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 Three)

I attacked with great resolution the editorial matter, and, reading it from beginning to end without understanding a syllable, conceived the possibility of its being Chinese, and so re-read it from the end to the beginning, but with no more satisfactory result."
-Edgar Allan Poe, "The Angel of the Odd"

The Simply Insane:

*John Evangelist Walsh, "Plumes in the Dust," and "Midnight Dreary." These two books present a sordid alternate universe where Poe fathers Frances S. Osgood's youngest child, Fanny Fay, and dies as a result of a beating administered by brothers of Sarah Elmira Shelton. I have read many poorly-done historical works in my time, on many different subjects. Walsh, however, is in a league all to himself. I do not believe I have ever encountered any books daring to present themselves as legitimate history that contain so many errors, indulge in so many unfounded speculations posing as facts, depict so many fictional scenarios, have so many examples of the deliberate omission of evidence that directly disproves the stated thesis (such as a letter, which Walsh must have seen, which suggests that at the time Fanny Fay was conceived, Mrs. Osgood was in Providence--with Mr. Osgood,) and commits so many sins against common sense as these two volumes. Astounding stuff.

*Joseph Wood Krutch, "Edgar Allan Poe, A Study In Genius," Marie Bonaparte, "The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe," and David M. Rein, "Edgar A. Poe, the Inner Pattern." These are all (with emphasis on the first two syllables) psycho-biographies. The two former books use psychological analyses of Poe's stories and poems to come to the conclusion that he was an impotent basket case who married Virginia (who is depicted as a childlike imbecile) only in order to shield himself from a "normal" relationship with a "normal" woman. The latter uses psychological analyses of Poe's stories and poems to come to the conclusion that he was a frustrated basket case, hopelessly scarred by the loss of Sarah Elmira Royster when he was a teenager--a loss that overshadowed his entire life--who married Virginia the childlike imbecile only because, uh, her mother told him to.

I have used psychological analyses of these three books to come to the conclusion that these authors really, really should have found other lines of work and given poor old Poe's psyche a break.

A postscript: I was thinking of adding some commentary on the many novels that feature Poe as a character, but the subject is too depressing. Except for Harold Schechter's highly enjoyable series of murder mysteries that star Poe as an amateur detective, I have yet to find one fictional work about Poe that is even readable. I've probably seen every novel there is about Poe, and trying to classify them all into various levels of "godawful" is just too much for me. Suffice to say they all seem to fall into three categories. In the first, Poe is Roderick Usher come to life, a dark, tormented character out of his wildest fiction, and bearing not the least resemblance to any human being who ever lived. (I'll never forget--although I sincerely wish I could--the novel that included a scene where Poe has an orgasm over Jane Stanard's corpse.) The second category are the novels such as Rudy Rucker's "The Hollow Earth," and Stephen Marlowe's "The Lighthouse At the End of the World," that feature a character bearing Poe's name, but otherwise are works of open fantasy that have no connection with his actual life, or oddities like Matthew Pearl's "The Poe Shadow" (a perfect example of what Poe would call "easy writing and hard reading.") The third--which are perhaps the worst of the lot--present themselves as straight biographical novels. They inevitably depict Poe as a perennially drunken, sexually frustrated, deeply unlikable, bumbling, and rather pitiful creature. To top it off, not one of the books in any of these categories ever portray Poe as someone intellectually capable of writing a shopping list, let alone "The Raven" or "Eureka."It's amazing how the only thing more painful to read than a typical Poe biography is a typical Poe novel.

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

The Bad:

(A note: Essentially, this category consists of practically every book ever published about Poe other than the ones mentioned in my previous post. However, these works listed below are what I consider to be the most important and influential disasters.)

*Mary E. Phillips, "Edgar Allan Poe, the Man." I long for the day when someone translates this book into English.



*Hervey Allen, "Israfel." Of all the major Poe biographies, this is perhaps the one I find most offensive. Allen was, by profession, a writer of trashy fiction (and, it was claimed, plagiarized trashy fiction, to boot,) and it shows. His lengthy Poe biography is often inaccurate, and highly speculative. That itself is hardly unusual in books about Poe. However, what makes his book particularly notable among the Poe Hall of Shame is the coarse, almost prurient tone that is diffused throughout--a tone that has proved to be quite influential, as it has been adopted by all the worst Poe-related biographers and novelists since. In that sense, I suppose you could say that Allen was a pioneer in his way. Of course, you could say the same about Typhoid Mary.

