Lawyers, Gold-Bugs, and Money (Part Two)

“No doubt you will think me fanciful--but I had already established a kind of connexion.”
-“The Gold-Bug”

In 1876, the magazine "Notes & Queries" carried a letter from a regular contributor known only as “Uneda,” claiming Francis H. Duffee had proven that Poe ("a most unprincipled man") plagiarized from George Ann Sherburne’s “Imogine.”

“Uneda’s” accusations caught the attention of John H. Ingram, an ardent Poe defender who was then engaged in researching his biography of the poet. Ingram sent a reply challenging the pseudonymous writer's statement. "Uneda" retorted he had good reason for the "very decided opinion that I entertain upon Poe's moral character." (He added "I never heard any one in this country express any other opinion than that which I entertain respecting the character of Poe"--an assertion absurd enough to disqualify anything he had to say on the topic.) He quoted a letter from Duffee giving his (demonstrably and remarkably inaccurate) side of the story: "I did accuse Edgar A. Poe of plagiarism, a charge which was never disproved...Miss Sherburne...informed me, in the first place, of the plagiarism, and I exposed Poe in an article in one of our daily papers, for which he commenced a libel suit." Duffee claimed that after Poe received a letter from him, the author "soon dismissed the matter, for very good reasons."

Ingram responded by sending "Notes & Queries" what he described as a "shutter up" letter. He pointed out a long list of people who had expressed an admiring view of Poe's character, and asked “Uneda” “in justice to the dead, and for the satisfaction of the living, to state how, when, and where this charge of literary theft was proved against Edgar A. Poe. Mr. Duffee's letter gives no particulars as to the necessary data.”

“Uneda” took over a year to respond. He commented sniffily that Ingram’s query should have been addressed to Duffee, "and ought to have been answered by him." However, as that gentleman failed to respond, “Uneda” “after much trouble and a considerable expenditure of time” found a copy of “Imogine,” a story he had never before read. In a rather startling about-face, “Uneda” stated matter-of-factly, “It is a very extraordinary work for a girl of thirteen to produce, but it does not bear the slightest resemblance to Poe's story of the Gold Bug, either in its incidents or its style. I cannot imagine why my friend Mr. Duffee was made the victim of so silly a hoax.”

Yes, “Uneda” repeated in print long-discredited, long-forgotten accusations that Poe was a plagiarist without ever bothering to discover for himself whether or not the charges had merit. And he admitted it without even a shadow of visible embarrassment. Truly, if Dr. Griswold had been unable to take on the job as Poe’s official biographer, “Uneda” would have made a worthy substitute. (“Uneda” also sent Ingram a private letter accusing Poe of what the biographer described as “all kinds of filthy crimes,” but this letter, perhaps fortunately, is not extant and its exact contents unknown.)

Ingram did not record the identity of this adversary who bore such a stubborn, irrational grudge against Poe, but we now know he was William Duane, Jr. Duane, whom a contemporary once described as “a strange, solitary, unsociable man,” was of distinguished ancestry (his father had been Secretary of the Treasury, and his mother boasted Benjamin Franklin as a grandfather.) However, in Poe biography he is known solely for figuring in another odd, and seemingly embarrassingly trivial scandal. In 1844, Poe, with Henry B. Hirst acting as self-appointed go-between, borrowed a volume of the “Southern Literary Messenger” from Duane. When Poe was engaged in moving from Philadelphia to New York City in April of that year, Mrs. Clemm was given the task of returning the book. According to her, she left it in Hirst’s office, with one of his brothers.

Duane and Hirst, however, insisted otherwise. According to them, Mrs. Clemm--either accidentally or deliberately--sold the book, after which it wound up with a Richmond bookseller, thus forcing Duane to rebuy his own property. Angry letters were exchanged between Poe--who defended his mother-in-law’s integrity--and Duane over the incident. Duane claimed that Poe later realized his error, and suffered a good deal of mortification for his rudeness, but we have only Duane’s word for this, and the “Uneda” episode hardly inspires faith in his credibility.

As so often happened elsewhere in Poe’s history, there is in this saga a curious pattern of seemingly unrelated incidents having obscure links. In this case, the link between the Duffee scandal, the attempt to revive it by Duane, and the curiously overblown incident involving a misplaced book is Henry B. Hirst.

