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3. Lewis Gaylord Clark
Lewis Gaylord Clark (1807?-1873), the twin brother of Willis Gaylord Clark, was born in Otisco, near Syracuse, New York. The boys attended the local schools and also received instruction from their father and from the Reverend George Colton, the husband of their half-sister. Both Lewis and Willis began their literary careers in the early 1830's, the latter going to Philadelphia, where he eventually became editor of the Gazette. Lewis edited newspapers in Hartford, Connecticut, and Providence, Rhode Island,(1) before becoming editor of the Knickerbocker Magazine in New York in 1834. In the autumn of that year he married Ella Maria Curtis.
Clark conducted the Knickerbocker for over a quarter of a century, and under his editorship the magazine became one of the leading monthlies of the country. Clark became widely and favorably known through his own departments in the magazine, “The Editor's Table” and “Gossip ‘With Readers and Correspondents.” Here he presented in an engagingly informal manner an interesting mélange of anecdotes, literary gossip, comments inspired by [page 265:] his reading, personal reminiscences, and quotable bits from rejected manuscripts. He lost control of the magazine in 1861, but was reinstated as editor for a short time in 1863. Later he wrote for other periodicals and held a position in the custom house in New York. During his last few years he lived in retirement and in straitened financial circumstances.
Clark's editorial duties left him little time for other literary effort. When an article of his appeared in Godey's in 1850, he stated in the Knickerbocker that for sixteen years his pen had not “before been employed out of these pages.”(2) In 1844, however, three years after the death of his brother, he edited The Literary Remains of the Late Willis Gaylord Clark, and in 1845 and 1852 he published selections from the Knickerbocker under the titles The Knickerbocker Sketch Book and Knick-Knacks from an Editor's Table.
As the popularity of the Knickerbocker increased, Clark achieved prominence in the literary and social life of New York. The author of his obituary notice in the New York Herald wrote that it was not known that Clark “ever made an enemy, while the roll of Ills friends contained every name of importance in the field of his life-long labors.”(3) While this statement is not wholly accurate, Clark seems to have been generally well liked, and his many literary friends included such figures as Halleck, Irving, Longfellow, and Dickens. He was a member of the Burns [page 266:] Club, an officer of the St. Nicholas Society, and a founder of the Century Club. In 1855 some fifty of the Knickerbocker's contributors, including Lowell, Holmes, Longfellow, Halleck, Irving, Willis, and Bryant, furnished original items for a volume entitled The Knickerbocker Gallery, the proceeds from which went toward the purchase of a home for Clark.(4)
Poe's prejudiced “Literati” sketch of Clark was written against the background of an animosity which dated back at least to 1843 and which may have had its roots in the reaction to Poe's harsh reviews in the Southern Literary Messenger Lewis Gaylord Clark himself does not appear to have participated in the denunciation of Poe's slashing criticisms, but the Knickerbocker was brought in the controversy through the fact that Willis Gaylord Clark, who objected spiritedly to Poe's critical methods, was editorially associated with his brother in the conduct of the New York monthly.(5)
Soon after Poe became known as a caustic critic, Willis Gaylord Clark, in the Philadelphia Gazette, described the critical [page 267:] department of the Messenger as “decidedly quacky”; it had condemned many a work “of which the critic himself could not write a page, were he to die for it.”(6) To this Poe, with a mildness he rarely displayed later, replied that Clark had a right to think what he wished.(7) But he knew of Willis Gaylord Clark's connection with the Knickerbocker, and a month later charged that the New York Mirror and the Knickerbocker had made “covert, and therefore unmanly, thrusts at the Messenger.” The two periodicals, he continued, “refused to exchange with us from the first” and naturally “feel themselves aggrieved at our success.” He admitted that he bore them “no very good will” and cared little what injury they did themselves “by suffering their mortification to become apparent.”(8)
Poe's relationship with Willis Gaylord Clark does not seem to have improved at any later time. In 1836 Poe referred to the Philadelphia Gazette as a periodical “which, being conducted by one of the sub-editors of the Knickerbocker, thinks it its duty [page 268:] to abuse all rival Magazines.”(9) In 1841 he wrote that Clark had reproved him in the Gazette “for speaking too favorably”(10) of a Baltimore writer.
