Edgar Allan Poe (4 page)

Living in Baltimore, Poe found some local hangouts to his liking, including the bookstores. According to tradition, Edward J. Coale’s, located on Calvert just north of Baltimore Street, was one bookshop that lured Poe within its doors. Amiable, easy-going and warm-hearted, Coale was just the kind of man willing to extend his hospitality to a down-and-out poet.
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Widow Meagher’s place, an oyster stand and liquor bar located on Pratt and Calvert, was reputedly another Poe hangout. The regulars at Widow Meagher’s nicknamed Poe ‘Bard’. ‘Bard, come up and take a nip,’ they would say. Or, ‘Bard, take a hand in this game.’

Living up to his nickname, Poe would compose impromptu verses at Widow Meagher’s request. According to an anonymous acquaintance, ‘Poe always complied, writing many a witty couplet and at times poems of considerable length. Much of his poetical work, quite as meritorious as some by which his name was immortalized, was thus frittered into obscurity.’
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Of all the people Poe met in Baltimore, none became a greater friend than Lambert Wilmer. ‘Almost every day we took long walks in the rural districts near Baltimore,’ Wilmer remembered, ‘and had long conversations on a great variety of subjects.’ Their talk often turned to literature. Poe was critical of many authors, Wilmer recalled, but he admired the poetry of Alfred Tennyson and enjoyed the prose of Benjamin Disraeli.
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Poe shared the manuscript of
Tales of the Folio Club
with Wilmer in the summer of 1832. Honoured by the gesture, Wilmer conveyed his appreciation of Poe’s tales in the
Visiter
. Writing in the editorial plural, Wilmer reported: ‘We have read these tales, every syllable, with the greatest pleasure, and for originality, richness of imagery, and purity of the style, few American authors in our opinion have produced any thing superior.’
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Wilmer hoped to publish some in the
Visiter
but never got the chance. It was around this time that Cloud dismissed him. Soured by the experience, Wilmer left Baltimore before year’s end.

After his departure, Poe attempted to work with Hewitt, submitting some verses for possible publication in the
Visiter
in 1833. Hewitt accepted them. ‘Enigma’ appeared in the third week of April. This clever sixteen-line puzzle poem challenges the reader’s literary knowledge. For example, the eleventh line – ‘The bard that paints imagination’s powers’ – stands for Mark Akenside, the author of
Pleasures of the Imagination
. Readers who guess all the poetic names correctly can solve the poem’s last two lines: ‘These names when rightly read, a name [make] known / Which gathers all their glories in its own.’ The answer, of course, is Shakespeare.

Other poems Poe published in the
Visiter
in 1833 include ‘Serenade’, ‘To —’, and ‘Fanny’. All are slight works. He withheld his best material from the magazine after Hewitt became editor. Poe had bigger plans for his fiction. In the first week of May he approached the
New England Magazine
, proposing to publish
Tales of the Folio Club
serially. Founded in 1831 by Edwin Buckingham with the help of his father, Joseph Buckingham, the magazine embodied Edwin’s youthful literary enthusiasm. It gained a nationwide reputation, earning respect from readers, who enjoyed its high quality, and from authors, who appreciated being paid a tidy one dollar per page.
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Poe asked the Buckinghams to publish his complete story cycle, now called
Eleven Tales of the Arabesque
. As a sample, he sent ‘Epimanes’.
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The story features Antiochus Epiphanes, the ancient Syrian monarch known as Epimanes (Madman), whom Poe knew from reading Polybius. Poe took great liberties with his source, having Epimanes parade through the streets of Antioch in an outlandish giraffe suit. Appalled at the sight, the city’s lions and tigers and leopards, all domesticated and working as valets, rise up against the king. The plot is silly, but ‘Epimanes’ remains notable for its experiments in narrative form. The narrator speaks to his readers like a tour guide leading them through the past, and stand-ins for the reader ask questions. ‘Epimanes’ thus challenges traditional barriers between narrator and reader.

John H. B. Latrobe,
c
. 1875.

In practical terms, the story was the victim of bad timing. The same month Poe sent ‘Epimanes’ to the
New England Magazine
, Edwin Buckingham died at sea. Joseph Buckingham assumed sole editorship, but his heart was not in it. Poe never received a response. Instead he submitted
Tales of the Folio Club
to the
Visiter
contest.

In the first week of October 1833 the contest judges – John H. B. Latrobe, John Pendleton Kennedy, Dr James H. Miller – decided the winners. The three gathered at Latrobe’s home with a sufficient supply of fine wine and good cigars to see them through. Poe had submitted his tales in a bound notebook, which they saved until last. Intrigued, Latrobe read the volume straight through, interrupted occasionally by Kennedy and Miller.

‘Capital!’ one would exclaim. Or, ‘Excellent!’ Or, perhaps, ‘How odd!’

They found much evidence of genius. ‘There was no uncertain grammar,’ Latrobe recalled, ‘no feeble phraseology, no ill-placed punctuation, no worn-out truism, no strong thought elaborated into weakness.’
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The only hard part was deciding which tale to choose as the winner, but they ultimately selected ‘Manuscript Found in a Bottle’.

