Matthew Pearl - The Poe Shadow

"I would sooner cut off my hand than spend my time worrying about magazines of blasted fiction! I would sooner get run down by an omnibus than-" You can see what he was driving at.

You'd probably guess that the real reason Peter objected was because I could not answer his questions about the fees. Poe was regularly reported in the papers as penniless. Why take upon ourselves, Peter argued, what others wouldn't? I pointed out that the source for our payments was obvious: the new journal. Success was guaranteed for it!

What I wanted to say to Peter was "Do you not ever feel you are becoming hackneyed by the lawyer's routine? Forget the fees. Wouldn't you wish to protect something you knew to be great that everyone else sought to desecrate? Wouldn't you wish to be a part of changing something, even if it meant changing yourself?" That line of argument would have accomplished nothing with Peter. When Poe died Peter was quietly satisfied that the matter had ended.

But I was not, not in the least. As I read newspaper articles eulogizing Poe with bitter voices, my desire to protect his name only grew. Something had to be done even more than before. When he was alive, he could defend himself. What enraged me most deeply was that these carping muckworms not only embellished the negative facts about Poe's life, but that they crowded around the scene of Poe's death like little hungry flies. Here was the ultimate evidence, the crowning symbol-ran their logic-of a lifetime of moral frailty. Poe's dismal and low end served to confirm the darkness of his life and the imperfections of his morbidly inclined literary productions. Think of Poe's miserable end, groaned one paper.

Think of his miserable end!

Think not of his unprecedented genius? Not of his literary mastery ? Not of how he sparked life in his readers at times when they felt none? Think of kicking a lifeless body into the gutter, and striking the cold forehead of a corpse!

Go visit that grave in Baltimore (the same paper advised) and receive from the very air around it the awful warning of this man's life to ours.

I announced one day that something must be done. Peter laughed.

"You cannot bring suit-the man is under the sod now!" said Peter. "You shall have no client! Let him rest; let us rest." Peter started whistling a popular tune. Whenever he was unhappy, he whistled, even if it was in the middle of a conversation.

"I tire of being hired for a little money to say or do other than what I believe, Peter. I made a commitment to represent his interests. A promise, dear friend, and do not tell me that promises should end at someone's death."

"He likely agreed to your help only to keep you from badgering him on the matter." Peter saw that this statement bothered me and he pressed the point with a more sympathetic but insightful tone. "Is that just possible, my friend?"

I thought about something Poe had said in one of his letters regarding The Stylus: This is the grand purpose of my life, wrote Poe. Unless I die, I will accomplish it. Poe insisted in the same letter that I stop paying advance postage in our correspondence. He signed the letter "Your Friend."

And so I had written the same words to him-the same two simple words in plain ink, and signed my name below them as I would a dead-serious oath. Who would ever have argued then that I should not keep it?

"No," I answered Peter's question. "He knew I could defend him."

THE THREAT CAMEon a Monday afternoon. There were no guns, no daggers, no swords, no near hangings involved (nor would I have believed these were coming for me). The utter astonishment on this day proved more forceful.

My visits to the Baltimore athenaeum reading rooms were becoming regular. A certain prominent debtor's lawsuit, commenced around that time, obliged us to gather diverse news clippings. In times of pressing business, Peter would have been happy to construct a bunk in our chambers and never meet with a ray of sunlight, so it fell to me to travel the short distance to the reading room to perform the researches. While I was there, I would also research Edgar Poe and his death.

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.