Authors: Matthew Goodman
It was worse, of course, when he drank. Though Poe was not a regular drinker, during especially difficult periods of his life he was prone to binges. Those were the times when he unleashed the full fury of his despair, when his charcoal eyes took on a strange shine and he mocked and abused everything around him. “He did not drink as an epicure, but like a barbarian,” wrote one of his later admirers, Charles Baudelaire. “As soon as alcohol had touched his lips he went to the bar and drank glass
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after glass until his good Angel was drowned, and all his faculties were destroyed.” Often the alcohol set him to roaming the streets, where he brooded over old battles and lost himself in reveries; surely too in his solitary wanderings he comforted himself with the happy memories he retained from his boyhood. Most of them centered on the Allan house in Richmond, that brick mansion with the mahogany staircase and mirrored ballroom. Outside the air was sweet with raspberry and jasmine from gardens overlooking the green valley that rolled down to meet the James, the little houses of Manchester perched as delicately as river birds along the south bank, and off in the distance, gleaming white, the state capitol with its triangular portico and Ionic columns, like a temple atop one of the hills of Rome. He had been given his own bedroom, with a well-stocked wardrobe (even as a boy he was something of a dandy) and a comfortable lounge, where by the glow of an agate lamp he stayed up reading books he borrowed from his stepfather’s library, discovering then the work of Byron and Milton and Keats, the poets who would,
in absentia,
become his lifetime companions. Perhaps his favorite place of all, though, was the wide porch that ran along the second floor of the house. There John Allan had installed a powerful telescope, and young Edgar spent many hours gazing at the night sky, when he first acquainted himself with the stars and the planets, and, as he wrote in his tale “Hans Phaall,” begun in Baltimore in 1834, “the wild and dreamy regions of the moon.”
In the summer of 1833, a short-lived Baltimore weekly called the
Saturday Visiter
sponsored a literary contest, offering a prize of one hundred dollars for the best story. The
Visiter’
s judges were three of the city’s most respected literary figures, among them a writer named John Pendleton Kennedy, who would become one of Poe’s most important benefactors. On the day of the judging, the panel met in the home of one of its members, John H. B. Latrobe. The men retired to the back parlor, where a table had been “garnished,” Latrobe recalled, “with some old wine and good cigars.” Thus fortified, they settled into easy chairs to begin their deliberations. Latrobe, as the panel’s junior member, opened the packets that had been delivered to the
Visiter
and read aloud each of the submitted stories. The rejections basket quickly began to fill up.
Many of the stories were discarded after only a few lines had been read; a few were set aside for later consideration, but upon further review these too were deemed unworthy of the hundred-dollar prize. The
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judges had just about decided not to award a story prize at all when Latrobe noticed another submission that had been left unread, perhaps, as he would later explain, because it looked so different from the rest. The other stories had been written on letter paper in the florid cursive script of the time, but Poe submitted a small bound notebook into which he had painstakingly copied out six stories in distinctive block letters, as if to imitate typographical printing. On the front page he had inscribed a title:
Tales of the Folio Club
. The other writers had produced manuscripts; Poe had created a book.
Latrobe began to read Poe’s stories aloud, and before long the room had fallen respectfully silent except for the sound of his voice and an occasional interjection from one of the other judges: “Capital!” one of them might be moved to exclaim. “Excellent!” “How odd!” When Latrobe had finished reading and laid down the book, the judges understood, without a word having been spoken among them, that the contest had come to an end. In Poe’s stories there was none of the sentimentality or cliché that had marred the other submissions. Instead, the language was richly styled (the judges were all impressed by what Latrobe termed the author’s “classic diction”), the writing passionate yet always controlled, and the plot-lines deeply imaginative. In the span of a half dozen stories, Poe had managed to create his own world—utterly strange yet believable, and altogether fascinating. For the judges, the question was no longer which writer should win the prize, but only to which of Poe’s stories the prize should be awarded.
