To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

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  TERROR HAS ITS OWN THEATER NOW. They thought the country air and the fresh food and milk would help Virginia’s health. For years she has suffered from tuberculosis, coughing to the point of choking and spitting up blood. The immaculate order and cleanliness of the cottage makes the poverty and deprivation of their lives all the more apparent. The reason the fireplace is so clean is that they can’t afford to buy wood. Virginia spends her days ailing on a thin straw mattress. She covers herself with a spotless sheet, nearly transparent from being washed and mended so many times, and with her husband’s old military overcoat from his days as a West Point cadet. There is little else in the house: a shelf of books, a cage that held a bird or a few birds, a family cat. Virginia places the cat on her lap over the coat for a little more warmth. She has a round, girlish face, flushed pink with constant fever. When Poe and his family lived in the house there were cherry trees all around. In the mornings, if he doesn’t take the train into the blue haze of the city to try to earn a little money or see if someone will publish a short story or a poem (things written anyhow, cribbed from others or from his own earlier pieces), Poe works in the garden or goes for a walk down a country path.

  THE SEER EDGAR POE. You have to climb a few wooden steps and ring a doorbell next to the closed door. Nothing can be heard inside. Not even the doorbell. Perhaps it is closed today. Who is going to visit this remote miniature house, what tourist, what lover of literature or devotee of Poe? Europeans, probably. People who were drawn to literature as teenagers by reading his stories about hidden treasure, murder, ruined mansions in the fog of a desolate moor, characters who wake up to find themselves trapped in a casket. There were horror films where seeing the name Edgar Allan Poe in the opening credits was already a promise or an invocation. On the shelves of stationery stores deep in provincial Spain you would find editions of Poe’s stories with an illustration of a skull and a dripping candle on the cover. Those covers were like lurid movie posters: black as night, red as blood. The stories had not been translated into Spanish directly from the original but rather from the French translations to which Baudelaire, more than a century earlier, had devoted himself as passionately as to his own writing.

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  HE HAD TO TAKE REFUGE IN MYSTERY. This room on the ground floor of the cottage is where Virginia died. Virginia Clemm Poe. She was too weak by then to climb the steep stairs to the upper bedroom. Although there is now a period bed in the room, it’s very likely that Virginia died on a pallet placed directly on the wide planks of this very floor. It is chilling to step across it. You want to make no noise so as not to disturb her in her illness, in her death. Poe had spent his life writing obsessively about very beautiful and very sick young women, about the beauty of dead women who can come back to life when they are already in the grave, or take possession, like vampires, of the soul of any other woman who tries to take their place.

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  AND TO THE CORDIAL WARMTH OF DRUNKENNESS IN THAT WORLD. A docent shows him around the house with a flurry of gestures and a voice that is better suited to the large halls of a museum. Standing very close to his visitor, in a small room with a low roof, he speaks as if they were at opposite ends of a museum lobby and he needed to raise his voice. It is, of course, an enthusiastic voice, full of possibilities, a baritone, the voice of a guide leading a tour group through a museum or a cathedral. In fact, one must stoop to go through the doors and even more when going up the stairs, which are quite narrow, twisting and turning to make the most of the cramped space. “People say, ‘How small they all were,’” the guide explains, “but it’s not true, they were just like us. Poe was a tall man, five feet, eight inches. Their roofs were low to save on building materials and for better heating.” He is a young man, an enthusiast, whose height and professional ambitions are out of proportion to this tiny place and to the lone visitor who came today, a foreigner no doubt, a little frightened, a little daunted by the legend of the Bronx, though secretly priding himself in being able to refute it.

  * * *

  IF YOU FALL YOU WILL BE TRAMPLED. On the landing there is a cutout of Poe taken from one of those daguerreotypes in which he seems so deeply wretched. It is actual size, and according to the guide very popular with visitors to the house who pose next to it for pictures, draping an arm over Poe’s shoulder with a big smile, best buddies with the poor dead man with the funereal face—that face that is like the face of a prematurely buried man in one of his own short stories or in an English movie from the sixties, shot in lurid Technicolor and featuring Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, an actress in a low-cut dress who screams in terror, yielding in advance to the vampire’s bite.

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  AND IF YOU SLIP AND FALL IN THE WATER. It is a poorly funded house museum, part of the Bronx Historical Society. Entrance is five dollars and the guide is the only employee. Upstairs, in a room with a pitched roof, there is an oil portrait of Poe. It looks very much like one of those sinister paintings that have such an important role in the horror movies of the Hammer Film production company, portraits that can come to life or reveal a likeness to a ghastly forebear. Only a truly low-budget film would feature a portrait like this one, in its gaudy frame. Movies of that sort were filmed in Spain in the seventies, the star and often the director was an actor named Jacinto Molina whose stage name was Paul Naschy. The guide stands in front of the painting and talks about it as if he were explaining Las Meninas or The Night Watch, or perhaps describing by dint of a prodigious memory every detail of a cathedral altarpiece to which he keeps his back turned. “This portrait was personally bequeathed to the Edgar Allan Poe House by its author. He lives in the Bronx and is a well-known member of the community, a war veteran. He is currently ninety-three.”

