Edgar Allan Poe, Finally
What makes a writer great?
What makes a writer great?
Is it his erudition? The genius of her plot? Turn of phrase? Characterization? Or is it his ambition, his willingness and courage to forge a new genre? Or is it breadth, the exploration and mastery of a wide variety of genres over time? Essential storytelling? Inventiveness? The ability to make a fiction plausible or, better, relatable?
By nearly half of these measures, Edgar Allan Poe was the greatest American author of all time.
Poe was singularly inventive, ambitious, and erudite. His work was extraordinarily diverse. By his early teens, he had consumed probably every line of antique, classical, and Renaissance literature that was available in the young country into which he was born. On page after page of his first decade of work, he easily, and indeed too frequently, summoned allusion after obscure allusion from more than two millennia of writing. In Poe’s breathtakingly short life and career, he invented, whole cloth and with neither antecedent nor even referent, the detective mystery, the psychological thriller, and plus or minus, science fiction. In literary chronology, Jules Verne was either Poe’s much younger brother from a third marriage or his high school prom lovechild; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a prodigious and savvy great nephew; H.P. Lovecraft was the self-appointed intellectual mantle-bearing great-great-grandson; and Daphne du Maurier was Lovecraft’s nuisance of a niece he left as a toddler to wander off by herself into the bowels of the county fair.
Poe died, badly, at the age of forty, his body giving into a long history of battery. His enduring alcoholism almost certainly killed him. If not, it weakened him terribly, and the proximate cause killer was likely syphilis. He was found delirious and wearing someone else’s clothes on the streets of Baltimore, which even in 1849 was a horrendous place to die. He never recovered full consciousness before expiring in a nearby hospital a few days later.
His output had been stunning. In his almost thirty productive years, and beyond the genres he created, Poe penned poetry, short stories, essays, comedy, burlesque, horror, philosophical meditation, and, in a notable miss, most of a single, tedious play.
To read Poe’s oeuvre is to encounter a mind made of quicksilver. He is, first and foremost, lettered and fluent. It is easy to get the impression that this phenomenal, anomalous brain did not fit in anywhere. Not in the theatrical family to which he was born; not in the well-to-do foster family to which he was entrusted as a tiny child; not in the Scottish and English schools he attended in his youth after his foster parents relocated overseas; not in the very wealthy society corner of Richmond, Virginia to which his foster family returned when he was in his teens; not at the nascent University of Virginia he attended for a year before leaving due to accumulated gambling debt and a falling out with his financially generous foster father; not in Boston, where he fled to make his romantic way as a jobber and apprentice journalist; not in the American army, where he initially enlisted as a private and three years later as a cadet at West Point, from which he appears to have stage-managed his own dismissal, after only eight months, through intentional disobedience and court-martial. He likewise seems to have belonged nowhere as an adult, not in New York nor in literary circles nor in family life. He lurched from one fraught friendship and relationship to another. In marriage, he was at the very least unlucky and at the very, very least rather odd. Somewhere around the age of twenty-six, he married Virginia Clemm, who was somewhere around the age of thirteen and with whom he had cohabitated in younger years. They shared a rapturous intimacy that accommodated his alcoholism and flirtations or affairs with other women until Virginia fell sick at the age of nineteen with a tuberculosis that would carry her off five years later. Poe, already a wild man, seems never to have recovered from the loss of Virginia, who had been a constant companion in his itinerant lifestyle.
There is a restlessness and furiousness to Poe’s life which seems to make sense in light of his extraordinary literary command and virtuosity.
I think he was the smartest man in the room. I think he was the smartest man in every room he ever entered.
At a minimum, he must have been the most erudite and literarily deft man everywhere he went.
A story Christopher Hitchens told in Vanity Fair about Salman Rushdie might give a scent of what I mean. Hitchens gleefully recalls that the shitbag guests at a dinner party were spending their precious time complaining about Robert Ludlum’s bad book titles like The Bourne Supremacy and The Aquitaine Progression. Someone had the bright idea to wonder what William Shakespeare’s play titles might be if reformulated into Ludlumian three-word combinations.
Hitchens recounts that someone asked what would “‘Hamlet’s title be if submitted to the Ludlum treatment?’ ‘The Elsinore Vacillation,’ [Rushdie] replied – and I find I must stress this [this is Hitchens writing] – in no more time than I have given you [the Vanity Fair reader]. . . . Macbeth? ‘The Dunsinane Reforestation.’” Hitchens – remember, Christopher Hitchens, who was nothing if not exceptionally fast and precise – gives us this story to illustrate how bowled over he was by Rushdie’s instantaneous facility with both memory and application.
This begins to simulate how extraordinary Poe was in his own time, except that it is just a simulation. America was a young nation. There were not yet dinner parties in New York overflowing with world-famous authors. Poe had no Hitchens to appreciate him. In his own time, Poe was both Rushdie and Hitchens.
Poe must have felt constantly incredibly alone, everywhere he went, except maybe, maybe, perhaps with his wife, who used to sit with him at long stretches and read his pages while refreshing his pens. Here was a guy who had consumed all the books there were to read, had understood all of them, had extracted their main virtues and could recite them at instant notice, could summon their historical influence and significance, could rework them at will, and then spawn new ones because the old forms did not give him sufficient breathing room to express what he wanted to say. In short, Poe makes Rushdie look like a bump on a log.
When I think of Poe, I think of Charlie Parker, Bird, the jazz musician who, like our writer, was a giant in his field but a walking, talking, personal catastrophe. Bird died at 35 but not before he had invented Bebop. All the jazz music that had preceded him was not enough for his genius. Bird needed to invent a new sound, and he did, and it endured, and it endures.
The extent of Edgar Allan Poe’s solitude is best illustrated, I believe, in his rivalry with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. You know Longfellow, the poet of “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1861), which you have certainly read and maybe recited in an elementary school production:
LISTEN, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
And of “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855), about which you have certainly heard, and which you have certainly never read:
Should you ask me, whence these stories?
Whence these legends and traditions,
With the odors of the forest
With the dew and damp of meadows,
With the curling smoke of wigwams,
With the rushing of great rivers,
With their frequent repetitions,
And their wild reverberations
As of thunder in the mountains?
And of Evangeline (1847), which to read is to wish to like it and to be unable to, because, while so very admirable as an attempt at an American epic poem and recreation of the classical dactylic hexameter of Roman and Greek tradition, it is, one finds, a cramped work that suffers immensely from a meter ill-fitted to English. But, for all its faults, I will say Evangeline starts off really well:
This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.
Unfortunately, that’s about as good as it gets, and mostly it is sharply downhill from there. Evangeline, published a decade or so before “Hiawatha” and “Paul Revere,” was Longfellow’s big lifetime hit, his money- and reputation-maker, and his extreme bestseller. And with good reason. Not only was it a massive undertaking that placed the emerging American oeuvre into the lineage of ancient and European literature, it is also a superb example of the invigorating patriotic tonic that was Longfellow’s brand. Evangeline was the Ur-source branding moment from which “Paul Revere” and “Hiawatha” could be said, later, to be “on brand.” America is huge, primordial, unsullied, and inevitable. America is energetic and dynamic. America is romantic and mirabile visu. America is the future, and it deserves to be. I mean, really, to hate “Paul Revere’s Ride” is to hate America and to commit yourself to membership in the Taliban. It is such an excellent and exciting expression of our country’s desperate revolutionary gambit, the success of which is still unfolding and daily making global miracles, that dwelling on its treacle is a profound misreckoning. It is to love the steakhouse but to cavil at the toothpicks.
