Justin R. Wert
The fiction of Robert Montgomery Bird was reviewed in the Southern Literary Messenger on four occasions between February 1835 and September 1836. We know for certain that Poe was author of the first two of these reviews (of Calavar and The Infidel), although the other two (of The Hawks of Hawk Hollow and Sheppard Lee) may have been written or cowritten with Poe by others on the Messenger staff.1 Bird was a major figure in early American fiction, a man who in Poe’s words had “risen . . . to a very enviable reputation.”2 Bird’s popularity was nearly on par with that of Simms, Kennedy, Paulding, and other contemporaries who are better known today. In fact, Robert Jacobs reinforces Poe’s opinion of Bird by listing Bird with Cooper and Simms as “the best of the [American] novelists of Poe’s time.”3 Moreover, Bird was not only a novelist but also a prize-winning playwright. In fact, four of Bird’s dramas were awarded substantial prizes (of as much as $1,000) by the preeminent producer/actor of the era, Edwin Forrest. Today, however, Bird is little known. With the exception of Nick of the Woods, his writings are out of print, and none appear in modern literature anthologies. His literary reputation, ironically in contrast to Poe’s, has fallen considerably from its “enviable” height.
However obscure Bird’s literary achievements may appear today, the Messenger reviews of Bird’s fiction help to illuminate Poe’s emergence as a leading American literary critic. First, the reviews of Calavar and The Infidel shed light on the critical criteria employed by American reviewers like Poe during the 1830s: criteria relating to the novel and related genres such as the romance and historical romance. Although Jacobs claims that Poe “was not prepared, in [his] review [of Bird’s The Hawks of Hawk-Hollow] or in later ones, to make any significant contribution to the theory of the novel [and that] to him it was not a true art form,”4 Poe certainly made significant contributions to the art of literary criticism and more specifically to the art of reviewing novels and romances. In reviewing Bird’s work, Poe previews his later theory of the short story, in which the “single effect” is all-encompassing.
Poe’s reviews of Bird’s works establish some critical reviewing practices concerning the novel and romance, based to some degree on his own theories of how to write and narrate “a tale”—concepts that are particularly vivid in the Sheppard Lee review. While Poe may have refused to accept the novel as a unified art form, he reviewed numerous novels during his tenure at the Messenger with a sharp critical wit. Even though Poe may not have been “prepared” to make a “significant contribution to the theory of the novel,” his reviews of Hawks and Sheppard Lee demonstrate the complex relationship between Poe’s development as a literary critic and fiction writer during the changing American literary-publishing environment of the 1830s.
The Southern Literary Messenger reviews of Bird’s works also help us better understand the nineteenth-century uses of the terms “romance” and “novel.” While the reviewers at the Messenger—Poe, Thomas Willis White, Edward Sparhawk, and Edward Heath—did not formally agree on their exact uses, the genres were frequently reviewed by the Messenger staff. Moreover, these literary terms were well-established; they had long been used to categorize long works of fiction on both sides of the Atlantic. In brief, I will explore some definitions and examples of both genres as represented in American literature, then demonstrate the Messenger’s expressions of criticism relating to the novel and the romance, assessing Poe’s limited use of the terms “historical romance” and “romance” in his terminology and other similar terms and related criteria. I will also explore possible reasons why Poe did not establish a finely tuned criticism of long fictional works, although he lavished exquisite detail upon all aspects of his criticism and delineated terminology for his own theories of short fiction and poetry while he worked at the Southern Literary Messenger between 1835 and the beginning of 1837.
