The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (39 page)

In France, no fewer than four editions of the complete moon series were issued, three from Paris and the other from Bordeaux. When the French astronomer François Arago first read the story, likely in one of the newspapers, he became immediately incensed at the liberties that had been taken with the reputation of his friend John Herschel. Arago was the
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country’s leading astronomer, serving simultaneously as director of the Paris Observatory and permanent secretary of the Académie des sciences
;
he was himself a pluralist who believed in the possibility of life on comets as well as the sun (“If one asked me whether the sun can be inhabited by beings organized in a manner analogous to those which populate our globe,” he wrote, “I would not hesitate to make an affirmative response”), but he understood at once that these discoveries did not bear the stamp of John Herschel’s work. Considering himself duty-bound to defend the honor of his friend, he brought the matter directly to the academy. He entreated his colleagues to condemn what he believed was a malicious defamation of Sir John Herschel, who of all men should be immune from such ridicule, who was at that very moment—and here Arago’s voice surely rose to fill the hall—engaged in an invaluable scientific mission in one of the remotest regions of the earth, labors from which all mankind would benefit, and it was the solemn responsibility of their Academy to protect him from such a poisonous attack as this one.

That he was correct in his interpretation would be immediately apparent from the translation that he held in his hand. With that, François Arago commenced to read aloud
Great Astronomical Discoveries,
all eleven thousand words of it. The other members of the Academy apparently found the story less invidious than did Arago; his reading was met by “repeated interruptions from uncontrollable and uproarious laughter.”

In the end, however, Arago got his wish: the French Academy of Sciences passed a resolution that officially declared the lunar discoveries “utterly incredible.”

By the end of September 1835, the
Sun
had still not admitted its role in the alleged discoveries; in print, as in private, Richard Adams Locke continued to counsel patience. Perhaps he was waiting for Benjamin Day to release him from his silence; perhaps he hoped the furor would soon abate. “Certain correspondents have been urging us to come out and confess the whole to be a hoax,” he acknowledged in one item; but this we can by no means do, until we have the testimony of the English or Scotch papers to corroborate such declarations. In the meantime, let every reader of the account examine it, and enjoy his own opinion.

Many intelligent and scientific persons still believe it true, and will con-

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Moonshine

tinue to do so to their lives’ end; whilst the scepticism of others would not be removed though they were in Dr. Herschel’s observatory itself.

In that same item, Locke wrote that some readers had suggested that the entire series was but “an elaborate satire upon the monstrous fabrica-tions of the political press of the country”—with the different species of lunar animals meant to represent various newspaper editors. Locke did not give any credence to this rather antic theory, although he did amus-edly confess that the “idea of intended satire somewhat shook our own faith in the genuineness of the extracts.” Still, it was the first time that he had referred to the possibility of the moon series being a satire; with this reference, at last, he was edging closer to the truth.

Meanwhile, at the
Herald,
James Gordon Bennett kept up his relentless cannonade. “The hoax is now complete,” he wrote on September 3. “The Sun can never thrive hereafter upon the moon or any other planet. It will sink—it has already sunk to its original inanity and insipidity. A newspaper can only attain a sterling character by a sustained and sustaining intellect. People are already beginning to be disgusted with its monstrous mendacity.” Two days later, Bennett told his readers he had learned that Richard Adams Locke was completing a novel “on a subject similar to that of his recent able invention of astronomy.” Of course, Bennett well knew that Locke had not written any such novel (nor would he ever write one); he was simply joking, teasing the
Sun
about the fiction of the moon series, but in his jest he had hit upon a genuine insight. “Mr. Locke,” Bennett declared, “has opened a new vein, as original, as curious, as beautiful, as any of the greatest geniuses that ever wrote. He looks forward into the future, and adapts his characters to the light of science.” It was, pronounced the item’s headline, a “New Species of Literature.” Bennett dubbed this genre the “scientific novel,” but readers of a later age would know it instead as science fiction.

As his rival and admirer James Gordon Bennett had so presciently observed, with
Great Astronomical Discoveries
Richard Adams Locke might well be considered the originator of American science fiction. This was a distinction, however, that history would more often accord to the author of “Hans Phaall—A Tale,” the short story that the
Transcript
finished serializing on the very day Bennett’s item appeared. At the end of the final installment, the
Transcript
raised the question of a sequel: “And now, as
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regards the residue of the adventures and doubtless highly important discoveries of Hans Phaall in the moon, will they not be published, as were the preceding, in the Southern Literary Messenger?”

Less than a week later, the author of “Hans Phaall” (who was now an editor of the
Southern Literary Messenger
) wrote a highly agitated letter to a friend, one that contained a question of his own. “Have you seen the

‘Discoveries in the Moon’?” he asked.

“I am convinced that the idea was stolen from myself.”

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c h a p t e r
14

Monck Mason’s

Flying Machine

In the late summer of 1835, walking to work, Edgar Allan Poe had to pass a strangely familiar sight. The offices of the
Southern Literary
Messenger
stood right next door to the storehouse of Ellis & Allan, his late stepfather’s tobacco brokerage firm, a place he had often visited as a boy. On those warm mornings, when all the windows in Richmond’s business district were thrown open, he would arrive at the corner of Fif-teenth and Main and smell again the distinctively sweet, faintly licorice scent of Virginia tobacco; at such times he must have felt himself momentarily plunged back to the happier days of his childhood, though the memories were darkened now with resentment about the patrimony he had been denied.

