Edgar Allan Poe (7 page)

Military Academy West Point
.

The change removes much of the poem’s complexity. Poe regretted it. He reverted to the 1829 version of ‘Tamerlane’ as the basis for later reprintings and made ‘The Lake’ a distinct work again.

The cadets did not like
Poems
at all. Assuming it would be filled with the satirical verse Poe had written at West Point, they were disappointed to find none of the poems they expected. Few copies reached the general public. A couple of mixed reviews appeared in the New York press, and Philadelphia editors reprinted selections. ‘To Helen’ appeared in
Atkinson’s Saturday Evening Post
, and
Atkinson’s Casket
reprinted ‘To Helen’, ‘Irene’ and ‘Sonnet: To Science’.
³⁵

Edward J. Coale placed an advertisement for the book in the
Baltimore Gazette
the last week of April. That same week, the
Baltimore Patriot
reviewed
Poems
. The reviewer took offence at Poe’s position in ‘Letter to Mr —’, that ‘none but poets are capable of forming a true estimate, or passing a correct judgment on poetry’. If that’s the way Poe wanted it, so be it. The reviewer continued: ‘Not, then, being poets, but belonging to the larger class thus challenged, we must profit by the monition, and carefully avoid expressing an opinion on the merits of the book.’
³⁶
Presumably, Poe himself brought the extra copies of
Poems
with him from New York, so Coale’s advertisement helps date his return to Baltimore.

Now living with Maria Clemm, Poe occasionally wrote to John Allan to beg for money. This summer Poe’s future became even more tenuous. In Richmond on 23 August 1831, Louisa Allan gave her husband a legitimate heir, John Allan, Jr.

‘To dream has been the business of my life’: so the nameless hero tells the narrator of ‘The Visionary’, the romantic tale Poe published in the January 1834 issue of
Godey’s Lady’s Book
. The hero is based on Lord Byron, but his statement reflects a personal ideal of the story’s author. Poe very much wanted to make dreaming
his
lifelong pursuit, dreaming in the broadest sense of the term, a wide-awake dreaming that would fully utilize his mental powers. He wanted to explore the possibilities of his mind, testing the limits of his imagination to see how far he could take it.

John Allan’s death in the last week of March 1834 changed Poe’s dreams for good. Though Allan now had a legitimate heir, Poe still expected some kind of inheritance, one substantial enough to let him live comfortably and devote his life to literature. When Allan’s will was probated the second week of May, Poe was stunned by his foster father’s neglect. Allan had left him nothing. Poe suddenly faced a daunting future: he now had to rely on his pen for his livelihood. Besides Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, no contemporary American author made a living solely as an author. For Poe, the situation was distasteful as well as intimidating. The world of the imagination, he naively believed, should be free from the crass and cut-throat world of business.

Poe’s whereabouts for much of the year remains a mystery. Not until November did he inform John Pendleton Kennedy of his financial plight. He wrote to Kennedy because he was wondering if Henry Carey might provide him an advance on
Tales of the Folio Club
. Since Kennedy had sent Poe’s manuscript to him the previous November, Carey had held onto it without making a decision. Carey’s behaviour seems unconscionable. If he did not want the book, he should have said so instead of stringing Poe along for a year.

Upon receiving Poe’s letter, Kennedy again wrote Carey, who replied quickly this time. Though willing to publish
Tales of the Folio Club
, he did not expect to profit from it. Considering the book’s unlikely prospects, he hesitated to pay its author an advance. Instead, Carey said Poe could turn a better profit by offering his tales to the annual gift books. A few years earlier Carey’s quondam business partner Isaac Lea had suggested much the same to Poe, who had not taken advantage of the idea then due to his inexperience with the publishing world. This time Carey specifically recommended
The Gift
, the annual Eliza Leslie edited. Piecemeal publication of several stories in the annuals could generate more income than the publication of a single volume of tales.

Carey’s hesitance to reject
Tales of the Folio Club
stemmed from his respect for Kennedy, not from indecisiveness. His comment about
The Gift
shows he was a shrewd businessman and a skilled publisher. He could look at a piece of writing, recognize where it belonged, and understand how to maximize income from it. Though disliking this dollars-and-cents approach to literature, Poe slowly realized he needed to become more business savvy if he ever hoped to profit from his writing. Disagreeable as it was, he needed to think about literature in terms of how much money he could make from it.

For one thing, he had to expand his audience.
Tales of the Folio Club
, after all, had been written for a very narrow readership: well-read individuals who could appreciate the subtlety of his satire. Poe had won the
Visiter
contest partly because he found in the committee – two lawyers and a physician – a group of intelligent, educated men well read in both ancient and modern literature, men who, like members of the fictional Folio Club, were wont to gather over good cigars and fine wine to discuss literature. There was a significant portion of the reading public Poe had yet to approach: women.

Publishing ‘The Visionary’ in
Godey’s
, Poe took his first step toward exploiting this market. But he had not written ‘The Visionary’ specifically for women readers. Rather, he wrote it as part of
Tales of the Folio Club
. ‘The Visionary’ tells the story of a wealthy, handsome young romantic who loves the Marchesa Bianca, the beautiful wife of the old, cold-hearted Mentoni, but the story’s sophistication stems from its narrative style. Despite their acquaintance, the narrator never fully understands the hero. He appreciates him as a dreamer and a poet without realising the depth of his love. The idea that a suicide pact would unite two lovers in a deeper, more spiritual love through the integration of their souls after death exceeds the narrator’s comprehension.
¹

Poe hesitated to write specifically for
Godey’s
or other women’s magazines, an endeavour which, to his mind, would compromise his art. Moral tales and sentimental stories dominated the current market for women’s fiction. Moral tales Poe refused to write: didactic fiction went against his most fundamental philosophy of art. He was ambivalent toward sentimentalism. He did not oppose it per se. Rather, he was against sentimentalism because its conventions had become clichés.

