Text: Michael Allen, “Poe's Elitism,” Poe and the British Magazine Tradition, 1969, pp. 182-198

[page 182:]

X

It has become, on very slender evidence, an accepted assumption of Poe scholarship that Poe's primary aim as a journalist was to reach the mass-audience: and quite often it seems to be assumed that he was successful in so doing, and was a popular writer. Howard Mumford Jones wrote in 1944 that

J. B. Hubbell, in 1956, incorporated this statement into his standard bibliographical essay on Poe.(2) The volume on Poe published in 1961 in the Twayne's American Authors series maintains (without producing evidence) that Poe was “intimately in touch with the mass market,”(3) and that his [page 183:] stories were successful. The foundations for such views were laid by a number of scholars, notably Napier Wilt,(4) F. L. Pattee,(5) and H. S. Canby(6) in the 1920's and 1930's. Canby, attempting to show that Poe was a forerunner of modern American mass-journalists, quoted(7) passages from the Hawthorne review of 1847, which I discuss on page 150 above. Since Poe, in that review, condemns any writer who cannot master the mass-audience, Canby assumed that he must himself have been successful in that purpose. And others may have assumed this after him. But I think we have seen that Poe's statements of intention cannot be isolated in this way: they must be fitted into the context of his total socio-literary attitudes. I have shown that he was by no means successful. What is more, such views of his journalism more or less ignore the consistently elitist journalistic ideal that he maintained throughout his career in connection with the plans for his own magazine.

 

I. DIVIDED AIMS, 1845-49

In momentary fits of optimism brought about by the successes of the ‘”Autography” series and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” Poe articulated in 1842, 1845, and 1846 the idea of himself as the conspiratorial massjournalist. A contemporary account of three successive visits to Poe's home in 1846 provides an illustration in miniature of the mechanics of his alternating attitudes. When Mrs. Mary Gove Nichols first visited Poe at Fordham, he had read “with quiet exultation” to his visitors Elizabeth Barrett's letter describing the success of “Valdemar” in London. On her second visit he had said, “Fame forms no motive power with me. What can I care for the judgment of [page 184:] a multitude, every individual of which I despise,” and had then expressed criticism of the journalistic conspiracy to “manufacture opinions” in which his poverty inevitably involved him. On her third visit, however, he contradicted himself saying,

Mrs. Nichols, despite Poe's denial of his earlier assertion, felt that “the utterances on both occasions might be true to the mood that suggested them.”(8) It is noteworthy that in both moods “fame” is equated with approval from “a multitude, every individual of which I despise,” and is to be enjoyed contemporaneously. (“No man lives unless he is famous!”) What Poe is discussing here is not future fame, but what we are calling “popularity.” It is easy to see how his “vacillation between ambition and the scorn of it” led him into seeing himself at times as a successful mass-journalist, in the same way that he saw himself as the successful detective Dupin, and as solving the Universe in Eureka. This idea of himself was partially a compensatory fantasy image, just as was its polar opposite, the intensely held view of himself as elitist artist. And it could appear and disappear momently in obedience to even the faintest encouragement.

But the main body of Poe's work was very unlikely to be assimilated by the public: its variations in tone, its proliferations of kind and superiority of attitude were completely inconsistent with the growing “homogenisation” of material, [page 185:] the repetition of a few simple escapist patterns which increasingly characterised American mass-journalism. And Poe had not, as we have seen, the temperament to remain consistent in his self-explanation in the face of apparent failure. We have to take into account, too, in his final few years, professional insecurity, physical and mental ill-health, and the disturbing effect on him of his wife's illness and death. It is hardly surprising that Poe's literary. attitudes in these final years are characterised by wild and inconsistent attempts to convince people (and himself) of his complete mental control over the course of his career. Occasionally he does now seem to have placed his hopes in book-publication of his tales and the gradual accretion of orthodox literary fame. In August 1846 he told P. P. Cooke:

Either this statement involves a falsification of his past intentions, or else it represents an over-all strategy which, because of his failure to have the Tales of the Folio Club published, and because of the small sales of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, he had kept to himself. Certainly his words to Professor Charles Anthon in 1844 are far more representative of his expressions of intention throughout his career:

What he was now saying to Cooke about book-publication may explain one aspect of his activities from 1846 on. It illuminates in particular his preparation of Eureka outside the magazine convention as lecture and book, his advice to correspondents to ignore the Godey's “Literati” series and wait for the book which he was “at ... body and soul,” and which would be “true.”(11) But Poe made few statements that are as thoroughly and consistently backed up by his expressed views throughout his career as the 1844 assertion that his ultimate purpose had been to found a magazine of his own, his main desire to establish a journalistic reputation which would be consistent with that purpose.

 

II. “TO BE CONTROLLED IS TO BE RUINED”

One of the most important assumptions of the mass-publication situation was the one that businessmen rather than writers should be the arbiters of the literary situation. J. K. Paulding explained mildly in a letter to T. W. White about Poe's book that he, as a man of letters, had no influence over Harper Brothers, the publishers, “and indeed, ought to have none, for my taste does not exactly conform to that of the Public at present.”(12) But Poe never accepted this. It will have been noticed that in neither of his predominant literary moods did he ever conceive of himself as anything other than infinitely superior to the mass-audience. And in his professional role, he still shared with the British journalists of the previous generation a sense of the “gentlemanly” tradition, which set him above his employers. Coleridge, De Quincey, Wilson, and Bulwer had each felt [page 187:] that the writer rather than the proprietors of the magazine should be the arbiter of its quality. The fact that Blackwood made him editor only in name and allowed him no actual freedom or responsibility in regard to the magazine's contents rankled very deeply with Wilson.(13) De Quincey's tiffs(14) with Blackwood had the same source as Bulwer's strained relations with Colburn and his more practical editorial associate Samuel Carter Hall,(15) a sense of superior right to judgement. And a similar sense of superiority was one element in Poe's difficult relationship with American magazine proprietors, like White and Burton. T. W. White recorded how he was “cramped” by Poe

To Burton, his next employer, Poe wrote aggrievedly:

G. R. Graham found a more co-operative attitude in Poe than did his predecessors,(18) but this was clearly to some extent the result of his own tolerance as well as of Poe's adaptation. In the relationship which Poe describes between the villainous “fat ‘editor and proprietor’ “ and the povertystricken young author he exploits to death in “The Magazine Prison-House” (1845), he expresses semi-fictionally the same frustrations explained bitterly to F. W. Thomas: [page 188:] “To coin one's brain into silver, at the nod of a master, is to my thinking, the hardest task in the world.”(19) And there can be little doubt that this inherited discontent with literary servitude was related to his sense of inadequate recognition and reinforced by his critical distaste for the mass circulation journals he served.

One reason for his discontent with Burton's Gentleman's Magazine was its “prize list” and other “humbug”;(20) and he claimed to have resigned from Graham's out of disgust with the “namby-pamby character of the Magazine — a character which it was impossible to eradicate — I allude to the contemptible pictures, fashion-plates, music and love tales.”(21) He said that he thought too little of the successful “Literati” series in Godey's “to guard sufficiently against haste, inaccuracy, or prejudice.”(22) In fact his general attitude to those aspects of the magazines of his day which ally them with Godey's consistently bears out the implication of that contemptuous phrase, “the Godeys, the Snowdens, et id genus omne” in his letter to Lowell of 1844.

Poe's discontent with the channels of mass-circulation and the mass-audience kept alive his impractical idea of an elite magazine which could rescue him and the other writers of the country from this servitude. He was suggesting in this letter that “the elite of our men of letters should combine secretely,”(23) to produce a magazine which in every other respect is his own imagined “Stylus,”(24) and thus defend themselves from the mass-circulation publishers. The feeling and endeavour with which Poe acted on his conviction that “to be controlled is to be ruined”(25) were so intense that he could claim the magazine project to be “the grand purpose of my life, from which I have never swerved [page 189:] for a moment,”(26) and this when he had not the remotest chance of achieving it.

