On the following day Poe replied in a letter of several thousand words, beginning “I have pressed your letter again and again to my lips, sweetest. Helen—bathing it in tears of joy or of a ‘divine despair.’ ” There was a great deal more in the same vein of theatrical, or elevated, sentiment in the course of which he renewed his claim for her affections and insisted that under his care she “would get better, and finally well.” He also provided her with a potted history of their brief relationship, recounting his emotions on first seeing her in Providence where “I felt, for the first time in my life, and tremblingly acknowledged, the existence of spiritual influences altogether out of the reach of reason. I saw that you were Helen—my Helen— the Helen of a thousand dreams.”
Helen Whitman replied eight days later, once more excusing herself from marriage on the grounds that she had taken responsibility for her mother and her unmarried younger sister. She could not abandon them for married life, however high-minded. She also asked Poe, somewhat tactlessly, the reason for his bad reputation among certain people. She had heard it said that “he has great intellectual power, but no principle—no moral sense.”
He replied at once, with another extraordinarily long and impassioned letter. He interpreted the eight days’ delay as a token of the fact that “You do not love me.” He lamented “that my heart is broken—that I have no farther object in life—that I have absolutely no wish but to die.” He was particularly upset about Mrs. Whitman's questions concerning his moral character. “Until the moment when these horrible words first met my eye,” he claimed, “I would not have believed it possible that any such opinions could have existed at all…” Since he had regularly viewed similar opinions in the public prints, and had even instigated a suit for libel, his surprise was a little forced.
He promised to reveal “the truth or nothing.” He claimed that “I deliberately threw away from me a large fortune, rather than endure a trivial wrong.” Of his marriage to Virginia Clemm he stated that “I did violence to my own heart, and married for another's happiness, when I knew that no possibility of my own existed.” There was very little “truth” in either statement, and the second complaint reads like a monstrous betrayal of his first wife. There then followed some obscure hints about his relationship with Fanny Osgood. It was by his standards a poor performance. It is certain that for him words, and the cadence of words, created their own reality. In the process of composition he may have believed it all. But here he was rewriting and revising his own life.
In “Berenice” the narrator confesses that “my passions always were of the mind,” and we may infer this to be a partial diagnosis of Poe's own condition. His yearnings were always of an idealised and spiritual nature. In his work, he was never interested in any sensual pleasure. In his life, whenever any physical union seemed to become a possibility, he fled into drink. A contemporary described him as “of all the men that I ever knew, he was the most passionless.” In his art and in his life, he fell in love with dying women.
Even before Helen Whitman received the letter, Poe appeared before her. Once more he asked her to entertain his offer of marriage. He was on his way to Lowell, where he was about to deliver a lecture, and he asked her to send a further message to him there.
But, at Lowell itself, he was once more in the presence of the other woman whom he adored in equal measure— Annie Richmond. After spending a little time with Mr. and Mrs. Locke, he moved to Annie's house nearby. This change in his affections altogether disrupted his friendship with Jane Locke, but sealed that with Annie Richmond. He became her inseparable companion, and her sister recalled him “sitting before an open wood fire, in the early autumn evening, gazing intently into the glowing coal, holding the hand of a dear friend—Annie’—while for a long time no one spoke.” This may have been in the presence of Annie's compliant husband, who clearly deemed Poe to be no threat.
But Poe had also recently written to Helen Whitman that he would joyfully “go down with you into the night of the Grave.”
A few days after his visit to Lowell he wrote a letter to Annie Richmond in which he asked, “Why am I not with you now darling…” His affections were infinitely malleable. He even consulted Annie Richmond on his future with Helen Whitman, and it seems that Mrs. Richmond counselled matrimony. He was not necessarily grateful, however, for her advice. “Can you, my Annie,” he wrote, “bear to think I am another's?” He left her in “an agony of grief,” and travelled once more to Providence.