Duffee, it will be remembered, blamed Hirst for the dispute with Poe that nearly got Duffee sued. Hirst was also central in the later problems between Poe and Duane. According to Poe, Hirst “seemed to make a point” of personally obtaining the desired “Messenger” volume from Duane. (He later put it even more strongly, describing Hirst as the person “who insisted upon forcing” the book on him.) If we believe Mrs. Clemm’s story--and, unlike virtually all of Poe’s biographers, I see nothing that disproves it--the book was returned to Hirst, after which it mysteriously wound up in the hands of an out-of-town book dealer. As Duane and Poe apparently had no personal acquaintance, it is probably thanks to Hirst that Duane acquired such a vehement, oddly personal loathing of the late poet.

It all suggests that Hirst (who was once described by a woman who knew him well as "the most accomplished liar of his day") made a habit of fomenting what Duffee would call “mischief” all throughout Poe’s Philadelphia years--and beyond. Over the years, Hirst made other, equally irrational, charges of plagiarism against Poe, and it seems not improbable that he spread other unflattering gossip against his soi-disant friend. (In 1867, Elizabeth Oakes Smith quoted Hirst as telling her that "the real contempt which Poe felt for his contemporaries came out at once under the influence of the wine-cup, and he ridiculed, satirized, imitated and abused them right and left without mercy." In a column published two weeks after Poe's death, Hirst stated he "never heard [Poe] express one single word of personal ill-feeling against any man...")

Thomas O. Mabbott wrote casually that Hirst eventually went “harmlessly insane.” Hirst’s so-called madness reads more like a method that was “business as usual” in the World of Poe. And it was far from harmless.

The Grotesque and Arabesque Stella Lewis (Part Two)

The Lewis divorce was also notable for a cameo appearance by none other than Elizabeth F. Ellet, in the role of espionage agent. According to Mrs. Lewis, while her divorce was in progress, Ellet paid a friendly call on her. Mrs. Lewis left to order them lunch, and wound up being absent for about half an hour. After the two women dined and Mrs. Ellet had left, Mrs. Lewis discovered that her desk had been ransacked and that a publisher's letter which "would have been worth $600" to her had vanished. Mrs. Lewis claimed that Mrs. Ellet, who was "in the pay" of Stella's estranged husband, stole it on his behalf. (When recounting the story to John H. Ingram, she snarled, "I blame myself only, for having received such a viper after all the things I had heard of her!") Mrs. Lewis never explained exactly what this letter was, why it was so valuable, or how and why Mrs. Ellet was enlisted for this bit of burglary, so this episode's exact implications are unknown. However, the combination of Stella Lewis, Elizabeth Ellet, divorce intrigue, and Purloined Letters in the same anecdote presents a sort of Poean Perfect Storm of sleaze that practically takes one's breath away.

Mrs. Lewis may have figured in another story involving letters. Maria Clemm once stated that soon after Poe's death, Rufus W. Griswold offered her a large sum of money for letters a certain literary lady had written Poe. She claimed she destroyed them instead. Most Poe biographers assume--on absolutely no evidence--that the "lady" in question was Frances S. Osgood, (even though that would contradict Sarah Helen Whitman's story--which they also blindly accept--that in 1846 a delegation of ladies obtained Osgood's letters from Poe.) Ingram, however, thought otherwise. He confided to Whitman that, judging by what he heard from others, the letters were not Osgood's, but those of Mrs. Lewis. Ingram hinted that Griswold had hoped to obtain them in order to subject the wealthy woman to a little casual blackmail. A remarkable sidelight on the literary society of the time. (A footnote: Ingram may have been correct, but my own suspicion is that what Griswold sought were the mysterious, scandal-igniting letters Poe claimed Elizabeth F. Ellet had written him. At that time, Ellet and Griswold were locked in a remarkably vicious personal war--which the lady was winning handily--and he undoubtedly felt her letters, whatever they contained, would be life-saving ammunition.)

