The Beautiful Cigar Girl Read online

  Initially the duties were much the same as they had been at the Messenger. Poe contributed various filler pieces while performing basic proofreading and other technical chores. Poe also resumed the savage criticism of his Messenger days, and weighed in on topics ranging from mundane housekeeping tips to help with romantic quandaries.

  When he was not dispensing advice to the lovelorn, Poe returned his attention to his own work and began to turn out a new series of short stories. In “The Man That Was Used Up,” a military officer whose magnificent and commanding figure has been whittled away by numerous battle injuries is methodically reassembled by means of false limbs, chest and shoulder pieces, and other prosthetics. In “The Journal of Julius Rodman,” an unfinished novella, Poe presented another imaginary travelogue in the style of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, transplanting the action to the Rocky Mountains. Once again Poe’s fiction, which drew heavily on the reports of Lewis and Clark, became mistaken for fact in some quarters, with the unexpected result that portions of the story were later incorporated into a government report on the Oregon Territory.

  With “The Fall of the House of Usher,” published in the September 1839 issue of Burton’s, Poe seized on the conventions of Gothic horror and spun them into an expression of psychological torment. In the process he found the notes that would form a major chord of his career. In the story the decay and ultimate destruction of an isolated mansion both mirrors and obscures the anguish of its strange inhabitant, Roderick Usher, who suffers from “a morbid acuteness of the senses.” The story drew wide praise when it appeared, and brought Poe some welcome notice as a writer of serious fiction. As a result, in December of 1839 the Philadelphia publishing house of Lea & Blanchard brought out Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, a two-volume collection of all of Poe’s stories to date, many of them revised for the occasion. In spite of the success of “Usher,” however, the publisher had little confidence in the book and granted no advance payment or royalties. Instead, Poe had to be content with receiving twenty free copies. Reviews were mixed, with some praising the collection’s “opulence of imagination” while others bemoaned the lack of “anything of elevated fancy or fine humor.” The book sold poorly, and when Poe later suggested a revised edition, the publisher declined on the grounds that the original had “not yet returned to us the expense of its publication.”

  By this time Poe had become disenchanted with William Burton and his magazine. Where Thomas White had deferred to Poe in most matters of editorial judgment, Burton had a robust confidence in his own literary talents and seemed to regard Poe as little more than an office boy. Although the magazine had garnered a great deal of attention for “The Fall of the House of Usher” and other contributions by Poe, Burton took issue with his assistant’s “morbid tone” and “jaundiced” frame of mind, which were at odds with the otherwise cheery tone of the magazine. Poe, for his part, resented the fact that Burton was not more generous with his compensation and was slow to recognize that Poe’s duties were far heavier than expected. Once again, Poe found himself in the embarrassing position of having to beg his employer for loans.

  By May of 1840 Burton’s theatrical aspirations had progressed to the point of hatching plans to build a national theater in Philadelphia. As his new preoccupation took hold, Burton recognized that he would no longer be able to divide his time between literature and the stage. Accordingly, he formed plans to sell the magazine. Burton, it seems, did not inform Poe, who only caught wind of the impending sale when he spotted a newspaper advertisement offering an unnamed magazine “of great popularity and profit.” Realizing that his job was in peril, Poe scrambled to capitalize on his position before he lost it. He drew up a prospectus for a new literary monthly, to be called The Penn Magazine, in hopes of fulfilling a long-cherished dream of becoming the editor of his own journal. Poe promised a magazine that would operate “without reference to particular regions” and would be free of “any tincture of the buffoonery, scurrility, or profanity” prevailing in other publications.

  Burton exploded when he learned of Poe’s scheme. Recognizing that Poe’s departure would undercut the sale price of Burton’s, he bitterly rebuked his assistant and gave him his notice. By one account Poe became so enraged that he shouted abuse at Burton and stormed out of the offices. Not content to let the matter rest, Poe followed up with an angry screed: “Your attempts to bully me excite in my mind scarcely any other sentiment than mirth.…If by accident you have taken it into your head that I am to be insulted with impunity, I can only assume that you are an ass.”

  To friends and colleagues, Poe attempted to cast his departure as a matter of high principle, claiming he could not countenance Burton’s underhanded editorial dealings. Burton offered a similarly self-serving version of the break, complaining that his employee’s “infirmities”—a reference to Poe’s drinking—had caused considerable annoyance. It was a charge Poe hotly denied. “I could obtain damages,” he told one colleague. “I pledge you, before God, the solemn word of a gentleman, that I am temperate even to rigor.…My sole drink is water.” Poe’s denial is suspect to say the least, as there are several accounts of him drinking liberally in Philadelphia. On one occasion a friend reported finding him sprawled in a gutter.

