GoKawiilIdeas How to Talk About Murder Edgar Allan Poe’s stories are full of ghastly crimes, but the true horror lies in their confessions.
Harry Clarke, illustration for Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelström,” from the 1919 edition of Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Courtesy The Public Domain Review
In the summer of 1841, Edgar Allan Poe was a man on the rise. At the age of thirty-two, he was living in Philadelphia, where he worked as an editor at Graham’s magazine. Back then, Philadelphia was the magazine-publishing capital of the United States, and Graham’s was one of the nation’s most important illustrated monthlies. With a peak circulation of forty thousand—enormous for its time—Graham’s included tales, light essays, colored fashion plates, and reviews. As a literary editor, Poe provided reviews and, for an extra fee, tales as well. In those days, Poe was a respected reviewer and a fiction writer of growing reputation. He had published three poetry collections of small circulation, as well as a sea novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). His first collection of stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, had come out in 1839. Although Poe was a sought-after writer, it was not easy for him to make money. The idea that writing was a profession from which one could make a living was still new. It would not have seemed unusual to Poe’s contemporaries that the publishers of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque retained all profits from the seven hundred and fifty copies they printed. Poe got to keep the copyright and twenty free copies. Graham’s was one of the first places to compensate its editors and contributors well, and magazine publishing in general was beginning to pay better than book publishing. Poe had set his sights on magazine work. Reaching the relative eminence of Graham’s staff had not been easy. Orphaned at a young age, Poe had been raised in Richmond, Virginia, by a foster father who later disinherited him. Thrown back on his own resources, Poe struggled. At times, he was so impoverished that he could not clothe himself. Before he finally got into the magazine business, his checkered career included stints as a common soldier, as a student at West Point, and (rumor has it) as a bricklayer. Editing suited him better than other work he had tried, but even so, Poe was prone to imperiling his previous magazine positions through self-sabotage—and drinking. Now, at Graham’s, Poe had a steady job and a promising future. His friends must have been praying he’d be able to keep it. But Poe grew restless. He wanted to found his own magazine, as he had tried and failed to do before taking the job at Graham’s, a magazine he considered middlebrow. He particularly detested its fashion illustrations. In April 1842, after working at Graham’s for a little over a year, he quit, then carefully choreographed the launch of a new magazine he called The Stylus. By early 1843, he had secured a partner with capital to invest and had arranged for a lengthy biography of himself and a prospectus of The Stylus to run in the Philadelphia Saturday Museum, a local newspaper. The biography used truths, half truths, and lies to paint Poe as a poetic genius, an entrepreneur, and an athlete. Poe either wrote the biography himself or closely supervised its writing; his fingerprints are all over its most colorful incidents, such as a Byronic voyage to Greece to fight in the revolution (a fabrication) and a six-mile swim in the James River as a teenager (a true event and, as Poe or his ringer wrote, longer than Lord Byron’s more famous “paddle” across the Hellespont). The biography also exaggerated Poe’s magic touch as a periodicals editor. It claimed that he had drastically increased the circulation of The Southern Literary Messenger, a Richmond-based magazine where he had previously worked. This wasn’t true; the scholar Terence Whalen has shown that Poe was “essentially an irrelevant variable” when it came to the Messenger’s circulation. But Poe wanted to paint himself as a man with as much business acumen as taste, the ideal editor for the new Stylus. The piece concluded with a bulleted list of glowing blurbs on Poe from Nathaniel Hawthorne and other well-known authors, some of which came from private letters. Even as he devoted his energies to his magazine venture, Poe also needed to replace his Graham’s salary. His meager freelance fees would not cut it for long; as a matter of fact, he was already in debt. He hoped for a government sinecure, a light-duty political post that would cover his salary while he devoted his time to The Stylus. Such things were not unheard of; Hawthorne would later hold a position of this kind at the Salem Custom House, a position he immortalized in the preface to The Scarlet Letter. Poe had patiently worked his connections to President John Tyler, and in 1843 he went to Washington in hopes of meeting Robert Tyler, the president’s son. It was an unfortunate decision. Things went wrong from the beginning. Poe’s friend, who was to secure an introduction to Robert Tyler, was sick and could not take him around. Poe drank too much and made a fool of himself in public. He behaved so badly that one of his hosts, Jesse E. Dow, wrote to Poe’s business partner to say he’d better come get Poe and take him home. Dow didn’t think it was safe to put his friend on the train alone. The letter is strikingly compassionate toward Poe. “He does not understand the ways of politicians,” Dow wrote; “how should he?” Poe, he reflected, “has the highest order of intellect, and I cannot bear that he should be the sport of senseless creatures who, like oysters, keep sober, and gape and swallow everything.” In the end, Poe made it back on his own, but he never got the sinecure, and he failed to launch The Stylus. He later sent a letter of apology to his hosts in Washington. “Express to your wife my deep regret for the vexation I must have occasioned her,” he wrote to Dow, also asking him to stop at the barbershop and “pay for me a levy which I believe I owe.” Evidently, he had stooped so low as to insult someone’s facial hair: he instructed another friend to give his best to a person “whose mustachios I do admire after all.”
