Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (5 page)

Poe’s tales continue to be the most admired part of his literary legacy, however much he wished to be a poet. One may legitimately ask what were his reasons for resorting to prose fiction as a mainstay, most notably to the short story or, as he preferred, the “tale”? The answer is simple: money. Poe received no profits from his early poems, so he turned to a form that was likely to sell better, the short story, and specifically to short fiction in the Gothic vein. Tales featuring a single character (or at least one who stood out from any others), beset by oppressive and mysterious forces, often amid fantastic settings, existed long before Poe found in this paradigm a suitable creative medium. Terror tales had become staples in periodicals, chiefly in a renowned literary magazine in the Anglo-American literary world during the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, the house organ for the well-established Scottish publishing firm of Blackwood:
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine,
colloquially called
Blackwood’s
or
Blackwood.
It is evident from his writings that Poe’s knowledge of this periodical was extensive. His satiric tale “How to Write a Blackwood Article” and its sequel, “A Predicament,” lampoon not just recurrent themes, motifs, and stylistic techniques of stories from
Blackwood‘s,
but indeed ridicule Poe’s own hallmark methods and themes in fiction. Compelling satire and parody require expert comprehension of what one wishes to treat comically, and so we might examine Poe’s own fiction to discover what he understood of the production of intriguing Gothic tales.

Apparently, from the time he left West Point in 1831 for his grand-mother Poe’s home in Baltimore, until his name appeared in connection with a literary contest in that city late in 1833, he thoughtfully considered what should constitute effective tales of terror. He gave himself an independent study course in content and methodology in popular Gothic fiction as groundwork for his own. He submitted five tales to a prize contest sponsored by a Philadelphia newspaper, the
Saturday Courier,
near the end of 1831. Although none won the prize, they all circulated in the paper, perhaps without Poe’s consent or knowledge, during 1832. The first to appear, “Metzengerstein,” seems all too customarily horrific in its “German” setting and its feuding families, connected by supernatural occurrences, who suffer stupendous catastrophes. Horror is evident in young Frederick Metzengerstein’s lips, lacerated in fright during his sensational final journey mounted on a giant supernatural horse, an ominous, repulsive creature. This tale may devolve from the folk motif of the devil riding a giant black horse to claim his victims. Poe alters the traditional black coloring of the horse to fiery shades. The other
Courier
tales were spoofs on what were then best-selling fictions and their authors, and one was not even Gothic.

In 1833 the Baltimore
Saturday Visiter,
a weekly newspaper, sponsored a competition with cash prizes for the best poem and tale. Poe’s tale “MS. Found in a Bottle” and his poem “The Coliseum” were ranked the winners until the evaluators discovered that both were written by the same person. They decided that the poetry prize would go elsewhere, although Poe asked that they give the other writer the money for the poem but announce that both of his own works had originally been named first’s. Poe’s wish was ignored, the poetry prize going to “Song of the Winds,” by John Hill Hewitt, editor of the
Visiter,
leaving Poe outraged. The prize selections appeared on October 19, 1833, and Poe’s poem on October 26. Those publications, which were reprinted elsewhere in the United States, brought the young writer his first literary recognition.

Looming, too, was another experimental venture of Poe‘s, generally known as “Tales of the Folio Club,” a book of interlocking frame narratives.
⁴
In this scheme, never actualized, a group of writers, the Folio Club, meet monthly for literary reading and critiques. Preceding the readings are substantial suppers accompanied by plenty of alcohol. After each member reads his original “brief prose tale” (a hit at some best-selling author’s typical theme and form), critiques follow. Poe once wrote that these critical interchanges were meant to enliven comedy in the project: Voiced by pretentious would-be authors, each tale is delivered by a first-person narrator, a caricature of an actual popular author represented. Because the author-reader of the worst tale hosts the next meeting, and because one of the group has his works successively targeted, someone in the group eventually becomes enraged, flees to a publisher with the manuscripts, and hurries them into print as an expose, for revenge.

