Edgar Allan Poe (20 page)

Many people who met Virginia Poe spoke well of her. Mayne Reid, for one, called her ‘a lady angelically beautiful in person and not less beautiful in spirit’. William Gowans, who reacquainted himself with the Poes upon their return to New York, praised her ‘matchless beauty’, lovely eyes and ‘surpassing sweetness’. Like Gowans, those who described her beauty almost inevitably mentioned Virginia’s big, beautiful eyes. F. W. Thomas, who also appreciated her graceful manner, said she had ‘the most expressive and intelligent eyes I ever beheld’.
¹

Even as they noted her attractive appearance and kindly demeanour, family friends also recognized her frightful illness. Reid used deliberately romantic language to soften his portrayal of her tuberculosis. He observed, ‘I well knew that the rose-tint upon her cheek was too bright, too pure to be of Earth. It was consumption’s color – that sadly beautiful light that beckons to an early tomb.’ Dr Chivers spoke more bluntly: ‘She was not a healthy woman, as I perceived after a little acquaintance with her – as, at irregular intervals – even while we were talking – she was attacked with a terrible paroxysm of coughing whose spasmodic convulsions seemed to me almost to rend asunder her very body.’
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Despite her ethereal beauty and her terminal illness, Virginia Poe could be a forceful woman, as a poem she wrote her husband for Valentine’s Day, 14 February 1846, indicates. She wanted out of the city and let him know it in a way he could appreciate: a thirteen-line acrostic, the first letters of each line spelling out his name. The poem expresses her desire for a cottage in the country, where ‘Love shall heal my weakened lungs’, where they could escape ‘the tattling of many tongues’.
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Her words acknowledge both her deteriorating physical health and her husband’s deteriorating social standing.

Since its publication in January 1845, ‘The Raven’ had turned Poe into something he had both desired and dreaded: a literary lion. ‘Raven’, to use the nickname society gave him, became the darling of New York’s well-to-do literary women, including one in particular, Frances Sargent Osgood. Though married to portrait painter Samuel Stillman Osgood, Mrs Osgood befriended Poe, and the two carried on a public flirtation. She addressed love poems to him, and he wrote verse responses to her and published their exchanges in the
Broadway Journal
. Is the speaker of her love poems a persona? Or do they express her true feelings? Poe took them seriously. Speaking of Osgood, he said, ‘Her character is daguerreotyped in her works – reading the one we know the other.’
⁴

Osgood’s social behaviour confirms her personal feelings. She was a fixture at the soirées hosted by Anne Lynch, whose home at 116 Waverley Place attracted everyone who was anyone on the New York literary scene. A petite woman with girlish features, Osgood often tilted her face upward, gazing at Poe with quiet awe. Virginia’s attitude toward her has gone unrecorded. Osgood asserted that she and Virginia were friends and that she enjoyed the company of both Mr and Mrs Poe when visiting their Amity Street home. But Virginia seldom attended the literary soirées, where Poe and Osgood seemed inseparable.
⁵

Though the
Broadway Journal
ceased publication in the first week of January 1846, its demise did not affect Poe’s standing as a literary lion. The recent release of
The Raven and Other Poems
reinforced his status as one of the nation’s greatest poets. Since Amity Street was only a short walk from Waverley Place, Lynch took advantage of Poe’s proximity. In the second week of January, she asked him to help write invitations. Poe’s signature lent cachet to an invitation, helping to persuade a hesitant guest to attend. Besides Frances Osgood and Edgar Allan Poe, the guest list for Lynch’s 10 January soirée included Margaret Fuller, who had established her literary reputation the previous year with
Women in the Nineteenth Century
, and Elizabeth Ellet, a prolific poet and translator Poe had reviewed in the
Southern Literary Messenger
the previous decade. As New York society was fascinated with Poe, he was fascinated with it – but he was in for a shock. He had yet to understand the pettiness, jealousy and backbiting that can afflict the social elite.

