Poe (21 page)

There are several descriptions of him in Richmond, generally of a contrary quality. To one contemporary he seemed “invariably cheerful, and frequently playful in mood.” To another his mouth displayed “firmness mingled with an element of scorn and discontent.” In general he was, when sober, cordial and courteous; he seemed rarely to smile, but to exercise an overwhelming self-control. There was “much sadness in the intonation of the voice.” There were times when he lapsed into old habits. On one occasion he was taken so ill from excessive consumption of alcohol that he had to be nursed by friends. It was said by a Richmond contemporary that for some
days “his life was in imminent danger” and that it was the opinion of his doctors that “another such attack would prove fatall.” He is supposed to have replied that “if people would not tempt him, he would not fall.” Under the circumstances, it was not perhaps the most convincing response. He spent some time in the offices of the
Richmond Examiner,
however, where he was surrounded by convivial spirits who might indeed have “tempted” him. Mint julep was a favourite drink in Richmond.

He was sturdy enough, however, to renew his advances towards Elmira Shelton. He called upon her several times, and by the summer there were widespread rumours that he had become engaged to her. One contemporary reported, at a later date, that “the lady was a widow, of wealth and beauty, who was an old flame of his.” But the path of true love is not often smooth. Two of Mrs. Shelton's children apparently opposed the match, and her dead husband had bequeathed his estate to her on condition that she did not remarry. Poe's intentions were also not entirely clear. He wrote a letter to Maria Clemm in which he suggested that she leave Fordham and remove herself to Richmond. And he added that “I want to live near Annie … Do not tell me anything about Annie—I cannot bear to hear it now—unless you can tell me that Mr. R. is dead.” So on the brink of an engagement with Elmira Shelton he was still expressing his devotion to another woman. Three weeks later he had softened somewhat towards Mrs. Shelton. “I think she loves me more devotedly than any one I ever knew,” he wrote to Maria
Clemm, “& I cannot help loving her in return. Nothing is yet definitely settled.” Four days later, on 22 September, an engagement was tentatively envisaged. On the same day Elmira Shelton wrote to Maria Clemm explaining that “I am fully prepared to
love
you, and I do sincerely hope that our spirits may be congenial.” She assured her that Poe was “sober, temperate, moral, & much beloved.” So he had made a considerable effort to reassure his new inamorata. On the same day, too, it was reported that he had joined the local temperance society.

He was invited to lecture on “The Poetic Principle,” two days later, and Mrs. Shelton sat in the front row before his lectern. A contemporary noted “her straight features, high forehead and cold expression of countenance … a sensible, practical woman, the reverse of a poet's ideal.” And so it proved. Mrs. Shelton said later, when questioned about the alleged affair, that “I was not engaged to Poe when he left here, but there was a partial understanding, but I do not think I should have married him under any circumstances.” As in all matters concerning Poe, the stories are convoluted and difficult to unravel.

• • •

There was another task to which he had to attend. A piano manufacturer from Philadelphia, John Loud, had offered Poe one hundred dollars for the task of editing a volume of his wife's poems. As Poe had written to Maria Clemm at the time, “Of course, I accepted his offer.” So he was planning to leave Richmond for a while, to complete
this remunerative but no doubt wearisome task. He calculated that it would take him three days. He also wished to travel on to New York, where he would make preparations for his new literary magazine.

Two evenings before he left Richmond he visited some old friends, the Talleys, to whom he expressed himself confident and hopeful. He declared that “the last few weeks in the society of his old and new friends had been the happiest that he had known for many years” and that he believed he was about to “leave behind all the trouble and vexation of his past life.” Susan Talley had a postscript to this cheerful meeting. “He was the last of the party to leave the house. We were standing on the portico, and after going a few steps he paused, turned, and again lifted his hat, in a last adieu. At the moment, a brilliant meteor appeared in the sky directly over his head, and vanished in the east.”

On the following evening, the last before his departure, he visited Elmira Shelton. At a later date she wrote to Maria Clemm explaining that “he was very sad, and complained of being quite sick. I felt his pulse, and found he had considerable fever.” Mrs. Shelton believed that he was too ill to travel the next day but, to her chagrin and surprise, she discovered that he had indeed taken the steamboat to Baltimore. He was beginning the fateful journey that would end in his death, as related in the first chapter of this book. He was found, six days later, slumped in a tavern in Baltimore. No one knew where he had been, or what he had done. Had he been wandering, dazed,
through the city? Had he been enlisted for the purposes of vote-rigging in a city notorious for its political chicanery? Had he suffered from a tumour of the brain? Had he simply drunk himself into oblivion? It is as tormenting a mystery as any to be found in his tales. He died in a hospital, on Sunday, 7 October 1849, a sad and beleaguered end to an unhappy and harassed life. He was forty years old.