The first two Messenger reviews of works by Bird help to define what a “novel,” “romance,” or—in the case of Calavar and The Infidel—a “historical romance” is. The word “novel,” however, was beginning to be the preferable term for reviews of all long narratives, as Jacobs explains, because by the 1830s the novel was taking precedence over the romance as a literary form. The Messenger review of Bird’s Calavar is a good gauge by which to determine where American literary criticism stood regarding the genre. As Jacobs notes, the review is useful “as an illustration of the standards applied to the novel [in the 1830s]. The reviewer examined the works in terms of verisimilitude, characterization, and style, and concluded that, although ‘[Calavar] is certainly the very best American novel, excepting one or two of Mr. Cooper’s . . . ,’ it fails in one respect because it is ‘too unnatural even for romance.’”5
The Messenger reviewer’s criticism of Calavar as being “too unnatural even for romance” is of particular interest. As Northrop Frye states, the chief difference between the novel and the romance “lies in the conception of characterization. The romancer does not attempt to create ‘real’ people so much as stylized figures which expand into psychological archetypes.”6 In other words, the romance writer’s characters should be “natural” or have compelling psychological aspects but not realistic appearances or “verisimilitude,” unless one is concerned with “historical romance” and actual historical figures—such as with the historically based characters in many of Simms’s works. Jacobs further explains that Poe, like his fellow Messenger reviewer Beverly Tucker, also “employed the standard of nature in regard to the novel.” Although there were “no rules of the novel” per se, the standard for American reviewers of the time was to examine whether a romance or novel achieved a uniform “nature” (romances) or “verisimilitude” (novels and historical romances) as Michael D. Bell also notes.7 In the Messenger reviewer’s comparison of Bird’s and Cooper’s uneven attempts to achieve “nature” or “verisimilitude” in their “novels,” one should read the term “novels” as romances or more specifically historical romances. In other words, neither Bird nor Cooper is very capable of depicting “stylized” female characters. As a result their characters were objectionable to the reviewer, much as they are to modern readers, because Bird’s and Cooper’s female characters seem to be mere constructs, not “stylized” characters or “psychological archetypes” like Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, or Phoebe in The House of the Seven Gables: two more “natural” characters in two more celebrated, contemporaneous romances.
By contrast, Cooper’s and Bird’s female characters wander “through the forests, unmussed in clothing and deportment, swooning at frequent intervals.” Moreover, Jacobs says, “the reviewer of the 1830s was also annoyed by the somnambulism of Cooper’s females,”8 a sentiment that this particular reviewer, be it Poe or Tucker, also finds objectionable in Bird’s Calavar: “The author [Bird], who is vastly superior to Cooper in dialogue, is we fear, equally unqualified with that writer [Cooper], to depict the female character in all its exquisite traits and attractive graces.”9 For a particular example of Bird’s uneven representation of female characters, the reviewer faults Bird for not giving “more than a mere glimpse at the daughter of Montezuma . . . whose image we behold as in a ‘glass darkly,’ and whose wretched fate we regard with less anguish, knowing so little as we do of the fair and unfortunate victim.”10 Herein one can detect the reviewer’s standard of both “verisimilitude” and “stylized” characterization, two definitive requirements of the historical romance. Poe uses these critical criteria in his reviews of Simms’ The Partisan and Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi: historical romances that present actual historical figures within a fictional context, demanding realistic characters in a kind of bas-relief or “verisimilitude" against a “stylized," mysterious and/or melodramatic backdrop.11
Concerning “verisimilitude” and other literary terms in use during the 1830s, Jacobs suggests that Poe, like other American reviewers of the time, had to “borrow” critical standards/terms from “other genres”12 since “there were no rules for the novel.” If a true “novel” “departed too obviously from verisimilitude,”13 or made use of Gothicism or excessive imaginative, as opposed to “natural” (realistic) elements, then the novel “could be considered a romance and the demand for verisimilitude was mitigated.”14 Both Calavar and The Infidel were “romances,” as Bird’s subtitles for both works reveal. Moreover, Bird’s subject matter in both books is Cortez’s conquest of Mexico—lending a factual context that suggests the kind of historical realism made popular by Scott, Cooper, and Simms. Hence, Calavar and The Infidel could loosely be termed “historical romances,” much as Simms, Parks, and Bell suggest.15
Furthermore, the reviewer recognizes Calavar as a “historical romance” but makes measured critical points about the work’s value as such. On the one hand, the reviewer takes issue with the probability of some of Bird’s rendering of historical events: “There is too much improbable and miraculous agency in the various life-preserving expedients, and extraordinary rescues which are constantly occurring,—and which . . . impart to a tale founded on historical truth, an air of oriental fiction which is not agreeable.” For the most part, however, the reviewer praises Bird’s historical accuracy and twice delineates the genre of Calavar, not only as “romance” but as “historical romance.” He also contends that, should Bird follow up this “success in the region of historical romance,” he would “assuredly outstrip all his competitors on this side of the Atlantic”: a lofty evaluation of Bird’s literary potential. More to the point, Bird’s novel is termed a good “historical romance” because it represents “a faithful delineation of Cortez,” so much so that the reviewer proclaims that, in this regard, Bird “has been wonderfully successful.”16 In other words, Bird’s rendering of history brought accolades from the reviewer because Bird’s “verisimilitude” has faithfully recreated history and historical figures in this “historical romance.”
