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Donald Weeks The Humour of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (1809/1849) is primarily known for his tales of the grotesque and arabesque and his lyrical poems. He was a master story-teller and invented, among other things, the mystery/crime story in which a detective solves a crime entirely through an alertness toward scientific methods which, in explanation, have a logical matter-of-factness. Although his detective, the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, of no official capacity, is a Frenchman and lives within his native locale, Poe wrote for the American reader - therefore creating not only the detective story but also what was to become the American Private Eye, duplicated in no other country with success.
The background material found in Poe's work was by no means unique in his day - the public clamouring for the Gothic element in story or poem. Going through a catalogue of fiction of that day will unearth many tales which startled the reader of the period but which are completely savourless today. The difference between all other work and Poe's lies in the latter's touch of timelessness. As a prophet, Poe has never been honoured as much in his own country as on the Continent. This has been due solely to the expert translations by Baudelaire and other Europeans shortly after its original appearance. Poe's range of logical philosophy, as an individual artist, influenced not only the Continental literature of the latter part of the nineteenth century but also its art and music. In the late 1880s, August Strindberg wrote to a friend: ‘The next epoch will be E.P.!’ The influence of ‘E[dgar]. P[oe].’ did not rest in Strindberg alone, but can be traced down to the present-day Theatre of the Absurd. Only once was an opinion of Poe's fallible. At the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839, he exclaimed its wonders and pronounced that it would soon replace the art of painting. This the protograph has not done during its first hundred and forty years. But the advent of the camera revolutionized the art of painting - thus making Poe's prophecy indirectly true, including those forms of art dependent on his philosophy - such as the Symbolists. (The last of the Symbolists was George Herriman (1880/1944), the American cartoonist who so wonderfully drew his comic strip incorporating his creation, Krazy Kat.) The finest compliment paid Poe in a painting was Nevermore, in which Paul Gauguin (1848/1903) placed not only a raven but the painting's title - in English.
Historians have found Poe a convenient point of reference in commenting on works of ‘strange beauty’ or ‘strange horror’. The symbolist movement made him into an elusive and tantalizingly mysterious personage. But the one aspect of his literary efforts outshining all others is his genius for rational analysis of the irrational. His sense of ‘the grotesque and the horrible’ actuated a complete rearranging of French romanticism, for instance - ‘For here was a writer who combined... a sense of form and a respect for the intellect with... the ability to move as in
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dreams through the depths of the mind and to illuminate the kind of verities the reason knows not of’ (Patrick Quinn, The French Face of Edgar Poe). Poe's spiritual underlining of the appreciation of the grotesque contrasted with, say, Victor Hugo's Quasimodo, who is merely a vulgar monster with a hump on his back. Instead of formulated stories, at times Poe created impressions - vividly visual or lyrical - impressions brought into being only through dreams, though some of them be nightmares, and not easily erased. The emphasis Poe placed into his fiction was that based on logic, on coherent forecast and calculation. ‘These conditions themselves have been imposed upon me, as necessities, in a train of ratiocination as rigorously logical as that which establishes any demonstration in Euclid’ (Poe, Eureka).
Since his death in 1849, there has been an endless flow of essays and books on Poe and his art. These usually can be placed under three main categories: his tales of the grotesque, his poetry, and his philosophy - from poetry to cosmology. He also excelled in two other fields. He was an expert critic. And the other is the subject which has never before been discussed at large: his tales of humour.
(Curiously enough, one of Poe's pieces of criticism, ‘William Ellery Channing’, was selected by E.B. and Katharine S. White for their Subtreasury of American Humor, 1941 - placing it just after an essay by Robert Benchley. In this piece, Poe's phlegmatic satire disposes of Channing's Poems: ‘His book contains about sixty-three things, which he calls poems, and which he no doubt seriously supposes so to be. They are full of all kinds of mistakes, of which the most important is that of their having been printed at all.’ (In a dramatic criticism, Benchley once wrote that the only fault of a certain play was that the curtain was allowed to go up.) ‘They are not precisely English - nor will we insult a great nation by calling them Kickapoo; perhaps they are Channingese.’)
Poe's life was buffeted about in an uneasy series of situations, none bringing him even the means to meet the necessities of the day. He was truly aware that man drifts rather helplessly on the current of circumstances and that he cannot alter the circumstances to suit himself. Yet his personal philosophy, engendered into his entire work, was that Man, the individual, is greater than men, the collective society. Tod Browning - who created Freaks, several films with Lon Chaney, and the 1931 Bela Lugosi Dracula - echoed Poe when he said that an audience should not be asked to believe ‘the horrible impossible, but the horrible possible, and plausibility increased, rather than lessened, the thrills and chills.’ Poe was a writer of ‘actuality’ - wishing each of his literary efforts to be believed as an actual event or impression. In the 1849 edition of The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, the Preface states that his ‘humorous tales... were, in the author's opinion, among the most perfect and successful of his performances.’ The quality of timelessness in Poe's fiction keeps it fresh, even though a patina now has robbed the luster from some of his comic effects. Yet his work has survived the humour of his fellow countrymen - the humour of Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw, 1818/1885), Petroleum V. Nasby (David Ross Locke, 1833/1888), Artemus Ward (Charles Farrar Browne, 1834/1876), Frank R. Stockton (1834/1902), Joel Chandler Harris (1848/1908), ‘Bill’ Nye (1850/1896), the poet Eugene Field (1850/1895), George Ade (1866/1944) and Abe Martin (Kin Hubbard, 1869/1930). The closest any early American humourist came to Poe's black comedy was Ambrose Bierce (1842/1913?), author of The DeviVs Dictionary. But Poe had to outdo all others - in any field. He was not a mere humourist but rejoiced in the fact that ‘practical jokes suited his taste
far better than verbal ones’ (‘Hop-Frog’). He reveled in the antics of the pun, the burlesque, the slapstick
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and what was more formidiably known in his day as the Hoax.
