by Selcuk Altun
*
I began feeling restless as my taxi from the airport drove into Balat. It had never occurred to me before how ready I was for another week of zigzagging behind Esther through the labyrinth of Buenos Aires. As I hauled my exhausted suitcase past Professor Ali’s apartment I felt a twinge of concern about who the next tenant might be, after Ali married his Esther and moved—probably—to upper-class Maçka. Another problematic and marginalized individual? Thanks to the amount of cheap soap and detergent lavished on it by Aunt Cevher, my living room smelled truly like a laboratory. I threw myself on the bed. My eyes were too tired to scan the ceiling for a secret camera before I nodded off to sleep fully dressed.
I rose to the evening ezan and had my much-missed “meditative shower.” I was out of excuses not to go into the study. Since the day I’d moved in, I’d never looked inside the closed cabinets below the library shelves. I must have subconsciously been dreading what I might find. I greeted the ringing of the doorbell enthusiastically; it was Sami. He agreed to accompany me to the Black Sea pide restaurant. Edip the cook asked whether “my commander” had gone to his home town, which seemed a poetic idea to me. “Close enough,” I answered, thinking my soul would quiver with bandoneon melodies. Sami didn’t take much pleasure in the fact that the professor and Esther had found each other, but when I told him I was about to lay hands on the thugs who attacked me his ears seemed to prick up. Thinking that I’d been too quick to doubt his integrity, I was suddenly unsure whether I’d moved my checkers correctly.
Back home I sluggishly unpacked my suitcase. My mood improved when I realized that I had money left from the $5,000 Ali had given me. I dressed and went to Disco Eden according to my usual custom. I don’t know how many glasses of vodka I drank before my attention came to rest on the Slavic girls dancing with each other on the little stage. The dark-haired one with a turned-up nose was dancing enthusiastically in front of me. I was curious to know what her sweat would smell like, so I had her called over to my table. As the head waiter brought the large girl, I knew he whispered in her ear that I was a V.I.P. When it came time to introduce myself I said, “My name is Salvador Buenos Aires.”
*
The next day my mood was that of a falcon growing accustomed to its cage. The noon ezan was just starting as I began rummaging through those closed cabinets in the library. By the time I extracted my haul of notebooks and journals from different periods, metal vases engraved with gothic designs, curious atlases, a pair of calligraphy scissors, two icons, pen cases painted with erotic motifs, silver Ottoman and Persian cigarette cases, an antique revolver, naïve wooden animal figurines, a sailboat in a bottle, geometrically cut ruby-red glass objects, a stuffed baby shark, a jar of dried seahorses, and four documentary videos and DVDs, the last strains of the evening ezan were dying away.
I carried two stylish notebooks of Venetian workmanship, a leather-bound diary, and a DVD marked SERENDIPITY to my desk, feeling as pleased as if I had pillaged a small museum. The first twenty pages of the A4 notebook were filled with dozens of pen-and-ink drawings of Edgar Allan Poe. The next section began with the portrait of a sad-looking girl above a caption that read, “Virginia Clemm (ANNABEL LEE),” and ended with a parade of theatrical characters whose surnames were all Poe or Allan. I think it was Kenneth Silverman’s biography, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance, that I pulled from the POE corner of the library to verify the names. I wasn’t surprised, on comparing the photographs in the book with the drawings, to note that the latter were as lively as photocopies.
OFFERING TO THE MASTER was how the last section began, and I wasn’t wrong, as it proved, to be startled. It must have taken weeks out of the life of a paranoid student to complete this letter, which was obviously written very slowly in gothic script. When I discovered the rationale behind the strange color of the ink that stood out dramatically on the white paper, I could scarcely credit my senses. Flabbergasted by the bizarre passage, I read it again, as though that would ease my heart:
19 January 1999
To the Prophet of Mystery, Master Edgar A. Poe,
Your disciple, who always hearkens to you when you descend to him in his dreams, desires—if you so permit—to offer his personal sentiments on your one-hundred-and-ninetieth birthday. Words fail me, Master, when it comes to explaining the bitter reason why I have added my own blood to the ink in my fountain pen.