Poe was twenty-six years old, and still unable to support himself by his writing. In early August, the publisher of the
Southern Literary Messenger,
Thomas Willis White, had hired him as assistant editor at a salary of $520 a year. The offer could not have come at a better time—an entry in the diary of his friend John Pendleton Kennedy noted that Poe had been living “in a state of starvation”—but he had accepted the job with misgivings because it meant moving to Richmond, leaving behind his aunt Maria Clemm and his young cousin Virginia, for whom he had recently developed strong romantic affections. The separation from his Baltimore family grieved him no end, and contributed to the ill habit he had lately acquired, of drinking in the morning before work, which in turn contributed to the black moods of despair that increasingly overtook him.

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“My feelings at this moment are pitiable indeed,” he wrote to Kennedy on September 11. “I am suffering under a depression of spirits such as I have never felt before.”

He had no time now, or energy, for writing poetry or tales. His days were instead filled with the routine tasks of office work, filling subscriptions, maintaining correspondence, correcting proofs, though he did manage to write frequent book reviews, a task that he always undertook with great seriousness. No matter how hard he worked, the pile of mail on his desk seemed never to diminish, the pace of books arriving for review never slackened, the shouts for copy from the printers in the front room never grew less insistent. At the end of August a letter from Aunt Maria, suggesting that she and Virginia might go live with his cousin Neilson Poe, sent him into a greater depression. His skin, always strikingly pale, now seemed even paler; he must have been biting his nails to the quick, as he always did when he was nervous or agitated.

His state of mind grew even worse when he learned that one of his stories had been ill used by newspapermen in New York. In his September 11

letter to John Pendleton Kennedy, in which he described himself as “miserable” and “wretched” and begged Kennedy for some form of consola-tion, Poe still took time to inquire:

Have you seen the “Discoveries in the Moon”? Do you not think it altogether suggested by
Hans Phaal?
It is very singular,—but when I first purposed writing a Tale concerning the Moon, the idea of
Telescopic
discoveries suggested itself to me—but I afterwards abandoned it. I had however spoken of it freely, & from many little incidents & apparently trivial remarks in those
Discoveries
I am convinced that the idea was stolen from myself.

Poe’s conviction was surely strengthened by the response he received from Kennedy the following week, with its reference to the series that had recently concluded in the
Transcript:
“More than yourself have remarked the coincidence between Hans Phaal & the Lunar Discoveries and I perceive that in New York they are republishing Hans for the sake of comparison.” The “coincidence” between the two stories must have made a very strong impression on Poe; he would return to it in print on at least three occasions: in 1839, in the appendix of his first short-story collection,
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque;
again in 1844, in the
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letters from New York that he wrote for the
Columbia Spy
newspaper of Pottsville, Pennsylvania (later collected under the title
Doings of
Gotham
); and once more in 1846, in the essay on Locke for his
Literati
of New York City
series, published in the Philadelphia fashion magazine
Godey’s Lady’s Book.

In one of his
Columbia Spy
letters, Poe claimed that in the fall of 1835

he had included in the
Southern Literary Messenger
a critique of the many

“philosophical blunders” of the moon series. (By philosophical Poe meant scientific; science was then widely known as “natural philosophy.”) However, the issues of the
Messenger
from that period do not reveal any such critique, and Poe did not repeat this assertion in his other discussions of the moon series. But he never stopped insisting that the series was rife with scientific errors, and always maintained that he had recognized them right away. “No sooner had I seen the paper than I understood the jest,”

he recalled in his essay on Locke, adding pointedly, “which not for a moment could I doubt had been suggested by my own
jeu d’esprit.
”

Poe must have found it supremely galling to watch helplessly from Richmond as
Great Astronomical Discoveries
created an international sensation—this story that he considered to be so riddled with flaws, so less worthy of acclaim than his own. The divergent responses given the two stories was a subject that he long mused about, and over time he came to understand that he had made two critical mistakes with “Hans Phaall.” First, he had published it in a literary journal, whereas the moon series had appeared in a newspaper; readers of a literary journal would immediately assume that a story was fiction, while newspaper readers would assume that it was fact. Second, the author of the moon series had maintained a serious tone throughout, never letting on to his readers that what had been written was anything less than the absolute truth; Poe, on the other hand, had begun “Hans Phaall” with a comic scene—the one in which the strange creature appears over Rotterdam in a balloon—imparting to his story a tone that was (as he would later ruefully characterize it) “half plausible, half bantering.” These two issues, in Poe’s view, had doomed “Hans Phaall” to be nothing more than a short story, when what he had really wanted to create, he understood now, was a hoax.

For the rest of his life Edgar Allan Poe would be fascinated by hoaxes.

He would produce several of his own, of varying degrees of seriousness,

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including the first book of prose he ever published, the novella entitled
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,
a seafaring adventure purportedly written by the sailor Pym himself. As he had with “Hans Phaall,” Poe labored to give his narrative the highest possible degree of realism—and once again accomplished this at least in part by plagiarizing authoritative sources. Many of the passages that described the South Seas were taken, sometimes virtually word for word, from encyclopedias and earlier travel narratives. All told, as much as one-fifth of the entire book came from elsewhere. Nonetheless, only a few reviewers believed the story to be true; many more identified it as fiction dressed up as fact. One New York newspaper, the
Gazette,
even raised the possibility that its author was “the very ingenious” Richard Adams Locke, a notion that would certainly have infuriated Edgar Allan Poe. Locke, however, quickly disavowed responsibility for what he called “this new hoax,” writing in the
New Era
that he “verily believes that the merit of it, be it what it may, is entirely due to Mr.