Poe (5 page)

In the middle of March 1827, Poe left the Allan household forever. He went to the Courthouse Tavern, from where he wrote to his surrogate father that “I have heard you say (when you little thought I was listening, and therefore must have said it in earnest) that you had no affection for me.” He added that his guardian “was continually upbraiding me with eating the bread of Idleness.” He also objected to being under “the complete authority of the blacks,” by which he meant that the slaves had adopted their master's manner and attitude towards him. He asked for his trunk, containing his clothes; he was determined to
travel north, where in one of the great cities he might earn enough money to complete his studies at university.

But then, in a letter written on the following day, he declared that “I am in the greatest necessity, not having tasted food since Yesterday morning. I have no where to sleep at night, but roam about the Streets—I am nearly exhausted …” This is the piteous tone that he would adopt in much of his later correspondence. Allan wrote on the back, “Pretty letter.”

• • •

Four days later Edgar Allan Poe was on a coal vessel to Boston. He was on his way back to the place of his birth. It must have been a surprise, after the casual languor of Richmond, to find himself in a city that prided itself on plain living and high thinking. Boston was a city of red brick and white wood. The principal sources of delight were the church and the lecture hall. There were no slaves. The citizens of Boston got up earlier and worked harder than the people of Richmond.

It was not easy, however, for a penniless and failed student to obtain employment in Boston. There are reports of Poe working in a wholesale merchandise house on the waterfront, and even of trying his hand at casual journalism. His first attempt to make his way in the world had foundered. He had no money, and in his desperation he decided to enlist.

Allan wrote to Poe's sister, Rosalie, that “Edgar has
gone to Sea to seek his own fortunes,” but in fact he was to be found much closer to home. On 26 May he visited Castle Island in Boston Harbor and, under the assumed name of Edgar A. Perry (Perry had been the name before his own in the entrance records of the university), he enlisted in the United States Army for the next five years. He gave his age as twenty-two, rather than the actual eighteen. Minors were accepted into the Army, so there was no practical reason for him to lie: he just wanted to disappear, and to lose the burden of his identity. In any case, lying came naturally to him.

I
t was not altogether a surprising or even unexpected decision. As a boy he had been appointed lieutenant in the Richmond Junior Volunteers, and at university, too, he had chosen to take part in a course of training in military drill. He needed the constraints of a formal order, no doubt as a counterweight to his pronounced “recklessness.” He deliberately sought restraint. He required external discipline in order to balance the miseries and longings of his private nature.

That nature, however, was expressed in an enduring form. During his months in Boston he had become acquainted with an eighteen-year-old printer, Calvin Thomas, who had agreed to publish a selection of Poe's poems. So in the early summer of 1827 fifty copies of
Tamerlane and Other Poems,
written by “a Bostonian,” came off Thomas's press. It included poems that Poe had been writing for the last four or five years, comprising the title poem and a
number of shorter poems. They evince a strong sense of form, cadence, and metre, equally balanced with a powerful inner mood of mournfulness and introspection. “Tamerlane” itself is a monody on the delights and dangers of ambition, couched in seventeen melancholy stanzas filled with pride and resentment, self-disgust and disillusion. In a preface to the volume Poe claimed that “failure will not at all influence him [Poe] in a resolution already adopted;” that resolution was none other than his aspiration to poetic greatness. His attempt to disarm criticism succeeded admirably. There were no reviews, and only two pre-publication notices, of
Tamerlane.

When the volume appeared, the young poet was busily engaged in artillery practice. As soon as he had enlisted he had been assigned to duty in an artillery battery off Boston Harbor. Six months later he was moved to Fort Moultrie on Sullivan's Island off the coast of South Carolina; from there, after a further year, he was moved to Fortress Monroe on the tip of the Virginia peninsula. His regimen in these establishments was unchanging, with a wake-up call at 5:30 introducing a day that included infantry drill and exercises at the guns. His own conduct was a model of military discipline. He worked as an assistant and company clerk in the quartermaster's department before being promoted through the various noncommissioned grades. His superiors considered him to be “exemplary in his deportment” and “highly worthy of confidence.” Then at the beginning of 1829 he was appointed regimental sergeant major at Fortress Monroe, the
highest rank to which he could aspire. It is perhaps difficult to imagine the author of “The Raven” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” in uniform. Yet it is an aspect of Poe's life, and character, that cannot be overlooked. Just as he could express his passionate and morbid nature in verses that are strictly controlled, so he could define himself in terms of rigid military identity.

