The Portable Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [6]
With a new job and an annual salary of $520, Poe nevertheless suffered from depression, and in late August contemplated suicide. Within a month he bolted from the Messenger office, returning to Baltimore perhaps to wed his cousin in secret and certainly to beg her and Mrs. Clemm to join him in Richmond. He then asked White for reinstatement, which the editor reluctantly granted. With his aunt and cousin installed in Richmond, Poe threw himself into the task of making the Messenger a leading national periodical. He did so less by featuring his own tales and poems—which in 1836 consisted mostly of reprinted pieces—than by begging contributions from respected authors, eliciting favorable notices of the Messenger in other publications, and composing pungent critical notices. He gradually expanded the journal’s circulation—though not so greatly as he later claimed. Defiantly he attacked the “misapplied patriotism” of nationalistic critics “puffing” inferior books by American authors. He also performed journalistic stunts, concocting an exposé about a chess-playing automaton as well as a pseudoscientific exercise in handwriting analysis. In May, perhaps to quash local rumors, he publicly married his cousin (then not quite fourteen) before a handful of witnesses that included his employer. Although White recognized his assistant’s brilliance, he nevertheless refused to name him the editor, struggled to restrain Poe’s literary attacks, and deplored his recurrent insobriety.
Meanwhile, Poe renewed his efforts to publish his “Folio Club” tales, approaching Harper & Brothers in New York through James Kirke Paulding; when the Harpers declined the volume, advising Poe to write a novel instead, he offered the collection—without avail—to Philadelphia and London publishers. But he also began an American novel about a Nantucket youth who revolts against his family by going to sea in quest of romantic adventures. The opening chapters of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym appeared in the Messenger in early 1837, just as White, beset by financial woes and exasperated by Poe’s instability, dismissed his mercurial assistant.
An outcast once more, Poe moved to New York just as an economic panic portended a long national depression. For more than a year he floundered in Manhattan without employment, writing little and publishing less, toiling mainly on the novel that Harper & Brothers agreed to print but postponed because the book market had collapsed. Desperate for work, Poe relocated to Philadelphia in early 1838, appealing unsuccessfully to Paulding (then secretary of the navy) for a clerkship. When The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym finally appeared that summer, it probably brought scant remuneration, and reviews were mixed. Poe called it “a silly book” and concluded that the only narratives worth writing were those readable at one sitting. Soon after the novel appeared, Poe earned ten dollars for his most brilliant tale to date, “Ligeia,” composed for the Baltimore American Museum. That journal subsequently carried the twin parody now known as “How to Write a Blackwood Article” and “A Predicament,” in which a mordant Poe satirized literary sensationalism and the palpable hazards of authorship.
Desperation alone explains Poe’s willingness in 1839 to allow his name to be used in connection with A Conchologist’s First Book, a plagiarized textbook on seashells. That spring he composed for The Gift another extraordinary tale, “William Wilson,” about a remorseless cardsharp whose adversary proves at last to be his own conscience. About then Poe also sought work with William E. Burton, a Philadelphia actor and theater