• • •

On the day after his burial Maria Clemm wrote to Mrs. Richmond, “ANNIE, my Eddy
is dead.
He died in Baltimore yesterday. Annie! Pray for me, your desolate friend. My senses
will leave me
.”

She may have been following Poe's stated wishes when she left the work of collecting Poe's papers to Rufus Griswold, but the decision had profound consequences for Poe's posthumous reputation. Griswold composed a memoir, as a preface to the third volume of Poe's works, which was part slander and part abuse. The tone had been set in Griswold's obituary of Poe, published the day after the funeral, in which he stated that his death “will startle many,
but few will be grieved by it… he had few or no friends
.” The vituperation of the memoir itself was such that it provoked several rejoinders, but the libels against Poe's name became common currency for the rest of the nineteenth century.

Charles Baudelaire once remarked that “this death was almost a suicide, a suicide prepared for a long time.” In
truth Poe believed himself to have been marked out by an unlucky destiny from the day of his birth. He had been well versed, from his early days, in what he once called “the iron clasped volume of Despair.” In one of his earliest stories, “MS Found in a Bottle,” his narrator had written that “it is evident that we are hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge—some never to be imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction.” Poe was fated to die in ignominy. He was fated to die raving. He once said that “I have often thought I could distinctly hear the sound of the darkness as it stole over the horizon.” That darkness was always rushing towards him.

Maria Clemm settled with the Richmonds for some time, and then became a guest in other sympathetic households; it is clear, however, that she sometimes wore out her welcome. Eventually she found a last refuge in the “Church Home and Infirmary” at Baltimore.

Poe's reputation continued to grow in the years immediately after his death, especially in England and in France. He profoundly affected Verlaine and Rimbaud; Mallarmé and Baudelaire both translated “The Raven” in homage to an American poet who in certain respects seemed to be a precursor of European Romanticism and in particular the harbinger of Symbolism and of Surrealism. Baudelaire declared that, on reading Poe's poems and stories, he had found “not simply certain subjects, which I had dreamed of, but
sentences
which I had thought out, written by him twenty years before.” Rémy de Gourmont declared, in
fact, that Poe belonged to French rather than to American literature. Valéry told Gide that “Poe is the only impeccable writer. He is never mistaken.”

Tennyson described him as “the most original genius that America has produced,” worthy to stand beside Catullus and Heine. Thomas Hardy considered him to be “the first to realise in full the possibility of the English language,” and Yeats believed that he was “certainly the greatest of American poets.” The science fiction works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells are heavily indebted to him, and Arthur Conan Doyle paid tribute to Poe's mastery of the detective genre. Nietzsche and Kafka both honoured him, and glimpsed in his sad career the outline of their own suffering souls. He was admired by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Joseph Conrad, and James Joyce, who saw in him the seeds of modern literature. The orphan, in the end, found his true family.

1827—Poe's first book,
Tamerlane and Other Poems

1829—Poe's second book,
Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems

1831—Poe's
Poems

1838 (July)—Poe's
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

1839—Poe's
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque

1843 (July)—Poe's
Prose Romances

1845—Poe's
Tales
and
The Raven and Other Poems

1848 (about 15 July)—Poe's prose poem,
Eureka

Hervey Allen:
Israfel. The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe.
Two volumes (London, 1927).

Harold Bloom (editor):
Edgar Allan Poe, Modern Critical Views
(New York, 1985).

Marie Bonaparte:
The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe
(London, 1985).

David Halliburton:
Edgar Allan Poe, A Phenomenological View
(Princeton, 1973).

Kevin J. Hayes (editor):
The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe
(Cambridge, 2002).

Daniel Hoffman:
Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe
(New York, 1972).

Jeffrey Meyers:
Edgar Allan Poe
(London, 1992).

Sidney P. Moss:
Poe's Literary Battles
(Carbondale, Illinois, 1969).

John Ward Ostrom (editor):
The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe.
Two volumes (New York, 1966).

Mary E. Phillips:
Edgar Allan Poe the Man.
Two volumes (Chicago, 1926).

Una Pope-Hennessy:
Edgar Allan Poe
(London, 1934).

Arthur Hobson Quinn:
Edgar Allan Poe
(New York, 1941).

Kenneth Silverman:
Edgar A. Poe
(London, 1992).

Floyd Stovall:
Edgar Poe, the Poet
(Charlottesville, Virginia, 1969).

Julian Symons:
The Tell-Tale Heart
(London, 1978).

Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson:
The Poe Log
(Boston, 1987).

Edward Wagenknecht:
Edgar Allan Poe, the Man Behind the Legend
(New York, 1963).

I.M. Walker (editor):
Edgar Allan Poe, The Critical Heritage
(London, 1986).