Once upon a gray day dreary, the writer staggered, weak and weary.
He collapsed on a Baltimore sidewalk, never to fully regain consciousness. Four days later, on Oct. 7, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe died in the hospital.
He was 40, and the circumstances of his death remain as bizarre as one of his tales. Was he on drugs? Had he been poisoned? And why was he wearing another man’s ragged clothes?
In “A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe,” Mark Dawidziak re-examines the poet’s puzzling demise.
“Like so many aspects of his life, his death has been the topic of endless debate, constant conjecture, speculation, guessing, and second-guessing,” Dawidziak writes. “Nobody can tell you with anything resembling certainty why, while traveling from Richmond to New York, he ended up in Baltimore. Nobody can tell you what happened to him during the missing days between his last sighting in Richmond on the evening of September 24 and his reappearance outside an Election Day polling place on the damp, chilly afternoon of October 3.”
But while Dawidziak admits he can’t fill in all those gaps, he can flesh out the man’s life.
It takes some work; Poe’s favorite fictional hero may have been himself. To appear more precocious, he shaved two years off his age. To sound more dashing, he claimed, like Lord Byron, to have fought in the Greek war of independence.
The facts of his early life were far less romantic.
Poe was born in a Boston boardinghouse on Jan. 19, 1809, to two actors who had just finished a production of “King Lear.” Poe’s mother, Eliza, had already built a reputation as a gifted thespian. His father, David, was more famous for drinking and quarreling with critics.
Later, Poe would take after him.
David Poe deserted the family — Poe was the middle child of three ? sometime around 1810. He died the next year – as did his 24-year-old wife, of tuberculosis. The children were split up, with John Allan, a wealthy Virginia merchant, volunteering to take in two-year-old Edgar.
But while Allan gave Poe a middle name, he never adopted him and tended to treat him as a charity case. Even when he sent Poe off to the University of Virginia, he refused to pay all his school fees or expenses. Desperate, Poe tried to raise the rest by gambling. It only sank him deeper into debt, and even lower in his guardian’s opinion.
Poe had to leave college. After an unexceptional hitch in the U.S. Army and a failed stint at West Point, he found himself disinherited. He was 22.
“While John Allan didn’t do Poe any favors by cutting him off so coldly from any chance at wealth and station, he did horror literature, mystery fans and generations of readers an enormous favor,” Dawidziak writes. “Allan consigned Poe to a life of struggle but, inadvertently, also to one of brilliance.”
Poe had already published three books of poetry, without any financial success. Now, desperate, he turned to anything that might sell – a play, essays, brutally honest book reviews. His first short stories, including “MS Found in a Bottle,” won him the top prize in a newspaper contest in 1833. That eventually landed him a magazine job as an assistant editor on the Southern Literary Messenger.
Accused of drinking at work, he didn’t last a month.
It was not an income that he could do without. Poe had grown close to his cousin, Virginia Clemm, and proposed. That she was 13 didn’t seem to matter. When she accepted, Poe begged his old boss to give him his job back. The man agreed – provided Poe go on the wagon.
“Learn to respect yourself, and you will very soon find that you are respected,” lectured publisher Thomas Willis White. “Separate from the bottle, and bottle-companions, forever!”
Yet by 1836, Poe was unemployed again — whether by choice or drunkenness is impossible to say. Poe eventually relocated his bride and mother-in-law to Philadelphia, then the center of the magazine industry. He dreamed of starting his own periodical.
That didn’t happen, but for a while, the family was happy, and Poe wrote some of his greatest stories – “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” In 1839, some of his best prose was published in two volumes, “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.”
But his attempts to secure a regular income failed, as alcohol continued to cost him work. Friends said a single drink could get him roaring drunk. The Poes moved again, this time to New York. He briefly took another assistant editor’s job, this one at the New York Evening Mirror. He continued to write – “The Premature Burial” and “The Oblong Box.”
Then, in 1845, he finished a piece. “I have just written the greatest poem that ever was written,” he told a friend.
Whether it was or not, “The Raven” was an immediate success. First published in The American Review, it was quickly reprinted in newspapers and magazines across the country. Poe was famous overnight. He was also still poor. The Review had only paid $9 for the poem, and the papers that reprinted it didn’t pay at all.
“I have made no money,” Poe complained later. “I am as poor now as ever I was in my life — except in hope, which is by no means bankable.”
There was worse to come. Virginia, always in delicate health, was quickly growing sicker. Poe grew frantic. “I became insane,” he wrote a friend, “with long intervals of horrible sanity.” On Jan. 30, 1847, Virginia died of tuberculosis at the age of 24 – just like Poe’s mother.
Somehow, Poe mustered the will to continue. On June 29, 1849, he set out on a circuitous journey – New York to New Jersey to Philadelphia to Richmond. His hope was to find investors for his own magazine. He failed.
What happened next is, as Dawidziak writes, hard to pin down. How did Poe end up delirious in Baltimore? Why was he wearing someone else’s ratty clothes? Poe died in the hospital without ever being able to explain. He was buried quickly, without an autopsy.
But then, his enemies already had their knives out.
“Editor and poet Rufus Griswold’s notorious obituary appeared in the evening edition of the New York Tribune,” Dawidziak recounts. It began: “‘Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many but few will be grieved by it.'”
“It went downhill from there,” Dawidziak notes.
Many of Poe’s contemporaries, once wounded by his brutally honest reviews, now used the occasion to “shovel all manner of dirt and mud on his memory,” Dawidziak writes.
Today, even the truth of his death is difficult to ascertain. Still, Dawidziak finds no evidence of murder or drugs. Most likely, Poe died of natural causes. Some modern doctors have suggested TB meningitis as the culprit – a disease that can take months to manifest, be aggravated by alcohol, and result in erratic behavior.
So, the mystery of Poe’s death persists, as does the tragic story of his life.
And so does his work — evermore.
