Poe (20 page)

But he had not entirely lost his sense of reality. Four days later he was writing to a putative benefactor, asking for two hundred dollars for the establishment of his proposed literary magazine. He slowly began to recover from the excitement induced by recent events, his composure only slightly ruffled by the news that Helen Whitman's mother had taken entire control of the Whitman estate.

• • •

Then on 20 December, Poe returned to Providence in order to deliver a lecture on “The Poetic Principle.” Any other motive must remain in doubt. One poet of his acquaintance, Mary E. Hewitt, asked if he was also going to Providence for his marriage. He is supposed to have replied, “That marriage will never take place.” He lectured
before some eighteen hundred people in the Franklin Lyceum, with Mrs. Whitman among the audience. On the following day she agreed to an “immediate marriage,” with the familiar stipulation that he would never drink again. Poe attended an evening reception at her home, where he remained very quiet. On the morning of the next day he was seen to take a glass of wine. He called upon Helen, with profuse apologies. The apologies were apparently accepted, for on the following day he wrote a note to the minister of the local Episcopal church asking him to publish the banns for the forthcoming marriage. Poe then wrote to Maria Clemm that “we shall be married on Monday [Christmas Day], and will be at Fordham on Tuesday.”

These well-laid plans came to nothing. On the day he had written to Maria Clemm, he had ridden out in a carriage with his intended bride. They visited one of the many libraries in the city, where a note was placed in Mrs. Whitman's hand. It was a “poison pen” letter of the most vicious kind, informing her “of many things in Mr. Poe's recent career” and in particular of his continued drinking. It may also have alluded to his association with Annie Richmond. This was too great a strain for Helen Whitman. When they returned to the Whitman home, she stupefied herself with ether and sank upon the sofa. Poe knelt down beside her, and begged for one word.

“What
can
I say?”

“Say that you love me, Helen.”

“I love you.”

Then the unhappy and confused woman collapsed into unconsciousness.

Poe had a less passionate interview with Mrs. Whitman's mother, in which she made it very clear that his presence was no longer required. The result was that he left the house, complaining of “intolerable insults,” and boarded the steamer to New York. He never saw Helen Whitman again.

It is a strange story, rendered even more bizarre by Poe's baffling and incoherent conduct. He was writing passionate and devoted letters to two women at the same time, promising undying love to both. He was like a cuttlefish floundering in its own ink. He had traduced his dead wife's memory. He had expressed the wish to die in Annie Richmond's arms; he had expressed something like infantile dependence upon both women. And, significantly, he knew well enough that both women were ultimately unobtainable. In that respect, at least, they resembled the idealised image of his own mother. There was one difference. To Helen, in his signatures, he was “Edgar.” To Annie, he was “Eddy.” It is as if two people inhabited the same body—the adult Edgar and the infant Eddy. It was Eddy who wrote that “I need not tell you, Annie, how great a burden is taken off my heart by my rupture with Mrs. W…”

There was one further complication. The family of Annie Richmond's husband lived in Providence, and were busily retelling all the gossip about Poe and Helen Whitman, including the information that Mrs. Whitman
had withdrawn the marriage banns. This was untrue. The marriage banns had never been published at all. But the suspicion was, of course, that it was Mrs. Whitman, not Poe, who had sundered their relationship and that she had done so on the basis of some new evidence against him. Poe wrote to Helen Whitman towards the end of January 1849, explaining “that
you
Mrs. W have uttered, promulgated or in any way countenanced this pitiable falsehood, I do not & cannot believe … It has been my intention to say simply, that our marriage was postponed on account of your ill health.”

Perhaps on the same day Poe wrote to Annie Richmond complaining that “I felt
deeply
wounded by the cruel statements of your letter.” He enclosed his letter to Mrs. Whitman, which he had post-dated, asking Annie to read it, seal it, and send it on. It was his best opportunity of clearing his name. Helen Whitman never replied.

H
e was trying to look ahead. In February 1849 he wrote a relatively optimistic letter to his old friend Frederick Thomas, in which he claimed that “I shall be a
litterateur
at least all my life.” In the same period he told Annie Richmond that “I have not suffered a day to pass without writing from a page to three pages.” By the spring he completed the final version of “The Bells” and began the poem he entitled “Annabel Lee;” he was also writing one of his most peculiar stories, “Hop Frog,” about the vengeance wreaked by a dwarfish clown forced to entertain various noble and royal patrons. He also wrote a “hoaxing” story, “Von Kempelen and His Discovery,” on the possibility of turning lead into gold. He claimed that he had not been drinking and, indeed, that he was “in better health than I ever knew myself to be.” He and Maria Clemm had taken the cottage at Fordham for another year. There was another reason for confidence. A prospective
patron for the
Stylus
had unexpectedly emerged. A young admirer of Poe, Edward Patterson of Oquawka, Illinois, had offered to subsidise a literary magazine under Poe's exclusive control. Poe wrote back in enthusiastic terms. All would be well.

But then there came the inevitable reaction. The journals, from which he had been hoping for funds for his contributions, collapsed one after the other. By April Poe had become once more seriously unwell. “I thought,” Maria Clemm wrote to Annie Richmond, “he would
die
several times.” He had relapsed into nervous despair. He reported to Annie that “my sadness is
unaccountable,
and this makes me the more sad.
Nothing
cheers or comforts me. My life seems wasted—the future looks a dreary blank.” It was the necessary response to that period of hysterical turmoil in his twin pursuit of Annie Richmond and Helen Whitman.