After her divorce, Mrs. Lewis lived a solitary life, mostly in England and the Continent. By all accounts, she had a genius for inspiring loathing, and Ingram, who saw much of her when she lived in London, described her as a very lonely and pathetic--and dreadful--woman whom he both pitied and detested. (He also occasionally implied that she was not entirely sane.) Before she died in 1880, Mrs. Lewis spent most of her last years writing Ingram over a hundred letters desperately trying to convince him of her importance in Poe's life. (He came to the conclusion that she did not "evince much real knowledge of the man.") Ingram later rewarded her efforts at self-glorification by writing a cruelly hilarious article for the July 1907 "Albany Review" entitled "Edgar Allan Poe and 'Stella'" where he dismissed her as one of the many "harpies" who helped make Poe's last years a misery.

Mrs. Lewis ranks among the worst of the many bizarre figures in Poe's history. (And considering that includes a cast of characters such as Sarah Helen Whitman, Frances S. Osgood, Annie Richmond, Rufus W. Griswold, Thomas Dunn English, Marie Louise Houghton, Thomas Holley Chivers, et al, that is a fairly frightening thought.) Poe was never truly close to anyone other than his wife and his mother-in-law, but there is a grim insincerity to his "friendship" with Mrs. Lewis that is quite depressing. In print and to others, his attitude towards Stella was warm, even effusive, and he was sincerely grateful for what he naively believed was her "kindness" to Mrs. Clemm. In truth, however, the sight of her evidently made him ill, and (according to Mrs. Clemm) she knew it. (Considering his similar encomiums to Frances Osgood, one is reminded of Hiram Fuller's cryptic remark that Poe's praise was as sinister as his abuse.)

As for Mrs. Lewis' feelings, it is quite clear that she never had any, for Poe or anyone else. When Poe was alive, she determinedly pried what she could out of him, for the sake of her literary ambitions. Immediately after his death, when Griswold's star was in the ascendant, she unblushingly transferred her loyalties to him. In 1853, she wrote that august biographer, "Nothing has ever given me so much insight into Mr. Poe's real character as his letters to you, which are published in this third volume. They will not fail to convince the public of the injustice of [George R.] Graham's and [John] Neal's articles." (It is doubtful she would have written any differently if she had known these letters were forgeries.) She continued, "I have ceased to correspond with Mrs. Clemm on account of her finding so much fault, and those articles of Graham's and Neal's. I cannot endure ingratitude. I have felt and do feel that you have performed a noble and disinterested part towards Mr. Poe in the editing of his works."

In later years, after Griswold was dead and his slanders of Poe discredited, she again did a 180-degree-spin any Olympic figure skater would envy. Eager to claim her share of Poe's burgeoning legend, she published a series of quite nauseating sonnets commemorating their "friendship," instructed everyone within earshot about the many kind services she had done him, and earnestly told Ingram that the late poet was "an angel," who had been cruelly defamed. (Unfortunately for her, Ingram lived long enough to see her correspondence with Griswold in print.)

Probably the clearest view of Mrs. Lewis' character and "friendship" with Poe comes through a letter of hers to an acquaintance in 1858. In the course of again asserting that Poe had asked her to write his life story, she managed, fittingly, to out-Griswold Griswold. She wrote:

"If anyone else should write it [Poe's life] do not permit the name of that old woman who calls herself his mother-in-law to appear in it. I have heard that she is not his mother-in-law. That she was something else to him. Anyhow, I believe that she was the black cat of his life. And that she at last strangled him to death."

After quoting this passage, Poe's biographer Edward Wagenknecht wrote with telling terseness: "And what the woman writes about herself in the same letter is almost equally repulsive."

At the end, when Poe lay slowly dying in that pitiful hospital bed in Baltimore, it can be hoped that he consoled himself with the thought that at least he had finally seen the last of Stella Lewis.

Quote of the Day

"I do like Mrs. H[oughton] so much for herself & not only for her goodness to Poe, but your suggestion as to that copy of a letter upset me greatly--yet it was right, & I am so grateful to you for pointing it out, not but what later on, when I came to weigh matters for publication, I must come to the conclusion I see you have. In fact, I wrote, & asked Mrs. H. whether she had not made some mistakes--which I pointed out--in her copy, & her answer confirms my & your views. Fear not--I print nothing that I am not sure about & trust that I shall have the joy of seeing you, & talking over all things, before I commence the biography for publication. Mrs. H. I'm sure loved Poe as a friend & would & will firmly stand for him & for me & she is a woman it would be difficult to put down, but she--I'm sure--is under a cloud. I fear, however, that having told me all she can remember of Poe she is drifting into the genus imaginative. Her reminiscences are so startling & so apt to satisfy one's needs that I cannot help being sceptical."
-Poe biographer John H. Ingram, writing to Sarah Helen Whitman about Marie Louise Shew Houghton, letter dated June 2, 1875