Evangeline, the epic poem, treats an earlier American birthing moment, with Old England again the villain. During the French and Indian War of 1755 to 1764, the British forcibly removed nearly all the French-speaking or French-sympathetic population from what is now more or less Canada and a spoonful of Maine. Many died. Some were sent back to Europe. Some made their way to Louisiana, where their Acadian francophonerie gave way to the language and culture we know now as Cajun.
It is likely impossible to overstate how important and vivid that war was in the minds of virtually every American revolutionary figure. Benjamin Franklin served as a soldier in that conflict. Franklin also convened the Albany Congress in 1754 – the first important conference of the American colonies – to urge colonial unity in the face of the French enemy. Franklin, from Pennsylvania, had an essential partner in that endeavor named Thomas Hutchinson, from Massachusetts, who would twenty years later become famous as the Loyalist pseudo-Governor of the Bay Colony who arrayed his forces unsuccessfully against the wily revolutionary Samuel Adams. It was the French and Indian War that so thoroughly burdened the British Treasury’s coffers that Whitehall decided to impose the now infamous Sugar Act, Stamp Act, and eventually the Tea Act to recover some of England’s hard-spent cash that it had dispensed, in its view, protecting its dominion and the rights of British citizens in the colonies. The rest, as you know, is history.
By the year 1847, when Longfellow published Evangeline, the story of this pre-making episode, the prequel to the Revolutionary War and Constitutional Convention and all of that, was still understood by the American public to be essential to the national story, though of course it would not have been as routinely on the minds of Americans as it had been decades earlier. In 1847, America was in the midst of another war of frontier destiny and expansion, and a rather bloody one, the Mexican-American War, which was unfolding in the southwest, near enough to Louisiana, where many French Acadians had migrated after their forced expulsion. Against this backdrop, Longfellow publishes Evangeline and re-elevates America’s heroism of the 1750s, in war and in rescue of a population expelled by a foreign empire. Evangeline is the story of a young Acadian refugee and her man, from whom she is separated on their wedding day. She travels through great trial and tribulation to Louisiana. For a long time, she searches for Gabriel. Eventually, she finds him, though only on his deathbed in Philadelphia. They kiss. He dies. She dies.
It is reasonable to assume that every Korean soap opera was in some way inspired by this maudlin ending. But that is not the main point.
The main point is that Longfellow – the grandson of a Revolutionary War hero – was a master of delivering the perfectly timed, well packaged, easily digested, patriotic American crowd-pleasing chestnut. This was not something Edgar Allan Poe did or could ever do. Longfellow’s superpower made him extremely popular in his day, probably maddeningly popular from Poe’s point of view.
Poe was also convinced that Longfellow was a plagiarist.
Biographers will natter. Poe and Longfellow never met. As far as we know, they shared exactly one exchange of correspondence in their lives. In 1841, Poe, the editor of a Philadelphia magazine, wrote to Longfellow, who held the Smith Professorship of Modern Languages at Harvard, to solicit a contribution to his periodical. Poe’s entreaty was florid and obsequious. Longfellow’s response was a gracious no. They each complimented the other’s work.
About a year later, Poe started a long campaign of criticism and, indeed, attack. Biographers make much of their single correspondence. The short version is that Longfellow’s refusal was a snub that it wounded Poe into critical action. (Much as some historians now estimate that Barack Obama’s two-minute roast of Donald Trump in 2011 prompted the Donald to get up on his hind legs and, five years later, make Obama’s legacy, for better or worse and such as it was, his recess playground kickball.) For my part, I doubt it. I don’t imagine that Poe forgot their letters, but nor do I believe Longfellow’s refusal was altogether that important to Poe’s evolved opinion of his work. Other facts loom larger.
Poe and Longfellow were contemporaries, born two years apart. (In case it helps – I always find it does – others born in the same half dozen year period include Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, an acquaintance of Longfellow’s since at least their days at Bowdoin College, 1804. Longfellow was born in 1807 and Poe in 1809.)
At the height of his career, Poe was famous both as a writer and, in the circles where such contributions can lend a man fame, as a critic. His first broadside against Longfellow was a poor review of some original and translated poetry. But it was not to get very nasty until 1845, a few years later. Poe gave his verdict on The Waif, a new collection of Longfellow poems. He wrote that Longfellow had lifted the poetical elements of style and imagery, if not the words themselves, from others. Poe’s campaign was sustained. He continued his attack for months, including over six consecutive weeks in the Broadway Journal, a short-lived magazine that he both owned and edited. His criticism reached a peak in a long essay of 15,000 words, which is about thirty single-spaced pages. He deemed Longfellow a “wealthy and triumphant gentleman of elegant leisure” who robbed from some “neglected man of genius.”
Longfellow appears never to have responded to Poe’s charges. That is how comfortable he was in his literary seniority, in his position in the New England establishment that Poe spilt voluminous ink deriding. Well, we cannot be quite sure. Someone anonymously wrote responsa to Poe. Those responsa prolonged the feud and Poe’s crusade, as he had much to refute, including various points for the Longfellow defense and even some coy sleight-of-hand criticism directed at Poe’s “The Raven.” That someone, like many in those centuries, called himself by a nom de guerre, in this case Outis, which was the sobriquet “Nobody” that Odysseus gave to himself to disguise his true identity from Polyphemus the Cyclops. We still do not know the true identity of this Outis. Perhaps it was Longfellow himself, or perhaps it was a friend of his. Outis claimed to be personally familiar with Longfellow. But Longfellow himself officially maintained an arch distance from the whole debate. As they say in Kentucky, if you wrestle with a pig, you both get covered in mud. In fact, during his career, Longfellow appears never to have responded to his critics, Poe or otherwise. Nevertheless, privately, Poe’s campaign seems to have irritated him. There is a tiny tantalizing passage in his journal from 1845 in which he fumes at the “censorious Poe.”
Accusations of spiritual, and even textual, plagiarism surfaced periodically thereafter in Longfellow’s long life. Perhaps the most notable example referred to his “Hiawatha,” published more than five years after Poe’s death, which was found to have close similarities, even at the verse level, to an ancient Finnish epic poem, sometimes referred to as the Kalevala, that was received through oral runic song tradition until it was written down in time for Longfellow to read and admire it.
Again, Poe never met Longfellow in person. For that matter, he never met Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom he at first loved and later dismissed, especially the Hawthorne of the Concord Transcendentalist period – the one who hung around Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Poe must have found the Transcendentalists to be precious and dull wheedlers. Especially in comparison to himself, whom he quite correctly considered to be a full-on genius.
But it was Longfellow who irked Poe the most. Longfellow was, in Poe’s lifetime and long and even more so afterwards, the court poet of the United States. Longfellow was the bard our young country needed, badly. The poems he published during Poe’s lifetime were delightful and committed to the traditions he was adopting and claiming for the United States. Though he was not as deeply read as Poe, his many literary allusions and homages were more happily and less laboriously delivered than Poe’s, particularly those from Poe’s early writing years. The success of this lesser mind must have driven Poe nuts. So much so that he came to accuse Longfellow of stealing his most important motifs, meter, and matter.
Longfellow’s success must have been an abominable irritant to Poe. Longfellow was a cardboard cutout of a figure. A colorless, feel-good blandifiarian, a Randolph Scott, a George A. Cohan, an O. Henry Alfred E. Newman, a Tom Hanks (Saving Private Ryan Tom Hanks, not the Turner & Hooch Tom Hanks Tom Hanks appears to have forgotten ever existed), a post-2005 Disney movie (the kind in which there is no villain, just a pleasant rival), an entire Hallmark channel Christmas season. He must have driven Poe just plain mad.
