He was still writing poetry, but admitted in a letter that writing was “a torture. I think composition is a great pain.” Byron, who described himself in letters as “the apostle of affliction,” believed that poets and writers, with their eyes trained toward the heavens, were more likely to stumble. “Those who are intent only on the beaten road” have it easy.
Byron escaped the clutches of death for far longer than even he expected. He may have lived as a poet, but he died a warrior on the battlefields of Greece in 1824 at the age of thirty-six. Though he had no nationalistic reasons to fight for Greek independence, his involvement satisfied his taste for adventure. Byron once told his wife that he preferred “action, war, the senate, and even science to all the speculations of those mere dreamers of another existence [i.e., poets].”
In the end, he dismissed all of his accomplishments in life as being more trouble than they were worth. “If I had to live over again, I do not know what I would change in my life—unless it were not to have lived at all.”
What is known about Lord Byron’s misadventures is scandalous enough, but what he recorded in his unpublished autobiography may have been even worse. A group of his friends and family burned the manuscript after his death. It is, perhaps, for the best. “Genius, like greatness, should be seen at a distance, for neither will bear a too close inspection,” he once said, no doubt with a knowing wink.
6
American Gothic
“Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence—whether much that is glorious—whether all that is profound—does not spring from disease of thought.”
—EDGAR ALLAN POE
Even if writing was still a profession unfit for upper-class gentlemen, the idea that an author could make a living from sales of his work was certainly gaining ground on the European continent. Things were very different in America, however, where copyright laws didn’t cover works created outside of the United States. This meant that American publishers could make an easy profit by simply pirating European books. Publishers were less likely to take a chance on American authors, because that would mean they would have to pay royalties or other remuneration.
“The history of American writers starting as early as the nineteenth century has been marked by unnatural strain, physical isolation, an alienation from the supposedly sweet and lovely aspects of American life,” literary critic Alfred Kazin wrote. While the United States was always a land of hope and opportunity for immigrants from its founding onward, it was also a harsh wasteland of despair for the poor. Few were as foolhardy as the “starving artist,” who appeared to be destitute by choice.
Success demanded thick skin and determination.
Success demanded publicity and controversy.
Success demanded someone like Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849).
Poe best illustrates the idea of the American writer-as-pioneer in the nineteenth century. He was fiercely opinionated, a trait that would come back to repeatedly bite him on the ass. He was also an alcoholic who drank for the same reasons he wrote: to push back the depression that he was constantly waging a war against. His French translator, Charles Baudelaire, said that Poe used alcohol as a weapon to kill “a worm inside that would not die.”
Regarding his drinking and drug use, Poe wrote, “I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.” While some critics have blamed his black moods on drinking, Poe believed the inverse: “My enemies referred the insanity to the drink rather than the drink to the insanity.”
Where did Poe’s darkness come from? Was it, as some biographers have posited, there from the beginning? “I do believe God gave me a spark of genius,” Poe once said, “but He quenched it in misery.” His father, a drunken stage actor, abandoned his family when Poe was a toddler; his mother died the next year after a long battle with tuberculosis. John Allan, a Scottish-born merchant, took in Poe as a foster child. Even though Poe was too young at the time to remember the details of his mother’s passing, death would never be far from his thoughts. Indeed, when he was six, he passed a graveyard and screamed in terror that the dead would run after him and drag him into the ground. Unsurprisingly, Poe’s early attempts at poetry were drenched in the macabre. Take this line from one of his teenage journals, for example: “I could not love except where Death was mingling his with Beauty’s breath.”
After a tumultuous childhood he later described as sad, lonely, and unhappy, Poe left his foster family’s home in Richmond, Virginia, to study law at the University of Virginia. With only $100 in support from his foster father, Poe turned to gambling to try to meet the $450 yearly tuition.
Poe soon fell into debt and took up drinking. Luckily for Poe’s pocketbook, he was a lightweight drunk. A single glass of wine was said to have been enough to unleash the dark forces within his heart. “His whole nature was reversed,” newspaper editor N. P. Willis said. “The demon became uppermost.”
Poe lasted less than a year at the University of Virginia. He had no interest in becoming a lawyer, anyway: his true passion was for writing. “Literature is the most noble of professions,” he wrote as only an impetuous American could. “For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path, even for all the gold in California.”
He returned to Richmond, and, following a fight with his foster father, left home again, this time for Boston. He published his first chapbook, Tamerlane and Other Poems. It sold poorly and failed to garner him any critical attention. All the gold in California had to look tantalizing at this point—he needed to support himself some way, and literature couldn’t put food on his table (not that he even had a table to call his own).
Upon turning eighteen, he enlisted in the U.S. Army as “Edgar A. Perry.” He was about as good a fit for the military as Samuel Coleridge. Poe’s five-year military career ended with a discharge from the West Point Military Academy for missing drills, parades, classes, and church.
