The Looking Glass of Arthur Gordon PymBy Frank Meola
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New-York, August 1838
It is with some reluctance but compelling need that I set pen to paper once again on the subject of my recent voyage into the southern Pacific Ocean and the narrative relation of it first published in the Southern Literary Messenger under the name of Edgar Allan Poe. Mr. Poe, editor of that publication, learned of my adventures and encouraged me to set them down, trusting that my awkwardness of style would testify to the veracity of my account. But I was hesitant. I did not believe I could write from memory a description that would convince the reader. Poe therefore suggested he himself write the narrative, or a part thereof, and publish it in the magazine as fiction. This ruse would demonstrate that the story's facts would be believed by the public even though presented to them as fiction! And indeed this is what occurred. The narrative was taken by many as truth. Consequently, I decided to write my own description of the entire adventure AS FACT, there being evidently no danger of the public not believing it was all true.
And so The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket was published as a book, edited to the point of extensive re-writing by Mr. Poe, who nonetheless took great pains to assert the authenticity of my story, allowing me, for instance, to write a preface explaining the genesis of the work. We had discussed it over whiskey in a series of dingy taverns in Richmond, Virginia; afterward we would make our slow way down the narrow streets in a sort of alcoholic haze of delight and terror. The details of my horrific ordeal had all come back to me in waves, and Poe obviously re-imagined them, vividly, almost as if he'd lived them himself. For the results of our shared intoxication--liquor and fantasy mingling--was a tale full of exaggeration, even though I recalled hewing close to the facts, perhaps somewhat colored by my state of mind.
Furthermore, over the next several weeks the book began to sell (modestly) and was received by reviewers and public alike as entirely the work of Edgar Allan Poe, based on the factual account related to him by me--that is, by Arthur Pym. My dismay at this turn of events, my feelings of betrayal and usurpation, were nothing compared to a far more powerful feeling: that of obliteration. This was my text, this text was my life, and now it was another man's text and life--no, worse, I was now the invention of this other person. I was, in effect, dead. One could say murdered. For I discovered (too late, not having read the final proofs or the finished book with all its emendations) that Poe had added a long note after the narrative's last page, the page on which I describe the "shrouded human figure," enormous and white, that rose up before us as our boat plunged into what seemed to be a giant cataract. The note began thus: "The circumstances connected with the late sudden and distressing death of Mr. Pym was already well known to the public through the medium of the daily press."
Sudden death! Well known! Imagine my horror at reading these fraudulent words. What could have been Poe's motive in writing them? I was (I am) quite alive and well, despite the nervous condition brought on by my terrible ordeals. I immediately sought out Poe and found him in another dreary, dank pub, inebriated but entirely capable of reasoned discourse. He explained--as we shared a drink--that this postscript was another ruse: my putative death would serve to reinforce the truth of my existence. His slight Southern inflections lent an ironic melancholy to his words as he regarded me closely with that intense, haunted yet mischievous gaze. I stared back, suddenly dizzy from the combination of drink and bizarre paradox. I found myself drawn into those bleary-sharp eyes, almost as if I were falling, body and mind, into their depths.
Perhaps noting my distress, Poe reached over and touched my arm, as if to reassure me that I was as solidly real as he. His face relaxed--as much as it ever relaxed--into a sardonic smile.
"My dear Pym," he said. "This need not pain you so much. I have told your story. Everyone believes it is true."
"But, sir, it is true!"
"Of course, of course. But the public wants a fable, they crave the fantastic. At the same time they want to believe it's all fact. They want reality as a story."
"Yes," I said. "I can see that. Yet when I read it, it feels like a dream of my experience rather than a memory."
"I am not sure they differ. Dreams like memory have imposed, often fanciful meaning. People crave meaning. We all want to see the symbolic significance of things. To read the hieroglyphic, as it were. Just as you did in those island caves in your story."
"In my reality," I replied. "And I could not read them." (He was referring to the caves on that island where we encountered the natives near the narrative's end.)
"In your reality, no. That is my point. I have attempted to provide those things people want but do not find in the quotidian."
His words were persuasive, like the rhetoric of a performer or a confidence man. I had begun to assent again--no doubt partly an effect of the liquor.
"Beyond all that, there is benefit to both of us. More in fact to you than to me."
"How is that?"
He leaned back, gave a terse, almost harsh laugh.
"I am gaining some renown. I hope to reach a larger public and thereby improve my precarious circumstances. Relieve my debt."
"And I?"
"Well, you too will earn some money. But you will also gain a second life."
I stared. He seemed, for a moment, crazed.
"A second life," I repeated.
"Yes. Your life is now my book. Our book. But you are the person living in it, the voice of its apparent reality. I am merely its author."
I found myself nodding in agreement, at first timidly, then eagerly. I realized it was exactly what I had wanted when I entrusted my story to Poe. I had come so close to death repeatedly. I felt a strange desire to be alive in a different way. A less vulnerable way.
"But there is a certain price for this," Poe continued.
"A price?"
"Yes. You see, in order to exist thoroughly and permanently in our book, you should disappear."
I pointed out that I did disappear at the end of the story. The narrator, that is.
"No, I mean you should disappear."
My enthusiasm drained away, replaced by a dread that seemed to rush up from a fathomless pit. I could not speak.
Poe continued: he was aware of my utterly solitary life, my nearly total anonymity. It would be a simple matter for me to go on being, as it were, dead. I could retire somewhere, there were so many secret places in this vast country into which a person could vanish, metamorphose from one life into another, become a different person. With a different name.
"But my name is Arthur Gordon Pym."
Again Poe laughed. I had of course spoken the first line of my Narrative (Poe's line).
"Yes, yes, certainly," he said. "But that name must now become a fiction, as it were. You can invent another."
