Text: Ruth Leigh Hudson, “Chapter IV.V,” Poe's Craftsmanship in the Short Story, dissertation, 1935, pp. 446-467 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 446, continued:]

As I have said, the comic vein continued to offer Poe an occasional medium of expression during the whole of his literary life, largely because he found such stories easy to turn out; and they were [page 447:] often the mere pot-boilers among his later writings. He could produce them, I believe, with minimum effort when he forced himself to turn to them. I doubt, however, whether after 1847, or thereabouts, he did them with any degree of pleasure unless they were created in the hoaxing spirit. By this time his conception of what constituted a short story had become so definitely fixed that, certainly, he must have felt little satisfaction with some of the farcical sketches which he penned. Critical writing had inevitably taken its toll of his imaginative powers; he wrote his tales in a serious vein with less enthusiasm, I think, and his humor had lost much of its original spontaneous quality. He had, however, found a sort of formula for writing the humorous story of the satiric and hoax variety.

So far as plot was concerned in many of the comic stories, it frequently consisted of stringing together a series of extravagant incidents arranged in increasing order of absurdity; many of them could be compressed or extended at will. For example, Poe lengthened “A Decided Loss” by several thousand words for its publication in the Messenger as “Loss of Breath,” and then, in turn, out it down considerably [page 448:] for later appearances. In the same way he extended “The Business Man” by the addition of two or three new episodes in the life of his Peter Proffit. Occasionally he tried to vary the tone or his humor by introducing a sort of dialect, as in “Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling,” “The Spectacles,” “X-ing a Paragrab,” “The Gold-Bug,” and “The Angel of the Odd.” He never succeeded, however, in using dialect skillfully. Another almost indispensable stylistic device of his comic invention came to be the use of the first-person form of narration. He used this method, of course, extensively in all of his tales, but it is predominantly the device of his comic stories. Of his seventy published stories, twenty-nine may be classed as definitely humorous, and two or three others are of the hoax variety, though serious, or even horrible in tone. Of the comic group, twenty-two are told in the first person. As we have seen, Poe's later tales are almost invariably related in a style of exaggeration and farce and, for the most part, are filled with absurd grotesqueries. Another mark of his comic vein is his use of characterizing, or descriptive, proper names. He resorted to the most obvious kind of wit in using [page 449:] names for places and people which would serve as labels or suggestions for ideas which he wished to convey; he showed a sort of impatience with the necessity of characterizing such crude figures as he had chosen as the instruments of his wit. For this practice he had sufficient precedent, of course, not only in the exaggerated tales of his own period, but even in the classical comedies and in Shakespeare.

We have seen that, with Poe, humor appeared to be synonymous with extravaganza, with exaggeration, and that he apparently had little conception of a humor that grew out of the natural and real events of ordinary life. Perhaps this attitude toward what constituted the comic was the result, on his part, of an attempt to shape his creation after the satires and grotesqueries current in his day; there was, however, a different sort of humor current — the sly, or smiling, pleasantry of everyday life if he had been able to find it. His failure to do so grew out of a defect in his temperament; an he put it, he simply was not of “the merry mood.” Humor came to him as the result of seeing the weaknesses of others, not so much the absurdities of life; oftentimes it is a humor inspired by the failings of mankind — their [page 450:] greed, their gullibility, their meanness. But he caught these traits quickly. Some of his most delightful witticisms and humor are to be found not in the tales in which he was deliberately trying to concoct the merely funny, but in the critiques where the cleverness is more spontaneous.

I have previously noted Poe's comment, in the Preface to his Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, that some of his tales had been created in the purest spirit of extravaganza, deserved no consideration, and of them he would speak no farther. I find myself tempted to dismiss a good round dozen, or more, of his stories with the same formula. Perhaps, however, in order to examine fully his much boasted variety and diversity, one should consider them to the extent of working out a sort of classification of their types.