The Knickerbocker's references to Poe prior to 1843 display no ill will on the part of Lewis Gaylord Clark. However, the notice of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym was not complimentary:
There are a good many tough stories in this book, told in a loose and slip-shod style, seldom chequered by any of the more common graces of composition, beyond a Robinson Crusoe-ish sort of simplicity of narration. The work is one of much interest, with all its defects, not the least of which is, that it is too liberally stuffed with “horrid circumstances of blood and battle.”(11)
Clark wrote in the Knickerbocker for April, 1840, that he thought he discerned in “The Journal of Julius Rodman,” then appearing in Burton's, “the clever hand” of Poe, who had shown in Arthur Gordon Pym “how deftly he can manage this species of Crusoe materiel.”(12)
Poe's stinging review of the poetry of Thomas Ward in Graham's for March, 1843, seems to have turned the tide of his relationship [page 269:] with Clark into story channels. Ward, a favorite of Clark's was a frequent contributor to the Knickerbocker, and Poe's low estimate of his verse amounted to an indictment of Clark's taste in poetry. Moreover, Poe's review included some patronizing references to the Knickerbocker: “We do not consider him [Ward], at all points, a Pop Emmons, but, with deference to the more mature opinions of the ‘Knickerbocker,’ we may be permitted to entertain a doubt whether he is either Jupiter Tonans or Poebus Appollo.” Poe classified Ward as “a second-rate, or third-rate, or perhaps a ninety-ninth-rate poetaster” and recalled that similar opinions had been expressed elsewhere, but “neither Mr. Ward nor ‘The Knickerbocker’ would be convinced.”(13) Thereafter Clark was Poe's enemy, and he frequently used the Knickerbocker to ridicule Poe as an author and critic and to attack his character. His immediate response to the review of Ward was to publish a letter from an unnamed correspondent who remarked that Poe might have written some of Ward's verses “in about a century of leap-years.”(14)
Striking at Poe by giving further circulation to the writings of his detractors came to be a favorite method of retaliation with Clark. He used it again a few months later, this time calling to his aid the able pen of George D. Prentice, editor of [page 270:] the Louisville Daily Journal:
MR. PRENTICE, the well-known Louisville Journalist, is ‘down upon’ a ‘gentleman of some smartness who rejoices in the euphonious name of POE,’ (a correspondent of ours spells it ‘Poh!’) for terming CARLYLE, in one of his thousand-and-one MAC-GRAWLER critiques, ‘an ass.’ The Kentucky poet and politician thus rejoins: ‘We have no more doubt that Mr. EDGAR A. POE is a very good judge of an ass, than we have that he is a very poor judge of such a man as THOMAS CARLYLE. He has no sympathies with the great and wonderful operations of CARLYLE'S mind, and is therefore unable to appreciate him What Mr. Poe lacks in Carlyleism he makes up in jackassism That Mr. POE has all the native tendencies necessary to qualify him to be a judge of asses, he has given repeated evidences to the public.’(15)
Clark apparently derived some satisfaction from misspelling Poe's name in the Knickerbocker. He published a letter from Briggs (“Harry Franco”) in which reference was made to “critics of the POH school”(16) and, speaking for himself, expressed the intention of publishing a volume on sonnet writing “as soon as we can make arrangements with Mr. POH for a puff.”(17)
What now appears to be a rather ineffective satiric hit at Poe appeared in the Knickerbocker for July, 1814. la what purported to be an extract from the journal of an American traveler, there appeared an account of an interview with the German author Karl Postl (referred to in American periodicals of the day as [page 271:] “Sealsfield” or “Seatsfield”):
‘Whom, do you consider as very great men?’
SEATSFIELD: ‘The author of ‘WASHINGTON, a National Epic,’ is a great man; but he is almost unknown, except to a select ring of admirers: the common herd laugh; so do clowns, at a tragedy.’ ‘But do you consider him truly our greatest poet?’
SEATSFIELD: ‘I would not say that, for his work is a part only .... POE is a man of nearly equal ability, but his genius condescends to dally with the diminutive. His soul-grasp is indeed vigorous, but his relish for the beautiful breaks up the wholeness of his life-imagery into brilliance of detail. There is splendor in his general survey of outward things which too often decoys him from the stern filling-up and elaborate job-work j which is absolutely demanded to render a work truly artistical.’(18)
“You'll find those Seatsfield notices capital, I think,” Clark wrote to Longfellow on July 5. “The [meaning?] of the writer was not so apparent at first. I can see that in his Standards (such as Poe and the author of ‘Washington!’) he designs to crucify the commenting and non-producing asses, who are nothing if not critical, and very little at that.”(19) Poe, since the review of Ward, had virtually ignored Clark and the Knickerbocker in his writings. “Of the ‘Knickerbocker’ I hear little, and see less,” he wrote to the Columbia Spy in May, 1844.(20)
During the first half of 1845 the Knickerbocker had little to say of Poe. This comparative silence, however, was very [page 272:] likely due less to any change in Clark's attitude toward Poe than to certain personal considerations which led Clark to suppress for the time any public expression of his feelings; he could not attack Poe without injury to his own friends. During this period Poe was associated on the Broadway Journal with Briggs, a friend of Clark's and formerly a contributor to the Knickerbocker. A like consideration was perhaps responsible for Clark's favorable remarks upon Poe's “The Raven.” In noticing the February number of the American Review he wrote that the best thing in the magazine was Poe's poem, “a unique, singularly imaginative, and most musical effusion.”(21) The editor of the Review was Clark's half-nephew, George H. Colton.
