Literary Rogues (8 page)

In 1845, he published “The Raven.” The gothic poem, with its haunting refrain of “Nevermore!,” was a smashing success, improbably placing Poe in the upper echelon of writers he had longed to be a part of. “No man lives,” Poe once said, “
unless he is famous
.” He became a hot commodity on the lecture circuit, becoming something of a sex symbol. “
Women fell under his fascination
and listened in silence,” one of his admirers wrote.

Unfortunately, despite his newfound success, Poe was still Poe. “
My feelings at this moment
are pitiable indeed,” he wrote. “I am suffering under a depression of spirits such as I have never felt before. I have struggled in vain against the influence of this melancholy—you will believe me when I say that I am still miserable in spite of the great improvement in my circumstances.” He dressed in a tattered black suit and had few friends, even in publishing circles. “
I never heard him speak
in praise of any English writer living or dead,” one of his West Point roommates said.

His wife, gravely ill with tuberculosis, tried to console her husband. “Now, Eddie, when I am gone
I will be your guardian angel
,” she told him. “And if at any time you feel tempted to do wrong, just put your hands above your head, so, and I will be there to shield you.”

Virginia passed away at the age of twenty-five, the same age Poe's mother had been when she died.

Poe took the loss in stride. “
The death of a beautiful woman
, is, unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the world,” he later wrote. His real feelings about losing his beloved cousin had long since numbed, as he wrote in this letter to a medical student:

Six years ago, a wife
, whom I loved as no man ever loved

before, ruptured a blood vessel in singing. Her life was

despaired of. I took leave of her forever and underwent all

the agonies of her death. She recovered partially and I again

hoped. At the end of the year the vessel broke again—I

went through precisely the same scene. Again in about a

year afterward. Then again—again—again and even once

again in varying intervals. Each time I felt the agonies of

her death—and at each accession of the disorder I loved

her more dearly and clung to her life with more desperate

pertinacity. But I am constitutionally sensitive—nervous in

a very unusual degree. I became insane, with long periods of

horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness

I drank, God only knows how often or how much
.

Miraculously, Poe's own health appeared to turn a corner after his wife's death. “
I am getting better, and may add
—if it be any comfort to my enemies—that I have little fear of getting worse,” he wrote to a friend in 1846. “The truth is, I have a great deal to do, and I have made up my mind not to die till it is done.” After years of struggling with alcoholism, he finally quit drinking, which appears to have lightened his mood.

Within the next year, the newly sober Poe was engaged to Sarah Helen Whitman, a wealthy poet. He downplayed his love for Virginia in his letters to Whitman. “I
did violence to my own heart
, and married, for another's happiness, where I knew that no possibility of my own existed,” he wrote. “
Ah, how profound is my love for you
.”

The match was not to be. The chasm created between Whitman and Poe by her fortune—and his lack thereof—seemed insurmountable to Poe. Whitman ultimately called off the engagement for reasons that are a mystery, but the fact that Poe started drinking again may have played a role in the breakup.

Poe went back to Richmond in 1849 and proposed to his childhood sweetheart, Elmira. She was widowed and, surprisingly, accepted Poe back into her life. They set a wedding date for October 17 of that year.

Despite his engagement, Poe revealed in letters that he was still beset by illness and depression. Since returning to Richmond, he had been arrested for public intoxication (although he claimed he wasn't drunk). He wished to see his aunt Maria one last time before he passed away. “
It is no use to reason with me now
; I must die,” he wrote to her. “I have no desire to live since I have done ‘Eureka' [a prose poem published the year prior]. I could accomplish nothing more.”

Before Poe left Richmond and Elmira for the final time on September 27, 1849, he stayed out with some friends late into the night. He was to leave on a boat for Baltimore the next day; his acquaintances escorted him to the dock. He was allegedly sober when they left him.

The next time that Poe's whereabouts can be verified is in Baltimore on October 3, where he was found at a tavern being used as a polling place. Poe was “
rather the worse for wear
,” according to one report. Or, less delicately, he was piss-drunk and wearing another man's clothes.

Four days later, Poe died in a Baltimore hospital at the age of forty. “Thus disappeared from the world one of the greatest literary heroes, the man of genius who had written in ‘The Black Cat' these fateful words: ‘What disease is like Alcohol!'” Baudelaire wrote. “This death was
almost a suicide
—a suicide prepared for a long time.”

The real story behind Poe's untimely death may never be known with certainty, but that hasn't stopped speculation. Among the causes of death listed on one website: “
alcohol, cholera, drugs
, heart disease, rabies, suicide, tuberculosis, epilepsy, meningeal inflammation, and/or syphilis.” The strangest theory to emerge has to be that, since he was found outside a polling place, he may have been kidnapped, drugged, and forced to vote repeatedly on Election Day.

Although some sources claim Poe's last words were “Lord help my poor soul,” no medical records or other credible sources exist that corroborate that story. He was to be buried under a marble gravestone reading, “
Hic tandemi felicis
conduntur reliquiae Edgari Allan Poe” (“Here are gathered the remains of Edgar Allan Poe, happy at last”), but the stone broke. His remains were subsequently buried in an unmarked grave.

