The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, page 19
Table Talk with Boz
On March 7, 1842, in rooms at Philadelphia’s U.S. Hotel, an intense tête-à-tête was under way. One tête belonged to the reviews editor and star story writer of Graham’s, one of America’s most celebrated and widely read magazines. The other was that of the thirty-year-old Charles Dickens, one of the most famous men in the world.
Dickens was stopping off for three days during a whirlwind tour of the United States. Poe’s friend the novelist George Lippard had giddily announced the great author’s impending arrival: “Sober, quiet, steady Philadelphia has waked up at last! Boston has gone mad—New York crazy—and we suspect Philadelphia is about to become one vast hospital of Boz-Bedlamites.” The reason was self-evident: “Charles Dickens is, we are told, the man of the age!”
“Boz” was taken on tours of the Pennsylvania Hospital, the Fairmount Water Works, and the “splendid unfinished marble structure for the Girard College.” Lower on Fairmount hill, he stopped at Eastern State Penitentiary, whose Gothic exterior, meant to frighten would-be criminals, contrasted with its modern form of imprisonment: solitary confinement. Though it was introduced as a humanitarian measure, Dickens was repulsed by “the immense amount of torture and agony” this treatment imposed, a “slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain.” A prisoner in complete isolation “is a man buried alive.” Dickens saved his social observations for his novel Martin Chuzzlewit and American Notes, which he published—to American indignation—after returning to England.
Portrait of Charles Dickens in Boston, 1842, by Alexander Francis
With Poe, the talk was of literature. Poe had sent Dickens a copy of his Tales along with his admiring review of Dickens’s recent book Barnaby Rudge, which featured a talking raven—modeled on Dickens’s own pet bird, Grip. Dickens replied with inside information about William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, the book to which Poe had compared his own: “Do you know that Godwin wrote it backwards—the last Volume first,” and after arriving at his conclusion, “he waited for months, casting about for a means of accounting for what he had done?”
The craftsmen talked shop during “two long interviews.” Poe shared his views about British and American trends, reading him Emerson’s poem “The Humble- Bee.” Dickens promised Poe he would try to find an English publisher for his Tales. As Dickens tried to leave on the final day of his visit, he was besieged by hundreds of fans. The landlord convinced him that refusing a meeting “would doubtless create a riot.” He spent several hours shaking hands.
Poe greatly admired Dickens’s plots and characterizations, his vivid descriptions of the streets, shops, clubs, and workhouses of the modern city. He had nothing like Dickens’s celebrity, but his own reputation and critical authority were on the rise.
As editor and attention-grabbing author in the most sumptuous magazine in the United States—soon to have the largest circulation of any in the world—Poe was an author to follow and a critic to fear. He had become a fixture at elegant soirees at Graham’s house on Sansom Street. Even his early poetry was now gaining a reputation, thanks to reprints in Graham’s.
Poe was scaling giddy heights, making a national and international name as a modern man of letters. With his scientific writings—his reviews of current research, his cryptography, his realistic tales such as “Maelström,” and his trademark invention, the infallible reasoner Dupin—he was becoming something more. In line with his age’s new possibilities but harking back to earlier models, Poe was fashioning himself as a universal thinker and natural philosopher: a Renaissance man who could weave together imagination, observation, logic, and the newest technologies—taking the measure of nature, mocking mortal folly, and artfully dreaming up worlds.
10
The Tide Turns
Between Hope and Despair
Poe could now afford to keep Virginia and her mother in comparative comfort in a small house, as well as some indulgences, including a gold pocket watch from France. After so much doubt, fear, and hunger, Poe had reached calm seas. Graham admired “how solicitous of the happiness of his wife and mother-in-law” Poe was; other than “the natural ambition of having a magazine of his own—I never heard him deplore the want of wealth.”
Yet his relationship with Graham had begun to chafe. Graham had let Poe believe he would help with his cherished project, The Penn, but showed no inclination to move forward.
