X-ING A PARAGRAB (1849)

Like THINGUM BOB, this one is Poe's attempt to satirize the world of small magazines. Again, there are barely any "characters" worthy of the term, but the satire seems a little more acute. Still, the story is only interesting to those who want to know more about Poe's career in American periodicals.

THE SPHINX (1846)

In this trifle Poe returns to the image of the "death's head moth" that he'd used in THE GOLD BUG. An overly nervous and superstitious narrator, while staying in the company of a more level-headed, logical friend, imagines that he sees a huge monster. Eventually the friend explains how the narrator perceived this illusion, which came from viewing an ordinary moth with the death's-head image.

THE ANGEL OF THE ODD. THINGUM BOB, ESQ. (1844)

THE ANGEL OF THE ODD concerns a young fellow who disparages the power of odd coincidences to affect him. Then a weird-looking fellow appears out of nowhere, chastises the man for his anti-coincidence prejudice, and proceeds to make his life miserable until he mends his ways.

No one else in the story ever sees the Angel, rather like the alleged double of WILLIAM WILSON. Poe never raises the possibility that the narrator is only dreaming, but after the man is put through many wild ordeals-- falling out of a burning building, being suspended from a hot-air balloon-- it may not be "coincidence" that he ends up back into his own home-- supposedly completely rebuilt after the fire-- waking up from his experiences.

THINGUM BOB, ESQ is just a Poe-escapade satirizing the world of small literary magazines, and hardly rates as a story at all.

THE OBLONG BOX (1844)

The unnamed narrator of this story is sort of an anti-Dupin. On a sea-voyage, he notices some odd behavior in the party of a well-to-do man, who happens to have a large "oblong box" in his luggage. The narrator attempts to suss things out and comes to completely wrong conclusions. The truth only comes out because the ship takes on water and sinks, which causes the man with the oblong box to reveal its entirely mundane contents.

The title was the only thing the 1969 movie had in common with Poe.

THE PURLOINED LETTER (1844)

In the last of the M. Dupin stories, Poe is careful to have the narrator mention the detective's previous two cases, as if they were something every reader ought to know about. (Shades of Stan Lee's cult of continuity!)

The ingenious solution of the "purloined letter" is now so well that it needs no detailing here. Most of the story takes place in conversation, with Dupin making his usual pithy observations at the expense of unobservant mankind.

THE BALLOON-HOAX, A TALE OF THE RAGGED MOUNTAINS(1844)

Once again Poe tries his hand at using his ratiocinative talents to put across a hoax. But whereas "Hans Pfall" at least a few amusing moments, "Balloon-Hoax" is utterly mundane, "fantastic" only in terms that Poe couldn't know exactly what elements would be needed for a balloon-ship to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Forgettable in almost every way.

A TALE OF THE RAGGED MOUNTAINS, however, is definitely underrated "Marvelous Poe." An unnamed narrator describes his friendship with a fellow named Augustus Bedloe, whose entire body had become rather elongated due to his suffering from neuralgia. Bedloe has been treated for years by a private doctor, Templeton, who is a follower of the doctrines of Mesmer, though mesmerism seems to play no role in the story.

Bedloe disappears from Charlottesville, the city in which he and the narrator reside. When Bedloe shows up at last, he tells a story of having got lost in the neighboring mountain range, the Ragged Mountains. Bedloe tells his friend and his doctor that before going for a walk in the mountains, he had a breakfast of coffee and pain-killing morphine. He then stumbled across a city and took part in an armed conflict before finding himself alone again. Templeton believes that Bedloe experienced a flashback to an earlier life, when a man named Oldeb, an acquaintance of the doctor, died during a riot in Benares, India.  A little later, Bedloe perishes in a manner loosely similar to the fate of Oldeb, whose name is almost exactly the same.

There are strong parallels between this story and E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman," published in 1816.