He had told Charles Anthon in 1844 that before leaving the Southern Literary Messenger he had realised “the brilliant field for ambition which a Magazine of bold and noble aims presented,” and that from then on his ‘ultimate purpose” had been to found “a Magazine of my own, or in which at least I might have a proprietory right. ...”(27) But Poe's hopeless attachment to this project would be additional evidence, if it were needed, that he found no real satisfaction in the mass-circulation channels of publication which offered him some economic security. His lack of faith in American highbrow journals which published his work, such as the Democratic Review and the American Review, probably reflected his awareness of their economic instability; his description of the Democratic Review in 1844 as, apart from its politics, ‘the most valuable journal of the day”(28) must be flanked by his complaint in 1849 that it and the Whig Review had been “forced to stop paying for contributions,” and that the Southern Literary Messenger which owed him a great deal “cannot pay just yet,” so that he was “reduced to Sartain and Graham. ...”(29)

The Broadway Journal was the only magazine that Poe ever actually controlled. It was far from the five-dollar monthly he always envisaged, being a weekly journal with a precarious circulation of under one thousand.(30) But Poe's emotional investment in it was considerable, since he had never before been even this close to his life's ambition. “The editorial conduct of ‘The Broadway Journal’ is under the sole charge of Edgar A. Poe ...,” said the first number of the second volume of the Broadway Journal, and number [page 190:] 16, “Edgar A. Poe Editor and Proprietor.”(31) But the journal did not prosper. Lack of capital was probably the main reason. But one cannot discount as another factor Poe's ruthless use of what had been a fairly popular paper as a vehicle in which to reprint so much of his own fairly highbrow work. In less than a year the Broadway Journal carried forty-two of the tales and over twenty poems, as well as many reviews and general articles. Poe's self-sustaining tone when it folded is significant:

“The B. Journal,” he wrote grandiloquently to Mrs. Hale,

Mrs. Weiss's article “Last Days of Edgar A. Poe”(34) shows Poe as latterly obsessed with the “Dream Magazine,” as J. W. Ostrom(35) calls the “Stylus.” And his letters confirm that this project became the central endeavour of Poe's life after the collapse of the Broadway Journal. After one has allowed for his unbalanced mental state in these: last years, one can still see a thread of opportunistic logic in this [page 191:] dedication. Despite his attempts to adapt, many of the qualities of Poe's later work — its variations on learned journalism, burlesque, prose-poetry, authoritarian criticism, and metaphysical enquiry; its controversial stridency, bitterness, and superiority; its variety of tone and fecundity of original forms — continued the tendency of his early work, and presupposed an elite audience for their appreciation. The “Stylus” represented the last hope of an alternative to the mass-journals, by which he could gain recognition and wider currency for his superior work. He told Eveleth lamely in June 1849 that he was going to Richmond to ‘see about” the “Stylus,” but that he was “awaiting the best opportunity for its issue — and if by waiting until the day of judgment I perceive still increasing chances of ultimate success, why until the day of judgment I will patiently wait.”(36) It was on this journey that he died.

 