What doubtless enlivened the overall scheme was that the club members, from the effects of either eating or/and drinking too much, would have articulated corresponding bizarre situations and repetitious language patterns within their tales, imparting zesty humor to those fictions, such mirth given point by the critiques. Had “Tales of the Folio Club” been published, a far different conception of Poe might have emerged early in his career—with what future we may only conjecture. Publishers rejected his manuscript, however, on grounds that the content was far too sophisticated for average readers and sales would not warrant the financial risk. Poe eventually dismantled the collection, brought out individual stories in periodicals, and thereby paved the way for readers’ disagreements that continue to be dynamic even today.

From the few manuscript leaves that survive, some ideas about the “Folio Club” are plausible. A portion forming a prologue—to an eleven-story version—lists and tersely characterizes the club members. For example, if in its original
Saturday Courier
form “Metzengerstein,” read by Mr. Horrible Dictu, existed as a “straight” tale of Gothic or “German” sensationalism that, revised for the Folio Club, was improved but remained chiefly serious in import (or indeed if it were read as a Gothic extravaganza), and with its likely position as sixth among Folio Club tales, it might have drawn varied responses from overfed, drunken listeners. First, if it was serious but well done, it might have gained merely a nod from the majority as familiar if unexceptional “German” fiction. Of course, any art in the tale would have eluded inebriated, drowsy listeners. Even if it were intended as a parody of “Germanism,” many could no longer have discerned that possibility. The repetitive phrases and words, the overall incoherence of young Frederick Metzengerstein, the treacherous protagonist, the demonic horse, the suspense and melodrama that surround impending tragedy—all these features might dovetail with an intoxicated reader reading to an intoxicated audience. Nonetheless, in this early tale we find Poe mingling human and animal traits, a mingling that recurs in his fiction: Witness “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Black Cat,” “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” and “Hop-Frog.” In all, however, the surface grotesquerie thinly masks psychological underpinnings.

Several other tales—for example, “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “The Visionary” (later entitled “The Assignation”), and “Bon-Bon”—contain innuendos of gluttony or drunkenness, although the first two do not have the comic surfaces found in the last. In light of the improbabilities or discrepancies in “MS. Found,” which invite wariness as to accuracy, we may ask of the bottle containing the manuscript: Was it a bottle actually tossed into the sea when the protagonist-writer of the manuscript had arrived at his most sensational and improbable adventure, remaining rational enough to pen meticulous diary jottings and attempt to dispatch them? Or was the bottle one on the Folio Club table or one to which the author of the tale had previously liberally resorted as he composed his story? Subtle wordplay alluding to imbibing and low-grade gin may assist us to realize some of Poe’s intent here.

“The Assignation,” too, may reveal alcoholic inspirations. From the torrent of words and kaleidoscopic visual effects in the opening paragraph, on through the narrator’s misapprehensions of the planned “assignation” to an early-morning visit to his mysterious friend’s dwelling, where they drink wine, the narrator grows bewildered by his host’s outré art collection (and, perhaps, the effects of the wine) and the host’s speech, which smacks of wordplay on alcohol (“the very spirit of cordiality”), until he realizes that the other has committed suicide by drinking poisoned wine; he soon learns that the Marchesa, the man’s paramour, has imbibed poison, too. If the entire story in one version was Folio Club material, then the high-pitched language and events may have enhanced a drunkard’s rendering of intense love, wholly misapprehended by him. “The Assignation” derives in large measure from Thomas Moore’s 1830 biography of Lord Byron, The
Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, with Notices of his Life,
although the sensational deaths of the lovers are Poe’s own creation.