As a practical joke or hoax, the most widely read of Poe's prose in any single day occurred on 13 April 1844, when the New York Sun brought out a special broadside with the headlines reading:
ASTOUNDING NEWS! BY EXPRESS VIA NORFOLK! THE ATLANTIC CROSSED in THREE DAYS!
headlines which caused an excitement not known again until Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio broadcast almost a century later on 30 October 1938. This story, ‘The Balloon Hoax’, is a description of the first balloon flight over the Atlantic with eight passengers. The narrator pieces together the report from the diaries of two passengers: Mr. Monck Mason and Mr. Harrison Ainsworth (author of Jack Shepard, etc.) - putting the whole ‘in a connected and intelligible form’ for the reading public.
On 13 April 1844, the square around the Sun building was pressed by those wishing to obtain the eventful news. This one tale can speak for most of his writing, for, in this type of lancet-like reasoning and hallucinatory definitive of form circumscribing the fantasies, Poe's prose marked a definitive effectiveness of final purpose. What holds up his work is the single effect which each story depicts through a contrast between a hyperfanciful subject and a hyperexact technique of presentation. The balloon and its flight were not new in 1844. The first manned ascent had occurred in 1783 and Cyrano de Bergerac's Histoire comique ou Voyage dans la Lune had appeared in 1650. But it was the sensationalist's mind of the author which produced such a public acclaim for this broadside with its ‘astounding news!’ - no more than a practical joke.
Imbibing in the glee of a hoax, Poe even advanced theories of how his own work was composed. One critic of ‘The Raven’ spoke of its composition during a prolonged but fierce burst of inspiration; another asserted that it was all the result of sober reasoning and poetic mechanism.’ And so Poe, ‘seeing the field open to him, wrote The Philosophy of Composition, a prose declaration to form pendant and companion to his accomplishment in verse.... But this version [of how “The Raven” was composed] has been known as false for some time now. Poe, in fact, confessed to his most intimate friends that no writing of his was so fictitious as the published analysis of The Raven.... But the matter doesn't end there. Poe appears to have had an accurate acquaintance with Oriental languages, which he turned to account by translating, almost literally, his Raven from the Persian’ [ - a supposition no longer regarded today]. When one carefully considers Poe's ‘marvellous imaginative resource, he looms big among literary workers. It needed almost as distinctive a genius to fabricate The Philosophy of Composition as to produce such a wide snatch of melody as The Raven.... If Lang's theory of the Eastern birth of The Raven is correct, Poe's genius as seen in the creation of The Philosophy of Composition is far more startling than it would otherwise appear. Robbed of his bay-leaves in the realm of poetry, Poe is crowned with a double wreath of berried holly for his prose’ (J. Rogers Rees, In the Study and the Firlds, 1890).
Another balloon story was published during Poe's last year. The strongly anti-democratic ‘Mellonta Tauta’, placed in the future, repeats Poe's philosophy from his larger work, Eureka. ‘Mellonta Tauta’ was written ‘On Board Balloon “Skylark”’ [an allusion to Shelley] in a series of letters commencing on 1 April 2848. The humour of this story has to be read into it as a piece of social history, as well as an indication of Poe's own opinion
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regarding scientific knowledge. One trick he introduces here is the ‘recalling’ of names from the Past - names which are spelled differently in 2848. These include Neuclid, Aris Tottle and ‘[James] Hog[g], surnamed the “Ettrick Shepherd” [1770/1835, author of Confessions of a Justified Sinner]’ - and he then adds that the ‘savans now maintained that the Aristotelian and Baconian roads were the sole possible avenues to knowledge.
“Baconian”, you must know, was an adjective invented as equivalent to Hog-ian and more euphonious and dignified.’ The ‘scientific facts’ in this tale can be compared to ‘The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Sheherazade’ - each comprising the latest scientific inventions of the day.
The most comic experiences with a balloon are contained in ‘The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,’ who flew from Rotterdam to the moon and back. In this story, Poe vents his biting, critical satire upon those of the publishing world - in that Hans Pfaall's balloon was ‘manufactured entirely out of dirty newspapers’ - a machine which sent aloft a journalistic hack to be carried off by his own hot air in a balloon made of foolscap in the shape of a fool's cap. This lengthy tale is filled with humourous ennuendos - beginning with the surname of its hero: Pfaall, which, when inverted, becomes ‘llaafp’ (‘laugh’). Speaking of the view of the earth, ‘at this period of my ascension,’ it was ‘beautiful in deed,’ Pfaall says and adds: ‘What mainly astonished me, in appearance of things below, was the seeming concavity of the surface of the globe.’ Exploring the extinct Hawaiian volcano, Haleakala, a humourist of a later day said: ‘It was curious; and not only curious, but aggravating; for it was having our trouble all for nothing, to climb ten thousand feet toward heaven and then have to look up at our scenery.... Formerly, when I had read an article in which Poe treated of this peculiar fraud perpetuated upon the eyes by isolated great altitudes, I had looked upon the matter as an invention of his own fancy’ - words written in Roughing It, 1872, by Mark Twain (1835/1910). Aerial travel was a subject of concern in Poe's day - and remained so even in 1930, when a Hollywood comedy film, Just Imagine, portrayed the hazards of air traffic (including balloons) in the future of 1980. (The name Pfaall (Fall) can also be connected with both Holland and printing under the historical name Fell. The Oxford University Press in England owes much to Dr. Fell, who, during 1666/1672, purchased for the Press
valuable matrices from the Dutch founder, Peter Walpergen. As for paper on which to print, Dr. Fell was instrumental in setting up a paper mill.)
‘The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Sheherazade’ is initially about Sinbad's last voyage around the world in a Brunei-like armoured cruiser which encounters a catalogue of Western fantasies: balloons, steamboats, railroads, printing presses, photography and the telegraph. The theme is satirical, presenting the credibility gap between the acceptance of scientific criteria and theological dogma. In its undertones of humour, the story gathers together all the strange adventures of the Oriental imagination to point out how they are all none other than the miracles of nature or civilization. The Sinbad episodes of this tale predate any Time Machine story or novel by Jules Verne (1828/1905).