III. THE LOST ELITE

In the 1830's and 1840's the increasing homogenisation of taste by magazine and book-publishers in New York and Philadelphia was making the mass-audience the effective arbiter of the American writer's situation.(37) But there was still a considerable New England elite audience,(38) upon which Eastern writers could depend, and a diminishing number of New England printers(39) representing the region's technological independence of the mass-audience; at the centre of the group was a coterie of “Brahmins,” who had some economic and political power and social influence. And although Longfellow, say, had full access to the mass-audience as well, this was less true of some of his fellows. Lowell, for instance, according to G. R. Graham, was [page 192:] highly thought of by the New England audience although he had little appeal for the national mass-audience.(40) Poe, however, had no chance of appealing to this ingrown regional audience. Instead he decided to make his own high- class literary magazine a practical proposition by appealing to a Southern gentlemanly audience. High hopes for the cultivation of literature in an area where so many well-educated men were placed above the necessity of professional activity had been expressed by J. K. Paulding in his congratulatory letter to the Southern Literary Messenger, and Cooper had written that “the South is full of talent, and the leisure of its gentlemen ought to enable them to bring it freely into action.”(41) The image is the common Southern image of the Southern planters as characterized by “wide reading ... deep reflection ... refined culture ... originality of thought and observation.”(42) Poe retained throughout his life some similar notions. As a professional, he was unready to concede much to the gentleman as a writer; the works of the “gentlemen of elegant lei- sure,” he said, tended to be insipid, conservative, and Anglophile. But he nevertheless approved the idea of a gen- tleman as one “who can live idly and without manual labour, and will bear the port, charge and countenance of a gentleman.”(43) In society, and consequently as members of an audience, he certainly approved of the high-born. “The sense of high birth is a moral force,”(44) he claimed, and the absense of an aristocracy to applaud and promote art was a cultural misfortune: “Is it, or is it not a fact, that the air of a Democracy agrees better with mere Talent than with Genius?”(45) It may well have been as editor of the Messenger that Poe absorbed that idea of a Southern “aristocratic” regional audience which remained with him throughout his [page 193:] life, and which sustained with hopes of an elite audience his immense and fruitless efforts to found his own magazine.

The planned “Penn Magazine” of 1840 was intended to appeal mainly to a Southern audience,(46) and he told Charles Anthon in 1844 that he had planned his own magazine enterprise before leaving the Southern Literary Messenger, knowing

As late as 1849, Poe's aim to “address the intellect — the higher classes — of the country’ involved the tour concentrating on the small towns of the South and West which might persuade Poe's “personal friends (old College ane West Point acquaintances scattered all over the land),” to provide one thousand subscriptions in advance.(48) The core of Poe's ideal audience was a Southern elite which would share and support his tastes.

It is clear that the plans for Poe's magazine were based on an illusion; in part this was Poe's private illusion, but only in part. Poe also shows himself a sharer in that great Southern illusion which was in process of creation in his lifetime — the fable of a cultured antebellum aristocracy which W. J. Cash explodes, and which even Professor Hubbell, in his The South in American Literature ... , has to recognise as mainly legendary. “The Southern aristocracy,” he points out, “was rather social than intellectual; there was [page 194:] little counterpart to what Dr. Holmes called the Brahmin Caste of New England.”(49) And he quotes T. W. White's disillusioned words in the Southern Literary Messenger for October 1839:

Even with its aristocratic glamour removed, Poe's idea of a Southern taste-upholding group was far from realistic. There was more literary activity in the towns than on the plantations, but little sense of literary community or regional loyalty: the Southern public calmly went on buying the Northern magazines and the reprinted British journals, and largely ignored the pleas of Southern magazinists for support.(51) In fact, when Poe later spoke of his “friends in the Southern and Western country,” he was invoking a cultural entity that was still more than half imaginary; when he imagined himself leading a Southern crusade “in the cause of a national as distinguished from a sectional literature,”(52) he was wildly optimistic. But even if this projected Southern audience is more symptomatic of his need than of any reality, it must be taken into account if one is to understand how Poe, in some moods, retained hope of an elite audience.

 

IV. POE'S IDEAL MAGAZINE

The elements of Poe's magazine project remained more or less consistent throughout his life and provide a useful [page 195:] guide to his concept of the ideal magazine. The relation of the formula to his own talents is apparent; its relation to the British precedents, while less clear in his public statements than in private letters (for obvious reasons), seems considerable. Many of Poe's principles were very similar to those which Bulwer enunciated as editor of the New Monthly. He disapproved of the anonymity of the Reviews, admired the “individuality” the “continuous definite character and ... marked certainty of purpose” which result when “one mind alone has the general direction of the undertaking.” His primary purpose was to be the practice of “absolutely independent criticism,” retaining “severity” only “as the calmest yet sternest sense of justice will permit.” He aimed to “please” through “versatility, originality and pungency.” These qualities, and particularly the last, were so generally attributed to Blackwood's and Fraser's that Poe found it necessary, after citing them, to deny that with so many characteristics of the European journals would be found any of their less admirable qualities:

In the “Stylus” prospectus of 1843, which largely followed that of the “Penn,” variety, uniqueness, vigour, pungency, originality, individuality, and independence are the qualities he imagines for the new magazine. In only one feature did Poe's formula for his own magazine change with his professional adaptation to the Godey/Graham pattern: his “‘Stylus” prospectus adds to that of the “Penn Magazine” the [page 196:] promise of “a series of Critical and Biographical Sketches of American Writers ... accompanied with full length and characteristic portraits ...”(54) which suggests that he was ready to incorporate the more gossipy style of criticism he was now cultivating, into the pattern which he had proposed in 1840. In all other respects Poe's magazine plan remained quite consciously opposed to the Godey/Graham pattern. Poe was always determined, despite the competition of the reprinted British journals ($5 magazines in quality, selling at five for $10 in the reprint), and of the mass-circulation magazines and eclectics at $3, to produce a $5 journal. T. H. Chivers, whom Poe had interested in the project, asked him in 1844, “would not the publication of such a Magazine as Graham's be more profitable to us?”(55) and he replied, “A Magazine like Graham's will never do.”(56) His later prospective partner Patterson also suggested(57) a $3 magazine as a practical proposition, and Poe was quick to assure him that “no cheap Magazine can ever again prosper in America.”(58) Poe's early idea of the possible circulation of a $5 journal (5000)(59) was realistic, but his estimates became increasingly incredible — 100,000 in one or two years,(60) 20,000,(61) 50,000(62) — and these figures were to be achieved without the help of “Agents or Agencies,”(63) although the latter were of course the standard channels of mass-circulation distribution, and were geared to the three-dollar, middle-brow magazine. Equally unrealistic was Poe's intention to pay “the highest European prices for contributions and designs”(64) on the strength of his high price and these magnificent circulation figures. He hoped to do all this by making his magazine a clearly upper- class journal like the British magazines, which would unite the higher-income groups at a level above that of common middle-brow taste. The mass-audience, he assumed, would [page 197:] then follow the lead provided by the upper classes; the journal that resulted would depend upon a “many” and “few” relationship like that cultivated by the British journals. And in a prosperous magazine of the Blackwood's type, journalism could aspire to the stature of art, and he would have found a vehicle for his own developing body of varied and idiosyncratic work.

The social foundations on which journalism of the Blackwood's type depended were quite clear to its writers. De Quincey, distinguishing between the readers of influential magazines like Blackwood's and those of less influential ones like Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, indicates that the former “ordinarily occupy that position in regard to social influence which could enable them rapidly to diffuse the knowledge of a writer,” and points out that the literary influence of the “aristocratic classes” is “‘inconceivably” more powerful than that of readers whose ‘social standing is moderate.”(65) Wilson, realistically aware of the rapid upward mobility of nineteenth-century middle-class society, had advocated that an “‘aristocracy of talent and virtue” should come to the aid of the aristocracy of rank to maintain literary values against the effect of the “commercial system.”(66) And Poe's thinking about the social basis of his venture was very similar. He told Patterson that “we must aim high — address the intellect — the higher classes — of the country. ...”(67) He saw the magazine as aiming to address the “‘aristocracy of talent,”(68) and emphasised to several correspondents the importance of social status to its success:

We have seen that he visualised the Southern plantation audience as providing the core of this elite. And at one stage his need for support above and outside the mass-audience even led him to negotiate for political patronage with Robert Tyler, the President's son, offering the possibility that “the Magazine might be made to play even an important part in the politics of the day, like Blackwood.”(70)

Poe's plan, if quite unrealistic, was entirely logical. Only in a prosperous, elite-supported, “quality-popularity” journal of the Blackwood's type, he felt, could journalism aspire to the stature of art. Only under these imagined conditions could he really find a periodical vehicle for his own developing body of varied and idiosyncratic work, and give dignity to his view of himself as “essentially a magazinist.” The whole scheme, admittedly, demonstrates his colossal (even magnificent) lack of common sense. But in any account of Poe's most habitually held intentions as a journalist, the conception of his own ideal magazine, resolutely reiterated throughout his whole career, must be given due importance.