The Poe Shadow

by Matthew Pearl

  A typical biographical account on Poe, which had increased as news of his death spread, might name some of his poems (“The Raven,” “Ulalume”), where he had been discovered (Ryan’s hotel and tavern, which on that day of election was also a polling place, at High and Lombard streets), when he had died (Sunday, October 7, in a hospital bed), and so on. More Poe-related articles began appearing in the larger presses of New York, Richmond, and Philadelphia that preferred events with a bit of sensation to them. I was able to find some of these mentions at our reading room. Mentions! Mentions indeed!

  His life was a regrettable failure. He was a gifted mind who squandered all his potential. Whose fantastical and affected poems and weird tales were too frequently tainted by the fatal, miserable fact of his life. He lived as a drunkard. Died a drunkard, a disgrace and a blackguard who injured sound morals through his writings. Not to be missed by many (said one New York journal). Not long to be remembered.

  Have a look with your own eyes:

  Edgar Allan Poe is dead. We have not learned the circumstances of his death. It was sudden, and from the fact that it occurred in Baltimore, it is to be presumed that he was on his return to New York. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it.

  I could not watch this desecration. I wanted to look away, yet at the same time I found myself thirsting to know everything that had been written, however unjust. (Or—think of the peculiarities of the human mind—the more unjust it was, the more I needed to see it, and the more unfair, the more essential it seemed to me!)

  Then came that cold, drizzling afternoon when the noon-day sky was the same at six in the morning as it would be at six at night. Fog everywhere. It drifted like fingers in your face and jabbed in your eyes and down your throat.

  I was on my way to the athenaeum reading rooms when a man bumped into me. He was approximately my height, and probably the age my father would have been. The stranger’s collision would not have normally seemed deliberate but for the fact that he had to coil his body in rather an unnatural way in order to extend his elbow against me. It was not a blow but rather a drifting tap, actually tender. I listened for an apology.

  Instead, there came this warning.

  “It is unwise to meddle with your lowly lies, Mr. Clark.”

  He flashed a glare at me that cut right through the dense air, and then, before I could think, he had vanished in the fog. I turned to look behind me as though he had been addressing someone else.

  No, he had said “Clark.” I was Quentin Hobson Clark, twenty-seven years old, an attorney chiefly in cases of mortgages and debt. I was Mr. Clark, and I had just been threatened.

  I did not know what to do. In my confusion, I had dropped my memorandum book, and it opened promiscuously on the ground. It was at that moment, retrieving it before it could be trampled by a mud-crusted heel, that I recognized how much I had been researching Poe. The name Poe was written on practically every page. I apprehended with sudden clarity what the stranger had meant. It was about Poe.

  I confess that my own response astonished me. I grew calm and collected, so notably calm that Peter would have grasped my hand with pride; that is, if this were relating to any other affair. I could never be a lawyer like Peter, a man who had passion for the dullest affidavit or suit, especially the dullest of them all. Though I had a respectably quick mind, ability could never outdo passion however much one memorized the pages of Blackstone and Coke. But in this moment, I had a client and I had a cause that I would not see extinguished. I felt like the finest lawyer ever known.

  Regaining my senses sufficiently I plunged into the crowd of umbrellas and soon located the back of the man. He had slowed to a stroll, almost a summer saunter! But I was deceived; this was not the same man. Upon gaining ground, I noticed that in the clouds of fog everyone looked approximately like the subject of my search, even the fairest ladies and darkest slaves. That creeping mist concealed and blended us together, disturbing the regulated order of the streets. And I own that each person tried their best to hold their heads and to stride in perfect indifferent imitation of that one man, that phantom.

  There on the corner a stream of gaslight broke through the thick air from a window half hidden underground. It came from the outside lamps of a tavern, and thinking this might be a beacon to attract someone of conniving motives, I rushed down and burst inside. I pushed through the clusters of men intent on their drinks, and at the end of a long row I saw one crumpled over a table. His once-fancy coat was just the one I’d noticed worn by my phantom.

