Text: Richard Beale Davis, “Introduction,” Chivers' Life of Poe (1952), pp. 9-20

[page 9:]

AMONG the manuscript remains of the eccentric Georgia poet, Dr. Thomas Holley Chivers, are several dozen closely written sheets entitled a “New Life of Edgar Allan Poe.” Almost a half-century ago a few excerpts from the material were published in garbled form,(1) but the text presented below is the first printing of the whole body of the observations of the poet who knew Poe personally, and who came as close as any of his contemporaries to understanding him. It should be of deep concern to anyone interested in Poe and American Literature in the 1840's.

More than fifteen years ago one critic remarked that “it seems impossible that we should ever again attempt an evaluation of the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe without a consideration of Chivers.”(2) He was not thinking of Chivers’ biography, but of Chivers’ possible influence on Poe's poetic technique and theme, and of Chivers’ career as an explanation of Poe's own. Anyone who reads a few of the poems of the Georgia poet, and the full-length study of him by Professor S. Foster Damon,(3) will be struck by this necessity for the consideration of Poe and his friend together. The text here printed presents them in that closest of literary relationships, subject and author. In order to appreciate it most fully, the reader should first glance for a moment at the history of their personal relationship.

POE AND CHIVERS

Thomas Holley Chivers was born near Washington, Georgia, [page 10:] on October 18, 1807,(4) the son of a wealthy plantation owner. In 1830, after an unsuccessful marriage ending in divorce, he graduated from the medical school of Transylvania University in Kentucky. Already he was writing poetry, and being under no financial compulsion to practice medicine, he soon abandoned the profession. By 1832 he had published his first little volume at Franklin, Tennessee, and had begun his wandering, nomadic life, from one region and hotel to another, with occasionally an interval of several years in his native Georgia. In 1834 he published Conrad and Eudora,(5) his version of that same Kentucky tragedy which Poe dealt with in Politian. In 1837 Naccoochee(6) appeared. That year, while living in the North, Chivers married again. The early deaths of several of the children of this union are the inspirations of his best known poems.

Chivers’ connection with Poe began in 1840 when the latter enclosed a letter with his prospectus of the Penn Magazine.(7) Chivers in turn wrote to Poe several times in 1840-1842, but Poe did not reply until July 6, 1842,(8) when there seemed a chance of getting Chivers interested in financing the Penn. During the next three years they corresponded, Chivers apparently writing three times to Poe's once, and eliciting a reply only when Poe felt that there was again a chance that Chivers might produce the capital which would enable him to launch his dream journal. Chivers sent subscriptions but somehow always evaded or ignored the suggestions of loans or partnerships. [page 11:] Meanwhile Poe had in Graham's Magazine for December, 1841, called the doctor “at the same time one of the best and one of the worst poets of America.”(9) Perhaps he was but attempting to live up to the observation Chivers had already made to him in a letter, that at times in his reviews he seemed “to lay aside the pruning knife for the tomahawk.”(10)

So matters stood in the spring of 1845. Chivers was in Georgia, and certainly had heard of Poe's immediate burst into popular favor with the publication of “The Raven.” At any rate, the doctor came to New York, probably in June or July, to get his latest poems, The Lost Pleiad volume, published. Then it was, as he states in the present work, that he first became personally acquainted with Poe, who was at the moment having his troubles with the Broadway Journal and his flirtation, or more serious affair, with Frances Sargent Osgood the poetess, both of which are among the matters touched upon by Chivers in his “Life.”

Chivers also here gives a detailed account of the inebriated Poe's violent encounter with Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of the Knickerbocker, of Poe's home life with Virginia and Mrs. Clemm, and of the two poets’ conversations on contemporary literature and poetic theory. For evidence that these things occurred as Chivers records them, see the discussion below.(11)

The Lost Pleiad appeared, and Poe reviewed it in the Broadway Journal for August 2. This time the criticism was highly favorable. The poems, all with the theme of the loss of loved ones, naturally appealed to Poe. The volume “is the work of that rara avis, an educated, passionate, yet unaffectedly simpleminded and single-minded man writing from his own vigorous [page 12:] impulses. . . .” Many of the pieces possessed “merit of a very lofty — if not of the very loftiest order.”(12)

