While most fans of Poe’s stories and poems are aware of the more widely known aspects of his life, such as his drinking and gambling (and probable drug use), the fact that he was kicked out of West Point for insubordination, that he was “goth” even in the 1830’s and 40’s and often found himself at odds with the intellectual establishment (who tried to play him off as a mere writer of horror tales and morbid poetry), his marriage to a bride who may have been just a tad on the young side, the untimely and extremely grevious nature of her death, etc...with a little investigation one can find out many more attributes of a truly amazing man and an authentic creative “original”.

For example, he was quite a fine sketch artist and painter who covered the walls of his college dorm room with murals which elicited awe from his fellow students. Also, he was a highly adept cryptographer and, in addition to the famous crypher in the story “The Gold Bug”, he often published cryptograms. A cryptogram is a coded message; an elaborate word puzzle in which the actual letters of the words are replaced by alternate letters, numbers, or symbols. Sometimes the order of the words is also scrambled according to some type formula. Poe’s cryptograms often involved prizes to anyone who could decipher them. Two of these remained unsolved in Poe’s lifetime and even long after his death. One was finally solved sometime in the first half of the 20th Century, and the other was just cracked within the last year. There had even been a $2500 award offered by the E.A. Poe Society of Baltimore to anyone who could crack this masterpiece of code.

For the area of his life this article purposes to investigate, we turn to Poe’s accomplishments as a successful (though woefully undercompensated) editor of various literary magazines. It was in these publications that many of his poems and stories were originally released to the public, as well as articles of criticism, philosophy, and “marginalia” like the one which opens this piece. These zines were also the battleground upon which Poe frequently engaged in high level literary warfare with a number of his contemporaries. He was infamous for his scathing diss jobs of that icon of American Letters, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, among others.

This warfare was not confined to critiques and articles; Poe’s more literary works sometimes contained oblique and even direct insults and/or “insider” jokes and mind games for the discernment of the cognoscenti along the Atlantic seaboard... perhaps in a poem such as “Israfel”, and most definitely in stories such as “The Man Who Was Used Up” or “Hopfrog”.

One can easily imagine the chuckling of an amused reader as “The Man Who Was Used Up” unfolds in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine. In it the author does a very clever sort of reverse dismantling of General Harrison (as in the “future President Harrison”) or some other “injun fightin’” sacred cow of the American political landscape.

The boorish lout of a king and his entourage, who are tricked by the tormented dwarf, Hopfrog (likely indicating Poe himself), into dressing in ourang-outang suits and then burned alive in a snare he catches them up in, is almost certainly in reference to society big shots and rival editors among the upper crust of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore... it is even possible that this story is an allegorical representation of some real-life social feat of extreme dissing that Poe pulled off in the drawing rooms and literary hangouts he frequented. In other words, he may have been using the story to “rub it in” a little.

My personal favorite among these intriguing diversions involves a phantom game of whist which is veiled just beneath the surface of “Murders In The Rue Morgue” and, when revealed, points to an innuendo of classic proportions. This bit of literary wickedness is alluded to by Jorge Luis Borges in his story “Death and the Compass” (from the collection Labyrinths), in which he attempts to elicit the complicity of James Joyce in accomplishing a similar ploy to discredit an editor... probably someone who had slammed Joyce’s Ulysses during its serial publication some years earlier.

“Murders In The Rue Morgue” begins with a kind of prologue, ostensibly preparing the reader for the level of analytical reasoning prowess possessed by Auguste Dupin, the central character of the tale, but also snakishly setting up a “grand slam” against one or more of Poe’s detractors, likely another editor...maybe several, as he was doing some serious head-banging with two or three at the time this story was published.

Right off the bat a challenge is issued, a throwing down of the gauntlet. Poe asserts that the game of chess, for all its renown of required intelligence, in fact merely requires calculative mental function and that an intent concentration is all that is needed to win it. On the other hand, he contends, the humble game of draughts (checkers) requires far more true analytical power and much more perceptive human interaction. He then goes on to explain how a fairly simple card game like whist can tax the truly analytical acumen to the fullest, and that an astute player will know well before the hand is played out exactly what cards the other players are holding. He stresses how one may find clues in things outside the actual parameters of the game itself, in the mannerisms of the other players and the way they respond to each trick, etc.

