The Poe Shadow

by Matthew Pearl

  Duponte continued: “Back to our train. Poe has separated from his friend—who, let us suppose, leaves the train first, or merely returns to a different carriage. Distressed at his physical shakiness, Poe is observed by a solicitous railroad conductor, who determines that Poe has become ill—how, the conductor cannot know. This conductor for whatever reason presumes Poe is more likely to have some persons as caretakers back in Baltimore, or Poe perhaps mumbles something interpreted in this fashion by the conductor. The conductor, seeing this as an opportunity to be benevolent, places Poe in an opposite-moving train at the next depot (as I notice Americans always call your stations), perhaps at Havre de Grace.

  “With this in mind, we may think of the facts at the hospital with more confidence. Poe replies to the doctor’s questions that he does not know how he has come to Baltimore or why—he cannot explain these facts. It is not because of successive days of bingeing. Nor is it because he has been given opiates by political fiends, as the Baron says. It is because Poe refers to his second arrival to Baltimore, after he had left, and had been in a cloud of confusion about how he ended up on a train back. We have thus countered the temperance press’s claims about Poe, as well as the Baron’s argument that Poe had to be kidnapped by a political club.”

  I could see how we had demonstrated the temperance claims untrue, but had not related this to the Baron’s argument. I proposed the question to Duponte.

  “Do you recall the Baron’s conclusion on this point, Monsieur Clark, as you wrote it down in your book?”

  I did.

  The political rogues of the Fourth Ward Whigs, who kept their headquarters in the den of the Vigilant Fire Company’s engine house across from Ryan’s, placed the helpless poet in a cellar with other unfortunates—vagrants, strangers, loafers (as Americans say), foreigners. This explains why Poe, a heartily well-known author, was not seen by anyone over the course of these few days.

  “Do you see, touching the issue of recognition, the Baron’s misplaced logic? As a result of the Baron’s own actions in relation to the press of Baltimore and elsewhere, and because of the numerous biographical volumes and articles since Poe’s death, Poe’s portrait has been widely circulated among the masses and his visage becomes known even as his death has begun to be studied. But before this, when Poe was alive, he would have been recognized, as a rule, only by literary fellows and avid readers, who at the very least would have been somewhat less likely to be out in the street and more likely to spend their daylight hours indoors, in offices, libraries, and reading rooms. Thus, that Poe was not reported to be seen over the course of these days becomes far less surprising, if even at all notable. Moreover, as he was a visitor to Baltimore, in an unannounced stay, no one would have anticipated seeing Poe around the city, even among his relations. This, if we think of the way of the human mind and eye, greatly reduces recognition. Have you ever had occasion to notice how, when you unexpectedly happened upon a close friend in a locale where you did not expect to see him, some greater than usual amount of time was required to register the identity of this person in your brain—indeed, more time than if you had seen someone with whom you were far less intimate? For the latter’s status remains closer to the stranger on the street, and thus more easily identified among them.

  “This is a general fault that the newspapers make, too, Monsieur Clark. Re-peruse the New York Herald extract and you will see.”

  I opened my memorandum book, where I had written the testimony I had planned to give to the court that day. The relevant portion from the week of Poe’s death, written by their correspondent in Baltimore, read as follows:

  On last Wednesday, election day, he was found near the Fourth Ward polls laboring under an attack of mania a potu, and in a most shocking condition. Being recognized by some of our citizens, he was placed in a carriage and conveyed to the Washington Hospital, where every attention has been bestowed on him.

  “You notice the fault, don’t you, Monsieur Clark? The correspondent from Baltimore tries hard to maintain facts in their true form. For instance, it is quite accurate and specific that Poe was placed in a carriage by others who did not drive with him, as we shall witness shortly. And yet we know, on the other hand, that Poe was not recognized by citizens. This has been written down for us by a first-hand witness.”

  “Do you mean the note from Walker to Dr. Snodgrass, which we found among Snodgrass’s papers?”

