by Kim Newman
Upon my writing desk is a gruesome object in the form of a volume: cheaply produced, ill-set, carelessly glued; issued not a year or two gone, but misdated through ignorance of the correct use of roman numerals. Less an edition than a falling from the presses, this book – for such we must call the damned thing, though so to do assaults our sensitive bibliophile vitals – is cast out to stalls and stores, for the penurious and the ignorant. It might be gawped over for an hour or two before its pages loosen like the leaves of October and are spilled in the streets. Upon its thin, ready-warped board cover is a rough, ugly woodcut: a grinning skull with eye-sockets too small, a downcast black bird with wings too large. And the title of this gathering of butcher’s paper, as given on the ready-yellowed, coarse frontispiece, is:
TALES AND POEMS
by Edgar Allen Poe
Tales and Poems need not concern us. The texts are a mish-mash, lifted entire through ingenious photographic process from several other editions so the face and size of type changes from page to page, from story to poem. Of course, many errors and misprintings are carelessly scattered throughout the copy, like seed strewn for chickens.
And there, on the frontispiece is the arch-error, the primal misprint, the eternal slip of the pen. Since I second ventured into the arena of print, dropping the dignified anonymity of ‘A Bostonian’ – for so I signed my first published work, Tamerlane and Other Poems – to speak up for myself and proudly state my own, true name, to stand by my work and dare the world to take it and myself as they would, this has plagued me.
Edgar Allen Poe
Allen! Edgar Allen Poe! All-damned Allen! Always Allen, always. Allen! Allen! Allen! Though it is the work of a devil of the printer’s variety, I cannot but think it also the product of the machinations of another of his breed, of more sulphurous and princely-yet-tenebrous mien.
Never am I rid of this phantom of my own making. The dreadful double has dogged me through the allotted span of my life and persisted even beyond the supposed release of widely reported death. Edgar Allen Poe mocks my aspirations to Art and Science, unpicks the threads of my tapestry, gnaws ratlike at the foundations of my endeavour.
Allen is my imp of the perverse, my goblin damned, my ravening ghoul, my frightful fiend.
For the love of God, shall I never be rid of E. Allen Poe!
I concede that the Allen is my own fault, that he is my creation. All evil that he is comes from within me, and he is all that is base and degraded in my person. Yet he has a damnable life of his own, beyond my conscious influence, and directed entirely towards the destruction of my self, my reputation.
What is a man’s name if not his reputation, his soul?
Each time his name appears in print, my own is devalued, trodden into charnel filth and forgotten.
The appearance of Allen is not confined to cheap, pirated editions that skim my most renowned works and pass them off as the ravings of a madman and a degenerate. Allen appears in learned commentaries, obituaries, scholarly histories, popular lectures, biographies and bibliographies, broadsheets and magazines, the credits of motion pictures and television programmes, the collections of major universities, articles in every manner of publication, private letters that have strayed into the public purview, numberless schoolboy essays and compositions, plaques and honours and monuments. Immortalised a thousand thousand times, he is carried abroad through media undreamed-of at the time of his, and my, first fame. The thousand-and-third tale of Scheherazade is of his rise to prominence in this fabulous age of futurity.
Edgar Allen Poe rules, as the graffito has it; and I, le vrais emble Edgar Poe, am lost, forgotten and impugned, cursed and doomed.
Like many of my sorrows, this has its beginning in the actions of the man who was never my father and acted, indeed, as no father to me.
I write, with distaste bitter still after more than a century and a half, of John Allan, of the trading house of Allan and Ellis. Upon the deaths of my true parents, David and Eliza Poe, I was taken as a babe into the house of Allan, a golden orphan, an ornament for the philistine businessman. With the death of his own wife, the devoted Frances, Allan began a programme of calculated torture by hope, dangling before me the prospect of wealth enough to support my literary endeavours but always snatching it away. My early failures, at university and West Point, can all be laid at the door of this Torquemada of the Modern Age, who mockingly refused either to cut me off and cast me out entirely or to finance properly my launch upon the literary world to which unasked-for poetical genius fit me.