Alcohol clearly played a role in Poe’s disastrous Washington trip. When Poe was drunk, and sometimes even when he was sober, he would find himself acting against his own interests for reasons that were opaque to him. Poe could have been thinking of frailties like his own when, in his short stories “The Black Cat” (1843) and “The Imp of the Perverse” (1845), he wrote about what he called perverseness: the “unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself”—the mysterious desire he felt, and believed we all feel, to get in our own way. Perverseness, Poe thought, was as fundamental a drive as hunger or libido, with its own dedicated region of the brain. When we are perverse, we turn not only against our better judgment but also against what are apparently our desires. “The Imp of the Perverse” begins with an essay defining the concept and giving examples that range from the harmless to the unsettling; Poe classes as perverse both procrastination and the impulse to kill oneself by jumping from a great height. One of his illustrations is particularly telling: talking too much at a party. The incessant talker dreads angering his listener, and “yet, the thought strikes him, that by certain involutions and parentheses, this anger may be engendered. That single thought is enough. The impulse increases to a wish, the wish to a desire, the desire to an uncontrollable longing, and the longing (to the deep regret and mortification of the speaker, and in defiance of all consequences,) is indulged.” Simply because he can imagine destruction, the perverse person feels compelled to bring it about. He knows he shouldn’t—he sees what he is doing—but he does it anyway. It is tempting to use Poe’s anatomy of perverseness to understand his self-sabotage in Washington. He saw the destructive consequences of his actions. But he couldn’t stop. Central to the experience of perverseness is this sensation that our own actions are out of our control. Either we are in the middle of a destructive action we can’t seem to stop, or, illogical though it may seem, we are still trying to stop, or undo, the self-defeating thing we already did. The physical sensation of the perverse, as Poe notes, is an icy chill in the blood. I have felt this chill. When I realized, several days after the fact, that I had left my wallet on top of the car, then driven away, I could not quite recognize myself as the person who would have made this mistake, who did make it. The chill in my blood seemed to want to turn back time, to replay the moment and fix it, by seizing me with a horror so concentrated and so intense that I wouldn’t ever make the mistake again.
what poe called perverseness is akin to what another explorer of the world of our dreams, Sigmund Freud, would, some seventy years later, call the death drive. The two concepts circle around the same mystery: Why do we frustrate ourselves? For both Poe and Freud, dreams and dark fantasies were the key to understanding those desires we have in spite of ourselves. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud observes how his one-and-a-half-year-old grandson throws away the very toys he values. Freud calls the game fort/da because the little boy yells what sounds like fort, or gone, when he disappears the object, then cries da, or there, when it reappears. Freud puzzles over this self-defeating gesture until it occurs to him that, with his toys, the boy might be replaying his mother’s absence—an absence that threatens his survival—in order to master it. Such a compulsion to repeat unpleasurable experiences can “give the appearance of some ‘daemonic’ force at work,” Freud notes—something persecuting the self from outside. In fact, it’s only the ego, trying to gain ascendancy over what can harm it.