*Kenneth Silverman, "Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance." The book's insufferably pompous title sets the tone for the entire work. Considering Silverman makes no secret of his disdain for Poe--as both a writer and a man--one wonders what drew him to such a project. "Remembrance" has many factual errors that appear to be due to hasty and sloppy research and writing (the book often reads like a failing grad student's first draft,) and his only interest in Poe's works seems to be in making endless juvenile pop-psychology attempts to view them as some mirror of what he imagines to have been Poe's warped psyche. Silverman also misses no opportunity to interpret every event in Poe's life in a way that paints him in the worst possible light--even when the circumstances clearly suggest otherwise. Silverman is also extremely inconsistent and vague in his descriptions and interpretations of Poe's personal life--his relationship with Virginia in particular. He gives the overall impression that he simply had not bothered to think out or had not been able to decide who or what Poe was, or what had even happened in the more controversial events of his life. This often causes him to take the easy way out by dismissing this or that situation by simply calling it, "murky," while simultaneously setting himself up as a censorious analyst of it all. (Which, again, brings up the question why this book was even written.) The fact that this goofy tripe is considered the standard modern biography of Poe quite frankly appalls the hell out of me.

*Thomas O.Mabbott never wrote a biography of Poe, but he published numerous magazine artcles about the poet, and edited the best-known modern editions of Poe's works, with extensive notes and annotations. Unfortunately, he spread a great deal of myths, errors, and flat-out libels about Edgar and Virginia Poe in the process. He seemed completely unable to judge historical evidence, accepting--and thus giving credibility to--a frightening amount of sheer hogwash. For reasons that completely elude me, Mabbott is considered something of a "dean" among Poe specialists, with his opinions having been given a quite unjustified air of authority. This was a man who considered Susan Talley Weiss to have been a most trustworthy source. Enough said. Mabbott also seemed to have odd problems with simple reading comprehension. I have found a number of instances where his descriptions of what someone said or wrote in no way matched the actual quotes or writings. Very strange stuff.

*George Woodberry, "The Life of Edgar Allan Poe" Woodberry evidently wrote his Poe biography on commission. He was a peculiar choice for the job, as his tastes and sympathies were all with the New England Transcendentalists who were particularly anathema to Poe. (Not to mention the fact that he was a friend of Rufus Griswold's son William.) Like Silverman, Woodberry made no bones about his instinctive antipathy to both Poe's writings and personality. The 1885 edition of his biography is reasonably scholarly and not without interest, but by the time he released a heavily revised edition in 1909, he had fallen under the baleful influence of the ubiquitous Susan Talley Weiss, and the book suffered accordingly. If you wish to study Woodberry, stick to the earlier edition.

*Peter Ackroyd, "Poe: A Life Cut Short." Another publisher-commissioned hack job. A mere summary of recent Poe books--mostly Silverman's--and this summarizing is not even done well. This book is most notable for featuring one of the worst metaphors I've seen in some time--where he compares Poe to a "cuttlefish floundering in its own ink." Methinks Ackroyd wound up floundering in his own attempts at profundity.

*William Gill, "The Life of Edgar Allan Poe." Gill was among the more eccentric Poe enthusiasts. His book about Poe has some interesting original information, but on the whole is not of any importance. He is perhaps best known for his claim of having retrieved the bones of Virginia Poe when her Fordham graveyard was demolished, and keeping her remains under his bed for years. Every time I think of Gill, I'm reminded of Robert Bloch's short story "The Man Who Collected Poe."

*J.H. Whitty. Whitty never did an actual book about Poe, but he wrote extensively about the writer, and provided information to several biographers (most notably Mary Phillips and Hervey Allen.) Very unfortunately, Whitty was--in the words of an acquaintance--"a crank." He had a long history of claiming to have uncovered important Poe material that turned out to be either misrepresented by him or simply nonexistent. He also had a passion for attributing practically every poem published anonymously or under pseudonyms during the 1830s and 1840s to Poe's pen. Most of these attributions have been contested or discarded, which is a blessing for Poe's reputation, as the poems Whitty promoted were always dreadfully bad. Even Thomas Mabbott--not exactly Mr. Reliable himself--admitted that Whitty was in the habit of blending fact with fiction. How such a person could remain as any sort of Poe authority astounds me, but such is the case.

He attributed two poems that appeared anonymously in "Graham's Magazine" in 1845, "Stanzas" and "The Divine Right of Kings," as Poe's work, on the grounds that he claimed to have discovered a volume of that magazine annotated by Frances S. Osgood, where she identified EAP as the author. Whitty never produced this volume when asked to do so, but the attribution has stuck, largely because Mabbott claimed that, some years later, someone else discovered a "Graham's" volume in the Boston Public Library, where some unknown person had written Poe's name under these poems. It does not seem to have occurred to Mabbott that someone hearing of Whitty's claim--or even Whitty himself--had used his story as an excuse to label these poems as being by Poe. He also ignored the fact that these highly mediocre poems are not in the least in Poe's style, and that Poe would have had no reason not to claim them as his own, if he had truly written them.

