Text: Michael Allen, “Literary Personality,” Poe and the British Magazine Tradition, 1969, pp. 56-73

[page 56:]

IV

If a journalist makes active and varied use of the projection of personality, there is an unconscious side to his activity as well as a conscious one. Journalism does not try to innovate radically; it depends upon responses to some extent already present in the reader. Consequently only a certain number of life-styles are available for use. For success, a journalist needs to pick an attractive one, a style likely to be widely imitated. And, in fact, he, like his readers, has usually already assimilated one or more potent lifestyles of the age in his own maturing. In the period we are considering, Byron and Coleridge seem to have provided two such dominant lifestyles for journalists and readers alike.

 

I. BYRONIC MODE

A whole generation of British journalists had looked to the great writers for models, as much in living as in writing, [page 57:] and above all probably to Byron. According to Bulwer, Byron was the chief English example of “literary charlatanism’:

Such a strategy for life became a strategy for literature partly because of the ready channels of publicity provided by the periodic press. And there is at least a hint of personal apologetic in Bulwer's account of the Byronic strategy, as one would expect of one whose early poetry was pure Byron and water, who lived his life as a man of several masks,(2) and who has been called “the pseudo-Byron of our literature.”(3) In the 1820's and 1830's, says Michael Sadleir, the Byronic pose with its melancholy satiety was “universal among the young intelligentsia.”(4) When Bulwer and Wilson contrived to fall in with gipsy bands in approved Byronic fashion,(5) or when Laman Blanchard and his friend Jerrold planned to join Byron in Greece,(6) they were complementing a habitual social role. But the mood of the writers was as much responsible for the Byronic pose as Byron was: “ ... It was our own likeness that we desired,”(7) said Bulwer explaining the appeal of Byron's melancholy and satiety to his own unsettled and uncertain generation. Writers like Bulwer and Wilson did not play romantic roles in life merely because of the influence of Byron. Wilson's early project to accompany Mungo Park to Africa(8) was a spontaneous gesture in the Byronic mode which just happened to go down well with his magazine admirers later.(9) [page 58:]

In this context Poe falls immediately into place. He, too, “walked the paths of life in the garments of the stage,” as N. B. Fagin demonstrates in his book The Histrionic Mr. Poe. And not merely his early poetry and tales(10) but so many of the trappings he used in presenting himself to his acquaintances are Byronic: his youthful swimming feats,(11) his “vagabondizing,” his “solitary communion with the ‘mountains and the woods’ — the ‘altars’ of Byron,”(12) his sense of himself as “l’âme perdue, — a soul lost beyond all hope of redemption.”(13) This may also be said of the main inventions in the information he gave to his biographers, the aristocratic lineage, the plan to fight for the Greeks, the restless travels in Europe. They suggest that he, like Bulwer, found a reflection of himself in the Byron image.

 

II. COLERIDGEAN MODE

The life-style of Coleridge, if not as influential as Byron's, was sufficiently recognisable to help bring one magazine writer to prominence. Of course, De Quincey's resemblance to Coleridge stemmed as much from a temperamental affinity as from any conscious aping of the older man. But the very pseudonym, “English Opium Eater,” added a particular colour to De Quincey's embarkation on “the present act of confession, in consideration of the service which I may thereby render to the whole class of opium-eaters.”(14) Coleridge's failing in this particular direction was well enough known for those who did not actually identify the “Opium Eater” as “S.T.C.”(15) to respond to a predicament at once familiar and morally questionable. The reader would feel the vibrations of painful self-justification and recognise a familiar and controversial talking point in the [page 59:] ambiguous rhetoric of the introduction “To the Reader.” Nothing, says De Quincey, is more revolting than “the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars,” and guilt and misery in any case “shrink by a natural instinct, from public notice.” But

Here are the moral terms of a recognisable conflict set up for the reader, and around them the most obvious, and no doubt sensational, appeal of De Quincey's two articles was built. Poe, as well as De Quincey, had a temperamental similarity to Coleridge heightened by study of his writings, and Poe's casting of self-justificatory feeling in the rhetorical terms of a similar moral conflict (in, for instance, “Berenice” or “William Wilson”) suggests one way in which his acknowledged debt to the “Confessions” manifested itself. The deeper emotional implications of Coleridge's character for the reader of the time were brought out by De Quincey:

And Poe's sense of the influence of this aspect of Coleridge on his own temperament emerges with peculiar force in the character and situation of Roderick Usher.