However, when Briggs quarreled with Poe and left the Journal, Clark immediately resumed the attack:
Some sage correspondent of the ‘Broadway Journal’ has temporarily resuscitated from oblivion an article from an old English magazine, entitled ‘Mr. Peter Snook,’ which it lauds without stint, but the very ‘plums’ of which we defy any person of taste to swallow with pleasure. Its humor, which we tried in vain to discover, is pronounced superior to that of Dickens; whereas the wit of the writer is no more to be compared with that of ‘Boz’ than the personal ‘style’ of Jaques Strop is with the manner of Robert Macaire. ‘Chagun a son gout,’ however; and had it not been for an indiscriminate fling at American periodicals, we should not have quarrelled with the commentaries of the nil-admirari critic in question: he is simply one of a numerous class, who are ‘nothing if not critical,’ and even less than nothing at that.(22) [page 273:]
Poe's reaction to this assault was described, by Thomas Holley Chivers in an account of one of the few meetings between Poe and Clark. Chivers, visiting in New York in the summer of 1845, met Poe one morning on Nassau Street; Poe was far gone in inebriation:
By this time we had gotten opposite the Trait House, where we met Lewis Gaylord Clark, the Editor of the Knickerbocker Magazine. The moment Poe saw him — maddened by the remembrance of something that he had said in a recent Number of the Magazine touching one of his own articles which had appeared in the Broadway Journal — he swore, while attempting to rush away from my hold, that he would attack him. “No!” said I “Poe! you must not do so while walking with me.” “I will, by G—d!” continued he, pulling me along. Clark was then talking with another man; but as soon as this man saw the determined attitude of Poe, he immediately left him and went on his way — when Poe approached him, giving him his hand. As Clark responded to Poe's offer of his hand, he exclaimed, “Why, Poe! is this you?” “Yes, by G—d! this is Poe? [sic]” answered he; Here is my friend Dr C — from the South. “What!” exclaimed Clark, giving me his hand — “Dr C., the author of so many beautiful Poems?” “Yes, by G—d” said Poe — ”Not only the author of some of the beautifullest Poems ever written any where, but my friend, too, by G—d!” I was very much pleased, said I, with Willis Gaylord Clark's Poems. “Yes, he was a noble fellow,” said Clark, “and I am his twin-brother! “ ”Good Lord!” said I, internally — while Poe looked Good Lord all over — exclaiming in a rather belligerent tone, “What business had you to abuse me in the last Number of your Magazine?” “Why, by G—d! Poe!” exclaimed Clark, siding [sic] off towards the curbstone of the pavement — ”how did I know the Article referred to, was yours? You had always attached your name to all your articles before, and how, in H—1, did I know it was yours?”
By this time Clark had completely bowed himself away from the middle of Nassau Street, on his way to his office.