The Infidel review offers up more praise of Bird’s “powers as a writer of fictitious narrative.”17 In fact this review also praises an aspect of Bird’s narrative abilities that the reviewer found defective in the preceding romance: “The principal female character is drawn with far greater vigor, than marked the heroine of Calavar,” he writes.18 This is measured praise, however, since the reviewer does comment, that much as in Calavar, “we think it problematical whether the author is capable of success in a purely feminine picture of female character.”19 Once again the reviewer returns to the criticism of characterization, especially the lack of effective female characterization in both Bird and Cooper’s works.
The reviewer concludes that The Infidel will enjoy the popularity of Calavar, confirming “public opinion as to the abilities of the author, who has suddenly taken proud station in the van of American writers of romance.”20 While this comment further supports the Calavar reviewer’s assessment of Bird as a major literary talent on the rise, it also firmly labels Bird as a genre writer. The reviewer also defines the creative elements of the romance as opposed to the novel, and compares Bird with Simms and Cooper:
[Bird] possesses a fertility of imagination rarely possessed by his com-peers. In many of their works, there is a paucity of events; and incidents of small intrinsic importance, are wrought up by the skill of the writer so as to give the factitious interest to a very threadbare collection of facts. Great ability may be displayed in this manner; but our author seems to find no exertion necessary. The fertility of his imagination displays itself in the constant recurrence of dramatic situations, striking incidents and stirring adventures; so much so, that the interest of the reader, in following the characters through the mazes of perils and enterprises, vicissitudes and escapes, which they encounter, is often painfully excited. If this be a fault, it is one which is creditable to the powers of the author, and indicates an exuberance of invention, which will bear him through a long course of literary exertions, and insure to him great favor with the votaries of romance.21
The reviewer distinguishes Bird from “his compeers” according to Bird’s heightened “fertility of imagination”—as opposed to other writers’ lesser engagement of the factual, in which they merely “give the factitious interest to a very threadbare collection of facts.” This analysis is fascinating not only for what it reveals about Bird’s writing and emerging status as an author, but also for what it reveals about the reviewer. Bird is admirable as a “romance” writer because he favors treading in the realm of the “imagination” as opposed to trudging through the merely factual, which Simms and Hawthorne thought to be the modus operandi of the “romance” writer. According to the reviewer’s assessment, Bird is a writer of superior “imagination” and thus a superior writer of “romance.”22
In this assessment of Bird’s Infidel, the reviewer seems Poesque (perhaps it is indeed Poe) in his descriptions of the imagination as the writer’s tool to induce a concentrated effect upon the reader: “the fertility of his imagination displays itself . . . so, that the interest of the reader in following his characters . . . is often painfully excited.”23 In other words, through his use of concentrated and well-orchestrated imagination, Bird achieves what Poe would later term a “unified effect” upon the reader. Poe never claimed, however, that a novel, “romance” or otherwise, could attain a “unified effect”; only short lyric/narrative poems and tales could achieve this desired effect. The initial source for this critical terminology is Poe’s December 1835 Messenger review of Tales of the Peerage and the Peasantry.
Between the Messenger reviews of Bird’s Calavar and The Infidel—which helped to establish the budding magazine’s critical stance concerning the novel and romance—and the reviews of The Hawks of Hawks Hollow and Sheppard Lee, Poe’s February 1836 review of Bulwer’s Rienzi provides a key example of Poe’s use of the terms “novel” and “romance.” Once again, Poe avoids delineating many particularities about what a “novel” and a “romance” entail, but Poe does describe the difference between the two genres to some extent. As Jacobs notes, “Poe discriminated carefully between the author’s ‘scrupulous fidelity to all the main events in the public life of his hero’ and ‘the relief afforded through the personages of pure romance which form the filling in of the picture.’”24 In addition, Poe understands that Rienzi is an epic, historically based account, and thus encompasses what his contemporaries would ordinarily call an “historical romance.”
