"Shall I ever forget the triple horror of that spectacle? Twenty-five or thirty human bodies, among whom were several females, lay scattered about between the counter and the galley in the last and most loathsome state of putrefaction. We plainly saw that not a soul lived in that fated vessel! Yet we could not help shouting to the dead for help! Yes, long and loudly did we beg, in the agony of the moment, that those silent and disgusting images would stay for us, would not abandon us to become like them, would receive us among their goodly company!"
(from "The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym," 1850)
Terry Southern once quipped that the Edgar Allan Poe tale "The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym" was never found in high school reading lists "by virtue of its extreme weirdness." It seems that the gothic overtones of Poe's own life (and death) continue to make his an American story of excess and a mythic, singular literary weirdness. Ed Pilkington, writing in today's The Guardian (UK) online, reports on the efforts of competing organizations to mark the mysteries of Poe's life, and this weekend's ceremonies to rectify Poe's nearly-forgotten burial one-hundred-sixty years ago this month in Baltimore. Pilkington writes:
By the standards of any age, it was a miserable way to go. Edgar Allan Poe, dark romantic writer and poet credited with inventing the genre of detective fiction, enjoyed a death far more Gothic and gloomy than any of his stories.
It began badly when he was found, aged 40, wandering the streets of Baltimore, penniless, raving unintelligibly, dressed in someone else's clothes, possibly having been beaten up. He died four days later, on October 7 1849, in hospital, having uttered the final words: "Lord, help my poor soul."
From there it only got worse. Although he was at the time probably the most famous writer in America, his cousin Neilson Poe omitted to tell anyone he had died, and so fewer than 10 people turned up for the funeral. The priest couldn't be bothered to give a sermon, and the entire ceremony lasted three minutes.
This Sunday, 160 years almost to the day since his sorry passing, Poe will finally be given the send off that his multitude of fans passionately believe he deserved. At 11.30 a.m., a life-size recreation of his body will be carried in a horse-drawn carriage from his Baltimore home in Amity Street, to the Westminster Burying Ground where not one, but two full-length ceremonies will be held in front of up to 700 admirers, some of whom will have travelled from as far away as Vietnam.
The ceremony is being held as part of a year-long series of events to mark the 200th year of Poe's birth. To the amusement of Poe experts, the double anniversary of the start and end of his life has led to an unseemly scramble between several US cities - notably Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia, New York and Boston - to claim ownership of the writer.
Organisers of the Baltimore funeral are playing their ace card, exclaiming: "We have the body!"
"There's a somewhat symbolic struggle going on to claim him," said Stephen Rachman, president of the Poe Studies Association, speaking from an international Edgar Allan Poe conference that has just opened in Philadelphia.
Of all the great classical American writers of the 19th century - Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne to name but three - Poe had the most hapless existence. "Poor Edgar Allan Poe, of them all he was the poorest; his life was very precarious," Rachman said.
His papers reveal that he would regularly send begging letters to magazine editors asking for as little as $10 to pay the fare to Richmond or Baltimore.
But by his death he left an extraordinary legacy. His innovations in detective writing can be seen as the direct antecedent to Sherlock Holmes, for instance, or to the films of Alfred Hitchcock. His "Balloon Hoax" of 1844 - in which he wrote a newspaper article reporting as fact the fictitious crossing of the Atlantic in a hot-air balloon - cuts a straight path to Orson Welles's famous radio broadcast War of the Worlds 94 years later.
Alice Cooper and other exotic 1970s pop performers would arguably not have existed without Poe's elaboration of the Gothic. And Dan Brown's huge success with The Da Vinci Code would have been impossible without his "The Gold-Bug," in which Poe incorporated ciphers as part of the story.
That cultural and literary debt will be repaid in part on Sunday, in what organisers hope will be a happier event than its predecessor 160 years ago.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment