Edgar Allan Poe (17 page)

He found a house in Greenwich Street, where room and board were surprisingly cheap. A half hour later he was escorting Virginia to their new home. The room was unremarkable, but the board elicited lengthy description. His account of their first meal there is that of a man who has been hungry a long time: wheat bread, rye bread, teacakes, strong tea, elegant ham, mountainous piles of sliced veal, and, for dessert, three dishes of cake. ‘No fear of starving here’, he told Mrs Clemm with obvious relief. The feast continued at breakfast: veal cutlets, ham and eggs, bread and butter, and plenty of strong, hot coffee.
³⁶

There was no time for dawdling after breakfast. With Virginia showing signs of improvement, Poe could leave her alone and venture out on his own. ‘The city is thronged with strangers’, he observed, ‘and everything wears an aspect of intense life.’
³⁷
For someone used to the peace and quiet of Philadelphia, the noise of New York was shocking. (It still is.) The din of the coal wagons and the cries of the clam and catfish vendors were especially grating. Poe had brought his newest story with him, the work later known as ‘The Balloon Hoax’. He went to the office of
The Sun
, where he sold it to editor Moses Y. Beach. In realistic and highly technical terms, the story relates what was supposedly the first successful balloon crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. Beach published it as an
Extra
to the
Sun
. Resembling a genuine news story in terms of both discourse and typography, the hoax was a success, and many people accepted it as truth until they heard reports to the contrary. Unlike so many of his other stories of the early 1840s, ‘The Balloon Hoax’ does not comment on the tourist, but it does anticipate transatlantic flight.

Augustus Köllner and Isidore Laurent Deroy,
Wall Street,
NY
,
1847.

A month after reaching New York, Poe had arranged with a smalltown Pennsylvania newspaper to contribute ‘Doings of Gotham’, a regular column relating what was happening in New York. Before Thoreau ever said, ‘I have travelled Concord extensively’, Poe commented, ‘I have been roaming far and wide over this island of Mannahatta.’
³⁸
‘Doings of Gotham’ culminates Poe’s exploration of the tourist. Instead of scrutinizing the actual tourist as he had previously, he exemplifies the ideal tourist in ‘Doings of Gotham’. Speaking as a Philadelphian on an extended visit to New York, he sees the city with the depth it deserves. Poe’s ideal tourist closely resembles the
flâneur
. He proceeds slowly and deliberately through the city, observing closely and analysing what he sees: the birth of modern New York.

One day Poe procured a light skiff and rowed his way around Blackwell’s Island on what he calls ‘a voyage of discovery and exploration’. He wanted most to get a view of the picturesque Manhattan shore. Poe’s vision was good, but his prescience was better. He shrewdly, if wistfully, saw the direction New York would take in the future: ‘I could not look on the magnificent cliffs, and stately trees, which at every moment met my view, without a sigh for their inevitable doom – inevitable and swift. In twenty years, or thirty at farthest, we shall see here nothing more romantic than shipping, warehouses, and wharves.’
³⁹
Ideal tourists do not let others determine what to see or how to interpret what they see. Like the
flâneur
, ideal tourists look carefully, but also think deeply. Refusing to accept the opinions of others, ideal tourists use their minds as well as their eyes to draw their own conclusions.

‘For the last seven or eight months I have been playing hermit in earnest – nor have I seen a living soul out of my family’: so Poe told F. W. Thomas the second week of September 1844.
¹
His words were not much of an exaggeration. After Maria Clemm had joined him and Virginia in New York, the three took lodgings with Patrick and Mary Brennan in their plain, old-fashioned, two-story farmhouse. Located atop a knoll on 84th Street, then part of the countryside, the Brennan home gave Virginia a place to recover her health and her husband a place to escape the pressures and temptations of city life.

Much as he had enjoyed the Wissahickon River and the surrounding countryside, Poe enjoyed the Hudson River and the woods that lined its banks. Mary Brennan remembered him as ‘a shy, solitary, taciturn person, fond of rambling alone through the woods or of sitting on a favorite stump of a tree down near the banks of the Hudson River.’
²
Unemployed and impoverished since moving to New York, Poe saw little professional advantage in this self-imposed hermitage. In terms of literary productivity, however, he was well positioned during these seven or eight months to do what he did best: write short stories. With the success of ‘The Gold Bug’ the previous year, magazines welcomed his contributions. Relying on periodical articles to survive, Poe turned 1844 into one of his most productive years. By the time they moved to the Brennans, he had completed such new stories as ‘The Oblong Box’, ‘The Premature Burial’ and ‘Mesmeric Revelation’.
³
He would write additional tales here and even return to his first love, poetry. The Brennan farmhouse no longer survives, but it remains famous as the place where ‘The Raven’ was written. But all Poe’s hard work could not guarantee sufficient income, as the case of ‘The Oblong Box’ illustrates.

The previous year George P. Morris and Nathaniel P. Willis had revived the defunct
New-York Mirror
as the
New Mirror
. Eager to contribute to this periodical, Poe sent Willis a copy of ‘The Oblong Box’. Knowing from past experience that periodical contributors generally were not compensated unless they stipulated so up front, Poe made it clear in his cover letter that he wished to be paid for the work. Willis greatly enjoyed the tale but said he could not pay for original contributions, suggesting Poe send it to
The Opal
instead. Poe was aware of
The Opal
, the annual giftbook John C. Riker published; the previous year he had published ‘Morning on the Wissahiccon’ there. But Poe generally disliked this annual. Since its contents were largely religious, reviewers of
The Opal
had ignored ‘Morning on the Wissahiccon’. The sharp-edged steel engravings that adorned the annuals offended Poe’s aesthetic tastes. The engravings in
The Opal
, as one reviewer noted, were as ‘stiff and cold as frozen carrots’.
⁴
The weeklies and monthlies also had a practical advantage over the annuals: they paid contributors more quickly. But Poe had idealistic reasons for preferring periodicals over annuals, as well. He wished to encourage the development of American magazine literature and foster the writing profession.

