Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (21 page)

Under the influence of a pious brother, Ingraham was increasingly drawn to the church. In 1852 he was ordained as an Episcopalian priest and went on to serve in a number of ministries in the South. His fiction changed drastically with this change of life. He became, to use his own term, a ‘rigidist’. No more jolly-rogering. In 1855 he published what was to be a perennial bestseller among religious readers,
The Prince of the House of David
. It was followed in 1859 by
The Pillar of Fire, or Israel in Bondage
. Ingraham’s third biblical romance,
The Throne of David
, was published in 1860, completing a trilogy on the Holy Land. The novels were epistolary (like the gospels), enabling them to be more easily broken up for Sunday school. In 1859 Ingraham received an honorary LL.D. from the University of Mississippi. Never a professor, he was now, legitimately, a doctor.

By the end of the 1850s, Ingraham had perceptively seen the oncoming war. The most interesting novel of his third, holy, phase is
The Sunny South
(1859), a narrative written from the South by a governess born and brought up in the north. Conceived as a response to
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, the novel pleads for mutual understanding. Ingraham was himself, of course, a Northerner transplanted to the South. But Ingraham did not live to suffer the war. He shot himself in December 1860. He always kept a loaded pistol in the vestibule of his church at Holly Springs, Mississippi (this was, after all, the American South). It seems to have been an accident, although the details are unclear. More twentieth-century readers know Ingraham than think they do. His book
The Pillar of Fire
is the credited source of Cecil B. DeMille’s movie starring Charlton Heston,
The Ten Commandments
(1956).

The extraordinary side of his work is of a nature that appeals to the statistician rather than to the literary critic. The American Bookman
’s verdict

The only son of J. H. Ingraham, Prentiss went on to become even more prolific with his pen (and handier with his six-gun) than his father. He is credited with the authorship of some 600 novels and 400 novellas under as many as fifteen pen-names – written, it should be added, in his retirement, and, unable to use the typewriter, written in longhand. Prentiss left medical school to fight in the Confederate cause in the Civil War. He was wounded, reached the rank of Colonel, survived, and in love with soldiering went off to fight for Juárez against the French in Mexico. A soldier of fortune, he also fought for the Greeks against the Turks and for the Cubans against the Spanish. As a Colonel with the Cuban army (and a captain in their navy) he was captured and narrowly escaped execution.

In the 1870s, Ingraham settled down in New York, marrying and starting a family. Having lived adventure, he now resolved to write about it and became a lead author in Beadle and Adams’s bestselling ‘dime novel’ series (also giving them many of his father’s copyrights, some of whose novels he rewrote). He had a strong line in ‘Buffalo Bill’ stories – and was, for a while, the buckskin-clad showman’s press agent – as well as material drawn from his own military past. Like his father, he was fond of piracy as a subject. Title pages proclaimed him ‘Col. Prentiss Ingraham’. Given his speed of production, he could as well have been called ‘Machine Gun Prentiss’ – the Beadle and Adams steam presses could barely keep up with his production.

He died of Bright’s disease, supposedly originating in one of his Civil War wounds, aged only sixty, in the Beauvoir Confederate Soldiers Home, Biloxi.

To take Poe with more than a certain degree of seriousness is to lack seriousness oneself.
Henry James

No writing life has been lived at such speed as was Poe’s. Like the hero of ‘The Premature Burial’ he was morbidly aware of death hurtling towards him. In a short life he wrote – other than one chronically bitty novel – short stories and short poems. A long poem, he liked to assert, was a ‘contradiction in terms’. Why? Because ‘all excitements are, through a psychal [sic] necessity, transient’. Life is too short for
Paradise Lost
. The poem on the Underground, snatched between stations, is quintessentially Poevian. Some of Poe’s stories – ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ or ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, for example – are, indeed, sufficiently terse to qualify as the ‘condensed novels’ (or fictional haikus) that J. G. Ballard, a distant literary offspring, toyed with. No poem or narrative, Poe estimated, could excite ‘for more than an hour’. Most of his finest stories can be read in Andy Warhol’s talismanic fifteen minutes. It was a fortunate coincidence that Poe’s career coincided with the rise of the popular magazine, marketed for an ever-hurrying American population with no hours to waste.

