THE BLACK CAT
835
winters of poverty and cold. Probably, it was with some such scene
before him, during the winter of 1842-1843-a winter especially
cruel, when Poe's poverty was extreme,
his
wife spitting blood and
he himself constantly tempted to drown his sorrows in drink-that
he conceived this tale of
The Black Cat.
1
"For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about
to pen," begins the hero of
The Black Cat,
"I neither expect nor solicit belief. . . . But tomorrow I die, and
to-day I would unburthen my soul. My immediate purpose
is
to place
before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series
of mere household events. . . . Yet I will not attempt to expound
them. To me, they have presented little but Horror-to many they
will seem less terrible than
baroques.
Hereafter, perhaps, some intellect
may be found which will reduce my phantasm to the common-place
-some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than
my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances I detail with awe,
nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and
effects."
It is almost as though Poe had sensed the remote advent of
psychoanalysis which, alone, has given us the means to reduce to a
series of causes and effects, emanating in fact, as he himself says,
from "homely and domestic happenings," the dreadful phantasms
that haunted his life and art.
The doomed man continues:
"From my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of my
disposition.... I was especially fond of animals, and was indulged by
my parents with a great variety of pets."
Such, indeed, must have been the small Edgar, when he lived with
the Allans, though we may somewhat doubt this statement as regards
John Allan. Towards his "Ma," however, we may be sure he was
"docile" in the extreme. We know, moreover, that he loved animals,
for we see him, at fourteen, admiring his friend Robert Stanard's
rabbits and pigeons, and there is no record of cruelty to animals in the
reminiscences of him as a boy. All this, together with our other knowl–
edge, allows us to conclude that the sadistic components of his
instincts must have been very early repressed, though they went on