Then, saying: “The narrative which follows will appear to the reader somewhat in the light of a commentary upon the propositions just advanced...”, he introduces us to Dupin and gives us examples of his amazing mental powers, which seem to the uninitiated nearly supernatural.

Once familiar with Dupin, we become embroiled in the “Murders in the Rue Morgue”;a woman and her daughter have been brutalized and savagely murdered. The police are at a loss for a solution of this ghastly crime. The newspapers print the details, including the indentities of twelve witnesses and a summation of what they know of the matter. This is the start of what seems to be a symbolic game of whist, cleverly worked into the fabric of the tale.

If you have played the game, which was very popular in Poe’s day before it evolved into what we know today as contract bridge, it strikes you right off that the twelve witnesses to the murders in the Rue Morgue are layed out like a hand of whist...and that the first trick has already been played. Two queens (the murder victims) having been taken by an as yet un-named trump card. There are, as the story progresses, various other whist-like indications as to the nature of the game afoot, but it is all actually a ruse. There is no game of whist hidden there, just the phantom of one.

What is the purpose of this sham? I believe Poe estimated that many of his readers would notice the whist hand, but, upon reasoning that it would require a bit too much work to follow right away, would continue on to finish the story for its primary value... that of a good story well told. Indeed, it is the first example of what was to become the modern detective story. But many of the more curious readers (i.e. a lot of them... especially those familiar with Poe, his cryptic nature, and his rivalries) would return to this challenge to see where it might lead them. Where it leads is back to the beginning of the tale where Poe asserts that an astute player of whist will consider all manner of clues outside the actual parameters of the game itself.

It can soon be reasoned that we are to look beyond the parameters of the story into the literary environs in which we encountered it: the magazine publishing field at large.

By the time we have this sorted out we can read the entire story, including the challenge at the beginning, as a high-level slam of Poe’s rivals and detractors (the principal victim is no doubt something of a renowned chess player...heh, heh). Seen in this light the tale is often hilarious; the description of the murders themselves, for example, that turn out to be committed by an escaped wild ourang-outang which its sailor master brought back from an exotic voyage. This scene with the hairy beast holding the screaming mother by the hair as he waves a straight-razor back and forth before her face, mimicking the ordinary act of a man shaving (which it had seen its master do), and then becoming enraged by her protestations and nearly severing her head completely off...

This scene reads as an analogy of Poe’s adversaries’ critical abilities. He has effectively cast a rival editor as an out of control simian in the keeping of a drunken sailor!

“Commodore” Vanderbuilt himself perhaps? At least someone like him, for it was then, as now, quite chic for American gazillionaires to become “patrons of the arts and letters” in order to upgrade their social standing. It is likely that the depicted murders represent a viscious critique of two women of Poe’s acquaintance... possibly his young wife and her mother, who had been attacked more than once in print during the writer’s lifetime... possibly actresses (Poe was big on drama, it was in this area that he first began attacking Longfellow)... maybe singers.

At any rate, the idea that Poe expected some of his readers to know exactly what scoundrels he was referring to, and that in the future there might even be scholars who would ferret out the identities of his victim(s), can be inferred from the quote of Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial which is at the very opening of Murders In The Rue Morgue: “What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions are not beyond all conjecture.”

I have no doubt that scholars the level of Borges and Joyce could have named actual names, as well as any number of the intellegentsia of Poe’s time.

It is worth noting here that “Hopfrog”, which was the last tale published in Poe’s lifetime, had the full title of “Hopfrog; or, The Eight Chained Ourang-outangs”.

So, dear reader, the next time you notice that an episode of The X-Files or Tales From The Crypt seems to be taking some veiled shots at various entertainment industry “weasels”, know that Poe was up to the same sort of thing over 150 years ago and that he was a master at it.