Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living (Icons) (13 page)

“I am resolved to be my own publisher,” he complained to a friend. “To be controlled is to be ruined.”

In the summer of 1848, he set off to his old hometown to try once again at raising funds for
The Stylus
. “I am desperately circumstanced—in very bitter distress of mind and body,” he explained to a prominent subscriber. “My last hope of extricating myself from the difficulties which are pressing me to death, is in going personally to a distant connection near Richmond.”

The trip was a disaster; though he made the rounds and introduced himself to
Southern Literary Messenger
editor John Thompson, he collapsed into drinking. “He remained here about 3 weeks, horribly drunk and discoursing ‘Eureka’ every night to the audiences of the Bar Rooms,” Thompson reported after Poe was bundled back to New York City.

The comment is a telling one. Thompson found Poe unable to write anything else while he visited; the author perseverated on
Eureka
, which he plainly regarded as his magnum opus. As to why Poe felt such an overwhelming connection to the work—declaiming it to any stranger who would listen—one must read its last words, a footnote regarding the collapse of the universe to its original unity:

*Note—The pain of the consideration that we shall lose our individual identity, ceases at once when we further reflect that the process, as above described, is, neither more nor less than that of absorption, by each individual intelligence, of all other intelligences (that is, of the Universe) into its own. That God may be all in all,
each
must become God.

Virginia Poe had scarcely been in the grave for a year when Poe wrote this. For a man who had spent much of his career touching upon the mysteries of dissolution—of liminal states of death in life, of its phantasmal effect upon the living, of its visceral
horrors—
Eureka
was a sincere effort to explain the inexplicable, to face the subject without artifice. That he failed by most measures says less about Poe than about death itself, and how it can leave even a great author at a loss for words.

In Poe’s own eyes, though, his work had succeeded. For now he had reconciled himself to death—perhaps too well.

On November 4, 1848, Edgar Allan Poe decided it was time to kill himself. It was a crisp and cold Saturday morning in Providence; after a sleepless night in a hotel room, the author took a brisk walk to clear his mind. The stroll didn’t work—“the demon tormented me still,” he complained—but it did take him past a pharmacy, and that gave him a fine idea. He bought a powerful enough dose of opium tincture to kill most men, boarded a railway car to Boston without bothering to return to his hotel, and proceeded to write a suicide note. Then, upon reaching the city of his birth, he downed an ounce of the laudanum and walked to the post office with his dying words in hand.

He never made it.

“Before I reached the Post Office my reason was entirely gone, & the letter was never put in,” he later wrote dejectedly. “The laudanum was rejected from the stomach, I became calm, & to a casual observer, sane—so that I was suffered to go back to Providence.”

It was there that a few days later he was coaxed into sitting for a photograph. The 1848 “Ultima Thule” daguerreotype is today one of the iconic images of the nineteenth century: Poe, staring out into an unreachable middle distance, looking faintly chagrined at his dubious good fortune in having survived.

He was not supposed to be alone and forlorn like this. But Virginia’s hope that Poe might marry her deathbed nurse, Marie Shew, had gone awry; their rather simple friend was fond of Poe but piously frightened by
Eureka
. Poe instead conceived a fascination with one the most prominent critics and poets in America,
Sarah Helen Whitman. She bore no relation to the still-obscure Walt, but—of far more interest to Poe—she
was
the wealthy widow of a Providence attorney. After quietly finding through a mutual friend that she admired his work, Poe sent a letter under a false name to determine whether she was in Providence at the moment:

Dear Madam—

Being engaged in making a collection of autographs of the most distinguished American authors, I am, of course, anxious to procure your own, and if you would so far honor me as to reply, however briefly, to this note, I would take it as a
very especial
favor.

Resy Yr mo. ob. st,
Edward S. T. Grey

A few weeks later, he contrived to meet her while in town, and in seeking to charm her met with an almost wildly improbable stroke of luck. Visiting the Athenaeum library, she idly asked him about an unsigned poem she’d admired in the
American Review
a year earlier. Had he seen it too? It was called . . . “Ulalume.”