I felt as if the shabby floor had opened up and I was falling. Steadying myself, swallowing another whiskey, I forcefully objected to Poe's suggestion, which sounded like a command, as though he was in control of my actions--indeed, at this point, of my existence.
There was little mirth in Poe's laughter nor in his sad eyes. He repeated that he was offering me immortality, that my formless real-life adventures required his shaping mind, his powers of reverie and ratiocination, to become the kind of fantastic (yet true) tale that might work its way into the nation's mind like some collective dream. There it might remain for generations, with my otherwise quite humble name attached to it.
"And of course your own name," I said.
"Of course." This time his laugh withered into a near sigh, as if the thought of this renown, this nominal continuance through time, potentially into some far unknown future, pained him as much as pleased him.
The deflation of Poe's spirits oddly calmed me, and I once again began to reflect on my good fortune at having survived, at being alive at all. Surely that was the important thing: I was robust flesh and blood, far more so than this shriveled, sad author sitting across from me. Yet I had no prospects. I had in fact inherited a goodly sum from my father, thanks to his wise investments in Edgarton New Bank stocks, but because of my prolonged nervous condition upon returning from the South Seas, it had been necessary for me to support myself entirely with those funds. They were dissipating quickly, given the comforts I indulged in as a means of calming my stormy mind. Indeed, part of my motivation in (reluctantly) attempting to write down my adventures was financial.
And I had always desired to distinguish myself, to demonstrate to my skeptical father that I was capable of great things. Alas, I was a failure in all respects save in the circumstances of my life at sea. In the recounting of those circumstances I might be a hero. Of course, my father was dead and so in a sense would I now be.
I assented to Poe's proposal; we shook hands. His, like mine, were trembling. He suggested an attorney in New-York who might effect a name change and handle Poe's periodic payments to me. It would be a good place to be anonymous, New-York, Poe wittily suggested. No need for obscure places. Hide in plain sight. Be a man of the crowd. I concurred.
I actually grew to enjoy my living nonexistence. Contrary to my (Poe's) statements in the first chapter of my Narrative, I have no close family and very few friends. None, sad to say, so much as noticed my disappearance or, if any did, they preferred not to take the trouble to inquire or report about it. I moved my few clothes and possessions to a small but comfortable room in the City Hotel near the southern tip of Manhattan. I passed most days walking the streets, filled with a vibrant mixture of humanity. I relished the notion that I was a sort of ghost among them, observing them, known to no one. Fully there yet invisible--one among the democratic crowd, as Poe had suggested.
At night, however, lying in my unfamiliar hotel bed, my brain teemed with phantoms, horrifying and outlandish images--some of them vivid memories of my arduous voyages, others weird and fantastic distortions of those memories (as in my Narrative). On waking, it became difficult to tell them apart. What had actually occurred? Poe had spoken truth: like dreams themselves, our memories are reconstructions, retrospective approximations. We make meaning of our dreams when awake, and we do the same with our memories of reality.
Yet there must be a distinction.
And so I want to revisit key episodes in my adventures, as I think they happened, not as Poe recounts them. I will try to focus on actual occurrences, things observed directly through my senses, not augmented by dream or imagination. I feel that these re-creations, these notes on what Poe wrote, would be closer to the truth, coming directly from my memory. In this way I hope to calm my feverish mind and so achieve more restful sleep, even if no one else reads these pages.
I want to rectify, for example, the false impression that my friend Augustus had smuggled me aboard the whaling ship Grampus, and that I had hidden myself below decks during the entire course of the bloody mutiny, of which I was completely unaware until Augustus informed me of it. This is preposterous, because in fact NO SUCH PERSON REALLY EXISTED. It was one of Poe's more audacious inventions. If the reader consults Chapter Two of my (that is Poe's) Narrative, the following passage can be found at the end of the first paragraph: "Augustus thoroughly entered into my state of mind. It is probable, indeed, that our intimate communion had resulted in a partial interchange of character." Oh, the ingenious Poe! How he thus both disguises and reveals his true intentions, his attempt to appropriate my identity and distort (while enhancing) my story. Note what he says several sentences earlier: "My conversations with Augustus grew daily more frequent and more intensely full of interest. He had a manner of relating his stories of the ocean (more than half of which I now suspect to have been sheer fabrications) well adapted to have weight with one of my enthusiastic temperament, and somewhat gloomy, although glowing imagination." There are several implications. First, that Poe and I are in some sense doubles, that in telling my story he has imbibed my character and I his, a phenomenon he expresses through the invented person Augustus. The second, more disturbing, suggestion is that I faked large portions of my narrative, that I am a fraud, even though it is not a narrative in any fictional sense; it is my actual life, albeit in the words of Edgar Allan Poe.
Here is the truth: I myself set forth on the Grampus, and I myself was a victim of the horrendous mutiny, held prisoner in the fetid bowels of the ship, without food and with minimal water, for several days until, through my own efforts, I escaped. I then formed a connection with one of the mutineers, a line-manager named Dirk Peters, and gradually we devised a plan to re-take the ship from the more radical rebels, who wanted to abort the voyage entirely and return home.
Who is this character of Augustus then?
I have found an answer in the narrative itself, odd as it was to be searching an account of my own life for clues to the true nature of the people and events in it (my life, I mean). You will perhaps recall the incident not long after I befriended Dirk Peters when we decided to terrorize the other faction of mutineers through my disguising myself as a shipmate who had recently died, most likely poisoned by another crew member. I dressed myself up as the dead man, painting my face to resemble that of a corpse. The scene in which I observe myself in the mirror is only slightly exaggerated; I do recall distinctly the delicious sensation with which I beheld my dead face or, rather, experienced myself as another, dead. Looking at me, a reflected disguise. It was this dizzying confusion of self that seized me, producing not only fear (as Poe asserts) but a sort of delight. And then the trick itself--the thrill of anonymous power, as though I were supernatural, combined with a magician's bliss at creating awe and wonder and fear through illusion. Falseness taken as fact.
