Poe (19 page)

After he had given his lecture he spent the rest of that evening, and much of the following day, with Annie Richmond. He may also have been in the company of her husband and her brother, but that does not seem to have lessened his enthusiasm. Jane Locke had already been forgotten. Annie Richmond herself recalled that “he seemed so unlike any other person… all the events of his life, which he narrated to me, had a flavour of
unreality
about them, just like his stories.” They may have been much closer to his fiction than she ever imagined. He was per-manently incomplete, passionately attaching himself to anyone who showed affection or even kindness. Hence his espousal of abstract “beauty” as the source of all wisdom and consolation. But at the same time he was a ferocious analyst and calculator of his position, examining all the objects that made up his prison.

In the same month as his meeting with Annie Richmond, for example, he made discreet enquiries about Sarah Helen Whitman, a poet from Providence, Rhode Island, who had lately sent him a Valentine poem. He asked one correspondent, “Can you not tell me something about her—anything—everything you know …” The tone of his letter suggests that he was in a state of some desperation: he needed the love and comfort of someone, anyone, with whom he felt a poetic affinity. He was the orphan crying for more.

Then in July he travelled down to Richmond, his boyhood home, ostensibly to gather subscribers for his literary magazine. There are reports of his drinking, however,
and of his reciting passages from
Eureka
in the public bars and taverns. One contemporary, the editor of the
Southern Literary Messenger,
reported that “his entire residence in Richmond of late was but a succession of disgraceful follies.” This sounds like an exaggeration.

He was collected enough, for example, to seek an interview with one of his erstwhile loves. Elmira Royster, by whom he had been enamoured before he had gone to the University of Virginia, had now become an affluent widow, Mrs. Shelton. She recalled later that Poe was excited by their meeting after many years. “He came up to me in the most enthusiastic manner and said, ‘Oh!, Elmira, is this you.’” It is likely that he considered proposing to her, but a newly composed poem from the other widow, Sarah Helen Whitman, changed his plans. It concluded with the immortal line, “I dwell with
‘Beauty which is Hope
.’ ” After he received the poem, through the agency of Maria Clemm, he left Richmond and made his way towards Providence. We may apply to him what he wrote to an earlier correspondent: “You need not attempt to shake off, or to banter off, Romance. It is an evil you will never get rid of to the end of your days. It is a part of your self—a portion of your soul.” And so it proved for Poe.

Mrs. Whitman possessed an ethereal temper. She was known as the “Seeress of Providence”—whether the town, or futurity itself, is open to question. She was distracted and absentminded; she swathed herself in veils, which invariably became entangled, and was continually dropping or losing little items such as fans and shawls. She
was said to flutter “like a bird.” She was a great exponent of table rapping and other communications beyond the grave. She was also addicted to ether, with which she liberally soaked her handkerchiefs in more than usually distressing moments. There were many such moments ready to engulf her.

Poe reached New York at the beginning of September 1848, and wished to satisfy himself that Helen Whitman was in residence at Providence by sending an anonymous letter asking for her autograph. It was one of the little “hoaxes” that he enjoyed. Two weeks later he presented himself in person, with a formal letter of introduction from a mutual friend. Then he gave her a signed volume of
The Raven and Other Poems
with a dedication “from the most devoted of her friends. Edgar A. Poe.” The next morning they visited the Athenaeum Library where Mrs. Whitman, somewhat disingenuously, asked him whether he had ever read “Ulalume.” To her infinite surprise, Poe revealed himself to be the author.

That evening Poe was introduced to the circle of Helen Whitman's closest friends. One of those present recalled that “Poe and Helen were greatly agitated. Simultaneously both arose from their chairs and walked towards the center of the room. Meeting, he held her in his arms, kissed her; they stood for a moment, then he led her to her seat. There was a dead silence through all this strange proceeding.”

