Poe’s Plate Articles

     An often impecunious writer who depended on publication for his income, Edgar Allen Poe sometimes wrote with a quick payment in mind. Amid the great poems and stories in the Collected Works the reader will see four “plate articles.” These were short essays describing engraved plates the publisher had already obtained. Apart from being expected to come up with something with broad popular appeal, the writer had a free hand. Thus these pieces, written to order like poems produced on a prompt at a workshop and tied essentially to the image they accompanied, could sometimes create the opportunity for an almost improvisatory composition, a sort of laboratory for creativity.
     They do not always fulfill this potential, though. The earliest of Poe’s plate articles, “Some Account of Stonehenge, the Giant’s Dance,” provides nothing but a factual description of the monument, including quotations from other writers both ancient and modern. His scheme allows very little space for the expression of Poe’s own sensibility. The flatness of the essay is evident in its banal concluding sentence: “The whole number of stones now visible, amounts to one hundred and nine.” The author was palpably anxious to finish up, turn it in, and get paid.
     By the time Poe was assigned another engraving, the result of the exercise was altogether different. The precious archaism of the word “fay” suggests the more self-indulgent style of Poe’s second such article, “The Island of the Fay.” Poe allowed himself a dramatic rush of words expressing a far more passionate and specific vision. His torrent of rhetoric however, is preceded by a sort of overture that might be considered its theoretical justification -- Poe’s sonnet beginning “Science, true daughter of old Time . . .” which indicts science for killing myth.
     He begins by quoting Marmontel to the effect that music is unique in that it may be best enjoyed alone, and proceeds to the quite simple next step of suggesting that to him the pleasures of admiring nature are likewise best pursued by a lone individual. Yet on the way to that point he tosses off a series of provocative propositions unrelated to what follows. In the very first sentence, in the middle in fact of Marmontel’s words, he throws into question the notion he has not even completed stating, saying that Marmontel speaks “with the same odd confusion of thought and language which leads him to give his decidedly equivocal narratives the title of ‘Contes Moraux.’” It may be called an “odd confusion,” but surely thought and language are always entangled. If they are entirely apart, would that not result in gibberish? If the French author is so “equivocal,” why cite him as an authority? But Poe’s American reader, concentrating perhaps on the French, is likely to slide forward past these diversions toward what seems likely to be the chief theme of the essay: the delectation of natural beauty.
     By the end of the article’s first paragraph the love of nature has gone far beyond a conventional picturesque sketch. It becomes a vision of the ancient rocks and mountains, the world itself, and the cosmos beyond as a vast organism upon which humans dwell as “animalculae” do upon our own bodies, and we are as ignorant of these great beings as the microbe – not on our skin in Poe’s imagining – but “those which infest the brain ” -- is of our own reality.
     He is only just warming up. Like a Hindu cosmographer, he goes on to conceive of “cycle within cycle without end – yet all revolving around one far-distant center which is the Godhead.” There is very little here of the scenic and pretty, no reference whatever to the engraving accompanying the piece, yet the reader does find the most effective demonstration possible of the heights to which an inspired solitary observer might rise. The true center of the essay seems to be the thrill of extravagant speculation.
     The remainder of the piece is devoted to natural description, albeit heavily colored with subjectivity, of a ramble among “melancholy tarns” of the area. There he says he felt like falling into a “doze” beneath an almost narcotic “unknown odorous shrub,” thinking that only by dreaming might he actually look upon the scene before him, “such was the character if the phantasm which it wore.” This comment, of course, leads the reader to question even the concrete details of passages like “The grass was short, springy, sweet-scented, and Asphodel-interspersed.”
     Whether the writer is awake or asleep, as night falls he glimpses the apparition of a fairy in a boat. Poe had notoriously maintained in “The Philosophy of Composition” that “the death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” Thus the poor “fays” must not only be seen in the process of dying, but dying repeatedly: “rendering unto God their existence little by little” until the apparition is gone, or night has fallen or the dreamer has awakened.
