Text: Michael Allen, “Poe's Inconsistencies,” Poe and the British Magazine Tradition, 1969, pp. 113-127

[page 113:]

VII

In various letters and articles (dated 1835, 1836, 1841, and 1845) Poe recorded respectful and even laudatory views of Blackwood's and the other British magazines. But while he always, between 1835 and 1845, expressed straightforward admiration for the general ethos and achievement of these journals, his attitude was more ambiguous where their more popular fiction was involved. In the 1835 letter to White, the first version of the ‘Peter Snook” review, and the 1842 Hawthorne review he expressed guarded approval for the artistic achievement of the ‘Blackwood Article.” He “has his doubts”(1) about the view that such tales are in bad taste; he speaks of them as “fine” tales of effect in which “the impressions produced were wrought in a legitimate sphere of action, and constitute a legitimate, although sometimes an exaggerated, interest”;(2) in his list of original magazine fictionists he numbers with Dickens and the author of “Peter Snook” “perhaps a couple of writers in [page 114:] Blackwood.”(3) And although he cautiously removed any actual names in revising his account of original British magazine fiction in 1845,(4) he must still have had Blackwood's in mind. But throughout the same period he was also expressing, through burlesques and satire, very critical attitudes to the same fiction. The burlesque “Loss of Breath” was written in 1832 and revised in 1835 as a parody of “Blackwood” tales. “The Predicament” (1838, revised 1842) was another such parody. And in the satiric sketch “How to Write a Blackwood Article” (1838, revised 1842) Poe depicted the publishing of such tales as involving erudite affectations and journalistic opportunism. As I said, until 1845, Poe uniformly admired the British journals taken as wholes. But in that year, as editor of the Broadway Journal, Poe was to direct a barrage of criticism against Blackwood's and its chief writer, Wilson.

One can, I think, infer that by 1845 Poe was in a position to throw off, at least consciously, the influence of the journal he had admired. Later in this study I shall discuss the way this came about, and at how deep a level Poe had really disengaged himself from the European conventions. But an influence which extends consciously over ten out of the thirteen years of a man's career as a journalist can hardly be other than major. It remains to be decided whether the inconsistency of his attitudes to Blackwood's fiction increases or diminishes the significance of the magazine for Poe's journalism. In order to decide this we must distinguish between Poe's superficial and significant inconsistencies, and then see how far temperament, fashionable attitudinising, and defensive strategies for his own writing are involved. [page 115:]

 

I. SUPERFICIAL AND SIGNIFICANT INCONSISTENCIES

It has been suggested that Poe's inconsistencies reflect nothing more than the pressure under which he worked as a journalist, which did not give him time to be consistent. J. E. Cooke saw them as resulting from Poe's “desultory career as a magazine writer — in which he often forgot today what he wrote yesterday. ...”(5) H. S. Canby would explain them in terms of the journalist's way of throwing together a sequence of stimulating and engaging ideas, which need not be necessarily consistent with the last or the next article.(6) The journalistic situation did, no doubt, produce many accidental inconsistencies without significance: but it also, I suggest, provided conditions in which the deeper inconsistencies of Poe's personal conflicts could be verbally rehearsed.

Poe's usual attitude to progress, for instance, was conventionally conservative. From ‘”Mellonta Tauta” or “Some Words with a Mummy” one would assume that he had little sympathy with it. But to stress the importance of intellectual construction in the drama, he uses it favourably: engineering has progressed immensely because of its rational content, and equal progress in the drama would be possible with a similar infusion of reason.(7) Here it was no more than a facile critical analogy that had made Poe invoke the spirit of the age, and one can imagine the verbal rapidity and perhaps the cynicism involved. Plenty of Poe's inconsistencies have no more depth or significance than this. But take the case where Poe exclaims, “And now — at the present epoch — there are few people who do not occasionally think. This is emphatically the thinking age; indeed it may very well be questioned whether mankind ever substantially [page 116:] thought before.” One feels immediately the vehemence and earnestness about the rhetoric here that generally indicates Poe's deeper personal involvement. And sure enough, in a mood of strong self-justification, Poe is praising the intellectual temper of the public of his age. His argument is against the long poem and for the short, and he congratulates the public for its realistic and matter-of-fact habits of thought which would reject the “impossibilities,” the “multitudinous incongruities” of Paradise Lost were it written contemporaneously.(8) He is, in fact, invoking the mass-audience to justify a kind of writing he himself is engaged in. In another article, however, we find him with the same degree of intensity attacking “that evil genius of mere matter-of-fact,” with its “‘grovelling and degrading assumptions’ which seems to him characteristic of his own age. It is significant that he is writing now in defence of Fouqué's Undine and “its class” of work (to which, of course, some of his own best tales belong) “with a view of impressing upon the public mind ... its most exalted and extraordinary character.”(9)