Edd Winfield Parks claims that Rienzi is “considerably more than a novel. In sweep and character of composition it is essentially epic rather than dramatic; it is also, in the truest sense, a History. Poe digresses to note that ‘we shall often discover in Fiction the essential spirit and vitality of Historic Truth—while Truth itself, in many a dull and lumbering archive, shall be found guilty of all the inefficiency of Fiction.’”25 Poe’s use of the terms “Fiction” and “Historic Truth” is similar to the use of “imagination” (i.e., “Fiction and Historic Truth”) and “factitious” (i.e., “Truth itself”) in the reviews of Calavar and The Infidel. As such Bird’s Calavar and The Infidel are “historical romances,” as is Bulwer’s Rienzi. Also interesting is the similarity in effect of downplaying the importance of the “factitious”: that is, the novel with its emphasis on the “factual” as juxtaposed with the romance/historical romance or “fiction,” which might contain “the vitality of Historic Truth.”
Especially important to Poe’s developing views of American literary criticism was the seemingly contradictory role of two elements: one, his drive to establish American magazines in an effort to publish short fiction, poetry, and critical reviews; and two, the overwhelming necessity of publishing book-length works to establish his own literary reputation. His tendencies as a fictionist fit the magazine’s venue of short fiction and poetry; Poe’s strengths as a writer are undoubtedly in his fiction, poetry, and literary criticism. Yet Poe knew the road to literary visibility and financial viability was through publishing a book, perhaps even a long narrative. While Poe worked at the Messenger his difficulties in publishing a book-length volume must have weighed heavily upon his mind.
For instance, Poe attempted to publish Tales of the Folio Club by enlisting the help of James K. Paulding. Paulding was a literary insider, having published many successful and critically acclaimed works. Moreover, he admired Poe and the Messenger for their high literary standards and agreed to solicit his publishers, Harpers. Poe hoped that Paulding’s influence—Harpers had just entered into a contract with Paulding to release a twelve- to fifteen-volume set of Paulding’s works—would boost his chances of publishing the Folio Club. But he apparently overestimated Paulding’s sphere of influence. In June 1836, Poe’s manuscript was rejected, partly because it was too satiric about the literary establishment. However, there were also market forces at work, as Harpers noted in its rejection letter: “Readers in this country have a decided and strong preference for works (especially fiction) in which a single and connected story occupies the whole volume, or number of volumes.”26 In Harpers’ estimation, the novel/romance was superior to collections of short stories in terms of marketability, and thus Poe’s Tales of the Folio Club would not sell. As a result of this rejection, it became all the more clear to Poe that he had to write a novel in order to succeed as a writer: as Kevin J. Hayes points out, “he was still struggling for literary fame, and he knew well that contemporary novelists [like Paulding, Bird, Simms, Kennedy] were garnering more attention than other imaginative writers.”27 This recipe for success ran counter, however, to Poe’s developing literary principle that the tale was superior to the novel/romance since only the tale could deliver “a unified effect” to the reader.
A few months before Harpers turned down Tales of the Folio Club, Poe reviewed Bird’s “novel” The Hawks of Hawk Hollow. In the December 1835 review, Poe referred to Hawks as a “novel” and Calavar as a “romance” but he did not explain what he meant by these terms. One can propose, however, three possible causes for Poe’s using the term “novel” almost exclusively. First, he did not admire long works of fiction as much as he did “the tale.” Second, Poe saw no need to distinguish between these two terms for his own fiction-writing purposes—unlike Simms and Hawthorne, who were deeply invested in defining the “romance” since it was their preferred prose genre. To Poe, the distinctions between the terms added little if any necessary clarification about a particular work’s literary merit—his key concern as a critic.
