Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living (Icons) (2 page)

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 father’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.

Strolling through its tearoom and mirrored ballroom, Poe
now had the dazzling prospect of the life of a wealthy scion before him. He would become a Virginia gentleman; for rather than returning to Britain to finish his education, he no longer even needed to leave the state. The year before, Thomas Jefferson had opened one of the great projects of his life, the University of Virginia. In the school’s second year of existence,
Edgar Allan Poe
was inscribed as student number 136 in its enrollment book.

For the first few months, it seemed to be going well.

“I this morning received the clothes you sent me,” Edgar wrote from Charlottesville to his father, “viz an uniform coat, six yards of striped cloth for pantaloons & four pairs of socks—The coat is beautiful and fits me exactly.”

Poe’s concerns were the usual ones of a college student away from home, including a shortage of money so immediate that he asked for another hundred dollars within a week of arriving on campus, and discovering he needed clothes and other items that he’d left at home. (“Send me a copy of the
Historiae
of Tacitus—it is a small volume—also some more soap.”) He’d also left a girlfriend back in Richmond, Elmira Royster, whom he had met over the summer. He dutifully wrote letters to her, and soon joined the long college tradition of wondering why they went unanswered.

Still, his new college digs—the auspiciously chosen Room 13 of his dorm—represented a new freedom for him, and an artistic sanctuary. Amid his spartan wooden furnishings and flickering tallow candles were copies of Voltaire and
Historie Ancienne
that he’d borrowed from the college library, and a prized illustrated copy of Lord Byron. Poe used one of the book’s plates to draw a life-sized portrait on his dorm-room ceiling; it had only been two years since the great Romantic poet died while joining the Greek war for independence, and Poe had a seventeen-year-old’s appreciation for a scandalous artist’s glorious death.

The scandals outside his door were a different matter. On a campus where the rotunda was still half-built, and the library’s books hadn’t even been catalogued, Jefferson had created an extraordinarily forward-thinking experiment in education—a school with an entirely elective curriculum, and self-policed through a student honor code. The result during Poe’s time there was sometimes less like Utopia than a barbaric state of nature. One UVA student horsewhipped a classmate over a card game, while another pair took to libeling each other so furiously, Poe marveled, that “every pillar in the University was white with scratched paper” from their opposing flyers.

Others sank their teeth into each other in a more literal manner.

“I saw the whole affair—it took place before my door . . .” Poe wrote to his father of one savage fight that resulted in bite wounds. “I saw the arm afterwards—It was really a serious matter—It was bitten from the shoulder to the elbow—and it is likely that pieces of flesh as large as my hand will be obliged to be cut out.”

Still, Poe tried to fit in by gulping down the favored campus drink of peach brandy, emptying his glasses at a single toss. But even then, Poe seemed curiously aloof—and, perhaps, just a little too serious about his art. After reading aloud to classmates a short story featuring a character named Gaffy, it instantly stuck to an exasperated Poe as his college nickname.

“My impression was and is that no one could say that he
knew
him,” a classmate mused years later of “Gaffy.” “He wore . . . a sad, melancholy face always, and even a smile, for I don’t remember his ever having laughed heartily, seemed forced.” It was a trait that others noticed in Poe. “He was a beautiful boy—Not very talkative,” his girlfriend Elmira observed. “When he did talk, though, he was pleasant, but his general manner was sad.” Perhaps, as he sometimes hinted, his melancholy disposition came from his birth parents and their tragic end; but if so,
it was deepened by John Allan’s refusal to formally adopt him, which left Edgar’s place in the world always slightly uncertain.

Yet Poe was at ease in the classroom. He’d signed up for two courses—Ancient Languages and Modern Languages, which met at alternating mornings on a 7:30–9:30 schedule. Poe coasted through them, relying on a natural ability so great that he went into class nearly unprepared. His freshman year came to an end in December 1826, with exams administered by no less than Jefferson’s two fellow Republican successors: James Madison and James Monroe. Poe scored top marks in Latin and solid ones in French.

The end of the school year, though, was not a happy one. Poe crossed paths with William Wertenbaker, a fellow student who also served as the campus librarian—a sympathetic ear on a campus where the young poet had never entirely fit in. He found “Gaffy” so ready to abandon campus that he’d smashed up his dorm-room furniture to save on buying firewood for his final nights there.

“It was a cold night in December,” Wertenbaker said, “and his fire having gone pretty nearly out by the aid of some tallow candles, and the fragments of a small table which he broke up for the purpose, he soon rekindled it, and by its comfortable blaze I spent a very pleasant hour with him.”

Poe still hadn’t turned eighteen, and was younger than most of his classmates, but Wertenbaker knew him as a fine scholar—he’d seen Poe take on an extra-credit assignment at translating Italian poetry, one that none of his classmates had bothered with. What the librarian hadn’t known was that their young genius was in deep trouble. As Poe sat by the embers of his table, he revealed his secret: that after being sent to college without enough money, he’d resorted to the quickest and most disastrous solution. Poe was up to his eyes in gambling debt.

“He spoke with regret of the large amount of money he had
wasted and of the debts he had contracted,” Wertenbaker wrote. “He estimated his indebtedness at $2,000, and though they were gaming debts, he was earnest and emphatic in the declaration, that he was bound by honor to pay at the earliest opportunity.”