     The castigation of science, then, with which the essay opens becomes profoundly ambiguous since, in an aestheticized analogue of Christ’s crucifixion, the decease of the divine is the moment of its greatest beauty. Just as with the beloved woman, it is the lover’s longing that is loveliest, not the object of his affection at all, and to bring that pathos to the greatest height, the fay must die.
     “The Island of the Fay” is an island in the mind. Far from the mundane appreciation of the natural beauty of trees, mountains, and lakes, Poe is looking for a meditation that will accommodate him to life on earth by fancifully transmuting what he sees. The first third of the article consists of ambitious mental exercises specifically designed to free the consciousness from mere observed reality and the remainder provides a vision of the divine at the moment of its vanishing, simultaneously indulging and denying the writer’s desire.
     In his third plate article “Morning on the Wisshiccon” Poe constructs a light burlesque of a similar theme of ambivalence and the veil of illusion. Beginning quite soberly, Poe suggests that foreign visitors to America miss the most beautiful sights because “the real Edens of the land lie far away from the track of our own most deliberate tourists,” in the wild back-country. He relates a journey of his own to such a remote region during which he “sank into a half slumber” dreaming of “ancient days.” In this condition he sees the noble elk featured in the plate posing atop a cliff. Yet the animal alone is not as beautiful as the animal with a sense of inevitable loss. “I fancied the elk repined . . .at the manifest alteration for the worse, wrought upon the brook and its vicinage, even within the last few years, by then stern hand of the utilitarian.” Imminent extinction lends the elk a patina of loveliness similar to the grace that descends on the dying woman.
     From this meditation, not so very different from the vision of the fay, he is suddenly roused by the appearance of a servant who feeds the animal which, it seems, though suggestive of an emblem of the aboriginal untouched wilderness, was a pet, a domestic animal. After the opening which declared that English tourists never see the real wild America, it seems this vestige of aboriginal fauna is kept by “an English family.” Thus the knot of contradiction is tightly tied. The joke is on the writer until the reader reflects that Poe had been in on it all along and the reader is the one he successfully strung along.
     For the last of his plate articles Poe was presented with an illustration of “Byron and Miss Chaworth.” The relationship of these two makes for him a model of noble true love. He opens with a quotation from George Sand (the name he uses is Mme. Dudevant) who, rather like Marmontel, he finds to mix “many an admirable sentiment” with “a chaos of the most shameless and altogether objectionable fiction.” She speaks of the purity of young love, and, according to Poe, Byron, who was, of course, notoriously promiscuous with men and women of all sorts, maintained the beauty of this relationship specifically because he and Miss Chatworth were never intimate after their youngest days. “It is better,” he says, “for the mere romance of the love-passages between the two [emphasis added], that their intercourse was broken up in early life.”
     Poe’s notion of love from afar as the highest love differs from its form in Jaufre Rudel, since for Poe the experience is deeply solipsistic. “It was born of the hour, and of the youthful necessity to love . . .It had no particular regard to the person, or the character, or the reciprocating affection of Mary Chatworth.” In fact, Poe enjoys thinking that to her Byron was “a somewhat portionless, somewhat eccentric and rather lame young man,” while to him she was “the Egeria of his dreams – the Venus Aphrodite that sprang, in full and supernal loveliness, from the bright foam upon the storm-tormented ocean of his thoughts.” Their love derives its power from the fact that it cannot be realized.
     While the piece on Stonehenge illustrates how, even for a writer as idiosyncratic as Poe, a restrictive journalistic assignment might produce routine hackwork, the other three articles prove that professional restrictions might also allow the writer the opportunity for rich rhetoric and soaring concepts. These essays elaborate in pathetic and comic strains Poe’s central themes: the superiority of imagination over reality, and in particular the supreme value of a sublime love as a wholly mental phenomenon for which an unreal object serves better than a real, and for which the impossibility of satisfaction is a paradoxically essential factor. In the end, as in his stories in general, his true focus is the nervous subjectivity of the restless creative mind, enjoying itself in the cosmic flights of the “island of the Fay,” deceiving itself in the cause of the Romantic in “Morning on the Wisshiccon,” and glorifying ethereal unrealized love in “Byron and Miss Chaworth.”

