Poe Page 3

  Poe visited her grave in Shockoe Hill Cemetery, and he told a female admirer that he shed tears by the freshly dug earth. All his life he liked to wander through cemeteries. Death and beauty were, in his imagination, inextricably and perpetually associated. “No more” was his favourite phrase. The secret chambers and the mouldering mansions, in which his fictions loved to dwell, are to be construed as those of the mind or of the grave.

  He had a more immediate concern for the dead; however. He told a friend, John Hamilton Mackenzie, that “the most horrible thing he could imagine as a boy was to feel an ice-cold hand laid upon his face in a pitch dark room when alone at night.” That was not his only fantasy. He feared that he might awake in semi-darkness, only to find an evil face staring closely at him. He became so afraid of his own imagined horrors that he would keep his head beneath the sheets until he practically suffocated himself. He seems to have taken a perverse delight in frightening himself, as well as others. Even in later life he admitted to a dislike of the dark. Here can be found the origins of his obsession with death, or deathlike states. Before his twentieth year he wrote a significant couplet:

  I could not love except where Death

  Was mingling his with Beauty's breath.

  Yet soon enough he found another thwarted and difficult love. He always said that he was “devoted” to Fanny Allan, although that attachment had not precluded his attraction to Jane Stanard. The love and comfort of one woman were not enough for him. In the year of Mrs. Stanard's death he met, and became attached to, a fifteen-year-old girl. Elmira Royster lived in a house opposite Poe's school, and so the possibilities of chance encounter were immense. Under the supervision of the girl's parents, they met in the parlour of Royster House; she played the piano, and he sang and played the flute. He made a sketch of her that survives only in a copy.

  She recalled the young Poe remonstrating with her for her friendship with one young woman whom he considered to be “unladylike.” “He had strong prejudices,” she said after his death. “Hated anything coarse and unrefined.” She described his grand manner, and his slight shyness in company. He was already growing into the model of a Southern gentleman, but he was not in the conventional mould. Elmira, or “Myra” as he used to call her, recorded that he was “very enthusiastic and impulsive” but that “his general manner was sad.”

  That sadness had to do with domestic unhappiness. All was not well in the Allan household. Frances Allan may have been exhibiting some of the symptoms of consumption that carried her to the grave five years later. But there were more immediate discontents. Poe and John Allan had begun to quarrel. It is possible that Allan reminded his young charge that he was in effect an object of charity. In November 1824, Allan wrote to Poe's older brother, Henry, that Edgar “does nothing & seems quite miserable, sulky and ill-tempered to all the Family. How we have acted to produce this is beyond my conception …” He added that Edgar “possesses not a Spark of affection for us, not a particle of gratitude for all my care and kindness towards him.” This would be a complaint about Poe in later years. He could not bring himself to appear humble to anyone or thankful for anything.

  In the same letter to Henry Poe, Allan refers to “your poor Sister, Rosalie,” who was living with the Mackenzies in Richmond, and writes that “at least She is half your sister & God forbid dear Henry that We should visit upon the living the Errors & frailties of the dead.” The meaning of “half your sister” is clear enough. Allan supposed that Rosalie had a different father and that she was, as a consequence, illegitimate. If Allan mentioned this to Henry Poe, he would no doubt have suggested it to Edgar. For a boy who seems to have held his mother in particular reverence, this would have been unpardonable. Poe's hatred of anything “unrefined” has been noticed. What could be more coarse than to accuse his mother of bearing the child of a man who was not her husband?

  How did the argument develop? Poe knew of Allan's illegitimate children, living in Richmond, and may have ascribed Frances Allan's weakened health to that cause. If then he upbraided Allan for siring illegitimate offspring, what more natural rejoinder from Allan than that Poe's own mother was guilty of a similar sin? This is the most likely to have been the primary cause of an increasingly bitter conflict. Poe was heard on several occasions wishing that he could escape from the Allan household and thus make his own way in the world. He expressed the desire to the Mackenzies, Rosalie's guardians, that he might run away to sea.

