by Norman Lock
Once, I saw it for myself, Moran: how he wrote—with what extraordinary application. He believed me to be asleep in a chair in the corner of his room. Bent over the foolscap, his hand seemed a thing apart, so still he was except for it. The fingertips of its fellow rested on his forehead—that lofty brow signifying ratiocination, imagination, determination, all of which a mind at the acme of possibility is capable. He was someone rare and untrammeled by convention. Like a man with a rope and pulley, he could raise himself above himself. He had the gift to stand outside of the little empire given us at birth and see it clearly. Anyone else would have gone insane, but I tell you, Poe did not! It was I who did. For a time, I was at my wit’s end, in thrall to Edgar’s magnetic personality.
That was thirty years ago and more; Poe’s been dead for over a quarter of a century. I’m a careful observer of the body’s minutest motions, its fevers, crises, maladies, disturbances, but however clearly I seem to see my past, I can’t be certain that what I remember of it is the truth. Memory is as liable to blight as the soul, both of which survive the departed—the one, in fame or infamy, the other in eternity, if there’s such a thing. As a surgeon and an unconvinced Christian, I tend to doubt it.
To be honest, Moran, I don’t believe in the immortal soul or in God’s heaven, except as a solace against the terror at midnight. Next to annihilation, Poe’s horrors are only whimsies. No, I’ve poked about in too many innards. If the soul were there to be seen, I ought to have seen it—at least some evidence of its having been, as the scorch mark evinces the quenched flame. Even after my three months with Poe, I find it hard to accept the immaterial realm—or, perhaps, my skepticism is the result of the time I spent with him. What cannot be seen smacks too much of his fancies, which I detest. The supernatural, the supersensual, is what I also find objectionable in Eakins’s picture: the intimation of a world beyond the senses, at the end of the tunnel and in the painted murk of the spectators. If I would open the palm of my hand with a knife, I’d see the actuality of what lies hidden from view.
At nineteen, I might have believed myself to be Poe’s disciple and apprentice, but I doubt I was ever truly suited to the role. Even now, I accept the bituminous quality of the world—unmalleable, black, flammable—but I don’t cultivate despair or find it seductive. No, I prefer the light of day to darkness, the music of Mozart to Bach, a comical story of Mark Twain to a somber one by Hawthorne, Melville, or by Edgar Poe. This is, however, to be my story of the winter months I spent with him. And I swear to you, Moran, I will tell it, if not straight out—I can’t help meandering—then truly—if the truth can be known and told with so insufficient a means as words. I ought to have been a dauber. I’d like to spend the rest of my days painting luminous landscapes like Bierstadt’s Among the Sierra Nevada and Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow. I’d leave hellish scenes to the gloomy apostles of Hieronymus Bosch or the German Dürer.
ON HIS THIRD VISIT to “Mütter’s museum,” as the students called it, Poe asked to see the catalogue of skulls. He was dressed exactly as he’d been on his previous visits and as he would be when he watched Nathaniel Dickey’s transfiguration and shouted his “Eureka!”—which, later, he’d retract. Despite the threadbare condition of his clothes, Edgar was always immaculately groomed. That day, I had the opportunity to study him. His sunken eyes might have persuaded me that the irises were black, had I not seen clearly that they were gray and flecked with tiny amber lights. The chestnut hair curled to the point of unruliness, but, except for a scraggly mustache, his face was cleanly shaved. His chin was classically molded, the face a pale oval, the brow imposing, lofty, intelligent. The physiognomists have made much of Poe’s high forehead.
Do you believe that our qualities—our souls, if you like the word—can be read, like Braille, in the bumps on top of our heads? Aren’t you convinced that the countenance betrays character, its quirks, inclinations, passions, humors, and that the shape of the cranial skull determines our mental faculties?
No? Then you’re an enlightened man; the sciences of physiognomy and phrenology, refined in the last century by Franz-Josef Gall, are only now being questioned. In 1844, we believed in the Austrian anatomist’s mapping of the brain according to its functions, and in Lavater’s insistence that outer appearance reveals inner character. Poe took it as a matter of course. He’d read Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe and Sir Thomas Browne’s treatises. Poe’s tale—the one I stole from him and in whose composition I was intimately involved—had everything to do with those doubtful sciences. He spoke of them at the college, after I had taken the catalogue from the shelf and laid open its pages to his devouring eye. He was sitting at a large table, whose polished oak shone in the sun of a mild January afternoon. His nicely shaped hands fluttered eagerly and then settled on the folio pages crowded with script and illustrations done in India ink.
“Mr. Poe,” I said, having taken a backward step or two in respect for his privacy.
“Thank you, young man,” he said kindly. “Did you make these entries?”
“I did, sir.”
“You have a fine hand, almost feminine in its graces.”
His manner was genial, even courtly. I was surprised to be the object of a gentleman’s goodwill. He was a gentleman, Moran; he would’ve been one had he been dressed in rags.
“Before I ever went to school, my mother had taught me to make my letters.”
“One can read something of a man in his penmanship. Something secret and otherwise hidden. Jacob Böhme believed in the doctrine of signatures, meaning God marked the things of this world with signs indicating their purpose. Do you think he was right—what is your name?”
“Edward Fenzil.”
“A good German name.”
“My father came here from Bavaria.”
“I never knew mine, or my mother, either. So, Edward, do you believe that the human face bears the warrants of its personality?”
“Yes, Mr. Poe, I do.”
“Charles Dickens’s characters—you are acquainted with Mr. Dickens’s stories?”
“I read Oliver Twist.”
“Fagin, Bill Sikes, Nancy, Mr. Brownlow—their faces are an index to their souls.”
“What do you see when you look at mine?” I asked him.
I knew it was an audacious question; Poe might have bridled at my familiarity on such slight acquaintance. But he had shown me unusual courtesy; moreover, I saw in his face, which was a puzzling mixture of the beautiful and strange, not the slightest reluctance or ill will. If anything, he appeared perfectly willing to accept me—boy that I was—as a person worthy of his consideration. Whether he was at heart comprehensive in his affections, like Walt Whitman, or exclusive, I don’t know. But that winter the two of us hobnobbed with men and women the world finds objectionable, even depraved, and he never carped or raised an eyebrow in disdain.
He gazed at my face awhile. He went so far as to follow its features with his fingertips and then feel with them the contours hidden beneath my hair. As he looked at me, I studied his eyes, lively and lambent with curiosity. The gray irises appeared to darken, assuming an almost violet tint difficult to describe. Their effect on me was magnetic: He held my eyes with his own, which did now seem black as pitch. I grew uncomfortable under his gaze but could not look away—did not wish to. I felt—I was too absorbed by his will to say that I “thought”—I was drowning—no, not drowning, buried. Entombed. It was nonsense. I had imagined it all. His eyes were not on mine; they were roving the landscape of my face. Poe was no mesmerist. He was, I saw after I had broken my fixed stare, a prepossessing man, slender, compact, amiable. A man of unusual gifts, who would soon befriend me.
“I am a poet,” he said, apropos of nothing.
“I’ve read two of your stories.”
“Not my poems?” When I shook my head, he seemed disappointed. “Well, Edward, your face is a good one, and I see in it a pleasing nature and an intelligence above the
ordinary.”
“I’m glad to hear it, sir.”
His expression suddenly altered as grasslands will when a cloud moves against the sun.
“Is something the matter, Mr. Poe?”
“There was something, Edward. . . .”
“What is it?”
“On your temple, immediately above the right ear, I felt a pronounced inclination toward destructiveness. Mind you, phrenology reveals only propensity, not necessity. I imagine most men’s skulls would tell a similar tale. Women’s, too, for what I’ve known of some of them.”
