Poe (16 page)

It should be remembered that Poe was a Southerner.
He was a Virginian, if not by birth, at least by inclination. He disliked the culture of New England in general, and of Boston in particular; he despised in equal measure Transcendentalism and Abolitionism. He was in spirit if not in practice a Southern gentleman. That accounts for the somewhat florid classicism, and the melodic intensity, of his prose. “It is high time,” he once wrote, “that the literary South took its own interests into its own charge.” So in Boston he had entered the den of his enemies.

He retaliated to the resulting abuse by proudly claiming to have “quizzed,” or made fun of, the Bostonians. In the
Broadway JournalPoe
revealed that “we like Boston. We were born there—and perhaps it is just as well not to mention that we are heartily ashamed of the fact… the Bostonians have no soul.” He added salt to the wound, or fuel to the flame, by adding that “it
could
scarcely be supposed that we would put ourselves to the trouble of composing for the Bostonians anything in the shape of an original poem… it did well enough for a Boston audience.” This was, at the very least, ungracious.

Cornelia Walter herself then returned to the attack by noting that “it must be confessed that he did
out-Yankee
the managers of the Lyceum since he not only emptied their pockets but emptied the house.” The general impression, assiduously spread by Miss Walter and others, was of Poe as unreliable and discourteous. He was not serious. He was a charlatan and a drunkard.

• • •

In this inauspicious month Poe also took charge of the
Broadway Journal.
In a series of negotiations and schemings he bought out his erstwhile partners. “By a flurry of manoeuvres almost incomprehensible to myself,” he wrote, “I have succeeded, one by one, in getting rid, one by one, of all my associates.” He also raised funds from friends and even issued an advertisement in the
Journal
itself proclaiming “A RARE OPPORTUNITY” for an investment in the enterprise. He begged money, he borrowed money, he promised money. Then, on 25 October 1845, Poe's name was blazoned on the masthead of
the Journal
as “Editor and Proprietor.” “I have to do
everything myself”
he wrote, “edit the paper—get it to press—and attend to the multitudinous
business
besides.”

One of his erstwhile partners, Charles Frederick Briggs, was happy to relinquish any interest in the magazine. He regarded Poe as a liability, calling him “the merest shell of a man,” “a drunken sot,” and the “most purely selfish of human beings.” He added for good measure that Poe quoted from the German without being able to understand a word of the language. This is likely to have been true. Briggs also believed that, in retaliation, Poe was spreading lies about him in New York: “I cannot conceive of such wanton malice, as Poe has been guilty of towards me.”

As sole proprietor, Poe was not a success. He curtailed the coverage of
the Journal,
for want of funds, and could not afford to pay any decent contributors. He republished his own work, and printed the poems of the “starry sisterhood”
and other poetasters. The magazine's circulation was uneven, and its publication was fitful. Six weeks after acquiring the editorship he sold half of his interest to Thomas H. Lane, a Customs House employee he had met in Philadelphia. “For the first time during two months,” he told one acquaintance, “I find myself entirely myself— dreadfully sick and depressed, but still myself. I seem to have just awakened from some horrible dream… I really believe that I have been mad.” He had been “mad” at the Lyceum, “mad” in his pursuit of Mrs. Osgood, “mad” in his decision to take up the editorship of the
Journal.
The madness, if such it was, had come from the combined effects of drink and intolerable strain. A month after signing the agreement with Lane, according to English, Poe succumbed to “one of his drunken sprees.” Lane closed down the magazine on 3 January 1846. It was the last editorial position Poe would ever hold.

The day before the
Broadway Journal
closed Poe witnessed an agreement by which Maria Clemm relinquished her claim to a piece of Baltimore property, worth twenty-five dollars; the family must have been desperate indeed to sign away their last piece of capital.

In the previous November Stoddard had passed Poe in the street. It was raining heavily, and for a moment Stoddard considered sharing his umbrella with him. But “something—certainly not unkindness—withheld me. I went on and left him there in the rain, pale, shivering, miserable … There I still see him, and always shall,— poor, penniless, but proud, reliant, dominant.” In the same
month Poe wrote to a relation, George Poe, “I have perse-veringly struggled, against a thousand difficulties, and have succeeded, although not in making money, still in attaining a position in the world of Letters, of which, under the circumstances, I have no reason to be ashamed.”

P
oe believed that he had many enemies. He blamed the failure of the
Broadway Journal
“on the part of one or two persons who are much imbit-tered against me,” and he declared that “there is a deliberate attempt now being made to involve me in ruin.” It is not clear who these “one or two persons” were, if they existed at all, but they may have been rival newspaper editors or writers unhappy about Poe's often scathing critical notices. But he was right to sense persecution. At the beginning of 1846, he was involved in unwelcome scandal. It came from an unexpected quarter.

In his life there were certain literary females who vied for his attention. Principal among them were Elizabeth F. Ellet, Fanny Osgood, Margaret Fuller, and Anne Lynch. Fanny Osgood, the poetess of New York, was by now a family friend. Margaret Fuller was a writer and reviewer who, four years before, had edited a Transcendentalist
quarterly the
Dial;
she had met Poe at a soirée in New York. Anne Lynch was a poetess and teacher, who hosted some of these soirées. Elizabeth Ellet was a poet and novelist whose work Poe had printed and praised in the
Broadway Journal.
Fanny Osgood, in perhaps not the most charitable spirit, remarked that Elizabeth Ellet “followed him everywhere.”