On the following day they visited a local cemetery, overlooking the Seekonk River. In these affecting surroundings
Poe proposed marriage. Helen Whitman recalled later that “he endeavoured … to persuade me that my influence and my presence would have power to lift his life out of the torpor of despair which had weighed upon him, and give an inspiration to his genius, of which he had as yet given no token.” She declined, or perhaps prevaricated, citing the need to support an elderly mother. She promised instead to write to him, with a fuller explanation. Two days later Poe left for New York, to which place he was followed by a letter from Mrs. Whitman claiming that she was too old and too fragile to become the second Mrs. Poe. She was in fact only six years his senior, but the protestation of a weak nervous constitution rings true. He was not a man for a faint-hearted female.

On the following day Poe replied in a letter of several thousand words, beginning “I have pressed your letter again and again to my lips, sweetest. Helen—bathing it in tears of joy or of a ‘divine despair.’ ” There was a great deal more in the same vein of theatrical, or elevated, sentiment in the course of which he renewed his claim for her affections and insisted that under his care she “would get better, and finally well.” He also provided her with a potted history of their brief relationship, recounting his emotions on first seeing her in Providence where “I felt, for the first time in my life, and tremblingly acknowledged, the existence of spiritual influences altogether out of the reach of reason. I saw that you were
Helen
—
my
Helen— the Helen of a thousand dreams.”

Helen Whitman replied eight days later, once more excusing
herself from marriage on the grounds that she had taken responsibility for her mother and her unmarried younger sister. She could not abandon them for married life, however high-minded. She also asked Poe, somewhat tactlessly, the reason for his bad reputation among certain people. She had heard it said that “he has great intellectual power, but
no
principle—
no
moral sense.”

He replied at once, with another extraordinarily long and impassioned letter. He interpreted the eight days’ delay as a token of the fact that
“You do not love me.”
He lamented “that my heart is broken—that I have no farther object in life—that I have absolutely no wish but to die.” He was particularly upset about Mrs. Whitman's questions concerning his moral character. “Until the moment when these horrible words first met my eye,” he claimed, “I would not have believed it possible that any such opinions could have existed at all…” Since he had regularly viewed similar opinions in the public prints, and had even instigated a suit for libel, his surprise was a little forced.

He promised to reveal “the truth or nothing.” He claimed that “I deliberately threw away from me a large fortune, rather than endure a trivial wrong.” Of his marriage to Virginia Clemm he stated that “I did violence to my own heart, and married for another's happiness, when I knew that no possibility of my own existed.” There was very little “truth” in either statement, and the second complaint reads like a monstrous betrayal of his first wife. There then followed some obscure hints about his relationship with Fanny Osgood. It was by his standards a
poor performance. It is certain that for him words, and the cadence of words, created their own reality. In the process of composition he may have believed it all. But here he was rewriting and revising his own life.

In “Berenice” the narrator confesses that “my passions always were of the mind,” and we may infer this to be a partial diagnosis of Poe's own condition. His yearnings were always of an idealised and spiritual nature. In his work, he was never interested in any sensual pleasure. In his life, whenever any physical union seemed to become a possibility, he fled into drink. A contemporary described him as “of all the men that I ever knew, he was the most
passionless
.” In his art and in his life, he fell in love with dying women.

Even before Helen Whitman received the letter, Poe appeared before her. Once more he asked her to entertain his offer of marriage. He was on his way to Lowell, where he was about to deliver a lecture, and he asked her to send a further message to him there.

But, at Lowell itself, he was once more in the presence of the other woman whom he adored in equal measure— Annie Richmond. After spending a little time with Mr. and Mrs. Locke, he moved to Annie's house nearby. This change in his affections altogether disrupted his friendship with Jane Locke, but sealed that with Annie Richmond. He became her inseparable companion, and her sister recalled him “sitting before an open wood fire, in the early autumn evening, gazing intently into the glowing coal, holding the hand of a dear friend—Annie’—while for a long time
no one spoke.” This may have been in the presence of Annie's compliant husband, who clearly deemed Poe to be no threat.

But Poe had also recently written to Helen Whitman that he would joyfully “go down
with
you into the night of the Grave.”

A few days after his visit to Lowell he wrote a letter to Annie Richmond in which he asked, “Why am I not
with
you now
darling
…” His affections were infinitely malleable. He even consulted Annie Richmond on his future with Helen Whitman, and it seems that Mrs. Richmond counselled matrimony. He was not necessarily grateful, however, for her advice.
“Can
you,
my
Annie,” he wrote, “bear to think I am another's?” He left her in “an agony of grief,” and travelled once more to Providence.

