Text: John C. Miller, ed., “Entry 183: Review of John H. Ingram's ‘Unpublished Correspondence by Edgar A. Poe,’ by Sarah Helen Whitman, May 4,” Poe's Helen Remembers (1979), pp. 498-500 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 498, continued:]

183. Review of John H. Ingram's “Unpublished Correspondence by Edgar A. Poe” (Appleton's Journal, 4 [May 1878], pp. 421-29), by Sarah Helen Whitman, Providence Journal, May 4, 1878

Moore was blamed for burning the biographical memoranda confided to him for publication. Some of Poe's later memorialists may perhaps be blamed for not burning material confided to them for publication by Poe's nearest and dearest friends.

It will be remembered that in the March number of Scribner's Monthly for 1878, Mrs. Susan A. T. Weiss gave to the public her recollections of the “Last Days of Edgar Allan Poe,” including the “true” story of his intentional rupture of an engagement with Mrs. Elmira Shelton, née Royster.

In the “Unpublished Correspondence” presented in the May number of Appleton's Journal, all this is reversed. The other side of the shield is now presented. Mrs. Shelton, after having been importuned on the subject for twenty-nine years, has at last spoken. We have the story, which Mr. Ingram assures us he was “graciously permitted to publish,” in the lady's own words. It is direct and to the point. She was not engaged to Mr. Poe; but there was an understanding between them. Her version of the story is a very matter-of-fact, discreet, straightforward story, not very romantic, but very credible, and so realistic in some of its details, that Balzac himself might have written it.

Mr. Ingram enthusiastically calls it “the story of Poe's first and last love, as romantic and interesting as was ever penned by poet.” This first and last love, however, does not seem to have precluded other romantic [page 499:] episodes whose epistolary records have also been confided to him, whether with a gracious permission for their publication does not appear.

The first letter in the series, Number one, purports to be a copy of “perhaps the only letter ever written by Poe to his wife,” a somewhat startling assumption, intended “perhaps,” to discourage future autograph hunters from wasting their time in fruitless research. Then follow the letters addressed to Mrs. Shew, a lady of generous impulses and great personal attraction, who at the period of Mrs. Poe's last illness is said to have been presiding over a private medical and water-cure establishment in upper Broadway. In November, 1850, she was married to Dr. Roland S. Houghton.

In the absence of all testimony as to the verbal authenticity of the letters presented under this heading, it is due to the literary reputation of the poet to whom they are ascribed to make certain statements omitted by their compiler.

In the spring of 1875, copies of some of these letters were submitted to me by Mr. Ingram. The first note, dated January 28, 1847, was claimed to be from a note in Poe's handwriting; the others were avowedly from copies of Poe's letters sent him by the same lady. Admitting their value as a record of facts, I frankly told him that from certain peculiarities of style and phraseology, so unlike the nervous rhythmical and emphatic style of Poe, I could not readily accept them as literal transcripts from the originals, and that however interesting in their details, they ought not to be presented to the public as verbatim copies of autograph letters.

In his reply, Mr. Ingram repeatedly and earnestly assured me that he entirely concurred with my opinion, and that I might rest assured that he would publish nothing until it had been carefully revised and “recast.”

Whether the letters “To Annie” were subjected to this process does not appear, but one can hardly imagine Poe to have said, “You are the only being in the whole world whom I have loved at the same time with truth and with purity.”

It is true that in Lowell as elsewhere the disturbing elements which had always developed themselves among the friends who could best appreciate his genius and the charm of his society, soon began to manifest themselves. Mutual misrepresentations and recriminations, attended by rash and compromising statements, seem to have followed, until driven to desperation he may have permitted himself to say unmanly things of those whom he believed to have injured him.

As an offset to the confused and contradictory impression which these letters must inevitably leave on the mind of the reader, we would refer those interested in the subject to the “Recollections” of a lady known as the “sister,” so often spoken of in the letters “To Annie.”

They will be found in the seventh chapter of Gill's Life of Poe, under [page 500:] the head of “Suggestive Recollections.” The delineation of Poe as seen by this lady in his earlier visits to Lowell, is so delicately, truthfully and tenderly treated, that, all who knew him will recognize the exquisite fidelity of the portrait.

Whether, as Mr. Ingram claims, the “unpublished correspondence” as a whole, will throw new lights on some of the dark and troubled phases of Poe's strange and sorrowful history, may be doubted. Observant and critical readers cannot fail to perceive that some of the new lights are cross-lights, tending to obliterate the outlines, obscure the colors and destroy what artists call the “values” of his illuminated record. To those who can read between the lines the letters undoubtedly supply some missing links, fix some suggestive and very significant dates, and furnish a clue to some important facts yet unrevealed.

If we must concede — since so many of the wayward poet's friends and “vindicators” will have it so — that Poe was like Hamlet, “very proud, revengeful, ambitious,” we are not yet prepared to believe he was deliberately treacherous and perfidious.

One thing is certain, if Boileau's celebrated axiom is to be received as valid, Le style c’est l’homme meme, a man's style is the man himself, we do not always in these letters find the man in the style.

A specimen of the avidity with which the most preposterous charges against Poe are received and circulated, appeared recently in the N.Y. Evening Post. A contributor affirming that one of Poe's intimate friends assured him that Poe insisted that he saw no reason why a man should not kill an objectionable person for his own convenience, while he was convinced that the maker of a false rhyme ought to be hanged for the offence. And this was put forth in a prominent journal as an evidence of Poe's moral obliquity. As well might Dr. Johnson have been denounced as a hardened reprobate, devoid of all moral sense, when, on being told that Boswell was preparing a life of him for posthumous publication, he exclaimed: “Sir, if I thought that Bozzy was preparing to write my life, I should be tempted to anticipate him by taking his.”