrics (“See the White Eagle soaring aloft to the sky / Wakening the broad welkin with his loud battle cry . . .”) suited Harrison fine, though the erstwhile songwriter demurred
any payment but “a pound of my best coffee.” When the grateful Harrison asked the lyricist for his name, he smiled faintly.

“Thaddeus Perley, at your service,” he replied.

It was not until later that Harrison was introduced to the same gentleman under a different name—and by then, there would be few indeed who could not recite a few lines by Edgar Allan Poe.

There was more than mere whimsy to Poe’s songwriting; as the child of a theatrical family, music remained one of his most powerful and inchoately recalled loves. “I am profoundly excited by music, and some poems,” he wrote that year to James Lowell. “Music is the perfection of the soul, or idea, of Poetry. The vagueness of exaltation aroused by a sweet air (which should be indefinite and never too strongly suggestive) is precisely what we should aim at.”

Although his hackwork and fiction paid better, Poe’s first love remained poetry. The Romantic bards of his youth—Keats, Byron, Moore, and Coleridge—all possessed a “vagueness of exaltation” exemplified in the latter’s dreamlike “Kubla Khan,” and a musicality so pronounced that in Moore’s case he was initially famed as a balladeer. (Tellingly, Poe was unmoved by the more prosaic Wordsworth.) As a critic, Poe’s most extravagant praise went to poets, particularly Alfred Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett. Drawing upon the meter of the future Mrs. Browning’s “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” Poe hit upon the opening lines of his most famous work, “The Raven”:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary
,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping
,

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door
.

“ ’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—

Only this and nothing more.”

One question too rarely asked of poems is why they are poems at all; after all, if one were to remove the line breaks and rhymes from the above lines, it would remain unmistakably a work by Poe. Midnight, dreariness, the strategically unnamed old tome, the liminal state of just dropping off to sleep, the denial of a supernatural visitation: we might as easily speak of Ligeia or Roderick Usher. And as it unfolds, the raven driving the grieving narrator mad with refrains of “Nevermore” serves as the same compulsive, self-destructive agent as heartbeats or black cats do for Poe’s other increasingly frantic narrators.

But by rendering it as a poem, Poe’s favored arc of visitation, denial, and destruction is laid bare in the space of a single newspaper column; both thematically and visually, it has what Poe would later call a “unity of effect.” Even a child can spot and then anticipate the cumulative pattern of “The Raven,” a powerful repetition inexorably heightening into wild despair; when combined with the easily memorized meter, and a stylized tragic loss without any of the visceral horrors of Poe’s fictions, it is a poem that any child or adult
could
read.

Poe knew he had achieved something rare in “The Raven.” Unusually for him, he sent a draft to the British poet Richard Horne—whose epic poem “Orion” Poe greatly respected—to ask him his opinion of the work, and to forward it to Elizabeth Barrett. Perhaps Poe already knew what their reaction would be. His friend William Ross Wallace—who himself achieved fame with “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle”—also recalled Poe reading him the still-unpublished lines, to which Wallace replied that they were “fine, uncommonly fine.”