Why kill the golden goose? When Graham’s started, it had five thousand subscribers. In January 1842, Poe estimated a run of twenty-five thousand. “Such a thing was never heard of before,” he boasted. By the spring of 1843, he anticipated a run of “fifty thousand copies”—the largest circulation of any magazine in the world, “as many as any steel line engraving will yield” before having to be recast.
Poe had proven beyond doubt his ability to helm a successful magazine. Yet he remained desperate to realize his own vision: “To coin one’s brain into silver, at the nod of a master, is to my thinking the hardest task in the world.” It soon became harder.
In early 1842, while singing at home, Virginia burst a blood vessel. She began coughing up blood—a sure sign of consumption. There was no cure. The episode was so severe that for two weeks Poe doubted she would recover; on February 3 he told F. W. Thomas, “It was only on yesterday that the physicians gave me any hope.” According to a neighbor, the house was ill-suited for her condition: “She could not bear the slightest exposure, and needed the utmost care … yet the room where she lay for weeks, hardly able to breathe except as she was fanned, was a little place with the ceiling so low over the narrow bed that her head almost touched it.”
Any negative prognosis was silenced: “No one dared to speak—Mr. Poe was so sensitive and irritable; ‘quick as steel and flint.’” He would not hear any talk of Virginia’s dying: “The mention of it drove him wild.” He told Thomas, “My dear little wife has been dangerously ill.”
Poe’s nervous state put his job in danger. The day after Virginia’s first hemorrhage, he visited Graham to ask for two month’s advance salary. Graham “not only flatly but discourteously refused. Now that man knows that I have rendered him the most important services.” Poe’s work over the past months had multiplied the publisher’s fortunes. “If, instead of a paltry salary, Graham had given me a tenth of his Magazine, I should feel myself a rich man to-day.”
Poe further bristled at Graham’s interference with his critical independence; in a few reviews, he admitted, he was “weak enough to permit Graham to modify my opinions (or at least their expression).” As if to compensate, he scrawled a particularly harsh review in February of Wakondah by Cornelius Mathews, a New York author and critic.
Virginia’s periodic crises were followed by gradual returns to partial health; with her first episode and recovery began “a horrible never-ending oscillation between hope & despair.” As Graham recollected, Poe’s “love for his wife was a sort of rapturous worship of the spirit of beauty which he felt was fading before his eyes. I have seen him hovering around her when she was ill, with all the fond fear and tender anxiety of a mother for her first-born—her slightest cough causing in him a shudder.” At the same time, Poe’s impatience with his situation at Graham’s—the clash between his growing reputation and his enforced subservience—was reaching a boil.
In April he quit. With dire economic conditions still in force—high unemployment, limited credit—this was a reckless, self-destructive move. Poe blamed Graham’s insistence on filling pages with expensive, nonliterary material: “My reason for resigning was disgust with the namby-pamby character of the Magazine,” its “contemptible pictures, fashion-plates, music and love tales. The salary, moreover, did not pay me for the labor which I was forced to bestow. With Graham who is really a very gentlemanly, although an exceedingly weak man, I had no misunderstanding.” There were no harsh words, tense scenes, or accusations as there had been when Poe left Burton’s—and Allan’s.
Poe was wounded by Graham’s failure to support The Penn. He saw, too late, that their interests had been at odds. “I was continually laboring against myself. Every exertion made by myself for the benefit of ‘Graham’s,’ by rendering that Mag. a greater source of profit, rendered its owner, at the same time, less willing to keep his word with me.”
Despite these rationalizations, Poe’s departure was an act of desperation. He found the situation with Virginia unbearable; Graham was unyielding; in a state of nightmarish frustration and confusion, Poe wanted to burn it all down. Graham later thought of Poe fondly, if condescendingly. Poe “was quick, it is true, to perceive mere quacks in literature,” Graham wrote, but his occasional harshness served a higher cause: “Literature with him was religion; and he, its high-priest.”
The Penn still had supporters. Of the nearly one thousand subscribers he had earlier secured, Poe thought that “3 or 4 hundred” would still be prepared to pay for its launch. He had earned widespread goodwill. The news of his departure from Graham’s prompted The New World to describe him “as one of the best writers of the English language now living.” Although “Mr. Poe has left Mr. Graham’s Magazine … in whatever sphere he moves, he will surely be distinguished.”