Samuel Hollyer,
The Brennan Farmhouse, 84th Street, New York
, 1909.

He called on Riker, who informed him that new editor Sarah J. Hale was now responsible for the contents of
The Opal
. Poe offered her ‘The Oblong Box’, asking if she would accept it sight unseen on Willis’s recommendation. Realizing the unusual nature of his request, Poe supplied a reason for it: ‘It cannot be improper to state, that I make the latter request
to save time
, because I am
as usual
, exceedingly in need of a little money.’
⁵
Poe’s appeal to her sympathies worked. Hale accepted the story, informing him of her rate of payment: fifty cents per page – half what he had received from
The Gift
a decade earlier. Such meagre remuneration sometimes prompted authors to use underhanded means to maximize their earnings. Instead of sending Hale ‘The Oblong Box’ – the tale Willis had recommended – he sent her ‘A Chapter of Suggestions’, which consists of a series of random ideas on life and literature. He sent ‘The Oblong Box’ to Louis Godey. Since Hale was co-editor of
Godey’s Lady’s Book
, she recognized Poe’s subterfuge, but happily it did not damage their working relationship. The list of suggestions appeared in
The Opal
, the tale in
Godey’s
.

‘The Oblong Box’ takes for its theme the same general subject of many tales Poe wrote this year, namely the influence the dead exert upon the living. A fascination with death runs through Poe’s work, but it seems especially acute in what he wrote in 1844: an indication of his fear over Virginia’s worsening health. After booking passage from Charleston, South Carolina to New York aboard the
Independence
, the story’s narrator is pleased to learn that his old college chum Cornelius Wyatt and his bride will be sailing with him. The narrator had not seen his friend since before the wedding and looked forward to spending time with them. Wyatt boards the
Independence
with a veiled woman, presumably Mrs Wyatt, and a mysterious oblong box.

Unaware of its contents, the narrator imagines that the box contains a valuable copy of Leonardo Da Vinci’s
Last Supper
. Once the
Independence
wrecks at sea, all the passengers make it into lifeboats safely. When the captain refuses to save the box, Wyatt leaves the safety of the lifeboat and returns to the
Independence
. He lashes himself to the box, determined either to save or go down with it. The box drops quickly, taking Wyatt along with it. Afterwards, the captain explains that the box contained the body of Mrs Wyatt, who had died shortly before the voyage. The veiled woman was a stand-in. The switch was essential because, the captain said, ‘Nine-tenths of the passengers would have abandoned the ship rather than take passage with a dead body.’
⁶

‘The Oblong Box’ would seem to confirm the superstition that a dead body aboard ship brings bad luck, but Wyatt is the only person who dies in the aftermath of the shipwreck. And he dies not because of traditional superstition but because of a nexus of different factors involving the preservation of the dead. With advances in funeral science, it had become possible to preserve a corpse in a near life-like state for weeks.
⁷
Tuberculosis, strange to say, left many young, good-looking corpses in its wake. In addition, a craze for all things Egyptian, including and especially mummies, raged in Poe’s America. Wyatt’s foolhardy devotion to his wife’s dead body leads to his own death.

Making Leonardo Da Vinci’s
Last Supper
a motif in ‘The Oblong Box’, Poe broadened the theme of the dead’s influence on the living. Christ’s behaviour during his last supper established the pattern for Holy Communion, the rite that Poe had committed to memory as a youth in England.
⁸
‘Do this in remembrance of me’: uttering this command while administering the sacraments, Christ gave all followers a ritualistic way to remember him. The painting itself represents another way the dead can exert an influence on the living: art. Poe’s use of Da Vinci’s fresco differs considerably from the way contemporaries treated it. In her poem on the painting, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, for example, conveys her reverence for Christ, then starts praising the painter, but stops short: ‘I dare not muse /
Now
of a mortal’s praise.’
⁹
Poe had no such qualms. He saw the artist – not just Da Vinci but any artist – as a god-like figure. Through the act of creation, an artist could transcend mortality.

The coffin forms a prominent motif in another story Poe wrote around the same time as ‘The Oblong Box’: ‘The Premature Burial’. This story’s general theme Poe found fascinating: he had used it earlier in such tales as ‘Berenice’ and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’. Poe was not alone. Many readers shared his fascination, as did the editor of the
Toledo Blade
, who reprinted ‘The Premature Burial’ in 1845. A month after reprinting Poe’s tale, the
Blade
published a story titled ‘Burying Alive’.
¹⁰

The narrator of ‘The Premature Burial’ first provides a series of case histories of people who had been buried alive and then generalizes: ‘
No
event is so terribly well adapted to inspire the supremeness of bodily and of mental distress, as is burial before death. The unendurable oppression of the lungs – the stifling fumes of the damp earth – the clinging to the death garments – the rigid embrace of the narrow house.’ Poe’s words express his debt to James Macpherson’s Ossianic verse, which had popularized the phrase the ‘narrow house’, a circumlocution for the grave. All the physical sensations associated with interment, the narrator continues, create ‘a degree of appalling and intolerable horror from which the most daring imagination must recoil’.
¹¹