  “I do. Walker writes, ‘There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan’s 4th Ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress’ and so on. To Walker, Poe is ‘a gentleman’; it is only through some communication by Poe of his proper name that Walker knows who to tell Snodgrass is in distress. Indeed, Walker’s language—‘who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe’—suggests he has some suspicions that the man is called something else entirely! As though it were an alias. Should he not write, ‘The gentleman Edgar A. Poe appears in great distress’ instead?”

  At Duponte’s request, I continued reciting to him the Baron’s account of Poe’s last days.

  “The miscreants probably drugged Poe with various opiates. When election day came, they took him around the city to various polling stations. They forced him to vote for their candidates at each polling venue and, to make the whole farce more convincing, the poet was made to wear different outfits each time. This explains why he was found in ragged, soiled clothes never meant to fit him. He was permitted by the rogues to keep his handsome Malacca cane, however, for he was in such a weakened state that even those ruffians recognized that the cane would be needed to prop him up…. In fact, he would be found with this very cane….”

  Duponte, listening to this, pointed out with some satisfaction that the Baron’s argument, though clever, seeks to find a reason for Poe’s location at an election polling station and for Poe’s clothing, rather than to use reason to find the truth behind that location and appearance.

  “Without a home, in a place where his family once lived, where some of his family lived still, the effect on Poe’s senses to be back in Baltimore, where he was once most at home—combined with the effects of his single indulgence in the company of Z. Collins Lee or another friend—is to make him now feel utterly alone. Without shelter he has no choice but to walk through the dreadful rain looking for it, thus soaking his clothing and exposing him to the onset of any number of additional maladies. You have already seen first-hand, I believe, the special quality of clothing most people fail to consider. When soaked, we say of our clothes, ‘My shirt is useless, it is ruined.’ Unlike any other ‘ruined’ article, its desolation, shall we say, like the great Sphinx, is temporary; you have seen that these special qualities allow Poe to trade his own outfit for dry clothes, which of course do not fit him as does a usual tailored outfit. This occurred likely near Ryan’s. We may note that of all the detailed descriptions of Poe’s clothes upon his discovery, for all the adjectives chosen to show his dejection, none call the dress wet, though this should be the first word otherwise used. The special cane with the expensively designed sword we know Poe did not sell or trade—for even in his state of mind he remembered that it did not belong to him. He had to take care to return it to its owner, Dr. Carter, in Richmond. It was his dignity, not his fear of violence, that kept his friend’s cane clutched to his chest.

  “In considering Poe at Ryan’s hotel, we now reach the Baron’s suspicion of the Herring family, George and Henry. It will not do, as the Baron would have it, to confuse collateral events with the subject of our inquiry. As you have observed in your report to me after hearing the account of Dr. Snodgrass, when Dr. Snodgrass saw Poe’s condition, he walked upstairs to secure a room for Poe before sending for Poe’s relatives, whom he knew lived in the vicinity. Yet no sooner had Snodgrass done this than Henry Herring was standing at the foot of the stairs—before Snodgrass had sent for him. Snodgrass, occupied with his private concerns and with the state of Poe’s health, did not seem to thin
k much of this startling fact when relating it in your presence. But we know better.

  “George Herring, Henry’s uncle, has been identified as the president of the Whigs of the Fourth Ward, the group who used Ryan’s hotel on several occasions in the weeks before the election for a rally, including once two days before the election. The Baron makes the assumption that after such efforts, George Herring would have also certainly been at Ryan’s, this Whig fortress, on election day itself, the day Poe was found. In this his reasoning is sound. However, the Baron then determines that Henry and George Herring, knowing that Edgar Poe experienced bad effects from any intoxicant, conspired to chose him to ‘coop’ and thus become one of their voters to be brought throughout the city.”

  “Still, it is remarkably coincidental, I would venture to say suspicious, Monsieur Duponte, if George and Henry Herring were both present at Ryan’s before Dr. Snodgrass even called for Poe’s relatives!”