I suspect that Poe’s extreme, perhaps unique erudition made him a terribly lonely figure. That, plus the kudos lavished upon others and chiefly upon what he perceived to be the beige, unimaginative thievery of the highly celebrated Longfellow, must have made him batty. My own guess is that it accelerated his alcoholism.
If you have never seen Pablo Picasso’s teenage artwork, I urge you to search for it. You can see that, while still a child, Picasso had effectively mastered classical technique. His early work explains a lot. If you are already entering the same solar system as Raphael and Michelangelo at fifteen years old, what is there left to do? The only path may be the invention of new perspective. Cubism, Analytic Cubism. Surrealism. Blue period. Commentators more expert in visual art than I would probably have a more precise list, but you get the point. Young Picasso was so good at the old stuff that he had to forge something new.
Poe followed a similar path. Though I do not think his teenage poetry is especially good, it evinces an unmistakable fluency in classical and historical authors, figures, and forms. In one example, a poem entitled “O, Tempora! O, Mores!”, probably written when he was sixteen, he laments the loss of manners and takes care to remember Democritus of Thrace and “Heraclitus of yore,” in what amounts to a bit of self-serious, meandering doggerel, with the illustrative age-appropriate wistful couplet “Philosophers have often held dispute; / As to the seat of thought in man and brute.” In a septet of the same rough vintage, he offers no fewer than four marginal allusive pointers, demonstrating references to Milton’s Paradise Lost, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Man,” and William Cowper’s The Task, a hugely long blank verse poem from 1785 that was very popular in the 19th century and has largely been forgotten since. Writings from this era are peppered with mentions of Eblis (king devil in Islam); Tamerlane (the Mongolian-Turkish ruler and a perennial favorite of Poe’s); the Asian night-flowering plant called the Nyctanthes (yes, I had to look it up, and I was not even sure at first that I had found the right thing); Corcyra, which is an especially aggravating styling of Korkyra, which is an unnecessarily antique name for Corfu, even when used to refer to the ancient city-state); the University of Göttingen (which also remained an enduring interest of Poe’s); the French playwright Pierre Corneille; a Romantic if minor British naval hero named Ned Knowles who died at 17 years old during the Seven Years War (the relevant portion of which was called, in North America, the French and Indian War); the 17th century Puritan Oxonian philosopher Joseph Glanvill; Anacreon (the Greek lyric poet); and Israfel (one of the Koran’s four archangels).
You see what I mean.
In his youth, Poe might have been just as insufferably pretentious and ostentatious as he was erudite.
Some of this heavy dose of allusion is not only interesting but edifying. I was struck, for example, by a reference to “Tom and Jerry,” which obviously predated the Hanna and Barbera cartoon characters by well over a hundred years. Following up, I learned that, to the early 19th century reader, the names would bring to mind the famous characters of an 1821 English stage play called Tom and Jerry, or Life in London, which was itself an adaptation of a bestselling serial book. The main characters – who were very much human, neither mouse nor cat – gallivanted about London in search of high and low life. The book and play were so popular that young men seeking lush hijinks were soon called Tom and Jerry, and a Tom and Jerry was soon after a byword for a bawdy pub. Such is one of the pleasures of reading.
We return to the derech. Without question, Poe was extremely, perhaps uniquely, well read as a youth, and he obviously liked to make sure his writing reflected that fact. Some of his early work remained unpublished in his lifetime, and it is easy to imagine that the twenty-something Poe, at the height of his powers, would have been glad to leave his juvenilia in a private drawer. His teenage production might have struck him as, in the language of the kids today, cringe.
Indeed the signs are that he got most of this showiness out of his system early. His writing never became what one might call spare – his was the era of the Baroque, of the Gothic, of the Romantic (some of which was of his own devising) – when writers would get paid by the pound. (You perhaps remember the old saw that you learned back in high school that Charles Dickens – whom Poe met in person in 1842 – was paid by the word, which was intended to explain why he was so extremely prolix – but that appears to have been nothing more than a myth. Dickens was, like the writers of the day, more atmospherically, and without any pun intended, more accurately paid by the pound.)
It was also in his early years that Poe developed some of the signal, even signature qualities of his most famous later writing. The clanging and insistent onward cadence which marks “The Raven” has glimmers of precedence. Here is a section of “Tamerlane,” published when Poe was eighteen and written probably a year or two earlier:
The rain came down upon my head
Unshelter’d – and the heavy wind
Rendered me made and deaf and blind.
It was but man, I thought, who shed
Laurels upon me: and the rush –
The torrent of the chilly air
Gurgled within my ear the crush
Of empires – with the captive’s prayer –
The hum of suitors – and the tone
Of flattery ‘round a sovereign’s throne.
You can begin to hear the adamant forward motion that appears in “The Raven.” He has not yet found the headlong acceleration that makes “The Raven” so spectacular, matching as it does the speaker’s descent into madness – a favorite subject of Poe’s – but the outlines of his interest in a muscular tempo are already evident. You would also be right if you heard echoes of Coleridge in such a passage. Poe was an avowed fan of Coleridge’s – in fact he frequently named him a favorite – and “Kublai Khan,” Coleridge’s unfinished masterwork, in the opinion of your faithful correspondent, had been published around a decade before Poe wrote about his own Mongol emperor.
In this period Poe displayed other elements that would find their way into his later work. I came across a sprinkling of rhymes with “nevermore” that I could only find tantalizing. He was a liberal user and then re-user of the motif of magnificent ruins of past civilizations, perhaps most importantly the Coliseum in Rome, which he held up as a touchstone of human achievement, of inspiration for great minds, and of the inevitability of loss. Early Poe was also interested in Islam. Interest in Muslim and especially Arabic and Persian culture was emphatically in the water in the Western Europe of the 19th century and perhaps especially in the first half of the 19th century, when Poe was alive and writing.
From his youth he was likewise already interested in the Devil, who remained forever a recurring explicit figure in his work. I believe the first actual Devil story was “Bargain Lost,” written in his early twenties, though we can see hints even earlier. Later heavily reworked as the moderately well-known “Bon-Bon,” this funny short story is a dialogue between Satan and a Monsieur Pierre Bon-Bon (such that the Devil meets, quite literally, Good-Good or, better, Mr. Goody Two Shoes). They sit in front of a fire and wax philosophical. It might remind the contemporary reader of a comedic Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal (wouldn’t that have been a hoot) – a movie which I may one day come to appreciate more than I do – in which the knight returning from the Crusades plays chess with the Grim Reaper. As he drinks the night away, Bon-Bon cajoles the Devil into giving him some profound ethical insight so that he might join the ranks of history’s great philosophers. The Devil reveals that he has eaten the souls of Bon-Bon’s philosopher heroes. He describes their peculiar flavors. In the end, though Bon-Bon protests that his soul, too, would be tasty, given his estimation of his own philosophical prowess, the Devil declines to take advantage of the drunken, egotistical sot. According to Poe, perhaps even the Devil can be fed up with a super-serving of hubris or what might now be referred to the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Throughout his life, Poe’s view of Satan was not what you would call traditional or Manichean. It was not like that of, say, John Milton or of the early American preaching class. For Poe, the Devil was a source of wickedness but more than that. He was an inspiration and catalyst of madness and chaotic emotion. Poe’s Devil was a phenomenon of the natural world and constant cohabitant of our organic and built environments.