By the time of his promotion to sergeant major, however, he had already had enough of army life. He did not wish to serve the remaining three and a half years of his enlistment, and petitioned his commanding officer, Lieutenant Howard, for release from uniform. He must also have revealed his true identity, because Howard acquiesced on condition that Poe—no longer “Perry”—was reconciled with John Allan. Howard then wrote to Allan, only to be sent the reply that Poe “had better remain as he is until the termination of his enlistment.” The fact that Poe was in the army at all must have come as an unwelcome surprise to Allan. But he showed no remorse at effectively driving him away from home. So on 1 December 1828, Poe wrote him a letter stating that “I could not help thinking that you believed me degraded & disgraced” by service in the army; he assured him that “at no period of my life, have I regarded myself with deeper satisfaction— or did my heart swell with more honourable pride.” He took pride, among other things, in his capacity for self-discipline. But he did not wish to waste “the prime of my life” in further service. That life had only just begun. “I feel that within me which will make me fulfil your highest
wishes,” he added. “… I must either conquer or die—succeed or be disgraced.” In a final paragraph he sent his love to “Ma,” and expressed the hope that his “wayward disposition” would not disappoint her.

He received no reply from Allan, and wrote to him again three weeks later in a more clamant manner imploring, “My father do not throw me aside as
degraded
… If you determine to abandon me—here take farewell—Neglected, I will be doubly ambitious.” The slightly histrionic tone is in accord with much of his later correspondence. Allan still remained silent. A month passed. Then, at the beginning of February, Poe tried another approach. He asked Allan to assist him in obtaining a cadet's appointment at West Point, the academy for the training of officers in the American army, which would then expedite “an honourable and highly successful course in my own country.” There is no doubt that he was serious about his application. Completion of the course at West Point would allow him to become an officer in the army; it would grant him a measure of financial independence as well as much needed social status. His enlistment as a common soldier might otherwise have left him, as he put it, “degraded & disgraced.”

His letter arrived at Richmond in a most unhappy time. Frances Allan was dying and, in the final stages of what a local newspaper described as a “lingering and painful” illness, she asked to see the young Poe to hold and kiss him for the last time, but, if she died before he could reach her, she requested that her foster son
have the opportunity of seeing her body before she was buried.

On the day of Frances Allan's death at the end of February, Poe was still on the muster roll of his regiment. John Allan had left it to the last minute.

Poe heard of the death on 1 March and left on the afternoon stage from Norfolk to Richmond. When he arrived, on the following day, Fanny had already been buried. His surrogate father had purchased for Poe a suit of mourning clothes. In that dress he visited the new grave in Shockoe cemetery. He collapsed upon the spot, and was helped back into the carriage by the family's slaves.
“Your love
I never valued,” he wrote to John Allan at a later date, when all seemed hopeless, “but she I believed loved me as her own child.” Another mother had been taken away from him, a double orphanhood that increased the burden of his woe. It is worth noting that the Shockoe cemetery was the resting place of Jane Stanard, his schoolfriend's young mother to whom Poe had been devoted.

His relationship with John Allan entered a new phase. It seems that his guardian had been softened by the death of Fanny, and that the presence of Poe was no longer objectionable to him. Poe related his plans to enroll at West Point, and he obtained Allan's consent. The way was now open for him to be honourably discharged. He left Richmond a week later, and on his return to Fortress Monroe he sent a letter to Allan as “My dear Pa” rather than as the “Dear Sir” of his previous correspondence.

• • •

At the end of March the process of discharging Poe began. He was obliged to find a substitute for his service, and informed the colonel of the garrison that he was “one of a family of orphans whose unfortunate parents were the victims of the conflagration of the Richmond theatre,” a flagrant lie designed to cover up what he considered to be his dubious origins. The explanation was accepted, however, and in the following month he returned to Richmond.

The path to West Point, however, was not easy. In the first weeks of his return Poe set about gaining political referees to bolster his application, among them a local major and the representative in Congress for his district. Allan must have materially assisted him, but wrote a reference that was curiously impersonal: “Frankly, sir,” he wrote to the Secretary of War, “I do declare that he is no relation to me whatever … but I do request your kindness to aid this youth in the promotion of his future prospects.” Allan did have some interest, however, in dispatching Poe to West Point; he would be out of the house and, more important, no longer a financial burden.

Poe submitted a formal application to West Point in May and, with a gift from Allan of fifty dollars in his pocket, travelled to Washington in order to present in person his letters of recommendation to the Secretary of War. He learned that there were some forty-seven candidates already on the list of appointments, but that it still
might be possible for him to enroll in September. He then travelled thirty miles north to Baltimore. He wanted to be reunited with his older brother, Henry, who had been living with General Poe and his family since infancy; this visit would also allow Poe to become acquainted with his paternal relatives. Now that his substitute family had been fragmented, he was happy to be embraced by what might be called his true relations. It was also possible that some erstwhile colleague of General Poe might help his enlistment at West Point.

Baltimore was the third largest city in the United States, but still at the very beginning of its fortunes. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad had just been completed. The Patapsco river-front was lined with warehouses. Baltimore was becoming a centre for manufacturing as well as for shipping, an energetic and serious city with broad streets and a skyline made memorable by buildings and churches. Two years before, John Quincy Adams had called it “Monument City.” The earliest photographs depict the busy area of the port, behind which, in the distance, can be seen the Basilica of the Assumption, the steeples of Saint Paul's Episcopal church and the German Reformed Church, and the Washington Monument. It was also the first city of slavery for those travelling south. In that sense, at least, Poe felt at home.