Even before seeing Helen Whitman, he broke down. He endured a “long, long, hideous night of despair” before purchasing two ounces of laudanum the following morning. He travelled on to Boston, where he wrote a letter to Annie in which he reminded her of her “promise that under all circumstances, you would come to me on my bed of death.” So he implored her to come at once to Boston, and named the place where he could be found. He seemed seriously to be contemplating suicide. But he was principally reacting to the thought of actually going through with the marriage to Helen Whitman. He explained to Annie “how my soul revolted from saying the words which were to be said.” Then he swallowed an ounce of the laudanum.
The effects were immediate and profound, suggesting that contrary to rumour he was not an inveterate taker of opium. His cousin, Elizabeth Herring, indicated that during the period of Virginia's illness he was “often in sad condition from the use of opium.” It was a natural reaction to his anxiety and despair. It would in fact be surprising if he had not used opium or tincture of laudanum occasionally, given its efficacy and ready availability. It would have been a useful alternative to alcohol. But the evidence does not suggest that he was an habitual imbiber of the drug. On this occasion in Boston, for example, he lost command of his reason and an unnamed “friend” helped him to cope with “the awful horrors which succeeded.”
Two days later, on 7 November, he was composed enough to journey to Providence. Helen Whitman was too agitated to see him, having been troubled by his absence of two days. So he sent her a note ordering her to “write me one word to say that you do love me and that, under all circumstances, you will be mine.” The changes in his mood are bewildering and extreme; they do suggest, at the very least, a temporary derangement fuelled either by the laudanum or by alcohol. She agreed to meet him, at the Athenaeum library, half an hour later. In the course of this interview he recounted all that had happened to him in Boston. They met again in the afternoon, when Mrs. Whitman once more prevaricated over his proposal of marriage. She also read him a letter, from someone in New York, in which his character had been abused. He seemed “deeply pained.”
That evening Poe began drinking. In his intoxicated state he despatched a “note of renunciation and farewell” to Mrs. Whitman. She assumed that he had travelled back to New York, but he had in fact stayed at Providence in the care of a Mr. MacFarlane. MacFarlane, on the following morning, persuaded Poe to sit for a daguerreotype. It shows him quizzical, sarcastic, subdued with that strange alteration in both halves of his visage. His face looks puffy, there are rings under his eyes, his mouth seems twisted in a sneer, his eyes are deep-set and thoughtful. After being photographed Poe rushed around to Helen Whitman's house “in a state of wild & delirious excitement, calling upon me to save him from some terrible impending doom.” His voice was “appalling … never have I heard anything so awful, even to sublimity.” He was in the throes of a condition akin to madness.
Mrs. Whitman's mother sat with him for two hours, in an attempt to calm him, but when Helen eventually entered the room “he clung to me so frantically as to tear away a piece of the muslin dress I wore.” A doctor was called, and he diagnosed “cerebral congestion.” Poe was then removed to the house of a friend of Mrs. Whitman, where he recuperated for two or three days. There were several more interviews, during which Helen agreed to a “conditional engagement”—the condition being that Poe stopped drinking altogether. But Helen's mother was stubbornly opposed to the match, telling Poe that her daughter's death woul
d be preferable to any union with him. On the evening of 13 November, frustrated in his muddled desire for marriage, Poe left on a steamer for New York.
From New York he composed a note to Mrs. Whitman, explaining that he felt “your dear love at my heart” but that he sensed “a strange shadow of coming evil.” He then took the train to Fordham, where he was at last reunited with Maria Clemm. Mrs. Clemm wrote to Annie Richmond saying that “God has … returned my poor darling Eddy to me. But how changed! I scarcely knew him.” Poe also wrote to Annie another long and agonised letter, in which he said that “you know I love you, as no man ever loved woman … oh, my darling, my Annie, my own sweet sister Annie, my pure beautiful angel—wife of my soul…”
But he had not entirely lost his sense of reality. Four days later he was writing to a putative benefactor, asking for two hundred dollars for the establishment of his proposed literary magazine. He slowly began to recover from the excitement induced by recent events, his composure only slightly ruffled by the news that Helen Whitman's mother had taken entire control of the Whitman estate.