“To my infinite surprise,” she recalled, “he told me that he himself was the author. Turning to a bound volume of the
Review
which was in the alcove where we were sitting, he wrote his name at the bottom.”

This was a sign, surely: and one day later, as they strolled through a local cemetery, Poe asked for her hand in marriage.

It was not quite a perfect match. Whitman’s friends included a number of writers whom Poe disliked, and she lived with a fiercely protective mother. Undeterred, Poe tried to overwhelm Helen’s doubts with torrential love letters—“Were I not poor—had not my late errors and reckless excesses justly lowered me in the esteem of the good—were I wealthy, or could I offer you worldly honors—ah then—then—how proud I
would be to persevere—to sue—to plead—to kneel—to pray—to beseech you for your love—in the deepest humility—at your feet . . .”

Yet Poe still nursed affections for several other women, all with the miserable knowledge that none of them were Virginia. His despair over these lonely courtships was enough that he had simply tried to end it all in Boston. But the widower’s pleas to Helen Whitman did not go unheard; at the end of November, she said yes, and they planned a Christmastime marriage. Now it was their friends and her mother who turned dubious. “She has seemed to me a good girl, and—you know what Poe is,” editor Horace Greely fretted to his colleague Rufus Griswold. “Has Mrs. Whitman no friend within your knowledge that can faithfully
explain
Poe to her?”

The widow did not have to wait long to find out for herself. Three days before the wedding, Poe’s prospective mother-in-law demanded that Poe cut himself out of the Whitman family finances, and promise to stop drinking. He duly agreed, and steeled himself to the task the next morning with some wine at the hotel bar. Within hours the wedding was off—forever.

Poe instead ushered in 1849 half-relieved to not be married, half-dismayed to be unmarried, and altogether worried about his career. Toiling over
Eureka
and futile love letters had come at the expense of paid work; he’d earned $166 in the previous year, barely enough to cover his rent, let alone anything else. “I am about to bestir myself in the world of Letters rather more busily than I have done for three or four years past,” he promised an editor.

The unlikely vehicle for this comeback was the
Flag of the Union
, an illustrated Boston weekly relaunching as “a paper for the million.” Its wide circulation was not matched by critical regard. “Why do you write for that cheap-literature broad sheet?” one of Poe’s friends asked bluntly—“Does the publisher pay you well?” In fact, they did, and contemporaries like Frances Osgood
and Lydia Sigourney also wrote for the
Flag
. But as Poe admitted, their fine literary sensibilities were lost on the venue: “whatever I send it I feel I am consigning to the tomb of the Capulets.”

Still, the
Flag
’s need to fill columns coaxed Poe into his most productive period since the collapse of the
Broadway Journal;
between February and June of 1849, he published as many new pieces of fiction as in the previous four years combined. “Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man,” he now declared amid reports of the Gold Rush. “Nor would I abandon all the hopes which lead me on for all the gold in California.”

Amid a number of trifles that he sent to the
Flag of the Union
, his revenge tale “Hop-Frog” showed Poe in fine form. Set in the indistinct time and place favored by his gothic fiction, it continues the theme of alcohol-fueled rage and cold-blooded murder from “The Black Cat” and “The Cask of Amontillado,” this time through the horrifying vengeance upon a king and his councilors by a court dwarf. Maddened by forced draughts of wine, he traps his tormentors into donning flammable costumes made of tar and flax, and exults over their “fetid, blackened, hideous, and indistinguishable mass” as he escapes through a skylight: “I am simply Hop-Frog, the jester—and
this is my last jest
.”

It was very nearly Poe’s as well: after the
Flag of the Union
quietly sent letters to contributors announcing that it could no longer pay for articles, the false spring of Poe’s output was over. He turned back to his fondest mirage: his own magazine, so that he might not be tormented by these unreliable editors. His hopes were unexpectedly stoked by a timely letter from a young prospective investor, one Edward Horton Norton Patterson. There was just one catch: Patterson wanted to headquarter this new national literary powerhouse in his unprepossessing hometown of Oquawka, Illinois . . . and instead of
The Stylus
, he wanted the title to be the
Oquawka Spectator
.

