Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [24]
It was Peters’s great fortune to happen upon Issue 34 of the Southern Literary Messenger, in which Edgar Allan Poe’s first telling of the beginning of Arthur Gordon Pym’s story was delivered. It appeared that the influence of the friendship had gone both ways, and Poe was now exploring the life of his friend who at this point was thought to have disappeared, presumably lost at sea. Poe seemed to be creating an homage† to a cherished associate, which would weigh in Peters’s favor when he attempted to retain Poe’s services. Dirk Peters, of course, was the only one who could solve the mystery of what happened to the missing Nantucketer, a bit of information Peters had never considered of much worth before that moment.
Interestingly, what remains of the letter that Dirk Peters sent Edgar Allan Poe is a heavily corrected first draft in an unknown hand. In addition to numerous basic grammar corrections, the unknown party—presumably a member of the officer class on his merchant vessel—adds into the text more elegant lines such as “it is my desire to commune with you about that most able gentleman, Arthur Gordon Pym, with whom we are both so pleasantly acquainted.” More linguistic embellishments followed, creating an altogether different impression of the letter’s author than Peters’s own literary voice was capable of. This was a particularly shrewd strategy considering Poe’s attraction to the upper classes, which Peters may have deduced from his former shipmate’s stories. Aside from his promise to share the information on the fate of the absent Mr. Pym, Dirk Peters made no further reference to the fate itself, deciding instead that it would be better to bait the storyteller. With this in mind, Dirk Peters included a segment from his manuscript along with the letter. It was a chapter he didn’t seem to think was particularly special, one he wasn’t worried about sending the sole copy through the post to a stranger who might not ever hand it back. It was “far from my good good work,” Peters lamented in the margins, but he sent it with the letter anyway. His intent was to entice Poe into ghostwriting his autobiography.‡ The segment’s sole strength in Peters’s eyes was that it contained mention of his and Poe’s mutual acquaintance. The selection began when the two met after the mutiny on the Grampus, and ended with the two of them sailing toward a chasm in Antarctica. All in all, from the opening sentence to the final letter, the piece measured three handwritten pages.
In basic substance, the tale that Dirk Peters told, in his throw-away little note, is the same as the one told in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Of course, there are differences in style. For instance, from Peters’s “we caught some big animal in the water, floating, not the best eating I will say,” we get Poe’s fascinating description of the misplaced polar bear. From “They got these fish down there what looks like that what comes out the buttocks,” Poe springs forth with the culinary ravings on the bêche-de-mer. And most fascinating, from Peters’s skewed, identity-denying perspective, comes the following:
Going further south, we came to an island full of niggers. Niggers just everywhere, black as night. More niggers than I could count. Coming up to the boat, making a big fuss. If I’d wanted to be around this many niggers, I would have stayed in Michigan. Acting such the fool that the white men just relaxed like they was a bunch of black babies. Don’t trust a nigger what’s acting like a nigger, any damn fool tell you that. I know that. Didn’t trust them one bit. One day, they started marching us up a mountain for no good reason. White folks just kept walking along like this made a damn