Matthew Pearl - The Poe Shadow

You are fortunate, Peter wrote to me when I was still at my university. You shall have a fine office here with me under your Father's auspices and you shall marry as soon as you wish. Every beautiful young woman of high standing on Baltimore Street smiles on you, by the bye. If I were you, if I had a face half as handsome as yours, Quentin Clark, how well I would know what to do with ease and luxury in society!

By the fall of 1849, where you joined me some pages earlier, I had my profession in place so securely I hardly took notice of it. Peter Stuart and I made excellent partners. My parents were both gone by then, killed by a carriage accident while they were traveling in Brazil for my father's business. There was an empty spot where there once had been guidance from my father. And yet, the life he'd arranged for me flowed on in his absence-all this, Hattie, Peter, the well-pressed clients appearing daily in our offices, my stately family house shaded by ancient poplars and known as Glen Eliza, after my mother. All this ran on as though operated by some noiseless and ingenious automatic machine. Until Poe's death.

I had the young man's weakness of wishing others to understand everything that concerned me-of needing to make others understand. I believed I could. I can call to mind the very first time I told Peter we should work to protect Edgar A. Poe. Believing that, as a result of the compliance I imagined on the part of Peter, I would be able to report back the good tidings to Mr. Poe.

My very first letter to Edgar Poe, on March 16, 1845, was brought about by a question I had when reading "The Raven," then a recently published poem. The final verses leave the raven sitting atop a bust of Pallas "above my chamber door." With these last lines of the poem, the impish and mysterious bird continues to haunt the young man of the poem, perhaps for eternity:

If the raven sits at the top of the chamber door, though, what lamplight would be behind him in such a way as to cast his shadow to the floor? With the impetuousness of youth, I wrote to Poe himself for an answer, for I wanted to be able to envision every crevice and corner of the poem. Along with the question, I enclosed in the same letter to Mr. Poe a subscription fee for a new magazine called The Broadway Journal, which Poe was then editing, to make sure I'd see whatever else flowed from his pen.

After months without receiving any reply, and without a single number of The Broadway Journal, I wrote again to Mr. Poe. When the silence persisted, I addressed a complaint to an associate of the magazine in New York and insisted that my subscription be refunded in full. I no longer desired to ever see it. One day, I received my three dollars back, along with a letter.

Signed Edgar A. Poe.

How startling, how uplifting that was, such a lofty visionary bringing himself to personally address a mere reader of three and twenty years! He even explained the minor mystery regarding the raven's shadow: "My conception was that of the bracket candelabrum affixed against the wall, high up above the door and bust-as is often seen in the English palaces, and even in some of the better houses in New-York."

There was the very nature of the raven's shadow explained just for me! Poe also thanked me for my literary opinions and encouraged me to send more. He explained that his financial partners in The Broadway Journal had forced its termination in yet another defeat in the struggle between money and literature. He had never regarded the journal as more than a temporary adjunct to other designs. One day, he said, we might meet in person and he would confide in me his plans, and inquire my advice. "I am entirely ignorant," he stated, "of all law matters."

I wrote nine letters to Poe between 1845 and his death in October 1849. I received in return four courteous and sincere notes in his own hand.

His most energetic comments were about his ambitions for his proposed journal, The Stylus. Poe had spent years editing other people's magazines. Poe said the journal would finally allow men of genius to triumph over men of talent, men who could feel rather than men who could think. It would cheer no author who did not deserve it, and would publish all literature that was unified by clarity and, most importantly, truth. He had waited many years to begin this journal. He wrote to me the last summer before his death that if waiting until the Day of Judgment would increase his chances of success, so he would! But, he added, he instead hoped to have the first number of it out the next January.

Poe anticipated with excitement a trip to Richmond to gather finances and support, commenting that if everything went as he intended, his final success was certain. He needed to raise funds and subscriptions. But he continued to be hindered by the rumors in the so-called professional press of irregular and immoral habits, questions about his sanity, unfit romantic dalliances, general excessiveness. Enemies, he said, were always at his throat for publishing honest criticisms of their writings, and for having had the great nerve to point out the complete lack of originality in revered authors like Longfellow and Lowell. He feared that the animosities of small men would attack his efforts by painting him as a sot, an unworthy drunk not deserving any public influence.

That is when I asked. I asked plainly, maybe too plainly. Were these at all true, these accusations I had heard for years? Was he, Edgar A. Poe, a drunkard who had given himself over to excess?

He wrote back without the least air of offense or conscious superiority. He vowed to me-me, a practical and presumptuous stranger-that he was wholly abstemious. Some readers might question my ability to judge his truthfulness from afar, but my instincts spoke with unclouded certainty. In my next letter, I replied that I put full confidence in his word. Then, just before sealing my reply, I decided to do better.

I made a proposal. I would bring suit against any false accuser attempting to damage his efforts to launch The Stylus. We had represented the interests of some local periodicals before, providing me with the proper experience. I would do my part to ensure that genius would not be trampled. This would be my duty, just as it was his duty to astonish the world now and then.

"Thank you for your promise about The Stylus, " answered Poe in a letter replying to mine. "Can you or will you help me? I have room to say no more. I depend upon you implicitly."

That was shortly before Poe began his lecture tour in Richmond. Emboldened by his response to my offer, I wrote again, pouring out a myriad of questions about his Stylus and where he planned to raise money. I expected he would respond while he was touring, which is why I visited the post office and, when business consumed my time, checked the lists of waiting mail the postmaster regularly inserted in the newspapers.

I had been reading Poe's work more than ever. Particularly after my parents died. Some considered it distasteful that I would read literature that frequently touched on the topic of death. Yet in Poe, while death is not a pleasant subject, it is not forbidden. Nor is it a fixed end. Death is an experience that can be shaped by the living. Theology tells us that spirits live on beyond the body, but Poe believes it.

Peter, of course, had at the time vocally dismissed the idea of our law practice taking up the cause of The Stylus.