Poe invented neither the practical joke nor the hoax. But he was competent enough to infuse sagaciousness into the information handed to the public who craved to learn of the latest of man's developments. Thus catering to such a public's demand, Poe chose a pleassant medium - that of humour - to tell what it wished to know in a way readily digested. In his thorough inventiveness, Poe has even been claimed the originator of what today is labeled science fiction. In his rational approach to ‘reporting’, his literary efforts purport an accepted scientific norm of today: universalism
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- implementing the principle that the truth of a scientific statement is totally divorced from the personal characteristics of the person who makes it. This was indeed the scheme Poe had in mind when presenting his stories - in serious or in humourous vein. But, in whatever way they were written, they have been imitated over the years - consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly - inciting a realm of coincidence. One such association-of-idea example is The Big Eye, a science-fiction novel of 1949, in which Max Erhlich imagines a near collision of the Earth with another cosmic object, terrorizing the inhabitants on the Earth. Most frightening is the fact that there is on this passing planet a natural feature which looked exactly like a hugh eye. The Symbolist Odilon Redon (1840/1916) once drew a lithograph, ‘L'oeil comme un ballon bizarre se dirige vers l'infini’ - directly inspired by Poe's work. ‘The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether’, composed in the pattern of Chinese boxes, begins with the ludicrous and finishes as the horrific. The narrator visits in the south of France ‘a certain Maison de Santé, or private Mad-House’. He has heard of the unique ‘system of soothing’ used here - ‘that all punishments were avoided - that even confinement was seldom resorted to - that the patients, while secretly watched, were left much apparent liberty, and that most of them were permitted to roam about the house and grounds, in the ordinary apparel of persons in right mind.’ The proprietor of the Mad-House is M. Maillard, who practices the theories of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether, of whom the narrator is ignorant. To indite the reader into a sense of belief, Poe here sets the locale in a foreign element. Yet, as an American Southerner, he could easily have adopted his own native background. The names of the two gentlemen
in the title derive from the peculiarly American innovation of tarring and feathering: to strip a person naked for an indignant punishment, paint him with tar, cover him them with feathers, and finally run him out of the district. Tarring and feathering (although flax is substituted for the latter) are used in ‘Hop-Frog’ - in the most diabolical form. This story concludes with a double force. What the narrator is witnessing during his visit to the Maison de Santé is the reversal of the normal - by seeing the lunatics at large, while the keepers have been locked away. The keepers, at the end, finally break through to recapture the inmates. But a social study is also presented here. As the narrator escapes, ‘a perfect army of what I took to be Chimpanzees, Ourang-Outangs [a favourite animal with Poe], or big black baboon of the Cape of Good Hope’ dash into the asylum. This asylum could easily have been located in the South of the United States - at the time of slavery. This story was written hardly fifteen years before the first flair between the South and the North which resulted in the American Civil War. The story, as social history, may not seem humourous, but it is a crucial satire written in the form of a psychiatrical hoax. The general theme has appeared in other stories from ‘The Adventures of the German Student’ by Washington Irving (1783/1859) to its direct descendant, the 1919 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (which also owes something to Poe's ‘Murders in the Morgue’). The conclusion of this story is also reflected in the climaxing holocaust of Nathanael West's Day of the Locust.
‘I never knew any one as keenly alive to joke as the king was’ are the opening words to ‘Hop-Frog’. But this ‘good story of the joke kind’ soon twists itself into an enflamed vision of truly horrible tragedy. The ‘fool’ outfools his masters - in righteous judgment - and in a solution never imitated.
Both the long ‘Journal of Julius Rodman’ and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe's only novel, are serious efforts of fiction. But the ‘imp of the perverse’ within him wished each to be accepted as actuality. For this reason into each is imbued historical and
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scientific lore, all the better to associate each with actual events. In this sense, each is a presumed hoax. In Pym, Poe's Jonah-like voyage ‘toward the south’ - into the regions of ice fields at the lower end of the Earth - is but the initial starting point of latter-day adventures via space travel.
‘King Pest’ is a comedy of morbidity, in which two drunken tars find themselves in the London ‘during the chivalrous reign of the third Edward’ - during an epoch of ‘Plague!’ The tale recounts the events of the two seamen in an undertaker's cellar, invited to partake in a drinking bout with six ‘ghastly-looking’ creatures: His Grace the Arch Duke of Pest-Iferous, His Grace the Duke of Pest-Ilential, His Grace the Duke of Tem-Pest, Her Serene Highness the Arch Duchess of Ana-Pest, Queen Pest and King Pest the First. ‘Hint everything - assert nothing,’ Poe had written (‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’) - and ‘King Pest’ is but an impression which is far more vivid than any detailed story. Reading this tale is similar to the plunge into the visual orgy of the unnatural in Tod Browning's film, Freaks. Sans the macabre decor of Poe's story-telling here, there is no merrier or roisterous feast in any other short piece of fiction than in the Christmas party story by H.L. Mencken (1880/1956).
‘The Business Man’ presents Peter Proffit, who is ‘a business man’. ‘I am a methodical man,’ he adds. ‘Method is the thing after all.’ However, instead of any respectable profession, Proffit's business ventures are weirdly chosen - and described. Of the eight speculations in which he engages himself here, the one having the most comic turn is that of Cur-Spattering. In this, a dog (cur) is employed to spatter mud on a dandy's shoes. The dandy immediately looks around and sees a boot-blacker (Proffit) and has him shine his shoes for sixpence. This one business, however, did not last because: ‘It was only a minute's work, and then came the sixpence. This was moderately well for a time; in fact, I was not avaricious, but my dog was. I allowed him a third of the profit, but he was advised to insist upon half. This I couldn't stand, - so we quarrelled and parted.’ This is the type of wit displayed by one of America's greatest radio comedians, Fred Allen (1894/1956). He wrote his own material for his shows and once suggested a ‘new business’ - ‘making suttee’: ‘I have a dead Hindu lying around the place here. There are so many fire-eaters out of work just now that I have been afraid to kindle a blaze in the yard lest these brimestone munchers gobble up the flame before I can get the Hindu kindled. I think that a good pyre would be a business getter here at the moment. There are so many frozen street-walkers around that one of them would gladly leap into the flames posing as the Hindu's mistress.’ Webster defines ‘diddling’ as a hoax or swindle. Just below the title of ‘Diddling, Considered as One of the Exact Sciences’, Poe quotes:
In this amusing essay, Poe lists various ways of diddling - of committing frauds - on the general public. Whether or not Poe was the first to bring this to the readers’ attention, frauds (by whatever name) have been going on since the beginning of mankind (in the Garden of Eden) and continue today - in the same forms as expressed here by Poe. One of the frauds listed here was later used as a ‘domestic fraud’ in Life With Father by Clarence Day, Jr. (1874/1935), when Father has to pay out $20.00 on something which Mother says had cost nothing.
