Text: Burton R. Pollin, “Poe in ‘Von Kempelen and His Discovery’,” Discoveries in Poe, 1970, pp. 166-189 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 166:]

10

POE IN “VON KEMPELEN AND HIS DISCOVERY”

“VON KEMPELEN AND His Discovery” represents the culmination of Poe's efforts in the field of the literary hoax. Written and published during 1849, his last year of life, it contains many themes and references of the utmost significance in his emotional and intellectual career. Yet, it has been studied perhaps the least of his tales and has received almost no critical attention.(1) It should be rewarding, therefore, to trace the origin of this story of gold-seeking — a subject which inspired his “Gold Bug” and probably his last poem, “Eldorado.”(2) Gold-seeking is a theme which symbolizes Poe's life-long difficulty in adjusting to ordinary economic realities and to the need for distinctions between the mystic world of dream fulfillment and that of practical necessity.

The hoax was apparently motivated by Poe's awareness of the frenzied rush to California for gold, 1848-49. Poe had set himself the goal of procuring funds to start the “Stylus,” but, as always, was distraught by the need for providing basic essentials for himself and Mother Clemm. His letter of January 21 (?), 1849, to Annie L. Richmond, written “in all my adversity,” pointedly remarks: “I am beginning to grow wiser, and do not care so much as I did for the opinions of a world in which I see, with my own eyes, that to act generously is to be considered as designing, and that to be poor is to be a villain. I must get rich — rich. Then all will go well — but until then I must submit to be abused.”(3)

On February 14, 1849, he was to write to Frederick W. Thomas, the editor of the Louisville Chronicle: “I shall be a [page 167:] litterateur, at least, all my life; nor would I abandon the hopes which still lead me on for all the gold in California.”(4) Poe placed considerable hope in this, the last of his hoax-tales, if we may judge from the letter which he wrote to Duyckinck a month later, March 8, 1849, asking him to print it in the highly reputed Literary World. (It was actually published by the far less celebrated but more responsive Flag of Our Union, of Boston, on April 14, 1849, with “Eldorado” following it, on April 21.) Part of Poe's letter to Duyckinck gives insight into his intentions:

Poe had always shown a leaning toward “diddling” or fooling the public; Since “man is an animal that diddles,”(5) the literary man and the magazinist must diddle via his tales.

In June 1835, Poe had published the hoax tale “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” full of details to give verisimilitude. Poe delved ardently into other sources in search of these facts, and thus was able to sidetrack the reader away from the main source of his story.(6) Invariably, he seems to enjoy teasing the reader with hints of his real sources, dropping here a name, there a title, as if to savor his triumphant deception through having left so many ungathered clues.(7) [page 168:] Even earlier, in the Baltimore Saturday Visiter of October 12, 1833, Poe had published the first of his tales of sea horror, “Ms. Found in a Bottle,” conceived entirely in the spirit of the hoax. Similar was the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which was issued as a book, in 1838, “edited” by Poe. In Pym the hoax is a double one, for the account is a literary invention and contains long passages borrowed from other sources without acknowledgment.(8)

When Poe returned to New York, he was ready for a full-blown, well-publicized deception, intended to raise his credit and make his fortune. He soon arranged to publish, in the New York Sun of April 13, 1844, a documentary tale, disguised as a news account, which has come to be known as “The Balloon-Hoax.” It was issued with the cooperation of the sympathetic editor, Richard Adams Locke (Harrison, 15.126-137). The broadside or “Extra page,” in the midday issue, as Poe tells it, was preceded by an early morning “Postscript.” The full title helps to explicate Poe's particularity of method:

The “Postcript,” reprinted by W. K. Wimsatt, Jr.,(9) who believes that Poe wrote it, shows the careful planning of the whole “jeu d’esprit,” to use Poe's own words in his footnote, added later (Harrison, 2.103). One wonders whether the editor knew that Poe filched over one-fourth the text of his tale from two pamphlets. The first was. Thomas Monck Mason's Account of the Late Aeronautical Expedition from London to Weilburg, Accompanied by Robert Holland, Esq., Monck Mason, Esq., and Charles Green, Aeronaut;(10) the second, probably also by Mason, was entitled, Remarks on the Ellipsoidal Balloon, progelled [page 169:] by the Archimedean Screw, described as the New Aerial Machine (London, 1843).(11)