This is the kind of inconsistency with which we are concerned in the case of Poe's various intense and obsessive references to the “Blackwood Article.” And this kind of inconsistency cannot be explained purely as the result of journalistic pressures. The extraordinarily divergent tendencies of Poe's personality, his lack of confidence in himself, and his need for various strategies to defend his work are all involved.

 

II. TEMPERAMENTAL INCONSISTENCY

Poe's stances in society, which his contemporaries saw as dualistic,(10) seem to have depended considerably on the attitude [page 117:] of the hearers: with sympathetic companions Poe was gentle, naive, courteous, and melancholy; but as soon as he sensed or imagined criticism, his savagely superior impulses came into play, as they did, for instance, catastrophically at the Boston poetry reading when he so affronted New England intellectuals. N. Bryllion Fagin has shown how Poe, as man and as writer, was comparable to the “histrio” who “by means of word and gesture and pose ... achieves self-importance and exaltation.”(11) While the playing of roles was an important characteristic of many Romantic writers, Poe's inconsistent poses are uniquely disturbing in their imperfect movement towards integration, towards that success in one role which enables another to take its place. Byron, too, “accepted both sides of his temperament, but did not try to reconcile them” (Peter Quennell), and his “inconsistency and emotional instability were as much a part of [his] character as his melancholy, his fatalism or his wild romantic yearnings.”(12) But Byron's posing was directed by relationships with other human beings at all kinds of levels, so that realism, social flexibility, and alertness always modified the implications of his inconsistencies, and the over-all pattern of his letters and writings was movement from one role to the next. Poe's deeper attitudes were more solipsistic;(13) and it is this solipsism, the considerable enclosure of his life “within the ego,”(14) which gives to his more significant inconsistencies their thwarted abortiveness. So that, as we fit his various writings into the context of his life, we have a continual sense of energy wasted in defensive strategies, for want of a positive direction. For a few years, between 1839 and 1845, there does seem to be some development towards genuine integration. These were the happier years of his marriage, his editorships of Burton's and Graham's magazines, various New York successes, and the acquisition of [page 118:] proprietorial interest in the Broadway Journal. But until 1839, and again after the failure of the Broadway Journal, the pattern is essentially disintegrative.

Poe's description of Roderick Usher, for instance, so clearly involves an idealised portrait of himself that it is startling to meet in an early story a very different attitude to a figure at least equally self-inspired:

This passage occurs in a piece called first “Von Jung” and later “Mystification.” E.H. Davidson has described Poe's almost total self-deprecation here as “ill concealed sentimentalism,”(16) and this can be agreed to, provided it is recognised that Poe shows himself, in the last sentence, to be very aware of the dual impression he made in society. He did eventually remove this satiric self-portrait from the tale: but it co-existed with the flattering one (of Roderick Usher) in the 1840 collection, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Even when one is prepared for it, the ambivalence of attitude to himself of which Poe is capable in his writing is startling. A. H. Quinn(17) is certainly correct to see the words of the hero of “Eleonora” (1842) as self-expressively descriptive of Poe's own temperament:

Almost all favourable criticism of Poe has, like Quinn, accepted the kind of justification for his literary range which these words imply. Yet at some stage among the jottings collected in “Fifty Suggestions” (1845) Poe had recorded:

It is difficult not to see these words as a piece of defensive self-criticism, which magnificently prophesies the usual premises for an unfavourable view of Poe's work up to the present day.