THE SPECTACLES (1844)

"The Spectacles" is a moderately successful comedic romp, for all that it telegraphs its payoff. The protagonist is a young man named Simpson, who used to have a French name that somehow metamiorphosed over the years from Froissard to Voissard and so on. Simpson, extremely nearsighted but believing himself very handsome, will not wear eyeglasses that spoil his looks. Therefore, when he falls for what he believes to be a moderately aged woman, one can practically guess that she's going to be more than a little older than him. In fact, just to take the Oedipal elements to an absurd extreme, his would-be lover proves to be his own great-great-grandmother. Simple Simpson is also victimized by a prank into believing he's married the 82-year-old woman, but he gets the consolation of marrying a much younger woman for real-- apparently a cousin, to whom the grand-dame introduces him-- while vowing thereafter never to take off his new spectacles.

THE GOLD-BUG (1843)

This story involves two white guys and a black former slave hunting for treasure on an island off the coast of South Carolina. There are a few macabre touches, as with the titular bug, which seems to have a "death's head" on its back. Still, the story handles its mystery-solving elements in a thoroughly naturalistic manner, much like the latter two Dupin stories. Poe handles the flow of dialogue in this story better than any previous tale, though most readers, including myself, will find precious little humor in the language-mangling of the mush-mouthed ex-slave.

THE MYSTERY OF MARIE ROGET (1842)

Not that long ago, I re-read "Marie Roget," the second outing for detective M. Dupin, and I liked it so little that I didn't re-read it for this post.

Suffice to say, Poe tried to hype his fictional detective by having the character solve an analogue of a real-life murder case. This was not his strength and "Marie Roget" is thus one of Poe's weakest stories.

A SUCCESSION OF SUNDAYS (1841)

A young man, raised by his uncle after his parents pass, conceives a passion for his uncle's daughter (yes, another first cousin). The uncle, a born jokester, tells the fellow that he can get married when three consecutive Sundays transpire. The ending is clever if not actually funny, in which the young man solves his problem with the help of the International Date Line.

THE ISLAND OF THE FAY (1841)

This is an entirely naturalistic rumination. Poe's narrator observes an island in a stream, and imagines a faery creature pass from life to death as it rounds the island's light side and encounters its dark side. This opposition between innocence and death was better served in the more poetic SHADOW-- A PARABLE.

THE MAN OF THE CROWD (1840)

This is more of a vignette than a developed story, and its premise goes like this:

A bored people-watcher speculates for a while on the comings and goings of the denizens of his city. He spies one particular old gentleman, and decides to follow the fellow, and see where he goes. To the narrator's dismay, the old guy doesn't do anything but follow other people himself, constantly seeking to be associated with, though not to actually interact with, large crowds of people. Hence he is a "man of the crowd," as the narrator dubs the man upon giving up the project.

The story may have had more consequence in the 1840s than it does now, given that for many the experience of big-city American life was relatively a new phenomenon.

THE JOURNAL OF JULIUS RODMAN; PETER PENDULUM, THE BUSINESS MAN (1840)

It's not hard to figure out why Poe never finished THE JOURNAL OF JULIUS RODMAN, his abortive attempt to compete with the popular novels of Fenimore Cooper. Though Poe tries manfully to create the sense of a trailblazing expedition in the Western wilderness, it's all too evident that he's doing a novel in the form of a "research-dump," using extensive research to convey the illusion that the author knows what he's talking about. All the wordy discussions of forest-lore would be excusable if Poe had even one interesting character. But RODMAN stands in complete contrast to the fascinations of THE NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM.

On the other hand, though I've thought most of Poe's early humor-pieces completely worthless, PETER PENDULUM is an ingenious satire on egotists who use their supposed genius as an excuse to do nothing. The story deserves to be better known, even allowing for the dated nature of its 19th-century concerns.

LITTLE FRENCHMAN..., HOW TO WRITE/BLACKWOOD, DEVIL/BELFRY, MAN WHO WAS USED UP (1837-1838)

As arranged in the Running Press book, the next four Poe tales are all pretty humdrum humor-stories from the author.

"Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling" is little more than an excuse for Poe to indulge in dialect-humor, in which a boastful Irishman competes with a "little Frenchman" for a maiden's favor. Even if one didn't know the story's title, Poe telegraphs the story's "surprise" from a mile away.