Poe grew up during what is often referred to as the Second Great Awakening, which historiographers have generally nominated to be a period lasting a half century. I have for some time considered this duration somewhat too stretchy to be altogether useful for any proper utility, set aside insight. But it is clear that the early 19th century was a period of heightened religious fervor, and Poe’s interest in the Devil corresponds intriguingly to the religious feelings that were swirling about America during his life. Poe was exceptionally interested in reason – the name he gave to his invented genre, which came to be known as detective fiction, was “tales of ratiocination,” the first examples of which were effectively tightly constructed proofs of complicated logic puzzles – but equally interested in the supernatural and spiritual miasmas that descended on individuals and towns to throw them into conflict and despair. His Devil was not just, not usually, an individuated actor but also an atmosphere of unhappiness and chaos.
One noteworthy flavor of the Christianity that appeared during the Second Great Awakening was its self-conception as a response to a sustained moment of over-reason and over-Enlightenment, of a drying out of the religious feeling that was a natural and necessary outcome of inspiration by and for heaven. The Christian moment sought to reinvigorate and reinvite an emotive attachment to religion. “Feel the spirit,” so to say. And the particular version of this reinvigoration that unfolded in the early 19th century had a Romantic and supernatural overlay – which is to say not only the supernaturality of theological Christianity but also contained within it a wonderment deriving from nature, which encompassed both Great Nature and Human Nature. In this time, more than most of the past couple of centuries, the Devil could be understood as the stimulant or adjuvant of evil acts, to be sure, but also of terror, lunacy, and pandemonium.
If we said it in simplistic Freudian shorthand, the Devil of Poe was the evil inclination that unhanded the worst instincts of the Id. Often as I read Poe’s descent-into-madness or madness-is-everywhere-around-us stories, I found myself thinking about Freud’s structural psychoanalytical idea of the Id. I speculate that Poe would have admired Freud’s conception and would have made much overt use of it. As an aside, it is possible that Freud may have taken an interest in Poe’s fascination with madness, death, and the Devil. I have found no evidence that he read Poe, but there is a body of literature that explores the connection, so perhaps the writers in that field will have been familiar with some.
Poe’s interest in the Devil was perennial, and Poe’s Devil was everywhere. Sometimes he appeared quite literally in traditional form with pointy ears and a sharp tail. In “The Devil in the Belfry,” he shows up as a literal fiddle-playing demon to invade the works of a sleepy but well-organized town’s beloved clocktower to disturb the residents’ rigid routine and sow chaos into their happy, somnolent lives. The short story is satire and is mostly funny, though Poe does not hesitate to make his devil figure engage in a rather vicious attack on the village campanologist so he can hijack the bells for a full thirteen consecutive rings. I have a particular affection for this story, as it takes place in an implied Dutch New York State, in one of the hidden vales that remained out of the usual orbit of the English who came later and dominated. Poe places the action in the “borough of Vondervotteimittiss” (get it? – “wonder what time it is”), which is exactly the kind of move Washington Irving, Poe’s older and even more famous contemporary, did all the time in his Knickerbocker stories. Distinguished readers of these pages will recall my own admiration for Irving, to whom Poe was doubtless paying some homage as part of the shared ongoing project of the 19th century to establish the United States as a literary great power. As an aside from quite a different time with quite a different point of view about America, “The Devil in the Belfry” brought to mind a song from the 1960s. See if you can guess which one. This from “Belfry”:
Round the skirts of the valley, (which is quite level, and paved throughout with flat tiles) extends a continuous row of sixty little houses. These, having their backs to the hills, must look, of course, to the centre of the plain, which is just sixty yards from the front door of each dwelling. Every house has a small garden before it, with circular paths, a sun-dial, and twenty-four cabbages. The buildings themselves are all so precisely alike, that one can in no manner be distinguished from the other.
Were you also reminded of “Little Boxes”? “Little Boxes” was the Pete Seeger and Malvina Reynolds song from 1963, his only single ever to hit the charts. It goes like this:
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes all the same
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same
This is the exact origin of the word “ticky-tacky.” “Little Boxes” was written as a social protest song against middle class conformity, inspired, according to Reynolds’s daughter, by seeing tract housing appearing in Daly City, California, across the San Francisco bay from Berkeley, where she lived in comfortable, condescending self-righteousness with her small family. I grew up in the 1980s listening to Pete Seeger and the Weavers and Simon and Garfunkel because my parents were clueless about modern music and thought this was rock and roll. Anyway, I loved this song as a child, and its lyrics long ago seared themselves into my memory. Poe’s depiction of Vondervotteimittiss reminded me instantly of the song. He, too, was making fun of undifferentiated bourgeois burgherdom, though I can’t help but like Poe’s take so much more than Reynolds’s. I am surprised that I have stumbled into citing Christopher Hitchens twice in one essay, but you will no doubt appreciate the second reference, perhaps even more than the first. In researching this aside, I found a 2008 Atlantic article in which Hitchens quotes the great and disappeared American humorist Tom Lehrer as saying that “Little Boxes” was the “the most sanctimonious song ever written.” That sounds about right to me.
We return to the derech. Poe’s Devil also appeared more figuratively – the raven, perching himself on top of the bust of Pallas Athena, is the most famous example – and obscurely and ubiquitously – the raven counts as an example here, too, though not the most famous – in his descent-into-madness stories. You remember the “Tell-Tale Heart” from junior high school, which you may have reread in a college Gothic literature course. The protagonist assures us he is perfectly sane. Then he recounts the story of the carefully executed murder, dismembering, and burial of an unidentified elderly man. The narrator then goes mad because he continues to hear the thumping of the heart from underneath the floorboards. He reveals himself to the police. What you may not recall is that, save for the morality tale, bad-guy-goes-to-jail ending, it is effectively the same story that Poe told in “The Cask of Amontillado” and “Black Cat.” Here, the satanic force is the atmospheric impulse that overtakes the protagonist, drives him berserk, and compels him to evil deeds and insanity, which are for Poe, importantly, essentially the same thing. In “The Haunted Palace,” a poem that Poe later embedded in a short story called “The Fall of the House of Usher” – he was often doing that, reworking stories and poems so that they would in later editions be placed as stories-within-stories or poems-within-stories written by specific characters – the poem’s subject, a king of old, expresses his dread at the forces arraying to destroy him and his palace. Poe later remarked that the poem was intended to depict “a mind haunted by phantoms – a disordered brain” – the bosom companion of doom.
Poe commentators often characterize his most famous broad genre with the handy suitcase word “Gothic,” and that is at least reasonably accurate and instructive enough as a helpmate in understanding his work. But I find it has two inadequacies. The first is that Poe himself was often derisive about the genre. He publicly disdained some well-known magazines entirely devoted to the form, usually its more purple, sensational flavors. In one of the signal accomplishments later compiled in his 1840 Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, Poe offered up a pairing of stories called “The Predicament” and “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” which were direct assaults on a Scottish periodical.
Blackwood was published from the early 19th century until the late 20th century and would have been about 20 years old when Poe was making fun of it. The magazine was a famous home for dark Gothic literature. The heroine of both pieces is named (are you ready for it?) Psyche Zenobia. In “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” he has the editor of Blackwood encourage Ms. Zenobia to commit suicide and record her sensations.
