Poe shadow (47 page)

“You have helped me enough, Edwin,” I said, “and I should not wish to risk your safety any further. I have called down enough trouble on everyone’s heads for a lifetime.”

“You have done what you believed right, you have bet your life on it,” he said. “Poe is dead. A man has been shot. Your friend, disappeared. And enough people have been hurt. You must stay safe, at least, so there is someone sure of the truth.”

“You must not be thought committing any crime, for aiding me,” I said. This was a serious point. If a free black was convicted of a significant offense, he could be punished in the worst way imaginable for a freeman: by being entered by the authorities back into slavery.

“I was not born in the woods to be scared by an owl.” Edwin laughed his reassuring laugh. “Besides, I think not even Baltimore has punished a man yet for giving some old duds to a man whose linen is out at the elbows. Now, will you be able to rest here for the night?”

Edwin continued to lend his aid and searched me out at the packinghouse at regular intervals. Although tempted to do so, I refrained from trying to make any calls on Hattie out of concern that they might endanger her. My outings were severely restricted, and I knew not to go anywhere near the grounds of Glen Eliza for fear of being seen. I still had in my possession the issue of
Graham’s
from 1841 that I was holding in my hand when I fled from Neilson Poe’s house—the issue in which “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” first introduced Dupin. I was thankful for this as though it were a talisman. I would reread the tale and wonder what Duponte might have already discovered about the Baron’s death. Yet this magazine was, for the time,
all
I had to read. So I read the other pages, too, though it was ten years old.

One time, Edwin came at an appointed hour and found me staring at the
Graham’s.

“All right, Mr. Clark?”

I could not stop reading these pages—reading and reading. I could hardly speak. I do not know how to describe my heart-wrenching discovery that night—I mean the truth about Duponte—or Dupin (you see I hardly know how to swallow all I understood, I hardly know where to begin)—that Duponte never was the real Dupin at all.

Once I had read the Baron Dupin’s handwritten lecture notes several times in my cell at the Middle District station house, and had ensured that every word remained forged in my memory, I had thrown the pages to the fire that sizzled in the hall separating the men’s and women’s cells. I had not assassinated the Baron, of course, but I eagerly murdered his handiwork. After all that had happened, the possibility of his fictions about Poe’s death spreading was a risk not to be borne.

It was not that his words were not convincing as to Poe’s death. They were quite convincing, but not the truth—the opposite of Poe, who wrote only the truth even when many were not ready to believe. We shall come to the Baron’s theories of Poe’s death later. The Baron Dupin, in his notes, had also taken the occasion to defend his claim as the real Dupin.

Here is a sample: “You know the Dupin of these tales as forthright, brilliant, fearless. Those qualities, I must admit, Mr. Poe derived from my own humble adventures in truth-telling.…For that is what Dupin really does, isn’t it? In a world where truth is hidden by the mountebanks and swindlers, by the lords and the kings, Dupin finds it. Dupin knows it. Dupin tells it. But those who tell the truth, my friends, shall always be met with ridicule, neglect, death. That is where we have found Edgar—no”—here I imagined the Baron shaking his head somberly, perhaps a leaden tear dropping from the corner of one eye—“that is where we have
lost
Edgar Poe. Edgar Poe has not left us, but has been taken away….”

Now, before Edwin’s arrival, as I sat in the empty warehouse’s small splash of light, I picked up that April
Graham’s,
that magazine containing the first appearance of Poe’s Dupin. “How fortunate for
Graham’s
to have Poe then,” I thought, “for he not only contributed his tales but also he was their editor.” Then my thumb stopped on a particular page. I strained in the light to see. It was not even a page I had meant to look at.

In the same number that “Rue Morgue” appeared, in that same April ’41 number, the editor of the periodical—that is, Poe—reviewed a book entitled
Sketches of Conspicuous Living Characters of France.
This collection of biographical sketches, we find, includes a number of French persons of distinction. The one that attracted my eye was George Sand, the famed novelist. I should not know how it raced into my mind from some distant article or biography I had read about her—but I somehow recalled that her given name, which she changed to the masculine George Sand to allow her to publish without prejudice, was Amandine-Aurore-Lucie
Dupin.
Poe, in his review of
Sketches,
delights in an anecdote that involved Madame Sand/Dupin sitting dressed up in a gentleman’s frock coat and smoking a cigar.

Another name in Poe’s review arrested my attention: Lamartine. You may hardly know the name, for his reputation as a Parisian poet and philosopher I doubt will persist in memory. But look here. I turned back through our magazine to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” that first tale of ratiocination.

We reached the little alley called Lamartine, which has been paved, by way of experiment, with the overlapping and riveted blocks.

Was it a coincidence, that in the same number of the magazine that Poe published his first Dupin tale, he used the name of another prominent French writer in both the Dupin tale and this review he wrote? Do not stop there. Look at “Rue Morgue” further, and read about one of the witnesses to the beastly violence, as told by the narrator:

Paul Dumas, physician, deposes that he was called to view the bodies about day-break…

Should this Dumas not make us all think of Alexandre Dumas, the inventive novelist of French romances and adventures? And there was this:

Isidore Musèt, gendarme, deposes that he was called to the house about three o’clock in the morning…

Yes: a name much like Alfred de Musset, the French poet, intimate companion of George Sand herself.

You have probably already guessed at the conclusion now ready to be drawn. My mind spiraled down without warning. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”—I can almost hear Poe chuckling cleverly at the real hidden mystery of this tale—was actually built as an allegory for the modern state of French literature. The references to George Sand (a.k.a. Dupin), Lamartine, Musset, and Dumas were the most prominent of the network of quiet, clever allusions.

If this was so, as I was instantly certain it was, Poe had not drawn on a real investigator to invent this hero, not Auguste Duponte, not Baron Claude Dupin, but had worked wholly from his head and his thoughts on the various literary personages. When I first found all this, I made bold to walk openly to a book stall and pillage various books; I found that not only was my recollection correct about George Sand’s real name, not only was her given name Dupin, but also that she had lost a brother in infancy named—yes, but you probably already guessed—Auguste Dupin.
Auguste Dupin.
Would Poe have known this detail? What was Poe’s message to us? He re-created her lost brother in the form of a genius against death and violence. Had Poe thought of his own brother William Henry, taken from him while poor Edgar was yet a boy?

In frantically reading again through “Rue Morgue” I found new meaning in the narrator’s description of his living circumstance with C. Auguste Dupin: “We admitted no visitors. Indeed the locality of our retirement had been carefully kept a secret from my own former associates; and it had been many years since Dupin had ceased to know or be known in Paris.
We existed within ourselves alone.
” Wasn’t Poe trying to tell us? The astounding ratiocinator existed only in the imagination of the poet.

We have been informed by a “Lady Friend” of the brilliant and erratic writer Edgar A. Poe, Esq. that Mr. Poe’s ingenious hero, C. Auguste Dupin, is closely modeled from an individual in actual life, similar in name and exploit, known for his great analytical powers…&c.

I thought of that newspaper extract, the one given to the athenaeum clerk by John Benson and then to me, with blurry vision and brewing contempt. How vague it was, these sentences, this flighty rumor that had taken me in. Who was this “lady friend” of Poe’s? How was it we could know she should be trusted? Had she ever existed at all? I searched my mind for answers to these singular questions, but all the while the larger reality possessed me like an unholy spirit—it seemed to say, “Duponte was nothing more than a fraud, Poe is dead, and you too will die, will walk the ladder to the gallows, will die for wanting more than you already had.”

Duponte was no more.

“Clark, are you unwell? Perhaps I should bring you to a doctor.” Edwin was trying to shake me from my spell.

“Edwin,” I gasped, with just this peculiar phraseology: “I am nearly dead.”

I should say something more, by way of an interlude, about what began all this—Poe’s death. For several chapters, I have mentioned knowing the Baron’s full lecture on the subject, and it would be stingy of me to withhold it any longer from the reader. As I say, I remember every word of the Baron’s notes. “‘Reynolds! Reynolds!’ This shall ring in our ears as long as we remember Edgar Poe, for it was his valedictory address to us. And he might have just said: ‘This is how I died, Lord. This is how I died, friends and fellow sufferers of the earth. Now find out why….’”

Though the Baron’s account of Poe’s death would have been ruinous to the truth, in some manner I regret that he did not deliver his words aloud. For now you cannot receive a full description of what it would have been like—the Baron marching back and forth on the stage as though it were his courtroom in his better days. Imagine the Baron, flashing his unmistakably shining teeth, spreading his hands wide and proclaiming the mystery solved:

POE HAD COME
to Baltimore at the wrong time. It had not been his plan to visit Baltimore, for he was on his way to his New York cottage to fetch his poor mother-in-law and start his new life. But some ruffians on the ship from Richmond to Baltimore harassed the poet and probably stole his money, so Poe missed the train from Baltimore to travel north. This is shown by the fact that Poe had earned money lecturing in Richmond, but was not found with any just a few days later. Stranded in Baltimore, he noticed himself being followed by the thieves and attempted to take refuge in the house of a kind friend, the editor Dr. N. C. Brooks. However, Dr. Brooks was not home and these craven ruffians, not knowing this and worrying that Poe would report their actions to someone inside, recklessly started a fire that nearly burned down the Brooks home. Poe barely managed to escape with his life.

The poet had money enough left for a small room at the United States Hotel, but not yet enough to take another train to New York or to Philadelphia, where a lucrative literary task awaited him. His new literary magazine, to be called
The Stylus,
was about to trumpet a new era of genius in American letters—but his enemies wished to stop him from exposing the mediocrity of their own writings. Poe therefore had begun to assume a false name, E. S. T. Grey. He even directed his own sweet mother-in-law—his cherished protector—to write him by this name in Philadelphia “for fear I should not get the letter,” for he worried that his adversaries would seek to intercept any letters of support or subscriptions to his daring enterprise. Nor did he wish them to know he was going to Philadelphia, certain that they would interfere with his task and destroy his attempt to raise money for his journal.

He found himself trapped in Baltimore during a heated election week. Poe was a literary man. He was above all this. He was above the petty and the grievous actions of politics and of ordinary man. But to the everyday rascal, the great genius is mere fodder.

Poe was easy prey. He had been traveling under his new alias, E. S. T. Grey. On the evening before election day, in the dismal weather that had plagued the city that week, he was snatched from the street. Here began the murder of Poe, perhaps one of the longest murders in history, certainly the longest and most pathetic in the history of literary men. The saddest since the poet Otway was strangled by a few crumbs of bread, the most iniquitous since Marlowe was stabbed through the head, into the very organ of his genius; and all of this turned Edgar Poe into the most slandered man since Lord Byron.