The term “historical romance” was also waning in popularity among American reviewers during this period. Beyond Cooper’s era, a shift in reviewing vocabulary occurred in part as a reaction by American reviewers bent on distinguishing American long works of fiction (novels) from their British counterparts (romances).28 Certainly Poe, like any other American critic of the time, clamored to distinguish American belle lettres from its European counterparts. Poe, however, refused to engage in “puffing” or inflating the value of an American literary work, just because it was American. Rather, he attempted to develop a systematic approach to assessing literary works—as his later essays, “The Philosophy of Composition” and “The Rationale of Verse” clearly indicate. While Poe did not establish a set of critical terms to distinguish novels from romances, he did indicate some critical criteria for what makes for a good romance or novel, which in turn reveals much about Poe’s developing theories of the short story.
Poe’s standard reviewing style is evident in his comments on Hawks and Sheppard Lee. He applauds merit but condemns structural, mechanical, or stylistic errors and inconsistencies. These commentaries, while less scandalous and contentious than some of Poe’s more infamous “tomahawk” reviews, were more typical of his reviewing style at the Messenger.
In his review of Hawks, Poe begins by commending Bird for Calavar and The Infidel and assesses his literary reputation by noting that it is “very enviable.” This method of reminding the reader of an author’s previous literary works and their critical approbation was standard procedure for reviewers of the time. Poe also says that others in literary circles had “asserted that [Bird’s] last novel, The Hawks of Hawk-Hollow, will not fail to place his name in the very first rank of American writers of fiction.” Neither Poe’s preliminary commendation of Bird nor others’ early estimates of Hawks, however, softened Poe’s sharp sword of criticism from cutting through the artificial surface of literary commendations to expose weak aspects of Bird’s novel. In fact, this balanced praise and criticism—despite what Poe’s acerbic review of Theodore S. Fay’s Norman Leslie and his condemning reviews of William Leete Stone's Ups and Downs or Laughton Osborne's Confessions of a Poet might have seemed to indicate—was Poe’s modus operandi when a deficient novel crossed his desk. Balanced critiques far outnumbered harsh or laudatory reviews, indicating that Poe was far more considerate and civilized in his reviews than his “tomahawk” reputation would indicate.29
Poe’s review of Hawks, while certainly not as vitriolic as his review of Norman Leslie in the same issue (Dec. 1835) of the Messenger, contains some sharp criticism. Poe’s review of Norman Leslie was intentionally scandalous to attract notice, his sarcasm filling his cup to overflowing: “Well—Here we have it! This is the book—the book par excellence—the book bepuffed, beplastered and be-Mirrored!”30 By contrast, Poe’s review of Hawks uses a milder-mannered, lighter sarcastic style. At first, Poe pretends that Hawks was written by Sir Walter Scott in order to criticize Bird for his heavy-handed imitation of that popular author: “It is unnecessary to tell us that this novel is written by Sir Walter Scott; and we are really glad to find that at length he ventured to turn his attention to American incidents, scenery, and manners. We repeat that it was a mere act of supererogation to place the words ‘By the author of Waverly’ in the title page. The book speaks for itself.”31 Poe’s sarcastic mode is in line with his affinity for parody since at the time he was writing the Folio Club. Moreover, the sarcastic critique illuminates his condemnation of American literary works that were more imitative than original.
Poe’s comments also reveal his objective critical criteria. He comments on Bird’s “style” of writing by first defining what he means by style: “The style vulgarly so called—the manner properly so called—the handling of the subject to speak pictorially, or graphically, or as a German would say plastically—in a word the general air, the tout ensemble, the prevailing character of the story, all proclaim, in words which one who runs may read, that these volumes were indited ‘By the author of Waverly.’”32 In other words, what Poe calls the “manner” of a work is its style, its “prevailing character.” In The Hawks of Hawk Hollow, Bird’s manner is imitative of Scott and “by no means in the best manner of its illustrious author . . . it is a positive failure.”33 By comparing Bird’s “novel” to Scott (implying by inference Scott’s preference for the romance), Poe indicates that a novel cannot compare to a romance, especially one written by Scott, the master of the genre. In addition one wonders if Poe might not be lampooning the forced similarity of style between Bird’s Hawks and Scott’s books, such as Waverly, in an attempt to ride on the coattails of Scott’s popularity. In this case perhaps, Bird’s book fails in that it is an inferior imitation of Scott and that it is more “novel” than “romance.”