In order to put to good use the talent of their wonder-child Elizabeth (Eliza) Arnold, her family migrates from England to America and establishes a theater company. At ten Eliza (1787–1811) is already a star in the making. The theater company’s comedian, Charles D. Hopkins, to whom they marry her five years later, dies mysteriously a year into the marriage. Eliza and the dancer David Poe, whom the company hires to replace her first husband, fall in love at first sight. Handsome and mysterious, Poe is a talented law-school graduate. His father, a general who presides over the customs house, is disappointed by his obstinate son’s passion for art. Eliza and David marry in 1806. Their first son, William Henry Poe, is born in 1807. The husband and wife are locked in constant strife and the theater business is not doing well. The grandfather takes over the job of looking after William Henry. In the year Edgar is born (1809), his alcoholic father is running away from home every chance he gets; he can’t stand living in his wife’s shadow. The year their daughter Rosalie is born (1810), David’s body is found in a pathetic hotel room in Chicago. At her first opportunity the poor and sick Eliza moves to Richmond with her two babies. Before she can succeed in obtaining the lead role in Romeo and Juliet, she dies of tuberculosis. Only with difficulty can the three-year-old Edgar, now an orphan, be pulled away from Eliza’s dead body. He has never seen his mother looking so beautiful and peaceful. Whereas humankind in general does not remember anything that happens before the age of four, Edgar begins to demonstrate a natural affinity with death as a three-year-old. Certain opportunistic and shallow scholars have in their biographies represented Poe as the victim of a tragic fate since the day he was born. In fact he was a genius blessed not only with a rich inner world but loaded with the advantages of having two artists as parents; and therefore he was, from birth, a member of THE ELECT!
Edgar and Rosalie are adopted by two wealthy families from Richmond, the tobacco center. The unrefined merchant John Allan cannot appreciate the actor’s son Edgar but his wife Frances, who has the soul of an artist, adores him until her death. The year Edgar begins primary school the Allans move to Great Britain for five years. The adopted child, spared their last name, attends Stoke Newington, a church school in the outskirts of London. John Barnaby, the priest and headmaster, possesses an unusual philosophy of education: the basic principle is to rely on textbooks as little as possible. If, for instance, it is the four mathematical operations that are to be taught, the birth and death dates on the tombstones in the neighboring graveyard may be used. If a funeral is in the offing, students may take turns at grave-digging in lieu of gym class. Edgar quickly grows accustomed to the atmosphere of this school located on the street where Daniel Defoe was born. He is warmed by the anecdotes of ill omen traded back and forth so spiritedly by his churchgoing teachers. When he wants to hear more elaborate stories, he sneaks into the pub patronized by old soldiers and sailors.
The year he becomes a sixth-former, the family returns to Richmond. His classmates don’t much like this “newcomer” with an English attitude who seems to be looking down on them. But the burgeoning genius of Edgar, who achieves marked success with little effort in every class he takes, is recognized in the end even by the tobacco man, John Allan. His favorite subjects are literature and foreign languages, and there is no classical work that he hasn’t devoured. He declares himself the guardian of his frail classmate Richard. Although he does not cease to write love letters and poems to his sister Rosalie’s friends, he falls in love with Richard’s mother J. When J. takes to her bed with a fatal illness, Edgar compares her more and more to his own mother. H
e visits her every day; he is at her bedside as she dies in excruciating pain. There isn’t a night when he fails to visit her grave. For a whole year he can only find solace, after every session of weeping, by wandering through the cemetery with his eyes tightly shut. His family is not disturbed by his peculiarities because they are all sympathetic to the mysterious vibrations of genius. In the year of his graduation from high school he has a dream that is like a divine revelation: as sounds pouring from the beak of a coal-black bird flutter and turn into a column of numbers running from top to bottom, clouds wafted by a sea breeze turn into letters of the Greek and Roman alphabets and parade before him from left to right. The numbers and letters hover and soar until he memorizes them. When he wakes in the morning he easily deciphers the meaning of the two sets of symbols, which he has converted into type fonts. The sentences he records in his personal journal are: “One day the whole world will admire your genius” and “You won’t be on earth to see that day.” He keeps this dream a secret even from Frances; I am the only other person who knows about it.