Poe, then, turning suddenly round to me, and locking his arm in mine, and pulling me impetuously along, with him, in a self-consciousness of his triumph, exclaimed in an indignant chuckle — “A d — d coward! by G-d!” and went on his way rejoicing.(23)
Clark could not escape Poe's pen. however: the Journal carried [page 274:] a reply to the Knickerbocker attack, but the rejoinder was somewhat weakened by Poe's faulty interpretation of the French phrase Clark had used:
The Knickerbocker for July has also some meritorious contributions — but neither man nor devil can dissuade its editor from a monthly farrago of type so small as to be nearly invisible, and so stupid as to make us wish it were quite so. In three lines devoted to the “Broadway Journal” intended to be complimentary, we believe, although we sincerely hope not, he makes use of what he supposes to be a French proverb, and writes it, Chaçun à son gout, taking great pains to place a grave accent on the verb, mistaking it for the preposition, and complimenting the hard o with a cedilla. Within the compass of the same three lines, he talks about a nil admirari critic; some person, we presume, having quizzed him with the information that the meaning of nil admirari is “to admire nothing.” We certainly do not admire Mr. Clarke [sic] — nor his wig — but the true English of the Latin phrase is “to wonder at nothing,” and we plead guilty to having wondered at nothing since we have found the Knickerbocker sinking day by day in the public opinion in despite of the brilliant abilities and thoroughly liberal education of Mr. Lewis Gaylord Clarke.(24)
In the same month Poe found another opportunity to ridicule Clark when he republished “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.” in the Journal. “Lewis G. Clarke on Tongue” is one of the works which Poe's hero consults as a source of the derogatory phrases he uses in his career as a tomahawk critic. From these works he cuts out sections of various lengths which he puts “into a large tin pepper-castor with longitudinal holes, so that an entire sentence could get through without material injury.” Upon shaking the container over a sheet of paper spread with “the white of a gander's egg,” he finds that many of the phrases — [page 275:]
... were quite awry. Some, even, were up-side-down; and there g re none of them which were not, in some measure, injured, in Regard to effect, by this latter species of accident, when it Recurred: — with the exception of Mr. Lewis Clarke's paragraphs, which were so vigorous, and altogether stout, that they seemed not particularly disconcerted by any extreme of position, but looked equally happy and satisfactory, whether on their heads, or on their heels.(25)
Later in the year the editorial exchanges became more temperate, and for a short period, even complimentary. Poe wrote that the September number of the Knickerbocker “abounds in good things; which no one can better supply than its editor — when he feels ‘in the vein.’”(26) Clark res d by concurring with Poe's unfavorable estimate of an article on American humor by William A. Jones.(27) Jones, however, was a member of the “Young America” group, which had often been a target for attacks by the Knickerbocker.(28) With certain other members of this group, particularly with Duyckinck and Cornelius Mathews, Poe was on friendly terms at this time, and in the closing months of 1845 the Journal and the Knickerbocker engaged in a controversy concerning the merits of Mathews’ novel Big Abel and Little Manhattan.(29) The Journal's [page 276:] November 15 article in this quarrel, entitled “A New Mode of Collecting a Library,” recommended as excellent purchases those works condemned by the Knickerbocker. A week earlier Poe had written:
The Knickerbocker Magazine, for November, is really beneath notice and beneath contempt. And yet this work was, at one time, respectable. We should regret, for the sake of New York literature, that a journal of this kind should perish, and through sheer imbecility on the part of its conductors. Its present circulation, we believe, is not more than 1400 at the most. Its friends should come to its rescue.(30)
This contest in defamation became unequal early in 184.6, when the Broadway Journal expired, leaving Poe without a medium in which to counter the Knickerbocker' s attacks. Much of Clark's review’ of The Raven, and Other Poems in the January issue was mere personal detraction. He stated that he could readily believe that, as Poe claimed, some of the poems were written in early boyhood; “as there have been infant violinists, pianists, mimics and dancers, we see no reason why there should not be an infant rhythmist.”
His reputation as a poet [continued Clark] rests mainly upon ‘The Raven,’ which, as we have already said, we consider an unique and musical piece of versification, but as a poem it will not bear scrutiny. If we were disposed to retort upon Mr. POE for the exceedingly gross and false statements which, upon an imaginary slight, he made in his paper respecting this Magazine, we could ask for no greater favor than to be allowed to criticize his volume of poems His criticisms, so called, are generally [page 277:] a tissue of coarse personal abuse or personal adulation. He has praised to the highest degree some of the paltriest writers in the country, and abused in the grossest terms many of the best. But criticism is his weakness: ‘to that music he rises and flutters.’ In ladies’ magazines he is an ARISTARCHUS, but among men of letters his sword is a broken lath.(31)
In another review in the same number of his magazine Clark remarked of those who had accused Longfellow of plagiarism (among whom Poe was foremost): “The pretentious and the self-conceited, the ‘neglected* and the soured, among our self-elected poets, may be pardoned for decrying that excellence they cannot reach.”(32)