He eventually decided to give the reading public an insider’s view of New York literary society, an endeavour fraught with peril. He would present his exposé as ‘The Literati of New York City’, a series of incisive character sketches published serially in
Godey’s Lady’s Book
. One of Frances Osgood’s most delightful anecdotes concerns the manuscript of ‘The Literati’, which she saw while visiting Amity Street one day.
⁶
Poe wrote the separate segments that comprise the work on narrow scrolls, each formed from individual strips of paper glued together end to end. He and Virginia unfurled the manuscript containing his sketch of Osgood, and it stretched all the way across the room.

Poe wrote much of his work on such scrolls. His habit of writing anticipates Jack Kerouac’s use of scrolls by more than a century. Like Kerouac, Poe recognized a relationship between the physical process of writing and the literary product that resulted. As a creative medium, the written scroll lent continuity to a work that individual sheets could not replicate. Poe anticipated Kerouac in other ways besides his writing process. Best known as the leader of the Beat Movement, Kerouac coined the term ‘Beat’ as a double entendre, to mean both worldweary malaise and transcendent beatitude, two characteristics often attributed to Poe. Given his affinity to both Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, Edgar Allan Poe could be called the original ‘Beat’ writer.

Like Kerouac after him, Poe never really fit into New York society. Neither did Virginia. The women who lionized Mr Poe snubbed Mrs Poe. Some pretended she did not exist. Elizabeth Ellet had a husband in South Carolina, but she, too, fell for Poe. She had no qualms about visiting Amity Street. With a notorious reputation as a snoop and a busybody, Ellet happened to read a suggestive letter from Frances Osgood to Poe on one visit. Afterwards, she persuaded Osgood to get the letter back. Anne Lynch and Margaret Fuller undertook the mission and headed for Amity Street to confront Poe. Offended by their meddlesome behaviour, he said Ellet should be more concerned about her own letters to him. Lynch and Fuller left with Osgood’s letter, reporting to Ellet what Poe had said. She sent her brother to Amity Street. He requested that Poe either produce the letters or apologize for insinuating that his sister had written such suggestive letters. When Poe refused, Ellet’s brother threatened him with violence.

Shaken by the threat, Poe went to see Thomas Dunn English to borrow a pistol. English refused, flippantly suggesting Poe had never received any such letters from Ellet. Offended by English’s suggestion, Poe struck him. A full-blown fist fight erupted. Conflicting stories obscure the outcome. Though ten years older than English, Poe had proven boxing skills, but his increasingly frequent drinking bouts hindered his athletic abilities. Let’s call it a draw. Even if Poe won the fight, he lost his social standing.

But Lynch and Ellet could not get rid of Poe, who continued to intrigue members of their circle. Though banished from Waverley Place, he remained an object of curiosity and a topic of conversation. When Lynch hosted a Valentine’s Day party that year, one guest read a Valentine for Poe, and another read ‘A Valentine’, which Poe had written for Frances Osgood. It begins:

This poem takes the form of a cross-acrostic. The first letter of the first line corresponds to the first letter of Frances Sargent Osgood’s name, the second letter of the second line to the second letter of her name, and so on.

There is something unsettling in the fact that Virginia wrote a Valentine for her husband in 1846, but he wrote one for Osgood. In addition, Poe’s cross-acrostic format is more sophisticated than his wife’s simple acrostic. Worse yet, Poe expressed his admiration of Osgood’s eyes: his wife’s best feature! Understandably, Virginia Poe was sick of New York society, sick of what it was doing to her husband, sick of the tattling tongues that circulated rumours about Osgood and Poe, tired of the small-mindedness, tired of the stuck-up women who looked down on her. Elizabeth Oakes Smith, another local poet with a crush on Poe, said of his marriage, ‘I have always regarded this marriage as an unfortunate one for the poet, who needs a more profound sympathy always, if he would sound the depths of his own genius.’
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To Poe’s credit, he granted Virginia’s wish. That spring he took her to Fordham and showed her the new home he had found. With the surrounding fruit trees in bloom, the cottage was beautiful. Smith snidely called it ‘a little band-box of a house’, but it was just what Virginia wanted.
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‘The cottage had an air of taste and gentility that must have been lent to it by the presence of its inmates’, said Mary Gove, one of the few members of New York society who stayed friends with Poe. ‘So neat, so poor, so unfurnished, and yet so charming a dwelling I never saw. The floor of the kitchen was white as wheaten flour. A table, a chair, and a little stove that it contained, seemed to furnish it perfectly. The sitting-room floor was laid with check matting; four chairs, a light stand, and a hanging bookshelf completed its furniture.’
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Poe rented it annually for only a hundred dollars. On Moving Day, he and his family moved into the cottage.