  Spurred on by his quarrel with Burton, Poe redoubled his efforts to launch his own journal. “I have been led to make the attempt of establishing it through an earnest yet natural desire of rendering myself independent,” he wrote. “I mean not so much as regards money, as in respect to my literary opinions and conduct.” Elsewhere he insisted that “if there is any impossibility about the matter, it is the impossibility of not succeeding.” In the end, however, failure proved not only possible but inevitable. A fresh bank panic cut off whatever resources Poe might have gathered—just at the moment, as he would later claim, that his magazine was being readied for the presses.

  While Poe’s plans foundered, William Burton’s moved ahead. In October of 1840 he sold his magazine to a Philadelphia lawyer named George Graham for $3,500. Graham already owned a magazine called Casket, which he now proposed to combine with Burton’s, giving his new Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine a healthy subscriber base of five thousand readers.

  It is often reported that Burton took a paternal interest in Poe’s welfare during the sale, instructing the new owner to “take care of my young editor.” In light of Burton’s strained relations with Poe at the time, it seems more likely that he warned Graham of Poe’s shortcomings. If so, Graham was not put off; soon after taking control of the magazine, he offered Poe a job. In spite of Poe’s yearning for independence, he recognized a promising opportunity. In February of 1841 he signed on as an editor, receiving a salary of eight hundred dollars a year, a healthy increase over his earnings at Burton’s. Graham gave him a warm welcome in the pages of the new magazine: “Mr. POE is too well known in the literary world to require a word of commendation.” Better still, Poe was no longer expected to handle the entire load of proofreading and other drudgery. Graham himself solicited and chose much of the material that ran in the magazine, a job he handled with a canny appreciation of public taste, leaving Poe free for more “elevated” contributions. It was agreed that each issue would feature an original Poe story, for which he would receive a contributor’s payment on top of his salary.

  On this encouraging note, Poe threw himself into his work and seems to have cultivated a genuine affection for his genial and outgoing employer. At twenty-seven, Graham was four years younger than Poe, which may have helped to place the relationship on a more collegial footing. Poe admired his young editor’s willingness to spend money to make a success of the magazine, commissioning original illustrations and shunning reprinted articles and stories in favor of fresh material. Under Graham’s more lenient stewardship Poe’s experience and innovation came into full flower, helping to transform the magazine into an immediate success. Over the first year, the circulation took an astonishing leap from five to forty thousa
nd subscribers.

  At first, Poe appeared sympathetic to Graham’s aim of attracting a broader, perhaps less aesthetic audience than he had envisioned for his own Penn Magazine. He initiated a popular series of articles on cryptography, resurrected from earlier freelance work, which resulted in readers submitting reams of coded messages for him to solve. Poe also resumed his literary criticism. Although he claimed to have set aside the “causticity” of his younger days, his work at Graham’s showed little softening. Other critics, he believed, were too quick to praise, with the result that each new writer and poet who came along was lauded as a genius. “Our very atmosphere is redolent of genius,” he protested. “All our poets are Miltons.”

  Poe’s vehemence on this point owed much to his belief that his own genius had been overlooked in favor of these lesser talents. Poe’s critical broadsides brought him a great deal of notice—and attacks on his perceived arrogance—but his work for Graham’s rose to an undeniably high standard and included several of his most exceptional short stories. In “The Man of the Crowd,” Poe again took up the theme of the workings of the criminal mind, as he had in “Politan” and other stories. The new story opens as an unnamed narrator sits in a London coffeehouse pondering the “tumultuous sea of human heads” that surrounds him, and marvels at the feeling of “solitude on account of the very denseness of the crowd around.” Presently he spots a decrepit old man whose ragged cloak reveals a dagger and a diamond—presumably the instrument and bounty of some terrible crime. With mounting excitement, the narrator pursues the stranger into the “most deplorable” depths of the city, but when he finally confronts his prey, the old man fails even to register his presence. The narrator concludes that his quarry “is the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds.”

  Poe’s growing fascination with deductive thinking, first expressed in his study of Maelzel’s chess-player, was shown to extraordinary effect in the new story. In the early pages, as the narrator sits isolated behind the glass of the café, he turns his energy to scrutinizing the passing crowds in the “fitful and garish lustre” of the dying day: “The wild effects of the light enchained me to an examination of individual faces; and although the rapidity with which the world of light flitted before the window prevented me from casting more than a glance upon each visage, still it seemed that, in my then peculiar mental state, I could frequently read, even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of long years.” In this fashion, the narrator is able to recognize a clerk by the protrusion of the right ear—“long used to pen-holding”—and a pickpocket by his “voluminousness of wristband.” This seemingly magical trick of divining case histories from apparent trifles would be developed and refined by later writers (“Holmes! That’s amazing!”), but in Poe’s hands, the technique was focused inward, in an effort to plumb the secrets of the human soul “which do not permit themselves to be told.”

  “The Man of the Crowd” was followed by the innovative “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” a story Poe described almost offhandedly as “something in a new key.” The story begins as Poe’s narrator, another nameless young man seeking knowledge, offers a brief homily on the joys of deductive skill: “The mental features discoursed of as the analytical are, in themselves, but little susceptible to analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment. As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talent into play. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension preternatural.” Poe continues in this vein for some time before concluding: “It will be found that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.”

