The Beautiful Cigar Girl

by Daniel Stashower

  Amid these struggles, Poe received an invitation to travel to Boston to read an original poem at the celebrated Lyceum. It was understood that a great honor had been bestowed on him, signaling Poe’s acceptance among the Boston literary elite. Once again, however, Poe’s contrary nature got the better of his self-interest. Instead of reading a new poem, Poe dusted off a copy of “Al Aaraaf,” a lengthy and singularly off-putting early effort, in what seems to have been a deliberate attempt to provoke his audience and alienate his hosts. Poe had barely hit his stride when the bulk of the audience, already wearied by a local politician’s two-hour speech, rose and began filing out of the hall. When the ordeal finally ended, Poe compounded the insult by taunting his hosts over dinner, claiming to have deliberately fobbed off on them a poem written when he was ten years old. “There lives no man who at some period has not been tormented, for example, by an earnest desire to tantalize a listener by circumlocution,” he wrote in “The Imp of the Perverse,” published three months earlier. “The speaker is aware that he displeases; he has every intention to please, he is usually curt, precise, and clear, the most laconic and luminous language is struggling for utterance upon his tongue, it is only with difficulty that he restrains himself from giving it flow; he dreads and deprecates the anger of him whom he addresses; yet, the thought strikes him, that by certain involutions and parentheses this anger may be engendered. That single thought is enough.”

  Back in New York, Poe promptly ran the Broadway Journal into the ground, writing increasingly desperate letters to friends for the money needed to keep it afloat. The strain began to tell, inspiring further drinking binges that left him unable to perform his editorial duties. When the money he needed could not be found, Poe detected the hands of his enemies trying to thwart him. “On the part of one or two persons who are much imbittered against me,” he told the poet Fitz-Greene Halleck, “there is a deliberate attempt now being made to involve me in ruin, by destroying The Broadway Journal.”

  “I really believe that I have been mad,” Poe told Duyckinck in yet another plea for a loan, “but indeed I have had abundant reason to be so.” At least one of these abundant reasons had to do with the strain of his concern over Virginia’s health. In December of 1845 he published a story called “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” in which his fears for his wife, now four years into her illness, can be plainly read. The story concerns a man dying of “confirmed phthisis,” a term used to describe the wasting effects associated with tuberculosis and other diseases. Poe is unsparing in his details of the manner in which the unfortunate patient literally putrefies before his eyes, employing language that suggests a morbid study of medical texts: “The left lung had been for eighteen months in a semi-osseous or cartilaginous state, and was, of course, entirely useless for all purposes of vitality. The right, in its upper portion, was also partially, if not thoroughly, ossified, while the lower region was merely a mass of purulent tubercles, running one into another. Several extensive perforations existed; and, at one point, permanent adhesion to the ribs had taken place.” Where he departs from the clinical texts, Poe’s imaginative powers produce an even more chilling effect. He describes the patient’s voice as striking the ear much as “gelatinous or glutinous matters impress the sense of touch,” and captures the final agonies in horrifying detail: “[H]is whole frame at once—within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk—crumbled—absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putridity.”

  By the end of December of 1845, the Broadway Journal had lost both its readership and its financial backing. The magazine had been all but bankrupt when he took the helm, and no amount of borrowing from friends could save it. At length, Poe resigned himself to the fact that nothing more could be done. In a note published in the final issue, he tried to strike a conciliatory tone: “Unexpected engagements demanding my whole attention, and the objects being fulfilled, so far as regards myself personally, for which the Broadway Journal was established, I now, as its Editor, bid farewell—as cordially to foes as to friends.”

  It was the last editorial position he would ever hold. Cut loose from the moorings of steady employment, Poe sank deeper into his destructive habits. His drinking bouts became more pronounced, and his quarrels with former friends began to have more serious consequences. Rumors circulated that he had gone insane and been confined to an asylum. At one stage he came to blows with his former friend Thomas Dunn English. “Poe was drunk and getting the worst of it,” wrote a witness, “and was finally forced partly under the sofa, only his face being out. English was punching Poe’s face, and at every blow a seal ring on his finger cut Poe.” Even now, Poe managed to put up a brave front. When friends moved forward to intervene, he shouted: “Leave him alone, I’ve got him just where I want him!”

