The Beautiful Cigar Girl Page 5

  John Allan would become the closest thing to a father that the young Poe would ever know. His wife, Frances, a nervous and sickly woman, had been unable to have children of her own. A Scottish immigrant, Allan was a man of cultured tastes and a reputation for acts of charity, but he was also known to be hot-tempered and imperious. “Mr. Allan was a good man in his way,” a family friend wrote of him. “He was sharp and exacting, and with his long, hooked nose, and small keen eyes looking from under his shaggy eyebrows, he always reminded me of a hawk.” At the time Allan was also extremely wealthy, having established a complex of offices and warehouses in Richmond’s business district from which he brokered tobacco, services, and other goods in a network of trade that stretched across America and Europe.

  At a stroke, young Edgar went from a life of wandering and struggle to a world of wealth and indulgence. The Allans lavished attention on their new charge, and assured the family of David Poe that they would provide a first-rate education befitting a young gentleman. From the first, however, John Allan’s benevolence was conditional. Although he added the family name to Edgar’s as a kind of honorific, he never formally adopted the boy.

  The newly christened Edgar Allan Poe proved to be a charming and precocious child, with many of his late mother’s theatrical tendencies. Dinner guests were occasionally treated to the spectacle of the boy standing on the dining room table in his velvet suit and stockinged feet, declaiming passages of poetry.

  At the age of five Edgar accompanied his foster parents on a five-year sojourn in Britain. While John Allan tended to his business, the boy was enrolled in a series of excellent boarding schools and shown off to Allan’s relatives in Scotland. Allan took visible pride in his young charge’s academic accomplishments, and showered him with gifts and extravagant sums of pocket money. Poe was “a quick and clever boy,” according to one schoolmaster, “and would have been a very good boy if he had not been spoilt by his parents.”

  Returning to Richmond in 1820, the eleven-year-old Edgar continued his schooling and was soon able to read Horace in Latin and Homer in Greek. Already the seeds of his future career were taking shape; he filled his notebooks with poems, some of which were thought to be so accomplished that the doting Allan considered having them published. “His imaginative powers seemed to take precedence of all his other faculties,” another schoolmaster recalled, while a cousin of Allan’s remarked that Poe was “fully imbued in his early youth with an idea that he would one day become a great writer.”

  By all accounts, the aspiring writer was also a fine athlete, and much given to reckless feats of daring. At age fifteen he made a swim of six miles in the James River against “the strongest tides ever known in the river,” trailed by a boat filled with cheering friends. Poe likened this exploit to Byron’s swimming of the Hellespont. “It would have been a feat comparatively easy to swim twenty miles in still water,” he boasted. “I would not think much of attempting to swim the British Channel from Dover to Calais.”

  For all his swagger, he was remembered as holding himself apart from his peers. A teacher recalled him as sensitive and somewhat aloof, but added that he would “strain every nerve to oblige a friend.” As Poe entered his teens and grew more conscious of the workings of Richmond society, he became keenly aware of his own tenuous social position. “Of Edgar Poe it was known that his parents were players,” a classmate would say, and that he was “dependent on the bounty” of his foster father. Worse, that bounty had become increasingly uncertain. As the boy grew older and more willful, Allan’s devotion began to wane. “I know that often when angry with Edgar he threatened to turn him adrift,” a friend said of Allan, “and that he never allowed him to lose sight of his dependence on his charity.”

  Allan’s charitable impulses were undoubtedly shadowed by a series of business reverses that had dogged his return to Richmond. As his finances grew more precarious, his foster son’s increasingly willful behavior struck him as all the more thankless. “The boy possesses not a Spark of affection for us,” Allan complained, “not a particle of gratitude for all my care and kindness toward him.” Uncertain of his position in the household, Poe began to look elsewhere for affection. He formed an intense attachment to Jane Stanard, the mother of a Richmond classmate, whom he would later recall as “the first, purely ideal love of my soul.” It is said that the aspiring young poet read his verses aloud to her and basked in the warmth of her praise and encouragement. She was, Poe would recall, “an angel to my forlorn and darkened nature.” By all accounts Mrs. Stanard was a beautiful and tragic figure, much given to fits of melancholy, and Poe watched with mounting despair as she slowly succumbed to a wasting illness. She was not yet thirty years old when she died in April of 1824, a few months past Edgar’s fifteenth birthday. With its echo of Eliza Poe’s early death, the loss of Jane Stanard cut deeply. The grief-stricken Edgar could often be found at her graveside keeping a vigil with her son Robert.