  I took his arm. He weakly lifted his head and gave a start upon seeing my intent countenance.

  “A mistake. Sir. Sir! A grave mistake on my part!” he cried. His words died together drunkenly.

  This was not the man either.

  “Mr. Watchman,” a nearby inebriate explained to me in a sympathetic loud whisper. “That’s John Watchman. I drink to him, the poor fellow! And I drink to you, too, if you’d like.”

  “John Watchman,” I agreed, though at that point this name meant nothing to me (if I had seen it in the newspaper columns, it was with only passing attention). I left some copper coins for the continuation of the man’s indulgences, and quickly returned above to the street to press ahead with the search.

  I saw the true culprit revealed to me where the fog lessened. At one given time it seemed, in my distress, that all the inhabitants of the street were giving chase to him, summoning their courage to hunt him.

  Did I say our Phantom was my height? Yes, and that is true. But this is not to suggest that he resembled me in any way. Indeed, I was perhaps the only one on the streets then not bearing a strict similarity to my subject. I, with dusty hair of a color like the skin of a tree, which I kept well-groomed, and small, reasonable, clean-shaven features too often called boyish. He—this Phantom—had different proportions to his body. His legs seemed nearly double mine in length, so that however briskly I went along, I could not reduce that gap between us.

  As I ran through the prickly mist, I was filled with frantic and excitable thoughts with nothing tying them together except that they thrilled me beyond any logic. I collided with a shoulder, another, and once almost the entire body of a large man who could have flattened me out on the red brick of the side pavement. I slipped on a track of dirt, coating my left side with mud. After that I was all at once alone—nobody in sight.

  I stood perfectly still.

  Now that I’d lost my prey—or he had lost his—my eyes focused, as though I had put on a pair of spectacles. Here I was, not twenty yards away from it: the narrow Presbyterian burial ground, where the thin slabs of stone sloping out from the ground were only barely darker than the air. I tried to think whether the interloper had actually led me here through half of Baltimore as he fled my pursuit. Or had he been gone for the whole length of the chase, before I came near this place? This place where Edgar Poe now rested, but could not.

  Many years earlier, when I was but midway through my teen years, there was an incident on a train I should recount. I was riding with my parents. Although the ladies’ car permitted family members of women to sit with them, it was quite full, and only my mother was able to stay. I sat with my father a few cars away, and we walked through the train to visit Mother at regular intervals, into that compartment where no spitting and cursing could take place. After one such excursion, I returned to our seats ahead of Father and found two gentlemen in the seats moments ago occupied by us. I politely explained to the men their mistake. One of the men flew into a violent passion, warning me that I would have to “walk over his dead body” to get our seats back.

  “I shall do that very thing if you do not step aside,” I replied.

  “What did you say, lad?”

  And I repeated the same absurd statement with equal calm.

  Imagine me as rather a thin boy at fifteen—stringy, you can say. Typically, I might have begged the pardon of the occupant and diligently searched out inferior seats. You wonder m
eanwhile about the second interloper in this episode, the other thief of our seats. He, it appeared by a similar look around the eyes, was the brother of the first; from his bobbing head and stare, I believed him to be slow-witted.

  You may wonder also as to my reaction. I had been enveloped in my father’s presence shortly before. Father was always a sovereign to all around him. You see, in the moment, it was perfectly natural to me to assume that I, too, could adjust the world as fit my sense of things. This had been the sneaking nature of the delusion.

  I may as well finish the story. The villain did not stop landing severe blows to my face and head until my father’s return to the train car. Less than a minute later, my father and a conductor had banished the men into another train of the car to be removed at the next depot.

  “Now, what did you do, my boy?” my father asked me afterward as I lay prostrate across our seats in a haze.

  “I had to, Father! You were not here!”

  “You provoked someone. You might have been killed. What would you prove then, Quentin Hobson Clark?” I looked back at the blurry image of this man lecturing me, standing above me with his usual composure, and knew the difference between us.

