When my family and I took a trip to Philadelphia in February, 2009, I brought along my copy of that big Barnes & Noble collection of Poe, hoping I could get my kids into it while on the road. Cailey did read the first few stanzas of ‘The City In the Sea’ aloud while riding in the back seat, then read the rest silently so I didn’t have the pleasure of hearing her pronounce those final lines, “Hell, rising from a thousand thrones, shall do it reverence,” in her sweet, eight year-old voice.
After three days of running around the cold, windy streets of Philly, checking out the Liberty Bell, the Franklin Museum (and the Philly cheese-steak guy on the corner), I was scanning the well-worn green map of tourist attractions when I saw two tiny words, ‘Poe House.’
I’d been to the Poe residence in Baltimore years ago, and had more recently seen his old dorm room at the University of Virginia (sealed-off behind what looks like a sheet of bulletproof plexiglass), so I didn’t think “Poe” when I thought of Philly. But there it was, easy to miss because it was far away from the other patriotic attractions clustered together, isolated by itself in the upper right-hand quadrant of the map. “Poe House.”
On our way out of town we drove down Spring Garden Street to the corner of 8th where the old red brick house stands off by itself, a national park sign and a statue of a raven visible from across the street.
A light rain was falling when we walked up to the door and knocked. A kindly gentleman with tidy grey hair and a disconcerting but lovely Virginia accent let us in. After a stroll through some modest displays and framed documents, then an informative but uninspired 8-minute video, we stepped into the rooms where Poe (along with his wife Virginia, her mother “Muddy”, and their cat Catterina) had lived and worked.
The first thing you notice is that the national park service has not attempted the typical restoration or redecoration; instead, the rooms are bare of furniture, the walls cracked and peeling. The effect, more than being simply “spooky” is that Poe has just moved out (“one step ahead of his creditors,” as my mother would say) and that nothing has been touched since he left. Walking through these empty rooms I had a feeling similar to the one I’ve had while touring vacant apartments in New York—that odd double-vision of imagining the former tenant’s life while also visualizing yourself living there.
The night before, I’d sat up alone in our hotel room and read ‘The Black Cat’ It had been years since I’d read it. I was astounded.
One of the powers of Poe’s stories—the vivid images conveyed in them—are also one of the greatest dangers that prevent the casual reader from appreciating their full power. The razor-sharp pendulum swinging closer and closer to the helpless prisoner’s chest, the yowling one-eyed cat sitting on the head of the woman’s rotting corpse—these images are so powerful, you can carry them in your head for years, vivid as photographs, and believe that you know the stories, that you know Poe. Those images, indelible as they are, are not the half of it.
What hit me full-force as I read ‘The Black Cat’ was that Poe’s real power was his unsurpassed ability to inhabit the hearts and minds of people who are confronting (and often being devoured by) fear, by terror, sheer horror, and to convey that experience in language that somehow manages to be unforgettably beautiful while losing none of the raw, visceral reality of those terrible thoughts and feelings.
But Poe deals in a very particular type of horror that also gets overlooked by his more casual admirers.
Much is made of Poe’s “obsession with death” (and with dead beautiful women, in particular). While there’s no doubt that Poe was indeed obsessed with death (or at least extremely ‘interested’ in it), death itself is almost never the real source of horror in his stories or his poems where it’s elevated to near-romantic (some would say necrophiliac) status—particularly when a beautiful woman is involved.
When Poe deals with Death (with a capital “D”) as an object of contemplation, not as a mere by-product of violent crime, Death is a destroyer but is also the means by which we are reunited with the ones we love—a complicated set of emotional responses, for sure, but not exactly horror.
The kind of horror that Poe excelled at portraying and generating doesn’t come from any outside source—it comes from within. The horror of loss of control, the loss of self.
When people talk about the relationship between Poe’s troubles with alcohol and his art, there are typically two schools of thought—first, the one that romanticizes or glorifies his alleged substance abuse (Man, he must have really been stoned when he wrote that one) and the one that denies it outright, claiming (often indignantly) that Poe’s stories are the pure products of superior intellect and craftsmanship alone.
When I read Poe’s stories today, they feel like brilliant life-and-death struggles between his considerable craftsmanship and his even more considerable devils, only one of which was alcohol.
The devil that Poe (or the typical Poe narrator) returns to again and again is his own horrifying inability to control his thoughts and actions. Poe’s narrators are often deeply deluded individuals, like the narrator of ‘The Black Cat’ who firmly believes he is a gentle and compassionate soul right up until the moment he buries the ax in his wife’s skull.
