Tales of Mystery and Imagination

Book : Flame Tree Collectable Classics

by Edgar Allan Poe

Genres: Short Stories; Classics; Horror

Synopsis

Here is a collection of nine tales of the macabre and the supernatural from the acknowledged master of these genres.

They are:

• “The Black Cat”
• “The Tell-Tale Heart”
• “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”
• “The Premature Burial”
• “The Pit and the Pendulum”
• “The Cask of Amontillado”
• “The Oval Portrait”
• “Berenice”
• “Ligeia”

Public Domain (P)2016 Spiders' House Audio/Roy Macready

Release date: April 26, 2012

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

EDGAR POE was born in 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts. The second of three children, his parents were both actors. In 1810 Poe’s father abandons the family and in 1811 his mother dies. The children are separated with Poe going to live with the Allan family. In 1815 the Allans take Poe to England, returning to Richmond, Virginia in 1820. In 1827, after a brief period at University, Poe enlists in the US Army. In the same year Tamerlane and other Poems is published in an edition of fifty copies. In 1830 Poe enters West Point Military Academy but is court-martialled in 1831. By this time John Allan has severed all links with Poe and ignored his pleas for financial help. Despite his poverty Poe is publishing some of his most famous tales. In 1834 Poe begins work for the Southern Literary Messenger and in 1836 marries his cousin, Virginia Clemm, just before her fourteenth birthday. In the same year he completes over eighty reviews for the Messenger. Poe moves to New York and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is published in 1838. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque is published in 1839. In the preface Poe declares that the ‘terror is not of Germany, but of the soul’. ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ is published in 1841, the first of the ‘tales of ratiocination’. In 1842 Poe’s wife almost dies and he continues to be in financial difficulties, although he is increasingly recognised as a significant writer. In 1844 he carries out the ‘Balloon Hoax’ – a spoof article on the supposed crossing of the Atlantic by balloon. 1845 sees the publication of the poem ‘The Raven’ – an immediate popular success. By 1846 Poe is ill, depressed, and again in financial straits. His wife is also ill and dies in 1847. Although weakened by ill-health Poe begins Eureka which is published in 1848. 1849 sees him engaged to a childhood sweetheart, but in the same year he visits Baltimore where, after disappearing for several days, he is found delirious and ill. He dies from ‘congestion of the brain’ on 7 October.

GRAHAM CLARKE is Professor of Photography and Visual Studies at the University of Kent. He is the author of Walt Whitman – The Poem as Private History, The Photograph: A Visual and Critical History, and Alfred Stieglitz. He is also the editor of numerous books including The American City: Literary and Cultural Perspectives, The New American Writing, The American Landscape, The Portrait in Photography, and Critical Assessments on Edgar Allan Poe.



Edgar Allan Poe remains an endlessly elusive and problematic writer. The critical response to his work, for example, is as varied as the meaning assigned to his stories. Mark Twain found him ‘unreadable’, T. S. Eliot ‘slipshod’ and William Carlos Williams ‘a genius’; while Henry James felt that ‘an enthusiasm’ for him was ‘the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection’. And yet despite the negative judgements Poe remains both a remarkably popular and a remarkably influential writer. If he is most widely known for the so-called gothic’ horror stories, he is also the author of a science fiction which anticipates Jules Verne and H. G. Wells; of detective stories (the ‘tales of ratiocination’) which, in the figure of Inspector Dupin, precede Sherlock Holmes and the later urban crime thriller; and of satirical sketches and parodies which reveal significant social and cultural criticism. In addition, his poetry (including the prose-poem ‘Eureka’) lies behind Baudelaire and the French Symbolist poets (and, in turn, T. S. Eliot), and aspects of his fiction can be found in, for example, the writings of Borges, Nabokov and William Burroughs. All this from a figure who belongs as much to romanticism as he does to modernism (and post-modernism) and whose stories, despite the body of exegesis devoted to them, remain, like his critical position, both cryptic and shifting in their suggestive ambiguity and paradox.