The avenues to the abyss are always opening on either side.
But Freud is not fully satisfied with his own explanation; he cannot shake the sense that the infant is elementally drawn to the destruction of himself and of his pleasure. A part of us wants not exactly to die, he theorizes, but to disorganize ourselves to the point of becoming mere matter: we carry in our very structure a memory of how, before there was life, there was only inanimate stuff. An imp in us wants to take apart our projects, our lives, our living molecules, until only atoms remain. We are perverse, Poe says, when “we stand upon the brink of a precipice.” As we stand there, a “cloud assumes shape.” And “out of this our cloud” comes a demon, or something more terrible than a demon, “and yet it is but a thought.” The thought is of ourselves falling forever and breaking. Conceptualization gets confused with desire: if I can think of jumping, it is as if I want to jump. The thought “chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror.” There at the bottom, we will be matter again, without the work of holding ourselves together. Freud’s idea is a strange one, hard to get right: the death drive is not so much a wish as a potential for dropping back down from animal to mineral, for becoming nothing again. Our perverseness is one way to explain a fact that has surprised thinkers at least since Aristotle: what would horrify human beings if it appeared in reality gives them pleasure if it appears in art. Everyone’s threshold is different; not everyone has the stomach for a gory movie. But it is sufficiently remarkable that many people do and that almost none of them are serial killers in real life. I watch vertigo-inducing scenes in movies, even though (or because) I am afraid of heights. When Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint cling to the faces of the fathers in the Mount Rushmore scene in North by Northwest, my palms sweat. Do I like these scenes? I don’t find them pleasing, but I do find them desirable; they draw me powerfully, even as they also make me want to look away. I am doing something here with my wish to jump—doing something other than acting on it or resisting it. But what? Aristotle’s famous answer is that painful emotions need to be purged from the body and that tragedy achieves this catharsis. Freud might have ventured that, by viewing horrifying art, I repeat and thus assimilate past injuries. He might say that what first appeared as trauma, experience I could not process, I now give to myself to reexperience in a less overwhelming form. As for Poe, he never directly answered the question of why a person would enjoy calamities in art. But he gave hints. One implication of the argument in “The Imp of the Perverse” is that human beings want destruction, plain and simple, just like they want food or sex. As with food or sex, the desire can be complicated with aversions; it can follow some extraordinarily winding roads. But at the last, there it is. One part of Poe wanted to destroy his Washington chances—not because he thought he deserved to lose the opportunity, not because he had some hang-up he had never worked out, and not even because he was drunk. He wanted to destroy his chances because destruction is, fundamentally and irremediably, one of the things that human beings like. Poe might say that we always want destruction—in life and in art—and in art we find that it is often allowed. Allowed, but not necessarily good for us. Poe did not demand that our play with destruction make us better people. He was staunchly opposed to the moralization of poetry. Poe was a sensationalist. He thought that art should put our bodies through their paces. It should remind us of what, for good and ill, we are.
Once Poe’s “The Imp of the Perverse” has defined its central term—perversion is the impulse that drives us to work against our interests and desires—the impersonal, theorizing voice becomes a narrator with a story of his own. The narrator, as he tells us, is a murderer who has committed the perfect crime. He killed his victim with a poisoned candle, a murder weapon that left no trace. When the investigation subsided and the case was closed, the narrator went out for a walk. He thought, “I am safe—I am safe—yes—if I be not fool enough to make open confession!” No sooner had this thought occurred to him than he felt compelled to shout his crime to everyone in earshot on the street. He was arrested and tried and, we now learn, will hang; the narrator is speaking to us from his cell, on the eve of his execution. The crime itself was not perverse, in Poe’s sense of self-sabotage, but this confession is: having nearly gotten away with the murder, just as Poe had nearly gotten away with his sinecure, the narrator will soon die for his crime. Perverseness will kill the theorist of the perverse.
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