Every alcoholic can tell you about things they did that they have no idea why they did. One moment they were laughing and playing with their children, the next moment they were raging at them. One moment the bottle is full, the next moment it’s empty. It wasn’t me. That’s what we tell ourselves. Because, in those terrible moments, it feels like the truth. It wasn’t me.
Then who was it?
Evil spirits. Witches. Gremlins. The Little people.Vengeful ghosts. The others. The one’s outside of us.
But Poe knew who really did it, and it scared the hell out of him. Which is why he still scares the hell out of us.
Poe’s best stories affect us so strongly because they occur right at that place where the harm that we’re capable of (and the guilt and fear it causes) makes us unrecognizable to ourselves. It’s the place where ghosts are born. (And it’s evidence of Poe’s mercilessness toward his narrators that there are no ghosts in his stories to take away the character’s burden of responsibility).
Poe once wrote a story called ‘The Imp of the Perverse’ in which he describes this aspect of human behavior that troubled and frightened him the most. It’s not a very good story. Taken as a work of fiction, it reads like a half-ass practice-run at ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’. Taken as a narrative/psychological/spiritual essay (like Kiergegaard), it’s ramifications are terrifying.
If there is something you know you must not do, must never do (Poe’s narrator says), then you will inevitably do it. Knowing we must not do something makes it irresistibly attractive to us.
Whether you take this to be Poe’s own personal neurosis or a central truth of most human behavior depends a great deal on how strong you’re feeling today.
This is what makes Poe’s stories tragic at their heart. So when I read ‘The Black Cat’ in that Philadelphia hotel room, it wasn’t just terrifying. It was heartbreaking.
Poe’s narrators spend a great deal of energy explaining themselves, justifying themselves, or just simply trying to make some sense of their unruly lives. Poe gives these deluded, tragic humans a desperate eloquence that reaches some pretty amazing heights (and depths).
When I read the passage where the narrator describes hanging his pet cat and attempts to explain why (both to us and to himself) I felt like I’d touched a live electrical current. Unbearable, undeniable human feelings are laid out bare for us to see, while (at the same time) the language sings. If I could have fallen to my knees in that hotel room without anyone seeing me, I would have done it.
So it was the morning after reading that story that I found myself climbing the narrow, winding stairs to the room where Poe wrote it.
When I’d first arrived at the Poe house, the friendly guide with the unexpected Southern accent had asked me if I had any questions. I had only one. “Do we know which room he worked in?”
“We have a pretty good guess,” the guide responded immediately. He told me that each floor had only two rooms; the first floor was the parlor and the kitchen. Bedrooms would be on the third floor, the highest, for quiet and privacy. Poe had most likely worked on the second floor, in one or both of the two rooms there.
I climbed to the second floor and entered the room on the right. It was small with one window. The walls, like the others, were cracked and peeling with one particularly deep and dramatic crack, jagged as lightning.
I stood there and tried to imagine Poe working in this room. I leaned on the windowsill where I imagined he had leaned, looking out at the same bare tree branches he must have also looked at while he was waiting for the words to come. I put out my hand and touched the cracked wall where his writing table must have stood and waited to feel something.
But the feeling I was chasing, the same awe and electricity I’d felt while reading his story the night before, receded. It was like, instead of putting my hand on hardened plaster, I was trying to press my hand into mercury.
I knew it was because the spirit I was looking for was not in this wall, not anywhere in this room. It had gone into the words that were written in this room a hundred and sixty years ago, and was still there. As it should be.
Before I left the room I took out my cell phone and snapped a few images to take with me—the light pouring in through the window across the peeling wall, the narrow wooden steps I’d climbed to get here.
I wanted to get a shot of the doorknob Poe had touched every day when he came into this room to work, so I knelt on the creaking floorboards to get a good angle. Then it occurred to me—I was on my knees in Poe’s writing room. And that was when the feeling finally came over me, maybe because I was no longer looking to get something for myself—instead, it felt like I was saying thank you.
I read a big volume of Poe when I was about ten or eleven (my Dad was a fan) but I see now that I should re-read him with an adult eye. If I can just find an adult to give up an eye…
I love the way this piece ends. It reminded me (bear with me) of visiting Stonehenge when I was twenty. I’d read so much about it, and seen so many documentaries, that by the time I’d taken two buses from London out to Salisbury Plain, I was expecting this massive, towering THING with druids and elves and Robert Plant singing an aria. Then I got there and realized it was basically a circle made of rocks that sure did look like they’d be hard to move. Yeesh. I think we expect the world to give us epiphanies without giving anything of ourselves. I wish I had stayed longer, and ignored the other tourists, and sat quietly and let the place have its say.
And with that, I’ll shut up and let people talk about Poe.
