The tell-tale cipher

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

By Jeffery Kurz

Mar 8, 2000 | 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.

Next Page: A reward for anyone who solves the puzzle

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