I also think that “Gothic” or even “horror” misses the important point that, whether he was telling a romantic story or a comedic one; a tale in which the bad guy gets away with the crime or is finally arrested; a narrative in which the malice is visibly physical, invisibly psychological, or semi-visibly supernatural; whether he was instilling us with a dose of fear or chortle; whether a particular story was about the evil that men do or the evil that they are made to do; there is a broadly unifying quality in his stories that an unseen force is sometimes, not always but very much often enough, in the background pulling some levers, and that a special incantation of the literary contract between author and reader constituted the unique high-powered field glass permitting us to discern the shape, and sometimes the very features, of the wicked man behind the curtain. I think Poe must have seen himself as a kind of high priest of vision, giving over some insight as to what was really going on in the world beyond our undeveloped natural senses. His Devil works, as one might call them, have little else to do with his science fiction or detective stories. Their overlap is manifest in their shared offer of priestly insight into the mechanics that we readers would otherwise not be able to see. These Devil stories are not mere horror. They are museum guides into one giant quadrant of Poe’s perceived greater reality.
And a rather complex quadrant it is. Poe is not friends with the Devil, but nor is he strictly a foe. As we have seen, he can sometimes find the Devil – even in his purest andromorphic form – to be a kind of hero. Nor does the evil inclination always meet its just end. In “Amontillado,” our narrator tells us that, fifty years after he has buried a rather guiltless man alive, his crime remains undiscovered. The insane murderous killer can get away with it. Consider everything you know about codes of culpability and justice in the arts from every single century until probably 1981, when the last remaining American state board of film review, the Maryland Board of Censors, was abolished. Think about how unusual it was that Poe regularly – regularly – had the bad guy survive and, in his own way, gain victory, except for whatever lingering punishment that internal Devil’s presence continued to press upon him.
This became enough of a theme in Poe’s work that he felt obliged to write a story explaining it. “Never Bet the Devil Your Head” is presented by Poe as an explicit rebuttal to his critics on exactly this subject. “There is no just ground . . . for the charge brought against me by certain ignoramuses — that I have never written a moral tale, or, in more precise words, a tale with a moral.” His preface then flows into a first-person narrative of a writer, named Edgar A. Poe, who recounts a story about a friend named Toby Dammit. Dammit has vices. He likes to utter the phrase “I'll bet the devil my head.” Our storyteller seeks in vain to persuade Dammit to take on nicer behavior.
The pair of friends one day find themselves on a covered bridge. Dammit declares he can leap over a turnstile at the end of the bridge. “I’ll bet the devil my head,” he announces. Guess who appears. A mysterious little old gentleman, who then proposes that Dammit have the advantage of a running start to see if he can make the jump. Dammit executes a good leap but fails to clear the turnstile, getting knocked backwards in the darkness. “At the same instant I saw the old gentleman limping off at the top of his speed, having caught and wrapped up in his apron something that fell heavily into it from the darkness of the arch just over the turnstile.” Poe milks the moment, as he often does, for laughs. He runs up to where his friend fell and tells us his friend suffered “what might be termed a serious injury. The truth is, he had been deprived of his head, which after a close search I could not find anywhere.” He looks more closely at the turnstile and sees above it “a sharp iron bar” that had cut Dammit’s head clean off.
Poe finishes in the same vein:
He did not long survive his terrible loss. The homœopathics did not give him little enough physic, and what little they did give him he hesitated to take. So in the end he grew worse, and at length died, a lesson to all riotous livers. I bedewed his grave with my tears, worked a bar sinister on his family escutcheon, and for the general expenses of his funeral, sent in my very moderate bill to the transcendentalists. The scoundrels refused to pay it, so I had Mr. Dammit dug up at once, and sold him for dog’s meat.
That, my distinguished readers, is what Poe thought of the devil and of the morality tale.
Nonetheless, the triumph of evil over good was not Poe’s most usual way of ending a story, even in stories that could appear to be trending that way. In “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” another satirical psychological horror story, the unnamed narrator is traveling through southern France and visits a lonely old mansion that has been turned into an insane asylum. (Yeah, he invented that subgenre, too.) Well, I don’t need to tell a 21st century audience that it turns out that the inmates have taken over the asylum and have been pretending to be the medical staff. Even more frighteningly, the Maison’s chief doctor, a Monsieur Maillard, has himself gone mad and become part of the patient population that has shanghaied the hospital and imprisoned the other professionals. The narrator finds himself trapped at the remote country mansion under the control of fully insane governors. He appears doomed. But a kind of twist obtains. The ending wraps up with an improbable breakout of the proper staff and the restoration of proper order. It is easy to speculate that the editors reviewing Poe’s work insisted that he had a happy outcome because otherwise the story would have been too bleak.
And bleak he could be. The most vivid exemplar is “Hop-Frog,” a tale so twisted and bloody that it remained unpublished – and probably unwritten, saving it as he may have for the end – till 1849, the last year of Poe’s short life. It is a court jester and revenge story, a kind of little people Inglorious Basterds. Hop Frog is the much-misused king’s clown. He is “a dwarf and a cripple.” He performs tricks for the monarch and his vile guests. Also performing is Trippetta, likewise a little person but, in contrast to Hop Frog, notably beautiful and graceful. They are royal slaves, having been stolen from their native land together at some earlier time. For his amusement, the king forces Hop Frog to drink too much alcohol. Trippetta begs the king to let him stop. The king responds by insulting and striking her. Soon after, the king and his guests seek Hop Frog’s comedic input on how to prepare for a masquerade. He recommends that they dress as orangutans, all chained together in a string of eight men, their costumes carefully designed to look authentic. He arranges for the monkey suits to be made of highly inflammable material like tar. As the costumed king and his seven chained privy councilors make their way into the great hall late at night, the partying, alcohol-infused guests are frightened at the convincing sight of aggressive beasts. But the king, being a royal asshole, has insisted the doors be locked behind him, and, being a royal idiot, has entrusted the keys to Hop Frog. The court jester manages to link the chain connecting the eight orangutans to another massive chain attached to the ceiling, perhaps of the kind one might have used for an enormous chandelier. Hop Frog contrives to pulley up the king and his seven fellows so that they hang above the crowd. He then lights them on fire. They burn, shrieking their last breaths high above the shouting and terrified partygoers. Hop Frog and Trippetta make good their escape through a skylight and are never seen again.
Who is the evildoer in this story, who the Devil? The king gets a graphic and gory comeuppance, worthy of the Brothers Grimm, who, by the way, were also contemporaries of Poe’s. Is his upside down burning alive proportionate to his strike upon Trippetta? To Hop Frog’s lifetime of humiliation? To their implied capture and enslavement? And what of the seven privy councilors who are incinerated with the king for all the court to see? They are certainly dislikable characters, similar in their behavior to schoolyard bullies. Their hearts then burst from the boiling. What are we to think of that?
Poe’s Devil was nothing if not constant, ubiquitous, and complex.
And what about death? If you remember your Poe, you may have the lingering impression that he was preoccupied with death. Well, I can confirm that he was.
This, from when he was about 22 years old: “It is evident we are hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge – some never to be imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction.” The line comes from one of Poe’s early successes, a story called “MS. [as in ‘Manuscript’] Found in a Bottle.” The narrator has written an account of his impending doom aboard a cargo ship in the southern seas, and the “manuscript in a bottle” purports to be a found object that he tossed overboard before what we can only conclude was his demise in a giant whirlpool off the coast of Antarctica. The story won top prize in the Baltimore Saturday Visiter, with a payout of $50, or about $1,900 in today’s currency. “Ms. Found in a Bottle” was published by the magazine on October 1, 1833, exactly 145 years to the day before I was born, which is surely a fact that no one has yet uttered in any prior analysis of the story. Anyway, the plot is about death. That much is clear. But consider that line for a second. “It is evident we are hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge – some never to be imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction.” You can hear the romance, the romanticization.