Poe’s previously neglected copy of Susanna Rowson’s
Charlotte Temple –
a classic example of literary sentimentalism – helps explain his ambivalence. The book’s former owner, Elizabeth Poe, had inscribed the title page of the second volume when she obtained the book in 1807.
²
Her son inscribed his name directly beneath hers. The presence of his mother’s signature softened Poe’s attitude toward
Charlotte Temple
and the literature it represented. The book was a personal relic for Poe, a memento of the mother he had loved and lost at such a young age. Though she died before Edgar’s third birthday, his mother lived again whenever he opened
Charlotte Temple
and read her autograph.

The literary annuals provided another outlet for fiction and verse directed toward a predominantly female readership that Poe found more appealing than the women’s magazines. On Kennedy’s say-so, Carey sent the
Folio Club
manuscript to Eliza Leslie, who chose ‘Manuscript Found in a Bottle’ to include in
The Gift for 1836
. Happy with the dollar-per-page this fifteen-page story would bring, Poe did think republishing it in an annual was a mistake. Because the story had first appeared in 1833, it scarcely belonged in an annual for 1836. Instead, Poe thought, Leslie should have chosen one of his unpublished tales, say ‘Epimanes’ or ‘Siope’.
³

Though Poe’s opinion of ‘Epimanes’ is overinflated, he correctly understood that ‘Siope’, a beautiful if cryptic prose poem, suited an annual gift book. A few years later he did publish it in an annual,
The Baltimore Book: A Christmas and New Year’s Present
. Speaking of ‘Siope’, a reviewer of
The Baltimore Book
commented: ‘This fable if we read it right, is intended to indicate the horror of silence – that man may not be entirely accursed while he can hear the sounds which hurtle in the bosom of nature; the curse of tumult is represented as happiness to the curse of silence. The strain is wild, the language beautiful and peculiar to Mr Poe.’
⁴

The response to
The Gift for 1836
indicates Poe was right about republishing ‘Manuscript Found in a Bottle’ in an annual. The
Cincinnati Mirror
, which had reprinted the story from the Baltimore
Saturday Visiter
in 1833, reviewed
The Gift
two years later. The
Mirror
considered Poe ‘a gentleman of very fine talents’ and thought ‘Manuscript Found in a Bottle’ was ‘wild and thrilling’ but complained that an 1833 story did not belong in an annual for 1836.
⁵

These remarks occur in a review of
Specimen of the Gift
, a sample copy of Leslie’s annual issued in August and intended to give reviewers an indication of its contents. No copies of
Specimen of the Gift
survive, but this neglected review shows that Leslie recognized Poe’s literary talents and did what she could to further his career. ‘Manuscript Found in a Bottle’ was the only literary article
Specimen
contained. In other words, Leslie used Poe’s tale to demonstrate the volume’s overall quality. Her selection is especially notable since
The Gift for 1836
would include contributions by several distinguished authors: Washington Irving, James Kirke Paulding, Lydia Huntley Sigourney and William Gilmore Simms.

Mathew B. Brady,
Washington Irving
, 1861.

The Washington Irving piece in
The Gift for 1836
was ‘An Unwritten Drama of Lord Byron’, which relates the plot of a tragedy Byron conceived but never wrote. A mysterious stranger persistently follows a Spanish nobleman named Alfonso, who becomes so perturbed that he fatally stabs the stranger – only to discover his own face on the victim. Irving suggested this plot provided ‘a rich theme to a poet or dramatist of the Byron school’.
⁶

Never one to back down from a challenge, Poe took Irving’s suggestion to heart and used it as the basis for ‘William Wilson’. This story had a long gestation period: Poe did not finish it until 1839, four years after reading Irving’s sketch. Appropriately, he published ‘William Wilson’ in
The Gift for 1840
. Presenting a copy of his short story to Irving, Poe revealed another motive underlying its composition. He hoped Irving would ‘find in it something to approve’.
⁷
The example of ‘William Wilson’ reflects a dual impulse that had been a part of Poe’s make-up ever since John Allan took him in: he challenged the authority figures in his life while simultaneously seeking their approval.

Knowing he had to concentrate on writings that could make money, Poe still hesitated. As 1834 came to a close, he was working on
Politan
. The richly allusive quality of this closet tragedy has prompted one appreciative modern reader to call it ‘an anthology of echoes’, but
Politan
had little commercial appeal.
⁸
Kennedy discouraged Poe from it and got him ‘drudging upon whatever may make money’.
⁹
He urged Poe to contribute to the
Southern Literary Messenger
, the monthly magazine Thomas W. White had started in Richmond that August. Poe soon completed ‘Berenice’ and sent it to White, who questioned its macabre conclusion but accepted the story nonetheless. ‘Berenice’ appeared in the March 1835
Messenger
.

‘Berenice’ demonstrates what Poe had learned since publishing ‘The Visionary’. Though a vivid example of Gothic literature, ‘Berenice’ has a basis in fact. It was inspired by a Baltimore scandal about grave-robbers digging up human remains to obtain teeth for dentists. Poe explained to White, ‘The Tale originated in a bet that I could produce nothing effective on a subject so singular, provided I treated it seriously.’
¹⁰
Poe accepted the challenge and attempted a tale based on this gruesome subject.

Explaining his intentions, Poe told White, ‘The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles
similar in nature – to Berenice.
’ Defining what he meant, he explained that the ‘nature’ of the story involved ‘the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical’.
¹¹
Poe’s series of paired elements could be characterized by one more pair: the cliché rendered into the original. ‘Berenice’ shows he had found a way to alter the conventions of sentimental fiction to make them his own.