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Susan Amper The Biographer as Assassin: The Hidden Murders in “TheAssignation” Is“TheAssignation”a spoof-ne that unfortunately is not, for the most part, very funny? Is it a serious romantic allegory, which incidentally includes an extended send-up of Thomas Moore’sthen-popular biography of Byron? Or is it some ironic fusion of the two, which leaves us neither laughing nor crying , merely wondering what it is all about?The tale is a mystery indeed. I believe it is a murder mystery. The principal source of the story is Moore’s description of a visit he paid to Byron in Venice at the time of Byron’s affair with the Countess Guiccioli. Richard P. Benton and G. R. Thompson have pointed out numerous parallels between Poe’s tale and Moore’smemoir. They view Poe’s story, in differing degrees, as a kind of hoax or ironic comment on the tale of romance.’ In addition, a great deal has been written, from a variety of perspectives, on Poe’s attitudes toward Byron’sromanticism itself.2 I believe the real subject of the tale is not Byron or Byronism but specifically Moore’s biography of Byron. Poe fastens on the malice in Moore’s profile that shows plainly through his effusiveflattery of his famous subject. Poe creates a similarduplicityin the relationship of his narrator to the Byronic hero and dramatizes the relationship by making the narrator the actual murderer of the hero. This essay details the evidencepointing to murder in the storyand adds some brief remarks regarding the implicationsof this finding. Before examining the evidence in Poe’sstory,we should consider his source: Moore’s description of his visit to Byron in Venice. Moore was met by Byron and conducted to his spacious,elegantpalazzo,where Byron offered his unorthodox opinions on sculpture and painting. As Benton and Thompson document, Poe’s story follows Moore’s account closely, even down to the location of the palazzo (on the Grand Canal, near the Rialto Bridge).Poe draws even more fundamentally, however, on two egregious features of Moore’saccount: his incessant, unctuous calumny ofByron and most particularlya humiliating blunder Moore made in ascribing to Byron a poem written by someone else. This poem appears in Moore’s discussion of Byron’s youthful infatuation with Mary Chaworth. Prior to his last meeting with Chaworth, according to Moore, [Byron] wrote, with a pencil, in a volume of Madame de Maintenon’sletters, belonging to her, the followingverses, which have never, I believe, before been published: Oh Memory, torture me no more, The present’s all o’ercast; My hopes of future bliss are o’er, In mercy veil the past. Why bring those images to view I henceforth must resign? Ah! why those happy hours renew, That never can be mine? Past pleasure doubles present pain, To sorrow adds regret, Regret and hope are both in vain, I ask but to-f~rget.~ Moore was soon disabused of his fond belief that he had uncovered a previously unknown poem by Byron. A footnote in the second edition of the biography , published in 1833 (a year before the appearance of “The Assignation”), acknowledges that the poem is not Byron’s but “the production of Lady Tuite,”from a volume published in 1795 (Byron, 1:75 n).Moore’s error would have delighted Poe, and he used it in “TheAssignation.”The poem that the narrator claimsto have discovered in a book in the hero’s palazzo parallels the one Moore quotes in its theme of lost love, its rhyming of “past”with “overcast”and “o’er”with “more,”and even, it seems,in havingbeen written in pencil. Most importantly, though previous readings of the tale have failed to question the authorship of this poem, the story clearly invites us to do so. When we do, we discover the key to detectinga concealed murder. 14 The motive for the murder isjealousy. The inferiority of the narrator to the hero, discussed notably by Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV and Edward W. Pitcher? derivesfrom Poe’ssource,forMooreunwittingly reveals in every paragraph his personal, intellectual , and moral inferiority to his host. In contrast to Byron’s peremptory declarationson what is good and bad in...

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