From the Boston Morning Post Clark copied into the Knickerbocker for the next month a condemnatory account of Poe's reading of “Al Aaraaf” in Boston,(33) and in the April number he alluded to Poe as “the besotted driveller who called CARLYLE an ass.”(34) In May the “Literati” began to appear, and Clark gave them just such a reception as Poe might have expected from that quarter. Beginning by reference to Thackeray's The Snobs of England, then appearing in Punch, he continued:
There is a wandering specimen of ‘The Literary Snob’ continually obtruding himself upon public notice; today in the gutter, tomorrow in some milliner's magazine; but in all places, and at all times, magnificently snobbish and dirty, who seems to invite the ‘Punchy’ writers among us to take up their pens and impale him for public amusement. Mrs. LOUISA GODEY has lately taken this snob into her service in a neighboring city, where he is [page 278:] doing his best to prove his title to the distinction of being one of the lowest of his class at present infesting the literary world. The ‘Evening Gazette and Times’ speaks of our literary ‘snob’ as one ‘whose idiosyncracies have attracted some attention and compassion of late’; and adds: ‘We have heard that he is at present in a state of health which renders him not completely accountable for all his peculiarities!’ We do not think that the ‘ungentlemanly and unpardonable personalities of this writer, of which our contemporary complains, are worthy of notice, simply because they are so notoriously false that they destroy themselves But after all, why should one speak of all this? Poh! POE! Leave the ‘idiosyncratic’ man ‘alone in his glory.’(35)
Clark could hardly expect a sympathetic “Literati” treatment, and Poe's sketch of him contained few surprises. The “editorial scraps” in the Knickerbocker, Poe stated incorrectly, were written, not by Clark, but by a talented group of New York journalists; they constitute “a very creditable and very entertaining specimen of what may be termed easy writing and hard reading.” The Knickerbocker had never attained “position among intelligent or educated readers.” It lacked individuality, a natural consequence of the editorship of Clark, who “has no distinctiveness, no saliency of point; — an apple in fact, or a pumpkin, has more angles. He is as smooth as oil ... he is noticeable for nothing in the world except for the markedness by which he is noticeable for nothing.” Poe's description of Clark's appearance is, on the whole, complimentary, but he overestimated Clark's age and remarked that his forehead was “phrenologically, bad ... ‘bullety.’”(36) [page 279:]
Clark's reply, from which an excerpt has been given,(37) appeared in the Knickerbocker for October, 1846. He quoted from the New York Mirror and the London Athenæum matter derogatory to Poe's personal and literary reputation and expressed his lack of concern that Poe “should underrate our circulation by thousands, overrate our age by years, or as sign to other pens the departments of this Magazine which we have alone sustained.” In a footnote, by way of showing that Poe was unknown to some of hi s subjects, Clark gave an account of his encounters with Poe, the first of which as given here was the meeting which Chivers had witnessed in Nassau Street:
The EDITOR hereof has no remembrance of ever having seen him save on two occasions. In the one case, we met him in the street with a gentleman, who apologized the next day, in a note now before us, for having been seen in his company ‘while he was laboring under such an “excitement’”; in the other, we caught a view of his retiring skirts as he wended his ‘winding way,’ like a furtive puppy with a considerable kettle to his tail, from the publication-office, whence — having left no other record of his tempestuous visit upon the publisher's mind than the recollection of a coagulum of maudlin and abusive jargon — he had just emerged, bearing with him one of his little narrow rolls of manuscript, which had been previously submitted for Insertion in our ‘excellent Magazine,’ but which, unhappily for his peace, had shared the fate of its equally attractive predecessors.(38)
Poe included another thrust at Clark in the sketch of Hoffman, which appeared in the last installment of the “Literati” papers in October. Hoffman, he wrote, as the original editor of [page 280:] the Knickerbocker, gave the magazine “an impetus which has sufficed to bear it on alive, although tottering, month after month, through even that dense region of unmitigated and unmitigable fog — that dreary realm of outer darkness, of utter and inconceivable dunderheadism, over which has so long ruled King Log the Second, in the august person of one Lewis Gaylord Clark.”(39)
Cleverer than usual in the way of Knickerbocker satire on Poe was an unsigned piece that appeared in November, 1846, entitled “Epitaph on a Modern ‘Critic’ ”:
‘HERE ARISTARCHUS LIES!’ (a pregnant phrase,
And greatly hackneyed, in his earthly days,
By those who saw him in his maudlin scenes,
And those who read them in the magazines.)
Here ARISTARCHUS lies, (nay, never smile,)
Cold as his muse, and stiffer than his style;
But whether BACCHUS or MINERVA claims
The crusty critic, all conjecture shames;
Nor shall the world know which the mortal sin,
Excessive genius or excessive gin!(40)
So far as Poe's published writings are concerned, his attacks upon Clark virtually ceased with the publication of the “Literati” papers. His only later public statement on the subject came in a “Marginalia” paragraph in 1849, into which went a revision of [page 281:] the “Literati” observation on Clark's lack of individuality.(41) However, Poe apparently intended to include a sketch of the Knickerbocker editor in the projected “Literary America,” for some fragments of a revised version of the “Literati” sketch of Clark exist in Poe's handwriting.(42) Here Poe added his Broadway Journal paragraph in which he had attempted to show Clark ignorant of French and Latin.(43) Of the many minor changes in this later sketch perhaps the most noteworthy occurs in the description of Clark's smile, which, Poe wrote, “is too continual and inane — inexpressive — occasionally degenerating into a simper.”
