Poe (11 page)

So how was he now to live? In a life of unrest and poverty he depended upon the merest chance to rescue his family from devastation. That chance returned in the shape of the erstwhile
Gentleman's Magazine.
William Burton had sold the journal to a young lawyer from
Philadelphia, George Rex Graham. Graham promptly changed the title to
Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine,
but, with little journalistic or literary experience, he needed someone to assist him. Burton himself might have recommended the assistant editor whom he had fired eight months previously. Animosities, in this world, rarely endured for long. And so, in the spring of 1841, Graham offered Poe a salary of eight hundred dollars a year as editor of the book reviews. Poe accepted immediately—with “great pleasure,” as he put it—and once more set to work on another's behalf.

A somewhat sentimental and saccharine affair, with well-meaning verses and tame “thrillers” and illustrations of pets and children, it was not the ideal literary journal of his prospectus. Yet Poe dismissed any misgivings he might have felt, and over the next two years published in its pages some nine new stories, fifty-one reviews, and fifteen essays. Here appeared, for example, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “A Descent into the Maelstrom.”

He considered it a temporary appointment, however, designed to shield him from immediate hardship. Just five months after accepting the post he was actively seeking a clerkship in a political office in Washington. The intermediary was Frederick W. Thomas, whom he had met a year before at a convention in Philadelphia. Thomas was a novelist and journalist who had known Poe's brother, Henry; he also drank a great deal, and had aspirations to literary fame. So a friendship was formed. Thomas was in fact one
of the few close friends Poe ever made. Thomas had acquired a sinecure in Washington, sifting through applications to the department of the Treasury, and he held out to Poe the prospect of similar employment. Poe wrote back enthusiastically. He was “really serious about the office.” He confided to Thomas that “notwithstanding Graham's unceasing civility, and real kindness, I feel more & more disgusted with my situation.” He was a hired hand on a mediocre publication.

Yet he was earning the largest income he had so far enjoyed. He told one acquaintance that “I am temperate even to rigor,” and for the first time in his adult life he was free of debt. He purchased some unaccustomed luxuries, including a four-poster bed, a porcelain dinner service, and, for Virginia, a piano and a harp. He attended literary dinners, mingling with other authors and other publishers, and was also a frequent visitor at Graham's own table. It is reported that Maria Clemm would wait in Graham's kitchen, with the express purpose of keeping Poe from excessive drinking and of accompanying him home.

The hope of a Washington post, like all of Poe's aspirations, came to nothing. But, in the autumn of 1841, he reached an agreement with Graham to stay at his editorial post through the following year. There is every reason why Graham would wish him to continue. The circulation of the periodical had climbed from five thousand to twenty-five thousand, and that rise had more than a little to do with the publication of Poe's tales and reviews. Through
his agency
Graham's Magazine,
as it was universally called, would soon become the largest selling monthly magazine in America.

Poe once described himself as “essentially a Magazinist,” and, in certain respects, he did have the sensibility of a journalist. He had an eye for effect, a predilection for novelty, an interest in contemporary crazes such as phrenology and ballooning, and a shrewd notion of the public taste for “sensation.” He wrote to one correspondent that the whole tendency of the age was towards magazine literature—“to the curt, the terse, the well timed, and the readily diffused, in preference to the old forms of the verbose and ponderous …” It might almost be a definition of his fiction. He was always in the marketplace.

After Poe's death, Graham wrote a tribute to him in which he described him as “punctual and unwearied in his industry—
and the soul of honor,
in all his transactions … He kept his accounts, small as they were, with the accuracy of a banker.” He also extolled him as a “polished gentleman” and a “devoted husband,” even in “his high-hearted struggle with adverse fate.” Graham left a small detail that helps to explain the nature of the Poe household: “What he received from me in regular monthly instalments, went di-rectly into the hands of his mother-in-law …”

Poe believed now that he had written enough new tales, in
Graham's Magazine
and elsewhere, to offer an expanded volume of them to Lea and Blanchard. He wished it to be called
Phantasy Pieces
and would include the tales already published by that firm under the title of
Tales of the
Grotesque and Arabesque,
as well as eight more recently written tales. Lea and Blanchard refused the offer, on the grounds that they still had unsold stock of the previous publication.

Among the rejected tales was “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which in later years was hailed as the harbinger of the modern detective story. It was fashioned around the character of C. Auguste Dupin, the French detective who resolves the most grotesque or ambiguous crimes with the keen logic of calculation. Dupin might be a version of his author. Poe prided himself on his intimacy with the secrets of cryptography, and successfully resolved the most apparently insoluble or enigmatic codes. He even started a series of papers in
Graham's Magazine
in which he challenged all exponents of “secret messages.” He loved the idea of unravelling secret writings, of saying the un-sayable. Could the idea of the secret also be related to the mystery of his father's disappearance and of his mother's supposed disgrace? He boasted to a friend that “nothing intelligible can be written which, with time, I cannot decipher.” And so it proved.

He said that “the
highest
order of the imaginative intellect is always pre-eminently mathematical” and that genius itself consisted of “method.” But the assumption of analysis and calculation was in part artificial: he confessed that the power of his studies lay in their
“air
of method.”

