Matthew Pearl - The Poe Shadow

No! Thirty-nine, I believed, but possessed of a wisdom worth a hundred times that… Born in this city. No again! (How questionable it all was, even before I knew more.)

Then I noticed…those four words.

Died in this city.

This city? This was not telegraphed news. This had occurred here in Baltimore. The death in our own city, the burial, maybe, too. Could it be that the very funeral on Greene and Fayette…No! That little funeral, that unceremonious ceremony, that entombment in the narrow burial yard?

At the office that day, Peter sermonized about Hattie, but I could hardly discuss it, intrigued instead by these tidings. I sent for confirmation from the sexton, the caretaker of the burial yard. Poor Poe, he replied. Yes, Poe was gone. As I rushed to the post office to see if any letter had arrived, my thoughts revolved around what I had unknowingly witnessed.

That cold-blooded formality. That had been Baltimore's farewell to our nation's literary savior, my favorite author, my (perhaps) friend? I could barely contain the sense of anger growing within me; anger of a sort that blocked out everything else. I know, looking back on this, that I never wanted to hurt Hattie through the commotion that crept over my mind beginning that afternoon. Yes, this was my favorite author, who had died in my midst, but even then it was far more than that. Perhaps I cannot in one breath fairly describe why it was so devastating to a man with youth, with romantic and professional prospects enviable to anyone in Baltimore.

Perhaps it was this fact. I-without having appreciated the fact- I had been the one to see him last; or, rather, as all others rushed past, I had been the last to watch the indifferent earth rattling over his coffin, as over the nameless corpses of the world.

I had a dead man for a client and the Day of Judgment as my hearing date.

That was the sardonic way Peter put it a few weeks later when I began my fateful inquiries. My law partner did not have enough of the wit about him to be sardonic more than three or four times in his life, so you can imagine the agitation behind the words. Peter, a man of height and bulk, was my elder by only a few years, but he sighed with the sigh of an old man, especially at the mention of Edgar A. Poe.

By my teen years, two facts in my life were as fixed as destiny: my admiration for literary works by Edgar Poe and, as you have heard, my attachment to Hattie Blum.

Even as a boy, Peter talked about Hattie and me being married with the focus of a man of business. In his prudent heart, the boy was older than all other boys. When his father had died, my parents, through my father's church, had assisted the widowed Mrs. Stuart, who had been left nearly destitute by debt, and my father treated Peter like another son. Peter was so thankful for this that he dutifully and genuinely adopted all of my father's positions on affairs of the world, far more than I could ever seem to do. Indeed, it might have seemed to a stranger that he was the rightful Clark, and I a second-rate pretender to the name.

Peter even shared my father's distaste toward my literary preferences. This Edgar Poe, he and my father were both prone to say, this Poe that you read with such compulsion is peculiar beyond taste. Reading for the relief of ennui was simply pleasuremongering, no more useful to the world than dozing in the middle of an afternoon. Literature should improve the heart; these fantasies cripple it!

That is how most people saw Poe, and I would not have disagreed at first. I was hardly out of boyhood the first time I came upon Poe's work, a Gentleman's Magazine tale called "William Wilson." I confess I could not make much of it. I could find neither beginning nor end and could not distinguish the portions that exhibited reason from those of madness. It was like holding a page up to a mirror and trying to read it. Genius was not looked for in the magazines, and I saw no greater amount of it residing in Mr. Poe.

But I was only a boy. My judgment was transformed by a story of a class peculiar to Poe, a story of criminal detection entitled "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." This story's hero is C. Auguste Dupin, a young Frenchman who ingeniously unravels the truth behind the shocking slayings of two women. One woman's body is found in a house in Paris, thrust up the chimney feetfirst. Her mother, meanwhile, has been sliced at the neck so severely that when the police try to raise her body, her head falls off. There were valuables in plain view in their chambers, yet whatever deranged intruder had been inside had left them unmolested. The singularity of the crime was entirely baffling to the Paris police and the press and the witnesses-well, to everyone. Everyone except C. Auguste Dupin.

Dupin understood.

He understood that it was the strikingly singular nature of the deaths that made them at once easily solvable, for it separated the event instantly from the indistinguishable muddle of everyday crimes. It seemed to the police and the press that the murders could not have been done by even an irrational person, because they had been done by no person. Dupin's reasoning followed a method Poe called ratiocination -employing one's imagination to achieve analysis, and one's analysis to climb the heights of imagination. Through this method, Dupin showed how a rare orangutan, provoked to a rage by abuse, had committed the horrible atrocities.

From the hand of an ordinary person, the particulars would have seemed stuff and nonsense. But at the very moment the reader expresses disbelief at the course of events, every difficulty is eliminated by an unbreakable chain of reasoning. Poe whetted the curiosity for what is possible to its sharpest edge, and that brought the soul along with it. These tales of ratiocination (with sequels touching Dupin's further cases) became Poe's most popular among a mass of readers, but, in my opinion, for the wrong reasons. Mere spectator readers enjoyed seeing an unbroken puzzle solved, but there was a higher level of importance. My ultimate object is only the truth, said Dupin to his assistant. I understood, through Dupin, that truth was Edgar A. Poe's only object, too, and that precisely is what frightened and confused so many about Poe. The genuine mystery was not the particular riddle that the mind aches to know; the mind of man, this was the tale's true and lasting mystery.

And I found something new to me as a reader: recognition. I felt suddenly less alone in the world with his words before me. Perhaps this is why the occasion of Poe's death, which might have riveted another reader for a passing day or two, inhabited my thoughts.

My father liked to say that truth resided in honest professional gentlemen of the world, not in the monstrous tales and hoaxing stories of some magazine writer. He had no use for Genius. He said that most men in the armies of the world were required to attend to homely duties of life, where Industry and Enterprise were more in need than Genius, which was too squeamish at men's dullness to succeed in the world. His business was packinghouses, but he took to the notion that a young man should be an attorney, a complete business in itself, he said admiringly. Peter positively thrilled at the plan as though he were boarding the first ship to California on whispers of gold.

Upon achieving maturity, Peter situated himself as an apprentice to a law office of some distinction and while there achieved notice for compiling a thorough work, An Index to the Laws of Maryland, from the Year 1834 to 1843. My father soon financed Peter's own practice, and it was clear that I was to study and work under my friend. It was a plan too reasonable to object to, and I never once thought to do so-not once that I can remember, at least.