I perceive a direct link between this scene and the later death of my "friend" Augustus, in Chapter Thirteen. Since Poe persuaded me to declare in my preface that I took over the narrative, I at first believed that he alludes there to his own "disappearance" from the story. But I re-read the latter parts of the work and was reminded of how fantastic and bizarre the story becomes, with its gargantuan polar bears, seas white as milk, murderous dark-skinned natives of fanciful islands, and near-starvation leading to atrocity. I daresay all this clearly flowed from the feverish pen of Mr. Poe, infusing my New England story with Southern grotesque and, surely, a Southern dread of Negro insurrection. Obviously I had little to do with these lurid descriptions.
Again, here is the truth: we did experience horrendous thirst and hunger, and we did encounter exotic, combative islanders in the southern Pacific. But there were no massacres and, emphatically, WE DID NOT RESORT TO CANNIBALISM. I would certainly have died rather than participate in the repulsive ritual described (thankfully in a brief and vague manner) by Poe in Chapter Twelve. Our shipmate Parker died of fever, induced by famine, and we gave him a proper burial at sea, with Christian prayer, quite the opposite of the heathen horror described by Mr. Poe.
All of which leads me to the conclusion that the character of Augustus is based not on Poe but on myself, and that it evinces Poe's desire to kill me (as it were) and take over my story. Which he did, voraciously. Indeed, the story as it unfolds beyond the death of Augustus follows only the outlines of my actual adventures; this is a voyage not only into the Pacific but--more forcefully--into the imagination and vision of Poe. Into some transformed world. I cannot have actually journeyed there and experienced those outlandish things. Which is to say that the character of Arthur Gordon Pym must actually be Edgar Allan Poe.
But who then am I?
I can only be the real Pym. The one who actually survived. And who has now died and has been living on in different forms, anonymously in the New-York streets and with a new name in this room I now inhabit while my former name attains a kind of immortality in that book by Poe.
But of course I died before. Because, you see, the ending--which puzzles so many--is the one aspect of the second half of the story (after Augustus' death) that is substantially true. We did sail through strangely opaque water, although it wasn't milky or warm as in Poe's description, and we did continue on south, through more and more mysterious and wondrous regions as we approached the Antarctic. But I fell ill during that last part of the voyage; an odd sort of lethargy came over me as we drifted toward an eerie horizon of pale daytime sky, nights brilliant with stars and flashing many-colored light, all the while surrounded by the icy sea. And suddenly, one day or night, there arose that vast white curtain as I (Pym, Poe) depict it in the Narrative's last pages, that cascade of whiteness like a glacier dissolving and plummeting in crystal fragments. And, yes, we did plunge directly into that cascade. It is the last thing I remember of that journey.
What actually happened? We were rescued, saved, by a British ship. Implausible, I know, but true. At least true according to others. I awakened--after intermittent episodes of semi-consciousness on what was clearly a boat--in a London hospital. I was told that I had seemingly died and had been perilously close to following poor Parker into burial at sea before suddenly displaying evidence of life.
I would go further. I believe that I actually died, briefly, and that the white cascade was the boundary of life, death's portal, through which I passed, only to return, filled with awe and terror. And a deep sense of the sublime. Since then, I have felt daily, in some recess of my mind, a strong desire to cross that boundary again.
Here the ms. of Mr. Arthur Gordon Pym breaks off. Evidently Pym never wrote the full revision of his (Poe's) narrative he had planned but left only these few pages sketching his intentions. My name is Dirk Peters, and I am the custodian of this remarkable letter to posterity. As the letter reveals, I too survived that all-but-incredible voyage. For a long time after our return to America from England, I had no contact with Pym. Perhaps neither of us wanted to be reminded of our dreadful if marvelous experience by being in one another's company. Also, I was living in Illinois and Pym (I believed) in Richmond, Virginia, so our paths did not cross. However, I recently received a note from him, asking that I visit him in New-York, where he was now residing. There was something very important he wanted to give to me. He also informed me that he had been living under a different name; his odd explanation for this was a desire for fame through his book without the burdens of fame in life. I was reluctant at first to see him again, but curiosity and a fellow-feeling born of extraordinary shared adventures at last compelled me to make the long trip.
Imagine my shock at finding out that the New-York address Pym had given me was that of the Bloomingdale Lunatic Asylum, in the wild northern reaches of Manhattan Island. Upon inquiring at that grim establishment, I was told that Pym (who was calling himself William Wilson) lived among the milder cases, in a private room on the third floor. His physician (a gaunt, pale man who seemed to blend with his white smock) was at first reluctant to discuss my friend's condition, but I convinced him that Pym (that is Wilson) had no close family or friends, and that he had expressly requested to see me. The doctor explained that Pym suffered from a neurasthenia perhaps induced by some horrendous ordeal, manifesting itself as inertia with episodes of delusion. He sometimes, for instance, believed he was dead, only masquerading--so to speak--as a living man. He was otherwise quite lucid, however, and no danger to himself or to others. He'd been ejected from the City Hotel when he took to sitting out on the sidewalk, staring blankly and referring loudly to the hotel as "a charnel house." A kindly woman from the hotel had brought him, passive and unresisting, to the asylum.
The doctor's explanation overcame my initial alarm and I followed him to Pym's small room, where Pym and I were permitted to speak in private.
He sat at a desk, looking out a window toward the Hudson River a few streets west. He turned and greeted me, using my Christian name. I had expected an enervated, wasted figure regarding me with crazed eyes but Pym was quite the opposite. He stood and walked serenely toward me, hand extended, and we shook.
"I am happy you came," he said.
"How could I not?"
