Poe (4 page)

From this age, too, he was writing poetry. His schoolteacher described him as “born poet” who wrote verses
“con amore
and not as mere tasks.” John Allan shared the master's high opinion, and showed him a manuscript of young Poe's poems with a view to eventual publication. This was deemed inadvisable, since it might lead to excessive flattery for an already over-excitable young boy. Allan's enquiry, however, emphasises the fact that he took his young charge's literary ambitions very seriously. He was not the authoritarian and distant figure of some biographers’ invention.

At school Poe studied the standard classical authors, among them Ovid and Virgil and Cicero. But he also excelled
in less scholastic pursuits. He was a good swimmer, and once swam six miles against the tide of the James River watched by masters and pupils alike. He was athletic, wiry and strong; he boxed, and excelled in field sports such as running. This is in marked contrast to the debility and almost continual ill health of his adult years. He was reported to be of “a very sweet disposition … always cheerful, brimful of mirth and a very great favourite with his schoolmates.” He won prizes for elocution, and excelled at the declamation of the Latin poets and the Elizabethan dramatists.

But, as is invariably the case in the accounts of anyone's life, there were conflicting reports. One fellow pupil described him as “self-willed, capricious, inclined to be imperious, and though of generous impulses, not steadily kind, or even amiable.” So the young Poe harboured a grudge against the world. His schoolfellows had learned, by some means or other, that he was the orphaned child of travelling players and that he had been “adopted” by the Allan family. For this reason the other boys “declined his leadership.” The rejection encouraged a “fierceness” in him, taking the form of pride, or hauteur, but also rendered him sensitive and vulnerable to every slight. These were also the characteristics of the older Poe. Another contemporary recalled that the young Poe was “retiring in disposition and singularly unsociable in manner.” It was remarked, in particular, that he never took any of his friends to his home after school. When he left the school grounds, his departure marked “the end of his sociability” for that day.

The schoolboy Poe went on long and sometimes solitary “tramps” through the woods above Richmond; with his friends he organised raids on the local orchards and turnip patches; he planned “fish-fries” by the banks of the James River. One schoolfellow recalls that “he taught me how to shoot, to swim, and to skate, to play bandy etcetera,” bandy being a game much like ice hockey. He had one other interest. With two or three companions he joined the local Thespian Society, held in a neighbourhood hall, where for a small charge they entertained the audience with plays or sketches or declamations. Reportedly John Allan did not approve of his theatrical activities; it may have been too disconcerting a reminder of Poe's dead parents.

Throughout these years, too, Poe continued to write poetry. He claimed to have written some of the poems published in his first book at the age of fourteen; despite his native tendency for exaggeration, there is no reason to question the assertion. His earliest known lines, scrawled on a sheet of John Allan's financial calculations in a neat hand, were composed at the age of fifteen:

The wistful tone of the couplet is interesting, as is the fact that it was written above Allan's sums of compound interest.

The boy soon found a subject for his romantic melancholia. One of his schoolfellows, Robert Stanard, invited
him to his house, where he met Jane Stanard, the thirty-year-old mother, who “took his hand and spoke some gen-tle and gracious words of welcome.” He became smitten, and “returned home in a dream.” She might have been his own mother revived.

Jane Stanard has the distinction of being the first motherly young woman to whom Poe became devoted. He had an abiding need for female sympathy and protection. It may be the characteristic of the orphan. In one of his journalistic “marginalia” he wrote later that “the boyish poet-love is indisputably that one of the human sentiments which most nearly realises our dreams of the chastened voluptuousness of heaven.”

The pleasure was indeed chastened. Poe possessed an unerring ability to choose frail, or in some way damaged, women, thus revisiting the experience of his fading mother. In the spring of 1824, a year after they had first met, Jane Stanard died insane.

Poe visited her grave in Shockoe Hill Cemetery, and he told a female admirer that he shed tears by the freshly dug earth. All his life he liked to wander through cemeteries. Death and beauty were, in his imagination, inextricably and perpetually associated. “No more” was his favourite phrase. The secret chambers and the mouldering mansions, in which his fictions loved to dwell, are to be construed as those of the mind or of the grave.