Benjamin F. Buck,
Poe Cottage, Fordham,
NY
,
1910.

Poe may have physically separated himself from the city, but ‘The Literati’ was about to create a swirl of controversy in New York’s literary circles. Compared with his earlier writings, ‘The Literati’ is closest in spirit to ‘A Chapter on Autography’. Whereas the earlier work discerns personality on the basis of handwriting, ‘The Literati’ discerns personality on the basis of other externals: attire, physiognomy and phrenology. Read in light of his recent work, ‘The Literati’ seems disingenuous. Revising his stories the previous year for the Wiley and Putnam
Tales
, Poe had systematically removed the references to phrenology. He cancelled the discussion of phrenology that had originally opened ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, omitted a sentence about phrenology in ‘The Black Cat’ and deleted a reference to George Combe in ‘The Man of the Crowd’. These revisions indicate the doubts he now had.

Regardless of his own attitude toward phrenology, Poe understood that many others accepted it, and he used their gullibility to his advantage. ‘The Literati’ incorporates much phrenological vocabulary to describe personal appearance. Poe claimed he was giving his ‘unbiased opinion’, but what he was really doing was using the ideas underlying phrenology and physiognomy to create an elaborate illusion, to make his biased opinions seem unbiased. Phrenology’s pseudoscientific vocabulary gave Poe the freedom to say whatever he wanted to say. He could curry favour with some by admiring the bumps on their head and denigrate others by identifying flaws in their physique.

His portrayal of Evert Duyckinck in ‘The Literati’ provides a good example. By now, Duyckinck had become the most influential figure on the New York literary scene. A review by him could make or break an author’s career. Staying in his good graces made good sense. Of Duyckinck’s physical appearance Poe observed, ‘The forehead, phrenologically, is a good one; eyes and hair light; the whole expression of the face that of serenity and benevolence, contributing to give an idea of youthfulness.’
¹⁰

Poe took his revenge against Thomas Dunn English in the third instalment of ‘The Literati’, which appeared in the July
Godey’s
, copies of which reached New York the third week of June. Critiquing
The Aristidean
, the magazine English briefly edited, Poe observed that ‘No spectacle can be more pitiable than that of a man without the commonest school education busying himself in attempts to instruct mankind on topics of polite literature.’ Whereas Poe had complimented Duyckinck’s youthful appearance, he made English seem both older and more inexperienced than he was. As Poe well knew, English was only twenty-seven, but he said, ‘Mr E. is yet young – certainly not more than thirty-five – and might, with his talents, readily improve himself at points where he is most defective.’ To enhance the aura of objectivity, Poe added one more boldfaced lie: ‘I do not personally know Mr English.’
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English had no intention of letting such insults pass without comment. On Tuesday, 23 June 1846, the New York
Morning
Telegraph
published ‘Mr English’s Reply to Mr Poe’. In the past, English had been Poe’s confidante. Now, he shamelessly violated their confidence, exposing Poe’s secrets, depicting him as ‘thoroughly unprincipled’, an ‘assassin in morals’ and a ‘quack in literature’.
¹²
Later that same day English took his reply to Hiram Fuller, who, with Augustus W. Clason, Jr, had taken over the
Evening Mirror
from Willis and Morris. Fuller published English’s reply in the
Mirror
that evening.