Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living (Icons) (14 page)

September was improbably happy for Poe—the best weeks of his life, he said, though of the bittersweet sort that suited him best. He was literally trailed by his past; his little sister, Rosalie Poe, still in Richmond after being raised by a different family, now so devotedly followed him around that he took to sending her out on errands. He visited old childhood friends, surprising them with his sobriety; rambling with them through the ruins of a neighborhood home from his youth, Poe sat down on the moss-covered remains of an old bench.

“There used to be white violets here,” he muttered, and then walked inside the wrecked house. He paused out of sheer habit, one friend recalled, to politely remove his hat as he entered the destroyed parlor. Other memories flooded back to him at strange, unexpected places. Invited to address a small assembly in Norfolk, he seemed momentarily stunned by one woman’s orris root perfume.

“Do you know what it makes me think of?” he asked her.
“My adopted mother. Whenever the bureau drawers of her room were opened there was the whiff of orris root, and ever since, when I smell it, I go back to the time when I was a little boy.”

By the end of September, it was rumored that Poe and Elmira were engaged, and at the very least they had reached a cautious understanding; first, though, business was to call him away. There was still
The Stylus
to consider, and his aunt Maria in New York to consult about the nuptials; he had also landed a lucrative offer of one hundred dollars to stop off in Philadelphia to edit the poems of a piano manufacturer’s wife. So he bade a melancholy farewell to Elmira—“He was very sad, and complained of being quite sick,” she recalled—stopped by a doctor’s office, and then took a steamer from the Richmond docks in the small hours of September 27.

Nobody is quite sure what happened next. On October 3rd, Dr. Joseph Snodgrass, a Baltimore literary friend of Poe’s who had been the first to publish “Ligeia” a decade earlier, received this urgent note:

Baltimore City, Oct. 3, 1849

There is a gentleman, rather worse for the wear, at Ryan’s 4th ward polls, who goes under the cognomen Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, & says he is acquainted with you, and I assure you, he is in need of immediate assistance.

Yours, in haste,
Jos. W. Walker

Snodgrass raced over to a nearby saloon and found Poe glassy-eyed and semiconscious—“utterly stupefied with liquor”—and in his oblivion his clothing had been robbed or pawned and replaced by a thin and soiled outfit. It had been rainy and in the fifties that weekend, and “the atmosphere partook sensibly of a
spongy character” as one local put it; Poe might well have also have suffered from exposure. Refused help by Poe’s local relatives, Snodgrass checked him in to Washington College Hospital. “So insensible was he,” he wrote, “that we had to carry him to the carriage as if a corpse.”

At 3
A.M
. on October 5, Poe trembled violently, his body drenched in sweat; when he came to the following afternoon, his doctor could get little coherent from him except the half-right notion that he “had a wife in Richmond.” Dr. John Moran told his delirious patient that soon he might recover to see his family and friends.

“At this he broke out with much energy,” Dr. Moran reported, “and said the best thing his best friend could do would be to blow his brains out with a pistol.”

For the next two days, Poe alternated between uneasy dozing and such violent delirium that two nurses had to restrain him. On Saturday evening, Dr. Moran reported, “he commenced calling for one ‘Reynolds,’ which he did through the night up to
three
on Sunday morning.” Reynolds might have been the polar explorer Jeremiah Reynolds, whom Poe had drawn upon for
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
—and whose hollow-earth theories ventured that Antarctica might hold the portal to a hidden realm.

It was an apt invocation for a guide to the underworld. At five that morning, Edgar Allan Poe met the fate anticipated in his poem “To Annie”:

Thank Heaven! the crisis—

The danger is past
,

And the lingering illness
,

Is over at last—

And the Fever called ‘Living’

Is conquer’d at last
.

He was buried the following afternoon with scarcely a dozen people in attendance, and that included the undertakers. One witness scoffed that the ceremony “did not occupy more than three minutes, [and] was so cold-blooded and un-Christianlike as to provoke on my part a sense of anger.” When it was over, his body was left in an unmarked grave.

Word of Poe’s death spread quickly. On the morning of his funeral, the
Baltimore Sun
failed to announce the service, but mourned that his death “will cause poignant regret among all who admire genius, and have sympathy for the frailties too often attending it.” By the following day similar reports had run up the coast to New York. Even the harshest obituary, in the
New York Herald
—“he had few or no friends,” it claimed—acknowledged that Poe was a genius, with speech “almost supra-mortal in its eloquence,” and invested with a grandly Romantic persona: “He was at all times a dreamer—dwelling in ideal realms—in heaven or hell—peopled with creatures and the accidents of his brain.” Within a week, plans were afoot for a collected edition of his works, to be edited by the Rev. Rufus Griswold.

Poe’s anthologist, in fact, was none other than the author of that friendless
Herald
obituary. Yet he had, by some accounts, been handpicked by Poe himself. The choice was hardly surprising: with his 1842
Poets and Poetry of America
, and the 1845 volume
Prose Writers of America
, Griswold was one of America’s most influential anthologists. He’d known Poe for nearly a decade, to mixed results; though Poe described Griswold as “a gentleman of fine taste and sound judgment” in 1841, and he’d praised Poe as “highly imaginative” and “eminently distinguished,” they’d also mortally offended each other at times. It hardly helped that, after Poe left
Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine
in 1842, Griswold had taken his place. But the two reached
a wary truce born of pragmatism, and Griswold’s appreciation of Poe’s talent was tangible: he’d given Edgar more space in an article on “Tale Writers” than to Cooper, Hawthorne, or even Washington Irving. For Poe, leaving his collected works in Griswold’s hands was personally awkward, but a canny business decision.

“Poe was not my friend—I was not his—and he had no right to devolve upon me this duty of editing his works,” Griswold complained to James Russell Lowell later that month. “He did so, however, and under the circumstances I could not well refuse compliance with the wishes of his friends here.”

Griswold worked swiftly: along with collecting reminiscences by Poe’s contemporaries Lowell and N. P. Willis, he placed newspaper ads to put out a call for copies of manuscripts and correspondence with Poe. Lost and unpublished work quickly turned up: Griswold’s copy of Poe’s final poem, “Annabel Lee,” immediately appeared in print, while the Poe household’s sometime nurse, Marie Shew, proved to have inspired the posthumously published poem “The Bells.” Its hypnotically repetitive lines of “From the bells, bells, bells, bells . . .” would soon join “The Raven” as a public favorite. More letters, stories, poems, and marginalia poured in; scarcely three weeks after Poe died, six clerks were already at work setting copy for the New York publisher J. S. Redpath.

The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe
, assembled at astonishing speed since his death on October 8, arrived in bookstores by January 10, 1850. Published into two green clothbound volumes—the first labeled
Tales
, and the second
Poems and Miscellanies
—they mark Poe’s ascension into the canon of world literature. In life, Poe had never maintained a relationship with any one magazine, genre, or publisher long enough to build up a consistent audience; it is conceivable that no one admirer or critic had ever seen a majority of his complete writings. James Russell Lowell’s comment on Poe’s criticism applied just as readily
to the rest of his work: “He has squared out blocks enough to build an enduring pyramid, but has left them lying carelessly and unclaimed in many different quarries.”

Gathered together into two volumes totaling a thousand pages, the breadth of his accomplishments at last became apparent. Yet Griswold’s personal criticisms of Poe left George Graham—who had employed both men as editors—fuming in print that Griswold “was not Mr. Poe’s peer,” and that his focus on Poe’s poverty and drinking “looks so much like a breach of trust.” Graham would find more to dislike when Griswold edited a third volume with Poe’s criticism and “literati” sketches later that year; its biographical preface repeated many of the worst accusations against the man, whether true or not—claiming that Poe had been expelled from UVA, that he had been subject to “brutish drunkenness,” that he contracted debts he could not pay.

“To think of that
villain
Griswold dragging before the public all my poor poor Eddie’s
faults
,” an outraged Maria Clemm wrote, “and not to have the generosity of speaking one word of his
good qualities
. . . . did you ever feel as if you wished
to die?
as if you wished to shut out the world and all that concerns it?
It is thus I feel.”

