The Death of Poe

The last week anybody can account for

On the twenty-seventh of September 1849, Edgar Allan Poe boarded a steamer out of Richmond in good spirits, newly engaged, and — by the account of every person who saw him off — sober. Six days later he was found on a Baltimore street in clothes that were not his. Four days after that he was dead, and nobody has ever established what happened in between.

The Richmond weeks were the best he'd had in years. He had been lecturing to full rooms. He had proposed to Elmira Royster Shelton, the woman he had been in love with as a teenager before her father intercepted the letters, and she had said yes. In August he had walked into a Sons of Temperance meeting and signed the pledge in front of witnesses, which was not a private gesture — it was a public one, made by a man who knew what people said about him.

He had an itinerary. Philadelphia first, to edit a small collection of poems for a hundred dollars. Then New York, to collect his aunt and mother-in-law Maria Clemm and bring her south for the wedding. He was forty years old and, for the first time in a long time, he was going somewhere.

He got off the boat in Baltimore, and the record stops.

The six days nobody can fill

There is no confirmed sighting of Edgar Allan Poe between the twenty-eighth of September and the third of October 1849. Not one. Every biography written since has a version of those days, and not one of them has a witness.

Baltimore then was a port city of a hundred and seventy thousand people with a hard waterfront, a thriving trade in cheap liquor, and an election coming. Poe knew the city — he had family there, he had lived there, he was buried there four days later. He had places he could have gone. As far as anyone can prove, he went to none of them.

Ryan's Tavern, and somebody else's suit

On the third of October, a printer named Joseph Walker found him at Ryan's Tavern on East Lombard Street. The building was serving that day as the polling place for the Fourth Ward. Walker recognised the name, understood that something was badly wrong, and sent an urgent note to Dr. Joseph Snodgrass, an editor Poe knew, asking him to come at once.

The detail everyone fixes on is the clothing, and they are right to. Poe was wearing a cheap suit that did not fit him and a palm-leaf hat. His own good black suit was gone. So was his malacca cane. Whatever happened to Edgar Allan Poe happened between the steamer and the tavern, and it took his coat.

Four days in a hospital that kept no paper

He was taken to Washington College Hospital and put under the care of Dr. John J. Moran. For four days he moved in and out of delirium. He hallucinated. He shouted at people who were not in the room. His pulse ran wild and his breathing went shallow. He was never lucid long enough to say where he had been, and no one who visited got an answer.

Through one night, Moran said, he called out a name — Reynolds — over and over. There have been candidates offered for who Reynolds was. There is no evidence for any of them.

Poe died in the early hours of the seventh of October 1849.

Now the part that governs everything else: there is no death certificate. There are no surviving hospital records. There was no autopsy. The entire clinical record of Edgar Allan Poe's final illness is one physician's memory — and Moran retold that memory publicly for the next thirty-six years, in newspapers and lectures and finally a book, and the story got richer every time. In the late versions, the dying man delivers speeches.

The diagnosis that arrived a hundred and forty-seven years late

In 1996, a cardiologist named R. Michael Benitez, who practised roughly a block from Poe's grave, was handed an anonymous case at a clinical pathologic conference. The patient was listed as E.P., a writer from Richmond. Admitted with lethargy and confusion. Then delirium, hallucinations, a wildly variable pulse, rapid shallow breathing. Dead within four days.

Benitez said rabies, and only afterward learned whose chart he was reading. Four days is the median survival once serious rabies symptoms begin. He published in the Maryland Medical Journal in September 1996, and the story went everywhere, because it did the one thing a century of Poe scholarship had failed to do: it looked at the case without knowing it was Poe.

It is the most interesting theory available and it is thinner than its reputation. There is no autopsy and no tissue, so it cannot be tested. There is no record of an animal bite — though a quarter of rabies patients never recall one, and the incubation can run a year, so that objection is weaker than it sounds.