He had a more immediate concern for the dead; however. He told a friend, John Hamilton Mackenzie, that “the most horrible thing he could imagine as a boy was to feel
an ice-cold hand laid upon his face in a pitch dark room when alone at night.” That was not his only fantasy. He feared that he might awake in semi-darkness, only to find an evil face staring closely at him. He became so afraid of his own imagined horrors that he would keep his head beneath the sheets until he practically suffocated himself. He seems to have taken a perverse delight in frightening himself, as well as others. Even in later life he admitted to a dislike of the dark. Here can be found the origins of his obsession with death, or deathlike states. Before his twentieth year he wrote a significant couplet:

Yet soon enough he found another thwarted and difficult love. He always said that he was “devoted” to Fanny Allan, although that attachment had not precluded his attraction to Jane Stanard. The love and comfort of one woman were not enough for him. In the year of Mrs. Stanard's death he met, and became attached to, a fifteen-year-old girl. Elmira Royster lived in a house opposite Poe's school, and so the possibilities of chance encounter were immense. Under the supervision of the girl's parents, they met in the parlour of Royster House; she played the piano, and he sang and played the flute. He made a sketch of her that survives only in a copy.

She recalled the young Poe remonstrating with her for her friendship with one young woman whom he considered
to be “unladylike.” “He had strong prejudices,” she said after his death. “Hated anything coarse and unrefined.” She described his grand manner, and his slight shyness in company. He was already growing into the model of a Southern gentleman, but he was not in the conventional mould. Elmira, or “Myra” as he used to call her, recorded that he was “very enthusiastic and impulsive” but that “his general manner was sad.”

That sadness had to do with domestic unhappiness. All was not well in the Allan household. Frances Allan may have been exhibiting some of the symptoms of consumption that carried her to the grave five years later. But there were more immediate discontents. Poe and John Allan had begun to quarrel. It is possible that Allan reminded his young charge that he was in effect an object of charity. In November 1824, Allan wrote to Poe's older brother, Henry, that Edgar “does nothing & seems quite miserable, sulky and ill-tempered to all the Family. How we have acted to produce this is beyond my conception …” He added that Edgar “possesses not a Spark of affection for us, not a particle of gratitude for all my care and kindness towards him.” This would be a complaint about Poe in later years. He could not bring himself to appear humble to anyone or thankful for anything.

In the same letter to Henry Poe, Allan refers to “your poor Sister, Rosalie,” who was living with the Mackenzies in Richmond, and writes that “at least She is half your sister & God forbid dear Henry that We should visit upon the living the Errors & frailties of the dead.” The meaning
of “half your sister” is clear enough. Allan supposed that Rosalie had a different father and that she was, as a consequence, illegitimate. If Allan mentioned this to Henry Poe, he would no doubt have suggested it to Edgar. For a boy who seems to have held his mother in particular reverence, this would have been unpardonable. Poe's hatred of anything “unrefined” has been noticed. What could be more coarse than to accuse his mother of bearing the child of a man who was not her husband?

How did the argument develop? Poe knew of Allan's illegitimate children, living in Richmond, and may have ascribed Frances Allan's weakened health to that cause. If then he upbraided Allan for siring illegitimate offspring, what more natural rejoinder from Allan than that Poe's own mother was guilty of a similar sin? This is the most likely to have been the primary cause of an increasingly bitter conflict. Poe was heard on several occasions wishing that he could escape from the Allan household and thus make his own way in the world. He expressed the desire to the Mackenzies, Rosalie's guardians, that he might run away to sea.

• • •

He did not go to sea. He attended university instead.