All paths, however, not merely those of glory, led – for Poe – to the grave, and his path was faster than most. It is a challenge to find a story where untimely death is not central – whether premature ‘inhumation’, the ‘red’ plague (an allegory, it is suggested, of his child-mother’s, child-wife’s and his own incipient, blood-spitting, tuberculosis) or murder. In his one so-called novel,
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
(in fact a bundle of disconnected narratives), there is a veritable holocaust of some twenty-five mariners disposed of (one consumed cannibalistically by the survivors, none granted easeful deaths) before the yarn proper even gets underway. Death, inevitably, awaits Pym, still not twenty years old. The skull on the desk, that standard Ignatian aid to meditation, is common enough in literature. With Poe, the warm flesh is still slithering off the shining bone. Another of his early tales, ‘Berenice’, has a hero prone – as are many of Poe’s heroes – to cataleptic trance. Berenice, the love of his life, wastes away from consumption. On the morning after her funeral he comes round after a long amnesia sitting in his library. His clothes are ‘muddy and clotted with gore’. A servant rushes in and points to a spade in the corner:

With a shriek I bounded to the table, and grasped the box that lay upon it. But I could not force it open; and, in my tremor, it slipped from my hands, and fell heavily, and burst into pieces; and from it, with a rattling sound, there rolled out some instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with thirty-two small, white, and ivory-looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor.

He has torn out her teeth. As a superfluous
frisson
Berenice was, it transpires, buried alive, and screamed under the dental operation. She is now, however, well dead and perfectly toothless.

Poe’s mother was an actress born in England who made her debut on the American stage, aged nine – a prematurity not even Edgar could match. Eliza Arnold was a veteran trouper before she was out of her teens. She was married at fifteen and widowed at eighteen. She promptly made a second marriage with fellow actor, David Poe, by whom she had three children – while touring the length and breadth of America. Edgar, the second child, was born in Boston. It pleased him in later life to proclaim himself on title-pages ‘a Bostonian’. The truth is no writer was more rootless – he could as well have called himself a New Yorker, or a Philadelphian, or a Flying Dutchman.

David Poe abandoned his wife and children two years after Edgar’s birth to be heard of no more. He leaves no echo in his son’s later fiction, where fathers are wholly invisible. Eliza then succumbed to consumption in 1811, aged twenty-three. Her husband did not stay to watch her die. Edgar, of necessity, did, barely weaned when she left him. The dying (and not-dying) woman would be a central element in his early work, notably in his majestic fantasia about witches, castles and corpses, ‘Ligeia’. The three orphaned Poe children were taken on, but not wholly adopted, by well-wishers in Richmond, Virginia, where Eliza had gone to die. Edgar was taken into the Allan family, whose name was inserted into his own. There ensued a textbook Oedipal relationship with his wealthy, alternately generous and skin-flint, ‘father’, John Allan, a prosperous merchant (among the other wares he dealt in were tombstones). The Allan family spent five years in Britain where Allan had attempted, unsuccessfully, to set up a branch of his business. It was here that Edgar got his early school education, and with it a lifelong penchant for English settings in his stories and poems – drawn (he was the most light-fingered of writers) from the Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott, then all the rage.

Edgar embarked on his adolescence as a child of privilege. But gambling debts – and a disinclination to own up to them – led to his being kicked out of the University of Virginia and having his allowance withdrawn. He was already exhibiting early signs of dipsomania – something which, like all mind-transforming conditions, fascinated him. He was, as his French admirer Baudelaire insisted, an explorer not an addict –and no territory was more interesting than the darker places of the human mind.