And the stories are his major achievement precisely because they remain so enigmatic and shifting in their meanings. Thus although Poe spoke of a ‘magazine literature’ based on ‘the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused’ rather than ‘the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible’, his stories, at their most intense, reveal an artistry and an internal unity similar to his American contemporaries, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. In his 1842 review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales Poe offers a view of the short story which is basic to his own writing. There the ‘prose tale’ is that ‘class of composition which, next to the poem’, can ‘best fulfil the demands of high genius’. The novel ‘is objectionable, for its length’ but the short story, because it takes ‘from a half-hour to one or two hours in its perusal’ allows for Poe’s central qualities: a ‘totality’ or ‘unity of effect’ gained from an uninterrupted reading in which every word, every detail is subordinate to the ‘pre-established design’. The effect, in turn, draws its power ( its ‘design’) from a ‘strong undercurrent of suggestion’: the ‘shadow’ and ‘glimpses’ of a seemingly unending compression of meaning characteristic of the tales – in brief, the density of their internal ambiguities.

Part of this effect (this density) must be related to Poe’s response to his contemporary America, a view which, he felt, based its faith on the myths of Western optimism and Manifest Destiny and sought an ideal community through a misplaced belief in the possibility of human progress. Stories such as ‘The Colloquy of Monos and Una’ and ‘Mellonta Tauta’ are openly satirical of a blind faith in science and of society’s ability to create earthly utopias. Some of this scepticism belongs to Poe’s Southern background – a cultural heritage which made him wary of New England, idealism and Western pragmatism, and which underlies the intensity of his alternative vision of America and the American psyche. In the stories Poe consistently inverts American myth and questions its beliefs. What, in Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau, is a transcendent land celebrated for its size, space, openness and newness – symbolic of an imaginative and spiritual potential which ‘dazzles the imagination’ – in Poe becomes the antithesis of hope and promise; a process in which the culture, and the psyche, is stripped of its myths and certainties, and where dream is invariably nightmare and the familiar is strange and alien.

Significantly, Poe’s direction was not West at all, but South. In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym the ship, like the narrative, is ‘pulled’ towards Antarctica – an ultimate (and compulsive) magnetic base for an alternative American consciousness. In going South rather than West Poe was invoking those very aspects of the American sensibility implicit in the structure of Southern slavery and violence before the Civil War. As Huck Finn was to discover, to go South was wholly distinct from the West. In Poe’s stories the direction is evidence of a fundamental alternative to the pragmatic and optimistic. It is, in brief, the underside of American myth – and a very different iconography of nineteenth-century America. This, perhaps, is behind Poe’s extraordinary fascination for today’s reader; for his mental landscape was one we would all now recognise as modern. Whether we accept it is, of course, another matter.

It is a paradox that the year of Poe’s death is also the year of the California Gold Rush, an event central to American culture at that time. It symbolically marked out California as the destiny of American promise and opportunity, echoed in Horace Greeley’s exhortation to ‘Go West’. In many ways the expansion of the Western frontier in the nineteenth century underpins the culture’s insistence on space and freedom. Equally it suggests how the promise of a democratic process based on opportunity and individual energy was also potentially founded on a corrupted, and inevitable, materialism. Poe foresaw this, as his poem ‘Eldorado’ suggests, but he also understood the implications for the idea of democracy in the United States.

In a culture which stressed the importance of individualism and, like Whitman, celebrated ‘the self’, Poe takes that self as one of his central subjects, but he inverts Whitman’s optimism over the ‘simple separate person’. To be individual in Poe is to be isolated, lonely and secluded; introverted states underlined and defined by the environments in which the stories take place. The physical space of the American continent gives way, as it were, to the internal space of the psyche where the only frontier is a provisional borderline between sanity and madness. As Poe’s narrators inhabit this internal and wholly individual space, so we are brought to a godless world in which the ‘natural’ gives way to the diseased and obsessive, an anti-world from which there is no release.