The austerity of ‘Four Beasts in One; The Homo-Cameleopard’ makes it a little gem. It is ‘a satirical fantasy of a more interesting order, in the form of a historical anecdote about a King of Antioch who, dressed as a “cameleopard”, roams the streets demanding and receiving worship of the people. The vulgarity and stupidity of the “idiots and madmen” who acclaim him is contrasted with
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the dignity of the lions, tigers and leopards who have been trained to act as valets to the unworthy humans. The appearance of the cameleopard, however, is too much for them. They revolt, eat some of their masters, and chase the King back to the hippodrome where he finds safety, and is given the wreath of victory in the foot-race. The narration is cast in the continuous present, which adds force to its contemptuous geniality, and the flavour is reminiscent of [Thomas] Carlyle [1795/1881]. This neglected story about the decency of beasts and the ignorant cruelty of men (two of the King's amusements are destroying temples and burning Jews) deserves a place in any selection of Poe's works’ (Julian Symons, The Tell-Tale Heart, 1978). It is another effort presenting Poe as the creator of black comedy.
‘Three Sundays in a Week’ is but a trifle, proving that there can be three Sundays in a single week when consideration is given to circumnavigating the world from west to east and from east to west and then comparing each excursion with the date ‘at home’. The word ‘dudgeon’ was much used by Poe and the expression in this essay, ‘in high dudgeon’, was also much used by W.C. Fields. No more than the recording of an incident, Poe includes in ‘A Tale of Jerusalem’ one hilarious, no matter how sparee, note in the expression ‘Holy Moses!’ ‘On the tenth day of the month Thammus, in the year of the world three thousand nine hundred and forty-one,’ several ‘sub-collectors of the offering, in the holy city of Jerusalem,’ lower a sheckles-laden basket down to the Roman soldiers, their ‘protectors’. In return, they retrieve the basket which is heaving with what they think is ‘a fatted calf from the pastures of Basham’ - only to discover upon closer examination that the basket holds ‘a hog of no common size’. Poe's satire is again used to excellent form in describing his ‘Philosophy of Furniture’. After mentioning several nations, Poe declares: ‘The Yankees alone are preposterous.... We have no aristocracy of blood, and having therefore as a natural, and indeed as an inevitable thing, fashioned for ourselves an aristocracy of dollars; the display of wealth has here to take the place and perform the office of the heraldic display in monarchial countries.’ The scathing satire of this piece on the modes of American architecture and interior decoration is even more apparent in the United States of today. Among the nations of the world, the United States is the infant - and has remained so. Instead of developing a History for herself, the populace of the
country merely ‘dressed itself out’ in infantile fashion - in the most garish but expensive style - doting on the novelty of kitsch. In a departure from his usual sustained, though fancied, form, in ‘Loss of Breath’ Poe ventures into the realm of what later were termed the stream of consciousness and the surreal. In an argument with his wife, Litdeton Barry loses his breath. Among his succeeding adventures, he is mistaken for ‘The mail-robber W -----’ and hanged in his stead. However, his loss of breath saves him from death. In attempting to write this tale, Poe was an apprentice leaving future masters behind. It is an example of his intuition stretching out its tenticles into the present day - and even, perhaps, beyond. Pierre Bon-Bon of ‘Bon-Bon’ ‘was a restaurateur of uncommon qualification’. And this - with the aid ‘of Monsseux’ and a series of hiccups - helps the hero to escape the devil bargaining for his soul - but escaping not far. That reason with its sharp sense of smell can sniff out an individual's character from his handwriting is the theme of ‘Autography’. The irony of this essay is even more pointed today, when Poe's fellow Americans have grown to be the most odour-conscious, the most odour-sensitive people in the world. Beginning in the America of the mid-1800s, a certain type of humour came to the fore: dialect humour - in recited or printed form. Today, it has lost much of its original flavour and is viewed only as a novelty left over from
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a by-gone day. For his story, ‘Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling’, Poe stooped to writing it in Irish dialect. ‘The Duc de l'Omelette’ is a comic aristocrat who escapes from the devil after a game of cards. A parodie view of duelling suffices for the background of ‘Mystification’.
The absurdities in ‘Never Bet the Devil Your Head: A Tale With a Moral’ deal with the life of Toby Dammit. He himself was not blamed for his vices. ‘They grew out of a personal defect in his mother. She did her best in the way of flogging him while an infant - for duties to her well-regulated mind were always pleasures, and besides, like tough steaks, or the modern Greek olive trees, are invariably far better for beating - but, poor woman! she had the misfortune to be left-handed, and a child flogged left-handedly had better be left unflogged. The world revolves from right to left. It will not do to whip a baby from left to right. If each blow in the proper direction drives an evil propensity out, it follows that every thump in an opposite one knocks its quota of wickedness in.’
Spanking is also introduced at the beginning of the life of the narrator of ‘I Learn Something About Sex’ - by Corey Ford, who also wrote under the name of John Riddell (1901/1969): ‘In fact my first impression upon opening my eyes on the world was of being dangled unceremoniously upside down by the heels, while the family doctor spanked me repeatedly with his open palm. It seemed to me even then this spanking business was starting pretty early, and I objected in my childish trouble. “Hey, what the hell?” I pipid. “Rockaby, baby,” replied the doctor kindly, seizing my ankles and slamming me against the mattress until I was red in the face.’ The most absurd portions of Dammit's existence can be compared with the more abstract delineations of Old Tom, the common housefly, in W.C. Fields' ‘How to Succeed in Business’ (Fields for President, 1940).