He asked me to sit in a chair next to the desk and resumed his own seat. We exchanged some inquiries about one another's health and lives but did not delve into shared memories. After awhile, Pym became silent and turned to his desk. He took up a handwritten document and offered it to me, explaining that it was a copy of a vitally important response he had written to his own narrative as written by Edgar Poe. He wanted me to keep the copy in the event that the original was damaged or lost. As the only other person with a major role in the events described, I should be the one to be the document's guardian.
I asked if I should read it. Of course, he replied, but he preferred that I wait until I returned home.
He smiled slightly. "I too will be returning home soon," he said. "Though I don't quite know where that is yet."
There was something mysterious and vaguely frightening about this statement; he seemed both eager and resigned at the thought of that "home."
I left him still sitting at his desk, once again gazing at the river, that majestic estuary of the bay and sea.
I read the document upon my return to Illinois. And I quickly understood that Pym was indeed delusional or perhaps some combination of delusional and deceptive: he had re-imagined some of the most horrific events of our journey (accurately rendered by Mr. Poe), ennobling and taming them and making himself their hero. At the same time, he had endorsed some of Poe's wilder exaggerations, notably the shrouded human figure appearing at the end of the narrative. This re-telling of occurrences indeed revealed a mind that could not cope with reality. I can certainly understand why Pym might not want to face the extremities to which we were forced, especially the eating of human flesh. But we did in fact engage in that dark ceremony of survival, and Pym's denial of this fact created in me a sense of solitary guilt and savagery, a feeling that I was not human. Or that Pym was attempting to exclude from the human those baser impulses Christian civilization (as we call it) would prefer not to acknowledge. That I am what Poe terms a "hybrid" man made these feelings all the stronger. My Indian blood and my participation in mutiny put me on the "savage" side of those questionable distinctions Poe insists upon toward the narrative's end. Poe misrepresents the violence as entirely perpetrated by the South Seas natives, while Pym turns away from the violence altogether.
Here are the facts (I am a simple man, not given to deceptions): Pym was trapped in the ship's hold throughout the mutiny, and he continued to conceal himself there, aided by his good friend Augustus. The assertion that Augustus was invented by Poe, a fictional element in the narrative, is utterly absurd and further evidence of Pym's current state--a sort of delirium, a moving in and out of fantasy. (Rather like that state he--that is Poe--describes in Chapter One, wherein Augustus is utterly intoxicated yet appears lucid and rational.) Both Augustus and Pym helped carry out the plan to take the ship back from the renegade faction of mutineers. Pym indeed disguised himself as a corpse or ghost to terrify that faction, a deception in which he took a strange sort of enjoyment.
Our journey to the remote southern islands and our adventures there among the native population occurred in a manner much closer to Poe's version (of Pym's account) than to Pym's re-writing of it (which would seem to indicate that Pym related the events to Poe in that original form). There were skirmishes, there was bloodshed; we had come into those islands as frightening pale invaders with mysterious weapons. As for the cryptic chasm writing, none of us ever deciphered it. Poe's attempt exactly to reproduce that writing on the pages of the book is surely a playful fraud.
And the curtain of white at the narrative's end, well, I did not see it as Pym describes it: for me it was a wall of ice or an effect of southern light or some other quite natural phenomenon. The sea did appear oddly colorless, but not milky white (or warm) as in Poe's description. Of course, Poe seems obsessed by whiteness.
But enough explanation. I am amending this note to the document Pym gave me, and I shall place both in a secure location in this home on the prairie, far from the sea, where I hope to live a long life amid family and friends--putting my wonderful, terrible adventures in the past. I will not spin those adventures into stories; I am no literary tale-teller.
To the readers of the New York Tribune, August 1900:
I found the above accounts in the Illinois home of Mr. Dirk Peters while doing research for my novel A Strange Discovery, about Peters' life after the events so powerfully described in Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. My name is Charles Romyn Dake, and my novel, recently published, is in fact a somewhat fanciful relation of my search for Dirk Peters as well as a truer account of his further adventures with Pym. Since the truth of my entire book has been challenged, I feel the need to explain. In reality, I did not find Peters myself; early in my investigation I learned that he had recently died. But the family living in his former home (not his own family) kindly allowed me to follow an intuition and search the home's musty cellar. There, in a long-neglected corner, sat a box labeled "Grampus"--the sort of box that would have been stored in that ship's hold, where Pym lay for so long in hiding. Inside were three documents: the two above (Pym's letter and Peters' note) and another, much longer manuscript by Peters--an account of his and Pym's later journey to an island near the South Pole called "Hili-li." On this latter narrative--too lengthy to be reproduced here but in my safekeeping--I based my fiction. I am aware that Peters makes no mention in his note to any further adventures (nor does Pym), but Peters' manuscript is presented as a true account and I have no reason to doubt it.
I know that questions will be raised about the authenticity of all these documents. I will likely be accused of fabricating them in order to defend my work and increase public attention to it. Naturally I considered the possibility that these were inauthentic, perhaps someone's playful attempt at making fictional characters appear to have been real persons. I even entertained the notion that Mr. Poe (known for his literary joking) had composed them--and presumably hid them in a basement in Illinois! But these possibilities seem absurd. It is true that I did not meet Peters in the flesh, but I assure you there is ample evidence of his existence. Augustus Barnard and Arthur Pym are harder to trace. The former name appears in records and in many New England memories, although there is no certainty that this is the Augustus in question. Pym, however, seems to have been erased or to have erased himself from the world. Not even the Bloomingdale Asylum has a record of him--neither as Pym nor, oddly, under his assumed name. I obviously believe he--and Peters and Barnard--actually lived among us, even if I have no definitive proof.
My work, like Poe's, is a true account of actual events, in fictional form. I offer these documents as evidence of my veracity. Believe them or not. They are genuine. The men who wrote them are as real--were as alive--as I am myself.