  Poe’s transparent and sometimes theatrical grief over Jane Stanard served to widen his rift with John Allan, who interpreted the behavior as a display of ingratitude toward himself and his wife. Poe, meanwhile, had found a new outlet for his roiling emotions. Within a year of Jane Stanard’s death, the forlorn young poet had fallen in love with Sarah Elmira Royster, the fifteen-year-old daughter of one of the Allans’ neighbors. Poe was keenly aware that her father considered him an unsuitable match, owing largely to his uncertain position in the Allan household, but he managed to persuade her to agree to a secret engagement.

  In March of 1825 John Allan’s diminished fortunes were suddenly restored—and vastly extended—by an enormous inheritance from a wealthy uncle. Financially secure for the first time in years, Allan bought a luxurious new home on Richmond’s Main Street, with commanding views of the capitol building and the James River. At the very moment that Allan received this windfall, Thomas Jefferson’s “academical village,” the University of Virginia, opened its doors in Charlottesville, sixty miles away. As Poe approached his seventeenth birthday, Allan made plans to enroll him, both as a statement of his own wealth and position, and as a means of honoring his earlier promise to provide an education. Privately, Allan felt relief at having his quarrelsome foster son out of the house, and hoped that college life would help to settle him.

  Poe arrived in Charlottesville in February of 1826 and had to contend with the hardships of the university’s ongoing construction, including crowded, unheated buildings and questionable sanitation. There were, however, numerous compensations. Thomas Jefferson, then eighty-three, was very much in evidence as the university’s first rector. Poe would have dined with him on several occasions, and would have been among the mourners when the former president died on July 4 of that year.

  Popular legend holds that Poe was a wild and dissolute rebel among sober young academicians. In fact, the opposite appears to have been true, at least in his earliest days. Jefferson had designed an educational system with the sons of wealthy Virginia planters in mind. In the belief that these “spirituous fellows” would chafe at a discipline similar to that of Harvard or Yale, he established a code of behavior that set aside restrictive rules in favor of self-governance. The experiment was not a success, culminating in a student uprising during the first year, with books, bricks, and bottles of urine thrown at the professors. In his first letter home, Poe would tell John Allan that fights among students were “so trifling an occurrence” that no one took any notice. He went on to describe a more noteworthy brawl in which a student, having been struck on the head with a rock, “drew a pistol (which are all the fashion here) and had it not missed fire would have put an end to the controversy.”

  Against this background, the less combative Poe proved a model student, and wrote home to Richmond of his hopes of succeeding, “if I don’t get frightened.” Initially, at least, Poe excelled, though he was known to rely on his sharp intellect and keen memory—often spending just a few moments preparing before a class—rather than careful study hab
its. Even so, he flourished. One professor would recall an occasion on which Poe had been the only member of the class to complete a suggested assignment, translating a portion of the Italian Renaissance poet Tasso into English verse. In December of his first year Poe was examined at length by two former presidents of the United States, James Madison and James Monroe, and received the highest honors in both ancient and modern languages.

  Poe’s classmates offered conflicting accounts of him. Some remembered Poe as being given to periods of lassitude and melancholy, while others described manic fits of “nervous excitability.” Poe could cut a flamboyant figure when he wished, favoring his classmates with snatches of poetry and covering the walls of his room with charcoal sketches of “whimsical, fanciful and grotesque figures.” Once he invited a group of students to hear a story he’d written, pacing back and forth in front of the fireplace as he read aloud. When one of his classmates ventured a word of criticism, Poe turned and flung the pages into the fire.