Poe’s critique of Bird’s “manner” and mechanics reveals something significant about Poe’s standards for good fiction. Bird’s characters are unevenly drawn according to Poe: some are admirable, some execrable. While one female character is “one of the sweetest creations emanating from the fancy [imagination] of poet or of painter,” yet another is “forced, unnatural, and overstrained.” The characterization of the first female figure in the book emanates “from the fancy of poet or of painter”; the latter character violates one of Poe’s tenets for “a tale,” a principle that he shares with the romancers: a character should seem “natural,” not “forced” or “overstrained.”34
According to Poe, Bird’s style is uneven. Poe attributes Bird’s stylistic vacillations in this novel to “moments of the most utter mental exhaustion.”35 This is an astute observation, as Bird was laboring at his writing table under extreme exhaustion. Between 1834 and 1837, Bird wrote five novels, including Hawks, while editing The American Monthly magazine and writing for the theatre. As a result Bird’s health was “adversely affected by the late, strenuous hours he was keeping.”36 In fact Bird had to recuperate from this period of “exhaustion” for the next two years, and eventually he moved away from Philadelphia and his strenuous schedule. Perhaps Poe was beginning to know the rigors and exhaustion of writing and reviewing himself.
Poe concludes by comparing Hawks, a “true” novel in many respects, to Bird’s two previous efforts, both of which were “romances.” Poe states, “Like Calavar and The Infidel, [Hawks] excels in the drama of action and passion, and fails in the drama of colloquy. It is inferior, as a whole, to The Infidel, and vastly inferior to Calavar.”37 So Bird’s “novel” falls short of his “romances.” This inferiority is based mainly on Bird’s unevenness of “manner”: it is not a complete failure but an effort that lacks the virtuosity of the previous two works, both “romances.” Poe’s evaluation of Hawks might very well indicate his preference for the “romance” over the “novel,” certainly in terms of what Poe refers to as “colloquy.” This evenhanded evaluation of Hawks demonstrates Poe’s developing critical abilities and his willingness to evaluate a novel on its merits and deficiencies in an objective manner—a hallmark in most of Poe’s reviews.
Poe’s review of Sheppard Lee shows us his appreciation of humor and social satire. In it we also see a range of perceptions about science, slave insurrections, abolition, and superstition in serious fiction. In addition, as Mabbott has noted, Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” and Sheppard Lee share some similarities.
Poe’s review of Sheppard Lee is more laudatory than his review of Hawks: “this novel is an original in American Belle Lettres,” he announces at the start of the review.38 Concerning Sheppard Lee’s soul migrations, Poe had already used metempsychosis in his own tale, “Morella,” and would use it again later in many other stories, including “Ligeia,” “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” “Mesmeric Revelation,” and “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains.” So it is of considerable interest that Poe reviewed Bird’s novel; he had discovered a novel with some similar subject matter, singular subject matter for an original American fictionist to explore and, for Poe, a “true” novel—a “work of profundity” rather than mere “play of the mind.”39
Poe is disappointed with Bird’s ending, however, where the narrator reveals that Sheppard Lee’s soul transmigrations were all just a dream, a delirium caused at the beginning of the novel by Lee accidentally striking his foot with a mattock. Poe believes that this plot maneuver does not create the most effective bizarrerie. Bird, Poe argues,
conceives his hero endowed with some idiosyncrasy beyond the common lot of nature, and thus introduces him to a series of adventures which, under ordinary circumstances, could occur only to a plurality of persons. The chief source of interest in such narrative is, or should be, the contrasting of these varied events, in their influence upon a character unchanging—except as changed by the events themselves. This fruitful field of interest, however, is neglected in the novel before us, where the hero, very awkwardly, partially loses, and partially does not lose, his identity, at each migration. The sole object here in the various metempsychoses seem to be, merely the depicting of seven different conditions of existence, and the enforcement of the very doubtful moral that every person should remain contented with his own. But it is clear that both these points could have been more forcibly shown, without any reference to a confused and jarring system of transmigration, by the mere narrations of seven different individuals.40
Poe is pointing out Bird’s means of narration and its weakness: that Sheppard Lee remains unchanged after his many unusual “transmigrations.” Moreover, Poe sees Bird’s plot resolution—it was all just a hallucination, a dream—as a deus ex machina, an artificial resolution of loose plot ends and difficulties, violating “the tone of the novel with incongruities,” as Jacobs explains.41 Poe saw that this flawed narrative device deprives “the reader of the emotional effect he had secured through identification with the character.”42 This concept is similar to what one sees in the previous Messenger reviews of Bird’s works concerning effective characterization.