Graham replaced Poe with the Reverend Rufus Griswold, a former editor of the Boston Notion. Poe had met the bearded, unctuous minister the previous year while Griswold was assembling a collection of American poetry. Poe wanted to be included, and Griswold needed publicity. Mutual dislike seethed beneath their transactions. Griswold published three short poems and a flat biography of Poe, while Poe’s review damned the collection with faint praise: “A thorough analysis of the book might induce many, whose minds are not comprehensive, to think it a bad, instead of what it really is, a good work.” Privately Poe saw the encyclopedic tome, crowded with smarmy praise for influential poets, as hackwork. He told Joseph Snodgrass that the book was “a most outrageous humbug, and I sincerely wish you would ‘use it up.’”
Published in 1842, The Poets and Poetry of America nevertheless granted Griswold an air of critical authority. Graham offered him the position of full editor and a thousand-dollar salary—two hundred dollars more than Poe’s.
Jesse Dow, Poe’s friend in Washington, noted Graham’s rapid decline soon after: “We would give more for Edgar A. Poe’s toe nail, than we would for Rueful Grizzle’s soul.” Griswold for his part spread “malignant, unjust, and disgraceful attacks” on Poe’s character to anyone who would listen. Within a few months of Poe’s departure, Graham made Poe “a good offer” to return to the magazine, because he was “not especially pleased with Griswold—nor is any one else, with the exception of the Rev. gentleman himself.” Poe politely declined.
Fits and Starts
Poe had largely been sober since leaving Richmond, but with Virginia’s illness and his departure from Graham’s, something snapped. In June he traveled to New York to scout a publisher for a new story collection he was calling Phantasy Pieces. He ran into a young poet, William Wallace, an enthusiast for mint juleps, and arrived at the offices of the Democratic Review and William Snowden’s Ladies’ Companion much out of sorts. A day later he surfaced in Jersey City, looking for an old friend: “He was on a spree, however, and forgot the address before he got across the river. He made several trips backward and forward on the ferryboat,” arrived for one cup of tea, then left. Maria Clemm followed, “much worried about ‘Eddie dear.’” Eventually he was found “in the woods on the outskirts of Jersey City, wandering about like a crazy man.” Clemm took him home.
Poe wrote to the Democratic Review with a tale and apologies: “You must have conceived a queer idea of me—but the simple truth is that Wallace would insist upon the juleps, and I knew not what I was either doing or saying.” They refused his story, “The Landscape Garden,” whose fantasy of artistic omnipotence—an immensely rich man’s plan to resculpt the earth—would nourish Poe in hard times ahead.
He scrambled to publish where he could, piecing together a new Dupin story. “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” reworked a horrific murder currently in the press: the death of a “beautiful cigar girl,” Mary Cecilia Rogers, whose body was found floating in the Hudson. Poe swapped Manhattan for Paris, the Hudson for the Seine. Though its plot was disappointingly haphazard—due to Poe’s making adjustments in the tale’s second and third installments as new facts were revealed—“Marie Rogêt” was the first detective story to be based on an actual crime.
The series was printed, as was “The Landscape Garden,” in Snowden’s Ladies’ Companion, a magazine whose production values were a steep drop from Graham’s. Poe cringed at the layout, writing to the editor, “Oh Jupiter! the typographical blunders. Have you been sick, or what is the matter?”
By the summer of 1842 debts were piling up for rent and doctor’s bills. The Poes moved to a house near the woods on Coates Street, now Fairmount Avenue, promising fresher air for Virginia and lower rent. The landlord’s son recalled Poe’s fondness for “roving about the country.” To a fellow poet Poe later explained, “There are epochs when any kind of mental exercise is torture, and when nothing yields me pleasure but solitary communion with the ‘mountains & the woods’ … I have thus rambled and dreamed away whole months, and awake, at last, to a sort of mania for composition. Then I scribble all day, and read all night, so long as the disease endures.” The location inspired “Morning on the Wissahiccon,” a description of the region’s lush forests, whose narrator, crossing paths with a magnificent elk, imagines himself transported to the Edenic period “when the red man trod alone” before the arrival of the whites and their enslaved Black servants—one of whom appears and claims the elk as a pet.