Elizabeth Ellet and Fanny Osgood had written rapturous letters to Poe that, to a prurient reader, might have erred on the side of indiscretion. Expressions of poetic devotion, as he himself knew well enough, are not the same thing as true passion. Yet that is not how it seemed at the time, when the two women became incensed and then alarmed at the manner in which their missives were being treated.

Early in 1846, Mrs. Ellet decided one day to call upon Poe at his home in Amity Street. When she came up to the house, she heard laughter, and on gaining entrance discovered Fanny Osgood in the parlour with Virginia Poe. It soon became evident that they were laughing at a letter. It was still in Fanny Osgood's hand, and it was Mrs. Ellet's letter to Poe. Mrs. Ellet snatched it up, and marched out. That is one version.

There is another. Mrs. Ellet called at Amity Street and, in the course of her visit, Virginia read out to her a letter to Poe from Mrs. Osgood. (If this version of the story is true, it is difficult to know why Virginia was being indiscreet.) Mrs. Ellet professed to be somewhat alarmed by the
tone of Mrs. Osgood's letter. No doubt aching with excitement, she went immediately to see Mrs. Osgood herself to advise her to retrieve all her letters to Poe. The question was one of womanly modesty.

The two other literary ladies now entered the scene. Margaret Fuller and Anne Lynch, dear friends from the soirées, visited Poe and formally demanded the return of Mrs. Osgood's letters. Poe was naturally resentful. He responded that Fanny Osgood was not alone. Elizabeth Ellet's letters were also open to misinterpretation.

In the meantime Elizabeth Ellet had asked her brother to call upon Poe and demanded the return of her letters. Poe insisted to him that he had already sent them back to Mrs. Ellet. But the brother did not believe him and threatened to kill him if he did not produce them. Poe then visited Thomas Dunn English, and asked for the use of his pistol. English denied the request, and insinuated that Poe never did possess any letters from Mrs. Ellet in the first place. The two men engaged in some kind of tussle. It sounds like the most absurd fiction, but somewhere in the welter of claim and counter-claim there was a genuine imbroglio.

Poe retreated to his bed after his encounter with English, and then persuaded his physician to deliver an apologetic letter to Mrs. Ellet. He denied making any improper claims about her correspondence but added that, if he did make any such remarks, he must have been suffering from temporary insanity. Mrs. Osgood was also incensed
about the mockery of her own letters, and persuaded Virginia Poe to write her a letter confirming what she called “my innocence.”

Poe never saw Elizabeth Ellet, or Fanny Osgood, again. Mrs. Ellet declared him to be “steeped in infamy.” He was ostracised from the salons of the starry sisterhood. According to Anne Lynch, Poe “said & did a great many things that were very abominable.” At a later date he was to excoriate “the pestilential society of
literary women.
They are a heartless, unnatural, venomous, dishonorable
set,
with no guiding principle but inordinate self-esteem.”

Anne Lynch described him as having “no moral sense.” It should be added that his stories have no “moral sense,” either, and that he disdained any such principle. Is “moral sense” to be expected of the man rather than the writer?

• • •

Yet his appetite for controversy was not extinguished. During this period a friend and journalist, William Gilmore Simms, wrote to him that “you are now perhaps in the most perilous period of your career—just in that position—just at that time of life—when a false step becomes a capital error—when a single leading mistake is fatal in its consequences.” Poe was not one to listen to advice, however well meant; nor was he ever likely to learn from his mistakes. His presiding deity was, after all, the imp of the perverse.

And so, perversely, in the spring of 1846, he began a
series of essays for
Godey's Lady's Book
entitled “The Literati of New York: Some Honest Opinions at Random Respecting their Authorial Merits, with Occasional Words of Personality.” Poe was in fact planning to bring out a volume of critical essays, entitled
The American Parnassus,
and these sketches were the first airing of a number of pieces, critical or respectful, on the merits of the more celebrated authors of the day. He resented the undue praise and “puffery” expended on what he considered to be “unworthy” writers and, as a result, he could at times be exceedingly satirical. Indeed he launched a full-scale attack on the literary cliques and circles that controlled the publication and reception of American literature; they represented what he called “the corrupt nature of our ordinary criticism.”

Of Lewis Gaylord Clark, the editor of the
Knickerbocker,
Poe wrote that “as a literary man, he has about him no determinateness, no distinctiveness, no point—an apple, in fact, or a pumpkin has more angles … he is noticeable for nothing in the world except for the marked-ness by which he is noticeable for nothing.” Of Thomas Dunn English, erstwhile friend but now confirmed enemy, Poe wrote that “I do not personally know him.” This false denial was followed up by a swipe at English's appearance: “he exists in a perpetual state of vacillation between moustachio and goatee.” Poe excelled at this kind of ad hominem criticism; it was immensely readable at the time, of course, with three editions of some issues being printed to keep up with sales. Poe was the most controversial,
and most widely discussed, literary journalist in the country. It is not clear, however, that his reputation as a writer was improved.

Some of his victims also had an unfortunate habit of fighting back. Lewis Gaylord Clark retorted, in the
Knickerbocker,
that Poe was “a wretched inebriate” and a “jaded hack.” He quoted from an unnamed source, most likely Clark himself, that “he called at our office the other day, in a condition of sad imbecility, bearing in his feeble body the evidences of evil living and betrayed by his talk such radical obliquity of sense … He was accompanied by an aged female relative who was going a weary round in the hot streets, following his steps to prevent his indulging in a love of drink; but he had eluded her watchful eye by some means, and was already far gone in a state of inebriation.”