The combined themes of ‘love at first sight’ and being too proud to wear glasses make ‘The Spectacles’ a tale of comic adventure - if only a dire one. The hero, with his affliction of weak eyes, falls in love with a woman whom he eventually marries - only to discover that in reality she is his great-great-grandmother. This story with its reversal of age brings to mind F. Scott Fitzgerald's ‘Curious Case of Benj amine Button’, with Button being ‘an old man apparently about seventy years of age’ and continuing to live - backward. ‘The Sphinx’ is a slight tale to be included in the same general category, for it comprises itself solely of the singularity of illusion - of an opposite nature than the image of Jiminy Cricket reflected in Monstro's hugh eye in Walt Disney's Pinocchio. (The ‘background images’ - shadows, for instance - in Disney animated films have a Poe-like grotesqueness.) During his life, Poe was unkindly used by newspaper and periodical editors. So, it is not surprising that, when opportunity afforded itself, he ‘hit back’ - and always with his rapier-pointed satire. ‘The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq. (Late Editor of the “Goosetherumfoodle”)’ reflects the manner of the editors of his day - those rejecting lines from Shakespeare, Homer, Milton or Dante, but printing the most conspicuously bad trash written by flattering contributors. Thingum Bob's father ‘stood for many years at the summit of his profession, which was a merchant-barber, in the city of Smug.’
Thingum Bob's ‘first attempts at composition’ resulted from a survey ‘of an old book-stall,’ getting together ‘several antique and altogether unknown or forgotten volumes.... From one of these, which purported to be a translation of one Dante's “Inferno”, I copied with remarkable neatness a long passage about a man named Ugolino, who had a parcel of brats. From another, which contained a good many old plays by some person whose name I forget, I extracted in the same manner, and
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with the same care, a great number of lines about “angels” and “ministers saying grace”, and “goblins damned”, and more besides of that sort. From a third, which was the composition of some blind man or other, either a Greek or a Choctaw - I cannot be at the pains of remembering every trifle exactly - I took about fifty verses beginning with “Achilles’ wrath”, and “grease”, and something else. From a fourth, which I recollect was also the work of a blind man, I selected a page or two all about “hail” and “holy light”; and although a blind man had no business to write about light, still the verses were sufficiently good in their way.’ This effort was sent to four magazines, which gave it ‘the coup-de-grace (as they say in France) to my nascent hopes, (as they say in the city of the transcendantals [Boston]).’ He continues: ‘The result of my experiment with the old books convinced me, in the first place, that “honesty is the best policy,” and, in the second, that if I could not write better than Mr. Dante, and the two blind men, and the rest of the old set, it would, at least, be a difficult matter to write worse. I took heart, therefore, and determined to prosecute the “entirely original”.... What I wrote is unnecessary to say. The style! - that was the thing... and I am giving you a specimen of it now.’
‘X-ing a Paragrab’ is a delightful descent into the mealstrom of pure humour. The city of Alexander-the-Great-o-nopolis had had but one newspaper before a second editor arrived to rival it. His initial editorial was composed of a number of words prefaced with ‘Oh’ - to the degree that the first editor commented: ‘We really do not believe the vagabond can write a word that hasn't an o in it.... O! it is pitiful.’ Upon consultation with himself, the second editor finally decided to stand his ground and insisted that he should not waver from this verbal threat. He would write a stunning editorial - with almost every word containing an o. This began: ‘So ho, John, how now? Told you so, you know. Don't crow, another time, before you're out of the woods!...’ This was duly handed to ‘the devil in waiting’, the newspaper's boy who set manuscript up in type. But, to his horror, he discovered that neither capital O nor lowercase o was in his case. As ‘x is rather the most superabundant letter in the cases’ and as lx is adopted as a substitute’ for any deficiency, x replaced o. And the next morning, the populace of Nopolis were ‘taken all aback’ by reading: ‘Sx hx, Jxhn, hxw nxw? Txld yxu sx, yxu knxw. Dxn't crxw, anxther time, befxre yxu're xut xf the wxxds!...’ Called from ‘an X-cellent joke’ to ‘in-X-plicable,’ it was added: ‘X, everyone knew was an unknown quantity, but in this case... there was an unknown quantity of X.’
‘“Thou Art the Man”’ is included in the humourous by Poe, yet it also is a detective story - both in the physical sense and in the literary. To be precise about all things, Poe here draws attention to the phrase ‘cui bono’ - saying that this simple Latin phrase is ‘invariably mistranslated and misconceived,’ adding: ‘“Cui bono,” in all the crack novels and elsewhere, - in those of Mrs. Gore, for example, (the author of “Cecil”,) a lady who quotes all tongues from the Caldean to Chickasaw, and is helped to her learning, “as needed,” upon a systematic plan, by Mr. Beckford, - in all the crack novels, I say, from those of Bulwer and Dickens to those of Turnapenny and Ainsworth, the two little Latin words cui bono are rendered “to what purpose,” or (as if quo bono) “to what good”. Their true meaning, nevertheless, is “for whose advantage” [and] is a purely legal phrase....’ That Poe connects William Beckford, author of Vathek, to Mrs. Gore is pertinent in his analysis of contemporary literature. Her Cecil, or The Adventures of a Coxcomb caused a sensation in 1841. It displays intimate knowledge of London clubs which she owed to Beckford. He also aided her in the 1844 novel, Agathonia. Although
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Poe cited this literary liaison nearly a century before, such points were not brought out in the 1930 bibliography of Beckford's work by Guy Chapman. As a detective story, ‘“Thou Art the Man”’ depicts two ‘firsts’. Poe has the true murderer strew false clues to convict an innocent man. And - again nearly a hundred years before a certain method in the science of criminology was accepted - he brings proof of the murder's guilt by examining two bullets - showing that each bullet was fired from the same gun by the identical marks the bore left on each.