It is with some reluctance but compelling need that I set pen to paper once again on the subject of my recent voyage into the southern Pacific Ocean and the narrative relation of it first published in the Southern Literary Messenger under the name of Edgar Allan Poe. Mr. Poe, editor of that publication, learned of my adventures and encouraged me to set them down, trusting that my awkwardness of style would testify to the veracity of my account. But I was hesitant. I did not believe I could write from memory a description that would convince the reader. Poe therefore suggested he himself write the narrative, or a part thereof, and publish it in the magazine as fiction. This ruse would demonstrate that the story's facts would be believed by the public even though presented to them as fiction! And indeed this is what occurred. The narrative was taken by many as truth. Consequently, I decided to write my own description of the entire adventure AS FACT, there being evidently no danger of the public not believing it was all true.
And so The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket was published as a book, edited to the point of extensive re-writing by Mr. Poe, who nonetheless took great pains to assert the authenticity of my story, allowing me, for instance, to write a preface explaining the genesis of the work. We had discussed it over whiskey in a series of dingy taverns in Richmond, Virginia; afterward we would make our slow way down the narrow streets in a sort of alcoholic haze of delight and terror. The details of my horrific ordeal had all come back to me in waves, and Poe obviously re-imagined them, vividly, almost as if he'd lived them himself. For the results of our shared intoxication--liquor and fantasy mingling--was a tale full of exaggeration, even though I recalled hewing close to the facts, perhaps somewhat colored by my state of mind.
Furthermore, over the next several weeks the book began to sell (modestly) and was received by reviewers and public alike as entirely the work of Edgar Allan Poe, based on the factual account related to him by me--that is, by Arthur Pym. My dismay at this turn of events, my feelings of betrayal and usurpation, were nothing compared to a far more powerful feeling: that of obliteration. This was my text, this text was my life, and now it was another man's text and life--no, worse, I was now the invention of this other person. I was, in effect, dead. One could say murdered. For I discovered (too late, not having read the final proofs or the finished book with all its emendations) that Poe had added a long note after the narrative's last page, the page on which I describe the "shrouded human figure," enormous and white, that rose up before us as our boat plunged into what seemed to be a giant cataract. The note began thus: "The circumstances connected with the late sudden and distressing death of Mr. Pym was already well known to the public through the medium of the daily press."
Sudden death! Well known! Imagine my horror at reading these fraudulent words. What could have been Poe's motive in writing them? I was (I am) quite alive and well, despite the nervous condition brought on by my terrible ordeals. I immediately sought out Poe and found him in another dreary, dank pub, inebriated but entirely capable of reasoned discourse. He explained--as we shared a drink--that this postscript was another ruse: my putative death would serve to reinforce the truth of my existence. His slight Southern inflections lent an ironic melancholy to his words as he regarded me closely with that intense, haunted yet mischievous gaze. I stared back, suddenly dizzy from the combination of drink and bizarre paradox. I found myself drawn into those bleary-sharp eyes, almost as if I were falling, body and mind, into their depths.
Perhaps noting my distress, Poe reached over and touched my arm, as if to reassure me that I was as solidly real as he. His face relaxed--as much as it ever relaxed--into a sardonic smile.
"My dear Pym," he said. "This need not pain you so much. I have told your story. Everyone believes it is true."
"But, sir, it is true!"
"Of course, of course. But the public wants a fable, they crave the fantastic. At the same time they want to believe it's all fact. They want reality as a story."
"Yes," I said. "I can see that. Yet when I read it, it feels like a dream of my experience rather than a memory."
"I am not sure they differ. Dreams like memory have imposed, often fanciful meaning. People crave meaning. We all want to see the symbolic significance of things. To read the hieroglyphic, as it were. Just as you did in those island caves in your story."
"In my reality," I replied. "And I could not read them." (He was referring to the caves on that island where we encountered the natives near the narrative's end.)
"In your reality, no. That is my point. I have attempted to provide those things people want but do not find in the quotidian."
His words were persuasive, like the rhetoric of a performer or a confidence man. I had begun to assent again--no doubt partly an effect of the liquor.
"Beyond all that, there is benefit to both of us. More in fact to you than to me."
"How is that?"
He leaned back, gave a terse, almost harsh laugh.
"I am gaining some renown. I hope to reach a larger public and thereby improve my precarious circumstances. Relieve my debt."
"And I?"
"Well, you too will earn some money. But you will also gain a second life."
I stared. He seemed, for a moment, crazed.
"A second life," I repeated.
"Yes. Your life is now my book. Our book. But you are the person living in it, the voice of its apparent reality. I am merely its author."
I found myself nodding in agreement, at first timidly, then eagerly. I realized it was exactly what I had wanted when I entrusted my story to Poe. I had come so close to death repeatedly. I felt a strange desire to be alive in a different way. A less vulnerable way.
"But there is a certain price for this," Poe continued.
"A price?"
"Yes. You see, in order to exist thoroughly and permanently in our book, you should disappear."
I pointed out that I did disappear at the end of the story. The narrator, that is.
"No, I mean you should disappear."
My enthusiasm drained away, replaced by a dread that seemed to rush up from a fathomless pit. I could not speak.
Poe continued: he was aware of my utterly solitary life, my nearly total anonymity. It would be a simple matter for me to go on being, as it were, dead. I could retire somewhere, there were so many secret places in this vast country into which a person could vanish, metamorphose from one life into another, become a different person. With a different name.
"But my name is Arthur Gordon Pym."
Again Poe laughed. I had of course spoken the first line of my Narrative (Poe's line).
"Yes, yes, certainly," he said. "But that name must now become a fiction, as it were. You can invent another."
I felt as if the shabby floor had opened up and I was falling. Steadying myself, swallowing another whiskey, I forcefully objected to Poe's suggestion, which sounded like a command, as though he was in control of my actions--indeed, at this point, of my existence.