Probably at about the date of this review Chivers returned to Georgia, this time to remain there until some time after Poe's death. They exchanged letters through 1848, letters in which Chivers exhorted Poe to keep away from his demon alcohol, and spoke vaguely of a loan of fifty dollars to Poe. Once in 1846, when Poe was dejected and ill, he received six letters in one mail from Chivers.(13) The grateful reply for once does not mention money but appears a sincere appreciation of what was a genuine kindliness and friendship.(14) The letters continued, Chivers once offering Poe a home with him in the South. The final reference to Chivers is in a letter to Mrs. Clemm of August, 1849, in which Poe remarks that “I got a sneaking letter today from Chivers.”(15) Probably to the very last, perhaps for a variety of reasons, the doctor was evading Poe's requests for financial assistance.

After Poe's death, stung by the remarks of people like William Gilmore Simms who deplored Chivers’ indebtedness to Poe,(16) and impelled by his extraordinary regard for his own powers as an artist, the Georgian under various pseudonyms published a series of articles(17) demonstrating to his own satisfaction that it was Poe who was indebted to him for rhythm, vocabulary, and theme. This whole dreary controversy has [page 13:] been discussed ably and at length several times.(18) It concerns us surprisingly little here. There are only slight shadows of its existence in Chivers’ observations in the “Life.” Undoubtedly his insistence on Poe's pre-eminence as a critic, rather than as poet or fictionist, is, by implication, a result of his sincere feeling that Poe had borrowed from him, sometimes unfairly. But it is a real tribute to Chivers’ sense of justice and impartiality that his strong feeling on this subject is almost entirely absent from what he meant to be his final presentation of Poe as artist.

Though Poe's interest was usually most evident when he thought there was a good prospect of getting money from Chivers, it has been shown that at least once he indicated that he really valued a friendship proffered so generously in every other way. Chivers, who idolized Poe's artistic mind,(19) could yet analyze it. And he saw clearly the weaknesses of Poe's moral and physical character. It is to the eternal credit of the Georgia planter and physician that he always insisted on distinguishing between Poe's fleshly shortcomings and his immortal genius, and that at a time when it was fashionable to deride or to calumniate the dead poet he bore strong witness in his defense.

THE “NEW LIFE” OF POE

The idea of writing a biography or at least a critique of Poe probably occurred to Chivers immediately after Poe's death, almost surely as soon as Griswold's memoir devastating the poet's reputation had appeared.(20) He already possessed certain [page 14:] files of Graham's Magazine and the Broadway Journal, in which so much of Poe's work had been published, and he had a number of clippings concerning Poe from the Southern Literary Messenger and the New-York Tribune. Before March 28, 1851, he had written Griswold trying to secure his own letters to Poe, evidently hoping to incorporate them into his work.(21) He wrote to Mrs. Clemm and Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman of what he had in mind.(22) Both eagerly gave him all the information they could,(23) for they had been outraged by Griswold's memoir. Mrs. Whitman even attempted to locate for Chivers a daguerreotype of Poe taken in Providence which might be used as a frontispiece for the work. William J. Pabodie, who had already replied to Griswold's account of Poe's behavior in Providence in the New-York Tribune(24) and had put Chivers in contact with Mrs. Whitman, encouraged the work and sent copies of the remarks he had addressed to Griswold.(25) [page 15:]

By October 27, 1852, Chivers was able to write to W. D. Ticknor that he had “a life of Edgar A. Poe, in MS., containing an elaborate analysis of his genius as a Poet and Prose writer, with also some of the most beautiful letters ever written.”(26) He believed the printing of the work would be profitable and hoped Ticknor would undertake it. Evidently the publisher was not encouraging, for a year and a half later, in February, 1854, Chivers approached B. B. Mussey of Boston and Lippincott of Philadelphia concerning the matter. Mussey advised that the life of Poe be published in Philadelphia, for “Mr. Poe was not as popular in Boston as He [sic] was in some of the Cities south of us.”(27) The Philadelphia firm, though admitting that a life of Poe might have a sale, was too full of engagements at the moment to undertake the project.(28)

The state of Chivers’ manuscript would suggest that he continued to revise the work at least through 1857, the year before he died. Apparently publishers discouraged him, perhaps because they were acquainted with the eccentricities of his poems, or had seen that the Poe manuscript was still fragmentary, or felt that Griswold had already said the final word. Though Chivers paid for the publication of many volumes of his own verse, he would seem not to have been willing to subsidize his remarks on Poe.