 

III. THE FASHION OF INCONSISTENCY

Those who were influenced by other aspects of Byron's life-style were, of course, likely to imitate him to some extent in this also. Byron's inconsistency expressed itself in two ways in his literary attitudes. He made superior and derogatory remarks about his own more popular verse;(20) and in his better poetry, like Don Juan, he cultivated a gift for deliberate self-parody.(21) Wilson shows a similar uncertainty about the good taste of his most popular writing in his self-portrayal as “Christopher North” in the “Noctes Ambrosianae.” For instance, “North” exclaims:

And the “Shepherd” responds, “Dinna fa’ into ony imitation o’ that flowery writer o’ the Lichts and Shadows. I [page 121:] canna thole that.” Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life was Wilson's best-known book, a volume of short-stories in very “purple” prose. Or “North” begins to defend the “wide extension of the legitimate province of prose” caused by “the extinction ... of English poetry,” and another character, “Tickler” mockingly argues:

Here the satire is specifically at the expense of Wilson's own prose-poetry and his highest literary pretensions. Of course, the characteristic inconsistency which Wilson injected into Blackwood's — half Romantic, half classicist, alternately attacking and defending Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Shakespeare(23) — was deep in his own personality(24) — not just a copy of the celebrated inconsistency of Byron. The London Magazine was right to see Wilson's theatrical attitudinising in Blackwood's as partly deliberate. (“It is true, — ‘One man, in his time, plays many parts,’ but few, we believe, have been so successful as Mr. Wilson in making extremes well meet. He has played both Hamlet and the cock.”)(25) And Carlyle was also right when he found in him, “a loose joint about the very centre of his existence, — a want, namely, of distinct veracity of mind.”(26) Similarly Poe's inconsistency must have grown in intensity as he met the same traits in Byron's literary personality. When he read in the magazines that Byron was a paradox in everything [page 122:] — “cold blooded satirist” yet “man of sentiment,” “aristocrat” yet “radical”(27) or that “SELF supplied to him the place of all things; of name, and home, and country; of law, of love, of religion; of friends, of kindred, of mankind ... his subject and his inspiration ... sometimes like a guardian angel — more frequently like a haunting demon,” causing “bodily as well as mental disease,” and “morbid feeling” against which he ‘seemed so little able or willing to struggle,”(28) he would have no difficulty in finding his own likeness, as well as absorbing that of Byron. And in this process he would, no doubt, recognise and utilise Byron's defensive weapons of self-deprecation and self-parody.

 

IV. POE'S ATTITUDE TO HIS EARLY FICTION

Poe's sensibility was Byronic in its double emphasis, responding on the one hand to eighteenth-century satiric modes, on the other to the fullest and most sentimental impulses of Romanticism. As in the cases of Byron himself and Wilson, this double alignment resulted in uncertainty on matters of taste and in self-deprecation or self-parody as a protective device. The counter-balancing of Gothic tales of effect against burlesques in the theoretic prescription for his fiction was, of course, a measure of protection against the charge of vulgarity, as it was in Blackwood's. Any evidence of a “gentlemanly” stance, an alliance with the “few,” would mitigate the effect of possible sentimental excesses. But Poe's Gothic tales were more emotionally indulgent, as well as involving a wider range of stock-response, than the Blackwood's models. And he seems to have felt the need, in the earlier years of his career, to defend his more sensational stories, not only by deprecation, but by claiming that [page 123:] some or all of them had actually been intended as burlesques.

We know that Poe had several short-stories ready as early as the summer of 1832,(29) and that when he had written eleven tales (about 1833), he must have prepared for them the satiric “Introduction to the Tales of the Folio Club.”(30) Several of these stories(31) are burlesques — ‘The Duc de L’Omelette,” “A Tale of Jerusalem,” “Loss of Breath,” “Bon-Bon,” “Epimanes’” (“Four Beasts in One’), and “Lionizing.” But some of the eleven were undoubtedly completely serious pieces — the Coleridgean “M.S. Found in a Bottle,” for instance, or “Siope” (“Silence”) in which Poe uses words and phrases from his earlier serious poem “The Valley Nis.”(32) Even a story like “Metzengerstein” seems, on the whole, to be serious in its feeling, its nervous involvement and self-indulgent intensity: there are no signs of the detachment, satirical edge, and consistent exaggeration that we expect in a burlesque. But there is, at the very end of “Metzengerstein,” a tonal uncertainty, a nervous exaggeration, which suggests that, even in the process of composition, Poe's divided psyche could respond half involuntarily to the fear of vulgarity, could deprecate its own deepest impulses. This ambivalence of tone is apparent from time to time also in “The Visionary” (later “The Assignation”). By 1836 Poe had enlarged to seventeen the number of tales to be included.(33) Again one has clear burlesques (“Mystification” and “King Pest,” etc.), serious pieces (‘”Morella,” “Shadow,” etc.), and one tale (“Berenice”) which, like “Metzengerstein,” is tonally serious with an ambivalent conclusion. Most of these tales were published in various magazines and newspapers.(34)

J. S. Wilson(35) has argued, from the satiric tone of the [page 124:] “Introduction to the Tales of the Folio Club,” that all the early tales (even the “M.S. Found in a Bottle”) were intended satirically. This presupposes that both the original eleven and the extra six tales were written to a prescription thought up beforehand. But it seems very unlikely that the “Introduction” would precede in composition this very heterogeneous group of tales, and dictate their themes and moods. Its various storytellers, Mr. Solomon Seadrift, Mr. Blackwood Blackwood, and the rest, were only too obviously invented to suit stories already in existence. It seems much more likely that Poe would, as L. A. Fiedler suggests,(36) write them in various moods, including self-indulgent intensity, and rationalise over them afterwards, to suit the better taste of his friends. Poe's letter to T. W. White of 1835 demonstrates the extraordinary evasions and equivocations with which he defended his tales in the period. His main aim was to try and defend “Berenice” and fiction of the same kind against accusations of vulgarity: “You may say all this is bad taste. I have my doubts about it.”(37) He claimed that “Berenice” originated “in a bet that I could produce nothing effective on a subject so singular provided I treated it seriously.” “Effective” and “seriously” suggest that he numbered this story with his serious rather than with his satiric tales, seeing it as similar to “Monos and Daimonos” and De Quincey's “Confessions,” both serious enough. But his tortured uncertainty about the value of such pieces is accommodated by the idea of the “bet,” a “let out” should his case not be taken seriously.

In February 1836, J. P. Kennedy accepted a two-fold division of Poe's tales into “bizarreries” and “grotesques”; and while he approved of the latter, “the serio tragi comic,” he disapproved of Poe's serious tales, which he saw as “extravagant” [page 125:] and as “intense” rather than “natural.” “Some of your bizarreries,” he added, ‘have been mistaken for satire — and admired too in that character. They deserved it, but you did not, for you did not intend them so.”(38) Poe's defence against this charge was to take up an elitist stance, exaggerating the tonal uncertainty of some of the tales into a more widespread satiric intention: “Most” of the tales, he said unspecifically, “were intended for half banter, half satire”; and then he destroyed the force of the word “intended” by adding, “although I might not have fully acknowledged this to be their aim even to myself.” (His “most” here could be an exaggerated reference to the three “ambivalent” tales I have isolated.) Only “Lionizing” and “Loss of Breath,” he added, were “satires properly speaking — at least so meant. ...”(39) Meanwhile, Poe's unsuccessful attempt to have the tales published with the “Introduction” as a group of satires had made further self-analysis unnecessary. By March 1836, J. K. Paulding, who had been Poe's intermediary with Harper's, was speaking of all the tales as satiric.(40) Poe, in September 1836, speaks of them as having a “generally whimsical character.”(41) But he did not maintain this defensive attitude when he was more confident about his own deeper emotional impulses as expressed in his fiction. When he wrote “Ligeia,” which sometimes demonstrates the same quality of tonal ambivalence(42) which we saw in “Metzengerstein,” “The Assignation,” and “Berenice,” he never allowed that it was anything but serious: the tone in which he discussed it as “lofty,” “thrilling,” “sublime,” in his letter to P. P. Cooke of 21 September 1839,(43) is passionately confident and committed. “Silence” does seem from its tone to have been a serious predecessor of “Shadow” in original conception. In its [page 126:] early appearances in 1839 and 1840, however, Poe gave it the protective sub-title “In the Manner of the Psychological Autobiographists,”(44) as if to dub it a burlesque; only in the 1845 printing was this sub-title removed, as though Poe no longer needed to insinuate that it was not to be taken seriously.