Notes on Recent Reading 38 (London, Vonnegut, Cather)

John Barleycorn (London)

London’s account of his lifelong use of alcohol is at the same time a revealing story of the economic conditions of his youth, reminding the reader yet again of how recently a person could work hard in America and yet suffer genuine need. He takes one strenuous and unrewarding job after another, including an illegal entrepreneurial venture as an “oyster pirate” on his own boat at the age of fifteen. His physical powers and discipline are not quite enough to lift him from the slough, but his mind can. He becomes radicalized, and eventually manages to acquire the rudiments of education. After very little time he is selling short stories and lands a book contract. In what seems temporarily almost a fairy tale denouement he acquires not just comfortable but substantial wealth, and establishes his estate in the Valley of the Moon in Sonoma County.

The narrative has in part the outline of a simple success story more inspirational than those of Horatio Alger that were popular in London’s youth and more real since it was not through charity or accident but his own energy and ability that he rose, but the author is pursued by a demon. He is stalked at every turn by John Barleycorn who, as he says, appeared everywhere that “chesty” men gathered, eventually weakening him and doubtless hastening his death. He is so clear-sighted about alcohol’s seductive power that he wishes to be rescued by circumstance. For this reason London enthusiastically supports women’s suffrage, certain that voting women will bring about Prohibition, which would redeem him whether he assented or not.

The book is a candid report of an individual’s addiction, and, as a study of chemical dependence, London’s evasions are as significant as his admissions. He insists countless times that he is not constitutionally or physically an alcoholic but succumbed due to alcohol’s accessibility, particularly on the “adventure-road” of masculine milieux. At the book’s end, he confidently reports his having overcome the temptation to overindulge as well as his tendency to “pessimism,” his term for depression. Essential as it is to a self-help book, London’s biographers would term that a rosy view.


Deadeye Dick (Vonnegut)

In those days when Vonnegut star was rising, I half-way tried to keep up with contemporary fiction, but I tended to prefer Barthelme and Barth and Coover. I was never taken by Vonnegut, though he was popular among the youth of my generation, and I certainly applauded his tendencies to pop culture, left-wing politics, and the counterculture. His vogue, after the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five, transformed his career, but his work never attracted much of my attention.

Reading Deadeye Dick now, I feel still dull to Vonnegut’s appeal. The book seems like a series of little routines, the more satisfying of which end with a snap something like a damp firecracker. The author’s considerable inventiveness rarely goes beyond what Coleridge might have called fancy. Reflecting this fact, his prose is simple and colloquial, matter-of-fact even while relating dramatic events.

Admittedly, this attitude consistently maintained through an accumulation of sketches amounts in the end to a Weltanschauung, which I would describe as a sort of youthful wonder at all things more or less equally, which, for this reader, eliminates the better part of the wonder. Perhaps I am too much reminded of the late sixties overuse of “wow.” (Its epigone “awesome” is flourishing, I believe, yet today.)



Sapphira and the Slave Girl (Cather)

Willa Cather’s last novel is her only work set in Virginia, the state of her birth. She is said to have based the central incidents of the story on whispered family lore she overheard from her elders. In the epilogue a first person narrator suddenly appears whom one might well take to be the author.

Cather’s descriptive prose is straightforward and quite precise. Descriptions of the changing seasons form a sort of lyric interlude every now and then in an episodic novel. Lit by righteous indignation overt slavery eighty years after abolition, she does deserve credit for making her case nuanced and engaging.

She is not portraying the plantation slavery more common in literature. In the western part of Virginia, in the hills among poor and struggling whites, Sapphira’s inherited slaves brought her not social prestige but her neighbors’ distrust. Her husband himself is opposed to slavery, but does not wish to make problems or diminish his wife’s wealth, so he does nothing. When he does raise the possibility of manumission to a slave who serves as his skilled assistant, the man asks to remain in servitude. Nancy, the slave “girl,” is virtuous but sufficiently boring to be annoying, though the reader can only be pleased that she comes to a good end.

Rather than description or theme, the real triumph of the book is the development of the character of Sapphira, whom one encounters as a snobbish and suspicious woman. Despite her social pretensions and her often small-minded and self-interested actions, the reader comes to appreciate her dignity and strength and to realize that, of course, she, too, has emotional capacity. Her bearing through her crippling dropsy and her approaching death make her in the end a hero, a feat that might have seemed unlikely after the first fifteen or twenty pages of the book.

Irving's Soft Romanticism

My copy of Tales of the Alhambra is, as I note at the outset, an odd edition, published by Editorial Padre Suarez of Granada and unlikely to be available to anyone else. The page numbers in parentheses are thus likely to be of little use. In order to allow the reader to locate the passages I cite, I have therefore appended a list of the chapters from which each quotation is taken.


