Poe shadow (3 page)

By the fall of 1849, where you joined me some pages earlier, I had my profession in place so securely I hardly took notice of it. Peter Stuart and I made excellent partners. My parents were both gone by then, killed by a carriage accident while they were traveling in Brazil for my father’s business. There was an empty spot where there once had been guidance from my father. And yet, the life he’d arranged for me flowed on in his absence—all this, Hattie, Peter, the well-pressed clients appearing daily in our offices, my stately family house shaded by ancient poplars and known as Glen Eliza, after my mother. All this ran on as though operated by some noiseless and ingenious automatic machine. Until Poe’s death.

I had the young man’s weakness of wishing others to understand everything that concerned me—of needing to
make
others understand. I believed I could. I can call to mind the very first time I told Peter we should work to protect Edgar A. Poe. Believing that, as a result of the compliance I imagined on the part of Peter, I would be able to report back the good tidings to Mr. Poe.

My very first letter to Edgar Poe, on March 16, 1845, was brought about by a question I had when reading “The Raven,” then a recently published poem. The final verses leave the raven sitting atop a bust of Pallas “above my chamber door.” With these last lines of the poem, the impish and mysterious bird continues to haunt the young man of the poem, perhaps for eternity:

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,

And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted
—
nevermore!

If the raven sits at the top of the chamber door, though, what lamplight would be behind him in such a way as to cast his shadow to the floor? With the impetuousness of youth, I wrote to Poe himself for an answer, for I wanted to be able to envision every crevice and corner of the poem. Along with the question, I enclosed in the same letter to Mr. Poe a subscription fee for a new magazine called
The Broadway Journal,
which Poe was then editing, to make sure I’d see whatever else flowed from his pen.

After months without receiving any reply, and without a single number of
The Broadway Journal,
I wrote again to Mr. Poe. When the silence persisted, I addressed a complaint to an associate of the magazine in New York and insisted that my subscription be refunded in full. I no longer desired to ever see it. One day, I received my three dollars back, along with a letter.

Signed Edgar A. Poe.

How startling, how uplifting that was, such a lofty visionary bringing himself to personally address a mere reader of three and twenty years! He even explained the minor mystery regarding the raven’s shadow: “My conception was that of the bracket candelabrum affixed against the wall, high up above the door and bust—as is often seen in the English palaces, and even in some of the better houses in New-York.”

There was the very nature of the raven’s shadow explained just for me! Poe also thanked me for my literary opinions and encouraged me to send more. He explained that his financial partners in
The Broadway Journal
had forced its termination in yet another defeat in the struggle between money and literature. He had never regarded the journal as more than a temporary adjunct to other designs. One day, he said, we might meet in person and he would confide in me his plans, and inquire my advice. “I am entirely ignorant,” he stated, “of all law matters.”

I wrote nine letters to Poe between 1845 and his death in October 1849. I received in return four courteous and sincere notes in his own hand.

His most energetic comments were about his ambitions for his proposed journal,
The Stylus.
Poe had spent years editing other people’s magazines. Poe said the journal would finally allow
men of genius
to triumph over
men of talent,
men who could feel rather than men who could think. It would cheer no author who did not deserve it, and would publish all literature that was unified by clarity and, most importantly, truth. He had waited many years to begin this journal. He wrote to me the last summer before his death that if waiting until the
Day of Judgment
would increase his chances of success, so he would! But, he added, he instead hoped to have the first number of it out the next January.

Poe anticipated with excitement a trip to Richmond to gather finances and support, commenting that if everything went as he intended, his final success was certain. He needed to raise funds and subscriptions. But he continued to be hindered by the rumors in the so-called professional press of irregular and immoral habits, questions about his sanity, unfit romantic dalliances, general excessiveness. Enemies, he said, were always at his throat for publishing honest criticisms of their writings, and for having had the great nerve to point out the complete lack of originality in revered authors like Longfellow and Lowell. He feared that the animosities of small men would attack his efforts by painting him as a sot, an unworthy drunk not deserving any public influence.

That is when I asked. I asked plainly, maybe too plainly. Were these at all true, these accusations I had heard for years? Was he, Edgar A. Poe, a drunkard who had given himself over to excess?

He wrote back without the least air of offense or conscious superiority. He vowed to me—me, a practical and presumptuous stranger—that he was wholly abstemious. Some readers might question my ability to judge his truthfulness from afar, but my instincts spoke with unclouded certainty. In my next letter, I replied that I put full confidence in his word. Then, just before sealing my reply, I decided to do better.

I made a proposal. I would bring suit against any false accuser attempting to damage his efforts to launch
The Stylus.
We had represented the interests of some local periodicals before, providing me with the proper experience. I would do my part to ensure that genius would not be trampled. This would be my duty, just as it was his duty to astonish the world now and then.

“Thank you for your promise about
The Stylus,
” answered Poe in a letter replying to mine. “Can you or will you help me? I have room to say no more. I depend upon you implicitly.”

That was shortly before Poe began his lecture tour in Richmond. Emboldened by his response to my offer, I wrote again, pouring out a myriad of questions about his
Stylus
and where he planned to raise money. I expected he would respond while he was touring, which is why I visited the post office and, when business consumed my time, checked the lists of waiting mail the postmaster regularly inserted in the newspapers.