A word of explanation: Mrs. Houghton--who had been anxious to impress upon Ingram what a benefactress she had been to the Poe household from 1847-48--sent him what she claimed were copies of letters she had received from Poe. Ingram passed these copies on to Mrs. Whitman, who emphatically warned him that they sounded nothing like Poe, and that Ingram would be making a serious mistake if he published them as verbatim transcripts. (She pointed in particular to this nightmarish wail.)

Ingram, as the above quote showed, fully agreed that the letters were untrustworthy--as, indeed, they were--but, unaccountably, he nonetheless later incorporated them in his biography of Poe.

In short, these words of Ingram's prove that he knew Mrs. Houghton was passing bogus Poe letters to him, that she was "under a cloud" (i.e. barking mad,) and that, having exhausted the little Poe information that she had, she was now resorting to wild fantasy in her recollections of the poet. He claimed to have grown to like her through her letters (Ingram, who lived in England, never met Mrs. Houghton--or, indeed, most of his sources--in person,) but still had to acknowledge her utter lack of credibility.

But yet, Ingram not only published this obviously disturbed woman's ravings as authentic history, but all Poe biographers ever since have copied these same fraudulent and patently bizarre materials furnished by Mrs. Houghton--without the slightest hesitation! Why? Even John Carl Miller, the editor of Ingram's correspondence, described Houghton's reminiscences as "shot through with inaccuracies, myths, half-remembered facts mixed with hearsay and caution," and added that "There is just enough truth in some of these stories to make them acceptable, but not enough to allow proof to back them up." The question is this: If so much of what Mrs. Houghton said about Poe must be distrusted or simply discarded, why should we accept anything she said, particularly since the letters themselves are--as Ingram had to concede--the work of someone who, by that time of her life at least, was far from rational? Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus--"False in one, false in all."

Soon after I began researching Poe's life, I became increasingly puzzled, then exasperated, and finally dumbfounded as I constantly stumbled upon bits of information that utterly contradicted the "conventional wisdom" of his history, and I realized that Poe "scholars" have overlooked, distorted, or simply buried these biographical anomalies. This quote of Ingram's is a fine example, but there are countless others--many of which I have (no doubt futilely) written about on this ultra-obscure little blog over the past year. Poe's biographers appear to be so fixated on the revelation that Rufus Griswold lied about Poe, that they are blinded to the fact that very many other people did, as well.

Surely I cannot be the only one ever to notice all these things? How and why have they been burked?

There are times when studying Poe biography puts me in mind of the Harlan Ellison story: "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream."

Quote of the Day

"The snares and subterfuges he [Poe biographer John H. Ingram] had encountered in his dealing with the ladies who had known Poe, and some who claimed they had, and on whom he was so completely dependent for source material, had kept him walking nervously, as on a knife edge, and had at times driven him quite close to that insanity which he daily feared."
-John Carl Miller, editor of Ingram's correspondence, in "Building Poe Biography"

This statement of Miller's--delivered as a casual aside in the final pages of his book--is actually an astonishing bombshell. Miller admits, as if it was a detail of no consequence, that the women who so eagerly volunteered source material for Ingram's highly influential biography--women whose testimony provided so much of what we think we "know" about Edgar Allan Poe, and who, inadvertently or not, did so much to destroy what was left of his personal reputation--engaged in "snares and subterfuges." Not only that, their ranks included women who lied about knowing him at all! Miller, whose editing and annotating of the correspondence these women had with Ingram did so much to promote trust in them, here conceded they were not to be trusted at all--and that they almost literally drove Ingram mad!

Whom, among Ingram's female "Poe contacts," did Miller have in mind? Sarah Helen Whitman? "Annie" Richmond? Marie Louise Shew Houghton? Elizabeth Oakes Smith? Sarah Elmira Shelton? Stella Lewis? Or simply the whole strange, self-glorifying, mendacious lot of them?