In ‘“Thou Art the Man”’, Poe resorts to actual names of authors and books. Yet, to add credence to some of his stories, he would, with humourous intent, record authors and books from a non-existent world - such as Professor Rubadub and Mynheer Superbus Von Underduk and referring to page 176 of a ‘somewhat ingenious little book, whose title page runs thus: - “L'Homme dans la lvne, ou le Voyage Chimerique fait au Monde de la Lvne, nouuellement decouuert par Dominique Gonzales, Aduanturier Espagnol, autremet dit le Courier volant. Mis en notre langve par J.B.A. Paris, chez Francois Piot, pres la Fontaine de Saint Benoist. Et chez J. Goignard, au premier pilier de la grand’ salle du Palais, proche les Consultations, mdcxlviii.’ Such names are from ‘Hans Pfaall’. No thought of added credence crossed Bob Benchley's mind when he, too, included titles and authors in his work - such as ‘“The Plumber's Garden: How and When to Plant” [from] The Plumbing Age’ and a quotation from page 233 of Greitz's ‘Untersuchungen und Gesellschaftsbiologie’ (from ‘Gardening Notes’, The Bedside Marnier or No More Nightmares).
Although ‘The Angel of the Odd’ speaks with a decided German accent, this ‘personage nondescript’ is similar in portrait to the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz books by Frank Baum (1856/1919). This story is singularly Poe's, whose narrator at one point decides to commit suicide by drowning. ‘Here, diverting myself of my clothes (for there is no reason why we cannot die as we were born,) I threw myself headlong into the current,’ he says of himself. However, his suicidal design is quickly detracted by ‘a solitary crow that had been seduced into the eating of brandy-saturated corn’ and flew ‘away with the most indispensable portion of my apparel.’ So detracted, and slipping upon his naked body only his coat, he chases the crow to retrieve the rest of his clothing. This dream-tale closes with the narrator tumbling ‘headlong down the ample chimney’ and alighting ‘upon the dining-room hearth’ - closely resembling the cyclone's course with Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.
Poe's inner belief in his fellow man is explicitly expounded in ‘Some Words With a Mummy’: ‘...as for Progress, it was at one time quite a nuisance, but it never progressed.’ (A similar sentiment is voiced by Will Cuppy (1884/1949) in his ‘A Short History of Man: The Modern Man’: ‘The Modern Man, or Nervous Wreck, is the highest of all Mammals because anyone can see that he is. There are about two billion Modern Men, or too many. The Modern Man's highly developed brain has made him what he is and you know what he is.... All Modern Men are descended from a Wormlike Creature, but it shows more on some people.’) The unwrapping of a mummy and bringing it back to life by means of electricity is basically told in a sombre tone. However, the verberations within the tale are both comic and ironically true of a world seen in its true light. What happened to an immidiately deceased Egyptian is described: ‘The brain it was customary to withdraw through the nose; the intestines through an incision in the side; the body was then shaved, washed, and salted; then laid aside for several weeks, when the operation of embalming, properly so called began’ - a true description of this practice in Ancient Egypt but also a description not far away from present-day
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brain-washing. Upon reviving, Count Allamistakeo, the mummy, proves to be anything than the average person immersed in the Wonderful World of Advertised Products, and, as an individual, demands of the eminent scientists who are present: ‘What am I to think of your standing quietly by and seeing me thus unhandsomely used? What am I to suppose by your permitting Tom, Dick and Harry to strip me of my coffin, and my clothes, in this wretchedly cold climate!’ - to which (in a comic touch of genius by Poe) ‘Mr. Gliddon replied at great length, in phonetics; and but for the deficiency of American printing-offices in hieroglyphical type, it would afford me much pleasure to record here, in the original, the whole of his excellent speech.’ The primary series of topics discussed between the eminent men and the mummy is the latter's reaction or opinion to such modern inventions and institutions which abounded in America in the mid-1800s. And, at the mention of each, Allamistakeo can honesdy say that such things in his day were superior. Poe's awareness of the public's pulse successfully brings this tale to its comic end. It was asked ‘if the Egyptian had comprehended at any period the manufacture of either Ponnonner's lozenges, or Brandreth's pills’ - modern-day patent medicines. After the lofty comparisons of the magnificent, the mummy is here defeated: ‘We looked, with prolonged anxiety, for an answer; - but in vain. It was not forthcoming. The Egyptian blushed and hung down his head. Never was triumph more consummate; never was defeat borne with so ill a grace. Indeed, I could not endure the spectacle of the poor Mummy's mortification. I reached my hat, bowed to him stiffly, and took leave.’ Yet it is at the first sign of the mummy's resurrection that a sentence from Poe is commemorated in a latter-day humourist's story. The mummy ‘first drew up its right knee... and then,
straightening the limb with inconceivable force, bestowed a kick upon Doctor Ponnonner, which had the effect of discharging that gendeman, like an arrow form a catapult, through a window into the street below’ - a similar fate befalling Jack (‘Pal’) Smurch in James Thurber's ‘Greatest Man in the World’, but a fate purposedly administered from his ninth-floor hotel window. Too, another American humourist wrote about Words With a Mummy - when Don Marquis (1878/1937) has his cockroach, archy, addressing a royal Egyptian in a New York museum in one of archy's pieces of ‘vers libre’.
The locale for ‘The Devil in the Belfry’ is ‘the Dutch borough of Vondervotteimittis’ and is only a scanty pastiche. Two of Poe's ‘good Dutch’ word-names used here are ‘Donder and Blitzen!’ - each neady borrowed from ‘The Night Before Christmas’ (or ‘A Visit From Saint Nicholas’), the Clement Clarke Moore poem first published in 1823 and in which St. Nicholas calls his eight reindeer, the last two being Donder and Blitzen. Poe was a Southern gendeman and, as such, believed in slavery and fully appreciated the social gap between white and black. Could he, in this tale, be reporting on a disagreeable condition, to him: the difference between the methodical music of the whites (and Poe was logical) and the seemingly inane and purposeless ‘noise-maker gabber’ of black music? If so, then in this tale he gives a foretaste of American jazz.