  From his first days in Charlottesville, Poe struggled with a chronic shortage of money, and his letters to Richmond were filled with increasingly desperate requests for books, soap, clothing, and other basics. By accident or design, John Allan had sent Poe off to the university with insufficient funds. This made a dramatic change from Poe’s early days in the Allan household, when the doting foster father had spared no expense to provide a fine European education. Now, at a time when Allan was considered one of the wealthiest men in Virginia, he kept a tight hold on the purse strings and placed Poe in a situation that would soon prove ruinous.

  Within weeks, Poe found himself unable to pay his room and board. In a bitter letter to Allan written four years later, the details were still vivid in his memory: “I will boldly say that it was wholly and entirely your own mistaken parsimony that caused all the difficulties in which I was involved while at Charlottesville. The expenses of the institution at the lowest estimate were $350 per annum. You sent me there with $110.…I had, of course, the mortification of running in debt…and was immediately regarded in the light of a beggar. You will remember that in a week after my arrival, I wrote to you for some more money, and for books—You replied in terms of utmost abuse—if I had been the vilest wretch on earth you could not have been more abusive.”

  Allan may have hoped that a tight budget would teach Poe self-reliance, as his own early struggles had done. Instead, the “mortification” awakened Poe’s worst instincts. He turned to gambling to make up the shortfall, only to sink further into debt. As his losses mounted, he turned to alcohol for consolation. “Poe’s passion for strong drink was as marked and as peculiar as that for cards,” a friend recalled. “It was not the taste of the beverage that influenced him; without a sip or smack of the mouth he would seize a full glass, without water or sugar, and send it home with a single gulp.”

  Not surprisingly, Poe found that alcohol and cards were a poor mix. He soon racked up staggering losses, estimated in some accounts to have exceeded $2,000—or more than five times his yearly expenses. In December, after Poe had completed only ten months of college life, John Allan descended on Charlottesville, paid off a few of the debts that he considered to be legitimate, and withdrew his foster son from the university, all but dragging him back to Richmond by the ear.

  Poe’s remaining debts followed him back to Richmond, and each day brought another demand for payment and threats of legal action. Allan imposed a further punishment by setting Poe to work without pay in his firm’s counting house. Adding to Poe’s distress, he now had to contend with the ruin of his courtship of Elmira Royster, the beautiful young woman to whom he had been secretly engaged. Poe had written to her often from Charlottesville, but she had failed to answer. It would be many years before he discovered the reason: Elmira’s father had intercepted the letters, so as to derail the courtship. In later life Elmira would claim, in spite of her promise to marry Poe, that she had not realized the depth of his feelings for her. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, she assumed that he had forgotten her once he went off to the university. One account holds that Poe, on his return to Richmond, attended a party at her home in hopes of a reunion, only to discover that the gathering was a celebration of her engagement to another man. While this incident may be apocryphal, Elmira would be married within two years, an occasion that inspired Poe to write the poem “Song” (better known as “I saw thee on thy bridal day”) in which he spoke of a “burning blush” of “maiden shame,” suggesting that the bride’s feelings for him had never faded.

  After two months in John Allan’s counting house, Poe’s festering resentments boiled over into an open confrontation. After a bitter argument, Allan threw Poe out of the house. Sheltering in a friendly tavern, Poe fired off a remarkably ill-judged letter: “My determination is at length taken—to leave your house and endeavor to find some place in this wide world, where I will be treated—not as you have treated me.” After accusing Allan of blasting his hopes for a college education, and taking delight in his failure, Poe requested, “if you still have the least affection for me,” that his clothes and books might be sent on immediately, along with enough money to see him safely out of town. “If you fail to comply with my request,” Poe wrote darkly, “I tremble for the consequence.”

  Allan responded with an angry catalogue of Poe’s sins, and ridicule for the manner in which his high-handed statement of independence was followed by a plea for cash: “after such a list of Black charges,” Allan wrote, “you Tremble for the consequence unless I send you a supply of money.”