Aged eighteen, lying about his age, and under a fake name, Poe enlisted in the US Army, on a salary of $5 a month. In the same year, 1827, he published at his own expense his first volume:
Tamerlane and Other Poems
. It was universally ignored
– despite the clear evidence of talent which hindsight can detect. A brief reconciliation with John Allan enabled Poe (who had risen in the ranks) to buy himself out, and buy himself into the US military academy, West Point. Here again he excelled before, in his last year, engineering his own court-martial and dismissal. It was the last straw for John Allan and Edgar was disinherited. All he had by way of legacy from his now obscenely rich guardian was his middle name (routinely misspelled). He was not, when one weighs everything up, that bad a foster-son. Despite Baudelaire’s admiration, no writer is less the
flâneur
or congenital wastrel than Edgar Allan Poe. It was the pattern of his life to succeed brilliantly, then move on before getting bogged down in the consequences of his own brilliance. If necessary he would drink himself out of the sinecures friends were willing to set up for him.

So, too, with his career as an author. He went from journal to journal, dashing off poems, savage reviews, and stories like a writing Gatling gun. He routinely broke contracts, confecting grievances to do so. His heyday as a writer-editor was with
Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine
, which he joined in 1841. His pieces raised the circulation fourfold to an astonishing 40,000 copies per issue. Aged twenty-six, he married a thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm. True to her name, she probably remained virginal. There is little evidence that Poe had interest (or time) for carnal relationships – although he liked women. His closest bond was with his widowed mother-in-law, ‘Muddy’ Clemm. Scurrilous accusations of incest were, inevitably, circulated after his death.

Poe was phenomenally successful, but never well off – particularly in the last phase of his life. It was a good year when he earned over $1,000. Regular use of alcohol and occasional indulgence in opium played a part. It is tempting to link this intoxication to the point of blackout with Poe’s fascination with epilepsy, catatonia and mesmeric trance. It features as a plot mechanism in many of his stories, most brilliantly in the late (1845) ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, a horrific voyage into the afterlife, which ends (as does M. Valdemar’s stay on this earth): ‘Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome – of detestable putridity.’

Despite the notoriety which attached to America’s
poète maudit
, surprisingly little is known about the details of Poe’s life. Myth has washed in to fill the vacuum and encourages such cultish bizarreries (a favourite Poe word) as the deranged spiritualist, Lizzie Doten, channelling a Poe poem, ‘Resurrexi’, from beyond the veil. The posthumous lies about Poe put into circulation by his self-appointed, venomously vindictive, ‘executor’ (‘executioner’ would be the more appropriate term), Rufus Griswold, have further tainted Poe’s image. Griswold’s Poe is less the
poète maudit
than a drug-crazed, sex-mad lunatic.

Typically clouded by enigma are the accounts of Poe’s death. On 3 October 1849, the forty-year-old was found wandering the streets of Baltimore, ranting deliriously, wearing someone else’s clothes. He seemed to be calling out ‘Reynolds’ (unidentified). One of his distant relatives who had been summoned took one look and refused to take charge of him. Poe was taken to the local hospital’s ward for drunks, where he died four days later. Since the death of Virginia a couple of years earlier, he had been chaotic in his personal life, proposing marriage to a series of women and embarking on pointless literary feuds – notably with Longfellow. His genius was, apparently, extinguished. His income, in his last year, had sunk to barely more than $150, largely raised from slurred public recitations of his signature poem, ‘The Raven’. ‘Nevermore’, rather than Longfellow’s ‘Excelsior’, would seem to have been his motto.

Newspapers, concerned that such a great man of American letters should be so destitute, raised subscriptions; friends intervened, without success. What destroyed Poe? Intoxication? Syphilis? Was it, as Baudelaire suggested, his chosen form of suicide? What happened in the missing days of that last week? Had he been drugged and robbed of his clothes in some squalid harbour bar? Had he been beaten up (as some suspected) by West Point cadets out on the razzle? Had he gone into the underworld, like M. Valdemar? Had he, like the hero of ‘Berenice’, committed some awful crime he could no longer remember? His medical records were lost, or were destroyed. Posterity will never for certain know what killed Edgar Allan Poe. Yet his work lives on. As a grateful Arthur Conan Doyle noted, each of Poe’s stories is a root ‘from which whole literatures develop’. It still grows.