De Quincey, of course, retained his pseudonym in much of his subsequent journalism, as a valuable reminder of his first and greatest success. Under it he could retain his erudite and allusive manner in serious pieces or exploit his acquaintance with the great literary men of the age in lighter moods. And in particular, what he retained of Coleridge's learned manner, his airing of the attitudes of German philosophy, became a characteristic pose in the journalism of the age. Poe, too, absorbed into his own critical style what can only be called a Coleridgean manner. And he clearly felt a sense of self-identification with the personality of Coleridge at the time when he was absorbing so much of Coleridge's critical theory. “It is more than possible,” he wrote of Coleridge in 1836,

Here he was formulating, with Coleridge in mind, his idea of the philosophical analyst who deduces from the effects of good writing on others the verbal patterns that will produce similar effects, and then constructs them. He was later to see himself as such an analyst: in “The Philosophy of Composition” he claimed to have written “The Raven” in just this way. [page 61:]

 

III. CONSCIOUS TECHNIQUES OF PROJECTION

If there was an unconscious, spontaneous, and inevitable exploitation of personality in the journals, there was also a conscious and deliberate channeling of its appeal into journalistic forms. Lamb is probably the British magazine writer whose persona retained most appeal for later generations, but the role he played as “Elia” was probably too original to approximate to the inner wish-image of the average upper-class reader or to maintain the appeal of a popular magazine. He clearly regarded T. G. Wainwright (who appeared in the London as “Janus Weathercock”) as a more successful journalist in this respect than he was himself. “He was a genius of the Lond. Mag.,” wrote Lamb when Wainwright dropped out of the enterprise,

Lamb had probably exaggerated the popularity of “Janus,” since Wainwright's persona, too, was rather recondite and sophisticated, owing a great deal to Sterne, whose manner was already that of a different age. But he does define well the kind of loose gossipy intimacy which a magazine needed as the central focus of its various contributions. It was understandable that the London should claim that “the Ettrick Shepherd is one of our cronies: an intimate acquaintance whom we have never seen, but with whom we are on the most familiar footing.”(20) Such an intimacy was inevitable when James Hogg, like all the other literary notabilities of the day from Byron, Coleridge, and Wordsworth [page 62:] down, had been depicted in innumerable literary portrait-galleries and review-articles in so many magazines. It was by exploiting this intimacy on behalf of its own writers and devising a semi-dramatic dialogue form, which could range from the most serious matters to topicalities and trivialities, that Blackwood's had made its most characteristic contribution to the periodical literature of the time.

The conversational staple of the “Noctes Ambrosianae” allowed for variety, sentiment, controversial “personalities,” trenchant comment, and sheer horseplay. The unanimity of opinion demonstrated by the semi-fictional personae in a way dramatised something of the feeling of consensus which lay behind the Reviews, while Blackwood's self-proclaimed exclusiveness provided that intimacy with the world of literary personalities which the popular reader required. “North” would ask, “Did you ever meet any of the Lake-poets in private society?” before plunging into a close and personal account of the appearance and conversation of Wordsworth and Coleridge as from one who was there. There was a conventionality of opinion, whereby Wordsworth, for instance, was criticised for failing to observe the rules of polite conversation. And the assumption of snobbish superiority which animated the “Cockney” criticism reappeared with a more slangy ease of manner and a hint of anti-Grub-Street invective:

The status of the famous literary men is assumed to be shared on equal terms by the members of the Ambrose's coterie. It is only with partial irony that “North” is asked by one of the other personae “Who are the first men in England? — The spirits of the age?” and replies, “I know none superior to our two selves.”(21) The simpler reader, if not the sophisticate, would be more than half willing to believe it.

