The tell-tale cipher

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salon.com > Books March 8, 2000
URL: http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2000/03/08/poe

The tell-tale cipher 

Could a mysterious cryptograph be a final message from Edgar Allan Poe? 

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By Jeffery Kurz

For Edgar Allan Poe, dying did not necessarily leave a person speechless. 
Take "The Case of M. Valdemar." The title character, his body decomposing 
into "a nearly liquid mass of loathsome -- of detestable putrescence," still 
manages enough tongue to beg the narrator, a mesmerist, to stop messing with 
him.

"'For God's sake! -- quick! -- quick! -- put me to sleep -- or, quick! -- 
waken me! -- quick! -- I say to you that I am dead!'" 

To say that speaking from beyond the grave was a Poe obsession would be 
understating the case. Some scholars believe he is trying to speak to us 
still by way of cryptography, a system of secret writings based on a 
predetermined set of symbols. Poe left behind one cryptograph that has 
remained unsolved for more than 150 years, waiting like a corked time capsule 
for someone to unlock its tangle of symbols. 

Whether the cryptograph in question was written by Poe remains a mystery, 
perhaps the last involving an author whose "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is 
considered the first modern detective story. As that sagacious inquisitor, 
Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, would say, "Let us enter into some examinations 
for ourselves, before we make up an opinion respecting them. An inquiry will 
afford us amusement." The details are as follows. 

Poe, who lived from 1809 to 1849, was fascinated by cryptography and made 
several references to such secret writings in his poems and stories. The 
solving of a cryptograph is the pivotal moment in "The Gold Bug." At the end 
of 1839, while working as a freelance writer for Alexander's Weekly Messenger 
in Philadelphia, Poe invited his readers to send cryptographs to him, 
boasting that he would solve them all. Until he stopped working for the 
Messenger in May 1840, Poe published his solutions to the ciphers and offered 
his thoughts on cryptography. 

A year later, writing for Graham's Magazine, Poe claimed in an article titled 
"A Few Words on Secret Writing" to have solved all 100 of the cryptographs 
sent to him by the Messenger's readers. While he was writing for Graham's, 
Poe received a letter from someone named W.B. Tyler that contained two 
cryptographs. Poe published the cryptographs for his readers to solve, but 
never published the solutions. He claimed he was wasting time on such 
puzzles, time that could be better spent writing stories and earning money, 
something he had trouble doing for his entire writing career. The Tyler 
ciphers languished, neglected like yesterday's newspaper. 

In a 1985 essay called "Poe's Secret Autobiography," Louis A. Renza, an 
English professor at Dartmouth College, suggested that Tyler was Poe's nom de 
plume. Renza sees Poe's fiction "as containing not readily apparent anagrams 
as well as thinly disguised allegories of his process of composing his tales 
-- often the very tale one is reading." He felt Poe's cryptography articles 
shared this approach. "So when I read the Tyler letter, with its tease of an 
insoluble cryptogram, I naturally suspected that this was Poe entertaining 
the possibility himself." 

Renza asked a Dartmouth reference librarian to search for W.B. Tyler in the 
city directories of the major cities where Poe had lived or that he had been 
familiar with, including Washington, Richmond, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New 
York and Boston. The absence of Tyler in those lists was, as Renza admits, 
"thin evidence, to be sure, but enough for me to venture my guess." 

That left the evidence of the ciphers themselves. The shorter of the two was 
solved by way of procrastination. In 1992, looking for a way to avoid working 
on his dissertation, Terence Whalen, now an English professor at the 
University of Illinois at Chicago, solved the first cipher in just a few 
afternoons of noodling. What started as a diversion became a significant part 
of his dissertation, now a book titled "Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The 
Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America." At first, Whalen 
believed he had uncovered an original Poe text. While the syntax was unlike 
Poe's, the message -- the survival of the soul when confronted by material 
decay -- had a common Poe theme: 

The soul secure in her existence smiles at the drawn dagger and defies its 
point. The stars shall fade away, the sun himself grow dim with age and 
nature sink in years, but thou shall flourish in immortal youth, unhurt amid 
the war of elements, the wreck of matter and the crush of worlds. 

It turns out that the lines are not Poe's, but from the 1713 play "Cato," by 
Joseph Addison, an English essayist, poet and statesman. But that does not 
rule out Poe as the originator of the cryptograph. At the time the cipher was 
published, Poe was trying to get a job in the administration of President 
John Tyler. Many of the readers intrigued enough by his challenge to send 
cryptographs to Poe were government employees (apparently with a lot of time 
on their hands). Tyler, who succeeded to the presidency following the death 
of William Henry Harrison, had a most troubled term in office. His cabinet 
resigned. The Whig Party disowned him in 1841 and two years later introduced 
impeachment resolutions. Quoting from a play named for a political enemy of 
Caesar, Whalen suggests, could have been a kind of inside joke on the part of 
Poe, who was an acquaintance of Tyler's son, Robert. W.B., muses Whalen, 
could stand for "Wanted By" Tyler. 

In any case, there remains the unsolved cryptograph. Whalen has been stymied 
in his efforts to decode the cipher, which contains about 150 words and very 
little character repetition. Once Whalen recognized that the three-character 
pattern of "comma-dagger-section symbol," repeated seven times, represented 
the word "the" in the first cryptograph, the remainder of the decoding 
followed fairly easily. The second cipher involves more complicated 
alphabetic correlations, says Whalen, making it far more challenging.

Hoping to settle the question of whether Tyler was Poe, Shawn Rosenheim, who 
teaches at Williams College in Massachusetts, is offering $2,500 to anyone 
who solves the second Tyler cryptograph. "It's very likely that if it's 
solved we'll be able to argue convincingly that it is or isn't Poe," says 
Rosenheim, author of "The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing From 
Edgar Poe to the Internet."

If the decoded text falls short of containing the words "I, Edgar Allan Poe," 
theme and syntax could still indicate Poe is the author. "It's like a fact in 
a court case," says Whalen. "It would have to be argued." The cryptograph and 
details about the contest are available on the Web site of Bokler Software 
Corp., a Huntsville, Ala., company that specializes in encryption software.

If the text turns out to be by Poe, it would fit into his grand scheme of 
speaking from the dead and be the final message from one of the greatest 
authors in American literature, a writer obsessed with the macabre and the 
transcendent power of words. "It's the ultimately condensed detective story," 
offers Rosenheim. "You have to be clever enough to see that there's even a 
story. Poe is playing a game with all his readers and so far his readers 
aren't winning."

Or, as Poe, in the beginning of his "Shadow -- A Parable," put it: 

Ye who read are still among the living; but I who write shall have long since 
gone my way into the region of shadows. For indeed strange things shall 
happen, and secret things be known, and many centuries shall pass away, ere 
these memorials be seen of men. And, when seen, there will be some to 
disbelieve, and some to doubt, and yet a few who will find much to ponder 
upon in the characters here graven with a stylus of iron.

salon.com | March 8, 2000

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About the writer
Jeffery Kurz lives in Connecticut. He is features editor of the 
Record-Journal in Meriden.