To this day, I don’t know if he was amusing himself with me or if those traits were really stamped upon my face and skull. In time, I’d have proof of Lavater’s doctrine to make me wish I’d never met Edgar Poe: proof that outward appearance and the heart’s secret places are bound by filaments as unbreakable as the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge.
“Never mind, Edward. These ‘sciences’ may be only a fantasy indulged in by novelists and mountebanks. Let us see what story the catalogue has to tell,” he said, glancing at its pages. “And bring me the skulls to which these notes refer, if you please.”
I fetched eight of what Hamlet had pondered in the graveyard at Elsinore. All in a row, they made a ghastly totem. To unearth a single skull is a surprise; to ponder a heap of them, a shock. It is the same with all things macabre.
“Thank you, Edward.”
I stood slightly behind him and watched as he contemplated each skull in light of its ledger entry. He caressed the polished bone like a blind person taking the measure of another’s face. His touch was full of tenderness. He might have been stroking his beloved or the death mask of a man he’d venerated. The sun, which had strengthened as it escaped the net of bare poplar trees across the street, made the memento mori gleam eerily. Although I had often held them in my hands, I shivered. Looking back on those days, I realize there was in Poe a vital connection with death. There’s sense in the oxymoron: He was never so alive as when he mused on extinction. I couldn’t have said then which entranced him more: his subject matter or his art. Now I know they were indivisible.
Having surveyed the skulls, he read their sordid particulars in a voice usually reserved for memorials to the honored dead. I thrilled at each fatal entry like a boy stirred by a martial air.
Name, age: Unknown
Gender: Female
Place of Origin: Unknown
Cause of Death: Suicide
Description: Metopic suture, nasal crest, low cranial vault
Name, age: Thorvald Becker, 51
Gender: Male
Place of Origin: Saxony
Cause of Death: Cut his throat because of extreme poverty
Description: Catholic. Frontal grooves, multiple supraorbital foramina
Name, age: Adrao Rabi, 40
Gender: Male
Place of Origin: Galicia
Cause of Death: Died of trauma in the Charity Hospital
Description: Railway worker. Continuous brow ridge
Name, age: Mirjam Dekker, 46
Gender: Female
Place of Origin: Holland
Cause of Death: Phlebitis, complicated fracture of the femur
Description: Prominent brow ridge, rhomboid orbits
Name, age: Czeslaw Vogel, 26
Gender: Male
Place of Origin: Warsaw
Cause of Death: Hanged
Description: Murderer. Dental pathology (possible abscesses)
Name, age: Menno Kira, 24
Gender: Male
Place of Origin: Friesland
Cause of Death: Gunshot wounds
Description: Sailor
Name, age: Nada Sokić, 17
Gender: Female
Place of Origin: Croatia
Cause of Death: Smallpox
Description: Mill hand. Tooth edges straight and continuous
Name, age: Biktop Shamo, unknown
Gender: Male
Place of Origin: Krasnoe, Ukraine
Cause of Death: Self-inflicted removal of testicles
Description: Member of Russian sect believing in castration. Dual left supraorbital foramina
From time to time, he would address a question over his shoulder to where I stood leaning over his. I had to clarify the anatomical descriptions and show him the places on the skulls to which they referred. He was amazed by the violent deaths that many of their former “owners” had suffered.
“More likely than not such men and women as these used to be were left with no one to mourn them,” he said thoughtfully. “If any did grieve, I imagine they would have done so alone, like an animal crawling off into the bushes to give birth or to die.”
I nodded and, despite my affectation of nonchalance, I felt the corners of my mouth turn down. I was nineteen, remember, and, though my family’s means were meager, we were happy, and I had yet to have my optimism blighted. It would take a winter with Poe, the hell he opened up to me, and, much later, a war to make me sullen and afraid. I smiled and assumed a cheerful countenance, determined to ingratiate myself. Why I should have cared, I don’t know, unless it was his eyes—what I saw in them: a depth of knowledge or, rather, of experience far beyond me and the confines of my life, no matter how I might have been surrounded by monstrosities, sickness, and death.
“Those with none to claim them end up in the almshouse cemetery or, if they’re lucky, here, in Dr. Mütter’s ‘cabinet of horrors’—begging your pardon, Mr. Poe.”
I winked drolly and would have done a comic gig suitable for the music hall to gain his favor. I must have appeared ridiculous, but I was determined that he should see me as a plucky lad uncowed by my gruesome occupation or his celebrity.
“Why should they be lucky?”
I wondered if he would reprove me for my nerve but went on just the same. “It’s more pleasant for their mortal remains to spend the next life, such as it may be, in the warmth and light. I hate to think of myself put into the ground, with no other company than beetles and worms.”
Poe was amused, so I continued to jolly him.
“Anyone would be glad to have his leftovers cleaned and dusted regularly by a smart young man like me. And isn’t it a privilege for them to advance the cause of science when, more than likely, these skulls did nothing in life but think where their next drink was coming from?”
“You are a scoundrel, Mr. Fenzil.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said, bowing. “I value your good opinion.”
Composing himself, he returned to his cranial examination. I, in turn, examined him further. The curls of his hair fell romantically over a frayed high collar. His shoulders were narrow, but I’d been mistaken in my first impression: Poe was not delicate, although many of his lady admirers thought him so. In his slender, erect frame, there was vigor, a strength of sinew consonant with tenacity and grit. He’d been a soldier, and, impoverished, he lived much of his mature life among ruffians and hard men. He knew how to get on with all sorts. During the winter of ‘44, we visited low haunts and did things good Christians would have seen us jailed for, if not hanged. But I had the feeling that he did what he did for the sake of his art and not for any relish of vice. He wasn’t vicious. He might have been weak—his troubles made him so—but he was not the moral degenerate some people say, no more than Dr. Mütter was for doting on nature’s freaks.
“Even now, after boiling and bleaching, this skull has secrets it won’t tell,” said Poe while he held Mirjam Dekker’s mortal portion in his hands and peered into the empty eye sockets.
“It has nothing anymore to tell them with,” I said flippantly.
“The truth will out, regardless.” He put the bone down on the table. “In its shape, it is as ancient as the mountains and, like them, keeps the time of the firmament and of the first atom.”
Poe had a conscience; he wrote about its crises—and something more: the dread that slowly erodes the better part of us with the inevitability of water dripping on a rock
. Who of us can stand between the pit and the pendulum and not give way? I believe that this was the human tragedy that fascinated him—not evil, but the faulty center, the rot in the roof beam, the crack in the keystone, an almost inevitable flaw at the heart of every human character, made to beat in a “story” that is not of its making and not entirely within its control. This is the awful truth that Edgar Poe realized, what he labored under, what he wrote about, and what the poor man died of. Not alcohol, brain congestion, opiates, consumption, cholera, rabies, or suicide did him in, but his embattled senses and embittered virtue, together with a lack of means and prospects. He was Micawber without optimism. I knew Edgar Allan Poe for only a short time; I was a principal character in one of his horrors.
I no longer blame him. I was too impressionable, too ready to fall under his spell, his dark enchantment, too young, too inexperienced to resist. I tell you, Moran, I lost myself that winter! Now, each morning, I look at my face in the shaving mirror to assure myself that I am still here. I and my unsavory—you are kind to take no notice of it.
Peering in a mirror is the nearest most children come to magic, or madness; for them, the looking glass alters, if only slightly, the world submerged in its depths. The boy in my mother’s cheval glass, staring at me with quizzical, even frightened, eyes was not me. I had momentarily lost myself in it! Each time, I would come away feeling diminished and afraid. And yet, I would return to stand and look—helpless to do otherwise—as I do now at Eakins’s picture.
When does the last ferry to Philadelphia leave?
Six o’clock tonight. Will that give you enough time to meet your General Custer?