Poe (12 page)

There was one curious incident, however, in the early summer of 1842 that throws a different light upon his high expectations. Poe had decided to travel to New York in order to find journalistic work, and to contact publishers likely to look favourably upon a new collection of his stories. But he drank himself into a state of inanition. He decided, in that condition, to call upon the old friend or “sweetheart” he had known in Baltimore eleven years before; Mary Devereaux, or “Baltimore Mary” as he called her in memory of happier times, had now become Mrs. Jennings. He had forgotten where she lived in Jersey City, and spent many hours crossing and recrossing the Hudson River on the ferry, accosting strangers and asking for her address. Eventually, by some miracle, he obtained it. He was fleeing from a sick wife to a young woman, one to whom he may once have been unofficially engaged. He was seeking some comfort, some recompense, in the memory of an earlier affection.

His unexpected arrival caused something of a commotion, and Mary recalled that “we saw he was on one of his sprees, and he had been away from home for several days.” He was, in other words, disoriented and dirty and dishevelled. He reproached his hostess for her marriage, saying that in truth she loved him only. This is an odd remark, from a man whose own wife was fatally ill. He asked Mary to sing and play the piano, meanwhile becoming “excited in conversation.” Poe then minced up some radishes with such fury that pieces of them flew about the room. He drank a cup of tea, and departed.

Several days later Maria Clemm arrived at the same house, desperately looking for “Eddie dear.” According to Mary, “a search was made, and he was finally found in the woods on the outskirts of Jersey City, wandering about like a crazy man.” The story may have been elaborated, but the gist seems authentic enough. No one could have made up the detail about the radishes.

• • •

He visited New York on another occasion, when again he became incapacitated by drink. He wrote an apologetic letter to a friend there, asking him to be “kind enough to put the best possible interpretation upon my behaviour while in N-York? You must have conceived a
queer
idea of me—but the simple truth is that Wallace [a poet] would insist upon
the juleps,
and I knew not what I was either doing or saying.” It was his habit to blame others for the extent of his drinking. It was, perhaps, the only way he could make sense of it.

By the following year the news of his drinking had become part of the gossip of Philadelphia. An acquaintance of his from Baltimore days, Lambert Wilmer, told a mutual friend that “he is going headlong to destruction, moral, physical and intellectual.” Poe was in such straitened circumstances that he was offering his latest tale, “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” at a low price to both the Boston
Notion
and the
Baltimore Saturday Visiter.
The loss of any regular income had consigned the Poe household to a state of real distress. They moved to a smaller house on
the outskirts of Philadelphia, where Frederick Thomas visited them in the autumn of 1842. He noticed that “everything about the place wore an air of pecuniary want” and that “there was delay and evident difficulty in procuring the meal.” Maria Clemm and Virginia expressed the wish to Thomas that “Eddie” might obtain some kind of steady work, but “I was not long in observing with deep regret that he had fallen again into habits of intemperance.” They made an arrangement to meet the following day, but Poe did not keep the appointment; he wrote later to say that he had fallen ill. It was his usual excuse.

He was still actively pursuing the position of clerk in the Customs House at Philadelphia. He believed the post to be assured but, as so often in his life, his hopes were raised “only to be dashed to the ground.” That was the phrase he used in a letter to Thomas, in which he detailed the insolence and hauteur of the petty official in whom he had placed his trust. It was always his fate to be thwarted. It cannot be said, however, that he had any interest in any form of government administration. He was wholly out of sympathy with American politics and questioned once “Is it or is it not a fact that the air of a Democracy agrees better with mere Talent than with Genius?” He was a proponent of slavery, and a believer in what he called “caste.” He had no faith in progress, or in democracy, and so was in a real sense divorced from the life of America—or at least of that spirit embodied by the Northern states.