 

V. “HOW TO WRITE A BLACKWOOD ARTICLE”

In this context of various kinds of defensive inconsistency, Poe's ambivalent attitude to Blackwood's fiction becomes explicable. Tortured with uncertainty about the taste and value of his own fiction of the same kind, he could make of Blackwood's fiction a surrogate, and by lashing it achieve both the satisfaction and the protection of self-parody. Setting the dates of his attacks on Blackwood's fiction (1832, 1835, 1842) against those of his cautious expressions of approval (1835, 1836, 1842), one can see how his inconsistencies must have expressed themselves in radical alternations of mood, rather than in dialectical development.

Apart from the clear burlesques of “Le Revenant” in “Loss of Breath” and of “The Iron Shroud” and the “Involuntary Experimentalist” in “The Predicament,” Poe's parody is very vague and inflated and can best be seen as hitting very generally as the whole ethos of learned sensationalism. Other articles mentioned in “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” like Warren's “Diary of A Late Physician” and De Quincey's “Confessions of an English Opium Eater,” are not specifically parodied in any detail. The main animus in these burlesques and in “How to Write a Blackwood Article” comes from that mood of self-deprecation which, as we saw earlier, was one pole of his dualistic nature, [page 127:] and is, in fact, defensively self-critical. When one finds a clearly traceable comment on a particular stylistic feature of one of the British magazine pieces, it is generally at the point where the British journal has influenced Poe. Thus Mr. Blackwood describes the ‘tone laconic, or curt”: “It consists in short sentences. Somehow thus. Can’t be too brief. Can’t be too snappish. Always a full stop. And never a paragraph.” Such a style is, in fact, found in Bulwer's “Too Handsome for Anything,” and is imitated in Poe's own “Lionizing” and most of his other burlesques. When Mr. Blackwood describes the “tone metaphysical” in which you must “Talk of the Ionic and Eleatic Schools — of Archytas, Gorgias and Alcmaeon. Say something about objectivity and subjectivity ...,”(45) one is reminded as immediately of Poe's own learned tone as of the similar tendencies in the British journals. Most critics recognise the bearing of “How to Write a Blackwood Article” on Poe's own work, but those who do tend to see him here as casting off the European influence of Blackwood's in a grand pro-American gesture. In fact, his tone of haughty elitism rejects even the compromise involved in the magazine fiction of the Blackwood's type and his own similar journalism. Mr. Blackwood's recipe for composition is a direct parody of those serious principles of writing to a preconceived effect which Poe later sets out in his Hawthorne reviews; and the minor details, the use of tags of an unknown language, abstruse philosophical ideas, “piquant expressions,”(46) and so on are also his. When Miss Zenobia is made to say, “We now take it (Blackwood's) for our model upon all themes, and are getting into rapid notice accordingly,”(47) the sentiments satirised are precisely those which Poe had seriously expressed in his letter to White of 1835. It is exactly the relationship [page 128:] implicit in these satiric pieces that is more or less acknowledged in the 1842 Hawthorne review, where Poe identifies his own theory with Blackwood's practice in his famous formula for the Tale of Effect:

But final stress could be placed on the fact that Poe could publish those words in the same year in which he was revising (and sharpening the claws of) “How to Write a Blackwood Article.”