"How to Write a Blackwood Article" is narrated by "Signora Psyche Zenobia," who gives a snarky account as to how a writer can sell short stories to the popular fiction magazine Blackwood's. In the original publication Poe this supposed instructional essay with one of the Signora's stories, "The Scythe of Time," in which Zenobia herself is beheaded by a giant clock-hand. Unlike the slightly later "Pit and the Pendulum" that contributed to Poe's notoreity, "Scythe" is presented as a tale that did not really take place, so that the paired narratives conform to the naturalistic phenomenality.

"The Devil in the Belfry" is a marvelous story in which a devilish being enters a Dutch community, one obsesses with orderliness, and upsets the citizens by causing a clock to strike thirteen o'clock. The satire probably worked better in 1838.

"The Man Who Was Used Up" is the only story with any substance. An unnamed narrator meets a famed war hero, A.B.C. Smith, at some party. The narrator is immediately fascinated with the man's physical comeliness-- indeed, in modern times readers would assume that the narrator has formed some sort of "man-crush," if not outright homosexual lust. But as the narrator hears strange rumors about Smith, he becomes consumed with curiosity. He finally seeks out Smith at the man's home, only to learn that the great war-hero has lost most of his natural body-parts to duels and battles with Indians. Smith's manservant has to put the "used up" hero together out of false legs, false arms, a false palate, etc. This too I rate as "naturalistic" even though it is certainly an exaggeration of what the prosthetics of the time could produce.

VON JUNG THE MYSTIFIC (1837)

VON JUNG-- published about 30 years prior to the birth of the most famous Jung in history-- is another of Poe's cerebral joke-tales that doesn't hold up too well these days.

One odd touch of the story is that Poe starts out by telling the reader about the "grotesquerie" of Von Jung's family, even though it has absolutely nothing to do with the story:

The Baron Ritzner von Jung was a noble Hungarian family, every member of which (at least as far back into antiquity as any certain records extend) was more or less remarkable for talent of some description—the majority for that species of grotesquerie in conception of which Tieck, a scion of the house, has given a vivid, although by no means the most vivid exemplifications.

The real focus of the tale is that the odd baron has a special talent:

The beauty, if I may so call it, of his art mystifique, lay in that consummate ability (resulting from an almost intuitive knowledge of human nature, and a most wonderful self-possession,) by means of which he never failed to make it appear that the drolleries he was occupied in bringing to a point, arose partly in spite, and partly in consequence of the laudable efforts he was making for their prevention, and for the preservation of the good order and dignity of Alma Mater.

The way Poe sets up the story, it almost sounds like Von Jung's "mystific" talent may have something to do with mesmerism, which became a big thing in France of the 1770s. However, it turns out that Von Jung's "knowledge of human nature" is simply an extremely well developed ability to know how to press people's buttons. The unnamed narrator, after presenting a catalogue of Von Jung's pranks at his Alma Mater, finishes up by telling how Von Jung managed to get away with insulting a fellow named Hermann, known for killing numerous tormentors in duels. The devious Von Jung does so by knowing how deeply Hermann is versed in the *code duello,* and so works a psychological trick that makes Hermann desist from a dueling-challenge on a technicality.

The main significance of this lightweight tale is that Von Jung may be seen as an anticipation of the author's detective-character M. Dupin, who boasts a similar talent for sussing out people's secrets through an understanding of basic psychology. Poe also presents the reader with a very grotesque description of Hermann, noting that the man has "a trunk worthy of a Farnesian Hercules"-- and though his build has nothing to do with the story, its inclusion suggests that this is something of a "brain beats brawn" tale.

On a minor note, the "Tieck" Poe mentions in the first quote was a well-known German author, whose work is largely unread today, though as the link points out, his vampire tale "Wake Not the Dead" predated Dr. Polidori's "The Vampyre,"and appeared in at least one paperback collection of horror stories, as well as being available in translated form online.

POLITIAN (1835)

POLITIAN is an unfinished play by Poe, set in 16th-century Rome. Early parts of the play appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger, but it failed to garner good notices so Poe never finished it.

I'm tempted to hypothesize that this was Poe's attempt to ape Shakespeare, given that the play's main action depends upon sexual jealousy among the elite classes. Main character Castiglione has become engaged to his cousin, which is probably less reflective of Poe's own tendencies than of a contemporary scandal during Poe's era. The main character also has apparently had some romantic interaction with his father's ward-- who would be his sister in a functional though not biological sense-- and this would seem to be the only relevance of the play for modern Poe-enthusiasts, as it's pretty bereft of either comic or dramatic interest.