Bird’s narration, in Poe’s opinion, was effective on some counts, but it might have been better handled as a novel with multiple narrators: “it is clear that both these points could have been more forcibly shown, without any reference to a confused and jarring system of transmigration, by the mere narrations of seven different individuals.”43 Poe does not seriously entertain this idea, however—a modernist narrative mode like that of Faulkner, for instance. Poe preferred the first person and third-omniscient narrative techniques. More important, Poe refers to the critical standard of “nature” in a romance as establishing believability, a standard that relates to his own theories of fiction writing: “all deviations, especially wide ones, from nature, should be justified to the author by some specific object—the object, in the present case, might have been found, as above-mentioned, in the opportunity afforded of depicting widely-different conditions of existence actuating one individual.”44 Poe’s remarks here anticipate his theory of the short story as based around a single effect. According to Poe, Bird is not only undermining the creation of “totality of effect” on the reader by saying it was all a dream, but also by claiming that writing bizarreries requires that “all deviations . . . from nature should be justified to the author by some specific object” (emphasismine). In Bird’s case this “specific object” is the effect of these various soul transmigrations on one particular soul, on “one individual”—that of Sheppard Lee. What Poe desires as a reader/critic is to feel the singular effect of Lee’s soul migrations rather than diffuse and multifarious effects, as multifaceted and interesting as they are. Furthermore, although Bird’s narrative method “is managed with unusual ingenuity,”45 Poe says that “having been worried to death with incongruities (allowing such to exist) until the concluding page, it is certainly little indemnification for our sufferings to learn that, in truth, the whole matter was a dream, and that we were very wrong in being worried about it at all.”46
As another means of narration, Poe suggests a “second general method”: to avoid “that directness of expression which we have noticed in Sheppard Lee, and thus leaving much to the imagination.”47 Here Poe shows how his fiction-writing and literary criticism were interdependent. Poe was just developing as a fiction writer; one could argue that much of his best work lay ahead of him. The analysis of Bird’s narrative technique points to Poe’s preferences for a narrative style that “leav[es] much to the imagination” and creates the singular narrative. To Poe, it is “as if the author were firmly impressed with the truth, yet astonished at the immensity, of the wonders he relates, and for which professedly, he neither claims nor anticipates credence—in minuteness of detail, being at variance with indirectness of expression—in short by making use of the infinity of arts which give verisimilitude to a narration—and by leaving the result as a wonder not to be accounted for.”48
One need not look any further than Poe’s most familiar tales—say, “The Tell-Tale Heart” or “The Black Cat”—to find pertinent examples of what he describes here. The purpose of this narrative is “to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events”—that is, "without explaining away the singularity, the 'romance' of the situations." This does not mean that an author should never explain bizarre incidents in a bizarrerie (especially when using a first person narrator-criminal perpetrator as in the tales mentioned above), but rather that their ultimate “nature”—that is, their occurrences and causes—should remain mysterious to the reader: “bizzareries thus conducted, are usually far more effective than those otherwise managed. The attention of the author, who does not depend upon explaining away his incredibilities, is directed to giving them the character and the luminousness of truth. The reader, too, readily perceives and falls in with the writer’s humor and suffers himself to be borne on thereby.”49 The “unified effect” then, while not possible in the novel form according to Poe, certainly is possible in the tale as long as the fictional lens of the author focuses on presenting everything with “the luminousness of truth” or verisimilitude and does not explain away the singular situations and characters the narrator relates to the reader.
Poe ends his critique of Sheppard Lee by claiming that stories that do not follow the aforementioned narrative method will not create a “single effect” upon the reader: “what difficulty, or inconvenience, or danger can there be in leaving us [readers] uninformed of the important facts that a certain hero did not actually discover the elixir vitae, could not really make himself invisible, and was not either a ghost in earnest or a bona fide Wandering Jew?”50 While Poe may at times overstate his own brand of narration as the best method of writing bizarreries, his own tales clearly exemplify them.