Similarly, a Poe "memoir" Whitty wrote for an edition of his poems featured hitherto unknown and unpublished reminiscences Whitty claimed were written by Poe's friend Frederick W. Thomas. Whitty never produced the actual manuscript of these "reminiscences," or even an account of how these papers came into his hands. Nevertheless, this completely unauthenticated information has become part of standard Poe biography. There are many other examples of Whitty's mendacious influence. Like Mrs. Weiss, he deserves a special infamy for his particularly large amounts of untrustworthy or outright false contributions to the Poe record.

* "Poe" by James M. Hutchisson

All you need to know about this derivative, astonishingly inaccurate, and rather pitiful biography comes near the end of the book. Hutchisson briefly describes the later life of Sarah Elmira Shelton, adding the statement that "After expressing her anguish over Poe's death in the October letter to Muddy, Poe's last love, Elmira Royster Shelton, entered into a discreet silence on all
matters about the author for twenty-six years. She broke it only in 1875, when she granted an interview to Edward V. Valentine, of Richmond, who tape-recorded her statements. After Elmira's death on 11 February 1888, the recording was placed in the Valentine Museum in Richmond, where it remains today."

Tape-recordings. In 1875. Brilliant, Mr. Hutchisson. Simply brilliant.

Coming next: The worst of the worst!

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!

On Poe Biography

"History is the bunk."
-Henry Ford

I have become convinced that one of the main reasons most books about Edgar Allan Poe are so bad--aside from the fact that most of his biographers are incredible dunderheads--is that he has been written about strictly as either a literary figure or a psychological case-history--never as a historical figure. So far as I know, no serious, trained historian has ever studied him to any extent. His biographers have been either professors of literature (Thomas Mabbott, Arthur Quinn) cheap novelists who see him as lurid source material (Hervey Allen,) overenthusiastic amateurs (John Henry Ingram, Mary E. Phillips, William Gill,) hacks (Kenneth Silverman,) eccentric psychologists who have studied way too much Freud (David Rein, Marie Bonaparte,) or outright cranks (J.H. Whitty, John Evangelist Walsh.) I suspect if some modern-day Francis Parkman or Edward Gibbon began researching Poe's life, starting from scratch and carefully weighing and judging the evidence--once they recovered from the shock of all the patent balderdash they'd have to wade through--the result would be a Poe we'd scarcely recognize. I'm certain that sources like Susan Talley Weiss would be laughed completely out of court. There would be a halt to endless attempts to interpret every work of fiction or poetry he ever wrote as a mirror of his personal life. (I'm continually reminded of the words of his friend C.C. Burr: "Of all authors, ancient or modern, Poe has given us the least of himself in his works. He wrote as an artist.") There would be an end to this practice of blindly repeating the statements of other authors without bothering to ascertain if there is any truth to them (e.g. Virginia Poe was a childlike simpleton with the personality of a wax doll, or that Frances Osgood was estranged from her husband in 1845.) Speaking of Osgood, Poe's relations with her would be judged on something other than measuring the physical placement of her poems in the "Broadway Journal." In short, there would be a recognition of the fact that people can lie, memories can deceive, and letters can be forged.

Well, a poor-devil blogger can dream, can't they?

The Problematic "Chivers' Life of Poe" (Part Three)

The "Life of Poe" is virtually worthless as a historical source. The biographical portion we have is a mere rehash of Griswold's error-plagued memoir. The portion that quotes Poe discussing with Chivers the merits of various authors often contradicts what Poe himself said about them in his published writings, and it contains ludicrous misinterpretations and misrepresentations of previously published material. The author of this manuscript--whether it truly was Chivers or someone else--makes it clear that he did not really know or understand Poe in the slightest degree. When the "Life" was released in book form in 1952, Poe biographer Arthur Quinn openly wondered why anyone even bothered publishing such a useless work.

