Authors: Matthew Goodman
In all, more than one-quarter of Poe’s balloon story was taken from the two earlier Mason pamphlets. Nor was his borrowing limited to the text of the story. The extra edition published by the
Sun
also included a large
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engraving of the steering balloon
Victoria
—copied almost exactly from the one on the frontispiece of Mason’s
Remarks on the Ellipsoidal Balloon.
Poe wrote an account of the Balloon Hoax (as it almost immediately came to be known) in his second letter to the
Columbia Spy,
published in May 1844, one month after his Monck Mason story appeared in the
Sun.
“The ‘Balloon-Hoax,’” he asserted, “made a far more intense sensation than anything of that character since the ‘Moon-Story’ of Locke.”
On the morning (Saturday) of its announcement, the whole square surrounding the “Sun” building was literally besieged, blocked up—ingress and egress being alike impossible, from a period soon after sunrise until about two o’clock P.M. In Saturday’s regular issue, it was stated that the news had been just received, and that an “Extra” was then in preparation, which would be ready at ten. It was not delivered, however, until nearly noon. In the meantime I never witnessed more intense excitement to get possession of a newspaper. As soon as the few first copies made their way into the streets, they were bought up, at almost any price, from the newsboys, who made a profitable speculation beyond doubt.
I saw a half-dollar given, in one instance, for a single paper, and a shilling was a frequent price. I tried, in vain, during the whole day, to get possession of a copy.
Having recounted the morning’s events (Poe’s assertions of the hoax’s great success were as fictional as the hoax itself), he then turned once again to the “gross errors” of Locke’s series in comparison with the perfect verisimilitude of his own story. “As for internal evidence of falsehood, there is, positively,
none—
while the more generally accredited fable of Locke would not bear even momentary examination by the scientific.” If there were those who disbelieved the balloon story, the blame can be laid at the doorstep of the
Sun,
which had published the moon story in the first place.
“The
success
of the hoax,” he wrote, referring to Locke’s moon series, is usually attributed to its correctness, and the consequent difficulty of detecting a flaw. But we rather think it attributable to the circumstance of this hoax being first in the field, or nearly so. It took the people by surprise, and there was no good reason (apart from internal evidence) for disbelief. It was therefore believed, although abounding in gross er-
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rors, which should have caused it to be discredited at once; while, on the other hand, the “Balloon-Story,” which had
no
error, and which related nothing that might not really have happened, was discredited on account of the frequent previous deceptions, of similar character, perpetrated by the “Sun.”
Few of New York’s other newspapers paid any attention to the balloon story, and those that did immediately denounced it as fraudulent. In the
Herald,
James Gordon Bennett called it “a ridiculous hoax,” “blunder-ingly got up” and “preposterously issued.” The
New-York American
observed that “the express which has hardly outstripped the regular mail, must also have brought along a woodcut of the balloon, as the Sun has the picture as well as the story—one as good as the other.” Nor was the criticism confined to New York. In Philadelphia, the
Saturday Courier
reprinted a portion of the story but advised, “We think every intelligent reader will be disposed to regard this attempt to hoax as not even possessing the character of pleasantry. The celebrated ‘Moon Hoax,’ issued from the office of the New York Sun, many years ago, was an ingenious essay; but that is more than can be said of this ‘Balloon Story.’”
The
Courier’
s comment indicates that the Moon Hoax was still fresh in people’s minds, as Poe had suggested, but there may have been another reason for the general skepticism. In Poe’s account of the scene at the
Sun
building, he presents himself as a mere bystander, watching in amazement as his work creates a frenzy. A rather different version of the morning’s events has been supplied by a prominent New Yorker of the time, Thomas Low Nichols, in his memoir
Forty Years of American Life.
Nichols was a novelist and newspaper editor, as well as a practitioner of what was then known as hydropathy, or the “water cure.” During Poe’s years in New York, the two men often saw each other socially (Nichols’s wife and fellow hydrotherapist, Mary Sargeant Gove Nichols, wrote her own “Reminiscences of Edgar Allan Poe” and was herself a subject of Poe’s
Literati
of New York City
series). Poe praised Thomas Low Nichols in the
Columbia Spy
as “a man of much talent.” In his memoir, published in 1864, Nichols returned the compliment, calling Poe “a man of rare genius,” although one “with some grave faults of character and one great misfortune— a temperament so sensitive that a single glass of wine made him not merely intoxicated, but insane.” The single incident Nichols related about Edgar Allan Poe involved the publication of the balloon story.
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The publisher, as is the American custom, had brought it out as an extra; and Poe, crazed by a glass of wine, stood on the walk before the publisher’s door, and told the assembled crowd that the extra was a hoax, as he personally knew, for he had written it himself. The crowd scattered, the sales fell off, and the publisher, on going to the door, saw the author making what he conceived to be the necessary explanation.
This would seem highly curious—even scarcely believable—behavior for the author of such a carefully designed hoax, but Poe’s career was riddled with acts of self-sabotage, often provoked by drink, which he came to regret when sober. Such may have been the case here. Since his earliest days as a writer, Poe had taken extreme pride in the quality of his work, which he believed would allow him to rise above the mass of ordinary people whose taste he disdained but whose acclaim he thirsted for like wine. (“I love fame,” Poe once confided to Mary Gove Nichols.
“I dote on it—I idolize it—I would drink to the very dregs the glorious intoxication.”) The pride, the vanity, the desire for fame: that powerful combination may have caused Poe to proclaim to the crowd assembled before the
Sun
building that he was the true author of the balloon story, especially if, as Thomas Low Nichols claimed, he was drinking at the time. Indeed, subsequent events seem to suggest that Nichols’s version is the more likely one. For if Poe’s account were accurate—if his hoax had created an “intense sensation,” with New Yorkers paying up to fifty cents for a single copy—then Moses Beach, enterprising businessman that he was, would have attempted to keep alive the possibility of the story’s veracity in order to extend the controversy (and the sales) as long as possible. But this path would not be available once word got around town that the author had very publicly admitted to perpetrating a hoax. (Richard Adams Locke had made his admission in private, to a single reporter.) In its very next issue the
Sun
printed a retraction of the story, something it had never done with the moon series:
The mails from the South last Saturday night not having brought confirmation of the balloon from England, the particulars of which from our correspondent we detailed in our extra, we are inclined to believe that the intelligence is erroneous. The description of the balloon and the voyage was written with a minuteness and scientific ability calculated to
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obtain credit everywhere, and was read with great pleasure and satisfaction. We by no means think such a project impossible.
For the Balloon Hoax, there would be no pamphlets or lithographs; no reprints in newspapers around the country and around the world; no theatrical parodies; no peristrephic dioramas portraying Monck Mason’s voyage across the Atlantic. Within weeks Poe’s hoax was largely forgotten, except for his report of it in the
Columbia Spy.
“Poe’s account of the publication of his own
Balloon Hoax
is extremely interesting,” Thomas Mabbott, an editor of the collected
Columbia Spy
letters, remarked nearly a century later. “From my own reading in various papers I have the impression that fewer people were fooled than Poe could have wished.”
In 1844, the year of his Balloon Hoax, Poe published an odd little essay called “Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences.” (The title is a play on Thomas de Quincey’s “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.”) As a genre, the humorous essay was not ideally suited to Poe’s talents, and this example is today little remembered, but “Diddling” is notable for the insight it gives into Poe’s longtime fascination with hoaxes—what one of his most sympathetic biographers termed “a child-ish and almost unbalanced delight in a hoax of any kind.”
“Man is an animal that diddles,” declares Poe at the outset of the essay,
“and there is
no
animal that diddles
but
man.” A crow may thieve, a fox may cheat, but only a man may diddle. Poe himself does not provide the et-ymology, but the word
diddle
can be traced to the British playwright James Kenney’s 1803 farce
Raising the Wind,
which featured a good-natured swindler by the name of Jeremy Diddler. A diddle is a kind of swindle, and Poe’s essay is full of examples of small-time swindles: a shopkeeper tricked into providing free whiskey, a ship’s captain deceived into paying a fake bill of charges, attendees of a camp meeting convinced to pay a toll to cross a free bridge. In each case the diddler has concocted a story that causes the un-suspecting listener to hand over his possessions willingly, even cheerfully.