  When it became clear that the door to Allan’s home was truly closed to him, Poe wandered the streets of Richmond in a state of mounting desperation, penniless and starving. One account has him falling into a round of drinking with a childhood friend and wheedling his way onto a ship bound for England. Another has him setting off for Greece in the tradition of Lord Byron, so as to fight for independence. Still another finds him sending a series of letters reporting on his progress in St. Petersburg. Allan himself confessed his uncertainty, and indifference, in a letter to his sister: “I’m thinking Edgar has gone to sea to seek his own fortunes.”

  The truth was notably more prosaic. Unable to pay for food or shelter, Poe somehow talked his way onto a coal vessel bound for Boston, probably working for his passage. It is likely that Poe gravitated toward Boston as the center of America’s literary establishment. He had a thin sheaf of poems in hand as he made his way north, clutched all the more tightly because Allan had scorned his literary aspirations. Unquestionably there was an even more personal reason pulling him toward Boston; one of the few mementos he had of his mother was a sketch of Boston Harbor, on the back of which she had written: “For my little son Edgar, who should ever love Boston, the place of his birth, and where his mother found her best, and most sympathetic friends.”

  Poe found few sympathetic friends in Boston. Arriving in April of 1827, he served brief stints as an office clerk and a reporter. One acquaintance recalled a landlady who “lost patience with a boarder who sat up nights writing on paper which he could not afterward sell. She soon turned him into the street.” Another spoke of being bustled into an alleyway by a shabbily dressed Poe, who urged him not to speak his name aloud, explaining that “until he hit it hard”—or until he made good—“he preferred to remain incognito.”

  After several weeks, Poe had still not managed to “hit it hard.” Finally, finding himself at loose ends, he enlisted for a five-year stint in the United States Army, listing his name as “Edgar A. Perry” and giving his age as twenty-two. In fact, he was eighteen.

  It is difficult to know what possessed Poe to join the army, though sheer desperation must have played a part. At the very least, the army promised to provide him with three square meals a day. He may also have wished to demonstrate to Allan the lengths to which he was prepared to go in order to make something of himself. In any event, it marked a dramatic change in his fortunes. At the University of Virginia he gambled awa
y hundreds and perhaps thousands of dollars. In the army, his salary was five dollars a month.

  “Private Perry” would spend six months with Battery H of the First Artillery, stationed at Fort Independence in Boston Harbor. He adapted quickly to the harsh regimen of army life, serving various functions as a company clerk, commissary worker, and messenger. It is unlikely that there were many other recruits in Battery H who were able to translate Cicero and Homer, and fewer still who had published a collection of verse. In the summer of 1827, just two months after Poe joined the army, a forty-page pamphlet entitled Tamerlane and Other Poems appeared in Boston. Poe had arranged for the publication before his enlistment, somehow paying for the private printing with funds cobbled together from his various jobs. Still incognito, Poe presented the volume as the anonymous work of “a Bostonian.” It drew heavily on his thwarted romance with Elmira Royster, with many of the poems addressing the follies of youth and lost love. In a brief preface, the young poet proclaimed that many of the verses had been composed “when the author had not completed his fourteenth year,” adding that “why they are now published concerns no one but himself.” If by any chance the volume failed to succeed, Poe assured his readers that “failure will not at all influence him in a resolution already adopted” to succeed as a poet. This was just as well. Poe’s limited resources had restricted the printing to a meager fifty copies—too few to attract serious attention from critics or readers. On publication, the collection drew almost no notice at all.

  Meanwhile, “Private Perry” found himself thriving under military discipline. After six months at Fort Independence, Poe’s battery shipped out to South Carolina in November of 1827. Poe would spend more than a year stationed at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island in Charleston Harbor, followed by a move in December of 1828 to Fortress Monroe near Hampton, Virginia. By this time Poe had been promoted to artificer, charged with the preparation of artillery shells, with a rise in pay to ten dollars a month, plus a ration of spirits per day. A commanding officer would praise his exemplary conduct, noting that the young private kept entirely “free of drinking.” On New Year’s Day of 1829 Poe was promoted to sergeant major, the highest possible rank for a noncommissioned officer.