A Mystery of Mysteries by Mark Dawidziak: Featured Excerpt
By Crime HQ
February 10, 2023
Having completed just forty years of what was without question a most stormy life, Edgar Allan Poe took leave of this realm early Sunday morning, October 7, 1849. Nobody knows precisely why. Indeed, like so many aspects of his life, his death has been the topic of endless debate, conjecture, speculation, guessing, and second-guessing. Nobody can tell you with anything resembling certainty why, while traveling from Richmond to New York, he ended up in Baltimore. Nobody can tell you what happened to him during the missing days between his last sighting in Richmond on the evening of September 26 and his reappearance outside an Election Day polling place in Baltimore on the damp, chilly afternoon of October 3. Nobody has ever solved the identity of the person, Reynolds, for whom Poe supposedly called out for hours before he died at the Washington University Hospital of Baltimore. Nobody has ever produced conclusive evidence, or so much as a first cousin to it, regarding the cause of the delirium generally described as “congestion of the brain,” “cerebral inflammation,” or “brain fever.” Even the melodramatic and rather pat last words attributed to him—“Lord help my poor soul!”—have been called into question. The source for that dying utterance is a shaky witness who trafficked in contradictory testimony, attending physician John J. Moran (who may or may not have been in attendance at the time of death). The one thing that can be said with absolute certainty is that Edgar Allan Poe died at the age of forty years, eight months, and change because he stopped drawing breath.
No matter how much the twisted record gets set straight, though, and no matter how many mysteries get solved, there will always be much about Poe that remains unknowable. We can never completely dispel the shadows that surround him. Rest assured, we will never lose the enigmatic Poe, and that’s because the trail of evidence is positively littered with unreliable witnesses, contradictory statements, questionable memories, and missing time. Sifting through it all, you’re reminded of the line from Poe’s satirical story “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether”: “Believe nothing you hear, and only half that you see.” That’s a bit extreme, and it must also be conceded that, sooner or later, any biographer writing about any subject must regularly cope with murky areas by falling back on such old reliable standards as evidently, seemingly, presumably, and apparently. But with Poe, these get an even more rigorous workout, and, while you’re at it, you can toss in supposedly, likely, possibly, and maybe. This is not by any means a criticism. It is a simple acknowledgment of a necessity—a constant requirement—when dealing with aspects of Poe’s life and death. “Around his name has accumulated a mass of rumor, conjecture, psychoanalysis, and interpretation based upon imagination rather than fact,” Quinn wrote in his biography of Poe, setting the standard for decades of scholarship to follow. With Poe, it’s often less a matter of what we know with absolute certainty and more a matter of settling for what we think we know.
“That’s true of his death in spades, but it’s also true of his life,” said Jeffrey A. Savoye, the secretary and treasurer of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore and the webmaster who oversees that organization’s extensive and invaluable online archive of Poe material. “We accept a lot of information about Poe in absence of strong contradiction. And there’s unquestionably a lot of information about Poe. But for a lot of it, we don’t really have a way of verifying whether it’s true or not.”
You’re continually reminded of this when grappling with the mysteries that have enveloped Edgar Allan Poe. You’re also constantly reminded what a brief life he lived. Poe wrote so much of such high quality in so many different genres that he leaves the illusion of a complete literary life. The accomplishments are so impressive and influential, we might not give due consideration to the notion that he died at an age when many writers are just entering their prime—that forty-to-sixty sweet spot when maturity and experience can propel an artist to greater heights. “There is that arc of improvement with Poe,” Peeples said. “It created the impression that he did what he was meant to do. There’s such symmetry to it all, you don’t tend to think of it as a career cut short.”
Yet death is always there, a regular companion on Poe’s trip to the grave in Baltimore. Death is always waiting for him, because, no matter where Poe happened to be in such a short span on this planet, he never was far from the end.
Things actually seemed to be looking up for Poe before fate and a steamer took him to Baltimore. While he was making plans to depart Richmond, he was holding on to many reasons for believing that the future would be a bit brighter. If not formally engaged to the love of his teen years, wealthy Richmond widow Elmira Royster Shelton, he certainly had reached an “understanding” with her. Poe’s dream of having complete control of his own literary magazine also seemed within his grasp. One of the reasons he was traveling during the last months of his life was to raise money and solicit subscriptions for such a publication. Throughout his life, whenever he was at a point where some good fortune seemed imminent, things invariably fell apart because of bad luck, bad timing, or a self-destructive outburst. Without doubt, among his many other gifts, he had a positive genius for drinking or picking an ill-chosen fight at precisely the wrong moment. “There are so many instances where Poe is his own worst enemy,” said Jeff Jerome, the former longtime curator of the Edgar Allan Poe House & Museum in Baltimore. “There are times when you just want to reach into the pages of the biography and slap him. You want to shake him and say, ‘What are you thinking? What’s the matter with you? Do you really think this was the right time to start arguing with this person who actually is going to help you?’ You see this again and again with Poe.”
Could he sense that the rug was about to be pulled out from under him one last time? Could he not stop himself from perversely pulling at the threads, contributing mightily to a final fall? There surely were many ill omens and troubling moments in the three months preceding his death. And there were the clear signs of the marked physical deterioration evident since the death of his beloved wife, Virginia, on January 30, 1847. The result of an undiagnosed illness, the drinking, years of battling poverty, the ravages of a grief that he described as taking him close to madness? He did not sound as if he suspected the end was so near when he took leave of his adoring mother-in-law and aunt Maria “Muddy” Clemm on June 29, 1849. They were still living in the modest Bronx cottage where Virginia died, and, although money was scarce, Poe hoped his journey would lead to an improvement in their fortunes. His destination was Richmond, the city where he had first made his name as a magazine editor and critic. Now he hoped his travels would yield financial support for a magazine of his own. Before he made it to Richmond, though, there would be a troubling stop in Philadelphia, another city where he had worked as an editor and critic. As Poe boarded a steamboat in New York that would take him to Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where he could make a train connection to Philadelphia, he told Muddy, “Do not fear for Eddy.” He then assured her that he would “come back to love and comfort you.” They were the last words she heard him speak.
About A Mystery of Mysteries by Mark Dawidziak:
It is a moment shrouded in horror and mystery. Edgar Allan Poe died on October 7, 1849, at just forty, in a painful, utterly bizarre manner that would not have been out of place in one of his own tales of terror. What was the cause of his untimely death, and what happened to him during the three missing days before he was found, delirious and “in great distress” on the streets of Baltimore, wearing ill-fitting clothes that were not his own?
Mystery and horror. Poe, who remains one of the most iconic of American writers, died under haunting circumstances that reflect the two literary genres he took to new heights. Over the years, there has been a staggering amount of speculation about the cause of death, from rabies and syphilis to suicide, alcoholism, and even murder. But many of these theories are formed on the basis of the caricature we have come to associate with Poe: the gloomy-eyed grandfather of Goth, hunched over a writing desk with a raven perched on one shoulder, drunkenly scribbling his chilling masterpieces. By debunking the myths of how he lived, we come closer to understanding the real Poe—and uncovering the truth behind his mysterious death, as a new theory emerges that could prove the cause of Poe’s death was haunting him all his life.
In a compelling dual-timeline narrative alternating between Poe’s increasingly desperate last months and his brief but impactful life, Mark Dawidziak sheds new light on the enigmatic master of macabre.
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