     I have just been reading Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra out loud with my wife. Our copy is, fittingly, I think, not a scholarly Library of America volume, but an undated octavo souvenir edition printed in Granada at least eighty years ago which includes many engravings which look as though they were quite old when the book was printed. It fits neatly into a pocket, and its ideas slide as easily into the mind. The author prefers to soothe rather than to disturb his reader. Irving shares with Hawthorne and Cooper the early development of specifically American writing, but Irving’s tone is altogether different from either of his fellow-countrymen. Whereas Hawthorne brooded on colonial history with a consciousness haunted by self-doubt and intimations of guilt, and Cooper spun tales of the frontier recast into morality plays like the later ones of the Old West, Irving provided considerably lighter fare. Just as his best-known works, the “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” made blithe entertainments spinning out the amusing if inconsequential lives of New York’s earlier inhabitants, his Tales of the Alhambra does much the same for both the Moors and Christians of Spain.
     Part of the Romantic program, of course, was the celebration of the ethnic and the regional, and there can be no doubt of Irving’s contribution to the development of national consciousness. Yet his work contrasts with Byron’s titanic anti-heroes, Wordsworth’s nature enthusiasms, Coleridge’s transcendental flights, and Keats’ almost painful aestheticism. He is perhaps closest to Scott’s rummaging in his country’s history for narrative, but, though Scott’s novels always turn out well with a satisfying round of retributive justice, this happens only after what seem genuine bumps and obstacles along the way. Irving is dedicated to writing that raises no dangerous or uncomfortable issue and explores no dark corners of human nature. Even pathos evaporates under his warm benevolent gaze; his greatest seriousness is likely to take the form of sentiment.
     Irving’s tone is fixed at the outset. In his dedication to David Wilkie he says they had been impressed as fellow travelers with the persistence of Islamic influence in Spain, and his friend urged him to “write something that should illustrate those peculiarities, something in the Haroun Alraschid styles, [sic] that should have a dash of that Arabian spice which pervades everything in Spain.” Further, he inscribes his volume of “arabesque sketches” to his friend “as a memorial of the pleasant scenes we have witnessed together in that land of adventure.” (13) As the Abbasid al-Rashid ruled in Baghdad (and Raqqa) far from Andalusia which had been conquered for the Ummayad dynasty by the Berber Tariq ibn Ziyad, the reference must be understood as a broad, unfocused reference to Islam in general. The blurring is significant. For Irving that entire tradition -- cultural, spiritual, and military -- is reduced to a dash of spice to awaken the flagging relish of his reader or to an exotic decorative motif, in fact, an arabesque. Doubtless he would have treated Indian or Chinese culture in just the same way.
     Apart from the lure of the exotic, the book is animated by a mild if enthusiastic devotion to romantic love. Thus, after describing the Hall of the Two Sisters, Irving does not allow his account of its rich ornamentation to stand alone. He goes on, “It is impossible to contemplate this once favourite abode of Oriental manners without feeling the early association of Arabian romance, and almost expecting to see the white arm of some mysterious princess beckoning from the balcony or some dark eye sparkling through the lattice. (47)
     Similar foggy fantasies regularly reappear. For instance, in the Court of the Lions “it needs but a slight exertion of the fancy to picture some pensive beauty of the harem, loitering in these secluded haunts of Oriental luxury.” (88) We are not far from the nineteenth century paintings of odalisques by Ingres and others.
     In this aesthetic the very vagueness of these sirens constitutes a good portion of their charm. The allure of such undifferentiated heroines provides the impetus for such narrations as that of Ahmed al Kamel or the three beautiful princesses. Love generally triumphs and, if it does not, one can breathe a heart-felt if pleasant sigh and proceed to the next attraction on the agenda. Though he actually lived for a time in the Alhambra, Irving remains a true package-tour visitor, satisfied with curiosities and a marvel or two without looking very deeply into history, art, or human psychology.
     Through the rose-colored glasses of the tourist “everything here appears calculated to inspire kind and happy feelings, for everything is delicate and beautiful. “ (88) The unfocused fuzziness of these adjectives is deliberate. Irving’s rhetoric is altogether conventional and most easily digestible with hardly an original turn. He is a comfortable author providing a very modest but also reliable positive sensation. The psychologists tell us that a similar dependable reward causes people to turn in idle moments to television or Facebook.
     Yet the values are consistently and distinctly Romantic. Rather than the orderly garden, Irving appreciates the belated, almost post-apocalyptic wildness of a scene of departed grandeur. “In the present instance the effect was heightened by the wild and lonely nature of the place. We were on the naked and broken summit of the haunted Mountain of the Sun, where ruined tanks and cisterns and the mouldering foundations of extensive buildings spoke of former populousness, but where all was now silent and desolate.” (123)
     As a tourist, he enjoys the temporary novelty of the scenes he visits while never doubting the superiority of his own culture. On his way the “sturdy Biscayan lad” he has hired as guide strikes him as “vain-glorious” (23), though he is “faithful, cheery, kind-hearted.” His condescending attitude is explicit in his naming the man Sancho after Don Quixote’s sidekick.
     The same attitude recurs when he hires the “son of the Alhambra” Mateo Jimenez. His “valet, cicerone, guide, guard, and historiographic squire” (a partially submerged reference to Cervantes), a tout of the sort familiar to everyone who travels in poorer countries, represents his stance toward the country as a whole. He finds this “alert and officious wight” (64) “”at times an amusing companion; he is simple-minded and of infinite good humour with the loquacity and gossip of a village barber.” (65) Jimenez is diminished in just the same way the entire country, its history, and the human emotions of love and aggression are here declawed, tamed and rendered fit to divert the reader.
     The volume ends with one of the most conventional of travelogue motifs, the setting sun, as the writer notes “thus ended one of the pleasantest dreams of a life which the reader perhaps may think has been but too much made up of dreams.” (354) Yet such a conclusion is a cliché because it is satisfying in a mild but reliable way. Even as dream, Irving’s portrait of Spain has nothing of the haunting power of many actual dreams; it is rather a easeful reverie, a recreation. The book is a breezy pleasure, and any pleasure is valuable and worth preserving. Thus we read Irving for one of the most important though little honored reasons for art: to pass the time.