  English’s antipathy would spill over into the pages of a satirical novel in which he portrayed Poe as a singularly unpleasant character named Marmaduke Hammerhead: “The bloated face—blood-shotten eyes—trembling figure and attenuated frame, showed how rapidly he was sinking into a drunkard’s grave; and the driveling smile, and meaningless nonsense he constantly uttered, showed the approaching wreck of his fine abilities.”

  In May of 1846 Poe removed his household to the quiet village of Fordham, fourteen miles north, in what is now the Bronx, New York City. Poe hoped that the more sedate setting might have a beneficial effect on his health, but he lost none of his combativeness. In a series of essays called “The Literati of New York City,” published in Godey’s Lady’s Book, Poe took shots at many of his former friends and colleagues. Foremost of these was Thomas Dunn English, with whom Poe continued to trade insults in the press, culminating in a libel suit filed by Poe. English fled the city rather than defend himself in court, with the result that Poe was awarded some $325 in damages and costs. Poe celebrated the victory with the purchase of a new black suit.

  The triumphant mood was short-lived. By the end of the year, Poe’s circumstances had reached a desperate state, and grave concerns were expressed about his health. In November, a group of well-meaning friends drew attention to his plight with a notice in the Morning Express:

  ILLNESS OF EDGAR A. POE — We regret to learn that this gentleman and his wife are both dangerously ill with the consumption, and that the hand of misfortune lies heavily upon their temporal affairs. We are sorry to mention the fact that they are so far reduced as to be barely able to obtain the necessaries of life. That is, indeed, a hard lot, and we do hope that the friends and admirers of Mr. Poe will come promptly to his assistance in his bitterest hour of need.

  A second notice, in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post, was even more pitiable: “It is said that Edgar A. Poe is lying dangerously ill with brain fever, and that his wife is in the last stages of consumption—they are without money and without friends.”

  Poe appreciated the concern that had motivated these actions, and felt gratitude for the donations they brought, but it wounded his pride to be presented to the public as a charity case. The following month, he sent a letter to his friend Nathaniel Willis of the Mirror, putting a brave face on his distress. “That, as the inevitable consequence of so long an illness, I have been in want of money, it would be folly in me to deny,” he said. Nevertheless, he insisted, the notion that “I am ‘without friends’ is a gross calumny…which a thousand noble-hearted men would have good right never to forgive me for permitting to pass unnoticed and undenied.” As to his declining health, he offered a brave assessment: “The truth is, I have a great deal to do; and I have made up my mind not to die till it is done.”

  Unfortunately, the same could not be said of Virginia. Her health had been in a steady decline through the winter months, and in the absence of warm blankets, she lay shivering in the thick overcoat Poe had worn in the army. In her final hours, she pleaded with her mother to take care of Poe when she was gone. She died—“suffering much pain
”—on January 30, 1847, at the age of twenty-four.

  For Poe, the loss was incalculable. In June of 1846, still smarting from the loss of the Broadway Journal, Poe had sent a heartfelt letter to his wife. “Keep up your heart in all hopefulness, and trust yet a little longer,” he wrote. “In my last great disappointment, I should have lost my courage but for you—my little darling wife you are my greatest and only stimulus now to battle with this uncongenial, unsatisfactory and ungrateful life.”

  It now became clear that Virginia’s long illness had taken its toll. A year later, Poe described his torment during her long decline. “I became insane,” he wrote. “I drank—God only knows how often or how much. As a matter of course, my enemies referred the insanity to the drink, rather than the drink to the insanity. I had, indeed, nearly abandoned all hope of a permanent cure, when I found one in the death of my wife. This I can and do endure as becomes a man. It was the horrible, never-ending oscillation between hope and despair which I could not longer have endured, without total loss of reason. In the death of what was my life, then, I received a new but—Oh God!—how melancholy existence.”

  This new existence offered few advances over the old one. Poe’s habits remained dissolute, and his fortunes gave no sign of improvement. He threw himself into work on a book called Eureka: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe, a work of metaphysical abstraction that he judged to be of earthshaking significance. The publisher George Putnam would recall a meeting in which Poe literally shook with excitement as he described the “profound importance” of the work. Putnam recalled Poe as saying that “No other scientific event in the history of the world approached in importance the original developments of this book.” When it finally appeared in March of 1848, the book and the lectures Poe gave to support it were dismissed as “hyperbolic nonsense.” Even the usually supportive Evert Duyckinck described the enterprise as a “mountainous piece of absurdity.”