This curiosity lasted for the balance of Poe’s writing life. There were all kinds of sudden deaths and slow deaths and talking mummies and reincarnations in his body of work. In the short story “Ligeia,” the narrator’s eponymous first wife dies. He marries Lady Rowena, who also dies. He lies with Rowena’s body overnight and observes as she comes back to life, this time somehow as Ligeia, his first wife. That is pretty typical Poe. “Ligeia” is also a delightful example of Poe’s combining separate works to make a greater whole. Probably the best-known part of the story is a poem Ligeia writes called “The Conqueror Worm” – my guess is you have heard of it or perhaps even read it on its own, but perhaps, like me, you did not know Poe repurposed it, two years after he first published it, as a work of art that the character Ligeia pens before her death. He published the first version of “Ligeia” in 1838, the first version of the “The Conqueror Worm” in 1843, and then he combined them in 1845. Cool, right? I am not aware of any other American author who did that quite as often as he did. Perhaps one of my readers will be.
What may surprise you about Edgard Allan Poe as much as it surprised me was how funny he was. We remember him now mostly for his serious, so-called Gothic oeuvre. But his most important commercial brand was probably as a humor writer. He died when Mark Twain was thirteen years old. Twain would be the natural successor as America’s most famous humorist. I would like to think that Twain was inspired in his youth by Poe’s comedy, especially by his biting satire. But I am not sure. The only comment I have located by Twain on Poe was unflattering.
William Dean Howells, a mostly justly forgotten great man of American letters, seems to have authored a critique of Poe’s work that I have not been able to find. I have read only Mark Twain’s letter to Howells complimenting him on it. More on that in a second. According to various sources, Howells appears to have dismissed Poe as a “jingle man.” I believe that is in reference to “The Cask of Amontillado,” in which the narrator walls up his victim alive and can hear, nearly at the moment of final burial, only the jingle of the bells on the costume jester’s hat that his victim was wearing at the time of the murder. Howells was, it seems, calling Poe a jester. I believe there is something to that, as I shall explain below, but perhaps not in the way that Howells himself intended, though I would have to read his critique in order properly to know. My surmise as to Howells’s read comes from Twain’s reaction to it, which is both funny and rather nasty. Here it is:
To W. D. Howells, in New York:
STORMFIELD, REDDING, CONN.,
Jan. 18, ’09.
Dear Howells,
I have to write a line, lazy as I am, to say how your Poe article delighted me; and to say that I am in agreement with substantially all you say about his literature. To me his prose is unreadable—like Jane Austin’s. No, there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane’s. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.
[Etc. etc.]
Yrs ever,
MARK
(By the way, it is noteworthy that he signed the letter Mark, rather than S.L. Clemens, which he almost always did. I do not speculate as to his reasons.)
It seems Twain did not like Poe’s work, which is a shame, because I place them both in the same top tier of American humorists (a tier in which James Thurber does not belong, as I will show if I ever get around to the less than exhilarating task of writing him up).
Yes, Poe was funny, relentlessly funny. He satirized pretty much everything, from the serious and macabre to the trivial and lively. He knew what worked, and he knew what sold. “Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling” is not about Napoleon Bonaparte but about a regular plain Frenchman, a suitor whose hand is crushed by his successful rival. Poe presents the story in an impossibly broad Irish brogue that requires some adjustment before you can hack your way through. “The Business Man” consists of a sequence of boasts by a con man named Peter Proffit who appears to consider himself a legitimate Gentleman of Commerce. He proudly explains that he used to be in the business of erecting “Eye-Sore” buildings so hideous that the neighbors would pay him to remove them. He moved on to the profit of “Assault-and-Battery” – picking fights and suing his opponents. When the legislature passes a bill rewarding the culling of cats, he “invest[s] [his] whole estate in the purchase of Toms and Tabbies,” raising them to kill them for the bounties. Having made enough money from “Cat-Growing,” he now plans on “bargaining for a country seat on the Hudson,” which means running for – or purchasing, in some corrupt way – a spot in the assembly. This farce also contains within it one of the occasional instances of what you might call Poe’s casual antisemitism. Behold this selection:
If there is any thing on earth I hate, it is a genius. Your geniuses are all arrant asses – the greater the genius the greater the ass – and to this rule there is no exception whatever. Especially, you cannot make a man of business out of a genius, any more than money out of a Jew, or the best nutmegs out of pine-knots.
Of course, he puts these words into the mouth of the distasteful narrator, but the line lands for its own reasons. I can’t find it in myself to dislike Poe for this kind of old hatred, as he was a product of his time and does not appear to have been a devoted or especial antisemite, nor a lazy and ahistoric cosplay antisemite flouncing about on a college green wearing a keffiyeh shouting about rivers and tea or something or other, but I was reminded when I read Poe about how far we have come and where we may once again descend – or where you may conclude we have already returned, even among some supposedly respectable quarters.
More of Twain’s humor remains funny today than does Poe’s, and that’s not just because we are a half century in time closer to it. Twain’s humorous material is, on balance, more timeless. The premise of Poe’s “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” is exactly as it sounds, and then some. The idea is that Scheherazade finally tells one fantastic story too many, and the king decides to have her strangled. The irony is that, as she unfolds the eighth voyage of Sinbad, most of the mysterious phenomena that she describes – a train moving at great speed, an automaton chess player, wave interference, the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, lava flows in Iceland – are real, even if they are out of time with the setting of the story and even though she describes them as the work of magicians. Anyway, some of the humor still plays now, and much of it does not, especially as it gets repetitive and particularly since Poe’s guided Tour around Natural Empires is no longer stimulating to today’s reader. Think of the older James Bond movies, especially of the Sean Connery era, in which the audiences were effectively “introduced to Jamaica” or “finally got a chance to see Venice.” This is the pre-glamour period – no that’s not right, it was the period before glamour was the only part of Bond’s travel that remained to the filmmaker and viewer – when “sights of the world” were still exciting to audiences. Well, many of the onetime delights of Poe’s “Thousand-and-Second Tale” were cut from the same cloth.
Sometimes it is hard to tell if Poe is having fun with us. In the macabre tale “Ligeia,” the one with the two dead wives, one of whom may be reborn as the other, he waxes on for multiple paragraphs on the first bride’s facial features, then for more paragraphs on her bridal chamber.
Here’s a sample that starts with her nose:
I looked at the delicate outlines of the nose – and nowhere but in the graceful medallions of the Hebrews had I beheld a similar perfection. There were the same luxurious smoothness of surface, the same scarcely perceptible tendency to the aquiline, the same harmoniously curved nostrils speaking the free spirit. I regarded the sweet mouth. Here was indeed the triumph of all things heavenly – the magnificent turn of the short upper lip – the soft, voluptuous slumber of the under – the dimples which sported, and the color which spoke – the teeth glancing back, with a brilliancy almost startling, every ray of the holy light which fell upon them in her serene and placid, yet most exultingly radiant of all smiles. I scrutinized the formation of the chin – and here, too, I found the gentleness of breadth, the softness and the majesty, the fullness and the spirituality, of the Greek – the contour which the god Apollo revealed but in a dream, to Cleomenes, the son of the Athenian.
The eyes are next. It goes on like this for a while.
I mean, chances are this is satire. The prose is such a rich hue of purple. But the overall mood of the story does not make humorous intent perfectly clear. Often it is that way with him. There is a puckish quality to Poe that can leave the readers wondering whether we are the butt of the writer’s joke. We ask the question: by keeping us in the dark about whether he is writing sincerity or satire, is Poe playing a prank on us?
