THE BLACK CAT
837
mentality of the Fiend Intemperance--had (I blush to confess it) ex–
perienced a radical alteration for the worse.... I suffered myself to
use intemperate language to my wife. At length, I even offered her
personal violence. My pets, of course, were made to feel the change
in my disposition. I not only neglected, but ill-used them." Pluto,
however, is spared for a time. "But my disease grew upon me-for
what disease
is
like Alcohol I-and at length even Pluto . . . began
to experience the effects of my ill-temper."
For Poe, in truth, no evil could compare with alcohol. After each
ungovernable excess he would return to Muddy to be nursed like a
wayward, repentant child. Indeed, it was just his disastrous Washing–
ton spree, before he began writing
The Black Cat,
which in all likeli–
hood cost him the fulfilment of his dreams for the
Stylus
and that
literary and material success which would have meant comfort for
himself and his ailing wife.
Poe also knew, from experience, the power of drink to release
phantasies of violence and sadistic attack. True, he did not carry
them out, but they, therefore, haunted his unconscious with still
greater intensity, as his tales clearly prove. Not by chance, did his
most famous tales of crime appear just when the "Fiend Intemper–
ance" had triumphantly re-entered his life.
If
he drank at this time,
in flight from Virginia's ha:moptyses and the unconscious temptations
her dying body aroused, nevertheless his drinking bouts always
brought him back to those visions of blood and death which, from
infancy, had dwelt in his soul. That fatal circle held
him
bound.
From it, he was rescued by
his
art. In the release and the cath–
arsis of fiction, as "innocent" and as harmless as a motionless sleep–
er's nightmare, Poe, the sado-necrophiIist, could do all that his prin–
ciples forbid.
Thus, as against the docility and sweetness which, as we know
from many witnesses, characterized Poe's domestic relations and
even his treatment of Catterina, here is what the narrator of
The
Black Cat
tells us of himself:
"One night, returning home, much intoxicated, from one of my
haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence. I
seized him; when, in his fright at my violence, he inflicted a slight
wound upon my hand with his teeth. The fury of a demon instantly