• • •
Then on 20 December, Poe returned to Providence in order to deliver a lecture on “The Poetic Principle.” Any other motive must remain in doubt. One poet of his acquaintance, Mary E. Hewitt, asked if he was also going to Providence for his marriage. He is supposed to have replied, “That marriage will never take place.” He lectured before some eighteen hundred people in the Franklin Lyceum, with Mrs. Whitman among the audience. On the following day she agreed to an “immediate marriage,” with the familiar stipulation that he would never drink again. Poe attended an evening reception at her home, where he remained very quiet. On the morning of the next day he was seen to take a glass of wine. He called upon Helen, with profuse apologies. The apologies were apparently accepted, for on the following day he wrote a note to the minister of the local Episcopal church asking him to publish the banns for the forthcoming marriage. Poe then wrote to Maria Clemm that “we shall be married on Monday [Christmas Day], and will be at Fordham on Tuesday.”
These well-laid plans came to nothing. On the day he had written to Maria Clemm, he had ridden out in a carriage with his intended bride. They visited one of the many libraries in the city, where a note was placed in Mrs. Whitman's hand. It was a “poison pen” letter of the most vicious kind, informing her “of many things in Mr. Poe's recent career” and in particular of his continued drinking. It may also have alluded to his association with Annie Richmond. This was too great a strain for Helen Whitman. When they returned to the Whitman home, she stupefied herself with ether and sank upon the sofa. Poe knelt down beside her, and begged for one word.
“What can I say?”
“Say that you love me, Helen.”
“I love you.”
Then the unhappy and confused woman collapsed into unconsciousness.
Poe had a less passionate interview with Mrs. Whitman's mother, in which she made it very clear that his presence was no longer required. The result was that he left the house, complaining of “intolerable insults,” and boarded the steamer to New York. He never saw Helen Whitman again.
It is a strange story, rendered even more bizarre by Poe's baffling and incoherent conduct. He was writing passionate and devoted letters to two women at the same time, promising undying love to both. He was like a cuttlefish floundering in its own ink. He had traduced his dead wife's memory. He had expressed the wish to die in Annie Richmond's arms; he had expressed something like infantile dependence upon both women. And, significantly, he knew well enough that both women were ultimately unobtainable. In that respect, at least, they resembled the idealised image of his own mother. There was one difference. To Helen, in his signatures, he was “Edgar.” To Annie, he was “Eddy.” It is as if two people inhabited the same body—the adult Edgar and the infant Eddy. It was Eddy who wrote that “I need not tell you, Annie, how great a burden is taken off my heart by my rupture with Mrs. W…”
There was one further complication. The family of Annie Richmond's husband lived in Providence, and were busily retelling all the gossip about Poe and Helen Whitman, including the information that Mrs. Whitman had withdrawn the marriage banns. This was untrue. The marriage banns had never been published at all. But the suspicion was, of course, that it was Mrs. Whitman, not Poe, who had sundered their relationship and that she had done so on the basis of some new evidence against him. Poe wrote to Helen Whitman towards the end of January 1849, explaining “that you Mrs. W have uttered, promulgated or in any way countenanced this pitiable falsehood, I do not & cannot believe … It has been my intention to say simply, that our marriage was postponed on account of your ill health.”
Perhaps on the same day Poe wrote to Annie Richmond complaining that “I felt deeply wounded by the cruel statements of your letter.” He enclosed his letter to Mrs. Whitman, which he had post-dated, asking Annie to read it, seal it, and send it on. It was his best opportunity of clearing his name. Helen Whitman never replied.
The Last Year
He was trying to look ahead. In February 1849 he wrote a relatively optimistic letter to his old friend Frederick Thomas, in which he claimed that “I shall be a litterateur at least all my life.” In the same period he told Annie Richmond that “I have not suffered a day to pass without writing from a page to three pages.” By the spring he completed the final version of “The Bells” and began the poem he entitled “Annabel Lee;” he was also writing one of his most peculiar stories, “Hop Frog,” about the vengeance wreaked by a dwarfish clown forced to entertain various noble and royal patrons. He also wrote a “hoaxing” story, “Von Kempelen and His Discovery,” on the possibility of turning lead into gold. He claimed that he had not been drinking and, indeed, that he was “in better health than I ever knew myself to be.” He and Maria Clemm had taken the cottage at Fordham for another year. There was another reason for confidence. A prospective patron for the Stylus had unexpectedly emerged. A young admirer of Poe, Edward Patterson of Oquawka, Illinois, had offered to subsidise a literary magazine under Poe's exclusive control. Poe wrote back in enthusiastic terms. All would be well.
