Matthew Pearl - The Poe Shadow

I read it again silently. For fear I should not get the letter… "First, he seems to have a striking and unusual fear of not receiving the letter."

"True."

"And, in addition, he contrives a rather elaborate method by which he imagines he can prevent this. Resorting, indeed, to using this false name, E. S. T. Grey!"

"Some might say this is our best clue yet that Poe, in the end, was mad-delusional."

"You do not agree though?"

"The contention would be entirely backward! Choices, my good Monsieur Clark, are both less rational and far less predictable than they seem, and this is what makes them so very predictable to the thinking man. Monsieur Poe, we should remember, is no ordinary specimen; his decisions which appear so irrational seem so because they are, in truth, utterly rational. We may benefit from being reminded about where Poe is going, when he writes these words in the fall of 1849, and where his mother-in-law is receiving his letters."

"Easy enough. Poe, upon writing, plans to start on his way to Philadelphia prior to continuing home to Fordham, New York, to bring Muddy back to Richmond, where he will marry Elmira Shelton. Muddy receives the letter in their small country home in New York. As I say, though, that seems easy enough."

"Then so is your answer to his unusual instructions. You have spoken before of the many cities where Poe had lived in his adult years."

"After Baltimore, he had moved with Sissy and Muddy to Richmond, Virginia, for several years. Then to Philadelphia for around six years. And finally, in the last years of his life, he was living in New York with Muddy."

"Yes! Therefore, you see, Muddy must write ‘E. S. T. Grey, Esquire.'"

I looked at my companion incredulously. "I don't see at all!"

"Why, Monsieur Clark, do you refuse outright the simplicity of the thing when it has been uncovered for us? I have been fortunate that on several occasions during my stay you have described in some precise and exacting detail the workings of your American post offices. In the year in question, 1849, if I have understood you, letters in your country were never delivered to particular residences but still only to the post office of a city, where one could then retrieve mail waiting for him. If a letter arrives in 1849 in New York for Edgar A. Poe, E. A. Poe comes and receives it. If a letter arrived in 1849 at the Philadelphia post office addressed to ‘Edgar A. Poe,' consider then what would unavoidably follow. The postmaster in Philadelphia, consulting his list of names of those former residents of the city, and finding that a name matches one on that list, would forward it to the post office at the location of that person's current residence. That is to say, a letter sent from Muddy in New York to Philadelphia addressed to Edgar A. Poe would upon receipt at the post office in Philadelphia be treated as a mistake and instantly be returned to New York!"

"Of course!" I exclaimed.

He went on. "Muddy, being also a former resident of Philadelphia, would understand this and find nothing strange in Poe's instructions that appear so peculiar to us. Poe's apparently outlandish fear that he would not receive a letter sent by Muddy to Philadelphia is, in fact, completely reasonable. If Edgar Poe presented himself with his own name at the Philadelphia post office, there would surely be nothing waiting for him, for any such letter branded with his name would have been sent away; however, if he offers a fictitious name, arranged in advance with his correspondent, and a letter has been sent to that name, he would duly receive it."

"But what of his instructions to Muddy not to sign the letter?"

"Poe has been anxious. Muddy is the last remnant of his family connections. Write immediately in reply, he says. Receiving this letter is crucial, and here he exhibits signs of some excess of care-once again, not of illogic, but of excessive rationality. He knows that, in the process of folding and sealing a letter, the signature and the address may be confused. If such a confusion were to take place, and the Philadelphia postmaster mistakenly believed the letter addressed to Maria Clemm, rather than signed by her, the letter, once again, would take route directly back to New York. You might notice that Monsieur Poe was generally anxious about mail in your own occasional correspondence with him, when at several points he expresses worry that a letter was lost or misplaced. ‘Ten to one I misdirected the letter, for I am very thoughtless about such matters,' he writes in one instance (if I rightly recall) when speaking of someone who had not replied to one of his letters. We know, too, from Poe's history that his first infamous heartbreak was caused when his letters as a young man never reached his young love, Elmira; and that another early courtship, of his cousin Elizabeth Herring, was disrupted by Henry Herring reading the letters, which contained his poetry. Indeed, the confusion over the placement of a letter, the anxiety over who possesses it, and the perplexing variety of folding and addressing through which a letter's identity might be misapprehended form the topic of one of Monsieur Poe's better tales of ratiocination and analysis, with which I know you are quite familiar.

"Still there is the question of the pseudonym that Poe chooses, this E. S. T. Grey. In truth, it matters not what name he chooses as long as it is not Edgar Poe, and is not so common as a George Smith or a Thomas Jones, which would put it at risk to be taken up by another person in a pile of other mail. Thus, Monsieur Poe desires Muddy to use a name with not one but two middle initials so that it may be that much more likely to reach him.

"Still you desire more significance to the name, I suppose? Very well. You will see, in some of the late numbers of the failed magazine Broadway Journal, of which Poe was editor, that he twice inserts an advertisement asking for capital to help secure the (doomed) future of that publication. In these notices he asks that correspondence for such purposes be addressed to ‘E. S. T. G.' at the office of the journal. Perhaps he wished to be discreet in the collection of any money. At all events, when he writes Muddy this letter four years later, he is once again engaged in a hopeful attempt to control his own magazine-this time The Stylus -and the same nom de plume of E. S. T. Grey perhaps automatically recurs to him from the similarity of his situation, and the corresponding position of his hopes for his delayed success. The letters of the name themselves-E. S. T. G.-need no more meaning, no more code, than the connection they hold for him between the two epochs of his life. Codes and symmetries are for those who think too much of thinking. The mystery of Poe's instructions to his mother-in-law, then, we have entirely dismissed." Duponte, with a hint of satisfaction, returned the papers related to the topic to the trunk.

"Except…" I began. Seeing a flash in Duponte's eyes, I stopped myself.

"Except?"

"Did you not once say, Monsieur Duponte, that this point would form a second piece of proof most sure that Poe did not arrive at Philadelphia?"

"I did. You will remember that one of the obituaries you collected after Poe's death was from the Philadelphia Public Ledger ? I believe you will find it also in the selection I've brought from Glen Eliza."

The obituary was in an issue of the Ledger from October 9, 1849, two days after Poe's death in Baltimore. I located the newspaper and passed it to Duponte.

He handed it back. "What is this?"

"Why, the very paper you asked for, Monsieur Duponte!"

"I asked for no such thing! I merely stated that it would be found in the trunk. Return it there. This obituary of Monsieur Poe in itself is as flimsy as most of the others. But you will not fail to remember that I instructed you, soon after our arrival in Baltimore, to retrieve all issues of newspapers a week before and after each article."