Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living (Icons) Read online

  OTHER BOOKS BY PAUL COLLINS

  Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn’t Change the World

  Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books

  Not Even Wrong: A Father’s Journey into the Lost History of Autism

  The Trouble With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine

  The Book of William: How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World

  The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars

  Duel With the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton & Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take On America’s First Sensational Murder Mystery

  Text copyright © 2014 by Paul Collins

  All rights reserved

  No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Amazon Publishing, New York

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo and Amazon Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.

  ISBN-10: 1477825495

  ISBN-13: 9781477825495

  Cover design by Rodrigo Corral Design

  To Dave Eggers, who gave me my first break as a writer

  Contents

  1 The Child of Fortune

  2 Manuscript Found in a Bottle

  3 The Glorious Prospect

  4 The Shakespeare of America

  5 Nevermore

  Notes

  Selected Further Reading

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Index

  1

  The Child of Fortune

  FOR MANY DECADES, the night of January 19 would bring a single mysterious visitor to a Baltimore graveyard: dressed in black and hidden by a hat and scarf, he’d raise a birthday toast and then leave behind a bottle of cognac and three roses at the stone marking the original burial site of Edgar Allan Poe. He has never been identified, and the tradition ended in 2009 amid claims that the original “Poe Toaster” had died years earlier. Curious onlookers and reporters still stake out the graveyard each year, though, and pretenders have continued to make the homage ever since, sometimes finding that other toasters have already beaten them to the grave earlier in the evening. That seems entirely fitting. An old graveyard at midnight, mysterious visitors, false identities, and an unsolved mystery: one suspects Poe himself would approve of the whole affair.

  But to understand Poe—the father of detective fiction, the master of horror, the critic, the novelist, the poet, the tragic artist—one might better turn their gaze from those shadowy figures in the graveyard and instead watch the Baltimore Sun reporter taking notes from the perimeter. There, and not amid the weathered tombstones, is the reality of the living and working writer. Poe’s reputation was not earned through tragedy, but in spite of it: he was a careful craftsman of words, and a man whose deep dedication to understanding art is often obscured by the drama around his life.

  Edgar Allan Poe was born into a world of artists struggling to survive. His father was the mercurial namesake son of one of Baltimore’s great patriots of the Revolution—but instead of the law career that had been marked out for him, David Poe Jr. took to the stage. In 1806 he married Eliza Arnold, who had theater in her blood—the child of English actors, she’d first appeared onstage by the age of nine, and was orphaned at fourteen as her family toured America. Renowned for her singing voice and her dancing, Eliza was often given lead parts reserved for pretty, magnetic young actresses; her Shakespearean roles alone included Juliet, Desdemona, Ariel, and Cordelia. A surviving cameo portrait shows a delicate woman with dark ringlets and a bemused look; she was lauded by one theater patron as “a brilliant gem in the Theatrick crown.”

  David was not quite her equal onstage. Rarely the lead, he tackled bit parts in Boston and New York theaters with earnestness, sometimes mumbling lines when flustered. The greatest role he ever landed, perhaps, was as Eliza’s husband. When they married, she was nineteen and newly widowed, and now she wasted no time in starting a family. Three children followed in quick succession in 1807, 1809, and 1810: Henry, Edgar, and Rosalie.

  Life in the theater was precarious, and after Edgar’s birth on January 19, 1809, David was back onstage the next night at the Boston Theatre. Eliza, after “the recovery of her recent confinement,” was treading the boards again just three weeks later. Soon they were leaning upon Boston’s theatergoers with shows “For the Benefit of Mrs. Poe.” Theater had a culture of such shows—perusing Boston newspapers that same month, one finds benefits for Mrs. Poe, Master Payne, Messrs. Stockwell and Barnard, Mr. and Mrs. Barnes, and Miss Worsall—a testament to the changeless struggle of artists to earn their way.