  “There is one coincidental event there, Monsieur Clark, and this one in fact is rather merely a coincidence, and renders the other occurrence quite natural. The coincidence I mean is George Herring’s presence in the same place that Poe is discovered. George Herring is here because he is the president of the Fourth Ward Whigs, and Ryan’s is the Fourth Ward polling station on that day. His presence is natural. Why Poe is present here we will address in a moment. Henry Herring is Poe’s cousin by marriage, to a woman who has now been deceased for some years; and whose decease was followed, very shortly after, by another marriage, contributing, we can presume, to Poe’s characterization of Monsieur Henry in a letter as a man of ‘unprincipled character.’ Generally speaking, then, Poe ends up in quite a threefold busy place—that is, a hotel, tavern, and polling station—with a man who is the uncle of a former cousin. I fear this is not in itself so much a coincidence as the Baron would like.

  “At all events, the Baron proposes that George Herring selects Poe to be a member of this voting coop because Monsieur George possesses from his family knowledge of Poe’s vulnerability when under the influence of even normal intoxicants. A notorious idea! Because Monsieur George is likely to know of Poe’s unpredictability with intoxicants, that would be the precise reason not to choose Poe for a coop, where only men who could tolerate alcohol well would do!

  “But, leaving behind the Baron’s tales of the coop, we return to our so-called coincidences. Given that George Herring would have some knowledge and perhaps acquaintance with Poe through Henry Herring, upon seeing Poe in distress, Monsieur George would almost certainly send for Monsieur Henry Herring. Our mere coincidence, the presence of George Herring and Edgar Poe in the same tri-purpose building, gives rise very naturally to our second incident, the odd arrival of Henry Herring before Snodgrass has called for him.

  “And what mean the subsequent events that led to Poe’s being sent to the hospital? Snodgrass has offered to engage a room upstairs in the hotel portion of the building. George Herring would not want Poe to stay at Ryan’s in poor condition, for as Whig president he would want to avoid precisely the sort of accusations of fraudulent or rough use of voters that the Baron would in fact later allege. Henry Herring was not particularly a boon companion to Poe, as the Baron is right to say—and would rather not invite Poe to his house, where Monsieur Henry still remembers with disapproval Poe’s courtship of his daughter Elizabeth years before. Snodgrass could not remember whether there were one or two relatives of Poe’s at Ryan’s—this is almost certainly because both Henry and George Herring stood before him. Poe is therefore sent to the hospital, whose attendants then send word to Neilson Poe.”

  “If there was nothing insidious, if the Herrings did nothing, Monsieur Duponte, then why would Henry Herring and Neilson Poe, cousin to Henry Herring as well as Edgar Poe, be so reluctant to speak on the matter, or for the police to make inquiries?”

  “You have answered your question in asking it, Monsieur Clark. Because they did nothing—that is, strikingly little—they had no wish to call attention to the matter. Think of it. George and then Henry Herring were present even before Dr. Snodgrass, and did nothing. When something was done, it was to send Poe to the hospital alone, in the prostrate position across the carriage seats. They forgot, even, to pay the driver, as you heard from Dr. Moran. They have sealed his fate, too, by assuming Poe was merely boozy, and excessively in liquor, for they no doubt passed this assumption to the doctors through the note that accompanied Poe to the hospital—so that the care given to the patient, rather than for the complex illness and perhaps multitude of illnesses that have set in from his exhaustion and exposure, would be that superficial kind given to all those who come in with too much drink. Neilson Poe came to the hospital, but could not even see the patient.

  “This narrative is not one of pride for the family, particularly for an ambitious man like Monsieur Neilson, who did not want to tarnish the name Poe. This explains, too, the lack of attempt from the family to produce a larger funeral. They would not wish to draw attention to their roles in his final days, nor wish to remind anyone that Edgar Poe himself had formerly said caustic words about both Henry Herring and Neilson Poe. There is some ‘shame’ in it, which is the word Snodgrass writes in his poem on the subject. The methods by which it is often necessary to understand someone’s motives are not by what they have done, but what they have simply omitted to do and neglected to consider.”

  “And yet,” continued Duponte, “the Baron is not wholly misguided in looking to the fact of Poe’s discovery falling on an election day as more than chance. The Baron wishes to find cause and effect; we, on the other hand, shall look for cause and cause. How, monsieur, would you describe the city of Baltimore on days elections are held?”