Poe evinced another form of calculation, too. He was often very sly, or subtle, in his dealing with other people. He was a great calculator in human relationships, ever
watchful of himself and of others. He strove after certain effects with the brilliant ease of a born manipulator. In one letter he confessed that “the peevishness was all ‘put on’ as a part of my argument—of my plan:—so was the ‘indignation’ with which I wound up.” Yet there is something almost childlike about this trait in his character. He suffered agonies after any drinking bout, in part because he hated the sensation of losing all sense of calculation.

Many of his most successful stories are, therefore, “tales of ratiocination.” The word “detective” was not coined until 1843. Dupin is, perhaps, the first. As such he is the forerunner of such diverse “ratiocinators” as Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown. As Arthur Conan Doyle put it, Poe “was father of the detective tale, and covered its limits so completely I fail to see how his followers can find ground to call their own.” Dupin is a bachelor, with an amanuensis who records the details of his investigation; he has only a provisional contact with the police, who come to solicit his help with the crimes they cannot solve. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” these concern the gruesome murders of a mother and young daughter. But Dupin subjects these events to impersonal and objective analysis. He is the Newton of the criminal world. Through a process of deduction and elimination Dupin comes to the conclusion that the perpetrator was not a human being at all. So he sets a trap. Poe described the story as “something in a new key.”

One of the other stories of this period, “Eleanora,” has a curious resonance in Poe's life. The narrator, Pyrros,
has married his fifteen-year-old cousin. “We lived all alone, knowing nothing of the world without the valley—I, and my cousin, and her mother.” This is an image of Poe's own existence, of course, but in his imagination events take a fatal turn. The young bride dies of consumption. Before her death she wrings a promise from Pyrros that he will never love another woman. But, in that, he proves false to her. The rest of the story is not important, with its maladroit “happy ending,” but there was another and more immediate parallel. A few months after this story was composed, Virginia herself succumbed to the first stages of consumption.

I
n the middle of January 1842, Virginia Poe had been singing at the piano, one of her favourite pastimes, when she stopped suddenly; she began coughing up blood. Poe considered it to be the rupture of a blood vessel, but the effusion is more likely to have been from her weakened lungs.

After the irruption she required the utmost attention, but circumstances were far from ideal for the care of an invalid. One neighbour reported that she was obliged to lie in a narrow bed, in a tiny bedroom with a ceiling so low that her head almost touched it; here she suffered, hardly able to breathe. But no one dared to mention the cramped surroundings to Poe, who had become “oversensitive and irritable;” “quick as steel and flint” said one who knew him in those days. Graham recalled that he would hover about his wife's bed, alert to every tremor and cough with “a shudder, a heart-chill that was visible.” And he would not
allow a word about the danger of her dying—“the mention of it drove him wild.”

Yet he still wrote about death endlessly. In “Life in Death,” a painter wishes to portray his young bride; but, in the turret room which is his studio, she pines and sickens to death. By painting her, he kills her. In the same year Poe wrote “The Masque of the Red Death,” a story of death and pestilence in which “blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood.” He wrote “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” in which a young girl is murdered by person or persons unknown. He wrote “The Tell-Tale Heart,” a story of intolerable intensity told by a maniac; this close and almost suffocating narrative concludes with a cry of terror, “here, here! it is the beating of his hideous heart!” In this same year, too, he wrote “Lenore,” an encomium upon a young woman and “A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.”

He wandered about the streets for hours, in despair, until Mrs. Clemm became so alarmed by his absence that she would leave the house in search of him. At this time, too, he began once more to drink. In periods of the utmost distress and anxiety, it was for him the natural course. No force on earth could have prevented him. Of Virginia he wrote that “at each accession of the disorder I loved her more dearly and clung to her life with more desperate pertinacity.” But then “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness, I drank—God only knows how often or how much.” He related the drink to the insanity, but it is
more likely that the temporary insanity emerged from the drink. He had an unusually nervous constitution, and any assault upon it had dangerous consequences.

In the spring of 1842 he resigned from
Graham's,
on the apparent grounds of his “disgust with the namby-pamby character of the Magazine … I allude to the contemptible pictures, fashion-plates, music and love tales.” But the real reasons lie deeper. He had once more become “irregular” in his editorial habits. He and a colleague had quarrelled violently, no doubt when Poe was in drink. Then, after one forced absence of some days, he returned to the office only to find someone else occupying his chair. He had no choice but to leave. He would not willingly have forfeited an annual income of eight hundred dollars.

He told one acquaintance in a letter that in any case “the state of my mind” had forced him to abandon “all mental exertion.” His wife's illness, his own ill health and poverty “have nearly driven me to distraction. My only hope of relief is the ‘Bankrupt Act’… but the struggle to keep up has, at length, entirely ruined me.” In the last sentences of this letter he wrote that “Mrs. Poe is again dangerously ill with haemorrhage from the lungs. It is folly to hope.” It seemed that the world was closing in around him; nothing but darkness lay ahead of him. It was in this period that he wrote “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Yet, against all the odds, he did hope. He hoped to obtain a clerkship in the Customs House at Philadelphia, again through the agency of Thomas. He hoped to revive the plans for his own journal, the
Penn Magazine.