In ‘The Man That Was Used Up’, Poe introduces ‘the man’ in this fashion: ‘I cannot just now remember when or where I first made the acquaintance of that truly fine-looking fellow, Brevet Brigadier General John A.B.C. Smith. Some one did introduce me to the gentleman, I am sure - at some public meeting, I know very well - held about something of great importance, no doubt - at some place or other, I feel convinced, - whose name I have unaccountably forgotten.’ In this introduction to both the story and ‘the man’, Poe summarizes the general capability of the average person of his or any day. John Smith
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is the most common name in America and solicits no illusion as to the individuality of any person. And a-b-c is no more than the rudimentary precepts of any general knowledge - and nothing more. At the outset, Poe's General is described as the very personification of Apollo and ‘the hero of the Bugaboo and Kickapoo campaign’. (Poe here cleverly interweaves ‘fact’ and fantasy: ‘...we are a wonderful people, and live in a wonderful age. Parachutes and railroads - man-traps and spring-guns! Our steam boats are upon every sea, and the Nassau balloon packet is about to run regular trips (fare either way only twenty pounds sterling) between London and Timbuctoo.’ In American slang, Bugaboo is nothing more or less than an irritating inanity. Kickapoo - a favourite word with Poe - was an actual tribe of North American Indians. However, this name also became part of the slang, expressing an almost mythical person or people as similarly placed as in Timbuctoo, a name in American slang indicating a location as remote as beyond our solar system. Poe brought forth from existing names the average man of his story. In doing so, he added nothing to the American vocabulary. (The embodiment of the average man of the twentieth century did make a name for himself: ‘a business or professional man who conforms unthinkingly to prevailing middle-class standards.’ This is Webster's definition for ‘Babbitt’ - or George F. Babbitt, the character invented by Sinclair Lewis for his Babbitt, 1922.) What Poe actually satirizes in this story is not any one particular person but Everyman. Although the type existed in his day - more than a hundred years ago - Poe portrays ‘the man’ who today is the result of man-made products to enhance his ‘beauty’ and/or ‘manliness’ with products, even if meaningless in themselves, which are
advertised in the mass media of the present environment. At the story's end, it is learned that ‘the man’ had truly been ‘used up’ and that almost all of him is artificial - his limbs, teeth, hair, one eye and even laranyx. To split Poe's General into two people, this story may have inspired Nathanael West to cast the General in both his more enduring but cunning Shagpole Whipple and Lemuel Pitkin, ‘the man who was used up’ in A Cool Million. Also, Poe is not mocking the pretensions of any single person but, rather, the modern delight in artificial substitutes - or ‘ersatzmania’.
In 1840, Poe added a Note to ‘Hans Pfaall’, saying that ‘some New York papers... collated it with the “Moon-Hoax” [or “Moon-Story” of Mr. Locke].’ And in the last year of his life, he prepared a final hoax: ‘Von Kempelen and His Discovery’. Inspired by the 1849 gold rush to the West Coast, Poe, as if presenting a scientific paper, here recounts that Baron Wolfgang Von Kempelen, in Bremen, truly discovered the philosopher's stone which turns lead into gold - thus reducing the value of the precious metal dug out of the soil in California. With Von Kempelen's discovery, it is declared ‘that beyond its intrinsic worth for manufacturing purposes... gold now is, or at least soon will be... of no greater value than lead’ - the story closing with these ironic words: ‘In Europe, as yet, the most noticeable results have been a rise of two hundred per cent in the price of lead, and nearly twenty-five per cent in that of silver [which is usually found with lead in mining].’ Poe had already exposed Von Kempelen in his ‘Maelzel's Chess-Player’ - which is itself a kind of hoax. Perhaps the best known of Poe's tales is ‘The Gold Bug,’ the finest of all treasure-hunt stories. As an editor at one time, Poe welcomed from readers cryptograms to be solved by him. Deluged with them, he was able to fathom each one - remaining undefeated in this Sphere of Logic.
Cryptography is put into use in ‘The Gold Bug’ and its fascination increases the enjoyment of the story. One other ingredient in this tale which is appealing is the totally fresh use of humour - a natural humour of
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itself and not meant to be the pivet of the story. Poe never improved on ‘The Gold Bug’ for this sort of subtle innovation. Elsewhere he punned or used a comic motif closer to his own day or used humour as a literary method to stretch the ridiculous to the horrible. But the casual play-upon-words in ‘The Gold Bug’ is to be found nowhere else in his work. The narrator is speaking to Legrand about a gold bug which had been loaned to a third party that day. Legrand replies: ‘Stay here to-night, and I will send Jup down for it at sunrise. It is the loveliest thing in creation!’ ‘What? - sunrise?’ asks the narrator. ‘Nonsense! no! - the bug,’ is Legrand's response. Once out on the treasure hunt, Legrand's negro servant, Jupiter, has to climb a tree and seek out a skull on one of the limbs. He has then to drop the gold bug, attached to a string, through the skull's left eye. Up in the tree, when told to look for the skull's left eye, he exclaims: ‘Hum! hoo! dat's good! why dare ain't no eye left at all.’ In his day, this humour was spontaneously written - and read - and imitated throughout the years which followed. In its total climax, it can be found in the zany dialogue of the Marx Brothers.
(In ‘How to Become a Great Writer’, his humourously slanted report on Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes, Alva Johnston relates how Tarzan, as an adult, first learned to read. He ‘had discovered in a deserted cabin a number of kindergarten books’ and in one found a picture resembling himself and captioned with ‘three little bugs - B, O and Y.... Using these three bugs, Tarzan works out a secret of all the twenty-six Bugs in the alphabet. He learns written English without knowing how to pronounce it. Burroughs' handling of Tarzan's self-education is better than the cipher sequences in “The Gold Bug” or “The Dancing Men” [of Sherlock Holmes].’)