I had been reading Poe’s work more than ever. Particularly after my parents died. Some considered it distasteful that I would read literature that frequently touched on the topic of death. Yet in Poe, while death is not a pleasant subject, it is not forbidden. Nor is it a fixed end. Death is an experience that can be shaped by the living. Theology tells us that spirits live on beyond the body, but Poe believes it.

Peter, of course, had at the time vocally dismissed the idea of our law practice taking up the cause of
The Stylus.

“I would sooner cut off my hand than spend my time worrying about magazines of blasted fiction! I would sooner get run down by an omnibus than—” You can see what he was driving at.

You’d probably guess that the real reason Peter objected was because I could not answer his questions about the
fees.
Poe was regularly reported in the papers as penniless. Why take upon ourselves, Peter argued, what others wouldn’t? I pointed out that the source for our payments was obvious: the new journal. Success was guaranteed for it!

What I wanted to say to Peter was “Do you not ever feel you are becoming hackneyed by the lawyer’s routine? Forget the fees. Wouldn’t you wish to protect something you knew to be great that everyone else sought to desecrate? Wouldn’t you wish to be a part of changing something, even if it meant changing yourself?” That line of argument would have accomplished nothing with Peter. When Poe died Peter was quietly satisfied that the matter had ended.

But I was not, not in the least. As I read newspaper articles eulogizing Poe with bitter voices, my desire to protect his name only grew. Something had to be done
even more
than before. When he was alive, he could defend himself. What enraged me most deeply was that these carping muckworms not only embellished the negative facts about Poe’s life, but that they crowded around the scene of Poe’s death like little hungry flies. Here was the ultimate evidence, the crowning symbol—ran their logic—of a lifetime of moral frailty. Poe’s dismal and low end served to confirm the darkness of his life and the imperfections of his morbidly inclined literary productions.
Think of Poe’s miserable end,
groaned one paper.

Think of his miserable end!

Think not of his unprecedented genius? Not of his
literary mastery
? Not of how he sparked life in his readers at times when they felt none? Think of kicking a lifeless body into the gutter, and striking the cold forehead of a corpse!

Go visit that grave in Baltimore (the same paper advised) and receive from the very air around it the awful warning of this man’s life to ours.

I announced one day that something must be done. Peter laughed.

“You cannot bring suit—the man is under the sod now!” said Peter. “You shall have no client! Let him rest; let
us
rest.” Peter started whistling a popular tune. Whenever he was unhappy, he whistled, even if it was in the middle of a conversation.

“I tire of being hired for a little money to say or do other than what I believe, Peter. I made a commitment to represent his interests. A promise, dear friend, and do not tell me that promises should end at someone’s death.”

“He likely agreed to your help only to keep you from badgering him on the matter.” Peter saw that this statement bothered me and he pressed the point with a more sympathetic but insightful tone. “Is that just possible, my friend?”

I thought about something Poe had said in one of his letters regarding
The Stylus: This is the grand purpose of my life,
wrote Poe.
Unless I die, I will accomplish it.
Poe insisted in the same letter that I stop paying advance postage in our correspondence. He signed the letter “Your Friend.”

And so I had written the same words to him—the same two simple words in plain ink, and signed my name below them as I would a dead-serious oath. Who would ever have argued then that I should not keep it?

“No,” I answered Peter’s question. “He knew I could defend him.”

THE THREAT CAME
on a Monday afternoon. There were no guns, no daggers, no swords, no near hangings involved (nor would I have believed these were coming for me). The utter astonishment on this day proved more forceful.

My visits to the Baltimore athenaeum reading rooms were becoming regular. A certain prominent debtor’s lawsuit, commenced around that time, obliged us to gather diverse news clippings. In times of pressing business, Peter would have been happy to construct a bunk in our chambers and never meet with a ray of sunlight, so it fell to me to travel the short distance to the reading room to perform the researches. While I was there, I would also research Edgar Poe and his death.

A typical biographical account on Poe, which had increased as news of his death spread, might name some of his poems (“The Raven,” “Ulalume”), where he had been discovered (Ryan’s hotel and tavern, which on that day of election was also a polling place, at High and Lombard streets), when he had died (Sunday, October 7, in a hospital bed), and so on. More Poe-related articles began appearing in the larger presses of New York, Richmond, and Philadelphia that preferred events with a bit of sensation to them. I was able to find some of these mentions at our reading room. Mentions! Mentions indeed!

His life was a regrettable failure. He was a gifted mind who squandered all his potential. Whose fantastical and affected poems and weird tales were too frequently tainted by the fatal, miserable fact of his life. He lived as a drunkard. Died a drunkard, a disgrace and a blackguard who injured sound morals through his writings. Not to be missed by many (said one New York journal). Not long to be remembered.

Have a look with your own eyes:

Edgar Allan Poe is dead. We have not learned the circumstances of his death. It was sudden, and from the fact that it occurred in Baltimore, it is to be presumed that he was on his return to New York. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it.

I could not watch this desecration. I wanted to look away, yet at the same time I found myself thirsting to know everything that had been written, however unjust. (Or—think of the peculiarities of the human mind—the more unjust it was, the more I needed to see it, and the more unfair, the more essential it seemed to me!)