Yet he had been hoping for the appointment, too, as a means of continuing his scheme for a literary journal
under his direction. He had been confidently planning for the publication of the first number at the beginning of 1843; but in this, as in so many of the affairs of his life, he was disappointed. Even as he was dogged with ill luck, however, someone else turned up to rescue him. He became acquainted with the editor of the Philadelphia
Saturday Museum,
Thomas C. Clarke, who was the perfect partner in the enterprise. Poe had decided to rename the prospective journal, changing it from the
Penn
to the
Stylus.
Clarke had agreed to finance the venture, while allowing Poe a half-interest in it. At last Poe had achieved “the great object—a partner possessing ample capital, and, at the same time, so little self-esteem, as to allow me entire control of the editorial conduct.” Was it too good to be true? Armed with a signed agreement, Poe distributed a new prospectus on the merits of a magazine that would be established upon “the purest rules of Art” and would “far surpass all American journals of its kind.” He wished it to be “the great literary journal of the future,” as he told one acquaintance. He also embarked upon a course of self-advertisement by arranging for a sketch of his life to be printed in the
Saturday Museum
itself. It was little more than a “puff,” but he believed that it would materially assist the fortunes of the
Stylus.
He provided the material himself, of course, but it did not err on the side of veracity. It was revealed that Poe had travelled to Greece and to Russia, and that he had somehow returned from Europe on the night of Frances Allan's funeral. He was described as “somewhat slender, about five feet, eight inches in height, and
well proportioned; his complexion is rather fair, his eyes are grey and restless, exhibiting a marked nervousness; while the mouth indicates great decision of character …”

The
Spirit of the Times,
another Philadelphian journal, noticed the biographical sketch and applauded Poe as one “of the most powerful, chaste and erudite writers of the day.” The
Museum
in turn announced that Poe was to become its associate editor and that his fame “shall be placed beyond the reach of conjecture.” It was a joint enterprise in log-rolling that no doubt appealed to Poe's vanity. In fact he never did join the staff of the
Museum.
It was another of the convenient fictions by which he chose to live.

His hopes for the
Stylus,
however, sent him to Washington in search of subscribers. He was also planning to renew his endless quest for a clerkship, and even entertained a fantasy of meeting President Tyler himself in order to plead for his cause. It was not, however, an auspicious journey. Almost as soon as he had taken a room at Fuller's City Hotel, he began to drink. On the first evening, according to an acquaintance, he was “over-persuaded to take some Port wine” and became “somewhat excited.” Two days later he met a fellow journalist on the street who reported him to be “seedy in appearance and woebegone.” He begged fifty cents, complaining that “he had not had a mouthful of food since the day previous.” On the following day Poe himself wrote to his new partner, Thomas Clarke, with the news that “I believe that I am making a
sensation
which will tend to the benefit of the Magazine.”

This was sheer self-delusion on his part, although he was perhaps creating a “sensation” in quite a different sense. He was once more drinking to excess. The editor of the Washington
Index,
Jesse Dow, had known Poe four years before. They had worked together on
Burton's
magazine in Philadelphia. Now he had the unenviable job of escorting Poe through the city. Dow tried to escape the responsibility by writing a solemn letter to Clarke, telling him that “I think it advisable for you to come on and see him safely back to his home.” Dow added that “Mrs. Poe is in a bad state of health, and I charge you, as you have a soul to be saved, to say not one word to her about him until he arrives with you.” Three days later Poe boarded the train from Washington to Philadelphia, where he found Maria Clemm anxiously waiting for him at the station. That evening he visited Clarke, no doubt in order to dispel any unfortunate impressions Clarke might have derived from Dow's letter. “He received me, therefore, very cordially & made light of the matter,” he wrote to Thomas and Dow jointly. “I told him what had been agreed upon—that I was a little sick & that Dow, knowing I had been, in times past, given to spreeing upon an extensive scale, had become unduly alarmed etcetera …” So he had agreed upon a story with his intimates to cover his excesses.

But there is no doubt that he was once again mortified by his behaviour under the influence of drink. To Dow he wrote “thank you a thousand times for your kindness & great forbearance, & don't say a word about the cloak
turned inside out, or other peccadilloes of that nature. Also, express to your wife my deep regret for the vexation I must have occasioned her.” Then he asked Thomas to send his compliments “to the Don, whose mustachios I do admire after all… express my regret to Mr. Fuller for making such a fool of myself in his house …” So he had paraded through the streets wearing his cloak inside out, and had made fun of a Spaniard's moustache. He had also behaved badly in someone's house. These are not hanging offences, and may have been a source of amusement to those around him. But he had a deep sense of pride, as well as an instinctive sense of formality and control. When these were abrogated and injured, he fell into sickness and grief. His illnesses were caused not by physical overindulgence but by guilty self-laceration.