  Now I thought of the new warning I had received. It is unwise to meddle… The Phantom’s image locked up my mind beside the demon of the train from my childhood. How I burned to talk about it! My great-aunt at this time was residing with me for a few days to help oversee the housekeeping. Could I tell Great-Auntie Clark about the threat?

  “You ought to have been caught young and trained carefully,” she would say—or something along those lines. She was a great-aunt on my father’s side, and applied the sternness of my father’s business principles to promoting sober behavior more generally. Great-Auntie Clark praised Father for his “strong Saxon thoughts.” Her affection for my father seemed to accrue partially to me, and she watched over me with dutiful vigilance.

  No, I did not tell Great-Auntie Clark and soon she had departed from Glen Eliza. (Could I have told my father if he were alive?)

  I wanted to tell Hattie Blum. She had always been pleased to hear of my personal enterprises. She alone had been able to speak to me after my parents’ deaths in a tone and confidence that understood that though my parents had died, they were not corpses to me. Yet, as I had not seen her since the day we were supposed to have been engaged, I could not fathom how she would perceive my interest in this.

  In a way, the Phantom’s words attracted as much as they startled me. It is unwise to meddle with your lowly lies. Though he was warning me away, the cryptic words acknowledged that the perception of Poe could be meddled with—in other words, they could still be changed by me. In a way, that warning encouraged me.

  I felt an excitement that was only remotely familiar and only half unwanted. It was different from anything I had known in our work.

  One long afternoon at the office I sat looking at the street from my desk. Peter was nearby. He was in the middle of reprimanding our copying clerk over the quality of some affidavit when he glanced over at me. He returned to his speech, then glanced abruptly at me again. “All right, Quentin?”

  It was a habit of mine that I occasionally fell into a sort of staring spell, glaring in the air at nothing in particular. Peter was especially fascinated and appalled whenever these reveries occurred. He noisily shook the bag of ginger-nuts I’d been eating. “All right, Quentin?”

  “All right,” I assured him. “Tolerably well, Peter.” Upon seeing that I would say no more, he returned to the clerk with the precise word of reprimand where he had left off.

  I could no longer keep buttoned up. “All right, certainly! If there is anything all right about being threatened!” I cried out suddenly. “All wrong!” Peter quietly dismissed our clerk, who gratefully scurried from the room. When we were alone, every detail spilled from my tongue. Peter sat at the edge of his chair, listening with interest. At first, he even shared in the thrill of the incident, but soon enough remembered himself. He declared the Phantom nothing but a cracked lunatic.

  I somehow felt the need to defend, even commend the threatening party. “No, Peter, he was no lunatic in the least! In his eyes was a rational purpose of some kind—a rare intelligence.”

  “What cloak-and-dagger business! Why—? Why should he bother to—? What, one of our mortgage cases?”

  I responded with a hoarse laughter that seemed to offend Peter—as though denying a would-be lunatic’s potential interest in our mortgage disputes devalued the whole legal profession. But I was sorry for the tone, and I more calmly explained that this affair was something to do with Edgar Poe; I explained that I had been studying clippings about Poe and had noticed important inconsistencies.

  “For instance, there is the common innuendo, the suggestion, that Poe died of his ‘fatal weakness,’ they say, meaning drinking. Yet who was a witness? Hadn’t some of the same newspapers reported, only a few weeks earlier, Poe joining the Sons of Temperance in Richmond and successfully keeping their oath?”

  “A thorough scamp and a poet, that Edgar Poe! To read him is like being in a charnel-house and breathing the air.”

  “You say you never read him, Peter!”

  “Yes, and that’s precisely why! I would not be half surprised if more people never read him each day. Even the titles of his tales are nightmares. Just because you cared about him, Quentin Clark, should that mean anyone else did? None of this is about Poe, it is about you wanting it to be about Poe! Why, this warning you think you heard surely had nothing to do with him at all, except in some disordered current of your mind!” He threw his hands in the air.