I’ve heard that about visiting Stonehenge, Phyllis. Never been there myself, but I imagine that the pressure for the place to to be “magical” (as well as simply historical) is huge, since the place is supposed to be..well, magical!
Visiting historical sites in the hopes of getting something from them is, in a way, no more silly than reading an author’s work in hoes of getting something from it. In both cases, our own state of mind, our *readiness* (or lack of it) plays a huge, huge role.
Chronological maturity and knowledge, of course, has a lot to do with it. For example, my parents took me on a truly remarkable literary tour of New England—Walden pond and Thoreau’s cabin, Hawthorne’s house (of the 7 gables, no less!)—but it was all totally lost on me because I was a jerky 14 year-old and if it wasn’t Led Zeppelin, I couldn’t be bothered.
Strangely, it’s the small things that seem to be able to cut through the fog and do the trick. Last summer on a visit to James Madison’s home in Virginia we were standing in the upstairs library where he wrote the Constitution, a fact entirely too big for my mind to wrap itself around—then the guide pointed to some dark blotchy stains on the 200 year-old pine floorboards under our feet and said, “That’s where Madison spilled his ink.”
“That’s where Madison spilled his ink.”
Yes. That’s what’s really moving and inspiring about the places where history was made — the signs of humanity. You can imagine Madison spilling his ink and cussing and maybe trying to wipe it up, just like you or me.
By the way, your parents sound like very cool people. Also, Led Zeppelin crowds everything else out of the teenage mind!
I haven’t reread Poe, and The Black Cat was assigned to us in 8th grade English class by Mrs. Carothers, and I had a beloved black cat. But I don’t remember much, just the wall burial. Just the building unease and terror reading it.
Have you read “The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allen Poe and The Invention of Murder” by Daniel Stashower? I started reading it before giving it as Christmas gift to my dad a few years ago. I have to get another copy. Read about it and you’ll see why. But because the parts I read, I knew of Poe’s connection to Philadelphia. He comes across quite enragingly self-absorbed an individual to know, always living off of someone. He was also probably writing from his own sense of fear and displacement when he writes so beautifully within these horror stories. He writes, as you say, about what a person is capable of without knowing he is. Poe was able to be creative with his fear of destitution and loneliness, and according to Stashower in this book, see into a confounding mystery to find its clarity.
I think we need to see that the room is just a room. It has its perimeters, decoration, light. The personality in on the page, in the stories, true, but it should not stop us from wanting to climb the same staircases and see inside the room where the person felt able to let loose the hounds.
The Stashower book sound really interesting, Amy. Is it non fiction?
Strange to say, but to hear about Poe being kind of a jerk (which he probably was, or could be) pains me. I still remember when I visited Poe’s house in Baltimore as a kid, how the guide was driven to tears while making a rather startlingly impassioned defense of Poe’s character and sobriety. That’s carrying it a little too far, probably, but it shows the depth of empathy and identification that some folks feel for Poe.
I don’t believe that literature is or should be a handmaiden for psycho-analysis, but I also have no doubt that Poe discovered (or un-covered) truths about his own personality in his writing—-things he apparently was unable to improve or act-upon in his life.
I think that’s why the Philly house moved me so much—-not just because he wrote most of his greatest work there, but because (according to the historians), he was “happiest” there.
What I found most unnerving about reading Poe’s stories was that some of the narrators were completely unaware of their loss of self (and self control). It so happens that when I read of this in other stories I find myself pitying the character(s) as well. But Poe did such an excellent job of describing it that I could feel it happening and how it could happen to me.
Stashower does a Maxwell–partly nonfiction, partly fiction because he includes Poe’s novel of the cigar girl.
It’s the drinking and debauchery, the poverty and self-righteousnous. He could not be a working man. He was the artist. He was disowned after being orphaned. It’s hard to be a good person after that.
Still, worth the read even while I cringed.
I know, Andrea. The narrator of ‘The Tell Tale Heart’ is probably the prime example of a Poe narrator who is completely unaware of his loss of self—so unaware, that when aspects of his self appear to him, they appear as external objects and entities (the sound of the old man’s heart beating beneath the floorboards).
The narrator of ‘The Black Cat’ feels more pitiable to me because, although he’s seriously out-of-touch with major parts of his personality, he has not yet suffered a complete break with reality—in other words, he seems to retain some sense of his own flaws and errors and suffers from that awareness (although he does end up “blaming” the black cat for his predicament).
your account of your visit to philly is suberb. it was written in a rather poe-esque style. thanks for the photos and the recollection. truly insightful beyond the typical analysis of poe.
Thanks, Sherri. I appreciate it.
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