The real problem is the water. Rabies encephalitis usually brings difficulty swallowing. Benitez leaned on a line from Moran's 1875 account describing exactly that. But in Moran's 1885 telling of the same bedside moment, Poe takes half a glass of water without any trouble at all.

Same witness. Same night. Two versions. The best-supported theory of Poe's death depends on which draft of one unreliable man's story you happen to pick up.

And five more, each with a decent afternoon in court

Brain tumour. Fed by an anecdote from the 1875 reburial, in which a workman reported that something in the skull had shrunk and rattled. Brains liquefy within weeks; a calcified tumour would not. It is a real argument built on a labourer's offhand remark twenty-six years after the fact.

Carbon monoxide. Coal gas, in a century that lit its rooms by burning it indoors.

Heavy metals. Mercury was medicine in 1849 — calomel was standard treatment, and Poe had been dosed during a cholera scare in Philadelphia that summer. Later testing of hair samples did find mercury. It also found it at a level far below poisoning. That result argues against the theory rather than for it, which has not slowed the theory down.

Meningitis, encephalitis, brain inflammation. The Baltimore papers at the time gave the cause as congestion of the brain and cerebral inflammation. Translated out of period medicine, those phrases mean: we do not know, but something was very wrong with his head.

Drink. The traditional verdict, and the one everybody grew up with. Two things complicate it. He had signed the pledge six weeks earlier. And several people who knew him well described a man who could be wrecked by a single glass — which describes an intolerance, not a habit. It is also worth knowing who pushed the drunk story hardest: Snodgrass, the man Walker summoned, was a temperance campaigner who spent later years lecturing on Poe as a cautionary tale, for a fee.

Cholera, syphilis, tuberculosis, influenza, epilepsy, diabetes, hypoglycemia, suicide and murder have all had their turn as well. Every generation diagnoses Poe with whatever it happens to be afraid of.

Cooping

Here is the practice. On election day, gangs would seize men off the street and pen them in a back room — the coop. The captives were kept compliant with liquor or with beatings, then walked from precinct to precinct to vote the same ticket over and over. Between stops they were put in different clothes so the election judges would not recognise the same face twice.

Baltimore was the national capital of it. The city's nickname in that era was Mobtown, and it was not affectionate.

Edgar Allan Poe was found at a polling place, on election day, in Baltimore, incoherent, wearing another man's suit. Building the case from scratch, you would not feel the need for much else.

Against it: nobody witnessed it, nobody confessed to it, cooping victims generally survived, and no one proposed the idea until the 1870s. It is entirely circumstantial. It is also the most Poe thing that has ever happened to anybody.

Rufus Griswold got there first

Two days after the death, on the ninth of October 1849, the New-York Daily Tribune carried a notice signed "Ludwig." It opened: "Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday." The third sentence observed that the news would startle a great many people and grieve almost none of them.

Ludwig was Rufus Wilmot Griswold. He was an anthologist and editor who had taken over Poe's chair at Graham's Magazine at a better salary, had been publicly filleted by Poe in print, and had competed with him for the attention of the poet Frances Sargent Osgood. He admitted writing the notice in a letter that December, adding that the two of them had never been friends.

Then he did something far worse than an obituary.

Griswold became Poe's literary executor — by his own account, at Poe's request. He took control of the collected works, and in September 1850 he published them with a "Memoir of the Author" bound into the front. That memoir invented the Edgar Allan Poe the world still pictures: the drunk, the addict, the madman muttering down the street, envious, friendless and ungrateful. He propped it up with letters he had altered. And the long passage assassinating Poe's character was lifted, nearly word for word, from the description of a fictional man — Francis Vivian, out of Bulwer-Lytton's novel The Caxtons, published the year Poe died.

He did not merely slander a dead man. He slandered him using somebody else's fiction.

It held because Griswold owned the edition. For decades, if you wanted to read Poe, you bought Griswold's Poe, and Griswold's memoir was the first thing in the book. People who had actually known him — Sarah Helen Whitman, George Graham, Charles Briggs — objected loudly and were shouting at a bound volume.