1826! He registers at the University of Virginia, founded by the third president of the United States of America. He will immediately become the “ wonder boy” of the literature department. His devotion to the classics and his talent for foreign languages at first intimidate his professors. He is in the spotlight also in drama and sports. He seizes every opportunity to use his rhetorical skills to protect the bookworms from the bullies—Virginia is a school favored by the children of the rich. Wishing to punish Edgar, John Allan withholds the moderate sum necessary for his school expenses. Edgar has to borrow money and, when it emerges that he gambles at cards to pay off his debts, is expelled. (This outcome does not affect him unduly. His private journal contains an entry known only to me: “My sole profit in the university adventure has been the absorption of cryptology.”) John Allan of course does not overlook this opportunity to evict Edgar from his home. Even Frances cannot soften his heart this time; Edgar has to enlist in the army for a five-year hitch. Just before he joins his company, his first book of poems is published under a pseudonym. (A copy of this 1827 volume, the source of his first and last literary frustration, recently sold for $200,000; the immortal copy in my possession is graced with the Master’s signature.) In two years he is bored with the military although he has risen to the rank of sergeant. He writes apologetic letters to John Allan asking permission to return home. No answer until Frances, whom he calls “Mother”, dies of tuberculosis. Bowing to his wife’s wishes, in 1830 John Allan uses his influence to get Edgar admitted to the famous West Point military academy, but again success eludes him. Although he excels at military strategy, he is expelled in 1831 for continued breaches of discipline (the first was failure to attend religion classes). In the same year his alcoholic older brother William Henry Poe—poet, exhausted journalist, and ex-sailor who lived with his aunt Maria Clemm—dies of tuberculosis at twenty-four. Edgar is clapped in jail because he cannot pay his brother’s debts, for which he is guarantor. His period of education concludes without the punctuation of a diploma. However, he manages to achieve something much more important: he has acquired a store of material for his writing life.
After several odd jobs culminating in confusion, he decides to go on with writing. In 1832 he takes refuge in Baltimore with his poor aunt, Maria Clemm. He falls in love at first sight with his cousin, the ‘sorrow virtuoso’ Virginia Clemm (then ten years old). Maria grants permission for a wedding three years hence. He prefers reading and idleness to the work of writing, except for letters—with judicious intervals between them—to John Allan asking for money. This time Allan, who has already remarried, is sympathetic. Edgar cannot enter into sexual relations with Virginia, whom he marries in 1835, for the first year. In twelve years of marriage their fondness for each other never wavers. Playing childish games with his thirteen-year-old bride makes him perfectly happy. He teaches her math and literature and helps with her piano and singing lessons. He is editor and columnist for several newspapers and magazines in different East Coast cities. His mystery stories are little favored, and the musical and experimentalist touches in his poetry go unremarked. He is constantly changing jobs but is consistently poor. (I am the only one, until now, to have read this in his journal: “A hundred years from now hundreds of writers will follow me and hundreds of thousands of people will read me.”) In 1845 his poem, ‘The Raven,’ brings him recognition. In 1847, when his beloved wife dies of tuberculosis at twenty-five, he doesn’t even have a blanket of his own to cover her with. Under pressure from his publisher, he changes the title of the farewell poem he’s written for Virginia Clemm Poe. ‘Annabel Lee’ shocks its readers, from slave to president. Edgar A. Poe is now a famous—but still poverty-stricken—writer.