Chapter list for cited quotations
13 dedication
47 “Interior of the Alhambra”
88 ”The Court of Lions”
123 “A Ramble Among the Hills”
23 “The Journey”
64 “The Household”
65 “The Household”
354 “The Author’s Farewell to Granada”

Notes on Recent Reading 9 [Plutarch, Tacitus, Williams]

Parallel Lives [Plutarch]

     Though his purpose was to praise and blame, Plutarch, like an old history book, is heavy with wars and politics and not so good on culture and thought. His Lives would be improved with fewer accounts of battles, but the stories never fail to engage the reader. It is fascinating to see how Athens and Rome, even in their days of power, were like small towns in that everyone knew everyone and historic changes might be initiated on a street-corner after a chance meeting.
     Though the so-called Dryden edition was not exactly translated by Dryden it is accurate enough and readable. I haven’t seen Sir John North’s version of Amyot’s French translation; perhaps it is more appealing.


Agricola and Germania [Tacitus]

     Tacitus’ praise of the work of his father-in-law Agricola in subduing the Britons serves as a vehicle for his expression of the old Roman values. His straightforward style is nonetheless susceptible to irony, archness, and some good set-pieces. The Agricola describes the assimilation of such “demoralizing temptations” as Roman “arcades, baths, and banquets,” saying that the “unsuspecting Britons” regarded these as “civilization” whereas they were more accurately enslavement. In the Germania he notes with approval the northerners disregard for gold and silver, their hardihood, and their strict sexual morality. “No one in Germany finds vice amusing, or calls it ‘up-to-date’ to seduce and be seduced.”
     His account of Boudica is sympathetic. The report of Calgacus’ speech rallying Rome’s enemies is eloquent, damning the imperial power for bringing “robbery, butchery, and rapine” while calling it government. His passionate cry of liberty or death must surely be a coded lament for the loss of the Roman Republic whose ineffectual Senate could only ratify the madness of one emperor after another. He goes so far as to implies that Domitian, whom he says had a “hatred of merit,” killed Agricola.
     In Tacitus one sees the dilemma of a man of principle seeking to take an honorable role in a tyrannical state. He is surely offering his own apologia when he says in the Agricola that “even under bad emperors men can be great,” and, through “a decent regard for authority” may attain “distinction,” whereas opposing even a wicked monarch can bring only an unseemly and “ostentatious self-martyrdom.”
     A modern reader of the Germania can hardly avoid reflecting on recent history when reading of the northern tribes passions for racial purity and for war. My old copy of the Penguin translation by Harold Mattingly from 1948 makes a number of contemporary references. Whether or not Tacitus was mistaken on the first point, the Nazis were only too glad to appropriate his words. As for the latter, Tacitus considers them a bit mad on their eagerness for battle and their scorn of farming. According to his account, when not fighting, they spend their time in idleness. The book includes solid anthropological information on governance, divination, and human sacrifice.


White Mule [Williams]

     William Carlos Williams’ novel (1937) is narrated in a pure distilled straightforward American idiom that moves fatalistically from each word to the next. Much of the book is colloquial, reproducing American working class accents of African Americans, Irish, German, and Norwegian immigrants will such precision the good doctor must surely have kept a notebook handy for years, making memoranda of expressions he heard in his daily life.
     The fact that the novel’s first reviewers (Alfred Kazin in the New York Times and N. L. Rothman in the Saturday Review) compared the book to Joyce only shows us what conventional narratives they expected. The stream of consciousness is mild indeed, though the figure of the infant Flossie, bearing the name of the author’s beloved wife on whose family the story is based, is original and unsentimental. The Stecher family’s further experiences are detailed in the sequels In the Money and The Build Up.