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  THEY WILL TOSS THEIR SANDWICH WRAPPERS AT YOU. Upstairs, in the main bedroom, there is a large flat-screen TV and several rows of plastic chairs. There is a low, narrow window and by bending down you can look outside. With a flourish, the guide reaches for the remote. “It’s time for our audiovisual experience.” Though he speaks to just one visitor, he keeps his gaze slightly unfocused, as if addressing a large group whose other members are invisible for some reason. The visitor says with cautious politeness that it’s not necessary, he only came to see the house, not the audiovisual experience. “But it’s included,” the guide says, baffled at first, then disappointed or dismayed, with a little pity as well for this man who doesn’t know how to get his money’s worth or properly value what he’s missing. They are both speaking English now though they know their native language is Spanish. The guide’s name is Glenn, and he is almost certainly Dominican. Downstairs, in the room with the fireplace, there is an area cordoned off with red rope to keep visitors from entering. But on the other side of the rope there is only a rocking chair and a small writing desk. Glenn says that Poe used to sit on the rocking chair. Perhaps the only thing that is truly genuine about the house is the meagerness of the space and its absolute deprivation, which is unmitigated by the various period details to which Glenn feels such defensive attachment.

  NO ONE CAN PICTURE THE LONELINESS. It’s overcast now, the light coming in through the windows is a pale gray. A dead light from the past. He would have liked Glenn to leave him alone at some point, to stop explaining things. He never truly sees anything unless he is alone and in silence. He goes over to a window and Glenn stays close to him. He hears him say at his back that this is not where the house originally stood. It used to be nearby, higher up, on the side of a hill. It was moved in 1913, to preserve it when an apartment building went up in its original location. How strange, among all the things that were lost, that something so fragile would survive. Glenn says that from the porch Poe would have been able to see the Long Island Sound.

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  RETHINK HOW YOU LIVE. After Virginia’s death, Poe fell into a state of lethargy, or calm. Perhaps being in mourning was a relief after years of endless anxiety about her health, all tho
se sleepless nights hearing her coughing, struggling to breathe, vomiting blood on the sheets. When people asked how he was doing, he would say, “I am well, very well, better than ever.” He wrote and published in journals much less than before. But this decline in his literary fortunes must not have been as bitter as being ceaselessly besieged by poverty. A friend went on a walk with him through the city and saw his patched boots nearly fall apart as he jumped over a puddle on a muddy street. Poe himself had contributed to his own misfortune as effectively as his worst enemy. He had a suicidal talent for falling out with those who could have helped him and turning viciously against his protectors. A cartoonist drew a picture of him preparing to write a scathing book review not with a pen but with a tomahawk. He had offended with equal virulence those who deserved it and those who did not. Perhaps because he was ashamed of his poverty, the generosity of those who helped him gave rise to a gratitude that would soon sour into rancor. Far less talented writers achieved much greater success and earned amounts that were unimaginable for him. Others had stumbled from birth into privileges that he was denied. Others inherited fortunes, houses, high positions. The popularity of some of his stories and poems had enriched the owners of the journals where they were published. Professional reciters could fill theaters by declaiming “The Raven.” He had been paid nine dollars for the poem. He was told he had many readers in England, France, even Russia. Sometimes he was sent a clipping from a foreign newspaper and he would keep it and take pride in showing it. Despairing of the hope that justice would ever be done to him, he squandered his strength on sad literary vendettas, ferocious reviews of second-rate books in which his refined taste and critical sense were tainted by resentment.

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  I KNOW THE HORROR OF THOSE OPEN EYES. The most constant feeling in his life was abandonment: a drunk and absent father, a mother dead of tuberculosis in abject poverty when he was three. Once, toward the end, he wrote in a letter, “I have many occasional dealings with Adversity, but the want of parental affection has been the heaviest of my trials.” On the day he walked out of the cottage for the last time, bound on a trip he thought would last several months, he brought with him a miniature portrait of his mother. On the back he wrote the date and a few words in a tiny hand: “My adored mother, E.A.P.” The woman in the portrait looks like a teenage heroine from a Jane Austen novel. The wealthy merchant who took him in never adopted him and left him nothing in his will. Poe was a déclassé, like Baudelaire, De Quincey, Melville, and Benjamin: the blows of fortune, along with their own tumultuous characters, left them without a stable place in the social order or in the commercial and property-owning class to which they belonged—to which Poe, too, could have belonged, if his guardian had been more patient or generous with him, or Poe himself more tractable. They all practiced, in addition, a precarious and socially suspect profession associated with a disordered and disreputable life, a useless trade pursued by people of no practical sense, as dubious and extravagant as the circus or the theater, fitting no productive or commercial category and failing to ensure the minimum of security and respectability that even a lowly secretarial position could provide. Black sheep and reprobates, failed heirs, useless slackers, derelict dandies, bankrupt rentiers, proletarians dressed in bourgeois boots and overcoats (patched-up overcoats, boots that were falling apart), skilled in obsolete crafts and lonely, meticulous trades that were wrecked and tossed aside by industrial production and mass commerce.