The more sophisticated reader would already have identified “North” with the well-known literary personality Professor Wilson, whose idiosyncracies were a popular topic for other magazines, and would enjoy the joke. And this identification would add point to such sentimental touches as ‘”North's” faintly Byronic inner sadness: “The warld's better acquainted noo wi’ the character o’ Christopher North than it was some score o’ years syne,” says the “Shepherd,” “ — and the truth is, that like a’ tham that's been baith wutty and wise, he is constitutionally a melancholy man. ... ”(22) Wilson could project and sentimentalise himself in his persona with the assurance that he was carrying his audience with him. “Christopher North,” given character in the “Noctes,” defines his valuesat more length in Wilson's critical and general articles; his ebullient voice may also introduce an issue of the journal, emerge in a footnote, or quarrel characteristically with a correspondent. “You begin,” he tells ‘”Philomag,”

Similarly, the “Shepherd” (James Hogg), the other main character of the “Noctes,” was one of the journal's principal contributors of poetry and fiction; and the host of real and imaginary people who appeared in the “Noctes” turn up as contributors to the magazine. Thus the ‘”Noctes” no doubt dramatised the entire Blackwood's ethos for the simpler reader much as the thirteen-year-old Charlotte Bronté's description suggests:

Poe's early response to this easily irresponsible magazine milieu, and particularly to the persona of “North,” had something of the same enthusiasm:

The projection of literary personality had become in America a preoccupation with the actual lives of the drab American literati, rather than a way of dramatising the intellectual and imaginative life, as it was in Blackwood's. The exaggerated qualities and fictional exploits that Poe attributed to himself, the extreme attitudes he was always striking in his articles, even the inconsistencies of which he [page 65:] was apparently aware seem often to be half-deliberate ways of infusing dramatic colour and excitement into the magazines he writes for. But he soon stopped modelling his magazine attitudes on those of Wilson: perhaps because of protests like Beverley Tucker's; he was also discovering that Wilson's style and manner were alien to his own temperament.

While pseudonymous scurrility of the original Blackwood's kind found a new lease of life in the pages of Fraser's, writers more sensitive to the increasing moralism of the age were rejecting the pseudonym. Bulwer, for instance, deplored the habit of anonymity and came before the public as editor consciously in his own name. He saw his aim as the imposition of his own personality on the New Monthly by breathing “into the general spirit of our Periodical, a more steady and uniform purpose, a more complete singleness of design than it has, as yet, been the fortune of the magazine to effect.”(26) Such self-expression was possible because Bulwer was not only editor but also a principal writer for the journal, so that his political and literary preoccupations, his taste for Gothic extravaganzas loaded with metaphysics, historical and romantic tales, could be translated into magazine terms. Of course, he could hardly fail to be aware of the extent to which his own character and opinions were the commonplaces of the magazine scene. When he was the best-known writer connected with the New Monthly, and shortly before he became editor, a glowing biography in the pages of the magazine(27) must have reinforced this image. And in it “L. E. L.” rather coyly broaches a major journalistic principle of the age: “We think the curiosity, personal though it be, about a distinguished author, is, to say the least, very excusable.” Bulwer, as well as being the most [page 66:] powerful influence on Poe's early prose writing,(28) also figures, like Wilson and De Quincey, among the “first men in England,” whose recruitment to literary journalism filled him with such high hopes for magazine literature. And in an early review Poe expressed admiration for Bulwer's critical articles.(29) Like Bulwer, he disapproved of anonymity in journalism, and wanted to stamp his own personality on the magazine he edited. The “Penn Magazine,” he promised, would show the “individuality,” the ‘continuous definite character, and ... marked certainty of purpose” which result when “one mind alone has the general direction of the undertaking.”(30) The pervasive presence of Wilson in Blackwood's or Bulwer in the New Monthly had also been built up by the writer's own critical, political, and miscellaneous articles and his editorial commentary, together with the literary portraits of each which appeared in his own or other journals. But it is only in the few numbers of the Broadway Journal that one sees Poe enjoying this opportunity of becoming a pervasive presence throughout the magazine as editor and principal writer. Without much hope of widespread success through book-publication or the ownership of a stable magazine of his own, and working as he did outside New England and New York prestige circles, it must have been even more important for Poe to draw attention to the many-sided originality of his own magazine personality. “ ... It has been my constant endeavour,” he wrote to Anthon,

He complained to P. P. Cooke that Duyckinck, in a selection of his tales for re-publication, had not represented his mind “in its various phases’ and thus had not given him “fair play.”(32) He spoke of the higher class of fictional art as that “in which, at every paragraph, arises a distinctive and highly pleasurable interest, springing from our perception and appreciation of the skill employed, or the genius evinced in the composition.” When we read this kind of writing, he says, we think not of the book but “chiefly of the author,” and even when the works perish, the man survives.(33) Whether Poe is thinking here of the ephemeral nature of much magazine writing, or not, his sense of fame as something which appertains to the personality of the writer rather than to particular works significantly colours his attitude to magazine writing.

