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His ability to articulate those deepest darkest designs that should remain locked up in some forbidden corner of the brain was his single biggest strength as a storyteller. Chaos and evil were his leitmotif, and ghastly, gory death a common feature of his discourse of horror. Example: Before killing his own pet, the narrator in The Black Cat describes how “he took from [his] waistcoat-pocket a penknife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket!” The reason? He got home drunk one night and felt like the cat was ignoring him. Later in the story, the narrator (was he sane?, was he insane?) proceeds to actually hang the cat – and then kill his wife with an axe for good measure.
It’s in this troubling arena, where the repressed subconscious becomes dark wilful acts, that the bigger questions arise: Why do we have such a burning impulse to do what we should not? Why do we have a passion for the horrendous and the unthinkable? Who are we and what the hell does that make us? Are we all mad?
The notion of being buried alive, one of his biggest fears, was just as much of an obsession. The Premature Burial addresses the topic: “It was the tumult within the grounds of the cemetery, he said, which appeared to awaken him from a deep sleep, but no sooner was he awake then he became fully aware of the awful horrors of his position.”
But his best and easily most famous work is The Raven. The year is 1845, time of day: night. After another glass of cognac, Poe – delirious, feverish, hallucinating? – sat down to compose a poem of sleeplessness, horror and the unending agony of the spirit when faced with its own private hell just outside the window:
And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting / On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door / And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming / And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor / And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor / Shall be lifted – nevermore!
Edgar Allan Poe might have died, but his demons most definitely live on.
Text: Vince Medeiros
Illustration: Rebecca Wright
Edgar Allan Poe
He was rushed to this Baltimore hospital five days ago, delirious, wearing clothes that were not his own, and calling for a mysterious man named Reynolds. Unable to string sentences together, the man failed to explain the cause of his undoing. Eventually, he fell silent. The doctors had given up. The nurses just bid their time. Death, at this point, was only a matter of time.
Edgar Allan Poe, decadent rock‘n’roller of the nineteenth century and writer of the greatest ghost story ever told, died alone in a Baltimore hospital on October 3, 1849. The demons, who’d terrorised him throughout his entire life, had finally won.
Poe was born in Boston in 1809. His parents were itinerant actors and early life was spent mostly on the road. Family life, however, was marked by brevity and grief: his mother died of tuberculosis and, not long thereafter, his dad abandoned boy Poe. Orphaned as an infant, he was adopted by a wealthy tobacco merchant, John Allan. Allan raised Poe, put him through school and sent him to university. But even the rich benefactor eventually dispensed with Poe when the young writer racked up massive gambling debts and got expelled from college.
So he’s out of school, he’s broke and living with his aunt. What’s a rogue like Poe to do? Marry someone especially young: his aunt’s 13-year-old daughter, Virginia, whom he took for his wife in 1836. With Poe often drunk and unable to sustain friendships, she became the sole pillar in his crumbling life. But even she was destined to leave him. One casual evening Virgina was singing in the lounge, happy, happy, when blood suddenly spurted from her mouth. His wife, much like the mother, had been taken from him by TB.
After that, Poe’s alcoholism and general mental state only got worse. But, like the true literary mutineer that he was, his writing only got better. Vice and misfortune, you see, inform much of his best work; they’re two sides of the same coin: disease and genius, all in one.
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01 January 2009
Win tickets to 'Lives of the Artists: Follow Me Down' premiere
It’s been in production for months, seen us journey to the ends of the earth and represents the second feature-length chapter in the meandering, cinematic adventure deep into the realm of personal obsession and heroic artistic pursuit.