Quote of the Day

"There is so much that is strange and almost incredible in our brief acquaintance that it must seem to one not acquainted with the private history of this epoch of his [Poe's] life apocryphal."
-Sarah Helen Whitman, trying to make sense of it all in a letter to John H. Ingram, March 17, 1874

You said it, lady.

Poe's Weirdest Woman, Sarah Helen Whitman; Or, The Biter Bit

"Even when the facts are available, most people seem to prefer the legend and refuse to believe the truth when it in any way dislodges the myth."
-John Mason Brown

Sarah Helen Whitman lived for thirty years after her disagreeable and still-mysterious parting of the ways with Edgar Allan Poe. Over the long course of these years, his memory took on ever-greater importance in her life. Her growing interest in his life and work both fostered and fed upon Poe's increasingly legendary reputation. She developed a widening correspondence with Poe biographers and associates, and drew to herself many young Poe cultists, deftly utilizing her three-month acquaintance with the poet and her unique status as his reputed sort-of fiancee to transform herself into "Poe's Helen." This aging, plain, rather affected, modestly-talented poetess, spiritualist, Transcendentalist, and habitual drug user--a woman, in short, who appeared to be a completely incompatible match for Poe--became, to many of his acolytes, the ultimate Girl Who Got Away, a goddess of sorts. It is hard to believe Poe sincerely wished to marry a woman fatuous enough to solemnly have herself photographed dressed as Pallas Athena, but thanks to her, most observers did believe just that. She convinced a great many people who really should have known better that she--and only she--was the one great love of Poe's life. (Although Whitman's campaign to convince the world that "Annabel Lee" was a paean to her was a utter failure.)Like all the women who associated their names with Poe's, there was a predominant element of self-glorification in her desire to perpetuate the name and fame of "The Raven." One cannot but think the dead Poe meant much more to her than the live one ever did. A telling example of her narcissistic attitude came when she proudly allowed Richard Henry Stoddard to read the notorious letter she claimed to have received from Poe, which featured the poet mendaciously assuring Whitman, as a sign of his unique love for her, and of his sense of "honor," that by marrying Virginia, he had sacrificed his own happiness. Whitman was surprised and deeply upset when Stoddard expressed his dismay at the letter's depiction of Poe's callous disloyalty to the memory of a loving wife, rather than applauding the tribute to herself.

Of course, Sarah Whitman had a particular incentive to shape public perception about her "romance" with Poe--the widespread belief that he had jilted her, or worse, never really wanted to marry her at all. Rufus Griswold was the first to put into print the claim that when Poe went to Providence for the last time, he was determined to break his relationship with Whitman, even declaring to a New York poetess, Mary Hewitt, that the marriage would never take place. Griswold's lurid details about Poe deliberately staging a drunken tantrum at Whitman's house, all in order to compel her to break their engagement, were, of course, false, but after communicating with Hewitt herself, Whitman was forced to privately concede that Poe had denied they would marry. As late as 1877, she was irritated by a magazine columnist's assertion that Poe "disclaimed any personal interest in the projected marriage, in the presence of literary acquaintances here, even at the moment of receiving congratulations upon the sudden betterment of his prospects, and that his passionate letters to Mrs. Whitman were either wanting in sincerity, or he was weak enough to pretend an indifference that he did not feel." Whitman was understandably troubled and embarrassed to have such details become common knowledge, not because she had cared so deeply for Poe--in private letters, she asserted she never really loved him--but because of the blow to her pride. Any woman would surely find such talk painful--especially if she was aware there was truth to it--and Whitman was particularly vulnerable, being an emotionally fragile, hyper-sensitive and extremely vain personality. For her own psychological well-being, she had to do what she could to counter this perception of their relationship.

Nemesis finally came for Mrs. Whitman in the form of a Lowell, Massachusetts housewife, Annie Richmond. Whitman had never met her, but she knew of Mrs. Richmond as an acquaintance and admirer of Poe's, who was also corresponding with his biographer John H. Ingram. Ingram even told Whitman that "Annie" was providing him with interesting Poe letters.