It was not until late in his career that Poe found himself in conditions of proximity to and equality with well-known writers of America which could be exploited in a series like the “Literati,” and he hadn’t the good fortune of Bulwer, who came to journalism with a literary reputation already made. Consequently it was almost entirely up to Poe to provide for himself the general background of gossip and information which, for a British writer of ability, came so naturally from others. This explains the incessant self-advertisement in his letters to everyone who had any access to the press, the puffs for his own work which he invariably included in his anonymous journalism, including his editorial notes in the Broadway Journal,(34) the often inaccurate information he handed over to Griswold, Lowell, Cooke, and Hirst for the preparation of his own literary portrait, and to some extent the concern with plagiarisms that enabled him continually to quote his own poetry. At a [page 68:] deeper level, that neurotic effort to justify himself, in which Poe was continually engaged, reinforced the effect of simple self-advertisement so that it is impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. The literary sensation which accompanied the Boston poetry reading in 1845 no doubt originated in some kind of temperamental incapacity on Poe's part, but he exploited it shrilly and persistently and claimed that it resulted in “doubling, in five weeks, the circulation of the Broadway Journal.” Similarly, the painful controversy with “Outis” about the way Longfellow had “plagiarised” his work was deliberately drawn out as though to keep an attention which it is difficult to believe Poe ever had, and its half-acknowledged focus is the unrecognised poverty-stricken man of genius, robbed by the well-known plagiarist.(35) This man of genius, we become increasingly aware, is really Poe himself.

 

IV. PERSONALITY IN FICTION

The propagation of personalities in journalism in this period was facilitated by the tendency to make the fictional heroes glamourised versions of the author. “We often hear complaints,” wrote L. E. L. in her New Monthly biography, “that the author does not sustain the beau ideal of his hero; this complaint, at least, cannot be made of Mr. Bulwer.”(36) Fictional heroes, were, as these words suggest, commonly identified with the author. A review of Galt's The Omen in Blackwood's describes the events of the novel throughout as happening to the “author,”(37) and the convention whereby a novel was presented as a factual memoir would encourage this identification as much as the tendency of novelists like Bulwer to make self-portraits of their heroes. The same [page 69:] convention working in reverse gave the impression (among some readers, Poe included) that De Quincey's “Confessions” was fiction, the “Opium Eater” a fictional character.(38) L. E. L. goes on in her portrait to describe Bulwer:

This simplified persona, a fusion of his habitual aristocratic hero and his own social self was well known to the public and was mercilessly pilloried for pride, superciliousness, and personal conceit by Fraser's Magazine. And in several magazine articles Bulwer projects his own well-known personality into fictional situations as a mode of self-justification, in the face of these attacks. The hero of a “Chinese Tale,” Fi-Ho-Ti, becomes “the author of his day,” but he is envied by all because of his reputation, abused anonymously in the Pekin gazettes, and so grows into a suspicious misanthrope.(39) The hero of another tale, Phylias, is disliked by his contemporaries because of ‘that unpleasant sensation which the superiority of another always inflicts on our self love”; so he retires “into the chamber of pride, becomes shy and is called supercilious.”(40) A third hero, Ferdinand Fitzroy, is a quite reasonable parliamentary speaker who is repudiated only because he is “too handsome for anything.”(41) In Poe's fiction, too, one senses that his hero is very often a persona for the writer in a way that carries forward the method of both Wilson and Bulwer (suggesting, [page 70:] incidentally, another perspective for Baudelaire's claim that “the character in Poe ... is Poe himself’).(42)

