Hello everyone. Another edition of #DispellingMyths. I hope the week is off to a good start for everyone.
When I was in high school, I did a term paper on Edgar Allan Poe. He’s always been a fascination for me. A wildly creative, intelligent and tormented mind, I’ve read everything ever discovered and printed and probably have more of his books than any other author save perhaps Oscar Wilde or William Butler Yeats. I vividly remember as a child reading The Tell-Tale Heart. Premature Burial and the Cask of Amontillado still have the ability to give me nightmares. So coupled with my empathy for any soul who’s taken too soon, a throwback to familial issues I’m sure, he’s remained one of my most favored authors. Like most of us who were taught that his creativity was largely fueled by drug use, I believed in the myth but in this digital age where any and every tiny piece of information is there to be found, most have rethought those allegations.
His detractors, arch-rival Rufus Griswold chief among them, certainly propagated the idea of Poe as a degenerate. A drug addled dissolute reprobate that drank hard and penned his chilling stories under those influences. You can still find articles about his purported drug use on the internet but old rumors, particularly those so rooted in literary melancholic romanticism, are hard to dispel. It’s easy to imagine his more fantastic stories coming from drug hazed binges but in truth he had a strict work ethic. Was very athletic, holding a record for swimming up the James River for six miles. He enjoyed rowing on Turtle Bay in New York and was an avid hiker. Sheer reason should cause us to question some of the myths. His lyrical prose was brilliant, his poetry more so. Compared to some of his ramblings in private letters, easily imagined to be written under the influence, it’s hard to envision his ability to craft such works when not in command of his faculties.
Part of the confusion may come from Poe’s use of first person narration. Then, as in now, some readers have a disconnect when it comes to the mystique of a writer. His use of a fictional writer as the narrator lends itself to confusion perhaps with his enemies quick to jump on any hint of scandal. With the publication of Poe’s Tales (1845), critics dismissed the work as “the strange outpourings of an opium eater” (The Daily Cincinnati Gazette, July 30, quoted in The Poe Log, p. 555) His one and only true personal accounting of opium use was in a letter to Annie Richmond on November 16, 1848 (Ostrom, Letters, pp.400–403). In rambling sentences, he recounts to Mrs. Richmond of a suicide attempt using laudanum. If this is a valid accounting, he admits lapsing into a coma before able to take a full dose which suggests he wasn’t used to taking the drug. In any case, laudanum was a medication taken by many at the time, affluent and indigent alike. The latter less so due to costs. And Poe seemed to have financial difficulties most of his life. In the year he penned The Raven, 1845, he made around $400. A windfall considering most years he made far less and had to beg and borrow from friends and family.
As to his drinking, and possible alcoholism, those are better documented and closer to truth. In 1875, R. M. T. Hunter, who had known Poe at the University of Virginia, recalled “Here [in Richmond] his habits were bad. . . . Poe was the only man on White’s staff capable of doing this [proofing classical quotations] and when occasionally drinking (the habit was not constant) he was incapacitated for work” (The Poe Log, p. 237). It wasn’t only his enemies who claimed alcohol as one of Poe’s demons. On May 20, 1843, Lambert A. Wilmer wrote to John Tomlin, “Edgar A. Poe . . . has become the strangest of our literati. He and I are old friends — have known each other from boyhood and it gives me inexpressible pain to notice the vagaries to which he has lately become subject. Poor Fellow! — he is not a teetotaler by any means and I fear he is going headlong to destruction, moral, physical, and intellectual” (Mabbott, Merlin, p. 37)
There are some rumors of Absinthe use, the Green Goddess or Fairy are out there but more on that in a future Dispelling Myths. (I make my own Absinthe. More on that too.)
So while it’s safe to say that personal demons chased Edgar Allan Poe into a bottle, they did not force him to the opium dens as so many would like to believe. The myths will persist. It’s easier to imagine him as a dark and sinister individual, insane and out of control. His works suggest otherwise, subjects notwithstanding. He had his flaws but drug use, it seems safe to say, was not among them.
So have a pleasant and productive day,
And oh, what myths might we bust today?
#DispellingMyths #NuRomantics #NRRTG