A third area of literary hoaxing besides the sea tale and the “airy” tale was that of mesmerism, a subject then popular among the “prescientific” educated public of the western world.(12) Poe's first major use of the topic was in the fantastic dialogue between Mr. Vankirk and “P” (Poe), entitled “Mesmeric Revelation.” It had five printings in 1844 and 1845 before it was published by the London Popular Record of Modern Science as a true document on November 29, 1845, entitled “The Last Conversation of a Somnambule.” The popularity of the tale led Poe to write “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” which appeared in the American Review of December, 1845. Poe was proud of the even greater acclaim granted this story in dialogue. Whimsically Poe gives Valdemar the designation “M.” for “Monsieur,” although he lives in Harlem, New York, and writes under the “nom de plume” of Issachar Marx. Here we find the same startling presentation of oddly specific and sometimes very plausible details as in “Von Kempelen and His Discovery.” Here too Poe garrulously states his intention to present a clear view of the “facts” to counter the “garbled” accounts circulating since “the year 1839” concerning Valdemar. Because of its verisimilitude and gruesome ending, involving the “putridity” of the awakened corpse, “Valdemar” had success in England. There it was republished both as an article in the Morning Post and as a pamphlet, “Mesmerism ‘In Articulo Mortis.”(13) The stir over both these printings led to the well-known letter about the “admired disorder” from Elizabeth Barrett Barrett (Ostrom, 2.318-320). When Poe decided to write another hoax, demanded, he thought, by the gold rush, he hoped for a similar reception from the public. A tale touching the purses of everyone should engender even more excitement than a tale of mesmerism.(14)

A summary of the tale will perhaps indicate why the public was less apt to be easily gulled in this case. Since it is not well known and I must treat of specific aspects, the order of its [page 170:] items must first be given. In first referring to the treatment of the “discovery” by Arago, “Silliman's Journal,” and Lieutenant Maury, Poe, as narrator, disclaims that he will attempt any scientific treatment of the subject; he intends merely to speak of Von Kempelen, who is a “slight personal acquaintance,” and of the results of the process. In a long passage, he denies that the discovery is “unanticipated,” finding hints in an apocryphal “Diary” by Sir Humphry Davy, for which he invents bibliographical data. However, he discredits an account in the Courier and Enquirer concerning an earlier “invention” by Mr. Kissam of Brunswick, Maine, and is somewhat amazed that the eminent “chemist” Professor Draper has deigned even to discuss Mr. Kissam's pretentions. Returning to Davy's “Diary,” Poe quotes a sentence to prove that it was only a “rough notebook,” intended to be burned. The quoted passage, plus others, says Poe, may have given Von Kempelen the hint for a discovery which may be a “service or disservice to mankind.”

Next he speaks of an account in the Home Journal, taken from an original item in the Presburg “Schnellpost,” translated with many errors, he says. This account has misled the Literary World into thinking Von Kempelen a native of Presburg.(15) Poe personally knows him, he says, and declares him to be from Utica, New York, of Presburg descent, his family having been “connected, in some way, with Maelzel.” He inserts a putative editorial note, that the original inventor of the chess-player was a Von Kempelen. He then denies the charge that Von Kempelen is a “misanthrope” and mentions being a fellow resident at Earl's Hotel in Providence, Rhode Island, where Von Kempelen gave no evidence of his thaumaturgic capacities. The strange truth of this entire story, says Poe, is like the startling truth of the California “discoveries.”

An account is now given of Kempelen's brush with the police officers of Bremen, where the transmutation was detected; their search of his rooms where he was caught in the deed; his destroying the crucibles and refusing to answer their questions; their finding a large trunk of pure gold; and their being [page 171:] unable to analyze a substance which, with lead and antimony, seems to constitute his “philosopher's stone” ingredients. Poe alludes to a report by Arago on the magic properties of bismuth. Finally, he speculates that the results of the “analysis” will affect migration to California. Meanwhile, in Europe the price of lead and of silver has risen considerably. Despite the “corroborating” details and, as we shall see, the importance and relevance of the proper names, it is, indeed, a “tired” kind of hoax, which defeats its purpose by presenting too much of the familiar from which readers could check on its authenticity. In the choice of these references, Poe reveals a large number of his deep-rooted attitudes and preoccupations.

Von Kempelen, the name of the discoverer, goes back to Poe's early study of “Maelzel's Chess-Player,” of April, 1836. Poe's expose has been beautifully exposed, in turn, by W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., as being entirely derived from Brewster's Letters on Natural Magic, a foreshadowing of the truth having been given by Woodberry.(16) Indeed, Poe's dependence upon Brewster's material in 1836 was so flagrant as to justify the belief that he intended it originally as a kind of hoax. The ignorance of the public and the failure of anyone to note the pretensions of his claim may then have led him to persist in presenting it as a piece of original ratiocination. At any rate, Poe knew very well that the inventor of the deceptive automaton, operated through a concealed player, was “Baron Von Kempelen,” a “nobleman of Presburg in Hungary” (Harrison, 14.11, 12, 29, 35), where it was first exhibited before being taken to Paris, Vienna, and other cities; finally Maelzel bought it for exhibitions in Europe and the United States. The personality of Maelzel himself must have appealed strongly to Poe. For one thing, he turned several other ingenious devices into gold for himself, without any real claim to the originality that was imputed to him: the metronome, the principle of which he borrowed without authorization from Winkel of Amsterdam; and the Panharmonicum, which was sold in the United States for a fantastic sum.(17) Poe later lists Maelzel as an inventor of a [page 172:] chess-player in “The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade” in the February, 1845, issue of Godey's Lady's Book.