“Shadow—A Parable” and “Silence—A Fable” may strike us as deliberately planned for companion reading. The former depicts seven mourners assembled to watch the corpse of Zoilus, fortifying themselves with “red Chian wine.” The formal, repetitive language, the mourners’ solemnity, the aura of impending catastrophe, their terror when Shadow appears and speaks in accents uncannily familiar but indefinable—all these features suggest alcoholic perception and rhetoric. Add a narrator named “Oinos,” Greek for “one” but also for “wine,” and the verdict that it is a wine-bibber’s tale gains strength. This story may also epitomize the general drift of “Tales of the Folio Club”: A group steadily drinks on amid an aura of death and terror (typical themes in Folio Club tales), and the gathering culminates in a rout, one that may signify the insulted club member’s absconding with the manuscripts and publishing them. The oddly familiar language heard by those in “Shadow—A Parable” may in context be redolent of language in Folio Club tales and debates. So, too, with “Silence—A Fable,” probably the tale read by the “very little man in black” whose tale of volatile emotions amid desolate scenery mimes Poe’s own early poems. The original title was “Slope—A Fable,” in which the initial word, a transliteration into English of the Greek word for “Silence,” may too be an anagram for “is Poe,” cream of a bizarre jest. The language—with its many repetitions and sentences starting with conjunctions, the unpleasant backdrop suggestive of decay, alternating calm with storm, the abject narrator and the hapless man on the rock, plus a demon storyteller—could be a drunkard’s verbal expression and his equivalent of “seeing pink elephants.”

Yet another aspect resides in these tales: Both would have appealed to Poe’s contemporaries because the language recalls that in the King James Bible. In “Silence—A Fable” the language notably resembles excited, fulsome “preacher rhetoric” that would have touched sympathetic chords among the more evangelical among them and that might be compared with similar rhetorical strategies in popular nineteenth-century comic takeoffs on sermons—for example, “The Harp of a Thousand Strings” and “Where the Lion Roareth and the Wang doodle Mourneth,” both attributed to William Penn Brannan, and both more overtly good-humored than “Silence—A Fable.” The account of Satan’s temptation of Christ in the wilderness may also have influenced the demon’s profane catechizing of the narrator in the tale. “Shadow—A Parable” recalls Psalm 23, with its valley of the shadow (death), thus adumbrating “Eldorado,” wherein a shadow (perhaps the protagonist’s ambiguous “other”) tells the questing knight that he must descend into the valley of death before his ambitions are fulfilled.

Poe’s oft neglected “King Pest” was during his lifetime never mentioned as a Folio Club tale, but its blended horror and mirth suggest potential kinship with the project. A bizarre group attempts to evade a plague terrorizing their city by sequestering themselves in an undertaker’s parlors, raiding his liquors, and attempting to retain health amidst the squalor of the contagion. Although the group pretends to royal status, such pretense fails to cow the two sailors who stumble into their midst, possibly because the sailors, already intoxicated, recognize like symptoms in those they meet. Collectively, the revolting physical features and stilted, pompous verbalizings of King Pest and his retinue keep readers alert to ambiguities coupling horror (from plague as actual disease and from equally revolting settings) with humor (comic names, “plague” as merely nuisance, wordplay) until the sailors seize Queen Pest and the Arch Duchess Ana-Pest, then bolt, evidently anticipating sexual conquest. As in the Folio Club, in “King Pest” emotions explode into grotesque speeches and actions, and conclude in the high jinks of the abduction of the females, one with decided alcoholism, the other with a give-away literary name. Add the implicit exposure of farce in the “pest-iferous” traits of the characters and the links with literary elements, and we can surmise that this tale might have concluded Poe’s contemplated book, where public revelation of bombast and bogus “quality” would have ensued. The subtitle for “King Pest,” “A Tale Containing an Allegory,” may have indeed glossed potential for the Folio Club, whatever other readings may ob tai
⁵

Here, then, we see Poe creating fiction that might be “popular” in several senses. That these early tales employ situation and language structures involving drunken narrators is no great wonder. Drunken narrators often framed stories that quickly plummeted the protagonist into events of dreadful import, only to close with disclosures that exposed the lurid events as originating in imbibing. Many such yarns came from authors usually designated as “frontier” or “Southwest” humorists. In his blendings of humor and horror emanating from alcohol or other intoxicant origins, Poe resembles many other American authors in his era and many in our own. For example, novels by the British writer Thomas Love Peacock often centered upon dinner-table scenes in which generous amounts of food and drink contributed to entertaining arguments concerning philosophical and literary topics. In
Blackwood’s
serialized “Noctes Ambrosianae,” characters loosely based on the editors and several prominent contributors offer gossip-column commentary ranging from politics and social issues to literary concerns; intermittently, the voices in the “Noctes” seemed to be inspired by alcohol.