At any rate, a “New Life of Edgar Allan Poe” was left among his voluminous papers. Perhaps it was notice of the death of Chivers and the failure of his work to appear that caused Mrs. Whitman to bestir herself and compose or complete “Edgar Poe and His Critics,” a better critical defense than Chivers would ever have been capable of. Yet in its personal reminiscences and its “analytical” interpretation of the subject's [page 16:] genius which also reveals so much of the author, Chivers’ work seems as pertinent to the Poe story as Mrs. Whitman's.

A word as to style. The peculiar Chiversian rhetoric of the life of Poe is characteristic of all the author's prose and poetry. One may agree with Professor Damon that a taste for it may be acquired, like that for olives. Or one may complete the reading of the memoir without ever willingly. admitting any attractiveness in the diet. At any rate, it is entirely appropriate that Chivers should describe the contemporary man of letters he most admired in the language he considered most elevated.

AUTHENTICITY OF THE PERSONAL DATA

The personal reminiscences of the few weeks in 1845 during which Chivers saw Poe frequently would in themselves be sufficient reason for the publication of this work. The fact that Chivers later made so many unsupported and often absurd contentions regarding Poe's literary indebtedness to himself may cause some suspicion, however, that he was twisting facts to his own purposes.

The major items of this personal record are 1) the conversations on literary subjects, 2) the meeting with Lewis Gaylord Clark, 3) the glimpse of the home life of Poe with Virginia and Mrs. Clemm, and 4) the reference to Poe's “amour” with a lady in Providence. A good deal of parallel reference which would support Chivers’ absolute veracity in all these accounts is given below in the explanatory notes with the passages concerned. In summary, it may be pointed out first that none of the critical opinions expressed in the “Conversations” is contradicted in Poe's published reviews. Though it would have been quite possible for Chivers to have created about half the conversation from copies of Poe's published opinions at his disposal, the remainder are new or additional opinions, “private” views entirely consistent with Poe's known [page 17:] attitudes but for good reasons never voiced in the journals to which he contributed.(29) That Poe expressed himself more freely to his friends than to his reading public is natural, and actually is indicated by almost every biographer. There is simply no reason to doubt that Poe restated old published opinions in great detail and added some new off-the-record ones in his talks with Chivers. Such things, for example, as the clash of opinion regarding Tennyson bear the ring of truth in themselves. The setting itself of these conversations — Poe's sick chamber — is suggested too naturally to have been invented.

Second, though only a somewhat misleading summary omitting highly significant details of the encounter with Lewis Gaylord Clark has appeared before in print, this episode has been universally accepted by Poe scholars for a half century. As Professor Herman E. Spivey has recently pointed out,(30) there is every circumstantial reason why it should be true, though the inaccessibility of Chivers’ actual account prevented Professor Spivey from recognizing the immediate cause precipitating Poe's attack on the editor of the Knickerbocker. In other words, the present account is the key to several unexplained attitudes and events, and it fits exactly.

Third, the description of the home life of the Poes at 195 East Broadway is supported by the observations of every other person who knew the family at the same period. Though nowhere else is there so simple, homely, and pathetic a picture of their life and relationship, especially during one of Poe's periods of intoxication.

Finally, the references to the mysterious affair with the lady [page 18:] of Providence is the matter at first glance most open to doubt. Was Chivers making a veiled reference to Mrs. Whitman, the only lady resident of Providence Poe knew well? It seems impossible. Chivers and everyone else knew that Mrs. Whitman was a widow, and moreover he was indebted to her for materials and encouragement in the biography. Was Chivers building on the current rumors regarding Poe and Mrs. Osgood, inventing the whole episode to catch the potential reader's interest, or because he had disliked Mrs. Osgood? That it refers to, or that Poe referred to, Mrs. Osgood seems likely, but there is nothing in Chivers’ life or correspondence to indicate he would have hurt this well-known woman to get publicity for his work. It seems most likely that Poe, while intoxicated, made some sort of boastful reference to an affair with a lady whose husband was an artist, an indiscretion he later regretted, as Chivers points out. As indicated in the notes given below, Poe's ungallant remark points to Mrs. Osgood, whose husband fits the occupation and situation. And with the lady herself Poe made an excursion to Providence about this time, a journey Chivers probably knew nothing of. Almost surely this record would have supplied more ammunition for the mudslingers who were besmirching Poe and the poetess in the late forties. Even now it is additional serious evidence that the relationship may not have been on as high a plane as many biographers have tried to make it. Or it may merely indicate an inebriated Poe boasting of an imaginary conquest. With either interpretation, Poe emerges as a normal man of normal impulses rather than the Freudian bundle of the strange and strained that “students” of the psychopathic have tried to make him.