“I left West Point two days ago and traveling to N. York without a cloak or any other clothing of importance,” he wrote to his foster father—a lie, it should be said, since he kept his cadet’s overcoat for the rest of his life. “I have caught a most violent cold and am confined to my bed—I have no money—no friends—I have written to my brother—but he cannot help me—I shall never rise from my bed—besides a most violent cold on my lungs my ear discharges blood and matter continually and my headache is distracting—I hardly know what I am writing.” He asked for money from his foster father but never received a response.
Following his discharge, Poe was more determined than ever to support himself with his pen. He won a fifty-dollar literary prize from a Baltimore newspaper. It was just enough to encourage him to strike out on his own without his foster father’s support.
In one of his darkest moments, he needed more than his pen—and alcohol—to stave off the demons. “I went to bed and wept through a long, long, hideous night of despair,” he wrote in a letter. “When the day broke, I arose and endeavored to quiet my mind by a rapid walk in the cold, keen air—but all would not do—the demon tormented me still. Finally I procured two ounces of laudanum.” While it was still legal in the United States at the time, it was well known as an addictive substance thanks in part to Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, a work that Poe was familiar with. Unlike De Quincey, however, Poe used the drug only occasionally and never became hooked on it.
Poe continued to write his foster father for funds. “I am perishing—absolutely perishing for want of aid. And yet I am not idle—nor addicted to any vice,” he wrote, leaving out any mention of his alcohol and laudanum use. “For God’s sake pity me, and save me from destruction.”
Again, his r
equests went unanswered.
John Allan died in 1834, leaving nothing to his twenty-five-year-old foster son in his will. This came as no surprise to Poe, who was living with his aunt, Maria Clemm, and her nine-year-old daughter, Virginia.
Still, Poe pledged to support his aunt and cousin, whom he married when she turned thirteen. While minors were allowed to marry in Virginia at the time with a guardian’s consent, it was certainly unusual—to say nothing of the fact that they were first cousins.
Poe moved his wife and aunt around with him as he worked for various magazines on the East Coast, writing short stories in his free time. His drinking cost him more than one job, including one in Richmond at the Southern Literary Messenger. “Mr. Poe was a fine gentleman when he was sober,” one of the printers at the Messenger said. “But when he was drinking he was about one of the most disagreeable men I have ever met.”
In 1842, Virginia was playing piano when she began coughing up blood. Doctors diagnosed her with tuberculosis, the same disease that had killed Poe’s mother, father, and brother. Poe, distraught at the prospect of losing another family member, ramped up his drinking and soon found himself on the doorstep of an old girlfriend, Mary Deveraux. He accused her of not loving her husband; she promptly sent her drunken visitor on his way. Poe was located a few days later, wandering the woods of rural New York distraught and disheveled, hundreds of miles from home.
Poe returned to his family, and buried himself in his work to get his mind off Virginia’s condition. He dreamed of launching a magazine of his own, Penn Magazine. In 1843, he was invited to lecture in Washington, D.C., and hoped to meet the president while in town. “I believe that I am making a sensation which will tend to the benefit of the magazine,” he wrote to a partner in his venture. The “sensation” that he had made, however, did little to benefit the magazine: his heavy drinking upon arrival in Washington caused the organizers of the lecture to cancel his speech. Poe never received the audience with the White House that he had been counting on.
In 1845, he published “The Raven.” The gothic poem, with its haunting refrain of “Nevermore!,” was a smashing success, improbably placing Poe in the upper echelon of writers he had longed to be a part of. “No man lives,” Poe once said, “unless he is famous.” He became a hot commodity on the lecture circuit, becoming something of a sex symbol. “Women fell under his fascination and listened in silence,” one of his admirers wrote.
Unfortunately, despite his newfound success, Poe was still Poe. “My feelings at this moment are pitiable indeed,” he wrote. “I am suffering under a depression of spirits such as I have never felt before. I have struggled in vain against the influence of this melancholy—you will believe me when I say that I am still miserable in spite of the great improvement in my circumstances.” He dressed in a tattered black suit and had few friends, even in publishing circles. “I never heard him speak in praise of any English writer living or dead,” one of his West Point roommates said.
His wife, gravely ill with tuberculosis, tried to console her husband. “Now, Eddie, when I am gone I will be your guardian angel,” she told him. “And if at any time you feel tempted to do wrong, just put your hands above your head, so, and I will be there to shield you.”
Virginia passed away at the age of twenty-five, the same age Poe’s mother had been when she died.
Poe took the loss in stride. “The death of a beautiful woman, is, unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the world,” he later wrote. His real feelings about losing his beloved cousin had long since numbed, as he wrote in this letter to a medical student:
Six years ago, a wife, whom I loved as no man ever loved
before, ruptured a blood vessel in singing. Her life was
despaired of. I took leave of her forever and underwent all
the agonies of her death. She recovered partially and I again
hoped. At the end of the year the vessel broke again—I
went through precisely the same scene. Again in about a
year afterward. Then again—again—again and even once
again in varying intervals. Each time I felt the agonies of
her death—and at each accession of the disorder I loved
her more dearly and clung to her life with more desperate
pertinacity. But I am constitutionally sensitive—nervous in
a very unusual degree. I became insane, with long periods of
horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness
I drank, God only knows how often or how much.
Miraculously, Poe’s own health appeared to turn a corner after his wife’s death. “I am getting better, and may add—if it be any comfort to my enemies—that I have little fear of getting worse,” he wrote to a friend in 1846. “The truth is, I have a great deal to do, and I have made up my mind not to die till it is done.” After years of struggling with alcoholism, he finally quit drinking, which appears to have lightened his mood.
Within the next year, the newly sober Poe was engaged to Sarah Helen Whitman, a wealthy poet. He downplayed his love for Virginia in his letters to Whitman. “I did violence to my own heart, and married, for another’s happiness, where I knew that no possibility of my own existed,” he wrote. “Ah, how profound is my love for you.”
The match was not to be. The chasm created between Whitman and Poe by her fortune—and his lack thereof—seemed insurmountable to Poe. Whitman ultimately called off the engagement for reasons that are a mystery, but the fact that Poe started drinking again may have played a role in the breakup.
Poe went back to Richmond in 1849 and proposed to his childhood sweetheart, Elmira. She was widowed and, surprisingly, accepted Poe back into her life. They set a wedding date for October 17 of that year.
Despite his engagement, Poe revealed in letters that he was still beset by illness and depression. Since returning to Richmond, he had been arrested for public intoxication (although he claimed he wasn’t drunk). He wished to see his aunt Maria one last time before he passed away. “It is no use to reason with me now; I must die,” he wrote to her. “I have no desire to live since I have done ‘Eureka’ [a prose poem published the year prior]. I could accomplish nothing more.”
Before Poe left Richmond and Elmira for the final time on September 27, 1849, he stayed out with some friends late into the night. He was to leave on a boat for Baltimore the next day; his acquaintances escorted him to the dock. He was allegedly sober when they left him.
The next time that Poe’s whereabouts can be verified is in Baltimore on October 3, where he was found at a tavern being used as a polling place. Poe was “rather the worse for wear,” according to one report. Or, less delicately, he was piss-drunk and wearing another man’s clothes.
Four days later, Poe died in a Baltimore hospital at the age of forty. “Thus disappeared from the world one of the greatest literary heroes, the man of genius who had written in ‘The Black Cat’ these fateful words: ‘What disease is like Alcohol!’” Baudelaire wrote. “This death was almost a suicide—a suicide prepared for a long time.”
The real story behind Poe’s untimely death may never be known with certainty, but that hasn’t stopped speculation. Among the causes of death listed on one website: “alcohol, cholera, drugs, heart disease, rabies, suicide, tuberculosis, epilepsy, meningeal inflammation, and/or syphilis.” The strangest theory to emerge has to be that, since he was found outside a polling place, he may have been kidnapped, drugged, and forced to vote repeatedly on Election Day.
Although some sources claim Poe’s last words were “Lord help my poor soul,” no medical records or other credible sources exist that corroborate that story. He was to be buried under a marble gravestone reading, “Hic tandemi felicis conduntur reliquiae Edgari Allan Poe” (“Here are gathered the remains of Edgar Allan Poe, happy at last”), but the stone broke. His remains were subsequently buried in an unmarked grave.
“Edgar Allan Poe is dead. This announcement will startle many,
but few will be grieved by it,” Rufus Griswold, a self-declared enemy of Poe, wrote two days after Poe’s death. “Poe had readers in England and in several states of Continental Europe. But he had few or no friends.” After spending several paragraphs of the pseudonymously published obituary damning Poe’s character, Griswold admitted, “We must omit any particular criticism of Mr. Poe’s works. As a writer of tales it will be admitted generally, that he was scarcely surpassed in ingenuity of construction or effective painting. As a poet, he will retain a most honorable rank.”
7
The Realists
“Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn’t, bleed like colors on the whole of our existence.”
—HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Back in Europe, the French Revolution in 1789 and the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 claimed the lives of almost a million young Frenchmen. The French youth that came of age in the aftermath were shell-shocked and emotionally scarred. “Don’t force me to do anything, and I’ll do everything,” Charles Baudelaire wrote. “Understand me, and don’t criticize me.” But don’t mistake them for simple troubadours and rebels: “Above all else, we were artists,” Gustave Flaubert wrote.
The bohemian youth launched a literary and artistic movement that swept Europe following the age of romanticism. This, the movement’s leaders proclaimed, was the age of realism! Realists did away with authorial moralizing. In contrast to the Romantics’ sweeping love stories and sagas, the Realists focused on the everyday trials and tribulations of the middle and lower classes.
Literary Rogues Page 5