  • • •

  He did not go to sea. He attended university instead.

  In February 1826, at the age of sixteen, he was enrolled at the new University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The cornerstone had been laid nine years previously, but the establishment had been in operation for only a year. Its founder and guiding spirit, Thomas Jefferson, had wished “to develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals,” in which ambitions he was not wholly successful. Poe was lodged at number thirteen in the West Range of the new buildings, on the west side of a central lawn, where he roomed alone. Roused by a servant at 5:30 each morning, he began his first classes at 7:00 a.m. in the Schools of Ancient Languages and of Modern Languages. He proved to be a model pupil, adept at translation from Latin as well as Italian. At the end of the year he was recorded as “excelling” in the senior Latin class and the senior French class. He said in a letter to John Allan that he expected to perform well in end of term examinations “if I don't get frightened,” an indication of the nervous anxiety that seems to have been his constant companion. He became secretary of the debating club, and was preeminent in the gymnastic exercises of running and jumping.

  One fellow student remembered “a sad, melancholy face always, and even a smile, for I don't remember his ever having laughed heartily, seemed to be forced.” No one ever really knew him well. He was too defensive, or too proud, to encourage intimacy. He would also “put himself under the influence” of drink in order to “quiet the excessive nervous excitability under which he laboured.” The drink in question is likely to have been the ubiquitous “peach [brandy] and honey,” a sweet if lethal concoction. This is the first reference to his partiality for alcohol. It is significant that it should have manifested itself at such a relatively early age. He was born, not made, a drinker.

  Another fellow student recalls that “Poe's passion for strong drink was as marked and as peculiar as that for cards.” Poe loved gambling. When he and a local clerk vied over the purchase of an edition of William Hogarth's prints, Poe proposed that they gamble for the book with dice. Poe lost. He played cards endlessly, often losing large sums of money. In such matters, according to a contemporary, he “plunged with a recklessness of nature which acknowledged no restraint.” This “recklessness” was apparent in later life, too, with his increasingly heavy drinking and his sometimes extreme behaviour. Yet it was accompanied, at university, by a steady attention to his studies.

  His life at university should in any case be seen in context. The young gentlemen of Virginia did not necessarily obey Thomas Jefferson's injunctions, at least in terms of moral cultivation. There were frequent fist fights, and most students owned a pistol that was readily drawn and fired. The culture of the South still harboured the traditions of the duelling code. Some students came from rich plantation families, and were accompanied by slaves. Some arrived with horses or with hunting dogs. There were drunken forays into the local towns, and inveterate gambling. Poe was not unique in his weaknesses. But he was unusual in not being able to pay for them. He appealed to Allan for money, who sent too little of that commodity too late.

  Allan was generally parsimonious in his provisions for the young Poe. In one letter Poe calculated the expenses of life at the university, including board and tuition, at $350 per annum. Allan had dispatched him to Charlottesville with $110 in his pocket. As a result Poe had enrolled in only two of the three schools open to him, thus saving $15. Allan sent him further sums, but they were never enough to allow him to pay h
is bills. They were certainly insufficient to cover his gambling debts, and according to Poe's complaint he “was immediately regarded in the light of a beggar.” There was no apparent reason for Allan's lack of generosity. Only the year before, Allan had inherited a large estate from the will of a wealthy Scottish relative who had also emigrated to America.

  It is not surprising that Allan harboured contradictory feelings towards his surrogate son. At a later date Poe himself characterised his foster father to a friend “as a man of gross & brutal temperament though indulgent to him at times & at times profusely lavish in the matter of money—at others, penurious and parsimonious.” It seems likely that Allan came increasingly to resent his young charge. Poe had already appeared to him, as he had to others, arrogant and unthankful. Poe may even have assumed that Allan's wealth would one day be bequeathed to him. This would have been the most hazardous assumption of all.