The only portion of the "Life" that has interested anyone--probably the sole reason why it was published at all--is one anecdote, of which the first part--the section most savoring of scandalum magnatum--did not appear in the 1903 publication and was previously unknown. The incident described allegedly happened when Chivers visited New York in the summer of 1845. The story goes that while walking on the street, Chivers encountered Poe, who was drunk out of his mind and looking for trouble. After doing his best to get into a public brawl with an old nemesis, "Knickerbocker" editor Lewis Gaylord Clark, Poe blearily announced to Chivers that he will reveal to him--a man he scarcely knew--the "secrets of my heart." He bragged about being involved in "the damnedest amour" with the unnamed wife of a painter, who was out of town often because of his work. Poe claimed the lady was currently in Providence, and she had written asking him to go there that afternoon. He added that his "noble" wife must not hear anything about this, as he would not hurt her for all the world. A strange concern, considering that he was disseminating all the juicy details not only to Chivers, but any other bystanders on the crowded city street within earshot. (Incidentally, it is also hard to believe that Chivers--who certainly would have no reason at the time to keep a precise record of his chats with Poe--could reproduce these conversations in such precise and profuse detail years later.)

When Chivers next saw Poe, two days later, he teased his companion about his "love-scrape" with the anonymous Providence lady. Poe, now sober, was taken much aback and frostily denied being involved in an "amour" with a woman in Providence or anywhere else in the world. Bizarrely, however, he soon afterwards volunteered to Chivers the information that "some body" (the 1903 printing read, "some lady") had written asking him to come to Providence, and he felt obligated to go. He then borrowed money from Chivers for his journey, and departed, again begging Chivers not to say anything to Virginia Poe or Maria Clemm about his plans. (One wonders what Poe himself could conceivably have told those ladies to explain his absence.)

While acknowledging that this squalid little tale has a mighty strange ring to it, few Poe biographers have dared to deeply question it, although it has serious flaws, even aside from the dubious authenticity of the manuscript itself:

First, the chronology makes no sense. Supposedly, Poe, in his drunken fit, tells Chivers that the Providence siren asked him to visit her that afternoon. Several days later, Poe again tells Chivers (whom he had evidently decided to make his sole confidante on the matter) that "some body" had written, asking him to go to Providence.

Second, according to this story, Poe, cold sober, learns from Chivers that he had been drunkenly drivelling to him about a "love-scrape" with a woman in Providence--a claim he indignantly denied. But then, the next time he sees Chivers, he goes out of his way to tell him that someone had summoned him to that very city--a summons, he made it clear, (obviously thinking he had hitherto failed to sufficiently incriminate himself to Chivers,) that needed to be kept secret from his wife and mother-in-law. I grant you that Poe often had his own strange way of doing things. Even so, does it make any sense whatsoever that the man would --particularly when he was sober and already aware that he had, while intoxicated, told Chivers way too much--voluntarily confide all this to him? Particularly since he kept stressing his anxiety to keep it all from his family? And that, as chatty and self-destructively revealing as Poe was to Chivers about all this, nobody else in the world--including people who knew Poe much better than Chivers did--gave any sign of knowing anything about this "amour?"

Third, Frances S. Osgood, who is assumed to be the painter's wife in question, was, in truth, in Providence around this time. (She knew many people there, and spent much time in the city.) However, Poe biographer Mary E. Phillips stated that her husband Samuel was there as well, executing portrait commissions. I do not know Phillips' source for this claim, but it is certainly credible. Be that as it may, a letter written to Frances by her friend Hiram Fuller indicates that during this Providence visit of hers, she was staying with her friends Mr. and Mrs. Henry Anthony. That alone makes it unlikely that she was conducting any sort of extramarital dalliance there.

Fourth, Poe himself, in his published "Reply to Thomas Dunn English," stated that he briefly left New York in the beginning of July, in order to "procure evidence" regarding charges of forgery that had been repeated against him by an ironworks merchant named Edward Thomas. (These forgery charges are themselves a strange, cloudy story that will be dealt with later.) Frances Osgood was the one who told Poe about these forgery charges (Thomas was a stranger to Poe, but a long-time friend of Osgood and her husband.) When he heard what Thomas had said, Poe intended to sue him, so it was logical that he needed to interview Osgood in person about the slander. At the time in question, Poe was absorbed in dreams of litigation, not love. (In an August 1845 issue of the "Broadway Journal," Poe mentioned a "recent" trip to Boston. It is not clear if this was the journey to "procure evidence," or if he traveled there for another, unknown reason. If he did travel to Boston, not Providence, early in July, that would obviously do critical damage to the credibility of the "Life of Poe" anecdote.)