When I was but two years of age, this creature prised apart my given name – Edgar Poe, honest and simple Edgar Poe of distinguished lineage – with prehensile fingers like those of a great orangutan, and spat in his own patronymic, marking me for ever as a man with three names (one invariably misspelled).
This is the most hideous irony of the situation. I care not for the name Allan and wish it were not mine. Truly, he had no right to force it upon me. In railing against the malforming error of Allen-for-Allan, I defend not myself but the man who more than any other mortal sought to ruin me, to stand between me and my rightful position.
Allan! John Allan! I only ever signed myself Edgar Allan Poe when communicating with my soi-disant stepfather, usually in signing missives stating my desperate need for funds, in the hope of pricking his elephant hide to awaken a conscience that was in him stillborn. Such letters were invariably unanswered, perhaps left in the rack for weeks on end as John Allan pursued his own mean pleasures. I understand that, in the writings composed during what is generally reckoned my lifetime, there survive only two minor instances of my use of the name Edgar Allan Poe, both from a period when I was unwisely tossing good emotional currency after bad by attempting reconciliation with a man beyond all decent feeling.
Many tales and poems and publications did I sign Edgar A. Poe. This, I admit, in mournful and never-ending remembrance. This, even, was a grievous, ruining error. I was born Edgar Poe. I am known as such to this day in that congenial country France – the only blessed dominion where American geniuses on the scale of myself and the estimable Mr Lewis are fully understood and appreciated.
I should never have succumbed to the temptation of a middle initial. It is a sheer puffery, whereby many authors of mediocre reputation and talents attempt to inflate their own by-line to something with cachet, with status.
He speaks a profound truth who warns you to beware authors – and especially authoresses, most especially my countrywomen – with three names. It seems these thrice-named ones are often afflicted with a peculiar and unwholesome compulsion to foist upon the public their maunderings in as many volumes as they have names, and indeed to pile upon such trilogies with additional instalments unpromised and unsought-for until the shelves of the booksellers groan with heartfelt pain.
I should have abandoned even the token of Allan’s name, that odious initial, that alien and alienating A. I am and was proud of the Poes that came before me, the Revolutionary general and the great star of the stage. I found my only safe harbour amongst the circle of their relatives, my cousin-wife Virginia Clemm (my own darling Sissy) and her mother, Maria Clemm (my devoted Muddy). Yet – I curse my weakness and vanity, my shameful need for cash and the acute embarrassment of living always in a state of genteel beggary – the Poes were much reduced in circumstances, through no fault of theirs, and John Allan was, through no endeavour of his own, colossally rich. A wealthy uncle died and left him a hoard of Croesus, a fabulous treasure beyond even that secreted by the pirate Captain Kidd. The gold tempted me, prevented me from breaking fully with this cruel man.
With money, what might I not have done? My cherished project, a true literary magazine for America, might have come to fruition and proved a very great success, much to the benefit of the culture of my homeland, which has – for the want of an influence such as The Stylus might have provided – descended into a barbarous, illiterate and nightmarish stew of ignorance and vulgarity beyond even the
blackest of my black imaginings. The Stylus would have proved a forum for the highest of artistic and political debate; it could have presented reasoned, definitive answer to those abolitionist fanatics who so dreadfully sundered the country but a decade after I passed from public notice, inflicting upon it a rapine from which it has never fully recovered and elevating to wasteful mastery the brutish and barely human blacks who were in my youth so properly and mercifully chained. If we had been blessed with an income, my Sissy, rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Virginia, might have received proper medical attention and survived beyond her tragically brief lifespan, to bear me sons and daughters who would have carried on my name and done me honour.
Allan denied me, denied America, these blessings.