  Poe’s relationship with the poet Fanny Osgood had come to an end by the time of Virginia’s death, but in his loneliness he sought renewed companionship through a series of earnest, even frantic courtships. Many of the women he pursued were married or otherwise unattainable, which had the effect of increasing Poe’s ardor. At times his romantic overtures were thrown out in several directions at once, with predictably unhappy results. Some of the women to whom he turned were uncomplicated and good-hearted in the mold of Virginia and even Mrs. Clemm (with whom he still lived), offering domestic stability if not intellectual companionship. Marie Shew, a family friend who had nursed Virginia in her final days, became the first of his new obsessions, followed soon afterward by Annie Richmond, whom he described in a story as “the perfection of natural, in contradistinction from artificial grace.” By contrast, Sarah Helen Whitman, an ethereal young widow, was an aspiring poet who engaged Poe’s creative instincts and flattered his intellect. The urgent and scattershot nature of Poe’s many courtships suggests that his motives were complicated and perhaps contradictory. In time his love life grew so chaotic that upon the publication of “Annabel Lee,” one of his greatest poems, no fewer than four of the women in his life believed themselves to be its inspiration.

  Poe’s health remained fragile after Virginia’s death. Marie Shew, a doctor’s daughter, noted that Poe had an irregular heartbeat and arrived at a dramatic diagnosis: “I decided that in his best health he had lesion of one side of the brain, and as he could not bear stimulants or tonics, without producing insanity, I did not feel much hope that he could be raised up from brain fever brought on by extreme suffering of mind and body.” Brain lesion or no, his behavior made an erratic downward spiral. In November of 1848, distraught over the rebuff of his attentions to Sarah Helen Whitman, he took an extreme measure. In a scene that recalled Daniel Payne’s final hours, Poe wrote to remind Annie Richmond of a “holy promise” to attend him on his deathbed and then swallowed an ounce of laudanum. It is difficult to say whether Poe actually intended to kill himself or merely hoped that the dramatic gesture would inspire sympathy and compassion from Helen. He reported to Annie Richmond that “the laudanum was rejected from the stomach,” but Poe nevertheless suffered a lengthy period of “awful horrors.” A daguerreotype made four days later shows the ravages of the episode in his deeply lined face, drooping eyelids, and haunted expression.

  No sooner had he recovered than he threw himself into another round of drinking. In June of 1849, on his way to lecture in Richmond, Poe stopped in Philadelphia to fortify himself. Arrested for public drunkenness, he was thrown into the Moyamensing prison, where he suffered a terrifying bout of delirium tremens. In his distress he suffered hallucinations that would not have been out of place in “The Pit and the Pendulum.” In one horrifying vision he imagined Maria Clemm, the person dearest to him in all the world, being made to suffer unspeakable agonies: “As a means to torture me and wring my heart,” Poe recalled, unseen tormentors brought his helpless aunt forward and sought to “blast my sight by seeing them first saw off her feet at the ankles, then her legs to the knees, her thighs at the hips, and so on.”

  Not surprisingly, Poe appeared careworn and bedraggled by the time he finally reached Richmond in July of 1849. To his delight, he was greeted warmly as a returning native son and his lecture drew a rapturous crowd. “I never was received with so much enthusiasm,” he told his aunt. “The papers have done nothing but praise me before the lecture & since.” Many of the friends of his youth turned out to see him, and it pleased him to be reminded of happier times. Soon enough, Poe renewed his acquaintance with Elmira Royster, now Mrs. Alexander Shelton, to whom he had been secretly engaged when he left Richmond for the University of Virginia. Now a wealthy widow with two children, Mrs. Shelton had never entirely forgotten the romance of her youth, and had followed Poe’s career with fond longing. In his marriageable frame of mind, Poe’s youthful passion was soon rekindled. Within days he proposed that they renew their decades-old engagement. Mrs. Shelton hesitated, knowing something of Poe’s history and his weakness for drink. Her uncertainty had the usual effect of increasing Poe’s ardor; he promised to reform, and even joined the Richmond chapter of the Sons of Temperance. Apparently Mrs. Shelton gave Poe reason to hope that she would soon consent. In September, he made plans to return to New York and settle his affairs, so as to return to Richmond permanently—with his Aunt Maria in tow. “I hope,” he wrote to Mrs. Clemm on the eve of his departure, “that our troubles are nearly over.”