Some are satires upon customs and practices which he happened to find objectionable: “The Business Man” exposes the absurdities of the boasted methodicalness of a world of affairs, and attacks, under the mantle of some ridiculously cheap devices for cheating the public, the whole system of fraudulent businesss-dealing. “Diddling Considered as One [page 451:] of the Exact Sciences,” even slighter in plot and conception than “The Business Man,” deals with the same theme — “diddling” being the word current in Poe's time, I suppose, for our modern slang, “gypping,” or more recently, “chiselling.” Two other sketches, “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.” and “X-ing a Paragrab,” have a slightly more convincing tone since they deal with experiences very near to Poe's daily life — the feuds, pretensions, and share of the editorial office. They are done, however, about as flimsily as it is possible to write and call the result a story. One can easily see why Poe preferred to remain anonymous when the authorship of these sketches was in question. We forgive him such sins of commission because we realize how desperately he often needed the few dollars brought in by such pot-boilers. We cannot so easily be forgiven the practice of “diddling” to which he apparently resorted some in connection with the sale of such stories. Many years after the incident, B. B. Minor, who owned an edited the Messenger from 1843 to 1847, gave an account of how he came to be what Woodberry called “the indulgent victim” of “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.”(75) Shortly after [page 452:] Minor assumed control of the magazine, he gave Poe an order for a monthly critical paper, or review, at Poe's own price, three dollars a printed page. Poe sent him, he said “two or three articles entirely unworthy of him, and the magazine.” Among these was “Thingum Bob,” which, though not at all the kind of thing Minor had specified, was paid for and published anonymously.(76)

Some of Poe's humorous tales do not lent themselves readily to classification. This is the case with “Thou Art the Man,’” which may be considered merely a ratiocinative tale done in a light manner, or may be classified as a satire upon gruesome stories of ratiocination. In some respects “Some Words with a Mummy” belongs to the satiric group, being perhaps a double satire on archeological pretensions and on the nineteenth century smugness in its inventions and progress. It must also be considered in relation to the hoaxing variety, as it resorts to the scheme of [page 453:] reviving an Egyptian Mummy by means of a galvanic battery and introducing him to the advanced civilization of the nineteenth century. It is interesting, however, from an entirely different point of view as giving us insight into one of Poe's methods of composition. It contains one of his most flagrant pieces of plagiarism in that he virtually copied certain passages in the Encyclopedia Americana for his details or embalming and the preparation of mummies.(77)

Poe's odd tale, “The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Father,” though an extravaganza, is hardly to be classified as either hoax or satire; it has, however, a considerable mixture of both elements in it. It treats of bizarre subject-matter — a revolt in an insane asylum resulting in the incarceration of the keepers and the freedom of the inmates. It is done somewhat in the manner of “King Pest,” though it keeps, of course, much nearer to a tone of reality.

Another extravaganza of a slightly hoaxing bent is “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of’ Scheherazade.” It purports to carry on by means of a document, the Tellmenow Isitsoörnot, the remarkable stories of [page 454:] the clever Scheherazade concerning the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor. Poe wove into the narrative a succession of experiences based upon modern wonders of the world. Scheherazade's tale sounded too extravagant even for her credulous spouse, and she became after all victim to the noose and her own inventiveness. For his story Poe availed himself of a variety of sources — books of travel, newspaper accounts, encyclopedias of geography, compendiums of history, chemistry, physics, and he like. His scheme of calling his tale “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” he may have owed to the example of Théophile Gauier, who also invented an additional tale for the Arabian Nights’ fables, calling it “The Thousand and Second Night” and relating the history of one Mahmoud Ben Ahmed, with whom a Peri fell in love. Gautier's tale was published in La Musée de Famille in the summer of 1842,(78) and Poe may have seen it or an allusion to it.