There was little mirth in Poe's laughter nor in his sad eyes. He repeated that he was offering me immortality, that my formless real-life adventures required his shaping mind, his powers of reverie and ratiocination, to become the kind of fantastic (yet true) tale that might work its way into the nation's mind like some collective dream. There it might remain for generations, with my otherwise quite humble name attached to it.
"And of course your own name," I said.
"Of course." This time his laugh withered into a near sigh, as if the thought of this renown, this nominal continuance through time, potentially into some far unknown future, pained him as much as pleased him.
The deflation of Poe's spirits oddly calmed me, and I once again began to reflect on my good fortune at having survived, at being alive at all. Surely that was the important thing: I was robust flesh and blood, far more so than this shriveled, sad author sitting across from me. Yet I had no prospects. I had in fact inherited a goodly sum from my father, thanks to his wise investments in Edgarton New Bank stocks, but because of my prolonged nervous condition upon returning from the South Seas, it had been necessary for me to support myself entirely with those funds. They were dissipating quickly, given the comforts I indulged in as a means of calming my stormy mind. Indeed, part of my motivation in (reluctantly) attempting to write down my adventures was financial.
And I had always desired to distinguish myself, to demonstrate to my skeptical father that I was capable of great things. Alas, I was a failure in all respects save in the circumstances of my life at sea. In the recounting of those circumstances I might be a hero. Of course, my father was dead and so in a sense would I now be.
I assented to Poe's proposal; we shook hands. His, like mine, were trembling. He suggested an attorney in New-York who might effect a name change and handle Poe's periodic payments to me. It would be a good place to be anonymous, New-York, Poe wittily suggested. No need for obscure places. Hide in plain sight. Be a man of the crowd. I concurred.
I actually grew to enjoy my living nonexistence. Contrary to my (Poe's) statements in the first chapter of my Narrative, I have no close family and very few friends. None, sad to say, so much as noticed my disappearance or, if any did, they preferred not to take the trouble to inquire or report about it. I moved my few clothes and possessions to a small but comfortable room in the City Hotel near the southern tip of Manhattan. I passed most days walking the streets, filled with a vibrant mixture of humanity. I relished the notion that I was a sort of ghost among them, observing them, known to no one. Fully there yet invisible--one among the democratic crowd, as Poe had suggested.
At night, however, lying in my unfamiliar hotel bed, my brain teemed with phantoms, horrifying and outlandish images--some of them vivid memories of my arduous voyages, others weird and fantastic distortions of those memories (as in my Narrative). On waking, it became difficult to tell them apart. What had actually occurred? Poe had spoken truth: like dreams themselves, our memories are reconstructions, retrospective approximations. We make meaning of our dreams when awake, and we do the same with our memories of reality.
Yet there must be a distinction.
And so I want to revisit key episodes in my adventures, as I think they happened, not as Poe recounts them. I will try to focus on actual occurrences, things observed directly through my senses, not augmented by dream or imagination. I feel that these re-creations, these notes on what Poe wrote, would be closer to the truth, coming directly from my memory. In this way I hope to calm my feverish mind and so achieve more restful sleep, even if no one else reads these pages.
I want to rectify, for example, the false impression that my friend Augustus had smuggled me aboard the whaling ship Grampus, and that I had hidden myself below decks during the entire course of the bloody mutiny, of which I was completely unaware until Augustus informed me of it. This is preposterous, because in fact NO SUCH PERSON REALLY EXISTED. It was one of Poe's more audacious inventions. If the reader consults Chapter Two of my (that is Poe's) Narrative, the following passage can be found at the end of the first paragraph: "Augustus thoroughly entered into my state of mind. It is probable, indeed, that our intimate communion had resulted in a partial interchange of character." Oh, the ingenious Poe! How he thus both disguises and reveals his true intentions, his attempt to appropriate my identity and distort (while enhancing) my story. Note what he says several sentences earlier: "My conversations with Augustus grew daily more frequent and more intensely full of interest. He had a manner of relating his stories of the ocean (more than half of which I now suspect to have been sheer fabrications) well adapted to have weight with one of my enthusiastic temperament, and somewhat gloomy, although glowing imagination." There are several implications. First, that Poe and I are in some sense doubles, that in telling my story he has imbibed my character and I his, a phenomenon he expresses through the invented person Augustus. The second, more disturbing, suggestion is that I faked large portions of my narrative, that I am a fraud, even though it is not a narrative in any fictional sense; it is my actual life, albeit in the words of Edgar Allan Poe.
Here is the truth: I myself set forth on the Grampus, and I myself was a victim of the horrendous mutiny, held prisoner in the fetid bowels of the ship, without food and with minimal water, for several days until, through my own efforts, I escaped. I then formed a connection with one of the mutineers, a line-manager named Dirk Peters, and gradually we devised a plan to re-take the ship from the more radical rebels, who wanted to abort the voyage entirely and return home.
Who is this character of Augustus then?
I have found an answer in the narrative itself, odd as it was to be searching an account of my own life for clues to the true nature of the people and events in it (my life, I mean). You will perhaps recall the incident not long after I befriended Dirk Peters when we decided to terrorize the other faction of mutineers through my disguising myself as a shipmate who had recently died, most likely poisoned by another crew member. I dressed myself up as the dead man, painting my face to resemble that of a corpse. The scene in which I observe myself in the mirror is only slightly exaggerated; I do recall distinctly the delicious sensation with which I beheld my dead face or, rather, experienced myself as another, dead. Looking at me, a reflected disguise. It was this dizzying confusion of self that seized me, producing not only fear (as Poe asserts) but a sort of delight. And then the trick itself--the thrill of anonymous power, as though I were supernatural, combined with a magician's bliss at creating awe and wonder and fear through illusion. Falseness taken as fact.