He cannot pull himself together after his wife’s death. He increases his alcohol intake and looks for chances to challenge the people around him. Unable to fall in love again, he attempts to commit suicide. He completes the poems of his mature period; he is forced to go on the lecture circuit to make money. (On the last page of his notebook he writes, “Eagerly to feel the approach of a gray tunnel.”) He was forty when they found him groaning on a Baltimore back street one foggy autumn morning. There are several explanations for his death. Even I wouldn’t know why the clothes he had on when they brought him to the hospital were not his …
Master, I discovered your work when I was in middle school, and by the time I was a lycée student had memorized it all. I enthusiastically followed your footsteps to the University of Virginia 170 years behind you. I may well have been to every place you stepped foot in between Richmond and Boston. In Charlottesville there was an antique shop called “Vintagia” on the edge of the university campus. In this place, which had a lot of things from the nineteenth century, my attention was drawn to a black hard-cover notebook. Its yellowing pages contained certain codes that had been formed by combining Latin and Greek letters and double-digit numbers. The writer had the dexterous hands of a calligrapher. The notebook had the charm of a holograph manuscript. I seized it eagerly and rushed home. As I cracked the codes with a kind of divine exultation I could not of course have foreseen that this would change my life. What made the hair on my head stand up was the suspicion that the notebook, encompassing reactions to certain literary and socioeconomic agendas which in turn provoked aphorisms and prophecies regarding the future, might actually be yours. Yet the last entry, in the year of your departure from earth, coincided perfectly with the anecdote about “the lost suitcase in Richmond.” I was elated to realize that your biographies had missed the substance of your inner world, which was protected by these codes. I did not feel like announcing the presence of this notebook to the world at large. It was my happy destiny to be the one and only creature on this perishable earth who had managed to decode you. As it imprinted itself on my brain line by line, I was at the same time crushed by the awareness of your genius. I felt as if I were entrusted with “the book of immortality,” and that if I failed to do what had to be done, I would incur your wrath, O Master!
I threw myself into the labyrinth of intellectual coordinates such as heaven/hell, past/future, and day/night and made them my own. By the time I emerged from this cul-de-sac I had become a Poe character myself. To do justice to my role it was necessary to become financially powerful and never to remove the cloak of mystery.
You broadened the horizons of thousands of writers, beginning with masters like Walt Whitman, William Faulkner, Herman Melville, Flannery O’Connor, Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, Marcel Proust, W. H. Auden, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Robert L. Stevenson, George B. Shaw, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, Arthur C. Doyle, Jorge Louis Borges, and Julio Cortázar. You saved the book world from being overrun by sentimental novels and academic critics. You widened the horizons of hundreds of millions of people. Furthermore, no love poem has surpassed “Annabel Lee” for the last 150 years.
I am moreover well aware o
f your use of mystery as a tool in “the dispensation of justice.” In 2009, on the 200th anniversary of your birth, I am determined to settle accounts on your behalf, O Master!
Your servant,
S.A.
Why was this letter addressed to Poe? Was it perhaps written when Suat was a student to prove his admiration for his master’s ghost, or more recently to confuse me?
As I finished this letter, I remembered the abridged Poe stories we had read on our English courses. I would have to study his Master’s longer stories and essays to determine how far Suat’s psycho-manifestation had exaggerated the facts.
The passionate move of my right hand toward the notebook in grayish-red leather startled me. Like a tentative periscope I surveyed the room. I stood and picked out a Branford Marsalis CD, and as “The Ruby and the Pearl” began to fill the room, cautiously lifted the cover on the notebook. The lines, “If I went I wouldn’t know it / Not even my shadow can come along” used as a preface seemed superficial. I followed the parade of Poe characters on the light pink pages. Every drawing looked like it was waiting, to be certified as a graphic-novel hero. Detective Auguste Dupin was endowed with two different expressions so that he resembled both Poe and Suat. I came up with the inane idea that if Suat’s life were made into a film, he would be played by Johnny Depp. After drawings of tigers, gorillas, and wild birds there was an innocent section in which, I think, all the alphabetical letters in the history of civilization were listed from top to bottom. They danced like the designs on a naturally dyed kilim. As I brought them together before my eyes, they seemed to escape from the page with the speed of light.