  • • •

  When Poe returned to Richmond at the end of 1826, Allan refused to finance any further period of study. Despite dunning letters from the young Poe's creditors, he also refused to pay any more of the debts, which amounted to some $2,000. Poe had expected to spend two years at the university; he would not have acquired a degree in the modern sense, but it would have been formally recorded that he had completed certain courses. He had an immoderate thirst for reading, but any future world of learning was now foreclosed. He told Allan in a subsequent letter that “in a moment of caprice you have blasted my hope.” It was a bitter homecoming in another sense: he learned that his letters to Elmira Royster had been kept from her by her father, and that she was about to be married to another man. There were frequent and sharp arguments between Allan and Poe. Any residual love between foster father and foster son had disappeared.

  In the middle of March 1827, Poe left the Allan household forever. He went to the Courthouse Tavern, from where he wrote to his surrogate father that “I have heard you say (when you little thought I was listening, and therefore must have said it in earnest) that you had no affection for me.” He added that his guardian “was continually upbraiding me with eating the bread of Idleness.” He also objected to being under “the complete authority of the blacks,” by which he meant that the slaves had adopted their master's manner and attitude towards him. He asked for his trunk, containing his clothes; he was determined to travel north, where in one of the great cities he might earn enough money to complete his studies at university.

  But then, in a letter written on the following day, he declared that “I am in the greatest necessity, not having tasted food since Yesterday morning. I have no where to sleep at night, but roam about the Streets—I am nearly exhausted …” This is the piteous tone that he would adopt in much of his later correspondence. Allan wrote on the back, “Pretty letter.”

  • • •

  Four days later Edgar Allan Poe was on a coal vessel to Boston. He was on his way back to the place of his birth. It must have been a surprise, after the casual languor of Richmond, to find himself in a city that prided itself on plain living and high thinking. Boston was a city of red brick and white wood. The principal sources of delight were the church and the lecture hall. There were no slaves. The citizens of Boston got up earlier and worked harder than the people of Richmond.

  It was not easy, however, for a penniless and failed student to obtain employment in Boston. There are reports of Poe working in a wholesale merchandise house on the waterfront, and even of trying his hand at casual journalism. His first attempt to make his way in the world had foundered. He had no money, and in his desperation he decided to enlist.

  Allan wrote to Poe's sister, Rosalie, that “Edgar has gone to Sea to seek his own fortunes,” but in fact he was to be found much closer to home. On 26 May he visited Castle Island in Boston Harbor and, under the assumed name of Edgar A. Perry (Perry had been the name before his own in the entrance records of the university), he enlisted in the United States Army for the next five years. He gave his age as twenty-two, rather than the actual eighteen. Minors were accepted into the Army, so there was no practical reason for him to lie: he just wanted to disappear, and to lose the burden of his identity. In any case, lying came naturally to him.

  The Soldier

  It was not altogether a surprising or even unexpected decision. As a boy he had been appointed lieutenant in the Richmond Junior Volunteers, and at university, too, he had chosen to take part in a course of training in military drill. He needed the constraints of a formal order, no doubt as a counterweight to his pronounced “recklessness.” He deliberately sought restraint. He required external discipline in order to balance the miseries and longings of his private nature.

  That nature, however, was expressed in an enduring form. During his months in Boston he had become acquainted with an eighteen-year-old printer, Calvin Thomas, who had agreed to publish a selection of Poe's poems. So in the early summer of 1827 fifty copies of Tamerlane and Other Poems, written by “a Bostonian,” came off Thomas's press. It included poems that Poe had been writing for the last four or five years, comprising the title poem and a number of shorter poems. They evince a strong sense of form, cadence, and metre, equally balanced with a powerful inner mood of mournfulness and introspection. “Tamerlane” itself is a monody on the delights and dangers of ambition, couched in seventeen melancholy stanzas filled with pride and resentment, self-disgust and disillusion. In a preface to the volume Poe claimed that “failure will not at all influence him [Poe] in a resolution already adopted;” that resolution was none other than his aspiration to poetic greatness. His attempt to disarm criticism succeeded admirably. There were no reviews, and only two pre-publication notices, of Tamerlane.

