Free Poe by Peter Ackroyd Page B

Carmine Street. A fellow lodger at Waverly Place described Poe as “one of the most courteous, gentlemanly, and intelligent companions I have ever met with;” he added that “I never saw him the least affected with liquor.” Yet it was a difficult time, compounded by the fact that in the spring there was a great financial collapse and subsequent panic. In these unpromising circumstances Poe tried to find work as an occasional journalist or reviewer. There is little evidence of any success. Only two of his tales, “Von Jung, the Mystific” and “Siope,” were published in this year. The
Messenger
had also given up the serialisation of
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,
after two instalments. It is not easy to see how Poe and his family survived. It is possible that Mrs. Clemm ran a small boarding house inCarmine Street—a print shows that it would have been just about large enough to accommodate paying guests— but no other sources of income are known. This was a period, after the “crash,” when many people literally starved to death. One of the few extant records concerning Poe reveals that, in the winter of 1837, he called at the Northern Dispensary in Greenwich Village to obtain medicine for a severe cold.
    It is not surprising, therefore, that at the beginning of 1838 the little family made its way to Philadelphia. Poe had a habit of moving on, wandering from one city to the next in search of good fortune. He never felt at home anywhere.
    Philadelphia was built in gridiron fashion and looked like a chessboard stretched out between the rivers Schuylkill and Delaware; it was one of the oldest, and was still the largest, city in the United States. It was booming. It was expanding. But it was not exhilarating. Poe may have considered himself to be a small piece on the board.
    The Poes and Maria Clemm lodged once more in a rooming house. They were poor. They may even have been desperate. The landlord reported that they were “literally suffering for want of food” and were “forced to live on bread and molasses for weeks together.” They moved to another lodging house a few weeks later, and then at the end of the year moved again. Poe's employment is not known, except for a reference in a letter to “the miserable life of literary drudgery to which I now, with breaking heart, submit.” He had obtained some work as a journalistichack, writing paragraphs and criticisms to order. He was addressing the new Secretary of the Navy, from whom he begged an appointment as a clerk—
“any thing, by sea or land,”
but nothing was forthcoming.
    Yet he was writing. He may have moved to Philadelphia precisely because it was still the publishing centre of the country, with journals such as the
Saturday Evening Post
and the
Gentleman's Magazine.
The city also sustained seven daily morning papers and two daily evening papers. But he was not at first successful in finding employment. Some comfort may have been drawn from the publication by the New York firm of Harpers, that summer, of
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
in volume form. Yet he never seemed much impressed by his first, and last, novel. Two years after its publication he described it as “a very silly book.” That was too harsh a verdict. It was a story that certainly strained credulity, filled with what, on the title page, were called “incredible Adventures and Discoveries,” but it was possessed by the strange excitement that issued from Poe's own restless and morbid nature. He had also learned from Daniel Defoe's narratives: he tried to maintain the utmost verisimilitude in order to encompass the wildest improbabilities.
    The first chapters concern Arthur Gordon Pym's confinement in a crawl space of a ship, between decks, a subject that elicits all the intensity of Poe's own nature. He thrills to, and yet suffers from, the experience of enclosure. His is the poetry of extremity and of morbidity. In succeding chapters Arthur Gordon Pym is the victim of