In this tale of 1849 he uses Presburg as the erroneously imputed origin of Von Kempelen. In itself this would have been astute, since the city was once renowned as a center of the study of the occult sciences. For the same reason, in “Morella” (1835), Poe gave the enchantress a “Presburg educa-tion.”(18) But this connection was too recherché and Poe provides another, more significant reason for mentioning Presburg. He speaks of a “brief account of Von Kempelen which appeared in the ‘Home Journal,’ and has since been extensively copied; Poe adds: “several misapprehensions of the German original seem to have been made by the translator, who professes to have taken the passage from a late number of the Presburg ‘Schnellpose “ (6.248-249). The title Schnellpost is a key to one of the sources of the whole tale and gives us insight into the literary method entailed by the persistent memory of Poe. The name, meaning “fast courier,” had actually been used from 1826-1829 by the Berliner Schnellpost fur Literatur, Theatre und Geselligkeit. This journal may have been the source for the title and format of a New York German-language semiweekly paper, started January 4, 1843, and continued, in various forms, into 1849. The New England Dial of January, 1844, affirms its high quality, praising especially “the very well selected paragraphs from all the German newspapers, communicating important news not found in any other American papers, from the interior of the continent of Europe.”(19)

Copies of this New York Deutsche Schnellpost fur Euro-paische Zustande, offentliches und sociales Leben Deutsch-lands came to the desk of Poe as associate editor of the Broadway Journal. After he had wrested control of the magazine from Briggs, he began the issue of July 12, 1845, with a, message to the public: “The editorial conduct of ‘The Brbad-way Journal’ is under the sole charge of Edgar A. Poe — Mr. H. C. Watson, as heretofore, controlling the Musical Department” [page 173:] (BJ, 2.1). In this number he inserted four paragraphs translated from the Schnellpost with the following headnote:

This is indeed taken from an article in the New York Deutsche Schnellpost of July 2, 1845.(21) Poe had been able to arrange for a very rapid translation of this eulogy of Humboldt's book. Later he dedicated Eureka to the scientist, “with very profound respect,” and showered praise upon him in the work that Poe was confident would be his own major “poem.”(22) The encomia lavished upon Cosmos by the Berlin correspondent may even have prodded Poe into making his own study of cosmology, as he implies in Eureka (Harrison, 16.186-187).

Poe could not forego mentioning once more a paper whose name gave a tone of cosmopolitanism to the Broadway Journal; on August 30 he includes a reference in his “Editorial Miscellany,” uncollected by Harrison: “We forgot to say, last week, that the ‘Schnell Post,’ published in New-York, has, by a ministerial edict, been forbidden to be taken at the Cabinets de Lecture of Leipsic. The exact reason for the prohibition does not yet appear.”(23) This tidbit of news must have come from the Schnellpost itself. Five years later he would use the name in his story of Von Kempelen, and just as the German paper brought him and his readers news of the cosmological “discoveries” of Humboldt, so the “Presburg Schnellpost” would bring word of Von Kempelen's discovery.

One of Poe's reasons for writing hoax tales was the sheer exuberant humor of his inventiveness, which frothed up into tales of magical flights and voyages but always with enough [page 174:] corroborative details to induce a hesitant acceptance — of part of the story at least. To supply these details Poe ransacked his richly laden memory, sometimes dropping no hint of the jokes that he gave out so freely to the public — jokes often unnoticed to this day. Several place names in “Von Kempelen” illustrate this. A single paragraph gives us three traceable bits of word play. In Bremen, “when the great excitement occurred about the forgery on the house of Gutsmuth and Co., suspicion was directed towards Von Kempelen, on account of his having purchased a considerable property in Gasperitch Lane, and his refusing, when questioned, to explain how he became possessed of the purchase money” (Harrison, 6.250). This corresponds to one of the “Marginalia” items, published in Godey's Lady's Book, August, 1845 (Harrison, 16.71). Significantly listing well-known geographers, Poe writes, apropos of John Henry Mancur's The Palais Royal: “Here is a book of ‘amusing travels,’ which is full enough of statistics to have been the joint composition of Messieurs Busching, Hassel, Cannabitch, Gas-pari, Gutsmuth and company.” Two of these writers of geography textbooks are used in “Von Kempelen” with changes. “Gutsmuth and company” becomes “Gutsmuth and Co.” in the tale and Gaspari becomes “Gasperitch Lane.” The first, in fact, was Poe's error for Johann Christoph F. Gutsmuths (1759-1838), whose fourteen works on geography and children's education are listed in Michaud's Biographic Universelle. Poe was under no obligation to be accurate about the name of “Guts-muth and company” in the tale, nor did he have to preserve the spelling of the surname of Adam Christian Gaspari (1752-1830), when this German geographer and statistician becomes part of “Gasperitch Lane.” But the unGermanic nature of Poe's spelling, “ — itch,” shows that the misspelling, in the above list, of the surname of Johann Gunther Friedrich Cannebich (“Cannebitch” in Godey's) springs from Poe's poor grasp of the German tongue.