  When the volume appeared, the young poet was busily engaged in artillery practice. As soon as he had enlisted he had been assigned to duty in an artillery battery off Boston Harbor. Six months later he was moved to Fort Moultrie on Sullivan's Island off the coast of South Carolina; from there, after a further year, he was moved to Fortress Monroe on the tip of the Virginia peninsula. His regimen in these establishments was unchanging, with a wake-up call at 5:30 introducing a day that included infantry drill and exercises at the guns. His own conduct was a model of military discipline. He worked as an assistant and company clerk in the quartermaster's department before being promoted through the various noncommissioned grades. His superiors considered him to be “exemplary in his deportment” and “highly worthy of confidence.” Then at the beginning of 1829 he was appointed regimental sergeant major at Fortress Monroe, the highest rank to which he could aspire. It is perhaps difficult to imagine the author of “The Raven” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” in uniform. Yet it is an aspect of Poe's life, and character, that cannot be overlooked. Just as he could express his passionate and morbid nature in verses that are strictly controlled, so he could define himself in terms of rigid military identity.

  By the time of his promotion to sergeant major, however, he had already had enough of army life. He did not wish to serve the remaining three and a half years of his enlistment, and petitioned his commanding officer, Lieutenant Howard, for release from uniform. He must also have revealed his true identity, because Howard acquiesced on condition that Poe—no longer “Perry”—was reconciled with John Allan. Howard then wrote to Allan, only to be sent the reply that Poe “had better remain as he is until the termination of his enlistment.” The fact that Poe was in the army at all must have come as an unwelcome surprise to Allan. But he showed no remorse at effectively driving him away from home. So on 1 December 1828, Poe wrote him a letter stating that “I could not help thinking that you believed me degraded & disgraced” by service in the army; he assured him that “at no period of my life, have I regarded myself with deeper satisfaction— or did my heart swell with more honourable pride.” He took pride, among other things, in his capacity for self-discipline. But he did not wish to waste “the prime of my life” in further service. That life had only just begun. “I feel that within
me which will make me fulfil your highest wishes,” he added. “… I must either conquer or die—succeed or be disgraced.” In a final paragraph he sent his love to “Ma,” and expressed the hope that his “wayward disposition” would not disappoint her.

  He received no reply from Allan, and wrote to him again three weeks later in a more clamant manner imploring, “My father do not throw me aside as degraded… If you determine to abandon me—here take farewell—Neglected, I will be doubly ambitious.” The slightly histrionic tone is in accord with much of his later correspondence. Allan still remained silent. A month passed. Then, at the beginning of February, Poe tried another approach. He asked Allan to assist him in obtaining a cadet's appointment at West Point, the academy for the training of officers in the American army, which would then expedite “an honourable and highly successful course in my own country.” There is no doubt that he was serious about his application. Completion of the course at West Point would allow him to become an officer in the army; it would grant him a measure of financial independence as well as much needed social status. His enlistment as a common soldier might otherwise have left him, as he put it, “degraded & disgraced.”

  His letter arrived at Richmond in a most unhappy time. Frances Allan was dying and, in the final stages of what a local newspaper described as a “lingering and painful” illness, she asked to see the young Poe to hold and kiss him for the last time, but, if she died before he could reach her, she requested that her foster son have the opportunity of seeing her body before she was buried.

  On the day of Frances Allan's death at the end of February, Poe was still on the muster roll of his regiment. John Allan had left it to the last minute.

  Poe heard of the death on 1 March and left on the afternoon stage from Norfolk to Richmond. When he arrived, on the following day, Fanny had already been buried. His surrogate father had purchased for Poe a suit of mourning clothes. In that dress he visited the new grave in Shockoe cemetery. He collapsed upon the spot, and was helped back into the carriage by the family's slaves. “Your love I never valued,” he wrote to John Allan at a later date, when all seemed hopeless, “but she I believed loved me as her own child.” Another mother had been taken away from him, a double orphanhood that increased the burden of his woe. It is worth noting that the Shockoe cemetery was the resting place of Jane Stanard, his schoolfriend's young mother to whom Poe had been devoted.