After Poe's death Clark appears to have confined his pronouncements on his former enemy to the book review section of the Knickerbocker, where he followed the course that had been clearly marked by his friends Briggs and Griswold. In his notice of the first two volumes of Griswold's edition of Poe's works, Clark wrote that Poe, in his habits, was much like Richard Savage but that he “had few of the apologies which could be urged by the English vagabond.” Clark stated that he had been “led to believe” that Poe was “mainly destitute of moral or religious principles.” He granted that few American writers had possessed [page 282:] Poe's “creative energy or ... constructive faculty” and that some of his writings might win “an enduring and not unenviable fame.” But, stated Clark, Poe was “a plagiarist of both thoughts and forms”; he had plagiarized from Longfellow and then falsely accused him of the theft. His criticisms, though in some respects ingenious, are “for the most part ... carping, and entirely worthless, for any judgments they embrace of books or authors; he was so much the creature of kindly or malicious prejudice, or so incapable of going beyond the range of the grammarian.”(44) When Griswold's edition of the Literati appeared later in the year, Clark restricted himself to a synopsis of the “Memoir.” He recounted many of Griswold's slanders and falsehoods which exaggerate Poe's drunkenness and portray him as lacking in honor. Poe's career, concluded Clark, “is not without its lessons, which rightfully regarded, may prove salutary to the young, the impulsive, and the gifted. A decade later, in reviewing Mrs. Whitman's defense of Poe, Clark quoted from an unfavorable notice of the work in a religious journal, stating by way of preface that he had already given his opinions of Poe. “It would give us pleasure to add,” he remarked, “that Mr. POE'S biographers had since given us occasion to change them.”(46)
The foregoing discussion of the Poe-Clark relationship has [page 283:] not taken into account two theories of questionable validity concerning the beginning of the quarrel between the two. The first of these is no more than a suggestion that the ill will had its origin in the fact that Clark was co-author with Locke of the “Moon Hoax,” the appearance of which in the Sun in 1835 interfered with some of Poe's publishing plans.(47) Evidence of Clark's participation in the hoax is afforded by an account of the dinner given on the occasion of Moses Y. Beach's retirement from the editorship of the Sun in 1848. At this affair Clark amused those present with —
... allusions to the phenomena of another luminous body, the Moon, and commented on the revelations of the “Man OF the Moon.” But unfortunately for Mr. Clark, that very personage [Locke] was present, and, in a style that excited convulsive roars of laughter, charged Mr. Clark with presenting him with the whole account. This left Mr. C. in the awkward predicament of being the real Man IN the Moon — that is in hatching the story from that respected planet, of her geography, division of surface, and the form and character of her inhabitants — ha! ha! ha! Mr. Clark!(48)
Clark's part in writing the hoax does not appear to have been generally known, and there is no evidence that Poe was aware of it. Moreover, Poe displayed no personal resentment toward Locke, [page 284:] to whom he unconditionally attributed the piece.
The second theory of the origin of the disagreement between Poe and Clark is based upon the assumption that Poe was the author of an article entitled “Our Magazine Literature” which appeared in the New World for March 11, 1843. In a discussion of the leading monthlies of the day, the author of this piece violently attacked Sargent's New Monthly Magazine and the Knickerbocker, both of which journals, according to the theory, had rejected the article before it was accepted by the New World. Of the Knickerbocker the author of the article wrote, in part:
The glory of the Knickerbocker is for ever departed. Once, it was a thrice welcome messenger of intellectual entertainment to everybody, ladies, gentlemen and all. Nearly all our distinguished literary men have at times, made it the medium of their communication to the public. But, alas! the good names now connected with it are few and far between, and its subscription list is rapidly dwindling away. But the principal cause of its melancholy decline, may be traced to the peculiar and unappreciated talent of its editor, Lewis G. Clark. The only redeeming quality which we (mind, we don't say the public) can find in this gentleman, is in the fact that he is the brother of the late Willis G. Clark, who was one of the most gifted of our poets, and an exceedingly pleasant prose-writer The present condition of this periodical is that of a poorly-cooked-up concern, a huge handsome-looking body, but without a soul. The sooner it dies, the better will it be for the proprietors: but if they will secure an able and efficient editor, we doubt not but that it might be placed in the noble station which it once occupied.(49)
This article aroused the wrath of Clark, as his comments in the Knickerbocker show.(50) [page 285:]