  In their scramble for desperately needed money, neither parent could care for Edgar much. Scarcely a month after his birth, Edgar joined his brother, Henry, with their grandparents in Baltimore. He rejoined his parents six months later, in New York City, but the infant’s new home was not an entirely happy one. Manhattan newspapers tolerated neither mumblers nor stumblers: one critic labeled David Poe a “muffin face” and mercilessly dubbed him “Dan Dilly” after he mispronounced a character named “Dandoli.” Over the next two years, David Poe would respond with the melancholy predictability of foolish men: he got angry, he drank, and then he abandoned his wife and children. There was no reconciliation, nor could there be: David died in obscurity soon afterwards.

  He left behind the newborn and sickly Rosalie, born after a theatrical run by her mother in Virginia—and soon Mrs. Poe herself was ailing. In November 1811, one Richmond local wrote: “Mrs. Poe, who as you know is a very handsome woman, happens to be very sick, and (having quarreled and parted with her husband) is destitute.” A visitor recalled finding the children “thin and pale and very fretful,” and being hushed by an old nurse with nips of opium and gin-soaked bread. Soon an ominous notice appeared in the Richmond Enquirer for another benefit show: “Mrs. Poe, lingering on the bed of disease and surrounded by her children, asks your assistance, and asks it for perhaps the last time.”

  This was no exaggeration. A month later, one could spot the well-to-do Richmond merchant John Allan and his wife, Frances, spending the Christmas holiday at a friend’s plantation—and toddling alongside them through the snow, a bewildered and newly adopted young orphan named Edgar.

  He was now, an aunt wrote, “truly the Child of fortune.”

  Poe was born into a life of art, but adopted into one of commerce, and from this uneasily mixed parentage, both the name and the career of Edgar Allan Poe would emerge. For just as Eliza Poe was a great talent in her profession, so was John Allan in retailing. At the Richmond dry goods warehouse of Ellis & Allan, one could find everything from sheet music to coal shovels, “Chamber door Locks” to window glass, and heaped piles of “superfine Broadcloths and Kersemeres.”

  A bluff and hardheaded merchant, Allan was a Scotsman turned American, adopted by the country he’d emigrated to in 1795. Though one contemporary described him as “rather rough and uncultured,” Allan also possessed more subtle qualities. Like many a hard-driven merchant, he’d never had a college education, and could seem alternately dismissive and ardent in his admiration for culture. “Gods! What would I not give, if I had his talent for writing!” he once wrote of Shakespeare. The survival of 615 volumes of Ellis & Allan commercial correspondence do not hint at a man with much time to fulfill such dreams. But he acquired the trappings of culture for his prosperous household: they would never lack for Shak
espeare, nor for a costly Rees’s Cyclopedia or a piano in the parlor.

  The Allans had both been orphaned as children themselves. At thirty-one, John was now a respectable Richmond merchant with no offspring—none by his rather frail wife, Frances, at least. It was Frances who pressed for taking in little Edgar, and by 1812 the Allan ledgers show the telltale touches of parenthood: amid the fine horses and casks of brandy are orders for diminutive suits of clothing, doctor’s visits for croup, and a child-size bed.

  Edgar was, visitors recalled, “a lovely little fellow, with dark curls and brilliant eyes, dressed like a little prince.” Yet he was the prince of an uncertain peerage. John hadn’t formally adopted him—perhaps imagining that Poe’s relatives would decide to raise him, as they had with his siblings, Henry and Rosalie. But as weeks passed into months and months into years, Edgar Poe disappeared from records, and in his place appeared a new identity: Edgar Allan. When John Allan set out in August 1815 to open a London branch of his firm, he was joined by his wife and his spirited six-year-old boy. Interrupting Allan as the merchant drafted a letter to confirm his arrival, Poe’s voice materialized on paper for the first time.

  “Edgar says Pa, say something for me,” Allan wrote in bemusement to his business partner. “Say I was not afraid coming across the sea.” Edgar took a child’s delight in the thirty-four-day voyage, even as his family was distinctly the worse for wear from seasickness.