To the hoaxing group proper belong “Hans Pfaall,” discussed as an example of the grotesque, “Mellonta Tauta,” “The Balloon Hoax,” “Von Kempelen and His page 455:] Discovery,” and two sketches in a serious vein “Mesmeric Revelation,” and “Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” The first three of this group were designed to appeal to the current interest in aerial navigation, and “Mellonta Tauta” deals also with Poe's frequently manifested concern as to what the world will be like after the interval of some centuries. Poe related it by means of a log, or journal, a device employed by him in a half dozen stories and enabling him to resort to his favorite eye-witness point of view. “Mesmeric Revelation” and “Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” are based upon the pseudo-science, mesmerism, which some students of Poe seem halfway inclined to believe that he credited as a true science. His own letter to a Scottish inquirer, owned and made public by Doctor J. W. Robertson, makes clear, however, that he regarded his own tales as genuine hoaxes.(79) [page 456:]

A small number of the comic tales may best be grouped an [[as]] anecdotes. “Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling is one of this variety, interesting chiefly because it was Poe's sole attempt to write a tale in the Irish brogue and as unsuccessful in that respect as were his other excursions into dialect. Another anecdote, “The Man that was Used Up,” relates the history of General A. B. C. Smith, a veteran of the Bugaboo and Kickapoo campaign, who put before the world a decidedly false front of hair, teeth, palate, shoulders, bosom, arms, and legs, to the admiration of the narrator and his utter consternation when he at length saw the hero under his true colors. Since Poe made much of the mechanical inventions which had enabled the general to present a respectable appearance before the world, he may have derived his idea for the tale from the advertisements of artificial limbs, teeth, and hair, which so generously sprinkled the newspapers of his day. [page 457:]

“Three Sundays in a Week” is another anecdotal type of story, deriving, as Miss Fanny N. Cherry has shown,(80) from a similar sketch, “Three Thursdays in One Week,” which appeared in a Philadelphia periodical. Like all of his other purely anecdote stories, it is told in the first person, and it deals loosely with a scientific idea, that of losing a day in going round the world. It shows decidedly also the influence of Dickens.

“The Spectacles” has slightly more plot than the tales just mentioned, but it belongs to the same general type and, like them, is a first-person narrative. The narrator is a near-sighted young man, Napoleon Bonaparte Simpson by name, who refused to mar his looks by wearing much-needed spectacles. His vanity resulted in his falling in love with a beautiful creature whom he saw for the first time at the opera. He learned that she was a Frenchwoman, managed an acquaintance with her, courted her precipitately, married her, and found out that she was his great-great grandmother who had tricked him into a pretended marriage to punish his false vanity. Her identity was kept secret because she had changer her [page 458:] name through marriage. The narrator, in the meantime, had just assumed the name Simpson instead of his true patronymic, Froissart, in order to inherit from an uncle.

It has been suggested that this story was a common one in Poe's time and that he merely used old material in a somewhat original fashion by introducing the device of having the great-great-grandmother deliberately trick the young man. I have seen no specific printed source pointed out for the tale, however. I am suggesting, therefore, that Poe put together details from two New Monthly stories, which appeared in that magazine around 1830, and perhaps threw in also a suggestion from Horatio Smith. The most important of these, since it has identically the main episode of “The Spectacles,” is “The Widow,” published in 1834.(81) It opens with the same dissertation on love and genealogy employed by Poe.

Having reached manhood, young Wilson decided to broaden his culture by sojourning on the continent. The name Wilson he thought too plebian; so he changed it to Augustus Montagu, grew a moustache, and cultivated foppishness. There he met, unconventionally over a dropped glove, an interesting coquettish widow, of fortune and excellent looks, by the name of Madame Pérollet. It was flattering to his vanity to find himself favored by such an attractive and accomplished woman, a little bit older than himself. His passion for her grew rapidly under her studied encouragement. After some little time she agreed to his p1ans for their immediate marriage. The arrangements for the license brought out the slight deceit both had practiced in the matter of names. She was Letitia Simpson, who had married first a Mr. Wilson [page 460:] and then a Mr. Winckworth. “Winckworth!” I exclaimed! “Simpson, Wilson, Winckworth! Heavens! You my grandmother!”