After some discussion, the judges awarded the hundred dollars to the story “MS. Found in a Bottle,” a harrowing first-person account of a shipwreck off the coast of Java and the survivor’s subsequent encounter with a phantom ship inhabited by an ancient crew. At the close of the story the narrator’s ship gets caught in a whirlpool and goes down, its only remaining traces the manuscript itself, which he has placed in a bottle and thrown into the sea. The story anticipated “Hans Phaall” because it was Poe’s first attempt to infuse a fanciful narrative with scientific and technical erudition in order to create the effect he called “very close verisimilitude,” leading the reader to believe that the story, however unlikely its events may seem, could well have happened in just this way. It was a technique to which he would return again and again in his stories, especially in his hoax stories, perhaps most memorably in the “Balloon Hoax” that he modeled on Richard Adams Locke’s Moon Hoax, and in his own
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moon story (he was then calling it simply “Hans Phaall—A Tale”), on which he was about to begin work.
Many years later, in an address to a Poe memorial service held in Baltimore in 1875, John Latrobe would recall that Edgar Allan Poe came to visit him at his law offices shortly after the
Saturday Visiter
contest in 1833. During that visit Poe began to describe a story he was writing about a balloon voyage to the moon. According to Latrobe, Poe became very excited as he recounted it, speaking rapidly and even clapping his hands or stamping his foot for emphasis. This behavior sounds like Poe, and the conversation between the two men surely did occur. However, recent scholarship has decisively shown that Latrobe’s chronology was faulty (understandable after an interregnum of more than four decades) and that the meeting took place no earlier than 1834. During the conversation Poe is said to have mentioned the Richmond journal the
Southern Literary
Messenger,
which was not founded until May 1834. Furthermore, Poe could not have begun “Hans Phaall” in 1833 because he drew heavily on John Herschel’s
A Treatise on Astronomy,
which did not appear in the United States until 1834.
It is possible that Poe began work on “Hans Phaall” as late as 1835, in which case he might have been influenced by a balloon story called
“Leaves from an Aeronaut” (its author’s name was given only as “D.”) that appeared in the January 1835 issue of the New York monthly the
Knickerbocker.
(There is little doubt that Poe saw the story, for he avidly read the literary journals and the
Knickerbocker
was the leading one of its time.) Like “Leaves from an Aeronaut,” Poe’s “Hans Phaall” begins with a four-line poetic epigraph, and like the earlier story, it presents a first-person account of a secretly prepared balloon flight, with detailed descriptions of the physical phenomena encountered during the flight, including—in both stories— the use of a test pigeon, the unexpected appearance of a “double horizon,” and the fearsome sight of a thunderstorm raging below the balloon. But while D.’s aeronaut is content to ascend five miles into the atmosphere, Hans Phaall sets his sights on the moon.
Poe’s story opens in the Dutch city of Rotterdam, where a large crowd in the town square suddenly beholds an unexpected sight. “Ten thousand faces were upturned toward the heavens” (in “Leaves from an Aeronaut,” the balloonist preparing for his flight is “the focus of ten thousand
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eyes”) as a large balloon descends from the sky. Inside the basket is a very strange-looking old gentleman, no more than two feet tall, dressed in brightly colored satin clothing. Pulling a leather pocketbook from his jacket, he takes from it a thick letter tied with red tape, and from his lofty perch drops it at the feet of the astonished burgomaster below; then, his mission accomplished, he soars away again, disappearing behind the cover of a cloud. The letter has been written by a bellows mender named Hans Phaall (the Latin word for bellows, as Poe undoubtedly knew, is
follis
), formerly of Rotterdam, who had mysteriously disappeared from the town some five years earlier. It relates Hans Phaall’s strange tale—his “unparalleled adventure,” as Poe would call it in a late version of the story’s title.
As the story begins, the bellows-mending business has been very slow, and Hans Phaall is besieged by bill collectors. One afternoon, having momentarily eluded his creditors, Hans ducks into a bookshop where he happens upon an obscure pamphlet of “speculative astronomy.” He soon finds himself absorbed in the work, and by the time he returns home he has concocted a daring plan to escape his debt. He will build a balloon, but not just any balloon, because (as he reveals later in the story) he is “determined to depart, yet live—to leave the world, yet continue to exist. . . . I resolved, let what would ensue, to force a passage, if I could,
to the moon.