  Arriving in London mere months after the end of both the War of 1812 and the surrender of Napoleon, the Allans found an empire staggered with debt and swarming with wounded veterans, yet poised upon the brink of the most powerful and peaceful decades that Britain had ever known. It was here, at the center of a new British empire, that Edgar would have many of his first childhood memories. Just before Halloween that year, a letter written by Allan gave the first real glimpse of Edgar. The family was “by a snug fire” in their parlor, he wrote, with Mrs. Allan sewing and “Edgar reading a little Story Book”—perhaps Sinbad the Sailor or Jack and the Beanstalk, both of which had recent children’s editions. When he wasn’t reading, Edgar could amuse himself with his mother’s parrot, which the family had taught to recite the alphabet.

  Such pleasant idylls could not last, though. Edgar was packed off to boarding schools; and there, a foreign child of seven, he fell asleep at night under a strange roof in a strange land, and woke to eat among yet more strangers. He was so desperate to flee the grounds and hike back to London that for a time a cousin had to shadow him just to keep him from escaping.

  In his copy of The English Spelling Book, though, he could lose himself in the beauties of language. His textbook was designed to inculcate the morals and mores of its time, with lessons including such edifying dialogue as “We poor folk must not eat white bread, Miss.” But it was also a textbook from the very height of the Romantic era, and one of the book’s earliest exercises is this weirdly lovely description of a dead fly: “Alas! It is dead. It has been dead for some time. Its wings, you see, are like gauze, and its head looks like gold and pearl, but far more bright its eyes! The fly can not move its eyes; so it has more than you can count, that it may see all round it. They look like cut glass.” Later the book treats readers to the tale of a brother who, frightened to insanity by his prank-loving sisters, promptly murders his father.

  Edgar Allan read these books eagerly. He had a natural aptitude for language, with his father singling it out for praise in an 1818 letter back to the States: “Edgar is a fine Boy and reads Latin pretty sharply.”

  By late 1819, a shaky economy briefly had the Allan family down to their last hundred pounds, and they decided to return to America the following summer. At least a few people in Britain would remember Edgar long after he left. When one of his schoolmasters, Rev. John Bransby, was asked decades later about Poe, he politely recalled the “quick and clever boy” that he still called “Edgar Allan” out of habit. But when pressed, the reverend’s assessment of his long-gone pupil became more succinct.

  “Intelligent, wayward and willful,” he said.

  In the July 22, 1820, issue of the New-York Daily Advertiser, amid the ads for “Harps and Piano-Fortes Cheap!!” and announcements of “Stollenwerck’s Mechanical & Picturesque Panorama,” readers could find the passenger manifests of the latest ships in harbor. Travel from across the sea remained momentous enough to warrant a mention in the news, but that day’s arrivals would bring the first appearance in print of five particularly auspicious letters: E A Poe. Returning to the States after five years away, the boy was no longer “Master Allan,” but a strapping eleven-year-old with a new name and identity. His conscious memories of childhood belonged to London, as did his manners, education, and speech; returning to Richmond, Virginia, Poe now found himself a foreigner in his own land.

  Still reeling from the Panic of 1819, for a time John Allan moved his family under the roof of his business partner, Charles Ellis. During the day, Edgar would roam the woods and fields of Richmond, often with Ellis’s young son Thomas in tow. “He taught me to shoot, to swim, and to skate, to play bandy,” Ellis later recalled, “and I ought to mention that he once saved me from drowning.” Edgar also knew how to make trouble, and received a hiding for shooting at a neighbor’s birds; when stuck back in the house, Poe donned a sheet to interrupt his father’s whist game dressed as a ghost, and chased Thomas’s sister with an imitation snake “until it almost ran her crazy.”