In short, if Poe said anything resembling the now-famous "amour" quip, it actually reads more like drunken, rather cruel (to the Providence lady in particular,) humor--the kind that humiliates the jokester once the alcohol wears off--than a case of in vino veritas. It is noteworthy that Poe's most vicious calumniators--such as Thomas Dunn English, Charles F. Briggs, and Rufus Griswold--never questioned Poe's fidelity to his wife. Truly, they called him every foul thing under the sun except an adulterer. (English and Briggs even went out of their way to state that Poe's relations with the women who surrounded him were platonic.) However, the history of the "Chivers' Life of Poe" is so sketchy and suspicious that the strong possibility that it is simply a fraud, based on a few facts that were already easily available, cannot be ignored. Even if it is not--if it truly is the fragmentary remainder of a lost manuscript written by an mentally unstable man with a grudge against Poe for having supposedly plagiarized from him, a manuscript that mysteriously came to light only many years after the author's death--this work has gotten far more attention and credibility than it deserves.

And on that note...have a great Labor Day weekend, kids. Next week, we delve into the saga of Elizabeth Ellet and Frances Osgood, the Pen Pals From Hell.

The Problematic Chivers' Life of Poe (Part Two)

The next we hear of anything relating to Chivers' manuscript comes thirty years after his death. Early in 1888, a nephew of Chivers named John Quincy Adams wrote a letter to the "Atlanta Constitution" claiming that he had acquired unpublished and previously unknown letters and documents by and about Poe, including a manuscript biography written by one of Poe's friends. Oddly, he not only avoided explaining how he obtained these manuscripts, but he said nothing about the author of this biography being his own uncle. In fact, he avoided giving the name of the writer at all. Also, his description of these manuscripts does not exactly match the Chivers papers we have today.

After this announcement, these papers seem to have vanished as suddenly and mysteriously as Adams claimed they had appeared. In following years, Adams provided biographical information about Chivers for newspaper articles and at least one biographer of the Georgia poet, but, inexplicably, he omitted any further mention of this treasure trove of documents he had earlier claimed to have acquired.

The Chivers biography of Poe did not surface until 1903, when the "Century" magazine published excerpts from it under the title, "The Poe-Chivers Papers." The editor of these article, George Woodberry, later privately admitted that he had never even seen the originals of these papers. He worked only with typed transcripts that had been sent to him. (And, in fact, the material published by the "Century" differs in some respects from what we now have.) The "Century" articles failed to say who currently owned these documents, where they had been since Chivers' death, or why they were only now being released.

After the "Century" material came out, the documents again disappeared from view for twenty years. Finally, in 1923, Harry F. Barker, a rare book dealer from Illinois, contacted Henry E. Huntington, offering to sell him the Poe-Chivers collection. He evidently gave no information about the collection's provenance or how he had obtained it, but this did not discourage Huntington from purchasing the papers, which now reside in the California library and museum bearing his name. The Poe biography--or what little there is of it--was published in a 1952 book.

The "Chivers' Life of Poe" (as it is now called) is far from being a complete manuscript. It is merely a handful of fragmentary writings, of what seems to be an uncompleted early draft. They are in poor condition and practically illegible.

The peculiar history of this manuscript raises obvious questions about its authenticity. We cannot even be certain that the documents in the Huntington are the same ones Adams claimed to possess in 1888. The actual text of the "Life of Poe," however, is even stranger.

More to come...

The Problematic "Chivers' Life of Poe" (Part One of Three)

...Or, as Perry Mason might put it, The Case of the Disappearing Documents.

Thomas Holley Chivers is among the creepier figures in Poeworld. A strange, half-mad Georgia poet and physician, he had mystical and intellectual pretentions that expressed themselves in a sort of muddled, hysteria-laced Swedenborgianism. He initiated a correspondence with Poe in the 1840s, which continued sporadically until the latter's death. The relationship could not be called a happy one. Chivers regarded Poe with an uneasy blend of awe and resentment, with a strong underlay of envy. In his later years, he fell into an increasingly psychotic obsession with the idea that Poe had stolen from his, Chivers', poetry. For his part, Poe seems to have privately held Chivers in scant esteem. However, he permitted their correspondence to continue, probably in the hope of enlisting the wealthy Georgian as an investor in his long-dreamed-of magazine project. Their only known personal contact, however, came when Chivers visited New York City around June or July of 1845.

Soon after Poe's death, Chivers began working on a biography of his late correspondent. He wrote to Maria Clemm and Sarah Helen Whitman for details about Poe, but seems to have gotten relatively little of note from them. Aside from some contemporary newspaper and magazine articles, and Griswold's biography, this was evidently the extent of his research. One wonders how much of a biography Chivers could have written, considering that Poe was essentially a stranger to him, and he did not even know anyone who had known his subject well. However, according to a letter he wrote in 1852, Chivers did manage to cobble together some sort of completed manuscript about Poe. Its exact contents are lost to us, and it never found a publisher (considering the quality of Chivers' writing, this is not surprising.) After his death in 1858, the manuscript was quickly forgotten.

To be continued...