TEXT

The text here presented is an assemblage, an arrangement, and a pruning from the several manuscripts among the Poe-Chivers [page 19:] Papers in the Henry E. Huntington Library. The papers apparently came to the library in brown manila envelopes appropriately marked by Chivers, but in such a bad state of repair that the sheets became or were already loose and mixed. Some years ago these individual leaves were gathered into what seemed obvious units.

As noted above, these papers present portions of Chivers’ observations on Poe over a period of several years, from perhaps as early as 1851 to 1857, the year before Chivers’ death. The writing appears on several kinds of paper. Many of the longer and more finished sections cover long foolscap sheets, once white. Even over sections of these, however, have been pasted slips on which appear second-thought sentences or paragraphs. Other material inserted (by Chivers himself) in these larger “completed” units is on small blue correspondence paper. And there are still smaller half-sheets and loose slips closely written. Markings and crossings through and insertions are frequent in most of the work.

The most nearly finished portion of the text, if one may judge by style and relative lack of correction, is the forty-three sheet group now included as HEH HM 2529. This was originally enclosed in a brown manila envelope marked “New Life . . .” perhaps together with other single long sheets now classified separately. As notations will indicate, the HM 2529 material forms the major portion of the present text. Most of the material now grouped in HEH HM 2530, beginning “A brief summary of Poe's birth, life, and death,” was evidently another draft, or version, of part of Chivers’ own critical commentary as it appears in HM 2529, though this second group does not contain any version of the “Conversations,” the “Personal Appearance,” and other biographical details. It presents the florid rhetoric of HM 2529 blown up to horrendous proportions. It does contain a few fragments of material (see [page 20:] textual notes) not present in HM 2529. Most of the other papers pertaining to the “Life” but now classified separately may have originally been grouped with the materials of either HM 2529 or HM 2530.

A score of clippings representing Poe's poems, tales, and critical prose, and the printed critical observations of others, are pasted to sheets at the top of which the biographer's own commentary is written in longhand. Evidently Chivers intended to buttress his own opinion and interpretation by the strong timbers of Poe's own work and the favorable criticism of a few contemporaries who had not followed Griswold's lead. Most of the lengthy printed material easily accessible elsewhere has been omitted in the present text unless it seemed essential to the clarity of Chivers’ presentation.

Apparently, since he gathered them, Chivers intended publishing several letters for which no “heading” in his own hand is now extant.(31) He does indicate the use he intended to make of other letters. As pointed out below, most of the correspondence he gathered has since been published in various places. Again only those items essential to the intelligibility or proper emphasis of Chivers’ account have been here reproduced.

The biographer-poet's peculiar and frequently inconsistent spelling and punctuation have been followed, usually without comment. In certain instances in which the reader might naturally entertain doubt as to whether the orthography is Chivers’ own or is typographical error, a sic has been inserted after the word or phrase. In his use of quotation marks Chivers is particularly erratic, sometimes beginning and not closing the quotation, and frequently employing or disdaining quotation marks in situations in which the reverse procedure would now be followed.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 9:]

1. George E. Woodberry, “The Poe-Chivers Papers,” Century Magazine, XLIII, No. 3 (Jan. 1903), 442-447.

2. Edd Winfield Parks, Southern Poets, New York, 1936, p. xcvi.

3. Thomas Holley Chivers, Friend of Poe, New York, 1930.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 10:]

4. Professor Damon, op. cit., p. 30 gives evidence for his belief that Chivers was born in 1809 rather than in 1807. For evidence that 1807 is the correct date see Parks, op. cit., p. 38.

5. Philadelphia.

6. New York. The preface to this volume presents his theory as to the transcendental nature of poetry. See Parks, op. cit., pp. 325-27.