In fact, Edgar Allan Poe possessed an affirmative philosophical point of view on pranksterism. It was an expansive, endorsement kind of view. He even wrote a story expounding his precise opinion. This story is a kind of meta-ist, dadaist piece. It advances the theory of pranking as an exact and essential magisterium unto itself, while presenting this doctrine as the advocacy of an outwardly funny character named Jeremy Diddler. We are left pondering whether Poe’s jokey way of articulating his Tenets of Serious Pranking was designed to let us conclude that his argument was, in fact, a joke. I conclude, on the contrary, that it was not.
This story, called “Raising the Wind, or Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences,” invokes as exordium the couplet from the famous old nursery rhyme:
Hey, diddle diddle,
The cat and the fiddle.
Which he then foxily ascribes to “an Epic by ‘Flaccus.’” As if. You’d think he’s tipping his hand that what follows is ridiculous and easily to be dismissed. But it is clear to me that he’s just toying with us as a cat toys with its yarn – or fiddle.
The short story is comprised of an argument that there exists a fundamental human inclination toward, and excellence in, “diddling,” which, we figure out in the course of the exposition, is just another word for conning, for swindling, for the material, pocket-picking prank.
He starts off nice and light. His stated objective is to offer a rigorous definition of an essential human instinct and behavior.
Diddling – or the abstract idea conveyed by the verb to diddle – is sufficiently well understood. Yet the fact, the deed, the thing diddling, is somewhat difficult to define. We may get, however, at a tolerably distinct conception of the matter in hand, by defining – not the thing, diddling, in itself — but man, as an animal that diddles. Had Plato but hit upon this, he would have been spared the affront of the picked chicken.
. . .
What constitutes the essence, the ware, the principle of diddling is, in fact, peculiar to the class of creatures that wear coats and pantaloons. A crow thieves; a fox cheats; a weasel outwits; a man diddles. To diddle is his destiny. “Man was made to mourn,” says the poet. But not so: — he was made to diddle. This is his aim — his object — his end. And for this reason when a man’s diddled we say he’s “done.”
Diddling, rightly considered, is a compound, of which the ingredients are minuteness, interest, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, nonchalance, originality, impertinence, and grin.
The piece then explains each constituent ingredient of diddling in turn. We increasingly get the picture that he is just talking about the act of the con man. But he continues to insist on elevating it to the stratosphere of historical and philosophical importance in much the same way that hucksters everywhere are prone to hype their latest erectile potion or Silicon Valley salve or SuperGrow unction into world-changing inventions.
The origin of the diddle is referrable to the infancy of the Human Race. Perhaps the first diddler was Adam. At all events, we can trace the science back to a very remote period of antiquity. The moderns, however, have brought it to a point of perfection never dreamed of by our thick-headed progenitors.
Finally, he starts offering up examples of “respectable diddles.” His meaning is no longer mistakable. Here is one:
A very good diddle is this. A housekeeper in want of a sofa, for instance, is seen to go in and out of several cabinet warehouses. At length she arrives at one offering an excellent variety. She is accosted, and invited to enter, by a polite and voluble individual at the door. She finds a sofa well adapted to her views, and, upon inquiring the price, is surprised and delighted to hear a sum named at least twenty per cent lower than her expectations. She hastens to make the purchase, gets a bill and receipt, leaves her address, with a request that the article be sent home as speedily as possible, and retires amid a profusion of bows from the shop-keeper. The night arrives and no sofa. A servant is sent to make inquiry about the delay. The whole transaction is denied. No sofa has been sold — no money received — except by the diddler, who played shop-keeper for the nonce.
Why he needs two illustrations, set aside nearly ten, is beyond me, but nearly the entirety of the story’s remainder consists of more examples of depriving honest people of their hard-won resources through criminal deceit.
This piece is one of a small handful among Poe’s large oeuvre that seek expressly to explain what he is on about in one aspect or another of his intellectually diverse body of work. It is probably unique, even among this small grouping, in two ways. First, it gives us a glimpse into an intent that might well be applied broadly across his multiple genres. Second, he is hiding the ball in plain sight that his true designs remain intentionally obscure. It certainly seems that he is telling you he’s going to pick a pocket or two, and it certainly seems he thinks you’ll enjoy having your own pocket picked, indeed by him, because you can’t help but find his entire argument delightful and somehow persuasive and actually permissive, because, as he puts it, diddling is just part of human nature since Adam, and even while you’re aware that he is almost certainly joking, you can’t be quite sure. The method is all very reflexive and very good. And he was not, for my money, joking.
We can return to Samuel Clemens’s dim view of Poe in order to say it a different way. Twain missed the mark. (Get it?!?!) And how. Much of Poe’s work is straightforward and easily comestible, frequently overtly funny, and often enough even exactly of the kind of literary and local color satire – think of the Washington Irving derivatives – that Twain was wont to love. Overall, perhaps coming from a different age or just because he had a different style, Poe would write with far more flourish than Twain. But that he averred to finding Poe’s “prose . . . unreadable” is hard to swallow.
In a letter to a friend, Twain once compiled a short list of books and authors whom he recommended for either younger people or adults. On this list was Gulliver’s Travels, the 1726 satire by Jonathan Swift, which is nothing if not replete with sentence frippery. Also on the list is Daniel Defoe’s 1719 Robinson Crusoe, which moves at the speed of mud through similar line-by-line and plot-level embellishment. The most interesting, on the level of this analysis, is his recommendation of “Parkman’s Histories (a hundred of them if there were so many)”, by which he means the works of Francis Parkman, the great historian of the 19th century. As probably one of the fewer than twenty living Americans who has read every word of Parkman’s massive, seven volume France and England in North America, I can assure you that, if Twain found Poe’s text to be “unreadable” and Parkman’s histories to be essential consumption, it is entirely possible that Mark Twain used the word “unreadable” as a cryptic synonym for something else, like “gall bladder” or “fried fish” or “super-duper readable.” But yeah. Twain dismissed Poe with a swat of the back of his hand. It is disappointing.
While we are on the subject of disappointing: as far as I can tell, Mark Twain never expressed any interest in or admiration for Herman Melville, either. If that is true, it should certainly prompt a reevaluation of potentially . . . everything.
If we are to find any relevance in Twain’s criticism of Poe – any insight that might be helpful to our own evaluation – we might think of the precise logical didacticism of Poe’s so-called “tales of ratiocination.” These are his detective stories that launched the world’s most popular genre of the past two centuries.
“The Gold-Bug” is a story of a man on the hunt for a treasure. Its chief parts take the form of a detailed, step-by-step unlocking of a pirate treasure cypher. It is a precursor of the type of thing that might be found in a “Boys’ Adventure Journal” of the 20th century, with a “do-it-yourself” substitution cypher included so “you can reveal the secret treasure map on your own.” Except in Poe’s case, the deciphering is wrapped into the narrative of a treasure hunt as told by the protagonist’s companion. Poe, often the commercial writer, was picking up on the public’s emerging fascination with substitution cyphers, cryptograms, and encoded messages.
“The Gold-Bug” was a hugely successful hit. I believe it was his most widely read prose during his lifetime, even though the 21st century reader has probably never even heard of it. “The Gold-Bug” proved to be such an important and enduring boost to the popularity of cryptography that it became not only an overt influence on Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island) but an inspiration to both the British and American men who would later lead the allied codebreaking efforts in the Second World War. It is probably of more than incidental interest that Poe, like Twain, admired Daniel Defoe and and may have found some inspiration in Robinson Crusoe for his own adventure tale. “The Gold-Bug” follows an excruciating step-by-step analysis of the substitution cypher, which is presented in-text so the readers take their own crack at it along the way.