This tale does not suggest short-sightedness as the agency bringing about the surprising contretemps; consequently, the widow is merely the narrator's grandmother and not the exaggerated great-great grand-mother of Poe's tale, an adaptation on Poe's part quite in keeping with his usual tendency to exaggerate comic details to the point of ludicrousness and often Anappropriateness. In “The Widow” Madame Pérollet meant to marry young Wi1son, or Montagu, in good faith, and the relationship was discovered before the ceremony. An interesting point of similarity between the two tales is the use of’ the name Simpson in both; in “The Widow” woman's name is Simpson; in “The Spectacles” the hero has taken the name in order to inherit a bequest. This recurrence seems a bit too striking, in my opinion for mere coincidence; either Poe had read the tale many years before he wrote his own story and had perhaps jotted down ideas for a plot, or he had heard the former told orally with the name Simpson used in it and perhaps attached to the wrong character. It is certainly [page 461:] doubtful that Poe was conscious of his indebtedness, if it may be called such, to the New Monthly tale. It is altogether improbable that he would have selected “The Spectacles” as the story to send to R. H. Horne, who had apparently agreed to try placing some of Poe's tales in British journals, if he had known of its similarity to its British predecessor.(82)

Other stories which it have suggested details of Poe's narrative are “Mark Higginbothan's Case of Real Distress,” in Horatio Smith's Midsummer Medley for 1830, and “Misadventures of a Short-Sighted Man,” published in the New Monthly in 1827.(83) Smith's tale is a clever quiz on names told by the distressed hero himself. He had taken the name Higginbotham in order to inherit a bequest from his uncle and found himself thereafter as shunned socially “as was Peter Schlemihl when he lost his shadow.” This is exactly the reason given for the assumption of the name Simpson by young Froissart in “The Spectacles.” [page 462:] The similarity between the other story suggested above and Poe's tale in obvious from its title, “The Misadventures of a Short-Sighted Man.” Peter Jones, the hero, gives an account of a series of misfortunes which befell him as the result of his embarrassing handicap. He took for a business partner a man who proved to be an arrant rogue; if he had only been able to see and had known phrenology, he would have recognized at once that the fellow had every single organ he shou1d not have had and none that he should have. Jones put his wife on a vessel bound for India instead of on the American-bound vessel he meant to take. He tried to rejoin her speedily and was arrested for theft and confined to prison for several months. After his release he arranged to meet his wife in France when she should finally get back from India and met, instead, an adventuress who resembled his wife. This act led to a separation between him and his wife and to an expensive process of buying off the other woman and assuming custody of the child she claimed to be his. The whole take is a piling up of misadventures in a series, any one of which might be left out or changed without much affecting the train of the story. In style and general [page 463:] effect, it is much like some of Poe's poorer efforts. For that matter, there were dozens of similar tales being published in the magazines of the time so that, after all, the short-comings of Poe in some of his comic efforts were also the short-comings of man of the humorous tales of his day.

Another of Poe's tales, “Mystification,” must be considered in a group by itself. It is a satire, which he evidently designed as a specimen of grotesquerie, based upon the absurd conventions in vogue among the students at the University of Göttingen in the matter of duelling. In its original state at least, Poe must have intended that it should reflect, not necessarily with the idea of satirizing, some of the follies of college life as he knew it on the University of Virginia campus. Probably a personal reminiscence prompted the inclusion in the original text of the following passage:

And in a section which he did not expunge from his tale he gave other details of collegiate life:

Professor Campbell has suggested that “Wertemuller” referred to in the cancelled passage may have had reference to William Wertenbaker, Librarian at the University of Virginia during Poe's time there, and his friend as well, and that “the protector, the consul,” may have been meant as an allusion to Thomas Jefferson.(84) The reference to the Rotunda is the most obvious of all his campus memories, I think, and I fancy that “the college ramparts” were identified in his mind with the serpentine walls and enclosing [page 465:] buildings of the Virginia campus. The Baron Von Jung, with his peculiarly magnetic personality and assumption of leadership among the students, is probably a reflection of some one whom the boy Poe knew and followed during his own brief period as a carefree student in Charlottesville. Certainly the escapades which he recited as taking place at the University of G———n are but an exaggeration reflection of some of the student scrapes which he wrote about to his foster-father and of others since related by his contemporaries.(85)

The real point of the tale lies, however, in its revealing the exaggerating formalities of the German duelling code. Once more Poe was very likely indebted to the New Monthly for the suggestion of his materials. In 1829-1830 the magazine published a series of six articles called “Recollections of a Götttingen Student.”(86) These articles made a great deal of the duelling code, its absurdities, its dependence upon conventions, and the formalities of [page 466:] determining the nature of insults. The writer emphasized particularly the great importance attached to familiarity with the Comment-Books and to the necessity of keeping up with the new ones as they appeared.