In February 1826, at the age of sixteen, he was enrolled at the new University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The cornerstone had been laid nine years previously, but the establishment had been in operation for only a year. Its
founder and guiding spirit, Thomas Jefferson, had wished “to develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals,” in which ambitions he was not wholly successful. Poe was lodged at number thirteen in the West Range of the new buildings, on the west side of a central lawn, where he roomed alone. Roused by a servant at 5:30 each morning, he began his first classes at 7:00 a.m. in the Schools of Ancient Languages and of Modern Languages. He proved to be a model pupil, adept at translation from Latin as well as Italian. At the end of the year he was recorded as “excelling” in the senior Latin class and the senior French class. He said in a letter to John Allan that he expected to perform well in end of term examinations “if I don't get frightened,” an indication of the nervous anxiety that seems to have been his constant companion. He became secretary of the debating club, and was preeminent in the gymnastic exercises of running and jumping.

One fellow student remembered “a sad, melancholy face always, and even a smile, for I don't remember his ever having laughed heartily, seemed to be forced.” No one ever really knew him well. He was too defensive, or too proud, to encourage intimacy. He would also “put himself under the influence” of drink in order to “quiet the excessive nervous excitability under which he laboured.” The drink in question is likely to have been the ubiquitous “peach [brandy] and honey,” a sweet if lethal concoction. This is the first reference to his partiality for
alcohol. It is significant that it should have manifested itself at such a relatively early age. He was born, not made, a drinker.

Another fellow student recalls that “Poe's passion for strong drink was as marked and as peculiar as that for cards.” Poe loved gambling. When he and a local clerk vied over the purchase of an edition of William Hogarth's prints, Poe proposed that they gamble for the book with dice. Poe lost. He played cards endlessly, often losing large sums of money. In such matters, according to a contemporary, he “plunged with a recklessness of nature which acknowledged no restraint.” This “recklessness” was apparent in later life, too, with his increasingly heavy drinking and his sometimes extreme behaviour. Yet it was accompanied, at university, by a steady attention to his studies.

His life at university should in any case be seen in context. The young gentlemen of Virginia did not necessarily obey Thomas Jefferson's injunctions, at least in terms of moral cultivation. There were frequent fist fights, and most students owned a pistol that was readily drawn and fired. The culture of the South still harboured the traditions of the duelling code. Some students came from rich plantation families, and were accompanied by slaves. Some arrived with horses or with hunting dogs. There were drunken forays into the local towns, and inveterate gambling. Poe was not unique in his weaknesses. But he was unusual in not being able to pay for them. He appealed to Allan for money, who sent too little of that commodity too late.

Allan was generally parsimonious in his provisions for the young Poe. In one letter Poe calculated the expenses of life at the university, including board and tuition, at $350 per annum. Allan had dispatched him to Charlottesville with $110 in his pocket. As a result Poe had enrolled in only two of the three schools open to him, thus saving $15. Allan sent him further sums, but they were never enough to allow him to pay his bills. They were certainly insufficient to cover his gambling debts, and according to Poe's complaint he “was immediately regarded in the light of a beggar.” There was no apparent reason for Allan's lack of generosity. Only the year before, Allan had inherited a large estate from the will of a wealthy Scottish relative who had also emigrated to America.

It is not surprising that Allan harboured contradictory feelings towards his surrogate son. At a later date Poe himself characterised his foster father to a friend “as a man of gross & brutal temperament though
indulgent to him
at times & at
times
profusely lavish in the matter of money—at others, penurious and parsimonious.” It seems likely that Allan came increasingly to resent his young charge. Poe had already appeared to him, as he had to others, arrogant and unthankful. Poe may even have assumed that Allan's wealth would one day be bequeathed to him. This would have been the most hazardous assumption of all.

• • •

When Poe returned to Richmond at the end of 1826, Allan refused to finance any further period of study. Despite dunning letters from the young Poe's creditors, he also refused to pay any more of the debts, which amounted to some $2,000. Poe had expected to spend two years at the university; he would not have acquired a degree in the modern sense, but it would have been formally recorded that he had completed certain courses. He had an immoderate thirst for reading, but any future world of learning was now foreclosed. He told Allan in a subsequent letter that “in a moment of caprice you have blasted my hope.” It was a bitter homecoming in another sense: he learned that his letters to Elmira Royster had been kept from her by her father, and that she was about to be married to another man. There were frequent and sharp arguments between Allan and Poe. Any residual love between foster father and foster son had disappeared.