In May 1842, F. W. Thomas, now living in D.C., suggested a new goal: an appointment in the Philadelphia Custom House, where one of Tyler’s supporters was expected to replace the current director. For his loyalty to the Whigs, Thomas had been appointed to the Treasury Department. He painted an enticing picture: “You stroll to your office a little after nine in the morning leisurely, and you stroll from it a little after two in the afternoon homeward to dinner … and if you choose to lucubrate [write by lamplight] in a literary way, why you can lucubrate.” He was making a tidy salary of a thousand dollars per year.
Poe congratulated him: “I wish you joy. You can now lucubrate more at your ease.”
Poe had known Tyler in Richmond, and with some effort he could cast himself as a party man: “I am a Virginian—at least I call myself one, for I have resided all my life, until within the last few years, in Richmond. My political principles have always been as nearly as may be, with the existing administration, and I battled with right good will for Harrison.” Further, his literary—and cryptographic—talents could be seen as proof of his usefulness; Tyler’s son Robert was a poet and one of Thomas’s friends in D.C., and Poe published an encrypted letter from one “W. B. Tyler,” intended to court the president’s favor.
The customhouse possibility gave him “new life”; it would enable him “to carry out all my ambitious projects.” With a government appointment and an investor, he could launch The Penn right away.
In August, a new collector was appointed. By then there were “1124 applicants” for only 30 posts. Poe persisted, though the collector “treated me most shamefully”: he “scarcely spoke—muttered the words ‘I will send for you Mr Poe’—and that was all.”
Thomas commiserated, visiting him in his “rural home” whose rooms “looked neat and orderly” but “wore an air of pecuniary want.” He was greeted by Virginia, who had “the most expressive and intelligent eyes I ever beheld,” although her “pale complexion, the deep lines in her face and a consumptive cough made me regard her as the victim for an early grave.”
Thomas saw his friend’s difficulties weighing on him: “His dark hair hung carelessly over his high forehead, and his dress was a little slovenly. He met me cordially, but was reserved, and complained of feeling unwell.” Though touched by his “tenderness and loving manners towards his wife,” Thomas observed “with deep regret that he had fallen again into habits of intemperance.” Poe missed the meeting the two arranged for the next day at Independence Hall, and the customhouse application came to nothing. In November, Charles Dickens wrote to him of his attempt to interest English publishers in his tales; “they have, one and all, declined the venture.” (In fact, Dickens had made only one cursory inquiry.)
In December 1842, Poe took advantage of a new act of Congress and voluntarily declared bankruptcy. The legal petition listed forty-five debtors for sums from $4 to $169, for everything from rent, medical visits, and books to piano rental. He owed $10 to J. N. Reynolds, promoter of the Exploring Expedition, and $20 to Nicholas Biddle, presumably put toward The Penn in more optimistic days. The document mordantly listed his only property as “his wearing apparel and a few hundred Sheets, of no use to any one else, and of no value to anyone.”
Tales of Guilt and Torture
After Virginia’s first crisis, Poe’s stories took on a bolder, more sinister aspect. The new series showed terrific focus and formal precision but added a desperate psychological intensity. Exploring the hidden, anxious, and destructive regions of the mind, these tales have left a deep and lasting mark on modern literature and on their readers.
His first story of 1842 was “The Oval Portrait,” a haunting fable: a painter’s artwork only achieves supreme “life-likeliness” with the death of his wife, who posed for it. Was there some inevitable balance sheet on which each step toward artistic perfection had to be paid in suffering and sorrow? In “The Pit and the Pendulum,” Poe confronted a prisoner of the Inquisition with one meticulously designed horror after another: a room of unknown shape with a terrifying pit at its center; metal walls heated to incandescence gradually closing in; a monstrous clockwork, a swinging pendulum sharpened to a blade, slowly lowering.