Later, in the same paragraph of “Von Kempelen” Poe uses two other names of interest: Von Kempelen always gave “his [page 175:] watchers the slip in the neighborhood of that labyrinth of narrow and crooked passages known by the flash-name of the ‘Dondergat.’ “ Here we find Poe coining a new word; “flash-name” seems not to exist independently. Since flash has so many meanings, such as “of the lightning’ and “sham” and “quibbling,” it seems appropriate for the word Dondergat — literally “thunderpass or thunderchanner — which combines the German forepart with gat from the Old Norse, used as a marine term in English. He had used the common Donder in “The Devil in the Belfry” (1839), where it also provided a humorous combination in “Dundergutz” (Harrison, 3.248). The last place name in the paragraph is Poe's pure invention, I believe. The seven-story building which houses Von Kem-pelen's aurific establishment is “in an alley called Flatzplatz,” a name which Griswold seems to have altered in his edition of the tale to “Flatplatz.”(24) The whole is a “jeu d’esprit,” for the knowing readers, but Poe could scarcely have expected many such; he seemed not to care greatly, since his mind threw off these bubbles of humor so freely.

To make his hoax credible, however, Poe presents some genuine scientific personalities, well known at that time although a trifle obscure today. With at least one of them — Draper — Poe was personally involved, and he was possibly involved with Maury as well. Arago, i.e., Francois Arago, chief savant and Perpetual Secretary of the Academy of Science in France at the time, need not concern us long; his fame was international and sound, as the seventeen volumes of his collected works could demonstrate. In his Scientific Notice of Comets, translated into English in 1833, Poe may have found a hint for his “Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” in which he postulates a comet which has exhausted the air of nitrogen, leading to the combustion of the world.(25)

Lieutenant Maury, as Poe terms him, the second scientist mentioned at the beginning of the tale, was one of the pioneers in the application of scientific knowledge to navigation. With good reason two biographers call Matthew Fontaine Maury [page 176:] “Pathfinder of the Seas.”(26) At the time of the gold rush, Maury's name would naturally occur to Poe, since the use of his charts was cutting the travel time between New York and San Francisco from 150 to 133 days.(27) Much earlier Poe had reviewed for the June, 1836, Southern Literary Messenger Maury's work, A New Theoretical and Practical Treatise on Navigation. There is almost a coincidental symbolism in the conclusion of Poe's flattering review:

Soon after, Maury briefly became the superintendent of the Federal gold mine at Fredericksburg in 1836. Between 1838 and 1841 he won far-flung renown with a series of articles which decried the Navy Department's inefficiency.(29) Influential posts in Washington were given to him in 1842, a place as head of the Depot of ,Charts and Instruments, for example. Upon the death of Thomas W. White, he became editor of the Messenger for the first eight months of 1843. His major endeavor was to organize the vast body of information in old logbooks owned by the Navy Department for the benefit of mariners; thus in 1847, he published his Wind and Current Chart of the North Atlantic and, in 1848, the ten-page “Abstract Log for the Use of American Navigators.”(30) The latter ingeniously offers a free copy of the 1847 book to navigators who put specified data into tightly corked bottles for later checking by Maury's office. The plan may well have been suggested by Poe's early “Ms. Found in a Bottle,” of October 19, 1833, which was to be reprinted five times before 1848.(31) It is a resource also mentioned in the “Balloon-Hoax” (5.234). Although biographers of Poe have little to say about Maury, the two must have continued to be well aware of each other into 1849.(32) [page 177:]

The third name, that of Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829), helped to lend authenticity to Poe's hoax, since no scientist in the English-speaking world was better known. In fact, Poe included a testimonial to his fame in the “Pinakidia” of the August, 1836 Messenger. Item 134 tells of the correct routing to Davy of a letter sent from Rome solely addressed “Alla sua Excellenza Seromfidevi” in London (Harrison, 14.64-65). Perhaps the reason for using his name was Davy's remark on gold-making which was added to one of the later editions of Isaac Disraeli's Curiosities of Literature, conspicuously placed at the end of the article on “Alchymy”: “Sir Humphry Davy told me that he did not consider this undiscovered art an impossible thing but which, should it ever be discovered, would certainly be useless.”(33) Poe could also have seen the same statement, quoted from this source, as a footnote to the first page of an early chapter in Bulwer's Zanoni, a novel which he did not review, as Harrison believed, but which he undoubtedly knew.(34) Surely Davy was worthy of being included in the tale, but Poe devotes a surprising amount of space to the passages from Davy's alleged “Diary,” purportedly including technical as well as purely personal material (Harrison, 6.245-248). Part of the actual material used by Poe comes from Davy's Researches, as we shall see. There is, however, a slight question in my mind about the origin of Poe's term “Diary,” from which he pretends to excerpt two passages, the first of which the “Ed.,” i.e., Poe himself, has omitted because “The ‘Diary’ is to be found at the Athenaeum Library.” As usual with Poe, there is a thin strand of truth from which this absurdity can hang, for Poe certainly had used the Baltimore Athenaeum Library many years before. One wonders whether any work corresponding to this could have been found therein. Its catalogue of 1827 lists only one by Davy, The Elements of Agricultural Chemistry, but others might have been added in the 1830's.(35)