There is something claustrophic about this extreme deductivism, which is even more evident in Poe’s detective stories. His invention of the genre is most properly located in the publication of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1841, which introduced C. Auguste Dupin, the sleuth who would appear in a total of three stories in Poe’s lifetime.
In this very first-ever detective story, Poe established many of the tropes that have come to be not just familiar but perhaps expected in probably every iteration of the genre since. The story is told by Dupin’s close friend and housemate. Dupin is eccentric in his personal habits. He is a private actor, not a policeman. He hails from fallen aristocracy. Though bereft of significant means, he is unmotivated by financial reward. He keeps much of the solution to the crime to himself until the end of the action. His method is more or less strict logic, inference, rational gap-filling, and extreme deductive reasoning. A more precise logician might characterize Dupin’s approach as abductive reasoning, but we should channel our inner Twain here and choose, for the moment, to eschew pedantry. He reads the micro-expressions on witnesses’ faces. He dismisses the easy solution of the crime proposed by the bumbling police. He examines windowsills and clothing and floorboards with spyglass care. He is French. His stories are situated in Paris, a city that itself is a character, offering up the society highs and criminal lows that only a city in full flower can. He is sometimes called upon to solve, with great discretion, the affairs of royalty and thereby prevent state scandal. Dupin is the kind of man who can listen to a friend’s remark and then backward-speculate the thought process that brought him to that utterance over the past half hour. He is likewise the type of detective who can observe a room, look across the alley outside the window, and figure out that an animal must have leapt in and committed atrocity. Poe invented all of that.
The stories “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “Mystery of Marie Roget,” and “The Purloined Letter” must have been enthralling in their day. Dupin’s powerful, coherent logic that induces the reader to say “aha!” and “wow” and “it fits!” The wondrous novelty of his personality. The oddities of his method. The redoubtable incorruptibility. Audiences ate it up and have continued to eat up its progeny. It is hard to overstate how instantly and perfectly Poe gave birth to this genre that has come to dominate every bestseller list around the world, never mind the most-viewed catalogs of movies and TV shows in every streaming language.
As impressive as they still are, the stories read nowadays as somewhat tight, somewhat too heavy in their deductivism. What probably once landed as the delightful meanderings of a unique invented mind can perhaps now come across as long paragraphs of steaming, overly delineated logical proof and self-absorption. In fairness, you could say the same about Arthur Conan Doyle, too. But it is so easy – in fact, I think it is so very necessary – to forgive this out-of-time imperfection in Poe’s case (and maybe in Doyle’s, too), because Poe clear-cut, whole-cloth, full-stop and full-send invented detective fiction.
Poe also virtually invented science fiction. I have elsewhere in these pages explained my view of this genre. Notwithstanding my opinion of the category, one simply must admire Poe’s imagination and achievement. “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” is a story from his mid-twenties that purports to be the true and correct manuscript of a voyager who built a new type of hot air balloon that allowed him to reach the moon. This is thirty years before Jules Verne. It is a found object story of the type that has been popular on and off for quite some time and was very well-characterized in the first century of American history (think again of our old pal Washington Irving, whom Poe sometimes channeled). “Von Kempelen and his Discovery” – published shortly before Poe’s death, as the Gold Rush was in full swing – was presented as a kind of news article that, in the course of its few pages, suggested a secret path toward successful alchemy. “Mellonta Tauta” is written in the form of a letter datelined April 1, 2848, “On Board Balloon ‘Skylark.” It is another spaceman tale from Poe that takes the opportunity to reflect, as did most later specimens of science fiction, on the writer’s own century. It is easy to get the scent of Monsieur Verne, who expressly credited Poe with being the “créateur du roman merveilleux scientifique.” Poe’s science fiction oeuvre is not quite as coherent as his detective fiction, but it is certainly very accessible.
Then comes Eureka. I don’t mean that figuratively. Eureka was one of Poe’s very longest works, published near the end of his life. It variously carried the title Eureka: A Prose Poem and Eureka: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe. It defies classification. Eureka is a long and rambling musing on the order of the universe, on the nature of G-d, on the “Physical, Metaphysical and Mathematical – of the Material and Spiritual Universe: of its Essence, its Origin, its Creation, its Present Condition and its Destiny.” In one of the more tantalizing themes, he proposes that the Universe is itself like the work of an author: “The Universe is a plot of G-d,” and “the plots of G-d are perfect.” In this sprawling and meandering sasquatch of an essay-poem, he returns to his earlier penchant for edified allusion, citing Euclid, Kant, Aristotle, and Bacon, among others. Poe appears to have thought much of Eureka. He is sometimes said to have believed it to be his masterwork. I have read that he suggested his publisher print one million copies, though it sold only five hundred of the less than one thousand that Putnam decided to print.
It is nonsense, Eureka, utter nonsense. It is, in fact, unreadable. It is the only one of Poe’s works that comes close to qualifying as unreadable, in my view, but it is very qualified.
If Mark Twain’s negative opinion of Poe is to be credited at all, it might be allowed that he was thinking of Eureka.
But I think that to make such an assessment, even as applied to Eureka, would be to make a major mistake.
I think Twain was not hep to the diddling.
I believe this outwardly stone-cold serious poem-essay-final-declaration was Poe’s most heavy-handed, largest practical joke. A jest to burn the house down. The preposterous, surreal, annoying, nonsensical Eureka was his final big diddle, his attempt to go out with a bang and pull the wool over the eyes of even the most educated society members who celebrated him – or perhaps insufficiently celebrated him, in his own privately harbored view. It was his puzzle for the later ages, a pharaonic inscription on the inner wall of his self-built mausoleum, one that would take forever to decipher until it was finally realized that Poe was diddling all over your rose garden. It is the only way I can make sense of Eureka. He was playing a grand joke on all of us. My own view is that there is, likewise, no other satisfactory explanation for James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. Tell me I’m wrong.
For the sake of some completeness that I really think should be strictly unnecessary, we can add an alternative interpretation, a less charitable view which would propose that by 1848, Poe was aware he was dying and hoping to create a grand philosophical legacy and, perhaps afflicted by an already aggressive syphilis, he was losing his mind. But I don’t think so. I think his putative cosmography was his cosmic leave-behind joke.
If my read is right, then we should allow that there might be perceived a soupcon of meanness in Poe’s pranksterism, perhaps especially in this final eureka. Nonetheless, I think a large dose of empathy for this wild, genius-man is in order. He would have certainly been a nearly entirely lonely figure for the great bulk of his short life. His intelligence, his imagination, his erudition, these would all have been underappreciated in his time. Inevitably so. I have a feeling that, like his alcoholism, his so-called diddling was a coping mechanism and, more to the point, a kind of private vengeance against his loneliness.
We owe a lot to Edgar Allan Poe. By we, I mean not just Americans and not just English speakers but people all over the world who benefit from the genres he gave us. It is hard to imagine a contemporary literature – or even a contemporary vocabulary – without him. It is also impossible not to lament the brevity of his life. What he accomplished easily qualifies him as one of America’s very greatest writers and probably its most influential. The scope of what he gifted us has perhaps descended into “forgotten lore.” It deserves total rehabilitation to its deserved place. He might have been our best ever. I do not like to think of his loneliness, of his torment. Would he have been as powerful without them? What about just a little less of them? What then? What would he have achieved? Poe had just over twenty productive years before he died. Imagine if life had been slightly kinder to him, if, finally, he had lived twice as long.