Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [558]
In 1845, at the behest of Duyckinck (whose Arcturus Poe had praised lavishly), Wiley and Putnam published editions of Poe’s tales and poems in the Library of American Books. Social success followed commercial success. Poe was welcomed to literary salons sponsored by wealthy New York women determined to repudiate the city’s money-grubbing reputation. He was often found at Anne Charlotte Lynch’s Saturday evening “conversaziones,” which attracted the likes of Irving, Bryant, Emerson, and Fuller to Lynch’s Waverly Place drawing room.
Poe worked fourteen-hour days at the Broadway Journal, but in the brutally competitive magazine world it failed to make money. A disenchanted Briggs turned it over to Poe’s exclusive management. Poe finally had his own magazine, but not the resources to promote it. He borrowed. He ran every aspect of the journal himself and wrote for it as well. Circulation kept falling, and in January 1846 it collapsed, leaving Poe destitute.
To bring in funds and to revenge himself on real and fancied enemies, he began writing “The Literati of New York City,” a series of thirty-eight sketches published between May and October of 1846 in a Philadelphia magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book. The pieces mixed brilliant if vitriolic criticism with venomous vignettes about local authors, gossip he’d picked up at salons. For all its pettiness, the series had an underlying ambition: to rid New York—which he considered “the focus of American letters”—of the curse of amateur writers. Poe, like Duyckinck and the Young Americans, had long railed against Lewis Gaylord Clark and his Knickerbocker puffery. He denounced the ability of “coteries in New York” to “manufacture, as required from time to time, a pseudo-public opinion by wholesale.” Puffery impeded America’s literary development by subordinating independent professionals to established cliques of privileged gentlemen.
These sallies precipitated full-scale war. Clark accused Poe of duplicity and drunkenness, impotence and cowardice. Poe sued for libel and won but was nevertheless banished from literary circles. Increasingly depressed and erratic, he raged at his foes from a cottage in Fordham, thirteen miles out of town amid hills and heavy foliage, where he had moved in hopes that country air would aid his failing wife. It did not: she died in January 1847, their first winter there.
Poe hung on a while longer. He took long walks atop the Croton Aqueduct, visited Jesuit faculty friends at St. John’s College, and did some writing (with mixed success), including “Mellonta Tauta,” a tale that imagined the future destruction of New York City by earthquake. By 1849, having concluded that the entire northern literary establishment was conspiring to thwart him, Poe decided to move south. Two weeks after Mathew Brady took his photograph, he set off to explore Richmond. On his way back, he stopped off in Baltimore, where in 1849, drunk and delirious, he died, aged forty, in a public house.
“DOLLARS DAMN ME”
Herman Melville had a bleaker yet more complex view of New York City than did Poe. Melville appreciated his hometown’s energy and diversity, but he could never forget that Manhattan’s marketplace had destroyed his father and stripped his family of its social position. Herman’s mother, Maria Gansevoort, traced her family to Hudson Valley Dutch aristocrats, and his father, Allan Melvill [sic], a descendant of Scottish nobility, had been educated as a gentleman. Allan, a successful Boston merchant, became convinced that New York was “destined to become the Commercial Emporium of our Country” and relocated there in 1818. Setting up as an importer of French luxury goods, he quartered his family in an elegant house on Pearl Street near the Battery.
Maria Melvill craved social distinction—she was thrilled when the mayor’s wife paid a welcome call—and soon after