Apart from the library collection, his reference to a “Diary” may have been derived from the two-volume Memoirs of the [page 178:] Life of Sir Humphry Davy, Bart, by John Davy, Humphry's brother, published in 1836 and republished in a much abridged form as volume one of the nine-volume set of Davy's Collected Works (1839-1840). Oddly enough, in the 1836 edition of the Memoirs, on page 83, following one of the two pages scrupulously indicated by Poe for the “Diary” (pp. 53 and 82), I find a passage which bears tangentially on “Von Kempelen” and even more closely upon the ideas that he had recently embodied in Eureka.

On page 53 of this 1836 edition there is no link at all with “Von Kempelen,” but in the revised Memoirs of 1839 is to be found a rather significant item: “He undertook an investigation of the effects of the gases in respiration. Of these, the nitrous oxide was one of the first he experimented upon. Its agency he found to be of a very novel and wonderful kind, contrary to all expectations, and almost exceeding belief” (1.53). The link is this, that a little further on in “Von Kempelen” Poe gives a passage, allegedly from the same “Diary,” concerning Davy's “researches about the protoxide of azote” (Harrison, 6.247). Poe then criticizes the ungrammatical style of the sentence which deals with the effect of a gas upon respiration, but he excuses it on the grounds that the “MS. so inconsiderately published, was merely a rough note-book, meant only for the writer's own eye.” Now, the passage which Poe quotes has been traced to one in an actual work by Davy — actually the work alluded to on page 53 of the Memoirs.(36)

To appreciate a series of very characteristic Poe jests, one must see the original in Davy and the corresponding passage in Poe. The brackets were inserted by Poe in the following: [page 179:]

Davy's passage reads:

Poe has provided his wary reader with all the clues for understanding the joke, for “azote” was the name given to nitrogen by Lavoisier and the “protoxide” of azote is therefore nitrous oxide, which occurs in the full passage before Poe's excisions were made. The title of the early and famous work by Davy, from which it comes, is Researches, Chemical and Philosophical, chiefly concerning Nitrous Oxide and its Respiration (1799). Poe is merely preserving the description of the physiological effect of nitrous oxide, that is, laughing gas. Faced by such delightfully hidden jokes, one wonders whether Poe ever had the satisfaction of hearing anyone, even one of the many literary ladies of his circle, comment on his humor. I fear that too often his jests were made solely for his “private world.”

I believe it possible to trace the origin of his distortion of Davy's respectable sentence about laughing gas and respiration; it will require our looking into the pages of the Broadway Journal of December 20, 1845.(37) In this issue, the next to the last published under Poe's direct editorship, appears a review of three books for young people, all called First Lessons, the first being in English Composition by Union College President E. Nott and the second in Political Economy by Columbia College [page 180:] Professor John M’Vicar. Poe devotes his entire review, however, to the anonymous third book. Since this item is uncollected by Harrison, I shall give it here:

This has all the touches of Poe's reviewing method and style, such as plucking an example from the beginning of the book — probably the only part given any real attention, the sarcastic reference to the anonymity of the author; the unnecessary attack upon Carlyle, one of his pet aversions, here so remotely drawn in; and finally the objection to “loose grammar.” Surely this item from one of Poe's last issues of the Broadway Journal, stored up in that marvelously allusive and capacious memory, led to the grammatical jesting of “Von Kempelen” with its effervescent humor rising from below the surface.

Sandwiched in between Poe's allusions to Sir Humphry Davy, we find a puzzling reference to Professor Draper, “eminent” as “a chemist.” This can be explained only through delving into Poe's relationship with George W. Eveleth, a medical student in Maine, and also into one of the forgotten minor controversies of the period. There is no question about the [page 181:] identity of Professor Draper — John William Draper (1811-1882), then teaching at New York University and distinguished in chemical and physical research. In “Von Kempelen” there is, I believe, an allusion to Poe's support of Draper when an attack was made upon his Treatise on the Forms Which Produce the Organization of Plants (New York, 1844). In the North American Review of January, 1845, the writer of a review of four new scientific works maintained that Draper's bold theory about the decomposition of carbonic acid through light in “vegetable digestion” has no substantial basis. On the other hand, there is a great deal that is “trite and elementary” — the mere condiments to the souffle, he says. Draper must have relied too much on material prepared as lectures to medical students.(39) The attack was soon noticed by the writer of paragraphs, i.e., Poe, in the New-York Daily Mirror, portions of which often appeared in the Weekly Mirror, both being under the direction of N. P. Willis and George P. Morris. In an article not collected by Harrison, Poe defends the New Yorker, Draper, against the much scorned organ of the New England literary group, the North American Review. On January 20, 1845, in the Daily Mirror and February 1, in the Weekly Mirror, Poe, the “paragraphist,” gives an account of the attack and speaks of the eminence of Draper, who had been praised by Brewster, Herschel, and Moser and was famous for experiments far above the skill of schoolboys. The “coarse allusion to medical students” makes Poe “suspect ... something connected with the rivalries of medical colleges” or the “gratification” of some personal feeling.(40)

There ensues a break in Poe's published references to Draper until the Von Kempelen story, but a private letter contains a statement shockingly at variance with the first one of 1845 and linked to Poe's reference to Draper in the story. It occurs in the last of thirteen letters that Poe wrote to Eveleth, the medical student in Brunswick, Maine, the place mentioned in “Von Kempelen” as the residence of “Mr. Kissam” (6.246247). The seven letters sent by Poe between April 16, 1846, [page 182:] and June 26, 1849, are among the richest and most varied of his whole correspondence. John Ward Ostrom has been able to present Poe's side of the exchange more accurately than James Southall Wilson and Thomas Ollive Mabbott were able to do in 1922 and 1924.(41) Unfortunately, however, the absence of Eveleth's letters makes it necessary still to consult the earlier compilations.

The warm letters between the callow medical student in Maine and the widely known literary figure have always seemed an indication of Poe's extreme graciousness. At the same time it has been difficult to understand Poe's remark in an undated letter printed by Rufus W. Griswold in his memoir, in which he calls Eveleth “a Yankee impertinent who, knowing my extreme poverty, has for years pestered me with unpaid letters.” Wilson believes this to be a Griswold forgery.(42) Yet the tone that Poe covertly takes toward Eveleth in the tale is very similar. I must explain, first, that Eveleth's letter to Poe of February 17, 1849, from the Maine Medical School in Brunswick, is a discussion of Eveleth's reading of Eureka, the work which Poe thought to be his masterpiece.(43) Eveleth asks Poe whether his notion about the origin of the rotation of the heavenly bodies is his own or that of Laplace.(44) He encloses a “bit in which is my expression of it. ... I wrote it some 2 or 3 months ago and offered it for insertion in Silliman's American Journal. I forwarded it to Professor Draper of your city for comment.” Eveleth then transcribes Draper's reply which speaks about two “introductory lectures, on phosphorus and oxygen, sent to Eveleth.” Next Draper mentions fugitive pieces that he wrote for the Southern Literary Messenger when Poe was editor: “I have not any personal acquaintance with him, and do not know what is his prospect with the magazine you refer to. From the circumstance that it is very rarely mentioned here, I should doubt its success.” This skepticism about the never-to-be founded Stylus, which represented a journalistic Eldorado for Poe the last two years of his life, might almost explain Poe's vituperation of Draper in his reply to Eveleth, [page 183:] June 26, 1849. It would not, however, explain his 1848 reference to him in Eureka, unless Poe were inventing the insulting application. Concerning Draper, Poe wrote to Eveleth:

Certainly, Draper seemed unaware of the Eureka animadversion when he wrote Eveleth in February, 1849. Draper's scientific and social eminence might have been precisely the cause of Poe's animosity at a time when he was contemplating the ruin of his own life and sensed his impending death. I believe, however, that some other personal animus must lie buried in an unknown phase of Poe's life.

Surely it might seem “impertinent” for the young medical student to attempt to rival Poe's Eureka glory with his own cosmological theory, as his letter of February 17, 1849 shows. Hence Poe goes out of his way in “Von Kempelen” to ridicule “a Mr. Kissam, of Brunswick, Maine,” who claims the “invention” of the gold-making apparatus and formula. The very name has its symbolic scorn for a humble admirer who has become too ambitious. Poe piles on the ridicule: “How happens it that he took no steps, on the instant, to reap the immense benefits which the merest bumpkin must have known would have resulted to him individually, if not to the world at large, from the discovery?” He “subsequently acted so like a baby — so like an owl — as Mr. Kissam admits that he did.” Kis-sam's claim, Poe says, has “an amazingly moon-hoax-y air” (6.247). This is perhaps a covert allusion to the gullibility Eveleth had displayed in two other letters: that of January 5, 1846, expressing a belief in the truth of “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (which Poe contradicted) and, more recently, that of January 19, 1849, in which Eveleth speaks again of the [page 184:] “Valdemar” story and also of Poe's “Balloon-Hoax,” both of which have “ingenious management and ... a coloring of truth.”(46) As if to resolve any doubts about the application of this section to Eveleth, Poe concludes by being “profoundly astonished at finding so eminent a chemist as Professor Draper discussing Mr. Kissam's (or is it Mr. Quizzem's?) pretensions to this discovery in so serious a tone.” May not his spirit have been wounded to find an intellectual leader in New York writing to a mere Eveleth in Maine and not to Poe?(47)

The matter concerns also the entire orientation of Poe to experimental and theoretical science. What should we assume, for example, from Poe's mention of Davy's “dislike to quackery directly before his being “morbidly afraid of appearing empirical” (6.248)? We have seen, in this attention to Maelzel and the real Von Kempelen, his interest in technical advancement, as represented by modern mechanical devices. In “Mel-lonta Tanta,” also of February, 1849 (Harrison, 6.197-215), a long trip in the year 2848 on board a balloon — named perhaps symbolically after the “Skylark” of the ameliorist Shelley — is the occasion for a gossipy discussion of progress. It is not clear that technology has really improved the life of man. Similarly, in his “Scheherazade” of February, 1845 (6.78-102), Poe had listed a long series of “marvels,” including scientific developments such as “The Electrotype” which has “the faculty of converting the common metals into gold” (6.98). The whole is given more in the spirit of a magic show than with a sense of any possible benefit to the lives of men. The invention of the “Electro Telegraph” is satirically equated with that of the bustle at the end of the tale. In April, 1845, in his tale “Some Words with a Mummy” (6.116-138), Poe humorously maintained that modern inventions are inferior copies or post-ludes to the glories of Egypt and makes a poor joke about the present lack of advance in that “which the Bostonians call the Great Movement or Progress” (6.136). Poe's social sense may be gauged by his admiration of Southern aristocracy and slavery.(48) Even in “Von Kempelen” no practical result seems [page 185:] worth mentioning save a probable shift in the migration to California, the fluctuations in the price of other metals, and for the fortunate discoverer the ability to purchase considerable property for his own benefit. Characteristic of Poe's approach is his showing the police as chagrined at not having pocketed a few slugs of gold while taking the chest of “brass” to the station.

How much more social-minded is the use of magical gold-making in the first Rosicrucian novel, Godwin's well-known St. Leon, which may have been a source for the theme of “Von Kempelen.”(49) The Baltimore Athenaeum Library contained a copy of the 1801 Alexandria reprint. Poe mentions St. Leon in the first sentence of his December, 1835, review of Godwin's Lives of the Necromancers: “The name of the author of Caleb Williams, and of St. Leon, is, with us, a word of weight ... ” (Harrison, 8.92). There are several interesting parallels between the two works: the search by the police of the gold-maker's premises and the lengthy interrogation in the police headquarters, the alarm felt by neighbors at the sudden acquisition of wealth as displayed in his purchase of property, the pointed references to the misanthropy of Von Kempelen and of Bethlem Gabor in St. Leon, and the extensive portion of St. Leon which is set in Presburg (spelled thus in both works).(50) Moreover, there are even hints for the plot in the references to Rosicrucianism in Godwin's Lives of the Necromancers.(51)

Godwin's influence may have merged with that derived from other literature of the period, rife with the twofold Rosicrucian theme: the search for the elixir of life and for the philosopher's stone. As a simple example, there is Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, which Poe cites at least nine times, and which he unquestionably used in his “Ms. Found in a Bottle.”(52) Poe alludes to the Juif Errant of Eugene Sue in the “Domain of Arnheim,” and he lengthily reviews Sheppard Lee, the novel of his unrecognized friend, William Bird, with its playful use of metempsychosis, in 1836 (Harrison, 9.126-139). Indeed, at the end of the review he objects to the, author's “jocular manner” and [page 186:] reliance upon a dream explanation of the successive avatars of the hero? (For Poe's use of metempsychosis see chap. iii.)

In the “Discovery” Poe gave Von Kempelen only one attribute for his would-be hoax, the aurific power, and endeavored to corroborate this with a wide range of details. Besides citing the names of scientific celebrities, he sought to establish the earmarks of a real event through glib references to famous periodicals. This may have been a blunder, since too many readers would have been able to check their own memories of recent issues. Biographical interest lies for us today in the titles that Poe chose. The first mentioned is “Silliman's Journal,” a rash stroke, since Silliman's American Journal of Science and Arts was a prominent publication in America and certain to be familiar to many readers of the tale.(53) Next he speaks of a paragraph from the “Courier and Enquirer” which is “now going the rounds of the press” in connection with his “Kissam” insertion. This mention confirms my belief that he is covertly referring to Eveleth and his cosmological discovery, for the Courier and Enquirer of New York had favorably reviewed Poe's Eureka lecture on cosmology, of February 3, 1848.(54) This was one of the two reviews which Poe sent to Eveleth, February 29, 1848, as items which approach “the truth,” the other being that from The Express. He specifically begs Eveleth to return the clippings (Ostrom, 2.360-362).