Light gives way to dark, day to night, hope to gloom and despair, and health to disease. Think, for example, of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, published only three years after that wholly different but quintessential text of the period, Emerson’s essay ‘Nature’. In Usher there is no optimism, no vocabulary capable of creating an alternative ‘natural’ world. The opening paragraph introduces us to an endlessly closed and dying environment from which there is no escape. ‘Dull’, ‘dark’, ‘dreary’, ‘melancholy’, ‘bleak’, ‘decayed’, ‘black’, ‘lurid’, ‘grey’, ‘ghastly’ create an atmosphere and feeling of ‘utter depression’, ‘insufferable gloom’ and ‘unredeemed dreariness’, an all-pervading sense of sentient decay. Thus, whereas in ‘Walden’ the pond is, for Thoreau, a symbol for the redeeming presence of God in an ever-sustaining natural world, in Usher we have only the black tarn which swallows everything into its negative depths and does so with what Allen Tate has called ‘the loss of the entire natural order of experience’.

Indeed, it is this loss which underlies the stories’ entry into their compulsive underworld. The characteristic settings declare the extent to which Poe invites us into psychological states which, like his houses, are suggested by enclosed, secluded and isolated interiors. As Poe moves from the open air into the closed and restricted, and from the public into the private, his stories create settings which, like his meanings, offer rooms within rooms and structures within structures. This is an essential part of the density and compression of effect in his writing. For the buildings in Poe are also expressions of a psychological environment: interiors which his narrators inhabit and through which they seek to define their states of consciousness and fractured identities. Perversely, such settings establish themselves as the proper domain of a Poe story: they are, paradoxically, the ‘natural’ habitat of both the psychic turmoil and experience which the stories evoke – much in the way Dracula could only move around at night. The house in Usher, the ‘haunted palace’ of a diseased mind, is labyrinthine in its construction and has multiple meanings. Similarly in ‘William Wilson’ the house has ‘no end to its windings’ and is ‘incomprehensible’ in its ‘sub-divisions’. Once entered, we are told, ‘it was impossible at any given time, to say with certainty upon which of its two stories one happened to be. From each room to every other there were sure to be found three or four steps either in ascent or descent’. The description is appropriately emblematic of the way Poe’s stories proliferate meanings in a deceptive fictional space: the internal rooms (and ruminations) of Poe’s own unusual house of fiction.

‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ in this context is a central example, but the clue to its significance is a poem in the story that is easily missed – ‘The Haunted Palace’. What is described as ‘Once a fair and stately palace’ has fallen into ruin. But the ‘palace’ is not so much a building as a head. And each stage of the poem describes how, inevitably, the palace falls into decline – a head plagued with nightmares and memories of past experiences and deeds. The ‘Banner’ (hair), the ‘two luminous windows’ (eyes), the ‘fair palace door’ (mouth) with ‘pearl and ruby glowing’ (teeth and lips) constitute an ideal state, an ideal America, and ideal language.

But, as ever, ‘evil things’ have attacked this innocence so that now, when we look ‘Through the red-litten windows’, we see,

Vast forms that move fantastically

To a discordant melody,

While, like a rapid ghostly river,

Through the pale door,

A hideous throng rush out forever,

And laugh – but smile no more.

Look into the head and see a fantastic and disordered internal world expressed in terms of a language which itself can only be described as a ‘hideous throng’ of words and sounds. This is ‘The House of Usher’, the ‘mind’ of Poe, and the ‘language’ of his psychological landscape. Poe’s tales are invariably the articulation of the hidden, the secret, of the interiors of their narrators. There is an excessive tone, and equally an excessive honesty in everything that they say. Each Poe story creates, in the end, an archetypal ‘inscape’ of the mind.

Once inside this ‘house’ the movement of a Poe story is invariably inwards, as if it seeks a hidden centre (abyss, vortex, maelström) and cuts into the underside, the underground, of its psychic setting. Hence the sense of claustrophobia which is one of the stories’ remarkable effects: as if the language is moving even deeper into an increasingly restrictive area. The cellars, pits, rooms, catacombs, tunnels and chambers close in upon the narrators as they, like their victims, are cut off from an assumed world of light, air and human society: a fiction of locked doors, sealed cavities, bricked-up alcoves and premature burial. It is, I think, the insistent and compulsive presence of these environments which gives to their place within the stories a force more than symbolic. They are not simply expressions of the narrator’s mind; more often they suggest almost archetypal, if extreme, psychological states of dread and deeply private emotion. ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ is characteristic. We enter a ‘subterranean world of darkness’ which exists amidst ‘the blackness of darkness’, so impenetrable that it contains nothing of the ‘familiar’ world outside.

And this should alert us to how many of the stories are narrated in the first person as well as to the kinds of narrative voice the stories give us. Think, for example, of ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ where the voices speaking to us are nervous and extreme; grotesque personalities which, like the settings of the stories, ‘come upon’ us without warning. The individuality of these narrators is such that, invariably, they have reached the edge, the borders of their narrative territory. If they are mad the term is freed of any absolute meaning. As alienated outsiders they speak to us through ennui and paranoia and yet with an intensity which allows their stories to create an inner logic. As they continue, so the narrative voices exhaust themselves – disclosing secrets in a style held together through the tensions and anxieties of their neuroses. What is buried is uncovered, and what is hidden revealed as the ghosts and phobias come out of the cellars and corners of the Poe house of fiction.

The telling of the stories is paramount: the needful exposure and expelling of a tale. Indeed, the psychological impulse propels the stories into an unconscious world which we would probably rather choose not to inhabit. The narrators make public what is private and, in their often absurd, almost preposterous language, establish inner worlds of dread, desire, murder and death in a style which, like the settings, is as exhaustive and self-destructive as many of the stories’ conclusions. Like the ‘spirit of perverseness’ the narrative voice comes close to what Borges defined as ‘baroque’: that ‘style which deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its possibilities and borders on its own caricature’.

Poe’s short stories, then, establish a public space for a private mythology. We should remember ‘The Man of the Crowd’, not because we might want to ‘see’ him as an archetypal urban figure but because, perversely, he is the Poe hero and, potentially, the narrator of all the stories. He may be nameless and faceless on the outside, but on the inside are the untold stories after which we, as readers, follow; secrets ‘which do not permit themselves to be told’. ‘The Man of the Crowd’ is the supreme Poe subject – wandering aimlessly through the streets as custodian of the hidden, inner and secret narratives that we must know.

When Poe said that the ‘terror is not of Germany but of the soul’ he alerted us to the ‘real’ centre of his fiction and made the important distinction between gothic mechanism and theatre, and the form in which his narratives seek a language appropriate to their telling. If, as Allen Tate suggests, his ‘one great subject’ is ‘the disintegration of personality’ it is equally the finding of a language capable of bringing us the ‘Dark Night of sense’. We must not, however, in our efforts to determine the meaning of these stories, reduce them to the status of allegories. Rather, it seems to me, we should enter them obliquely and allow their rich and multiple suggestiveness to establish their ‘design’ upon us – the creation of a very special and ever-shifting fictive territory. Let, then, the telling begin; but we would do well to remember that Poe is the interminable hoaxer and that while he wrote some wonderful short stories he also told some excessively tall tales.

GRAHAM CLARKE

What say of it? what say of CONSCIENCE grim,That spectre in my path?

CHAMBERLAYNE’S Pharronida

Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation. This has been already too much an object for the scorn – for the horror – for the detestation of my race. To the uttermost regions of the globe have not the indignant winds bruited its unparalleled infamy? Oh, outcast of all outcasts most abandoned! – to the earth art thou not forever dead? to its honours, to its flowers, to its golden aspirations? – and a cloud, dense, dismal, and limitless, does it not hang eternally between thy hopes and heaven?

I would not, if I could, here or to-day, embody a record of my later years of unspeakable misery, and unpardonable crime. This epoch – these later years – took unto themselves a sudden elevation in turpitude, whose origin alone it is my present purpose to assign. Men usually grow base by degrees. From me, in an instant, all virtue dropped bodily as a mantle. From comparatively trivial wickedness I passed, with the stride of a giant, into more than the enormities of an Elah-Gabalus. What chance – what one event brought this evil thing to pass, bear with me while I relate. Death approaches; and the shadow which foreruns him has thrown a softening influence over my spirit. I long, in passing through the dim valley, for the sympathy – I had nearly said for the pity – of my fellow-men. I would fain have them believe that I have been, in some measure, the slave of circumstances beyond human control. I would wish them to seek out for me, in the details I am about to give, some little oasis of fatality amid a wilderness of error. I would have them allow – what they cannot refrain from allowing – that, although temptation may have erewhile existed as great, man was never thus, at least, tempted before – certainly, never thus fell. And is it therefore that he has never thus suffered? Have I not indeed been living in a dream? And am I not now dying a victim to the horror and the mystery of the wildest of all sublunary visions?

I am the descendant of a race whose imaginative and easily excitable temperament has at all times rendered them remarkable; and, in my earliest infancy, I gave evidence of having fully inherited the family character. As I advanced in years it was more strongly developed; becoming, for many reasons, a cause of serious disquietude to my friends, and of positive injury to myself. I grew self-willed, addicted to the wildest caprices, and a prey to the most ungovernable passions. Weak-minded, and beset with constitutional infirmities akin to my own, my parents could do but little to check the evil propensities which distinguished me. Some feeble and ill-directed efforts resulted in complete failure on their part, and, of course, in total triumph on mine. Thenceforward my voice was a household law; and at an age when few children have abandoned their leading-strings, I was left to the guidance of my own will, and became, in all but name, the master of my own actions.

My earliest recollections of a school-life, are connected with a large, rambling, Elizabethan house, in a misty-looking village of England, where were a vast number of gigantic and gnarled trees, and where all the houses were excessively ancient. In truth, it was a dream-like and spirit-soothing place, that venerable old town. At this moment, in fancy, I feel the refreshing chilliness of its deeply-shadowed avenues, inhale the fragrance of its thousand shrubberies, and thrill anew with undefinable delight, at the deep hollow note of the church-bell, breaking, each hour, with sullen and sudden roar, upon the stillness of the dusky atmosphere in which the fretted Gothic steeple lay imbedded and asleep.

It gives me, perhaps, as much of pleasure as I can now in any manner experience, to dwell upon minute recollections of the school and its concerns. Steeped in misery as I am – misery, alas! only too real – I shall be pardoned for seeking relief, however slight and temporary, in the weakness of a few rambling details. These, moreover, utterly trivial, and even ridiculous in themselves, assume, to my fancy, adventitious importance, as connected with a period and a locality when and where I recognize the first ambiguous monitions of the destiny which afterwards so fully overshadowed me. Let me then remember.

The house, I have said, was old and irregular. The grounds were extensive, and a high and solid brick wall, topped with a bed of mortar and broken glass, encompassed the whole. This prison-like rampart formed the limit of our domain; beyond it we saw but thrice a week – once every Saturday afternoon, when, attended by two ushers, we were permitted to take brief walks in a body through some of the neighbouring fields – and twice during Sunday, when we were paraded in the same formal manner to the morning and evening service in the one church of the village. Of this church the principal of our school was pastor. With how deep a spirit of wonder and perplexity was I wont to regard him from our remote pew in the gallery, as, with step solemn and slow, he ascended the pulpit! This reverend man, with countenance so demurely benign, with robes so glossy and so clerically flowing, with wig so minutely powdered, so rigid and so vast, – could this be he who, of late, with sour visage, and in snuffy habiliments, administered, ferule in hand, the Draconian laws of the academy? Oh, gigantic paradox, too utterly monstrous for solution!

At an angle of the ponderous wall frowned a more ponderous gate. It was riveted and studded with iron bolts, and surmounted with jagged iron spikes. What impressions of deep awe did it inspire! It was never opened save for the three periodical egressions and ingressions already mentioned; then, in every creak of its mighty hinges, we found a plenitude of mystery – a world of matter for solemn remark, or for more solemn meditation.

The extensive enclosure was irregular in form, having many capacious recesses. Of these, three or four of the largest constituted the play-ground. It was level, and covered with fine hard gravel. I well remember it had no trees, nor benches, nor anything similar within it. Of course it was in the rear of the house. In front lay a small parterre, planted with box and other shrubs; but through this sacred division we passed only upon rare occasions indeed – such as a first advent to school or final departure thence, or perhaps, when a parent or friend having called for us, we joyfully took our way home for the Christmas or Midsummer holidays.

But the house! – how quaint an old building was this! – to me how veritably a place of enchantment! There was really no end to its windings – to its incomprehensible subdivisions. It was difficult at any given time, to say with certainty upon which of its two storeys one happened to be. From each room to every other there were sure to be found three or four steps either in ascent or descent. Then the lateral branches were innumerable – inconceivable – and so returning in upon themselves, that our most exact ideas in regard to the whole mansion were not very far different from those with which we pondered upon infinity. During the five years of my residence here, I was never able to ascertain with precision, in what remote locality lay the little sleeping apartment assigned to myself and some eighteen or twenty other scholars.

The school-room was the largest in the house – I could not help thinking, in the world. It was very long, narrow, and dismally low, with pointed Gothic windows and a ceiling of oak. In a remote and terror-inspiring angle was a square enclosure of eight or ten feet, comprising the sanctum, ‘during hours’, of our principal, the Reverend Dr Bransby. It was a solid structure, with massy door, sooner than open which in the absence of the ‘Dominie’, we would all have willingly perished by the peine forte et dure. In other angles were two other similar boxes, far less reverenced, indeed, but still greatly matters of awe. One of these was the pulpit of the ‘classical’ usher, one of the ‘English and mathematical’. Interspersed about the room, crossing and recrossing in endless irregularity, were innumerable benches and desks, black, ancient, and time-worn, piled desperately with much-bethumbed books, and so beseamed with initial letters, names at full length, grotesque figures, and other multiplied efforts of the knife, as to have entirely lost what little of original form might have been their portion in days long departed. A huge bucket with water stood at one extremity of the room, and a clock of stupendous dimensions at the other.

Encompassed by the massy walls of this venerable academy, I passed, yet not in tedium or disgust, the years of the third lustrum of my life. The teeming brain of childhood requires no external world of incident to occupy or amuse it; and the apparently dismal monotony of a school was replete with more intense excitement than my riper youth has derived from luxury, or my full manhood from crime. Yet I must believe that my first mental development had in it much of the uncommon – even much of the outré. Upon mankind at large the events of very early existence rarely leave in mature age any definite impression. All is grey shadow – a weak and irregular remembrance – an indistinct regathering of feeble pleasures and phantasmagoric pains. With me this is not so. In childhood I must have felt with the energy of a man what I now find stamped upon memory in lines as vivid, as deep, and as durable as the exergues of the Carthaginian medals.

Yet in fact – in the fact of the world’s view – how little was there to remember! The morning’s awakening, the nightly summons to bed; the connings, the recitations; the periodical half-holidays, and perambulations; the play-ground, with its broils, its pastimes, its intrigues; – these, by a mental sorcery long forgotten, were made to involve a wilderness of sensation, a world of rich incident, a universe of varied emotion, of excitement the most passionate and spirit-stirring. ‘Oh, le bon temps, que ce siècle de fer!’

In truth, the ardour, the enthusiasm, and the imperiousness of my disposition, soon rendered me a marked character among my schoolmates, and by slow, but natural gradations, gave me an ascendancy over all not greatly older than myself; – over all with a single exception. This exception was found in the person of a scholar, who, although no relation, bore the same Christian and surname as myself; – a circumstance, in fact, little remarkable; for, notwithstanding a noble descent, mine was one of those every-day appellations which seem, by prescriptive right, to have been, time out of mind, the common property of the mob. In this narrative I have therefore designated myself as William Wilson, – a fictitious title not very dissimilar to the real. My namesake alone, of those who in school phraseology constituted ‘our set’, presumed to compete with me in the studies of the class – in the sports and broils of the play-ground – to refuse implicit belief in my assertions, and submission to my will – indeed, to interfere with my arbitrary dictation in any respect whatsoever. If there is on earth a supreme and unqualified despotism, it is the despotism of a master mind in boyhood over the less energetic spirits of its companions.

Wilson’s rebellion was to me a source of the greatest embarrassment; – the more so as, in spite of the bravado with which in public I made a point of treating him and his pretensions, I secretly felt that I feared him, and could not help thinking the e