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  GIVING HIMSELF AN INJECTION OF LEPROSY. Poe and Virginia’s mother stayed in the tiny house like a pair of strange orphans, living as aunt and nephew, son- and mother-in-law, mother and son. Poe was not so much a widower as an orphan, mourning a wife who was only thirteen when they married and also his first cousin, a childish, asexual sister more than a wife, buried in a nearby cemetery that he visited often, sometimes at night, in shirtsleeves, or draping over his shoulders the military overcoat that must have still retained her scent. From her bed, Mrs. Clemm, Muddy, would hear him leave the house and shut the door. Then she would stay up until he returned, always fearing the worst, that he would lose his mind, or vanish like so many times before to reappear several days later in a drunken stupor. Sometimes she would hear instead the sound of his steps as he paced up and down the echoing porch. On clear winter nights the whole sky must have been a dark and blazing dome. There would have been no gaslight this far from the city, no smoke from factories or chimneys to cloud the view.

  EXACTLY WHAT YOU WISH FOR. Downstairs, by the entrance, where the kitchen used to be, there is a modest stand with publications and souvenirs: postcards, key chains, prints where the cottage looks like a Gothic mansion on a stormy night. Glenn keeps everything in perfect order. The money he collects for the entrance fee goes into a wooden box with several compartments. Each time he sells a ticket, a postcard, or a souvenir, he draws a little cross in the corresponding box on a form. He accepts credit card payments with a little dismay. It forces him to bring out a rather ancient device and make sure he can get a connection. Poe looks out from the row of postcards on the stand with successive expressions of misery and grief, trapped two centuries ago in the frozen, brutal faithfulness of a daguerreotype.

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  THE PUNCTUAL HANDKERCHIEF OF PARTING. In the general imagination Poe wears a small black mustache just as Mozart or Bach wears a wig, Dracula a black cape and tailcoat, Superman a pair of blue tights, Marilyn Monroe a platinum-blond hairdo, and Karl Marx a prophet’s beard. In fact, Poe only wore a mustache during the last two years of his life. In earlier portraits, whether sketched or painted in oil, he wears long sideburns that reach down nearly to his chin, but no mustache. He is a complete stranger: a dignified young man with a kind, agreeable expression and big eyes that are wide open. Although he looks sensitive, perhaps a little lost in reverie, he could well be someone in a very different walk of life from literature, a lawyer, maybe, or a clerk, someone leading a peaceful life but having no great prospects, perhaps from lack of initiative. There is sadness in his eyes, even abandonment, but not fear, much less a pall of misery.

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  YOU’LL TAKE INVISIBLE PICTURES. The first photograph is a daguerreotype taken in 1847. It is his first portrait with a mustache. Less than a year had passed since Virginia’s death. The mustache is small, clipped neatly at the corners of the mouth, Chaplinesque, with slightly twisted ends. The later pictures form a sequence as gradually dismal as Rembrandt’s self-portraits of old age, ruin, and decay. Two of them were taken within days of each other, in November 1848. The third, which is also the last, dates to mid-September 1849, just a few weeks before his death. In November 1848 Poe was in Providence paying a visit to one of those widows with literary inclinations who were drawn to him and whom he occasionally courted in the hope of attaining through marriage a certain social and financial stability in life. They found him irresistible. He recited his poems in a whisper and copied them in his own hand with a special dedication. They were captivated by the lost, magnetic gaze of the widowed poet and by his Southern manners. His dignified elegance was ennobled rather than spoiled for them by his obvious poverty. The rumors of his nights of drink and ruin, which were not unfounded, added an attractively alarming quality to his ceremonious manners. He made promises to abstain from drinking. He behaved charmingly at social gatherings. Then he got savagely drunk, disappeared for a whole week, and everything was ruined.

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  NOT TO KNOW IF YOU ARE IN THIS WORLD. In the November 9 picture he looks hungover and filled with regret. His mustache, which is thicker now, accentuates the bitter grimace of his lips. His facial muscles seem contracted and collapsed. Around that time he took a large dose of laudanum as he boarded a train to Boston, and when he turned up several days later he remembered nothing except terrifying hallucinations. In the November 13 photograph he seems somewhat recovered, some of his dignity is back, but his general appearance is one of insurmountable despair. He is wearing the military coat wi
th the big lapels, the one that kept Virginia warm. In each picture his forehead seems larger, more swollen, his dirty hair more plastered to his skull.