But then there came the inevitable reaction. The journals, from which he had been hoping for funds for his contributions, collapsed one after the other. By April Poe had become once more seriously unwell. “I thought,” Maria Clemm wrote to Annie Richmond, “he would die several times.” He had relapsed into nervous despair. He reported to Annie that “my sadness is unaccountable, and this makes me the more sad. Nothing cheers or comforts me. My life seems wasted—the future looks a dreary blank.” It was the necessary response to that period of hysterical turmoil in his twin pursuit of Annie Richmond and Helen Whitman.
Yet once more he travelled down to Richmond, in order to deliver a series of lectures. He may also have welcomed the opportunity of renewing his approaches to Elmira Shelton, the wealthy widow who had once been his belle. And he wanted to find new subscribers for the proposed journal. “I am now going to Richmond,” he told one correspondent, “to ‘see about it.’ ”
So, on 29 June 1849, Maria Clemm saw him off on the steamboat to Philadelphia. His words of farewell, according to her memory, were “God bless my own darling Muddy do not fear for your Eddy see how good I will be while I am away from you, and will come back to love and comfort you.” He was, essentially, going home. She never saw him again.
• • •
He had intended to travel through Philadelphia on his way to Richmond, but a recurrence of his old sickness detained him. He began to drink. His suitcase, which contained two of the lectures he was about to deliver at Richmond, was lost at the railway station. This was not a good sign. The next two or three days are enveloped in a haze. Poe told Maria Clemm, in an hysterical letter written a week later from Philadelphia, that “I have been taken to prison once since I came here for getting drunk; but then I was not. It was about Virginia.” The only problem with his confession is that the available prison records sho
w no evidence of Poe ever being arrested. In turn it has been suggested that he was detained for his own safety; that he was recognised in court, and acquitted. But the most likely explanation seems to be that Poe was suffering from delirium tremens or some form of paranoiac hallucination.
On the day after his supposed arrest, for example, he called upon an old acquaintance, the engraver and publisher John Sartain, looking “pale and haggard, with a wild and frightened expression in his eyes.” He pleaded with him for protection and explained that “some men” were about to assassinate him. Then in his tormented state he entertained the prospect of suicide and asked Sartain for a razor. He wished only to shave off his moustache, however, so that he could escape detection from the possible murderers. Sartain then performed the deed with a pair of scissors. (Here we may entertain a cavil of doubt about Sartain's memory. Poe had a moustache on his arrival in Richmond soon afterwards.)
That evening they made an expedition to the local waterworks by the Schuylkill River where, according to Sartain's account, foolishly they mounted the steps to the reservoir. Poe then confided to him his visions, or hallucinations, while incarcerated in the Philadelphia jail. They included the sight of Maria Clemm being frightfully mutilated. He went into a “sort of convulsion,” and Sartain had to help him carefully down the steep steps to safety.
Poe stayed with his protector for two or three nights, and on the second morning he was recovered sufficiently to leave the house unaccompanied. On his return he confided that his recent delusions were “created by his own excited imagination.” Sartain may have already come to that conclusion. A few days later Poe wrote to Maria Clemm, complaining that “I have been so ill—have had the cholera, or spasms quite as bad.” He asked her to come to him immediately on receipt of the letter, with the ominous warning that “we can but die together. It is no use to reason with me now; I must die.” He sent the letter to the care of Sarah Anne Lewis, in Brooklyn, but Mrs. Lewis wisely did not pass it on to Maria Clemm. Mrs. Clemm, meanwhile, fretted and worried about poor Eddy.
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