Poe easily could have become a writer for humourous solo comedians. This is depicted no stronger in any other story than in
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‘Lionizing’. This, in itself, could have been recited by W.C. Fields and, if the source were unknown, could have been declared his own work. Fields was noted for his bulbous nose and his thirst, and this story can be imagined in a person's mind as being read in the nasal twang which was part of Fields’ humour. The second and third paragraphs of the story alone can conjure up the Fields known for his work in Hollywood: ‘The first action of my life was the taking hold of my nose with both hands. My mother saw this and called me a genius: - my father wept for joy and presented me with a treatise on Nosology. This I mastered before I was breeched. I now began to feel my way in the science, and soon came to understand that, provided a man had a nose sufficiently conspicuous, he might, by merely following it, arrive at Lionship. But my attention was not confined to theories alone. Every morning I gave my proboscis a couple of pulls and swallowed a half dozen of drams.’ (Fields was also an accomplished juggler. In this, he can also be compared with Poe in an indirect from. Poe's more lurid stories - as Paganini's music - were linked with Satan. William of Parifc (1180/1249) once asserted that juggling was so complex an art that it only could be performed with the aid of demons.) In ‘Lionizing’, Poe uses an exchange of dialogue and action which equals the very best of Robert Benchley (1889/1945), one of the great American humour writers. In this story, the hero's father asks him what ‘is the chief end of your existence?’ - to which he replies: Nosology or the Science of Noses. This he begins to explain: ‘“A nose, my father,” I replied, greatly softened, “has been variously defined by about a thousand different authors.” (Here I pulled out my watch.) “It is now noon or thereabouts - we shall have the time to get through with them all before midnight. To
commence then: - The nose, according to Bartholinus, is that protuberance - that bump - that excrescence - that - ” “Will do, Robert,” interrupted the good old gentleman. “I am thunderstruck at the extent of your information - I am positively - upon my soul.” (Here he closed his eyes and placed his hand upon his heart.) “Come here!” (Here he took my arm.) “Your education may now be considered as finished - it is high time you should scuffle for yourself - and cannot do a better thing than merely follow your nose - so - so - so - ” (Here he kicked me down stairs and out of the door.) - “so get out of my house, and God bless you!”’ In Bob Benchley's classic, ‘The Treasurer's Report’, the nervous speaker is addressing an audience as a replacement for ‘Mr. Rossiter, unfortunately our treasurer - or rather Mr. Rossister our treasurer [who] unfortunately is confined at his home tonight with a bad head cold.... Well, the joke seems to be on me! Mr. Rossiter has pneumonia!’ And, during his report, he mentions ‘a dear little old lady, dressed all in lavender,’ who came up on the platform after the previous year's report, saying: ‘“Mr. So-and-So (calling me by name) Mr. So-and-So, what the hell did you do with all the money we gave you last year?” Well, I just laughed and pushed her off the platform...’
Poe was an avid student of contemporary literary trends specially of the British periodical, which, in form and scope, far outweighed anything published in the ‘new’ America. To satirize any such institution was a temptation not to miss. Two of his tales which are interlinked and have to be read together are ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’ and ‘A Predicament’ - through which roams the Signora Psyche Zenobia, p.r.e.t.t.y.b.l.e.u.b.a.t.c.h. - for she is secretary to the Philadelphia, Regular, Exchange, Tea, Total, Young, Belles, Letters, Universal, Experimental, Bibliographical Association, to Civilize, Humanity. (Does this make Poe the inventor of the acronym?) (In the first tale, Poe speaks of ‘the s.d.u.k., Society for the Diffusion of Useful
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Knowledge,’ but has the Signora Zenobia say ‘that s stands for Stale, and that d.u.k spells duck (but it don't) and that s.d.u.k. stands for Stale Duck, and not for Lord Brougham's society’.) The most comic and most bizarre of Poe's output merges in this twin tale when the Signora Zenobia attempts to prepare an article for the periodical ‘in the good city of Edina’. She climbs a belfry with her negro, Pompey, and her poodle, Diana. Through an opening in one wall, she pushes her head. While she is ‘deeply absorbed in the heavenly scenery beneath me, I was startled by something very cold which pressed with a gentle pressure upon the back of my neck. It was needless to say that I was inexpressibly alarmed.’ Poe resorted to symbolism in his fiction and here, as in ‘The Devil in the Belfry’, the Devil - or Death - is represented by the clock's minute hand. And what is pressing into her neck is the minute hand of the belfry's clock - which eventually severs her head, which rolls down to the ground below. ‘With my head I imagine, at one time, that I the head, was the real Signora Psyche Zenobia - at another I felt convinced that myself, the body, was the proper identity.’ Thus, with head and body separated - in the cause of gaining a true perspective for a magazine article - she is now no more than a ‘Sweet creature! she too sacrificed herself.... Dogless, niggerless, headless, what now remains for the unhappy Signora Psyche Zenobia?’ This sort of surreal adventure - in all its crazy manifestations - was featured in the turn-of-this-century films of Georges Méliès - as well as in the nearfatal episodes in the Hollywood films starring Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy. But the comically bizarre substance of the Signora Zenobia's adventure rises to
a peak when the minute hand ‘had buried itself two inches in my neck.... I prayed for death, and, in the agony of the moment, could not helping repeating those exquisite verses of Miguel De Cervantes:
Vanny Buren, tan es codida
Pork and pleasure, delly marry
Nommy, torny, darry widdy.’
These completely nonsensical lines can favourably be compared with others of the exact nature - in the song Charlie Chaplin sings in Modern Times:
Gi la tour la tour la twa.
The forte of the humourist is to provide an assumption that something may be done immediately to save men from themselves. Satire and irony, two aspects of humour, do this by acting as mirrors, reflecting the image of men and showing them what they are. Each, then, at least prepares man's ‘salvation’ - if only, in that reflection, causing a temporary release from the immediate. Poe, so desperately and personally bound by the intricacies of tragedy, attempted to produce a release from any such turbulences within his fellow men which haunted him - by doing so in whatever way his mental attributes could perform. And, in doing just this, he may have found a certain immediate release himself from the pressures encumbering him. ‘Satire, professedly such, at the present day, and especially by an American writer, is a welcome novelty indeed.’ These words were once written by Edgar Allan Poe - logical Poe, inventive Poe, comic Poe.
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