I perceive a direct link between this scene and the later death of my "friend" Augustus, in Chapter Thirteen. Since Poe persuaded me to declare in my preface that I took over the narrative, I at first believed that he alludes there to his own "disappearance" from the story. But I re-read the latter parts of the work and was reminded of how fantastic and bizarre the story becomes, with its gargantuan polar bears, seas white as milk, murderous dark-skinned natives of fanciful islands, and near-starvation leading to atrocity. I daresay all this clearly flowed from the feverish pen of Mr. Poe, infusing my New England story with Southern grotesque and, surely, a Southern dread of Negro insurrection. Obviously I had little to do with these lurid descriptions.
Again, here is the truth: we did experience horrendous thirst and hunger, and we did encounter exotic, combative islanders in the southern Pacific. But there were no massacres and, emphatically, WE DID NOT RESORT TO CANNIBALISM. I would certainly have died rather than participate in the repulsive ritual described (thankfully in a brief and vague manner) by Poe in Chapter Twelve. Our shipmate Parker died of fever, induced by famine, and we gave him a proper burial at sea, with Christian prayer, quite the opposite of the heathen horror described by Mr. Poe.
All of which leads me to the conclusion that the character of Augustus is based not on Poe but on myself, and that it evinces Poe's desire to kill me (as it were) and take over my story. Which he did, voraciously. Indeed, the story as it unfolds beyond the death of Augustus follows only the outlines of my actual adventures; this is a voyage not only into the Pacific but--more forcefully--into the imagination and vision of Poe. Into some transformed world. I cannot have actually journeyed there and experienced those outlandish things. Which is to say that the character of Arthur Gordon Pym must actually be Edgar Allan Poe.
But who then am I?
I can only be the real Pym. The one who actually survived. And who has now died and has been living on in different forms, anonymously in the New-York streets and with a new name in this room I now inhabit while my former name attains a kind of immortality in that book by Poe.
But of course I died before. Because, you see, the ending--which puzzles so many--is the one aspect of the second half of the story (after Augustus' death) that is substantially true. We did sail through strangely opaque water, although it wasn't milky or warm as in Poe's description, and we did continue on south, through more and more mysterious and wondrous regions as we approached the Antarctic. But I fell ill during that last part of the voyage; an odd sort of lethargy came over me as we drifted toward an eerie horizon of pale daytime sky, nights brilliant with stars and flashing many-colored light, all the while surrounded by the icy sea. And suddenly, one day or night, there arose that vast white curtain as I (Pym, Poe) depict it in the Narrative's last pages, that cascade of whiteness like a glacier dissolving and plummeting in crystal fragments. And, yes, we did plunge directly into that cascade. It is the last thing I remember of that journey.
What actually happened? We were rescued, saved, by a British ship. Implausible, I know, but true. At least true according to others. I awakened--after intermittent episodes of semi-consciousness on what was clearly a boat--in a London hospital. I was told that I had seemingly died and had been perilously close to following poor Parker into burial at sea before suddenly displaying evidence of life.
I would go further. I believe that I actually died, briefly, and that the white cascade was the boundary of life, death's portal, through which I passed, only to return, filled with awe and terror. And a deep sense of the sublime. Since then, I have felt daily, in some recess of my mind, a strong desire to cross that boundary again.
Here the ms. of Mr. Arthur Gordon Pym breaks off. Evidently Pym never wrote the full revision of his (Poe's) narrative he had planned but left only these few pages sketching his intentions. My name is Dirk Peters, and I am the custodian of this remarkable letter to posterity. As the letter reveals, I too survived that all-but-incredible voyage. For a long time after our return to America from England, I had no contact with Pym. Perhaps neither of us wanted to be reminded of our dreadful if marvelous experience by being in one another's company. Also, I was living in Illinois and Pym (I believed) in Richmond, Virginia, so our paths did not cross. However, I recently received a note from him, asking that I visit him in New-York, where he was now residing. There was something very important he wanted to give to me. He also informed me that he had been living under a different name; his odd explanation for this was a desire for fame through his book without the burdens of fame in life. I was reluctant at first to see him again, but curiosity and a fellow-feeling born of extraordinary shared adventures at last compelled me to make the long trip.
Imagine my shock at finding out that the New-York address Pym had given me was that of the Bloomingdale Lunatic Asylum, in the wild northern reaches of Manhattan Island. Upon inquiring at that grim establishment, I was told that Pym (who was calling himself William Wilson) lived among the milder cases, in a private room on the third floor. His physician (a gaunt, pale man who seemed to blend with his white smock) was at first reluctant to discuss my friend's condition, but I convinced him that Pym (that is Wilson) had no close family or friends, and that he had expressly requested to see me. The doctor explained that Pym suffered from a neurasthenia perhaps induced by some horrendous ordeal, manifesting itself as inertia with episodes of delusion. He sometimes, for instance, believed he was dead, only masquerading--so to speak--as a living man. He was otherwise quite lucid, however, and no danger to himself or to others. He'd been ejected from the City Hotel when he took to sitting out on the sidewalk, staring blankly and referring loudly to the hotel as "a charnel house." A kindly woman from the hotel had brought him, passive and unresisting, to the asylum.
The doctor's explanation overcame my initial alarm and I followed him to Pym's small room, where Pym and I were permitted to speak in private.
He sat at a desk, looking out a window toward the Hudson River a few streets west. He turned and greeted me, using my Christian name. I had expected an enervated, wasted figure regarding me with crazed eyes but Pym was quite the opposite. He stood and walked serenely toward me, hand extended, and we shook.
"I am happy you came," he said.
"How could I not?"
He asked me to sit in a chair next to the desk and resumed his own seat. We exchanged some inquiries about one another's health and lives but did not delve into shared memories. After awhile, Pym became silent and turned to his desk. He took up a handwritten document and offered it to me, explaining that it was a copy of a vitally important response he had written to his own narrative as written by Edgar Poe. He wanted me to keep the copy in the event that the original was damaged or lost. As the only other person with a major role in the events described, I should be the one to be the document's guardian.