Professor Wilson believes that “Mystification” was one of the Folio Club group of tales, to be hold by “Mr. Horrible Dictu,” who had been at the University of Göttingen.(87) The tale unquestionably suggests youthful work in a number of ways, particularly in its fumbling after a unity and effectiveness which it does not achieve. The details of college life appear to have been woven in as a remnant from another tale, for the incident of the duel is especially related to the prankish atmosphere which Poe sketched as his background. The tale may have been originally inspired by the stories of “A Modern Pythagorean,” or Robert Macnish, with whose work Poe upon various occasions showed apparent familiarity, as I have pointed out, and with whose themes he himself dealt in several of his early stories. It will be remembered that Macnish's “The Metempsychosis,” [page 467:] “The Barber of Göttingen,” and “The Loves of the Learned” had their settings in the German university town. As he himself acknowledged, Macnish meant his tales as satiric reflections of his own experiences and professors at the University of Glasgow. This, as I see it, was very much the plan which Poe originally adopted in drawing a partial picture of his own university life under the veil of the University of G———n

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 451:]

75.  Woodberry, II, 109.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 452:]

76.  Harrison, Biography, 220. Also Minor, The Southern Literary Messenger, New York and Washington, 1905, 132f. Minor's memory of the transaction with Poe in 1844 appears somewhat hazy. For example, he identified the sub-title of “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.,” “The Editor of the Goosetherumfoodle,” as a second article.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 453:]

77.  Lucile King, “Notes on Poe's Sources,” University of Texas Studies in English, No. 10, 131.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 454:]

78.  See F. C. de Sumicrast's edition of Gaultier, Introduction to volume XXII, and page 227ff.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 455, running to the bottom of page 456:]

79.  In spite of the proof of Poe's letter, Doctor Robertson is one of those who appears to believe that Poe gave credence to mesmerism. See his discussion in Edgar A. Poe: A Study and A Commentary upon a Bibliography of Poe. Poe wrote his Scottish correspondent: “ ‘Hoax’ is precisely the word suited to M. Valdemar's case. ... Some few persons believe it — but I don’t — and don’t you.” See facsimile of his letter written Dec. 30, 1845, in Robertson's Commentary, opposite page 234. In the Broadway Journal, “Editorial Miscellany,” Sept. [page 456:] 20, 1845, p. 174, he wrote also: “The Mesmeric journals, and some others, are still making a to-do about the tenability of Mr. Vankirk's doctrine as broached in a late Magazine paper of our own, entitled ‘Mesmeric Revelation.’ ‘The Regenerator’ had some very curious remarks indeed.” Poe quoted from ‘The Regenerator’ a passage curious only in that the writer had taken Poe's hoax seriously.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 457:]

80.  American Literature, II (Nov., 1930), 232f.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 458:]

81.  New Monthly Magazine, XL (April, 1834), 506ff.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 461:]

82.  See Horne's letter to Poe, April 27, 1844, Letters, 167.

83.  “Mark Higginbotham's Case of Real Distress,” Midsummer Medley, 235ff. The latter tale appeared in the New Monthly, XIX (June, 1827), 149.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 464:]

84.  The Mind of Poe, 145, note 3.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 465:]

85.  In this connection see Poe's letters to Allan written from Charlottesville, Letters ... in the Valentine Museum. Also Harrison's Biography chapter II, 35ff. and Phillips's Edgar Allan Poe — The Man, Section III, 232ff.

86.  XXVI (Dec., 1889), 515ff.; XXVIII (1830), 12., 143ff., 245ff., 340ff., 423ff.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 466:]

87.  “The Devil Was in It,” loc. cit.