Whitman had no idea just how interesting these letters were until Ingram published some of them as part of an 1878 "Appleton's Journal" article, "Unpublished Correspondence by Edgar A. Poe." This article revealed to her--and the world--the previously undreamed-of claim that, during Whitman's entire association with Poe--an association that had by then become central to her entire identity--he had been sending a married woman letters that made it painfully clear that she was his favored object of adoration, and the widowed, available "Poe's Helen" was a mere unsatisfactory consolation prize. If Mrs. Whitman had seen nothing wrong with informing the world that Poe had emotionally betrayed his dead wife to her, Mrs. Richmond was equally comfortable with asserting that Poe had betrayed both Virginia and Mrs. Whitman to her.

O. Henry could not have written a more stunning surprise ending to Mrs. Whitman's story. Her shock and humiliation must have been severe--the seventy-five year-old died about two months after the article's publication, and no wonder! What did the poor woman now have to live for?--but she publicly reacted with a commendable dignity.

Soon after Ingram's article appeared in print, she published a wry, telling commentary on the piece in a local paper, the "Providence Journal." She began by observing that "some of Poe's later memorialists may perhaps be blamed for not burning material confided to them for publication by Poe's nearest and dearest friends."

About the "material" itself, Whitman noted "the absence of all testimony as to the verbal authenticity of the letters." Referring in particular to a long, surreal letter Poe supposedly wrote Marie Shew Houghton, she pointed out that the text came from a mere copy provided by Mrs. Houghton, and was thus untrustworthy. Whitman wrote that when Ingram showed her the copy of this letter, she warned him that the "peculiarities of style" and phraseology were so different from Poe's known writings that it was impossible to accept this as a literal transcript, and that he ought not to present it as such. She said he had fully agreed with her opinion, and that he assured her nothing would be published until it had been "revised" and "recast." (The obvious irony here is that many of the letters by and about Poe among Whitman's papers exist only in copies written out by herself.)

Regarding Mrs. Richmond's contributions, Mrs. Whitman said only that she had no idea whether they had been "revised" or "recast," but "one can hardly imagine Poe to have said, 'You are the only being in the whole world whom I have loved at the same time with truth and with purity.'"

Whitman suggested to her readers that as an "offset to the confused and contradictory impression which these letters must inevitably leave," they should study the "Recollections" that Mrs. Richmond's sister Sarah provided for William Gill's "Life of Poe." Whitman praised the "exquisite fidelity" of Sarah Heywood's description of the poet. It is interesting that Whitman made this observation. Miss Heywood depicted Poe--whom, she made it clear, she scarcely knew--as a quiet, reserved, dignified, brilliant gentleman; always charming and courteous, but whose inner self was his own, something kept private from Sarah, from sister Annie, and from everyone else. She found a line from Wordsworth applicable to him: "Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart." In other words, he was the antithesis of the undignified, unmanly, ungrammatical jerk depicted in the letters both Mrs. Richmond and Mrs. Whitman claimed to have received from him.

Whitman summarized Ingram's article by stating that if Boileau's axiom, "a man's style is the man himself," is valid, the style of these letters leave us unable to find Poe the man in them. She closed with a quote from Samuel Johnson regarding Boswell: "Sir, if I thought that Bozzy was preparing to write my life, I should be tempted to anticipate him by taking his."

Whitman's short article is apt, witty, and insightful--one of the best brief Poe-related critiques I've seen. She obviously had a personal stake is discrediting letters that delivered such a grievous blow to herself, but that does not discount the validity of her criticism.

However, her article is the final, sardonic twist to her long career as a professional Poe fiancee. She seemed completely unaware--or was she, deep in her heart?--of one fact. All of the cogent arguments she used to cast suspicion on the integrity of these letters and the ladies who presented them--the reliance on mere copies, the startling stylistic variations from Poe's known writings, the inability to find "the man" Poe in any of these missives, the "absence of all testimony as to...authenticity of the letters," the dubious service Poe's "friends" provided him by bequeathing such material to posterity in the first place--all apply with equal force and justice to...herself.

Quote of the Day

"Were it not so terrible I should often laugh at my American lady correspondents. Half their time and space is devoted to slandering each other--swearing that Poe cared only for them, and that everybody else who lays claim to his friendship is an impostor! That they (each one says the same) were only girls when he knew them, and when he died, and so could not vindicate him to the world, etc.!!...In fact, they all look upon Poe's fame as a convenient peg upon which to hang their own mediocrities where the world may see!"
-John H. Ingram, letter to Sarah Helen Whitman

It's amazing to me how, in the course of his Poe research, Ingram admitted a number of times that he had become increasingly skeptical, or downright contemptuous, about the veracity of most of his sources--the female ones in particular...but he wound up including them all in his book anyway.

