. involves a tendency to return into Unity—a tendency ineradicable until satisfied.” And he later elaborates, “[The atoms’] source lies in the principle, Unity. This is their lost parent. This they seek always—immediately—in all directions—wherever it is even partially to be found; thus appeasing, in some measure, the ineradicable tendency, while on the way to its absolute satisfaction in the end.” As in Pym, then, that which is lost will be recovered.

 

Early chapters of Pym, identified as Poe’s writing, appeared in the January and February 1837 issues of the Southern Literary Messenger. However, Poe’s editorial work on the periodical came to an end in January 1837, probably because of his drinking, and he finished the novel while he lived in New York City in 1837 and the first half of 1838. Publisher Thomas W. White thought poorly of Pym: remarking on the January 1837 issue of the Messenger, he wrote, “A great deal of it is good matter—and all far better than [Poe’s] Gordon Pym for which I apparently pay him now—$3 per page, but which in reality has and still costs me $20 per page.” Meanwhile, to build verisimilitude in his novel, Poe significantly qualified his authorship of the Messenger section—he provided the preface by the supposedly real Pym, who explained that Poe had written the Messenger portion of the narrative to prove that readers would believe Pym’s story; evidence of their belief supposedly persuaded Pym to write the rest of the work. And Poe added the note about Pym’s death, perhaps to strengthen readers’ belief in Pym’s existence. Poe’s novel was published on July 30, 1838, by Harper & Brothers; a British edition was published in October of the same year by Wiley and Putnam. However, in the British edition, the remarkable final journal entry (later to be termed by Malcolm Cowley “the finest passage in all [Poe’s] works”) was omitted—perhaps because of its seeming inexplicability. A pirated edition of Pym was published by John Cunningham in 1841.

Pym did sell—better in England than in the United States—but it was not the popular success for which Poe had hoped. It did win critical commendation, but expressions of appreciative amazement were complemented by those of annoyed incredulity. Yet while Poe attempted to ingratiate himself with William Burton, author of that angry review of Pym, by terming the novel, in an 1840 letter, “a very silly book,” and while, according to the Duyckinck brothers, Poe did not express pride about the book in conversation, he did, shortly after the book’s publication, begin to plan the first modern detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”—almost as if he understood from responses to Pym the need to suggest to his readers some of the most effective methods of reading (including a very close attention to the most unusual details). And it is striking to see that Poe, living in Philadelphia in mid- 1838 and ever avid for reviews of his work, found adjacent to a highly positive notice of Pym in the August 4, 1838, issue of the Philadelphia Saturday News (“. . . it abounds in the wild and wonderful, and it is apparently written with great ability”) the story of a murder on Broadway in New York City—a story that came to serve as a vital source for “Rue Morgue.” Thus, Poe repeated his experience with the Norfolk Herald: seeking a review, he found a source; seeking both a popular readership and a learned one, he turned news into literature. The two audiences of antebellum America are still with us to-day; the richness of Poe’s work for both audiences may help to explain the extraordinary endurance of that work.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym endures as a classic for students of American literature both in and out of the classroom; it endures, as well, in dissertations and scholarly journals and books, in myriad translations and illustrated reprints (and in Henri Magritte’s celebrated 1937 painting, La Reproduction Interdite), and in the literature that it helped to shape. Many scholars agree that Pym influenced Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), especially the chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale,” and clearly the novel influenced Henry James’s The Golden Bowl (1904). And Pym is a touch-stone for James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888), Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Captain of the ‘Polestar’ ” (1894), Jules Verne’s The Sphinx of the Ice-Fields (1897), Charles Romyn Dake’s A Strange Discovery (1899), Walter de la Mare’s The Three Mulla-Mulgars (1910), B. Traven’s Death Ship (1926), H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1939), and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962). Modern writers have relied on Pym, as well—for example, John Gardner in The King’s Indian (1973), John Barth in Sabbatical (1982), and John Calvin Batchelor in The Birth of the People’s Republic of Antarctica (1983). Versions of the white shrouded figure in Pym may be discovered in such works as David Morrell’s novel Testament (1975) and John Dunning’s novel Bookman’s Wake (1995). And the eminent fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges once said of Pym—as related in Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express (1979)—“It is Poe’s greatest book.”

Doubtless, Pym will continue to endure and to be recognized as one of the great achievements of Poe’s career—and, indeed, by some as his single greatest achievement. The novel is a work whose story will continue to enthrall and whose complexity, economy, and unity will continue to amaze. Still reaching for a popular readership and a literary one, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym will continue to create a community of readers—a community that will also endure.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Allan, Hervey, and Thomas Ollive Mabbott. Poe’s Brother: The Poems of William Henry Leonard Poe. New York: George H. Doran, 1926.

Bezanson, Walter E.