The result of the Washington debacle was, of course, that he did not gain an interview with President Tyler or retain any hope of obtaining the clerkship. It is also doubtful whether he enlisted many subscribers for the new periodical. Or, if he had, that he would be able to remember them. “Did you say Dow,” he wrote to his friend in a postscript, “that Commodore Elliot had desired me to put down his name? Is it so or did I dream it?” Poe was completely unsuited to arranging the economic management, or financial future, of any enterprise.

• • •

Soon after his return from Washington, the Poe household decamped once again. The pressure of debt
kept them moving on. They had now arrived in a suburb of Philadelphia, in the district known as Spring Garden, and were lodged in a wooden plank-built “lean-to” of three rooms. This was the account of their dwelling given by a neighbour, Captain Wayne Reid, who became acquainted with them. Reid characterised Maria Clemm as “a woman of middle age, and almost masculine aspect.” It seemed astonishing to him that she should be the mother of “a lady angelically beautiful in person and not less beautiful in spirit.”

Reid also left a description of Maria Clemm's familial role. “She was the ever vigilant guardian of the home,” he wrote, “watching it against the silent but continuous sap of necessity … She was the sole servant, keeping everything clean; the sole messenger, doing the errands, making the pilgrimages between the poet and his publishers … And she was also the messenger to the market; from it bringing back not ‘the delicacies of the season,’ but only such commodities as were called for by the dire exigencies of hunger.”

Yet despite its privations, and Virginia's illness, the family appeared to others to be relatively contented. Another neighbour recalled that in the mornings “Mrs. Clemm and her daughter would be generally watering the flowers …They seemed always cheerful and happy, and I could hear Mrs. Poe's laugh before I turned the corner. Mrs. Clemm was always busy. I have seen her of mornings clearing the front yard, washing the windows and the stoop, and even white-washing the palings.” Everyone remarked
upon the neatness, and cleanliness, of the various Poe abodes. Maria Clemm also rented out the front room of the Spring Garden house to lodgers. This was one way of alleviating their endless poverty.

And what of Poe himself? Another neighbour, Lydia Hart Garrigues, a young girl who lived on the same street, recalled that he “wore a Spanish cloak.” She noted that “I was always impressed with the grave and thoughtful aspect of his face … He, his wife and Mrs. Clemm kept to themselves. They had the reputation of being very reserved— we thought because of their poverty and his great want of success.” Miss Garrigues added that “it was not until after ‘The Raven’ was published … that we knew him as a literary figure.” It might have interested her to know that, in fact, Poe had already begun the writing of that famous poem while residing in Spring Garden. It had a long gestation, and by Poe's account it was accompanied by an amount of calculation and technical experiment that would have wearied Milton and Sophocles combined. He wanted the bird to be an owl, but then changed his mind. So here, in Philadelphia, was hatched the raven.

There also emerged a prize-winning short story. Poe's tale of adventure and detection, “The Gold Bug,” won a hundred dollar prize from the
Dollar Newspaper.
It is a story concerning the discovery of hidden treasure, set in the neighbourhood of Sullivan's Island, where Poe had been stationed as a private soldier fifteen years before. The subtropical beaches, with their “dense undergrowth of the sweet myrtle … burthening the air with its fragrance,”
provide the atmosphere for a tale of invisible ink and cryptography, enigmatic codes and secret instructions. “The Gold Bug” may not hold sufficient interest for a contemporary audience, but Poe's first readers deemed it “a production of superior merit” in which all the pleasures of verisimilitude were maintained within the context of a quest for fabled gold. Poe could quite rightly be construed as a second Defoe, whose
Robinson Crusoe
he had praised very highly for its constant pursuit of veracity and probability. The
Saturday Museum,
Poe's usual champion, described the story as “the most remarkable piece of American fiction that has been published within the last fifteen years.” The edition of the
Dollar Newspaper
containing the first part was sold out.