Rating Poe Biography: The Good, the Bad, and the Simply Insane (Part One)

This is an overview of the major works about Poe--and a sorry, sorry lot they are, for the most part. When I see what passes for Poe scholarship, I'm generally reminded of Henry Ford's classic observation that "History is the bunk." (In the case of Poe history, I'd probably use a more impolite word than "bunk," but never mind that.)

The Good:

*Arthur Quinn, "Edgar Allan Poe." Overly pedantic at times (do we really need to know the precise location of the building where Eliza Poe died?) and slightly dated, but still the best complete biography. Quinn is, on the whole, admirably clear-headed and much more judicious than most Poe specialists. If you must read only one Poe book, here's the place to go.

*Edward Wagenknecht, "Edgar Allan Poe, the Man Behind the Legend." Not an actual biography--more like a biography of Poe's biographies--but it's a fine overview of what has been written about the man. More intelligent and insightful than many other Poe books, this makes a good introductory volume to Poe's strange life. Its only serious flaw is that Wagenknecht--who was not a professional Poe scholar--often accepted clearly untrustworthy material (most notably the demented outpourings of the omnipresent Susan Talley Weiss) as fact, which sometimes misled him into making erroneous conclusions.

*Sidney P. Moss, "Poe's Literary Battles," and "Poe's Major Crisis." Like Wagenknecht's book, Moss' works are not full biography, but they provide important source material on Poe's storm-tossed literary career. The latter work, in particular, dealing with his libel suit, provides a lot of information not found elsewhere.

*John C. Miller (ed.) "Building Poe Biography," and "Poe's Helen Remembers." These two books provide the highlights of John Henry Ingram's extensive correspondence about Poe. The former volume publishes the most important letters from his major sources, including Nancy "Annie" Richmond, Marie Louise Shew Houghton, and George Eveleth. The latter is devoted to Ingram's voluminous communications with Sarah Helen Whitman. Everything anyone says in either book is to be taken with even more than the usual amount of salt grains--Ingram himself eventually came to the depressing conclusion that most of his contacts were either blatant liars or, to use one of his favorite words, "imaginative," but these letters still make fascinating reading. (Miller's editorial comments and footnotes, unfortunately, are mostly remarkably uninformed, irritating and unintelligent, and are best ignored.)

*John H. Ingram, "Edgar Allan Poe." I included his book in this category with great reservation. Ingram's was the first serious Poe biography, and is obviously a labor of love. It was a landmark event in Poe scholarship. However, it is clumsily written, occasionally misleading, and frequently naive. He was also far too dependent on what one contemporary critic called "gossipy old women."

*Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson (eds.) "The Poe Log." The one truly indispensable source for anyone with an in-depth interest in Poe's life. It chronicles, as much as possible, every day of Poe's life, presenting much original material (letters, diaries, newspaper accounts, etc.) that are otherwise unpublished or not easily available. There is one caveat, however--the editors, understandably, have gone for a complete record, rather than a selective one. They make little or no differentiation between reliable and unreliable source material, thus they include much that is either of questionable believability or clearly bogus.

*William F. Hecker, "Private Perry and Mister Poe: The West Point Poems." A brief, but excellent and highly underrated analysis of Poe's military career and how it related to his writings. Hecker, a professional military man himself (who was, tragically, killed in Iraq in 2006,) provides authoritative and intelligent insights on Poe's stints in the army and West Point (a period that is oddly dismissed by most biographers,) showing that if Poe had not opted to become a legendary writer, he would have made a first-rate soldier--perhaps the most curious and intriguing anomaly in his entire life story. (The book also includes a facsimile of Poe's 1831 volume of poems.)

*Michael J. Deas, "The Portraits and Daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe." The book goes beyond its self-explanatory title. This is a scholarly, but highly readable history of the surprisingly numerous and varied visual depictions of Poe, providing a fresh take on the growth of the Poe Legend. Deas also includes a compilation of the many spurious portraits of both Edgar and Virginia Poe that have emerged over the years.