Although far more subtle than his “tomahawk” onslaughts, Poe’s critiques of Bird’s romances and novels in the Southern Literary Messenger demonstrate his more standard, evenhanded reviewing practices. They also show his unwillingness to “puff” a work merely because it is American: to Poe a flawed work is flawed, an inferior work inferior. To Poe, a literary critic was not supposed to be a circus sideshow advertiser for good and bad fiction alike, puffing the latest works of established authors, renowned individuals waxing literary or powerful publishing houses. If a work is overly imitative, poorly plotted or narrated, riddled with grammar, diction or punctuation errors, Poe says so. In this manner, Poe helped to establish literary criticism as more objective than subjective—a timely transformation, helping to further American literature’s “renaissance.” Moreover, the Messenger’s four reviews of Bird’s works demonstrate the established critical criteria concerning novels and romances, illuminating some of Poe’s own literary techniques and standards for the short story or “tale,” leading up to his theory of the “single effect.”
1. Two earlier Messenger reviews—that of Calavar (Feb. 1835) and The Infidel (June 1835)—have not been conclusively attributed to Poe, but are variously included or excluded from the canon.
2. Edgar Allan Poe, Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 5, ed. Burton R. Pollin and Joseph V. Ridgely (New York: The Gordian Press, 1997), 50.
3. Robert D. Jacobs, Poe: Journalist and Critic (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 189.
4. Jacobs, 100.
5. Jacobs, 100.
6. Northrop Frye, “Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays” in Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 22, ed. Robert D. Denham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 285. For definitions and discussions of the “Romance” see also Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957); Michael Davitt Bell, The Development of American Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); and Joel Porte, The Romance in America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1969).
7. Jacobs, 73; see also Bell, 3–39.
8. Jacobs, 74.
9. Edgar Allan Poe, “Poe’s Criticisms” in Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, www.eapoe.org/works/criticism.htm, 315.
10. Poe, “Criticisms,” 315.
11. Jacobs, 73.
12. Jacobs, 73.
13. Jacobs, 73.
14. Jacobs, 73.
15. See William Gilmore Simms, The Yemassee (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993); Edd Winfield Parks, Edgar Allan Poe as Literary Critic (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1964), and William Gilmore Simms as Literary Critic (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1961); Bell, Development of American Romance.
16. Poe, “Criticisms,” 315.
17. Poe, “Criticisms,” 315.
18. Poe, “Criticisms,” 582.
19. Poe, “Criticisms,” 582.
20. Poe, “Criticisms,” 582.
21. Poe, “Criticisms,” 585.
22. Poe, “Criticisms,” 585.
23. Poe, “Criticisms,” 585.
24. Jacobs, 100.
25. Parks, Poe as Literary Critic, 41.
26. David K. Jackson, Poe and the Southern Literary Messenger (New York: Haskell House, 1970), 212.
27. Kevin J. Hayes, Poe and the Printed Word (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 61.
28. See Chase, 16; and Bell, 3–39.
29. See Jacobs.
30. Poe, Collected Writings, 60.
31. Poe, Collected Writings, 50.
32. Poe, Collected Writings, 50.
33. Poe, Collected Writings, 50.
34. Poe, Collected Writings, 52.
35. Poe, Collected Writings, 53.
36. Justin R. Wert, “Robert Montgomery Bird,” Dictionary of Literary Biography 202 (1999): 36–41.
37. Wert, 53.
38. Poe, Collected Writings, 282.
39. Poe, Collected Writings, 285.
40. Poe, Collected Writings, 286.
41. Jacobs, 173.
42. Jacobs, 173–74.
43. Poe, Collected Writings, 286.
44. Poe, Collected Writings, 286.
45. Poe, Collected Writings, 286.
46. Poe, Collected Writings, 286.
47. Poe, Collected Writings, 286.
48. Poe, Collected Writings, 286.
49. Poe, “The Black Cat” in Works, 37.
50. Poe, Collected Writings, 286.