And the cruelty of it is that it worked in the wrong direction. The doomed degenerate genius turned out to be a far better product than the meticulous working critic who wrote book reviews to pay rent. Baudelaire carried that Poe into French and the French carried him to the world. Griswold set out to bury the man and accidentally built him a monument. He died in 1857, aged forty-two, and is remembered today for exactly one thing.

The obituaries got there before the facts did

Griswold was the loudest but he was not the only one, and the speed of the rest is the part worth noticing.

Within days of the death, before anybody could possibly have established anything, the verdict was in print across the country. The New York Herald reported that Poe had died in an attack of mania a potu — the period term for delirium tremens. The temperance papers were faster still and far more useful to themselves. The New York Organ of 9 October ran a notice observing that Poe had lately joined a Division of the Sons of Temperance in Virginia and taken the pledge, that his friends had been hopeful, and that he had then broken it and died of drink in a Baltimore hospital — and it closed by instructing readers to think of his miserable end and point to that grave when tempted.

The pledge, in other words — the one genuinely hopeful documented act of his last months — was turned inside out and used as the setup for the sermon. Within seventy-two hours.

Poe's own family reached for the same shape. Maria Clemm concluded, after talking to friends in Baltimore, that he had run into old West Point classmates who talked him into a toast. John Pendleton Kennedy, a Baltimore lawyer who had been an early patron and had no reason to be cruel, wrote in his diary on 10 October that Poe had fallen in with a companion who seduced him to the bottle, and that the consequence was fever, delirium and madness.

None of them were there. All of them were reasoning backward from a reputation that Griswold was, at that very moment, sitting down to make permanent.

And set against all of it: Moran, the only physician who actually attended him, said he did not believe Poe had been drinking at all in the days before the collapse, and pointed to the length of the illness and the brief rally in the middle of it as inconsistent with death by drink. Moran is an unreliable witness about almost everything else in this story. On this one point he is also the only witness there was.

Three minutes, and twenty-six years in an unmarked grave

Poe was buried on the eighth of October 1849 in Westminster Burying Ground in Baltimore, with a handful of people present. By the accounts that survive, the service lasted about three minutes.

The grave went unmarked for a generation. A first headstone was destroyed before it ever reached the plot, when a derailed train ran through the marble yard where it was being cut — a detail you would take out of a draft for being too much. In 1875 a campaign led by Baltimore schoolteachers, funded in large part by pennies collected from children, finally paid for a monument, and he was moved to the front of the churchyard. Walt Whitman came to the dedication.

Which means the author of The Premature Burial was dug up and reburied twenty-six years after his own funeral.

Worth remembering, too, what an unmarked grave near a medical college meant in 1849. The resurrection trade was a going concern in American cities that decade, and the anatomy schools were the customers. There is no evidence anyone disturbed Poe. There did not need to be for the fear to be ordinary. He had written about that fear before it was his address.

The trade that made an unmarked grave a live worry in 1849 was a real business with real customers, and it ran later in America than most people think.

No ending

Six theories with a genuine case, a dozen more without one. No autopsy, no certificate, no records. One attending physician who improved his story for thirty-six years, one enemy who got to the printer within forty-eight hours, and six days that are simply gone from the world.

Everything else written about this has to land somewhere, because a list needs a number one. This is not a list. The honest answer to how did Edgar Allan Poe die is that the record was never made, and the only man who could have made it spent the rest of his life polishing an anecdote instead.

Poe would have taken it well. He invented the detective story — built the form from nothing, handed Doyle the blueprint — and then went and died inside one that nobody can close.

The Poe on our shirt is mid-episode, green and wrecked and magnificently unhinged. That Poe is Griswold's Poe. It is a hatchet job, it has outlived everyone involved, and it is a hell of a thing to wear.

---