Poe's authorship of “Our Magazine Literature” has been both accepted and denied by the commentators and scholars who have interested themselves in the matter.(51) The evidence adduced to link Poe with the article is far from conclusive. Clark's reference to the author of the article as “an ambitious ‘authorling’ perhaps of a small volume of effete and lamentable trash, full of little idle, ragged ideas, stolen and disguised among original inanities, which has fallen dead-born from the press, before the first fifty copies printed are exhausted in a ‘third edition,’”(52) which Campbell cites as pointing to Poe, certainly does not point unequivocally in that direction, and offers little assurance that even Clark himself knew who the author was. The most thorough effort at providing evidence of Poe's authorship has been made by Spivey, who l) cites W. M. Griswold's attribution of the article to Poe; 2) cites Campbell's statement that the evidence is “insufficient to warrant the unconditional ascription of the article to Poe” (italics Spivey's); 3) states that “Objective [page 286:] evidence [for Poe's authorship] is found in an editorial footnote the Knickerbocker for October, 1846, in which Clark says that Poe some years before had submitted to the Knickerbocker an essay which he (Clark) rejected and which another editor of another journal later refused to accept”; 4) states that the Poe-Clark enmity dates from about 1843 and that “No other known biographical incident Ethan Poe's authorship of the piece! can explain this animosity”; and 5) asserts that the remarks about Clark made in “Our Magazine Literature” and in the “Literati” articles of Clark and Hoffman are “strikingly alike, in some places practically identical.” Against these points it may be argued l) that W. M. Griswold, without offering any evidence, merely asserts that Poe wrote the article; 2) that Campbell's statement could as easily be used in support of the opposite conclusion; 3) that Clark's paragraph (given above, p.279) states only that Poe on more than one occasion had submitted to the Knickerbocker articles which were rejected — nothing concerning another journal is even implied; 4) that the ill will between Clark and Poe may have begun with Poe's harsh review of Thomas Ward in Graham's for March, 1843, the same month in which “Our Magazine Literature” appeared in the New World (see above, pp.268-269); and 5) that far from seeing striking similarities in the statements on Clark, another scholar found that “the two discussions of Clark differ so markedly in approach, demonstration, and effect, that it is very convincing that the first is not Poe's” (Hull, op. cit., p.705).
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 264:]
1 The authors of the sketches of Clark do not mention his work on newspapers; however, the New York Mirror for September 22, 1832 (X, 95), complimented “the proprietors of the ‘Providence Daily Journal’ on the pleasure they may promise their readers from the talents and industry of Mr. Lewis Gaylord Clark, who has recently assumed the helm of that excellent journal.” The writer added that Clark “has retired from the direction of the Connecticut Mirror, which derived a very perceptible advantage from his exertions.” The Connecticut Mirror was published at Hartford.
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4 Clinton Mindil's sketch in the Dictionary of American Biography; the Duyckincks’ Cyclopaedia (1880), II, 534-535; Appletons' Cyclopaedia; the National Cyclopaedia, VIII, 454-455; T. B. Thorpe, “Lewis Gaylord Clark,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, XLVIII, 587-592 (March, 1874); Leslie W. Dunlap, ed., The Letters of Willis Gaylord Clark and Lewis Gaylord Clark, New York, 1940; and the obituary notice of Clark in the New York Herald, November 5, 1873, p. 6. The question of the birth date of the twins is discussed in Dunlap, op. cit., p.6.
5 Knickerbocker, IV, 327; October, 1834. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, p. 245n., suggests that Poe's troubles with the Knickerbocker and its editor may have begun with the quarrel with Willis Gaylord Clark.
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6 Southern Literary Messenger, II, 327 (April, 1836); Works, VIII, 278. Poe quoted Clark's remarks in the Messenger from the New York Commercial Advertiser of Colonel William L. Stone, who had reprinted them with approval.
7 Southern Literary Messenger, II, 327 (April, 1836); Works, VIII, 278.
8 Southern Literary Messenger, II, 460 (June, 1836). One of the Mirror's editors, Theodore S. Kay, of whose novel Norman Leslie Poe had written a scathing review, replied to his critic in the Mirror for April 9, 1836 (XIII, 324-325), in a satiric sketch entitled “The Successful Novel.” I have found no adverse reference to the Messenger in the issues of the Knickerbocker which antedate Poe's remarks.
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9 Poe to the editor of the Richmond Courier and Daily Compiler, ante September 2, 1836; Ostrom, op. cit., I, 102.
10 Ostrom, op. cit., I, 175.
11 Knickerbocker, XII, 167 (August, 1838). In the Knickerbocker for March, 1840 (XV, 262), Lewis Gaylord Clark claimed the authorship of the literary notices which had appeared in the magazine since he had assumed the editorship in 1834.