Yet once more he travelled down to Richmond, in order to deliver a series of lectures. He may also have welcomed the opportunity of renewing his approaches to Elmira Shelton, the wealthy widow who had once been his belle. And he wanted to find new subscribers for the proposed journal. “I am now going to Richmond,” he told one correspondent, “to ‘see about it.’ ”

So, on 29 June 1849, Maria Clemm saw him off on the steamboat to Philadelphia. His words of farewell, according to her memory, were “God bless my own darling Muddy do not fear for your Eddy see how good I will be while I am away from you, and will come back to love and
comfort you.” He was, essentially, going home. She never saw him again.

• • •

He had intended to travel through Philadelphia on his way to Richmond, but a recurrence of his old sickness detained him. He began to drink. His suitcase, which contained two of the lectures he was about to deliver at Richmond, was lost at the railway station. This was not a good sign. The next two or three days are enveloped in a haze. Poe told Maria Clemm, in an hysterical letter written a week later from Philadelphia, that “I have been taken to prison once since I came here for getting drunk; but
then
I was not. It was about Virginia.” The only problem with his confession is that the available prison records show no evidence of Poe ever being arrested. In turn it has been suggested that he was detained for his own safety; that he was recognised in court, and acquitted. But the most likely explanation seems to be that Poe was suffering from delirium tremens or some form of paranoiac hallucination.

On the day after his supposed arrest, for example, he called upon an old acquaintance, the engraver and publisher John Sartain, looking “pale and haggard, with a wild and frightened expression in his eyes.” He pleaded with him for protection and explained that “some men” were about to assassinate him. Then in his tormented state he entertained the prospect of suicide and asked Sartain for a razor. He wished only to shave off his moustache, however, so that he could escape detection from the possible
murderers. Sartain then performed the deed with a pair of scissors. (Here we may entertain a cavil of doubt about Sartain's memory. Poe had a moustache on his arrival in Richmond soon afterwards.)

That evening they made an expedition to the local waterworks by the Schuylkill River where, according to Sartain's account, foolishly they mounted the steps to the reservoir. Poe then confided to him his visions, or hallucinations, while incarcerated in the Philadelphia jail. They included the sight of Maria Clemm being frightfully mutilated. He went into a “sort of convulsion,” and Sartain had to help him carefully down the steep steps to safety.

Poe stayed with his protector for two or three nights, and on the second morning he was recovered sufficiently to leave the house unaccompanied. On his return he confided that his recent delusions were “created by his own excited imagination.” Sartain may have already come to that conclusion. A few days later Poe wrote to Maria Clemm, complaining that “I have been so ill—have had the cholera, or spasms quite as bad.” He asked her to come to him immediately on receipt of the letter, with the ominous warning that “we can but die together. It is no use to reason with me
now;
I must die.” He sent the letter to the care of Sarah Anne Lewis, in Brooklyn, but Mrs. Lewis wisely did not pass it on to Maria Clemm. Mrs. Clemm, meanwhile, fretted and worried about poor Eddy.

Poe was still ill and impoverished. He visited a Philadelphia reporter, George Lippard, in his offices. He was wearing only one shoe. He had no money, and had not
eaten. He said that he had no friends, having conveniently forgotten about Sartain. Lippard quickly raised some money from sympathetic local publishers, and Poe finally scraped together the fare to make his way to Richmond.

He found his suitcase at the railway station; but, to his dismay, it had been opened and his lectures stolen. It is not clear what thief would have been interested in Poe's lucubrations on the state of American poetry.

Richmond had been his destination all along, but he arrived much later than he expected. The whole experience in Philadelphia became for him a phantasmagoria of suffering, brought on by what he described as
“mania-a-potu,”
or alcoholic madness. It is the first indication that he realised the nature of his true condition. The sequence of events in Philadelphia is not at all clear, and it is not wise to take the later recollections of Sartain or of Lippard at face value. There is always much myth-making in stories of Poe. That he did face some kind of crisis, however, is not in doubt. Lippard later recalled that, on their leave-taking at Philadelphia, “there was in his voice, look and manner something of a Presentment that his strange and stormy life was near its close.” This is known as the benefit of hindsight.

• • •

As soon as Poe arrived in Richmond he wrote to Maria Clemm, explaining that for the last weeks “your poor Eddy has scarcely drawn a breath except of intense agony.” He added towards the end that “my clothes are
so
horrible,
and I am so
ill
.” Then five days later, he seems to have recovered his spirits. He was in better health and wrote to Maria Clemm that “all may yet go well. I will put forth all my energies.” He had the most extraordinary powers of recuperation—or it may be that the wild alterations in his moods (and in his physical well-being) had more to do with words than with realities. He took lodgings in the Swan Tavern, and paid calls upon old friends and acquaintances. He renewed his ties with his sister, Rosalie, with whom he had previously lost contact. And he began earning money by lecturing. He was, in fact, something of a public figure. “Mr. Poe is a native of this city and was reared in our midst,” one newspaper reported, “… he reappears among us with increased reputation, and a strong claim upon public attention.” He reported to Maria Clemm, in August, that “I
never was
received with so much enthusiasm.”