Much of Griswold’s biography was unobjectionable; many of its inaccuracies came from Poe’s own tall tales. But in tiresomely emphasizing Poe’s flaws through his correspondence, Griswold also engaged in a secret campaign of slander. So subtly as to even escape Aunt Maria’s detection, he’d rewritten Poe’s letters, inserting both base ingratitude and the occasional fawning praise of Griswold himself. “You so perfectly understand me,” he has Poe enthuse: “ . . . I can truly say no man’s approbation gives me so much pleasure.” It took the better part of a century to scrub Griswold’s rather pathetic defacements from Poe’s correspondence.

Yet Griswold’s worst transgression against Poe’s family was
a contractual one. There is no record of Poe having left a will; if he died intestate, his estate should have descended to his sister, Rosalie. Instead, it was Aunt Maria who negotiated away Poe’s rights to Griswold—and scarcely even received anything in return. Though the books included a note from her thanking Griswold for publishing the books “for my benefit,” Maria Clemm was only paid in copies, which poverty compelled her to sell. One of the first people to step up to help her out was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—the very poet who was so often the target of both Poe’s admiration and bewildering vitriol.

Longfellow understood Poe quite well, though. As a Harvard professor of poetry and linguistics who lived comfortably and was respected by the literary establishment—who had, in short, the life that Poe longed for—he intuited Poe’s envy just as well as he understood his genius. Unlike Griswold, he had long forgiven it: “The harshness of his criticisms,” Longfellow wrote, “I have never attributed to anything but the irritation of a sensitive nature, chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong.”

Griswold, alas, was not so kind. And yet for all his betrayals of Poe’s life, his editing of Poe’s
art
was perfectly serviceable for the era—so much so that one might say that Poe’s wisdom in entrusting his fame to him proved entirely justified. Even J. M. Daniel, a critic so hard on Poe that they’d once nearly dueled, was moved to this prophesy after reading the
Works:
“While people of this day run after such authors as Prescott and Willis . . . their children, in referring back to literary history, will say, ‘This was the time of Poe.’ ”

The common notion is that Poe’s name was blackened for generations after his death; it is one any publisher will find amusing, given the sale of tens of thousands of copies of
Works
during that time. Poe’s personal failings, both real and imagined, probably had as little effect on his readership as it had on his heroes
Byron and Coleridge. By 1860, he was so entirely embraced by the American public that a weekly “Raven Club” literary salon was held in Washington, D.C., by various senators and judges; even President Buchanan showed up for one meeting. Not to be outdone, Lincoln’s presidential campaign biography that year boasted that he read three authors for pleasure: Robert Burns, William Shakespeare, and Edgar Allan Poe. In particular, Abe was “pleased with the absolute and logical method of Poe’s tales and sketches, in which the problem of the mystery is given, and wrought out into everyday facts by processes of cunning analysis. It is said that he suffers no year to pass without the perusal of this author.”

It is a telling commentary on how authors control what they write, but not what is read. Poe regarded his tales of ratiocination as something of a distraction; his great loves were poetry and his “prose poem,”
Eureka
. “The Raven” was indeed Poe’s most famous work during his lifetime, and time has not lessened its charms—but as art it is distinctly backward-looking. Poets still find kinship in Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, but one would be hard-pressed to find many who claim Poe as a profound influence. It is a mastery of narrative voice—and above all, the creation of the detective story—that made Poe an author that Lincoln and the world at large placed beside Shakespeare.

Yet it was indeed a fellow poet, Charles Baudelaire, who would prove Poe’s greatest advocate abroad. After first coming across his work in France in 1847, Baudelaire felt that he had discovered the work of a blood brother. “I felt a singular excitement,” he later explained. “ . . . I found poems and stories which I had thought about, but in a vague, confused, and disordered way, and about which Poe had been able to treat perfectly. . . . The first time I opened one of his books I saw, to my amazement and delight, not only certain subjects which I had
dreamed of, but
sentences
which I had thought out, written by him twenty years before.”