Yet, each time I was on the point of abandoning entirely all hope of aid from that quarter, some crumb, some trickle, would come from John Allan. By keeping the ghost of his name within mine, and with each appearance of my name in print above a tale or a poem or an article or a work of criticism, I maintained the limping, lagging last of our relations.
John Allan passed out of my life, married again and with fat, bawling new heirs for his fortune. But, as he rode off in his gilded carriage to undeserved bliss, another appeared and crept from the shadows to torment me.
Edgar Allen Poe.
I cannot remember when he first appeared. It could not have been in any periodical for which I laboured in an editorial position: The Southern Literary Messenger, Graham’s Magazine or The Broadway Journal. I was a proofreader of unmatched skill, as even those of my colleagues who became my bitterest foes would have been forced to acknowledge. When the matter was within my influence, I insisted upon the initial only, not the full name. Edgar A. Poe was safe, but Edgar Allan Poe was a dangerous venture which so often rebounded upon me.
No, Edgar Allen Poe must have been born in some other connection. Scratched on an envelope by a barely literate tradesman, over one of the damnable reminders that elaborately brought to my attention some debt as if it were possible that I could with honour forget such a matter. Or perhaps it was printed above one of the many, many – mostly anonymous with the full cowardice such implies – attacks upon my work and character issued in publications that were the despicable organs of that canting gaggle of fools, knaves, toadies and dunderheads who then – as now! – made American letters their own frog pond, croaking at each other and their pitifully few indentured readers; all the while contriving to do down and push under any truly original, important voice.
Was there initially malign intent? Surely, the first to have made the mistake – the common mistake, I have heard it called, though how such a lingering and deadly blight could ever be a commonality is beyond the confines even of my notoriously fevered brain – could not have known. No, it was repetition that had the power to bring into the world the fiend who built upon the foundations of John Allan and worked so devotedly towards my utter degradation and ruin.
At first, when grotesque tales reached me, I was indignant, certain that lies were being propagated by my so-called friends and acquaintances. Of course, none dared repeat such calumnies to my face, but I was always sensitive to whisperings, perhaps unnaturally so. His voice, Allen’s, is always a whisper, a low, distinct and never-to-be-forgotten whisper which thrills to the very marrow of my bones, the whisper of a man dead yet unable to depart his mummifying corpse.
The world knows, or thinks it knows, my story. After my final break with Allan, I was forced to embark upon a perilous and rarely remunerative career in the employ of the periodicals of the day, all the while hoping in vain to combine pursuit of literary excellence with the plebeian necessity of earning a daily buck. Sole support of my sickly wife and her helpless mother, I took a succession of positions with a succession of publications, making fortunes for bloated and idle owners but not myself, and losing through my drunkenness or stubborn pride each employment, leaving behind only tales and poems that have lasted to this day and bad debts. It has been said, over and over, that I was a slave to the demon drink, that my condition was such that even a single glass of wine was enough to spin my brain into a frenzy, to send me on a binge that might last days and during which I was as one possessed, capable of any vice or insult, a terror to my friends and foes alike, yet so addicted to such stimulus that I would continue imbibing even to the point of physical collapse and, finally, death.
That, I maintain, was him.
Edgar Allen Poe.
Not I. Not Edgar Poe. Not, and it pains me to type the name to which I should never have laid claim, Edgar Allan Poe.
It was in Philadelphia, or perhaps New York, and after my Sissy had suffered the terrible onset of consumption, a vein in her throat exploding as her voice was raised in song, but before that dread disease took her away from me and robbed me of all hope for future happiness. I was writing so much and so fast that my fingers were permanently grooved by the pen and my hand was wrung with constant pain. Suddenly, without premonition, I was no longer welcome in the offices of publications with which I had hitherto enjoyed a cordial connection. The private homes of many were similarly closed to me, and the staff of certain hostelries or stores began to give me a wide berth in the street.
Had I somehow, unknown to myself, been transformed into a pariah?
