Matthew Pearl - The Poe Shadow

"Edgar was rash, even as a boy, Mr. Clark," he began. "He took as his wife our beautiful cousin, Virginia, when she was thirteen, hardly out from the dew of girlhood. Poor Sissy-that's what we called her-he took her away from Baltimore, where she'd always been safe. Her mother's house on Amity Street was small, but at least she was surrounded with devoted family. He felt if he waited, he might lose her affections."

"Edgar surely cared for her more dearly than anyone," I replied.

"Here, Mr. Clark, is what I wanted you to see. Perhaps it will help you understand."

Neilson removed from a drawer a portrait that he said had been sent by Maria Clemm, Sissy's mother (and Edgar's aunt and mother-in-law). It showed Sissy, a young woman of around twenty-one or twenty-two with a pearly complexion and glossy raven-black hair, her eyes closed and her head tipped to the side in a pose at once peaceful and unspeakably sad. I commented on the life-like quality in the portrait.

"No, Mr. Clark." He turned pale. " Death- like. It is her death portrait. After she died, Edgar realized they had no portrait of her and had this done. I do not like to show this, though, for it poorly captures the spirit she possessed in life-that pale and deathly look about her. But he valued it beyond measure. My cousin, you see, could not relinquish her even to death."

With the portrait were some verses written by Virginia to Edgar the year before her death, speaking of living in a blissful cottage where the "tattling of many tongues" would be far away. "Love alone shall guide us when we are there," her tender poem read. "Love shall heal my weakened lungs."

Neilson put aside the portrait and poem. He explained that during her last years Virginia had required the utmost medical attention.

"Perhaps he did love her. But could Edgar have properly provided for her care? Edgar might have done better all along finding a woman of wealth." Neilson paused at this thought and seemed to shift topics. "Until I was about your age, you know, I myself edited newspapers and journals and wrote columns. I have known the literary life," he said with fallen pride. "I know its appeal to the raw spirit, Mr. Clark. Yet I have always had dealings with reality, too, and know better than to keep at something for personal gratification after it proves a losing proposition, as Edgar's writing did. Edgar should have stopped writing. This alone might have saved Sissy, might have saved Edgar himself."

Regarding Poe's final months, his final attempt to obtain financial success, Neilson referred to his cousin's aim to raise money and subscriptions for the proposed Stylus magazine by delivering lectures and visiting people of good society in Norfolk and Richmond. It was in the latter city that he renewed an acquaintance with a woman of wealth, as Neilson described her approvingly.

"Her name was Elmira Shelton, a Richmond woman whom Edgar had loved long before." In their youth, Edgar and Elmira had promised themselves to each other before he left to attend the University of Virginia, but Elmira's father disapproved, and confiscated Poe's constant letters so his daughter would not see them. I interrupted Neilson to ask why.

"Perhaps," he replied, "it was that Edgar and Elmira were young…and that Edgar was a poet…and do not forget, Elmira 's father would have known Mr. Allan. He would have spoken with him and he would have known Edgar was likely to receive no inheritance at all from the Allan fortune."

When Edgar Poe was forced to return from college after John Allan would not pay his debts, Edgar attended a party at Elmira's family home only to find, to his heartbreak, that Elmira was engaged to another.

By the summer of 1849, when they met again, her husband had died, as had Virginia Poe. The carefree girl of so many years ago was now a wealthy widow. Edgar read her poems and reminisced with good humor about their past. He joined a local chapter of a temperance society in Richmond and swore to Elmira to keep their oath. He said love that hesitated was not a love for him and he gave her a ring. Theirs would be a new life together.

Only weeks later Edgar Poe would be found at Ryan's, here in Baltimore, and rushed to the hospital, where he'd die.

"I had not seen Edgar for some years toward the end. It was a great shock, you will imagine, Mr. Clark, when I was told he was found at one of the places of election in Old Town in poor condition and carried to the college hospital. My relation, a Mr. Henry Herring, was called to the scene at Ryan's. At what time Edgar arrived in Baltimore, where he spent the time he was here, under what circumstances, all this I have been unable to ascertain."

I showed my surprise. "You mean you sought this information on your cousin's death, and could not find it?"

"I felt it my duty to try, relationships and so on," he said. "We were cousins, yes, but we were also friends. We were the same age, Edgar and I, and he was not old enough to see the end of his life. I hope my own death is peaceful and in plain sight, somewhere surrounded by my family."

"You must have found something more?"

"I'm afraid that whatever happened to Edgar has accompanied Cousin into the grave. Is this not sometimes the course of a life, Mr. Clark, for death to swallow a man up so wholly there are no traces left? To leave not a shadow, not even the shadow of a shadow."

"That is not all that is left, though, Mr. Poe," I said, insistently. "Your cousin will be remembered. His works are immensely powerful."

"There is a kind of power to them. But it is usually the power of disease. Tell me, Mr. Clark, do you know something more about Edgar's death?"

I did not tell him about the man who warned me to stop looking at Poe's death. Something stopped me. Perhaps this hesitation was the true beginning of the investigation. Perhaps I already suspected that there was more to this situation, more to Neilson Poe, than I'd yet been able to see.

He could not even say much about Edgar Poe's condition after he was rushed to the doctors from Ryan's. Once Neilson had arrived at the hospital, the physicians advised that he not enter Edgar's room, saying the patient was too excitable. Neilson only saw Poe through a curtain, and he looked from that vantage point like another man altogether, or a ghost of a body he had known. Neilson did not even have the chance to view the body before it was closed into the coffin.

"I'm afraid there's nothing more I can tell you about the end," he sighed. Then he said it. The eulogy that I could not forget. "Edgar was an orphan in every way. He had seen much of sorrow, Mr. Clark, had so little reason to be satisfied with life that, to him, the change, death, can scarcely be said to be a misfortune."

My frustration at Neilson Poe's complacency inspired me to call on the offices of a few newspapers with a faint hope of persuading them to at least pay better tribute to the genius of Poe. I described Poe's paltry burial and the many erroneous facts in the short biographies so far published in the papers, hoping they would improve. But these visits were useless. At the office of one of the Whig newspapers, the Patriot, some reporters overheard me and, calling to mind that Poe wrote for the press, suggested with great solemnity that they take up a subscription to pay for a marker on Poe's grave to honor a fallen fellow. As though Edgar Poe were simply another spinner of newspaper tales! Note, too, that I would not make the error of saying, as the periodical press had taken to doing, Edgar Allan Poe. No. The name was a contradiction, a chimera and an unholy monster. John Allan had taken in the poet as a young child in 1810, but later ungenerously abandoned him to the whims of the world.

Passing the Presbyterian burial yard on my way home late one afternoon, I decided to see the poet's resting place again. The old cemetery was a narrow block of graves on the corner of Fayette and Greene streets. The location of the grave was near the fine marker of General David Poe, a hero of the Revolutionary War and Edgar Poe's grandfather. But there was something disconcerting.