Those publications, which were reprinted elsewhere in the United States, brought the young writer his first literary recognition.

Looming, too, was another experimental venture of Poe‘s, generally known as “Tales of the Folio Club,” a book of interlocking frame narratives. 4 In this scheme, never actualized, a group of writers, the Folio Club, meet monthly for literary reading and critiques. Preceding the readings are substantial suppers accompanied by plenty of alcohol. After each member reads his original “brief prose tale” (a hit at some best-selling author’s typical theme and form), critiques follow. Poe once wrote that these critical interchanges were meant to enliven comedy in the project: Voiced by pretentious would-be authors, each tale is delivered by a first-person narrator, a caricature of an actual popular author represented. Because the author-reader of the worst tale hosts the next meeting, and because one of the group has his works successively targeted, someone in the group eventually becomes enraged, flees to a publisher with the manuscripts, and hurries them into print as an expose, for revenge.

What doubtless enlivened the overall scheme was that the club members, from the effects of either eating or/and drinking too much, would have articulated corresponding bizarre situations and repetitious language patterns within their tales, imparting zesty humor to those fictions, such mirth given point by the critiques. Had “Tales of the Folio Club” been published, a far different conception of Poe might have emerged early in his career—with what future we may only conjecture. Publishers rejected his manuscript, however, on grounds that the content was far too sophisticated for average readers and sales would not warrant the financial risk. Poe eventually dismantled the collection, brought out individual stories in periodicals, and thereby paved the way for readers’ disagreements that continue to be dynamic even today.

From the few manuscript leaves that survive, some ideas about the “Folio Club” are plausible. A portion forming a prologue—to an eleven-story version—lists and tersely characterizes the club members. For example, if in its original Saturday Courier form “Metzengerstein,” read by Mr. Horrible Dictu, existed as a “straight” tale of Gothic or “German” sensationalism that, revised for the Folio Club, was improved but remained chiefly serious in import (or indeed if it were read as a Gothic extravaganza), and with its likely position as sixth among Folio Club tales, it might have drawn varied responses from overfed, drunken listeners. First, if it was serious but well done, it might have gained merely a nod from the majority as familiar if unexceptional “German” fiction. Of course, any art in the tale would have eluded inebriated, drowsy listeners. Even if it were intended as a parody of “Germanism,” many could no longer have discerned that possibility. The repetitive phrases and words, the overall incoherence of young Frederick Metzengerstein, the treacherous protagonist, the demonic horse, the suspense and melodrama that surround impending tragedy—all these features might dovetail with an intoxicated reader reading to an intoxicated audience. Nonetheless, in this early tale we find Poe mingling human and animal traits, a mingling that recurs in his fiction: Witness “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Black Cat,” “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” and “Hop-Frog.” In all, however, the surface grotesquerie thinly masks psychological underpinnings.

Several other tales—for example, “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “The Visionary” (later entitled “The Assignation”), and “Bon-Bon”—contain innuendos of gluttony or drunkenness, although the first two do not have the comic surfaces found in the last. In light of the improbabilities or discrepancies in “MS. Found,” which invite wariness as to accuracy, we may ask of the bottle containing the manuscript: Was it a bottle actually tossed into the sea when the protagonist-writer of the manuscript had arrived at his most sensational and improbable adventure, remaining rational enough to pen meticulous diary jottings and attempt to dispatch them? Or was the bottle one on the Folio Club table or one to which the author of the tale had previously liberally resorted as he composed his story? Subtle wordplay alluding to imbibing and low-grade gin may assist us to realize some of Poe’s intent here.

“The Assignation,” too, may reveal alcoholic inspirations. From the torrent of words and kaleidoscopic visual effects in the opening paragraph, on through the narrator’s misapprehensions of the planned “assignation” to an early-morning visit to his mysterious friend’s dwelling, where they drink wine, the narrator grows bewildered by his host’s outré art collection (and, perhaps, the effects of the wine) and the host’s speech, which smacks of wordplay on alcohol (“the very spirit of cordiality”), until he realizes that the other has committed suicide by drinking poisoned wine; he soon learns that the Marchesa, the man’s paramour, has imbibed poison, too. If the entire story in one version was Folio Club material, then the high-pitched language and events may have enhanced a drunkard’s rendering of intense love, wholly misapprehended by him. “The Assignation” derives in large measure from Thomas Moore’s 1830 biography of Lord Byron, The Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, with Notices of his Life, although the sensational deaths of the lovers are Poe’s own creation.

“Shadow—A Parable” and “Silence—A Fable” may strike us as deliberately planned for companion reading. The former depicts seven mourners assembled to watch the corpse of Zoilus, fortifying themselves with “red Chian wine.” The formal, repetitive language, the mourners’ solemnity, the aura of impending catastrophe, their terror when Shadow appears and speaks in accents uncannily familiar but indefinable—all these features suggest alcoholic perception and rhetoric. Add a narrator named “Oinos,” Greek for “one” but also for “wine,” and the verdict that it is a wine-bibber’s tale gains strength. This story may also epitomize the general drift of “Tales of the Folio Club”: A group steadily drinks on amid an aura of death and terror (typical themes in Folio Club tales), and the gathering culminates in a rout, one that may signify the insulted club member’s absconding with the manuscripts and publishing them. The oddly familiar language heard by those in “Shadow—A Parable” may in context be redolent of language in Folio Club tales and debates. So, too, with “Silence—A Fable,” probably the tale read by the “very little man in black” whose tale of volatile emotions amid desolate scenery mimes Poe’s own early poems. The original title was “Slope—A Fable,” in which the initial word, a transliteration into English of the Greek word for “Silence,” may too be an anagram for “is Poe,” cream of a bizarre jest. The language—with its many repetitions and sentences starting with conjunctions, the unpleasant backdrop suggestive of decay, alternating calm with storm, the abject narrator and the hapless man on the rock, plus a demon storyteller—could be a drunkard’s verbal expression and his equivalent of “seeing pink elephants.”

Yet another aspect resides in these tales: Both would have appealed to Poe’s contemporaries because the language recalls that in the King James Bible.