The tome I'm using, Running Press' UNABRIDGED EDGAR ALLAN POE, next prints three Poe efforts that I consider to be more in the vein of "essays." I assume they were included because they bear on the way the author composed some of his hoax-stories, like HANS PFALL. I don't consider the three essays relevant to my project and so I'm skipping them.

LION-IZING: A TALE (1835)

This is another of Poe's overtly humorous tales, which means that many of its contemporary references went over my head. An over-educated young man becomes a "Doctor of Nosology," thanks to his own sizable proboscis. He enjoys being "lionized" by the literati until he fights a gun-duel with another man, and shoots the man's nose off. Somehow, this loses him all the acclaim he received before, for now his noseless victim is seen as a superior expert on Nosology.

About eight years later, Nathaniel Hawthorne published "The Celestial Railroad," which takes a similar satiric stab at 19th-century intellectual movements, but does so, IMO, with a more skillful sense of the ludicrous.

THE ASSIGNATION (1834)

With "The Assignation," Poe reverts back to the mode I've personally found so dissatisfying: the ironic know-it-all who tells some story that has neither sound nor fury, and still signifies nothing.

The tale's told by an unnamed bystander who witnesses a weird melodramatic incident in the canals of Venice. Somehow or other, an infant child is precipitated into one of the watercourses. The child's mother, known as "the Marchesa," watches in consternation as the servants of her husband, a powerful man named Mentoni, try and fail to locate the child before it freezes in the icy water. Somehow the servants can't seem to find the kid, and Mentoni, watching silently from a window, doesn't seem too concerned about the baby's fate. The narrator then sees a dashing young man dive into the water, unerringly dive into the water, and bring the living, though very damp, child back to its mother.  The incident seems to mean nothing, though the narrator befriends the young man, known as only "the stranger." The two men go back the latter's apartment, which is full of rare, precious art. Then the young fellow makes some wild pronouncements, drinks a glass of wine, and dies of poisoning-- just as a page serving the house runs in and announces that the Marchesa has also died of poison.

I got absolutely nothing out of this story but Poe's tedious need to show off his erudition, and though I presumed by the title alone that some indiscretion had been committed, the story gave me nothing to go on. The Internet rescued me with this essay, arguing that Poe was satirizing an allegedly biographical story by Thomas Moore. This sounds like the best possible solution, but knowing this doesn't make the story read any better.

In the comments-section of this online essay, a poster named Amper offers an even more intriguing reading: that the narrator is a hired gun, responsible for executing two clandestine lovers on the orders of the jealous Mentoni. If this could be conclusively demonstrated, then "The Assignation" would stand as a direct predecessor to the much more effective "Cask of Amontillado." But I still consider "Assignation" an artistically sterile exercise.

FOUR BEASTS IN ONE (1833)

Like "Tale of Jerusalem," this naturalistic tale is based on a bit of archaic lore. A narrator relates to the reading audience a story of ancient Antioch. It seems that at one point in history, both wild and tame animals were allowed to run free in the streets. This seems to work out well until the advent of the city's ruler-in-name-only: a huge "cameleopard" (giraffe), which the citizens of Antioch have decided to elevate to kingship. The long-necked fellow attracts the gustatory lusts of the roaming predators (certainly a lot of food-motifs in the early stories), and that's the end of the Giraffe King. More erudition for its own sake.

A TALE OF JERUSALEM (1832)

This seems to be Poe's first publication of a naturalistic story. It takes place in ancient Jerusalem, and seems based on an authentic Talmudic story of how the priests of the Temple coped with a siege from an invading army. Because the priests needed proper animals for daily sacrificial rituals, they came to an arrangement to buy said animals from their enemies: sending gold coins over the wall in a basket, and then the enemy would send back the requested animals in the same basket.

The arrangement comes to an end when the Jews' enemies send them an unclean animal, a pig. Very much a simple "gimmick" joke, based on an obscure bit of Jewish lore.