12 XV, 359.
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13 Graham's, XXII, 195-198 (March, 1843); Works, XI, 160-173. “Pop Emmons,” perhaps, is Richard Emmon, the author of The Fredoniad (1827), as epic poem in four volumes.
14 Knickerbocker, XXII, 88-89 (July, 1843).
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15 Knickerbocker, XXII, 392 (October, 1843). Peter MacGrawler, an editor and critic in Bulwer's Paul Clifford, could write “slashing,” “plastering,” and “tickling” reviews with equal ease. Poe's remark about Carlyle had appeared in Graham's, XXIII, 113-114 (August, 1843); Works, XI, 177.
16 XXIII, 202 (February, 1844).
17 XXIII, 283 (March, 1844).
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18 Knickerbocker, XXIV, 73 (July, 1844). Washington: A National Poem, which apparently was published anonymously, had received a denunciatory notice in the Knickerbocker, XKII, 192 (August, 1843).
19 Dunlap, op. cit., p. 121.
20 Spannuth and Mabbott, op. cit., p. 41.
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21 Knickerbocker, XXV, 282 (March, 1845).
22 Knickerbocker, XXVI, 76 (July, 1845). Robert Macaire and Jacques Strop are characters in Frédéric Lemâitre's comedy Robert Macaire, which was often produced in American theaters in the nineteenth century.
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23 Davis, op cit., pp. 58-59.
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24 II, 11 (July 12, 1845).
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25 Broadway Journal, II, 37 (July 26, 1845); Works, VI, 21-22. In reprinting the tale Poe merely substituted Clark's name for that of John Neal in this passage.
26 Broadway Journal, II, 138 (September 6, 1845).
27 Knickerbocker, XXVI, 378 (October, 1845).
28 Stafford, op. cit., p.35.
29 Broadway Journal, II, 177-178, 283-284 (September 27, November 15, 1845); Knickerbocker, XXVI, 451-453, 579-583 (November, December, 1845).
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30 Broadway Journal, II, 276 (November 8, 1845).
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31 Knickerbocker, XXVII, 70-72 (January, 1846).
32 Ibid., XXVII, 73.
33 XXVII, 184 (February, 1846).
34 XXVII, 354.
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35 Knickerbocker, XXVII, 461 (May, 1846).
36 Godey's, XXXIII, 132 (September, 1846); Works, XV, 114-116.
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39 Godey's, XXXIII, 158 (October, 1846); Works, XV, 121. Poe, of course, vastly overrated the benefits the Knickerbocker derived from Hoffman's brief editorship. Clark wrote to W. H. Seward on November 1, 1839, that when he became editor of the magazine in 1834, it had “not two hundred subscribers, and a reputation beneath contempt” (Dunlap, op. cit., p. 109).
40 XXVIII, 425.
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41 Southern Literary Messenger, XV, 337 (June, 1849); Works, XVI, 163.
42 In the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. For the relationship of this fragmentary sketch to the “Literary America” manuscripts in the Huntington Library, see above, p. 51.
43 Above, p. 274.
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44 Knickerbocker, XXXV, 163-164 (February, 1850).
45 Ibid., XXXVI, 370-372 (October, 1850).
46 Ibid., LV, 429 (April, 1860).
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47 The National Cyclopaedia, VIII, 455, states that Clark furnished the “incidents and imaginative parts” of the hoax, and the same claim is made in Benson J. Lossing, History of New York City, New York, [1884], pp.361-362, and in Dunlap, ed., op. cit., p. 16. Dunlap adds in a footnote: “I am indebted to Dr. T. O. Mabbott for the suggestion that Poe's antagonism toward Clark may have been partly due to the latter's role in the ‘Moon Hoax.’”
48 Reprinted from an unnamed daily paper by the Home Journal, December 9, 1848.
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51 The article is attributed to Poe without reservation in W. M. Griswold, op. cit., pp. 118-119; Algernon Tassin, The Magazine in America, New York, 1916, pp. 121-122; Cullen B. Colton, “George Hooker Colton and the Publication of ‘The Raven,’” American Literature, X, 323 (November, 1938); and Herman E. Spivey, “Poe and Lewis Gaylord Clark,” PMLA, LIV, 1127-1128 (December, 1939). Killis Campbell, The Mind of Poe and Other Studies, pp. 227-228, states that “such evidence that we have is insufficient to warrant the unconditional ascription of the article to Poe”; Campbell, however, seems to incline toward acceptance of the article as Poe's. Hull, a careful student of Poe's style, wrote that it seemed to him “impossible that the review could be Poe's” (op. cit., p.704).
52 Knickerbocker, XXI, 380 (April, 1843).
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - PNYL, 1954] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - Poe and the New York Literati (Reece)