  “A bit unpredictable,” I admitted, “wild at times. Dangerous, in certain quarters. But does this mean Poe was kidnapped?”

  “Of course not. The mistake of men like the Baron, who apply their giddy thoughts to creating violence, is to imagine that most violence contains sense and reason, when, by its nature, this is just what it is lacking. Yet we must not dismiss the secondary effects that may come from outside disruptions. Think of Monsieur Poe. Exposed to the deplorable weather, having failed to secure the ready money from Philadelphia, his constitution weakened and confused by his single glass of spirits, Poe would have been vulnerable to the greatest detriments to our health: first, fear, and second, dread.

  “Now, those local newspapers that you went out to collect shortly after our arrival from Paris, will you put them on this table?”

  The first cutting that Duponte selected was from the Baltimore Sun, October 4, the day after the election. Very little excitement, it read, reporting the events of the election. We heard of no disturbance of the polls or elsewhere.

  Another cutting from the same day read as follows:

  Yesterday afternoon a fellow with about as much liquor in him as he could conveniently carry, stationed himself at the foot of Lexington market, and for an hour assailed and assaulted every man that passed by, all of whom, very fortunately for the poor inebriate, appeared to be exceedingly good-natured, or they would have “tripped him up.” He struck several of them in the face, but they forbore to resent it on account of his having “seen the elephant.” He afterwards went in a tavern, and thence proceeded to the office of Justice Root, which was closed (it being dinner hour) seeking perhaps for justice.

  And finally this, reported of the same afternoon:

  Assault. About dusk on Wednesday evening, as a carriage containing four persons amongst whom was Mr. Martin Rudolph, engineer of the steamer Columbia, was proceeding past the corner of Lombard and Light Street, some atrocious miscreant threw a large stone, which struck Mr. R on the head, fortunately occasioning nothing more than a severe bruise.

  “The first article,” Duponte said, “insists there was no disturbance anywhere in the city. Yet here, separately, we find some samples of what we can only label disturbances. You see, in a newspaper, especially the finest ones, one hand hardly not
ices the other or, rather, one column hardly notices the other, and so only by reading the entire newspaper—never just a single article—can we claim to have done any reading at all. They likely were told of the lack of disturbances by some policeman. Police in Europe want all criminals to know they are there; police in America want people to believe there are no criminals.

  “Let us examine these two separate disturbances. First, we have a loud and rude fellow, alleged to have struck in the face several men passing by, and yet left without molestation by his fellow citizens. While the editor from the leisurely position of his desk would prefer to believe that the lack of outrage from the surrounding public was caused by the fact that the inebriate was ‘good-natured,’ I would ask how many good-natured fellows have been classified to be so after they punched men in their faces. Rather, we can safely surmise that the nature of the disturbance, remarkably, was common enough that day as to not sufficiently arrest the attention either of the authorities or the common people. That is, there were so many like this one that he could not claim much public response. This may give us more idea of the goings-on during election day in the rest of the city than the editors imagine.

  “Taking now the third extract, describing a scene not far in distance, I believe, from the location of the polling station where Poe was discovered on Lombard and High; read again this cutting, which describes an engineer and his fellow carriage passengers being struck by a large stone thrown by some miscreant. We may imagine Poe, too, having to dodge a tempest of wild stones on those streets or, perhaps, now ill from the drink, the terrible exposure of many hours to the weather, and complete lack of sleep, Poe may have himself been disoriented enough to be throwing stones at perceived or real villains, thugs, and rascals that filled the streets that day. It hardly makes a difference if we think of Poe as target or as targeting, or involved in this incident not at all. What we know is that Poe would likely possess a manic fear at this point in reaction to whatever wild and disorderly actions he might witness along the streets that day. The polling station, rather than being a dark dungeon of cruelty—as your Baron finds it necessary to envision it—may well have been seen by Poe as a sanctuary, a place where there would likely be the semblance of some order. Poe went in for help that, alas, was too late to be found. In this way, we have thoroughly followed Poe from his disembarking to his futile rescue by Snodgrass.”