  Perhaps Peter was right; the Phantom hadn’t specifically said anything pertaining to Poe. Could I be so certain? Yet I was. Someone wanted me to stop inquiring into Poe’s death. I knew someone had to hold the truth of what had happened to Poe here in Baltimore, and that is what others must have feared. I had to find that truth to know why.

  One day, I was checking over some of the scrivener’s copies of an important contract. A clerk thrust his head into my office.

  “Mr. Clark. Mr. Poe. Here.”

  Startled, I demanded to know what he meant.

  “From Mr. Poe,” he repeated, waving a piece of paper in front of his face.

  “Oh!” I gestured to him for the letter. It was from one Neilson Poe.

  The name had been familiar to me from the newspapers as a local attorney representing many defaulters and petty thieves and criminals in court and, for a time, as a director on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad committee. Addressing a note to Neilson a few days earlier, I had asked whether the man was a relative of the poet Edgar Poe’s, and had requested an interview.

  In this reply, Neilson thanked me for my interest in his relation but averred that professional duties made any appointment impossible for some weeks. Weeks! Frustrated, I recalled an item about Neilson Poe I had read in the latest court columns of the newspapers and quickly gathered up my coat.

  Neilson, according to the paper’s advance report of the day’s activities at court, was at that very moment defending a man, Cavender, who had been indicted for assault with attempt to commit an outrage against a young woman. The Cavender case had already adjourned for the day when I reached the courthouse, so I looked in the prisoners’ cells that were housed in its cellar. Addressing a police officer with my credentials as an attorney, I was directed to the cell of Mr. Cavender. Inside the chamber, which was dark and small, a man garbed as a prisoner sat in deep communion with one wearing a fine suit and a lawyer’s fixed expression of calm. There was a stone jug of coffee and a plate of white bread.

  “Rough day at court?” I asked collegially from the other side of the prison bars.

  The man in the suit rose from the bench inside the cell. “Who are you, sir?” he asked.

  I offered my hand to the man I had first seen at the funeral on Greene and Fayette. “Mr. Poe? I am Quentin Clark.”

  Neilson Poe was a short, clean-shav
en man with an intelligent brow almost as wide as the one shown in portraits of Edgar, but with sharper, ferret-like features and quick, dark eyes. I imagined Edgar Poe’s eyes having more of a flash, and a positively opaque glow at times of creation and excitement. Still, this was a man who, at a casual glance in these dim surroundings, could almost have doubled for the great poet.

  Neilson signaled to his client that he would be stepping outside the cell for a few moments. The prisoner, whose head had been in his hands the moment before, rose to his feet with sudden animation, watching his defender’s exit.

  “If I’m not mistaken,” Neilson said to me as the guard locked the prisoner’s door, “I’d written you in my note that I was pressed with business, Mr. Clark.”

  “It is important, dear Mr. Poe. Regarding your cousin.”

  Neilson set his hands stiffly on some court documents, as though to remind me there was more pressing business at hand.

  “Surely this is a topic of personal interest to you,” I ventured.

  He squinted at me with impatience.

  “The topic of Edgar Poe’s death,” I said to explain it better.

  “My cousin Edgar was wandering about restlessly, looking for a life of true tranquillity, a life as you or I are fortunate enough to possess, Mr. Clark,” Neilson said. “He had already squandered that possibility long ago.”

  “What of his plans to establish a first-rate magazine?”

  “Yes…plans.”

  “He would have accomplished it, Mr. Poe. He worried only that his enemies would first—”

  “Enemies!” he cut me short. Neilson then paused as his eyes widened at me. “Sir,” he said with a new air of caution, “tell me, what is your particular interest in this that you would come down into this gloomy cellar to find me?”

  “I am—I was his attorney, sir,” I said. “I was to defend his new magazine from attacks of libel. If he did have enemies, sir, I should like very much to know who they were.”