Next post: The stinkers!

The Mystery of Anna Blackwell

Providence, RI poetess Sarah Helen Whitman was an ether-sniffing eccentric who had a strange, unhappy relationship with Edgar Allan Poe during the last three months of 1848. Over the next thirty years of her life, this minor literary figure reinvented herself as a major source for Poe scholars. As she grew older, she became increasingly obsessed with Poe's memory, keeping up an extensive correspondence with his acquaintances, relatives, and biographers, sharing and receiving information and speculation about the elusive Edgar. This circle, was, you might say, the original Dead Poets Society.

The major figure in Whitman's correspondence became John Henry Ingram, who spent the 1870s doing extensive research on Poe for his 1880 biography. Whitman soon became not only his main personal source about Poe--she was a virtual collaborator.

This congenial partnership hit a very peculiar snag. In 1874, Whitman told Ingram that in mid-1848 (before she met Poe) Anna Blackwell, a writer visiting Providence whom she knew slightly, gave her a letter Poe had sent her some time earlier. (The text can be found here.) In this letter, he expresses his interest in Whitman, and asks Blackwell for information about her. Whitman explained to Ingram that she no longer had the original letter--she had given it to her friend John Russell Bartlett for his autograph collection--but she had retained a copy of the text. Whitman also told him that in 1847, a mutual friend, Mary Gove Nichols, had arranged for Blackwell to board for several weeks at Poe's country cottage in Fordham.

Ingram did not hear from Miss Blackwell herself until 1877, and her reply to his letter proved a rude shock. She flatly declared that her only contact with Poe consisted of two brief meetings. She never boarded with him and never even had any correspondence with him. Ingram then asked Mrs. Nichols about Whitman's story. That lady evidently confirmed Blackwell's account.

Ingram, understandably confused and uneasy, wrote Whitman describing these refutations of her story. She became extremely angry and defensive, insisting her tale was true, and calling upon Ingram to contact Bartlett, who would, she snapped, confirm she had given him this letter. (We do not have any statement from Bartlett on the controversy, and the actual letter Poe allegedly wrote Blackwell was never produced.)

Ingram was in a bind--and, judging from his letters about the dispute, deeply afraid. Whitman had become not only his epistolary friend, but a large part of his cherished dream of writing the definitive Poe biography. And here, at this late date, she presented him with a detailed, circumstantial, seemingly credible story that not only had no evidence to support it, but had the leading figures in the tale unequivocally rejecting it. It was indisputable that someone was selling him an utter fabrication. And he had no idea which side to believe.

In the end, he claimed to accept Whitman's story. He really had no choice. If he did not--if he decided that Whitman was capable of being an untrustworthy fantasist--then the implications were simply too great and too alarming to bear.

Everyone since has followed Ingram's lead and branded Blackwell and Nichols as liars. John Carl Miller, the editor of Ingram's published papers, theorized that Blackwell merely wanted to avoid the taint of being associated in any way with someone as notorious as Poe.

This is an untenable argument. Her erstwhile friend, Mrs. Whitman, took great pride in her own relationship with Poe. Her other friend, Mary Gove Nichols, also happily published every detail about her acquaintance with "the Raven." By the 1870s, Poe had become almost a mythical figure. Everyone who ever had the least contact with him was positively eager to share their reminiscences with the world. And we are to assume that this obscure literary figure would blatantly lie about receiving a perfectly innocuous letter from him? And Mrs. Nichols would help her? And why did John Russell Bartlett fail to end the controversy by simply producing Poe's letter?

Another point to consider is that, assuming Whitman's story was true, Blackwell, when she received Ingram's letter of inquiry, must have assumed the Poe letter was still in existence. With this in mind, it staggers belief to think that Blackwell would risk denying Whitman's story, as she would presume that Sarah Helen could produce the letter and prove her to be a shameless liar.

The truth of the whole strange story can never be known for certain. But we are left with the inarguable fact that Whitman gave Ingram information that has nothing to support it, and several important factors that disprove it. The strong possibility that her entire story was a fable cannot be ignored.

And if Whitman cannot be trusted in this relatively important story, can any of the many, many other stories she contributed to Poe lore be trusted?