The anecdotes all seem very lighthearted, and Poe’s sympathies throughout clearly lie not with the victim of the diddle but its perpetrator. The diddler possesses all of the attributes that Poe so esteemed: he is ingenious; he is audacious; he is persevering; he is nonchalant (“He is cool,” Poe observes admiringly, “cool as a cucumber”); he is original. He also takes great pleasure in his own work. Having finished his daily labors, Poe informs us, the
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diddler goes home at night, locks the door, undresses, puts out the candle, gets into bed, and then, alone in the darkness, he grins. “A diddle,” Poe informs us, “would be
no
diddle without a grin.”
The diddler is a man who lives by his wits. The tools of his trade are intelligence, cunning, and bravado, which he uses to concoct a story so authentic-seeming that the listener cannot help but believe it. To diddle, then, is not merely to swindle, but to do so by creating a carefully planned, artful deception—by producing a kind of hoax.
According to Poe, the hoaxer is the extraordinary, the superior man, for with his hoax he has managed to rise above the foolish, credulous mass of people. (In his account of the Balloon Hoax, Poe refers to them as
“the rabble.”) He has achieved his success not by being born into it (an especially sensitive topic for Poe, given how little he received from his wealthy stepfather) or by cultivating friendships with more successful men (Poe was forever railing against the clubbiness of the literary world), but by earning it: his success is a reflection of his own brilliance.
“Diddling,” then, helps explain Poe’s complicated response to Richard Adams Locke. Poe’s finely tuned sense of literary competitiveness caused him to disparage Locke’s most celebrated work as shoddily constructed, if elegantly delivered, but he also could not help but admire what he saw as Locke’s consummate skill as a hoaxer: his calm, his audaciousness, his ingenuity. Sometimes one of those feelings was ascendant in Poe, and sometimes the other—as in his 1841
Autography
series, when he extolled Richard Adams Locke, then a journalist about to give up journalism forever, as “one among the few men of
unquestionable genius
whom the country possesses.”
Poe loved all kinds of puzzles, but he was especially devoted to codes and ciphers. In 1840 he invited the readers of the Philadelphia newspaper
Alexander’s Weekly Messenger
to send him their own ciphers—pieces of prose written with replacement alphabets—which he promised he would be able to solve. The more interesting solutions he printed in
Alexander’s
along with his comments. The series grew so popular that he repeated it the following year in another Philadelphia publication,
Graham’s Lady’s
and Gentleman’s Magazine.
Soon he was so deluged with submissions that he had little time for his own writing, but he felt obligated to solve all he had received. “Nothing intelligible can be written,” he pronounced in a letter to a friend, “which, with time, I cannot decipher.”
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For Poe, no greater intellectual pleasure could be found than in match-ing wits with a capable adversary. Of course he greatly enjoyed perpetrating his own hoaxes—a diddle would be
no
diddle, after all, without a grin—but he also loved to expose the hoaxes of others, taking them apart to reveal their inner workings. This was what he strove to do in his dissection of the flaws of Locke’s moon series, and, in a more literal manner, in his famous exposé of Maelzel’s automaton chess player, which would be his one true success in the world of hoaxes.
By the time Edgar Allan Poe focused his attention on it in 1836, the automaton chess player had been fascinating audiences for three-quarters of a century. Invented in 1769 by the Hungarian engineer Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen, it was a life-size wooden figure resplendently attired in traditional Turkish garb: a white turban, ermine-lined jacket, billowing trousers, and white gloves, its left hand holding a long, thin pipe. (The automaton was popularly known as “the Turk.”) It sat at a wooden cabinet four feet long, two and a half feet deep, and three feet high—the dimensions would be critical to the efforts to solve the mystery—on top of which had been affixed a chess board. At the beginning of every performance, Kempelen ceremoniously opened the doors of the cabinet, one by one, illuminating the inside with a candle to reveal a complicated-looking mechanism of gears and levers, like that found inside a clock or music box. Then, after closing the cabinet again, he announced that the automaton would play a game of chess against anyone in the audience who dared to challenge it. When a volunteer had been found, Kempelen wound up the figure with a large key, whereupon it briefly surveyed the board and then, its gears whirring, reached out a delicately carved hand and made its first move.