“Some serious difficulties present themselves . . .” Poe suggested tactfully. “Your residence at Oquawka is certainly one of the most serious.” But Patterson was the most solid backer he’d seen in years, and Poe set off to tour the East Coast to gather subscriptions, despite his aunt Maria fretting over his health.

“Do not fear for Eddie!” he called to her as he left.

Days later, in the Philadelphia engraving room of magazine editor John Sartain, Poe burst in, looking wild and begging to be hidden. “It would be difficult for you to believe what I have to tell—that such things could be in the nineteenth century,” he babbled. “It is necessary that I remain concealed for a time. Can I stay here with you?” He’d been riding on a train, Poe explained, and heard men several seats back plotting to kill him.

“If this moustache of mine were removed I should not be so readily recognized,” he proposed. “Will you lend me a razor, that I may shave it off?”

Sartain played along, and finally coaxed the shorn author to stroll the streets and sit by the reservoir. Slowly a different story emerged. Poe had been in the local Moyamensing prison, where he’d seen a boiling cauldron and witnessed his aunt Maria having her legs sawn off—first “her feet, then her legs at the knee, her thighs at the hips, and so destroy her piecemeal, all to torture me.” Poe calmly related these hallucinations as facts. He also claimed he’d been jailed for a counterfeit fifty-dollar note. But the prison stay, Sartain suspected, was for drunkenness. It had only been a few hours, for he was recognized in the courtroom—“Why, this is Poe the poet,” they said—and then let go.

The hallucinations may have been delirium tremens—for at forty, Poe’s body was finally beginning to rebel. When he turned up a week later at the door of his fellow gothic novelist George Lippard, he was in even worse shape—wandering penniless through a local cholera epidemic, starving and wearing
only one shoe. Poe collapsed into a corner of Lippard’s office, his head in his hands.

“It is no use to reason with me now; I must die,” he wrote back home in a despairing letter to his aunt Maria. “I have no reason to live since I have done
Eureka
.”

Lippard did his best to console him—feeding and clothing him, getting fellow writers to pitch in train fare to continue his journey. But when he helped Poe board the southbound night train, Lippard sensed something different in his old friend. “He held our hand for a long time, and seemed loth to leave us,” he recalled, “—there was in his voice, look and manner, something of a Presentiment that his strange and stormy life was near its close.”

The trip back to his childhood home of Richmond began wretchedly: he was heading into a Southern summer still dressed in the miserable black clothing that he’d worn in jail. “My clothes are
so horrible
, and I am
so ill
,” he wrote to his aunt Maria as he neared Richmond. Worse still, his poetry lectures, with which he’d hoped to raise money while on the road, had disappeared from his valise in Philadelphia: “All the object of my trip here is over unless I can recover them or rewrite one of them,” he lamented.

But his arrival in Richmond, with just two dollars left in his pocket, was followed by a desperately needed reprieve: a fifty-dollar check from his Oquawkan benefactor. Poe cleaned up, bought himself a jaunty summer hat, and went looking for his college girlfriend. Not only was Elmira Royster still in Richmond, she had been widowed with an estate of some $100,000. She was busying herself for church one Sunday morning when, she recalled, “a servant told me that a gentleman in the parlour wanted to see me.” She went downstairs and recognized him instantly.

“Oh! Elmira, is this you?” he called out.

She would not be kept from going to church, but when he came back again later, his mind was already made up: he thought they should get married. “I laughed at it . . .” she admitted. “Then I found he was serious and I became serious.”

He became serious enough to tell a doctor that he’d stop drinking; serious enough to rewrite his lecture on “The Poetic Principle” and announce it for a local concert venue. Poe lectured a packed house; topped off with a crowd-pleasing recitation of “The Raven,” it was a sort of calling card to Richmond society. Their poet had come back home, and for his encore, he delivered a stunning surprise: on August 27, 1849, he joined the local chapter of the Sons of Temperance. Poe had become a very serious suitor indeed. When he delivered a second lecture to Richmond the next month, Mrs. Royster could be seen sitting together in the front row, watching his performance of “The Raven” and his recitations from memory of Byron, Tennyson, and—yes, even Longfellow.