The Portable Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [9]
An administrative change at the Custom House persuaded Poe that he could secure a government job by appealing directly to the president in Washington. He had expected Thomas to arrange the necessary interview with Tyler, but Thomas was ill, and upon reaching Washington, Poe began drinking heavily. His boorish behavior offended his friends, the president’s son, and a visiting Philadelphia writer named Thomas Dunn English. In desperation, Poe’s ally Jesse Dow implored Clarke, a temperance man, to rescue Poe from humiliation. Poe returned to Philadelphia on his own steam, however, making an immediate, conciliatory visit to the publisher. But Clarke had seen enough and soon retracted his offer to publish The Stylus. In the wake of this misadventure, English included a derisive portrait of Poe in his temperance novel, The Doom of the Drinker, a work commissioned by Clarke.
But Poe’s situation was not altogether hopeless. His tale “The Gold-Bug” won a hundred-dollar prize offered by the Dollar Newspaper. Reprinted in many papers, the story garnered more recognition for Poe than any previous publication; one Philadelphia theater immediately staged a dramatic adaptation. In August the author resumed a loose affiliation with Graham’s, his sporadic reviews serving to repay loans from the publisher. That same month the Saturday Evening Post published “The Black Cat,” Poe’s own temperance tale about the perverse compulsions incited by drink. As The Doom of the Drinker appeared in serial form, Poe found a new source of income: He became a public lecturer, speaking on American poetry to large crowds in Philadelphia, Wilmington, Newark (Delaware), Baltimore, and Reading. In early 1844 his staunch support of the copyright issue drew a letter from Cornelius Mathews of New York, who sent his pamphlet on that subject and perhaps an invitation to join the American Copyright Club. Having imposed too often on too many people in Philadelphia, Poe moved in April to New York.
The author created an instant sensation in Manhattan when his “Balloon Hoax” appeared as a dispatch in an extra edition of the Sun. The public clamored for news about the transatlantic flight, but James Gordon Bennett of the rival Herald detected a ruse and forced a retraction. The uproar, however, only confirmed Poe’s talent for what he called “mystification” and excited his creativity. That summer he told Lowell of the “mania for composition” that sometimes seized him; since December 1843 he had composed “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” “The Spectacles,” “Mesmeric Revelation,” “The Premature Burial,” “The Oblong Box,” “The Purloined Letter,” “ ‘Thou Art the Man,’ ” and “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” as well as “The Balloon Hoax” and several shorter pieces. Like “The Gold-Bug,” most of the new tales portrayed American scenes, and Poe declared that he was writing a “Critical History of Am. Literature.” For a small Pennsylvania newspaper he was also writing a chatty column called “Doings of Gotham.” Once indifferent to American subjects, he manifested a pragmatic shift in focus. That spring Poe again proposed to Lowell coeditorship of a “well-founded Monthly journal” featuring American authors; he reminded Chivers of a similar offer, and in late October he cajoled Lowell a third time while sending proposals for both the magazine and a new, multivolume collection of tales to Charles Anthon, an influential New York professor.
Disillusioned by Whig partisanship and cheered by the copyright campaign of Young America, a group of rabid Democrats, Poe lent token support to the Democratic Party in 1844, befriending the head of a political club and writing the lyrics to a campaign song. He commented wryly on the contest between Whig Henry Clay and Democrat