7. See Damon, op. cit., p. 128 and John Ostrom, ed., The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 2 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1948, II, 498-99. Hereafter referred to as Letters.

8. See Letters, I, 207-9; II, 498.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 11:]

9. See Damon, op. cit., p. 129 and James A. Harrison, ed., The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 17 vols., New York 1902, XV, 241. The latter is hereafter referred to as Works.

10. Works, I, 190.

11. See “Authenticity of the Personal Data,” p. 16.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 12:]

12. Reprinted in Works, XII, 201-6.

13. Chivers had not known of the change of his address to Fordham.

14. Letters, II, 325-27.

15. Ibid., II, 459.

16. See Simms’ letter to Chivers of 5 April, 1852, Henry E. Huntington Library, HM 24280.

17. Most of these appeared in the Waverley Magazine of Boston and in the Georgia Citizen of Macon, Georgia. See the explanatory notes below and Joel Benton, In the Poe Circle, New York, 1899, pp. 34-37. E.g., “The Origin of Poe's Raven” appeared in the Waverley of July 30, 1853, and later in the Georgia Citizen of 22 and 29 September, 1854. Both are signed “Fiat Justitia.”

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 13:]

18. E.g., see Benton, op. cit., pp. 31-53 and Damon, op. cit., pp. 198-219.

19. A typical remark is that in his letter of 4 November, 2848, (Duke University Library) to [William] C[arey] Richards: “The following is from Edgar A. Poe, one of the profoundest minds of the age.”

20. The Reverend Rufus W. Griswold, anthologist and Poe's literary executor, published his notorious “Ludwig” article on Poe in the New-York Tribune of October 9, 1849. This was incorporated into the “Memoir” prefixed to the third volume of the four-volume edition of Poe's works edited by Griswold and published in 1850.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 14:]

21. See his letter to Griswold of this date (Works, XVII, 408) stating that he asked for the letters because he wanted them, “not to insult you.’ It is this same letter which indicates that Griswold told Chivers that Poe's letters contained comments derogatory to Chivers.

22. Professor A. H. Quinn (Edgar Allan Poe: a Critical Biography, New York 1941, p. 688n) dates Mrs. Whitman's letter of November 24 mentioning Chivers’ project as 1851. Internal evidence and the dates of Mrs. Clemm's letter to Chivers (8 and 13 December, 1852,) resulting from Mrs. Whitman's putting the two in contact, however, place the letter in 1852. Actually the 1852 date appears on the letter itself, though in a heavier hand than Mrs. Whitman's.

23. Among the papers presumably available to Chivers and now in the Huntington Library are Mrs. Whitman's letter to Mrs. Clemm of June 2 [1852] concerning her own defense of Poe, William J. Pabodie's letter to Griswold of June 11, 1852, denying the truth of Griswold's assertions regarding the Providence episode in Poe's life, Pabodie's letter to Chivers of July 14, 1852, and those addressed to Chivers by Mrs. Clemm and Mrs. Whitman noticed above.

24. For text see Works, XVII, 408-11. It is dated June 2, 1852.

25. See Pabodie's letter to Chivers of July 54, 1852, Huntington Library, HM 24347. He sent a copy of the Tribune article and of the letter he sent to Griswold supporting his Tribune statement. Griswold had threatened to place before the public certain documents “infinitely painful to Mrs. Whitman” unless Pabodie retracted the published article, but after his letter to Griswold he heard no more.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 15:]

26. Letter in the Huntington Library, HM 24233.

27. February 8, 1854, among the Chivers Papers at Duke University.

28. February 17, 1854. From Lippincott, Grambo Company to Chivers. Huntington Library, HM 24269.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 17:]

29. For example, Poe's opinion of Lowell. Professor Quinn, op. cit., p. 462 refers to Chivers as “untrustworthy” as a witness (apparently thinking of his plagiarism charges against Poe) yet admits that “Poe probably said something like the quotation.” Professor Quinn gives Chivers’ account as “Poe's impression of Lowell.”

30. “Poe and Lewis Gaylord Clark,” PMLA, LIV (December 1939), 1124-1132.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 20:]

31. Chivers intended to publish at least in part, all the letters supplied or written to him by William J. Pabodie, Mrs. Clemm, Mrs. Whitman, and perhaps others, including at least one of Poe's own. He also planned to use Poe's letters to himself.