I asked if I should read it. Of course, he replied, but he preferred that I wait until I returned home.
He smiled slightly. "I too will be returning home soon," he said. "Though I don't quite know where that is yet."
There was something mysterious and vaguely frightening about this statement; he seemed both eager and resigned at the thought of that "home."
I left him still sitting at his desk, once again gazing at the river, that majestic estuary of the bay and sea.
I read the document upon my return to Illinois. And I quickly understood that Pym was indeed delusional or perhaps some combination of delusional and deceptive: he had re-imagined some of the most horrific events of our journey (accurately rendered by Mr. Poe), ennobling and taming them and making himself their hero. At the same time, he had endorsed some of Poe's wilder exaggerations, notably the shrouded human figure appearing at the end of the narrative. This re-telling of occurrences indeed revealed a mind that could not cope with reality. I can certainly understand why Pym might not want to face the extremities to which we were forced, especially the eating of human flesh. But we did in fact engage in that dark ceremony of survival, and Pym's denial of this fact created in me a sense of solitary guilt and savagery, a feeling that I was not human. Or that Pym was attempting to exclude from the human those baser impulses Christian civilization (as we call it) would prefer not to acknowledge. That I am what Poe terms a "hybrid" man made these feelings all the stronger. My Indian blood and my participation in mutiny put me on the "savage" side of those questionable distinctions Poe insists upon toward the narrative's end. Poe misrepresents the violence as entirely perpetrated by the South Seas natives, while Pym turns away from the violence altogether.
Here are the facts (I am a simple man, not given to deceptions): Pym was trapped in the ship's hold throughout the mutiny, and he continued to conceal himself there, aided by his good friend Augustus. The assertion that Augustus was invented by Poe, a fictional element in the narrative, is utterly absurd and further evidence of Pym's current state--a sort of delirium, a moving in and out of fantasy. (Rather like that state he--that is Poe--describes in Chapter One, wherein Augustus is utterly intoxicated yet appears lucid and rational.) Both Augustus and Pym helped carry out the plan to take the ship back from the renegade faction of mutineers. Pym indeed disguised himself as a corpse or ghost to terrify that faction, a deception in which he took a strange sort of enjoyment.
Our journey to the remote southern islands and our adventures there among the native population occurred in a manner much closer to Poe's version (of Pym's account) than to Pym's re-writing of it (which would seem to indicate that Pym related the events to Poe in that original form). There were skirmishes, there was bloodshed; we had come into those islands as frightening pale invaders with mysterious weapons. As for the cryptic chasm writing, none of us ever deciphered it. Poe's attempt exactly to reproduce that writing on the pages of the book is surely a playful fraud.
And the curtain of white at the narrative's end, well, I did not see it as Pym describes it: for me it was a wall of ice or an effect of southern light or some other quite natural phenomenon. The sea did appear oddly colorless, but not milky white (or warm) as in Poe's description. Of course, Poe seems obsessed by whiteness.
But enough explanation. I am amending this note to the document Pym gave me, and I shall place both in a secure location in this home on the prairie, far from the sea, where I hope to live a long life amid family and friends--putting my wonderful, terrible adventures in the past. I will not spin those adventures into stories; I am no literary tale-teller.
To the readers of the New York Tribune, August 1900:
I found the above accounts in the Illinois home of Mr. Dirk Peters while doing research for my novel A Strange Discovery, about Peters' life after the events so powerfully described in Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. My name is Charles Romyn Dake, and my novel, recently published, is in fact a somewhat fanciful relation of my search for Dirk Peters as well as a truer account of his further adventures with Pym. Since the truth of my entire book has been challenged, I feel the need to explain. In reality, I did not find Peters myself; early in my investigation I learned that he had recently died. But the family living in his former home (not his own family) kindly allowed me to follow an intuition and search the home's musty cellar. There, in a long-neglected corner, sat a box labeled "Grampus"--the sort of box that would have been stored in that ship's hold, where Pym lay for so long in hiding. Inside were three documents: the two above (Pym's letter and Peters' note) and another, much longer manuscript by Peters--an account of his and Pym's later journey to an island near the South Pole called "Hili-li." On this latter narrative--too lengthy to be reproduced here but in my safekeeping--I based my fiction. I am aware that Peters makes no mention in his note to any further adventures (nor does Pym), but Peters' manuscript is presented as a true account and I have no reason to doubt it.
I know that questions will be raised about the authenticity of all these documents. I will likely be accused of fabricating them in order to defend my work and increase public attention to it. Naturally I considered the possibility that these were inauthentic, perhaps someone's playful attempt at making fictional characters appear to have been real persons. I even entertained the notion that Mr. Poe (known for his literary joking) had composed them--and presumably hid them in a basement in Illinois! But these possibilities seem absurd. It is true that I did not meet Peters in the flesh, but I assure you there is ample evidence of his existence. Augustus Barnard and Arthur Pym are harder to trace. The former name appears in records and in many New England memories, although there is no certainty that this is the Augustus in question. Pym, however, seems to have been erased or to have erased himself from the world. Not even the Bloomingdale Asylum has a record of him--neither as Pym nor, oddly, under his assumed name. I obviously believe he--and Peters and Barnard--actually lived among us, even if I have no definitive proof.
My work, like Poe's, is a true account of actual events, in fictional form. I offer these documents as evidence of my veracity. Believe them or not. They are genuine. The men who wrote them are as real--were as alive--as I am myself.
Frank Meola has published work in a variety of forms and places, including New England Review and the New York Times. He writes essays, often on American literature and culture, as well as short stories. His novel "Clay" is scheduled for publication later this year, and he is at work on a new novel that juxtaposes the present and the nineteenth century. He has an MFA from Columbia University, and he teaches writing at NYU. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his husband and their two cats.