Even before seeing Helen Whitman, he broke down. He endured a “long, long, hideous night of despair” before purchasing two ounces of laudanum the following morning. He travelled on to Boston, where he wrote a letter to Annie in which he reminded her of her “promise that under all circumstances, you would come to me on my bed of death.” So he implored her to come at once to Boston, and named the place where he could be found. He seemed seriously to be contemplating suicide. But he was principally reacting to the thought of actually going through with the marriage to Helen Whitman. He explained to Annie “how my soul revolted from saying the words which were to be said.” Then he swallowed an ounce of the laudanum.

The effects were immediate and profound, suggesting that contrary to rumour he was not an inveterate taker of opium. His cousin, Elizabeth Herring, indicated that during the period of Virginia's illness he was “often in sad condition from the use of opium.” It was a natural reaction to his anxiety and despair. It would in fact be surprising if he had not used opium or tincture of laudanum occasionally, given its efficacy and ready availability. It would have been a useful alternative to alcohol. But the evidence does not suggest that he was an habitual imbiber of the drug. On this occasion in Boston, for example, he lost command of his reason and an unnamed “friend” helped him to cope with “the awful horrors which succeeded.”

Two days later, on 7 November, he was composed enough to journey to Providence. Helen Whitman was too agitated to see him, having been troubled by his absence of two days. So he sent her a note ordering her to “write me
one word to
say that you
do
love me and that,
under all circumstances,
you will be mine.” The changes in his mood are bewildering and extreme; they do suggest, at the very least, a temporary derangement fuelled either by the laudanum or by alcohol. She agreed to meet him, at the Athenaeum library, half an hour later. In the course of this interview he recounted all that had happened to him in Boston. They met again in the afternoon, when Mrs. Whitman once more prevaricated over his proposal of marriage. She also read him a letter, from someone in New York, in which his character had been abused. He seemed “deeply pained.”

That evening Poe began drinking. In his intoxicated
state he despatched a “note of renunciation and farewell” to Mrs. Whitman. She assumed that he had travelled back to New York, but he had in fact stayed at Providence in the care of a Mr. MacFarlane. MacFarlane, on the following morning, persuaded Poe to sit for a daguerreotype. It shows him quizzical, sarcastic, subdued with that strange alteration in both halves of his visage. His face looks puffy, there are rings under his eyes, his mouth seems twisted in a sneer, his eyes are deep-set and thoughtful. After being photographed Poe rushed around to Helen Whitman's house “in a state of wild & delirious excitement, calling upon me to save him from some terrible impending doom.” His voice was “appalling … never have I heard anything so awful, even to sublimity.” He was in the throes of a condition akin to madness.

Mrs. Whitman's mother sat with him for two hours, in an attempt to calm him, but when Helen eventually entered the room “he clung to me so frantically as to tear away a piece of the muslin dress I wore.” A doctor was called, and he diagnosed “cerebral congestion.” Poe was then removed to the house of a friend of Mrs. Whitman, where he recuperated for two or three days. There were several more interviews, during which Helen agreed to a “conditional engagement”—the condition being that Poe stopped drinking altogether. But Helen's mother was stubbornly opposed to the match, telling Poe that her daughter's death would be preferable to any union with him. On the evening of 13 November, frustrated in his
muddled desire for marriage, Poe left on a steamer for New York.

From New York he composed a note to Mrs. Whitman, explaining that he felt “your dear love at my heart” but that he sensed “a strange shadow of coming evil.” He then took the train to Fordham, where he was at last reunited with Maria Clemm. Mrs. Clemm wrote to Annie Richmond saying that “God has … returned my poor darling Eddy to me. But how changed! I scarcely knew him.” Poe also wrote to Annie another long and agonised letter, in which he said that “you
know
I love you, as no man ever loved woman … oh,
my darling, my
Annie, my own sweet
sister
Annie,
my pure
beautiful angel—
wife
of my soul…”