Similarly, a reference to the “brief account” of the discovery, in the “Home Journal” plunges one into the Eureka matter and other aspects of Poe biography. The Home Journal had printed a “very complimentary notice of the forthcoming lecture” (Ostrom, 2.359). Nathaniel P. Willis had founded the Journal in February, 1846, and was to show the greatest friendliness to Poe in its pages, even to excess, in Poe's opinion, as when the Journal published an appeal for aid to the Poes as Virginia lay dying, at the end of 1846 (Ostrom, 338-339). (Poe had reciprocated Willis's many acts of solicitude in his earlier “Literati” picture of the man, May, 1846.) May there not be a definite trace of this very notice of the Journal concerning Virginia's [page 187:] anguish in Poe's pretense in the “Discovery” that “in the brief account of Von Kempelen” the Home Journal has misapprehended the “German original”:

In relation to the gold-making achievement this insertion makes no sense at all, but it poignantly illustrates the obsessive force of the last grim days of Virginia's life, filled with “viele leiden.” It also serves to confirm more substantially the transmutation of Poe into the successful gold-maker, Von Kempelen.

The next periodical mentioned, The Literary World, was also highly significant in Poe's life. As I indicated at the beginning of this chapter, Poe had offered his “Discovery” to the editor, Evert A. Duyckinck, March 8, 1849, and had apparently been refused.(56) This magazine had just reprinted “Ulalume,” on March 3, 1849, from the Providence Daily Journal of November 22, 1848.(57) In his letter of June 26, 1849, to Eveleth, Poe pointedly asks whether he has ever seen The Literary World. In the last or else the penultimate letter of his life, that of September 18, 1849, to Maria Clemm, Poe says in a postscript: “Be sure & preserve all the printed scraps I have sent you & keep up my file of the Lit. World” (Ostrom, 2.461).

There is another amazingly specific reference in the tale, which also conceals significant personal experiences. Twice Poe disclaims misanthropy for Von Kempelen, a quality not ill-applied to the deteriorating Poe himself.(58) The passage is important:

All students of Poe, at the mention of Earl's Hotel, i.e., the Earl House in Providence, will recall the painful circumstances involved in the courtship of Mrs. Helen Whitman, in 1848. There is no need to rehearse the course of letters to and from the attractive, wealthy widow of Providence, Poe's visits and attempt at suicide by laudanum, his refusal to withdraw his suit despite the opposition of her family and friends, her signing away her property as part of the marriage agreement, and finally her rejection of him the day of the marriage because of an alleged drinking episode at the bar of the Earl House.(59) A few excerpts from the correspondence will indicate how heavily the fact of Mrs. Whitman's affluence and respectable position in Providence society may have weighed with Poe. In his first letter, of October 1, 1848, he would be “proud” to “beseech” her for her love, “were I wealthy, or could I offer you worldly honors ... ” (Ostrom, 2.389). On October 18 he writes, with a rather obvious denial of his knowledge of that affluence: “That you are quite independent in your worldly position (as I have just heard) — in a word that you are comparatively rich while I am poor, opens between us a gulf ... ” (Ostrom, 2.397). After her friends have managed to make this gulf impassable at the last moment, Poe follows up the shocking separation with a letter of January 21, 1849, while he is writing the “Discovery.” He asks Mrs. Whitman for an explanation of certain allegations concerning her termination of the marriage proceedings and refers to the settlement by which he took her without her property: “So far I have assigned no reason for my declining to fulfill our engagement — I had none but [page 189:] the suspicious & grossly insulting parsimony of the arrangement into which you suffered yourself to be forced by your Mother” (Ostrom, 2.420-21).

The well-attended lecture on “The Poetic Principle” was held in the Earl House, on December 20, 1848 (Ostrom, 2.391 and 413); his drinking bout at the hotel bar gave Mrs. Whitman's friends and family a reason to cancel the marriage. Can we doubt that his inclusion of the name “Earl's Hotel” in the tale is significant?(60) It appears to me likely that the termination of the affair had something to do, also, with Poe's use of the terms “notoriety” and “misanthrope” as applied to Von Kempelen.(61)

At this time of dire “adversity,” as Poe called it in January, 1849, the need for material gain was very much on Poe's mind and entered into fantasies which find expression in letters as well as tales: “I am so busy now, and feel so full of energy. Engagements are pouring in upon me every day.” Ostrom comments on the sad lack of evidence to support this euphoria (2.417-420). It seems clear that at this period thoughts of “Eldorado” were unusually urgent.(62) In “Von Kempelen and His Discovery” Poe ingeniously merges the profitable practice of Rosicrucian magic with the search for California gold. But the period is no longer suitable for Poe's fantastic trickery. In a kind of apt symbolism, the same periodical, a week later, published the poem concerning the self-described “gallant knight”: