Poe (18 page)

Slowly he recovered. Maria Clemm would sit beside him as he lay restless in his bed, continually smoothing his brow and applying “soothing” lotions to his forehead.

• • •

There are many reminiscences of his new life at Fordham, in the company of Maria Clemm and Catterina the cat. Catterina would settle herself on his shoulders, while he was writing, and purr with delight. A visitor said that “she seemed possessed.” Poe entertained visitors with tea, and took rambles with them along the banks of the Bronx River. On one occasion he engaged in a game of leaping, at which he had excelled as a schoolboy; he excelled again, but at the cost of a pair of broken gaiters. He sat on a garden seat beneath the cherry tree, whistling to the pet birds whose cages hung in the branches. He ate fruit, and buttermilk, and curds. He told one correspondent that “I have never been so well… I rise early, eat moderately, drink nothing but water, and take abundant and regular exercise in the open air.”

Now he needed to restore his life. One cause of drinking and of despair had at least been removed. In a letter he wrote some months after Virginia's funeral he revealed that he had been intoxicated even to madness and “I had indeed, nearly abandoned all hope of a permanent cure when I found one in the
death
of my wife.” This might
have been a line out of his fiction, but the truth was there. It was the crippling anxiety induced by her condition, and the fatal progress from hope to despair, that had materially influenced his drinking. Now, he said, “my ambition is great.” Once more he began to revive hopes of publishing his own literary magazine.

In the summer of 1847 he visited Washington and Philadelphia with the intention both of gaining subscribers and of placing articles in the local magazines. He was spotted in the garden of the Episcopal High School in Virginia, near Washington, and was persuaded to recite “The Raven” to “the delight of all who were present.” Without the restraining presence of Maria Clemm, however, and despite his own earnest protestations, he fell back into drink. To one associate in Philadelphia he wrote, on returning to Fordham, “Without your aid, at the precise moment and in the precise manner in which you rendered it, it is more than probable that I should not now be alive to write you this letter …” He said that he was “exceedingly ill—so much so that I had no hope except in getting home immediately.” “Ill” was often, for Poe, a euphemism for being drunk. No force on earth could now restrain him from the bottle. There was never any connection between his protestations and his behaviour, just as there was no relation between his reminiscences and his real life. His words sprang freely from his imagination, his actions from need and obscure desire.

During these months at Fordham, however, away from the temptations of the bottle, he began to contemplate
a long scientific essay. On 3 February 1848, the newspapers of New York announced that Poe would be lecturing that evening on “The Universe” at the Society Library on the corner of Broadway and Leonard Street. The proceeds were supposed to help to finance the
Stylus.
But it was a stormy night, and only sixty people attended. Poe spoke for some two and a half hours on the mysteries of the cosmos, and one young lawyer in the audience recalled “his pale, delicate, intellectual face and magnificent eyes. His lecture was a rhapsody of the most intense brilliancy. He appeared inspired, and his inspiration affected the scant audience almost painfully. He wore his coat tightly buttoned across his slender chest…”

The newspaper accounts were on the whole laudatory, although it is not at all clear that the journalists present fully grasped Poe's analysis of “divine essence” and “infinite space.” Yet the
Morning Express
concluded that “this brilliant effort was greeted with warm applause by the audience, who had listened with enchained attention throughout.” Others were not so enthusiastic. One contemporary regarded it as “a mountainous piece of absurdity for a popular lecture.” Of the newspaper reviews Poe commented that “all praised it… and all absurdly misrepresented it.” He predicted that his work would be appreciated two thousand years hence. Nevertheless Poe was emboldened by its more immediate success. Two months later he approached George P. Putnam in his publishing offices on Broadway.

Putnam recalled the meeting when Poe “seated at my
desk, and looking at me a full minute with his ‘glittering eye’ he at length said ‘I am Mr Poe.’ I was ‘all ear,’ of course, and sincerely interested.” Poe then paused. “I hardly know,” he said, “how to begin what I have to say. It is a matter of profound importance.” He then went on to claim that he proposed the publication of a work that would throw into the shade Newton's discovery of gravitation, and that the book “would at once command such universal and intense attention that the publisher might give up all other enterprises, and make this one book the business of his lifetime.” He proposed a first printing of fifty thousand copies. Putnam was “impressed” but not “overcome,” he said, and promised a response two days later. Then Poe asked him for a small loan.

Putnam thought over the matter, purchased the manuscript, and eventually printed five hundred copies of
Eureka.

In the meantime Poe lingered in New York. He dined with his literary friend Rufus Griswold and unfortunately became inebriated. He sent a request for assistance to Mrs. Shew, who dispatched a doctor and a friend to minister to him. They “found him crazy-drunk in the hands of the police, and took him home to Fordham (eleven miles), where we found poor Mrs. Clemm waiting for him.” He had been away from home for three days, and had spent all the money given to him. So his rescuers left Maria Clemm five dollars for immediate necessities.

Mrs. Shew was in any case reaching the limit of her toleration for the eccentricities of her erstwhile patient.
She never complained of his drunkenness or his excitability; for her these were merely the symptoms of a fatally weakened constitution. But she objected to Poe's beliefs, stated in his lecture on the universe. He had already prepared his notes for publication, and at the end of his discussion he made a clear argument for a version of pantheism. A clerical friend of Mrs. Shew, the Reverend John Henry Hopkins, had discussed the matter with Poe. In a letter to Mrs. Shew he described how “a strange thrill nerved and dilated for an instant his slight figure, as he exclaimed, ‘My whole nature utterly
revolts
at the ideas that there is any Being in the Universe superior to
myself.’
” Poe was hardly a Christian at all.

This is not what the pious Mrs. Shew wished to hear. She could not consort with a heretic. Her trips to Fordham became infrequent. She became more formal, and more restrained. When she uttered a faint “amen” for the grace before dinner, Poe claimed that “I felt my heart stop, and I was sure I was then to die before your eyes.” In the early summer Mrs. Shew sent him a letter of leavetaking. He replied that “for months I have known you were deserting me.” It should be remembered that, of all the calamities he most feared, that of female withdrawal was by far the most painful. It was connected with the death of his mother, and the deaths of the other young women to whom he had been devoted. So to Mrs. Shew he called out as from the depths—“for me alas! Unless some true and tender and pure womanly love saves me, I shall hardly last a year longer!” He added that “it is too late you are floating away
with the cruel tide. I am a coward to write this to you, but it is not a common trial, it is a fearful one to me.” It was the last letter she ever received from him.

Even before Mrs. Shew's defection, however, Poe had been surveying the horizon for another and more impressionable young woman. In May 1848, he wrote an impassioned if not exactly passionate letter to Jane E. Locke; he called her “Sweet friend, dear friend” and alluded ruefully to his “hermit life …buried in the woods of Fordham.” He claimed that “my whole existence has been the merest Romance—in the sense of the most utter unworldliness.” He wanted to learn more, much more, about her personal history. There was one question “which I ‘dare not even ask’ of you.” That question was, no doubt, concerning her marital status. It turned out that she was married. She went from being “My Dear Friend” to “My Dear Mrs. Locke.” His plans had again been thwarted. But within a few weeks he was set to try again.

• • •

Eureka
was published in the summer of 1848. It was the last of his works to be issued in his lifetime, and is in certain respects the most puzzling. The confusion is not helped by his preface in which he declared the composition to be “an Art-Product alone: let us say as a Romance; or, if I be not urging too lofty a claim, as a Poem.” It purports to be an account of the origin and the history of the universe, couched in the most recondite prose, but it is also a record of the obsessions and preoccupations that
had animated Poe's fiction and poetry. It begins with the general proposition that,
“In the Original Unity of the First Things lies the Secondary Cause of All Things, with the Germ of their Inevitable Annihilation.”
Poe surveyed the universality of gravitation before suggesting that the gravitational principle was simply one manifestation of the desire of all things to return to some original state of unity. “I am not so sure that I speak and see,” he wrote, “that my heart beats and my soul lives … as I am of the irretrievably bygone
Fact
that All Things and All Thoughts of Things, with all their ineffable Multiplicity of Relation, sprang at once into being from the primordial and irrelative
One”
But all things yearn to return to that original “unity” and that primaeval “nothingness” or, as he put it, “their source lies in the principle,
Unity. This
is their lost parent.” The reference to “lost parent” may be significant. Was he contemplating that yearned-for return to the mother? There may be some buried allusion to his own loss in the belief that a “diffusion from Unity, under the conditions, involves a tendency to return into Unity—a tendency ineradicable until satisfied.” Is there perhaps here some explanation for his excessive drinking, in the desire to return to some state of infantile bliss and tactility?

But then in the return to that original unity, that womb, “the processes we have here ventured to contemplate will be renewed forever, and forever, and forever; a novel Universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart Divine. And now—this Heart Divine—what is it?
It is our own”
The
tell-tale heart beats within Poe, and within every one of us. The universe is within us. It is an ancient doctrine, which Poe might have derived from Paracelsus or from Blake, but it is likely to have been found anew by Poe himself. In a letter to one correspondent he stated that “What I have propounded will (in good time) revolutionise the world of Physical and Metaphysical Science. I say this calmly—but I say it.” Some cosmologists have claimed that Poe is the harbinger of Einstein and the first theorist of “black holes,” but it might be suggested that Poe is simply applying his ever restless and perplexed imagination to the world of matter and of spirit. He added, in this context, “The plots of God are perfect. The Universe is a plot of God.” Poe gives himself too little credit.

• • •

In the same period Poe composed two of his most famous poems, “Ulalume” and “The Bells,” that come as close to “sound poetry” as any verse he ever wrote. It is said that he designed the first of them as an exercise in elocution or recitation, and that in the other he wished to reproduce the effect of the pealing of bells. He told some journalists in Richmond that he wished “to express in language the exact sounds of bells to the ears.” In both cases he succeeded, but at the cost of sense and perhaps of significance. They are exercises in “pure poetry,” where cadence and the suggestive melody of rhyme are employed for their own sake. He wished to create “this poem which is a poem and nothing more—this poem written solely for
the poem's sake.” Its object was pleasure, not truth, and its effect was one of indefinite rather than definite pleasure; it consisted solely in “the
Rhythmical Creation of Beauty
.” This theory is equivalent to the doctrine of art for art's sake, adumbrated by Pater and Swinburne for a later generation. Yet there was something more. There was also his statement that “the origin of Poetry lies in a thirst for a wilder Beauty than Earth supplies,” for a “supernal Loveliness” to be glimpsed in “the glories beyond the grave;” he is invoking the yearning for something irremediably lost, something missing for ever.

His late poems, then, could be seen as complementary to his speculations in
Eureka.
It was poetry like this that appealed to the French Symbolist poets and guaranteed his preeminent reputation among poets such as Baudelaire and Mallarmé. But the same work was less enthusiastically received by Anglo-American poets and critics, who have deemed it “juvenile” or a form of “nonsense poetry” in the line of Edward Lear. That disparity of judgement exists still.

T
he departure of Mrs. Shew, and the false start with Mrs. Locke, had not materially affected Poe's passionate desire for female companionship. In the summer of 1848 he visited Mrs. Locke and her husband at Lowell, in Massachusetts, where he was about to deliver a lecture on “The Poets and Poetry of America.” Mrs. Locke then introduced him to a neighbour, a young woman named Annie Richmond. At a later date, in a fictional essay, he claimed that he was smitten at first sight. “As she approached, with a certain modest description of step almost indescribable, I said to myself, Surely here I have found the perfection of natural, in contradistinction from artificial
grace
… So intense an expression of
romance,
perhaps I should call it, or of unworldliness, as that which gleamed from her deep-set eyes, had never so sunk into my heart of hearts before.” Her eyes were “spiritual.” Perhaps he deemed her even capable of an early death.