”
Secretly, so as not to excite the attention of his creditors, Hans and his wife (she is a capable woman, he assures the reader, and will get along perfectly well without him) sell whatever property they can and use the money to purchase fine cambric muslin, strong twine, a large wicker basket, and everything else he will need to construct “a balloon of extraordinary dimensions.” Under cover of darkness, he transports these supplies to a secret location east of Rotterdam, along with an unspecified quantity of materials he will identify only as “
a particular metallic substance
” and “
a very common acid,
” which, when combined, form a gas much lighter than air. More darkly (for his scientific program has a sinister aspect as well), Hans has also purchased five large iron casks, which he fills with cannon powder and buries near the balloon, leaving visible only a short section of fuse.
At last his preparations are complete. It is the first of April, a rainy, star-less night. (Surely it is not a coincidence that Poe begins the main action of his story on April Fool’s Day.) Hans Phaall sets to work inflating his balloon with the aid of his three creditors, whom he has inveigled to help him with
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an invention that he promises will be a sure money maker. By daybreak the balloon is fully inflated and the basket loaded with provisions, which include 175 pounds of ballast, an apparatus for the condensation of air, various devices for conducting experiments in the upper atmosphere, food and water, and his traveling companions—two pigeons and a cat.
After surreptitiously igniting the fuse leading to the cannon powder, Hans hops into the basket and cuts the cord. The balloon shoots into the sky, its takeoff followed almost immediately by a deafening roar from the earth below: an explosion of burning wood and scattering metal and man-gled limbs (for his creditors have now met their violent end), the blast sending up such a mighty concussive force that Hans Phaall, like one of the slapstick comedians of a later century, is thrown out of the basket and quickly finds himself dangling upside down, hanging on only by an entangled left foot. His situation has become unexpectedly desperate, but Phaall—showing, under the circumstances, a remarkable sangfroid— manages to pull himself back to the safety of the basket by jury-rigging a grappling hook out of his cravat and the belt buckle of his pantaloons. Before long he has regained his composure and given himself over fully to his voyage, his narration of which will include an account of his sighting of the North Pole (a view never before beheld by human eyes), the changes in the appearance of the earth’s surface at different altitudes, his experiments with gravity, and his terrifying encounter with a meteor shower. All the while the balloon is rising ever closer to its destination, the moon.
In the climactic moment of the story, Hans Phaall awakens to find that the balloon has undergone a
bouleversement,
a reversal of position caused by the shrinking gravitational pull of the earth relative to that of the moon, so that the earth has suddenly disappeared, hidden behind his balloon overhead, while the moon itself now lies directly below. The next day—just nineteen days since his departure from Rotterdam—Phaall successfully lands on the moon, avoiding the immense volcanoes that cover the lunar surface and tumbling into the center of “a fantastical-looking city,” where he finds himself surrounded by a large crowd of silent, grin-ning, earless little creatures. His voyage, “undoubtedly the most extraordinary, and the most momentous, ever accomplished, undertaken, or conceived by any denizen of earth,” has reached its end.
Though Edgar Allan Poe would make vigorous claims for its originality,
“Hans Phaall—A Tale” was by no means the first literary account of a
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lunar voyage. Ludovico Ariosto’s sixteenth-century epic poem
Orlando
Furioso,
for instance, includes a trip to the moon in a chariot driven by four swift red horses. Two centuries later, a chariot also figured in the novel
The Consolidator,
by Daniel Defoe; this one was mounted atop two large wings, each of them powered by a mysterious fuel discovered by the lunar inhabitants themselves. In Francis Godwin’s
Man in the Moone: or A
Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales, the Speedy Messenger,
published in 1638, the eponymous hero uses a harness rigged up to a flock of trained geese; having gotten into some trouble with the British navy, Diego Gonsales believes that the geese—he refers to them by the Spanish word
gansas
—are carrying him to safety on a nearby mountain, and is bewildered when they soar past the mountaintop and keep on rising.