The
Visiter
contest brought Poe in contact with its judges. Listening to him talk about his writings, Latrobe became entranced. Poe ‘seemed to forget the world around him, as wild fancy, logical truth, mathematical analysis, and wonderful combinations of fact flowed, in strange commingling, from his lips, in words choice and appropriate as though the result of the closest study’.
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When Latrobe asked what else he was writing, Poe said ‘he was engaged in a voyage to the moon, and at once went into a somewhat learned disquisition upon the laws of gravity, the height of the earth’s atmosphere, and the capacities of balloons, warming in his speech as he proceeded’.
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What Latrobe heard was the beginnings of ‘Hans Pfaall’, a long story about a balloon voyage into outer space. Previous works of science fiction had been heavily didactic, utopian tales. Poe was the first to remove science fiction from the realm of the didactic and celebrate it for its own sake. As Jorge Luis Borges observed, ‘What today is called science-fiction originated with Poe.’
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Kennedy, a popular novelist, encouraged him to publish
Tales of the Folio Club
. Poe entrusted the manuscript to Kennedy who sent it to Philadelphia publisher Henry Carey in November. For the next several months, Poe eagerly expected news from Philadelphia concerning the fate of his manuscript. At the end of March 1834, he received some unexpected news from Virginia.

John Allan, his foster father, was dead.

America lured people from Scotland to its shores throughout the eighteenth century. In the final decade an ambitious, teenaged youth named John Allan left Irvine, an Ayshire seaport, for Richmond, Virginia, where he worked for his uncle William Galt, a wealthy merchant. With business partner Charles Ellis, Allan established a mercantile firm in 1800. Three years later he married Frances Valentine. Mr and Mrs Allan soon realized they could not have children. Or, to be precise, they discovered Mrs Allan could not have children: Mr Allan’s philandering proved him quite capable of fatherhood. The Allans shared an interest in the stage, often attending the Richmond Theatre on Broad Street. When it opened its doors for a new season in August 1811, the theatre featured one of the nation’s most beautiful and talented actresses: Elizabeth Poe.

Born into a family of English actors, Elizabeth Arnold had come to America as a child with her actress mother. She performed on the American stage in her adolescence, establishing a solid reputation. Elizabeth married young; her first husband died before she was out of her teens. She wed her second husband, David Poe, Jr, in April 1806. He became an actor – still a disreputable, poorly paid profession – without his family’s approval. His acting talents in no way approached hers, but the two patched together a precarious living. She took little time off despite giving birth to three children over the next four years. William Henry Leonard Poe, known as Henry, was born 30 January 1807. Edgar was born in Boston on 19 January 1809. And their sister Rosalie was born 20 December 1810. The family travelled the eastern seaboard as the young parents performed in the major cities. In July 1811 they were living in Norfolk, Virginia, where David deserted Elizabeth and the children after a vicious quarrel.
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Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe
, 1914.

Elizabeth, now desperate, welcomed an invitation from the manager of the Richmond Theatre in August. Though suffering from tuberculosis, she was anxious to use her talents to help the children. She performed through September. By mid-October, her health had worsened. Unable to perform, she lost her sole means of support. Her plight touched the heartstrings of Richmond’s theatregoers. Celebrity misfortune holds a macabre allure. Strangers visited to gawk at Elizabeth, to see the pitiful sight of the lovely actress in her sickbed with her starving children nearby. A local merchant wryly observed that this season Mrs Poe’s sick chamber was ‘the most fashionable place of resort’.
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Frances Allan and her friend Jane Mackenzie visited the ailing actress. They were moved by the sight of her children. Elizabeth Poe died on 8 December 1811. Her husband’s whereabouts remained unknown, but he apparently succumbed to tuberculosis himself and died soon afterwards. Henry went to Baltimore to live with his grandparents. Jane Mackenzie adopted Rosalie. Frances Allan convinced her husband to take the younger boy into their family. Sometimes they called him Edgar Allan, but he remained a foster child. Mrs Allan adored him. Mr Allan tolerated the boy to please his wife.

Ellis and Allan became profitable enough in the coming years that the partners decided to open a London branch. In 1815 John and Frances Allan left Richmond for London, taking with them Edgar, now six, and Frances’s unmarried sister Ann Valentine – Aunt Nancy. They disembarked at Liverpool and travelled north to Scotland, where they visited friends and members of the Allan clan.

John Allan has gone down in history as mean-spirited, tough-minded and cold-hearted, but he seldom behaved wickedly toward his foster son. His British correspondence is sometimes quite sweet. Informing Ellis they had arrived safely, Allan wrote while his foster son looked on.
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‘Pa,’ said Edgar. ‘Say something for me, say I was not afraid coming across the Sea.’

Edgar’s words exhibit characteristic behaviour. He wanted others to know he had successfully faced a challenge. After their Scottish sojourn, they reached London in the first week of October 1815. By month’s end, they found lodgings in Bloomsbury at 47 Southampton Row, Russell Square, near the British Museum. Later they would relocate to 39 Southampton Row, which Poe would make the setting for ‘Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling’.

In April 1816 Poe entered the London boarding school of the Misses Dubourg, where he learned English grammar and composition. Selections from Joseph Addison and Oliver Goldsmith provided models for composition. Selections from John Milton and James Thomson offered models for verse – models against which Poe would rebel. From the Dubourgs, he acquired a copy of the
Book of Common Prayer
. Intended to indoctrinate him in the fundamentals of the Anglican Church, the
Book of Common Prayer
gave him another model of English prose, one perhaps more attractive than the selections in his composition textbook. His other readings came largely from the Augustan Age, but the prose of the Anglican prayer book, with its formal diction and long periods, recalled the Elizabethan.
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