  At school, Poe showed a more thoughtful side. Placed in the academy of a local Latin scholar, he became captivated by the Odes of Horace. First published in 23 BC during the zenith of Roman power, their very existence proved one ode’s promise that poetry was “A monument more durable than brass / And higher than the loftiest pyramid . . .” Poe memorized them, reciting the Latin “so often in my hearing,” recalled one classmate, “that I learned by sound the words of many, before I understood their meaning.”

  Poe’s competitive side manifested itself even in poetry—especially in poetry. Schoolboys amused themselves by “capping verses,” or quoting a line of Latin poetry at a rival who then had to respond with another quote whose first letter matched the last previous letter. The trick was to use a letter like X, which was easy to end a line with, but hard to start on. A surviving duel of Horace and Juvenal quotes from the era, slightly condensed, gives a feel for it:

  “Nec vaga cornix.”

  “Xanthia Phoceu, prius insolentum.”

  “Mittit venenorum ferax—trouble you for another x.”

  “Xerxis et imperio bina coisse vada.”

  “Ad summum, nec Maurus erat, nec Sarmata, nec Thrax . . .

  I’ll trouble you once more to cap me with an x.”

  And so on, until someone emerged victorious at having stumped the other for an answer. It was not a talent Edgar could extend to all subjects—“he had no love for mathematics,” his schoolmaster Joseph Clarke mused—but in poetry, he brooked no rival. Before Poe turned thirteen, his father had already approached Dr. Clarke with an unusual question.

  “Mr. Allan came to me one day with a manuscript volume of verses,” the schoolmaster recalled, “which he said Edgar had written, and which the little fellow wanted to have published.” Clarke dissuaded him, arguing that “Edgar was of a very excitable temperament,” and that the attention might turn the boy’s head altogether. The manuscript circulated among his classmates, though, with one even borrowing pages to take home and show to his mother. Of their contents, they were recalled as “chiefly pieces addressed to the different little girls of Richmond.”

  Women did not exactly diminish in his attentions in the next year or two. He felt, he later explained, “the first, purely ideal love of my soul” toward Jane Stannard, the pretty and kindly mother of one of his classmates. Her mind and health were faltering, though, and Poe was thrown into turmoil by her death in April 1824. He sought solace once again in poetry; his earliest surviving scrap dates from this year, when he picked up a sheet of calculations from his f
ather’s office and scratched three lines onto it:

  — Poetry. by . Edgar A. Poe —

  Last night with many cares & toils oppress’d

  Weary, I laid me on a couch to rest —

  His foster father, apparently surprised by a fifteen-year-old’s capacity to turn moody, quickly blamed Edgar’s friends. “He does nothing & seems quite miserable, sulky & ill-tempered to all the Family,” Allan wrote that autumn. “How we have acted to produce this is beyond my conception. . . . I fear his associates have led him to adopt a line of thinking & acting very contrary to what he possessed when in England.”

  Allan might not have understood his son, but he had Edgar’s friends right. The boy was literally acting different around them. Poe had a fondness for singing that he’d inherited from his mother, and remained curious about his theatrical birth parents; brief visits by his older and long-separated brother, Henry Poe, only served to remind him of his past. With Mrs. Stannard’s son and another classmate, Edgar formed a Thespian Society, putting on the occasional production like Julius Caesar for one-cent admission. And while his classmates could admire Poe for his athleticism—he had become a lean, swift runner and powerful swimmer—they were less sure what to make of his theatrics.

  “Of Edgar Poe it was known that his parents had been players, and that he was dependent on the bounty that is bestowed upon an adopted son,” his classmate John Preston recalled. “All this had the effect of making the boys decline his leadership; and on looking back on it since, I fancy it gave him a fierceness he would otherwise not have had.”

  But the standing of Poe and his adoptive family was about to change. Ever since his ill-fated venture in London, John Allan had barely kept his creditors at bay, and his partnership with Ellis finally dissolved in 1824. But the following year brought both shock and relief: the death of a rich uncle, and a one-third share of his estate. Almost instantly, Allan became one of the wealthiest men in Richmond; the creditors disappeared, and Allan bought a fine brick mansion.