The fictional method of self-projection used by Bulwer and elaborated by Poe was originally Byron's. According to a writer in the London Magazine, while Byron's more popular writings are “studiously calculated” to promote a “‘personal interest” rather than a poetical one, he never offers a “professed portrait of himself in any of his heroes.” Instead he “coupled the histories of his bravoes and villains with the incidents of his own life; mingled their feelings with even affectedly open disclosures of his own. ... ”(43) John Wilson in dramatising his personality, Bulwer in fictionalising his, were doing just this. And this is Poe's method in, for instance, “William Wilson,” where episodes from his own well-publicised past career, such as his school days in England, his “European travels,” are collated with the adventures of his Byronic(44) hero, and his own intimations of impending doom are placed in Wilson's mouth.(45) He gives Wilson his own birthday, January 11, and different birth years (1809, 1811, 1813) in the different versions which, according to A. H. Quinn, “reflect either Poe's uncertainty concerning his [own] birth date, or his deliberate attempt to alter it for reasons of his own.” It seems to me most likely that he wanted to maintain a consistent (and perhaps youthful) public image by these changes. In 1841 he had given 1811 as his own birth year in the memorandum which he sent Griswold for the life-sketch in Poets and Poetry of America; in the “Phantasy-Pieces” of that year he changed Wilson's birth year from 1809 (his own true birth year) to 1811. In 1845 he gave Wilson's birth year as 1813, and this is the birth date given in Hirst's piece in The Saturday Museum for 1843(46) (written from notes supplied by [page 71:] Poe),(47) and in letters from then on.(48) And he seems also to have intended his heroes physically to embody him. As Vincent Buranelli says,

It certainly fits the various magazine descriptions of the poet and the portraits which accompanied them. Poe's concern for his physical image was such that he wrote asking J. M. Field to condemn in his St Louis Daily Reveille an article which misrepresented his physique,

In the Broadway Journal he had complained (anonymously) of the poor portrait of himself which accompanied Lowell's biography of him in Graham's.(51)

If the heroes of Poe's earlier “confession”-type stories, “Berenice,” “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” were meant to be seen by the more sophisticated reader as studies in mental illness (objectified for examination by an almost Jamesian fictional technique), their projection of Poe's personality to the wider audience was almost certainly [page 72:] more than implicit and accidental. The later “confession” heroes are less metaphysically preoccupied and less exotic in their criminal impulses, but they invariably carry some traits of Poe's projected self-portrait and often seem to speak for him in a more public way. At the time (1845) when his drunkenness had become the most bruited piece of literary gossip about Poe, the hero of “The Imp of the Perverse’ rationalises about the perverse impulse which leads men to do the very thing they want exceedingly not to do. Quinn comments,

Poe had publicly answered the gossip about his drinking in his reply to English (1846) by saying that medical evidence could be brought to show that his “irregularities” were the result of a “physical ill” (i.e. inherited dipsomania), “ ... the effect of a terrible evil rather than its cause.”(53) And in “Hop-Frog” (1849) the dwarf “was not fond of wine; for it excited the poor cripple almost to madness; and madness is no comfortable feeling.” The king demands “characters — characters, man — something novel — out of the way,” and forces him to drink so that “his large eyes gleamed rather than shone; for the effect of wine on his excitable brain was not more powerful than instantaneous.”(54) A glance at the precedent of Bulwer suggests that here, too, deliberate self-justification may well have been intended, although the degree of self-consciousness would be difficult to gauge. [page 73:]

Certainly the recognition seems to have been expected in the case of the metaphysician-hero Dupin: Poe wrote to Cooke in 1846 that “the reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the supposititious Dupin with that of the writer of the story.”(55) “Now I have elsewhere observed,” says Poe in Eureka,

But it is Dupin, the hero, who makes this observation in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” to which Poe's note directs us. Dupin is poet and mathematician and both exemplifies and proclaims Poe's self-centred view that “The truly imaginative [is] never otherwise than analytic.”(57) And, of course this idea of the genius is reiterated not only in Eureka but throughout Poe's criticism: the highest genius comprehends science and letters, the highest mathematical and highest poetical gifts invariably coincide.”(58) Literary criticism and literary composition, too, Poe increasingly insists, are highly ratiocinative pursuits. And by these recurrences we are drawn to the pervasive presence behind learning, fiction, and criticism of the well-known poet-analyst, cryptographer, and autographer. “This discovery, as well as that of the above mode of scansion,” he writes in his anonymous review of Griswold's Poets and Poetry of America, “was left to Edgar A. Poe, who has spent more time in analysing the construction of our language than any living grammarian, critic, or essayist.”(59)