“
Edgar Allan Poe is dead
. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it,” Rufus Griswold, a self-declared enemy of Poe, wrote two days after Poe's death. “Poe had readers in England and in several states of Continental Europe. But he had few or no friends.” After spending several paragraphs of the pseudonymously published obituary damning Poe's character, Griswold admitted, “We must omit any particular criticism of Mr. Poe's works. As a writer of tales it will be admitted generally, that he was scarcely surpassed in ingenuity of construction or effective painting. As a poet, he will retain a most honorable rank.”

“
Vocations which we wanted to pursue
, but didn't, bleed like colors on the whole of our existence.”

—
HONORÉ DE BALZAC

B
ack in Europe, the French Revolution in 1789 and the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 claimed the lives of almost a million young Frenchmen. The French youth that came of age in the aftermath were shell-shocked and emotionally scarred. “
Don't force me to do anything
, and I'll do everything,” Charles Baudelaire wrote. “Understand me, and don't criticize me.” But don't mistake them for simple troubadours and rebels: “
Above all else, we were
artists
,” Gustave Flaubert wrote.

The bohemian youth launched a literary and artistic movement that swept Europe following the age of romanticism. This, the movement's leaders proclaimed, was the age of realism! Realists did away with authorial moralizing. In contrast to the Romantics' sweeping love stories and sagas, the Realists focused on the everyday trials and tribulations of the middle and lower classes.

Honoré de Balzac
(1799–1850) was one of realism's self-proclaimed leaders—and also an unlikely sex symbol who inspired Byronic devotions of love from his female fans.

As a young man, Balzac was the quintessential “nice guy,” a friend to many women but a lover to none. He tried everything in his power to gain the attention of the opposite sex, but always came up short. Once, he took dancing lessons in preparation to woo ladies with his gracefulness on the dance floor. When, after months of preparation, he made his grand entrance in a ballroom in front of a crowd of women, he slipped and fell. Cue laughter. He never danced again.

In one of his novels, he describes what very well may have been his plight, pre-fame: “
Women one and all have condemned me
. I determined to revenge myself on society; I would dominate the feminine intellect, and so have the feminine soul at my mercy.” Indeed, the young Balzac had two “
immense and sole desires
—to be famous and to be loved.”

At his father's insistence, Balzac interned at a legal firm after his schooling was complete, but he balked when it came time to declare law as his vocation. He begged his parents to allow him to try his hand at writing instead. Although his mother was steadfastly against the idea, Balzac's father granted his wish. Two years, his father said. Two years to begin making a living as an author. If he couldn't do that, Balzac would enter the legal profession—and never look back.

His family rented him an attic apartment in Paris, chosen because of its proximity to a local public library. To avoid embarrassment over their son's career path (which would surely lead to a life of poverty, even if he was “successful”), his parents told friends and neighbors that Balzac had left town to visit a cousin. Balzac fictionalized his journey into the literary ether as “
the pleasure of striking out
in some lonely lake of clear water, with forests, rocks, and flowers around, and the soft stirring of the warm breeze.” In reality, he was sitting in a drafty, uncomfortable attic room, with barely enough money to eat more than a piece of bread most days.

After a year and a half, Balzac emerged from his exile, proudly clutching a play titled
Cromwell
. Balzac's family gathered at their home to hear their son recite from his masterpiece. They even invited one of his former teachers to the event. When Balzac began reading, his audience was sitting in rapt silence; when he ended, his audience was sitting in rapt silence. When no feedback was forthcoming, his family asked his former teacher for feedback. Balzac, he said, should “
do anything, no matter what
, except literature.” Balzac's mother insisted that her son give up his dreams and return home immediately.

Balzac moved back into his parents' house, but his dreams were far from shattered. He continued writing, churning out numerous novels over the next several years despite the distractions and discouragements he experienced living at home. To his parents' surprise, publishers were willing to take a chance on his work. Although there is little of Balzac's familiar genius in these early books (all of which were either written under pseudonyms or with collaborators), they kept him from being forced to get a “real job.”

His artistic breakthrough came in 1829, when he published
Les Chouans
, the first novel he signed his name to. He became more confident, his ambitions nearly overtaking him for the next several years. In 1832, Balzac ran into his sister's apartment and exclaimed, “
I am about to become a genius
.” He had spontaneously conceived of what would be his masterwork,
La comédie humaine
, a panoramic portrait of all aspects of society that would tie together his published fiction. He didn't owe this revelation to illegal drugs or alcohol—Balzac's poison of choice was coffee. He allegedly drank up to fifty cups of black coffee every day. The caffeine powered him through long stretches of time where he would shut himself off from the outside world, sometimes up to three weeks at a time. When he didn't have any brewed coffee handy, he swallowed a handful of crushed coffee beans. “
Coffee is a great power in my life
,” Balzac said. “I have observed its effects on an epic scale. Coffee roasts your insides.”

Under the pseudonym “Le Comte Alex de B.” he wrote a book about opium abuse,
L'opium
. It's unclear whether he had any firsthand knowledge or whether he was simply trying to make a quick buck by capitalizing on the success of Thomas De Quincey's opium diaries. He did try hashish once, though, with Baudelaire at the Hôtel Pimodan in Paris, where the artist François Boissard ran a hashish club from 1845 to 1849 to test the effects of the drug on creativity. Balzac “
heard some celestial voices
” during their session but didn't find the experience worth repeating. According to Baudelaire's account, however, Balzac actually just sniffed the drug and passed it back to Baudelaire without inhaling.