  Stopping in Baltimore on September 27 on his way back to New York, Poe ran into some old friends who suggested that they celebrate their reunion with a glass of whiskey. Poe, who had been sober for three months, seems to have offered no resistance. What followed has long been a blank page in Poe’s time line, though it has invited a great deal of speculation. Poe’s cousin Neilson, who was living in Baltimore at the time, would later say that “where he spent the time he was here, or under what circumstances, I have been unable to ascertain.”

  Six days later, on Wednesday, October 3, Poe was found collapsed in a gutter outside an Irish tavern. A local election was under way, and the tavern was serving as a polling place, leading to speculation that Poe had been encouraged to cast a ballot in exchange for a drink. The fact that he was wearing clothes that were evidently not his own suggests that he may have done it more than once, having changed his appearance to avoid recognition at the polls.

  A short time later, Joseph Evans Snodgrass, Poe’s old Baltimore friend, who was a doctor as well as an editor, received an urgent note. Snodgrass, the man to whom Poe had originally offered “Marie Rogêt” seven years earlier, learned that Poe was “rather worse for wear” and “in need of immediate assistance.” Hurrying to the tavern, Snodgrass found Poe in a ragged and desperate state, muttering incoherently. Snodgrass called for a carriage to take him to a hospital. When the carriage arrived, Snodgrass recalled, “we tried to get the object of our care upon his feet, so that he might the more easily be taken to it. But he was past l
ocomotion. We therefore carried him to the coach as if he were a corpse, and lifted him into it in the same manner. While we were doing this, what was left of one of the most remarkable embodiments of genius the world has produced in all the centuries of its history—the author of a single poem, which alone has been adjudged by more than one critic as entitling its producer to a lasting and enviable fame—was so utterly voiceless as to be capable of only muttering some scarcely intelligible oaths, and other forms of imprecation, upon those who were trying to rescue him from destitution and disgrace.”

  At the nearby Washington College Hospital, resident physician John Moran locked Poe up in the drunk ward. For several hours Poe appeared to be unaware of his condition or his surroundings. Soon he lapsed into a hallucinatory state. Moran recorded that Poe began a “vacant converse with spectral and imaginary objects on the walls. His face was pale and his whole person was drenched in perspiration.”

  After two days the hallucinations dissipated, but Poe remained confused and agitated. When Moran tried to calm him, Poe insisted that the best thing to do “would be to blow out his brains with a pistol.” By the end of the day, Moran noted, Poe had entered “a violent delirium, resisting the efforts of two nurses to keep him in bed.”

  In the early hours of the following morning, Moran reported, “a very decided change began to affect him. Having become enfeebled from exertion, he became quiet and seemed to rest for a short time, then gently moving his head he said, ‘Lord help my poor Soul,’ and expired.” The doctor recorded the time as five A.M. on Sunday, October 7, 1849. Poe was forty years old.

  POE’S FUNERAL, held the following day at the cemetery of the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, was austere even by a pauper’s standards. Virginia Poe’s cousin, Reverend William Clemm, presided over a ceremony that lasted all of three minutes, and Poe was laid to rest in a shoddy coffin that lacked handles, a nameplate, or even a pillow for his head. “A grave had been dug among the crumbling mementos of mortality,” recorded Joseph Snodgrass. “Into this the plainly-coffined body was speedily lowered, and then the earth was shoveled directly upon the coffin-lid. This was so unusual even in the burials of the poor, that I could not help noticing the absence of not only the customary box, as an inclosure for the coffin itself, but of even the commonest boards to prevent the direct contact of the decomposing wet earth with it. I shall never forget the emotion of disappointment, mingled with disgust and something akin to resentment, that thrilled through my whole being as I heard the clods and stones resound from the coffin-lid.”