  Having mapped out this ideal blending of the artistic temperament and the scientific turn of mind, Poe goes on to introduce its human embodiment, Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin. The narrator becomes acquainted with Dupin while studying in Paris, after a chance meeting in an obscure library, “where the accident of our both being in search of the same very rare and very remarkable volume brought us into closer communion.” Dupin proves to be an intriguing figure. Born to an illustrious family, he had “by a variety of untoward events” been reduced to such poverty that “the energy of his character succumbed beneath it, and he ceased to bestir himself in the world.” Left with a small income, Dupin contents himself with the basic necessities of life, apart from the sole luxury of an indulgence in books. Believing that “the society of such a man would be to me a treasure beyond price,” the narrator elects to share lodgings with Dupin in a “time-eaten and grotesque mansion” not unlike the house of Usher. Cut off from the world, they devote themselves to reading and writing, emerging only to revel in the “sable divinity” of night.

  During a long stroll one evening, Dupin reveals an astonishing talent. Though the pair had been walking in silence for some fifteen minutes, the Frenchman suddenly breaks into his companion’s meditations with an offhand, conversational remark—as if in response to a spoken question—demonstrating that he has been following his friend’s private thoughts as easily and accurately as if they had been spoken aloud. Thunderstruck, the narrator demands an explanation, with the result that Dupin easily reconstructs every link in his companion’s chain of thought, ranging from the Orion nebula to a theatrically inclined cobbler. The narrator is dumbfounded: “I do not hesitate to say that I am amazed,” he admits, “and can scarcely credit my senses.”

  Soon afterward, the narrator draws Dupin’s attention to an unusual item in the newspaper. A shocking outrage has been discovered at a home in the “miserable thoroughfare” known as the Rue Morgue. In the dead of night, the account relates, the neighborhood was roused by the sound of “terrific shrieks” issuing from a fourth-floor room. Summoning the gendarmes, a group of men forced their way into the room, only to find a scene of the “wildest disorder”—shattered furniture, valuables strewn about the chamber, and a blood-smeared razor resting on a chair, surrounded by clumps of human hair apparently torn out at the roots.

  The two women who own the house, a Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter, are found to have been “fearfully mutilated.” Madame L’Espanaye has been savagely beaten and her throat cut with such a violent, slashing stroke that it has “nearly severed her head from her body.” The daughter is nowhere to be seen, until one of the investigators notices an unusual quantity of soot in the fireplace. Only then is it discovered that the body of the young woman, covered with scrapes and bruises, has been stuffed feet-first up the chimney.

  The police are utterly baffled, and none of the investigators can supply a motive for the crime or a method by which it was committed. In addition, there is no clue as to how the killer got out of the room, as the doors and windows are found to have been locked from the inside, and the tapered chimney is too narrow to admit the passage of “a large cat,” much less a human being. The two women are known to have led quiet and retiring lives, and although they lived comfortably, the killer has taken no interest in their valuables—four thousand francs in gold have been left untouched.

  Matters grow more confused as the neighbors give their testimony. Although some eight or ten men responded to the sounds of violence, their accounts offer puzzling contradictions. All agree that the sounds of “two voices in loud and angry contention” were heard at the scene. The first was that of a gruff-sounding Frenchman, but the other, “much shriller” voice was that of a foreigner, though no two neighbors can seem to agree on his country of origin.

  The newspaper accounts agree that no crime of such a “horrifying character” has e
ver been committed in Paris, nor does there seem to be “the shadow of a clew apparent.” In the absence of other suspects, the police arrest a bank clerk named Adolphe Le Bon, who brought the women their unusually large supply of cash only three days earlier.

  After scouring the newspapers carefully, Dupin reveals that the imprisoned bank clerk once did him a service for which he is “not ungrateful.” He determines to look into the matter for himself, telling his companion that an “inquiry will afford us amusement.” After obtaining permission from the police to examine the murder scene, Dupin conducts a thorough investigation, demonstrating a “minuteness of attention” that leaves his friend bewildered. Apparently satisfied with what he has seen, Dupin returns home without another word, stopping along the way at a local newspaper office.

  It is not until the following day that Dupin breaks his silence with the unexpected pronouncement that he has solved the case. In fact, he goes on to say, he expects one of the guilty parties to present himself at the door momentarily. Accordingly, he provides his companion with a pistol and advises him to use it if necessary.

  As they await their caller, Dupin launches into a dreamy soliloquy, giving his view of the events and explaining how he arrived at a solution. The problem, he insists, was not nearly so complex as the newspapers had supposed. The official investigators had “fallen into the gross but common error of confounding the unusual with the abstruse.” To Dupin’s way of thinking, the seemingly bizarre and inexplicable aspects of the case held a ready key to its solution, for “it is by these deviations from the plane of the ordinary that reason feels its way.”