I overheard stories of my exploits. I had assaulted this prominent novelist with a savage fury, importuned the wife of that noted editor with unbelievable licence. More than once, I found Sissy in tears and had to coax from her the substance of some misdeed she had overheard ascribed to me. I found myself dunned by bills – yes, in that hated phantom name, but with my actual address – that I knew for certain I had never run up.
There was only one possible conclusion, the impossibility that I might unknowingly be the subject of these fantastic tales having been justly excluded.
My double was at large, wrecking my life.
My doppelganger, as the Germans put it. Identical in every outward aspect, but inside a prodigy of evil, a warped mirror of my own self.
Many times, I was driven from home and position by Edgar Allen. He was a brawler and a drunkard, but possessed of the same canny intelligence that fired my own genius. I might be a pioneer among poets, but he was first among degenerates, as devoted to his calling as I to mine.
I set out to find him, and put an end to this sorry business between us. I knew he could be no more than a projection, a ghost before his time, escaped from my body but attached by a golden thread. If I were to snap him back, I would be free of him and he of me. We would be one mind, one soul. I was confident that I had the force of intellect and strength of character to deal with any ill influence he might have upon my thoughts.
It seemed that he was always just out of my sight. I might arrive at a place mere moments after his passing, which often put me in the position of answering for his misdeeds. My pursuit was dangerous, leading me to the receipt of many an unearned thrashing. Sissy and Muddy would tend my wounds, and worry over me, but my beautiful Sissy – her life leaking slowly, agonisingly away in a poetical tragedy of the first water – was in no condition to consider my poor health before her own. The walls appeared to be closing in on me and mine, and the scythe of death swished closer, ever closer, above the head of her whom I loved the most in all the world. It became paramount that I finish with this Allen, for only when he was a barely discernible heartbeat within the tomb of my mind would I be free to devote full energies to my husbandly duties and to the higher work of literature.
As dogged and perspicacious as any detective, I traced the impostor through reasoning. He led me from place to place, to other cities, and I apprehended that Allen was as intent on evading as Edgar was on ensnaring. In clues – the torn corner of a page scrawled with words in a caricature of my own hand, a button that upon examination I found missing from my own army greatcoat, lines of obscene verse scratched on the underside of a table in a low grog-shop – I found messages from him to me, from Edgar Allen to
Edgar Poe. He could not bring himself to vanish into the mists, for he needed me at his heels to give his life purpose. Eventually, in dreadful and depthless despair, I realised he had almost won his final victory. In following him, I was compelled to venture into the dens of vice he frequented, and forced into many of the wretched habits that were his. Stories went back to Sissy and Muddy of me being seen in such-and-such a sinkhole of drunkenness and depravity; now, these tales were, in all particulars, sadly true.
The worst came when, after weeks in search of Edgar Allen, I decided finally to abandon the pursuit entirely. I purged myself of the obsession, and determined to let my rival go his own way. I would elevate my name so far above his that he could do me no harm. I returned to our poor home, bedraggled from my adventures and in a sorry state, to discover from Muddy that I was already in residence, closeted with Sissy, and that I had been so for some days.
Oh terror beyond imagining!
My home, shared with such tender and innocent souls, I had thought inviolate, off-limits as we said at West Point. Yet now it was transformed at a lightning strike into a haunt of horrors, each familiar item of furniture or crockery becoming a mocking grotesque. My limbs would not serve me as I dashed for the stairs, and I seemed to plunge into a maelstrom of churning darkness. Our cat, a wise and humorous presence suddenly become a fire-eyed imp, was between my ankles, stretching out to undo my balance. Muddy, full as ever of concern for her Eddy, rushed to support me. At first bewildered by what she took to be my bilocation, that good woman became affrighted that I had fallen from an upstairs window and received ill-treatment, perhaps under the hooves of a horse, in the street. I found myself struggling with my wife’s mother, a true mother to me, and terrifying her with my cries. The cat joined in with the sounding of ferocious mewls, rendering my already-taut nerves like the strings of a violin sawed at by the devil’s fiddler.