Literary Rogues (7 page)

Shelley's final, unfinished poem was ironically called “The Triumph of Life.” A London newspaper reported, “Shelley,
the writer of some infidel poetry
, has been drowned. Now he knows whether there is a God or no.”

But Shelley's story doesn't end there: according to Lady Blessington, the poet “had an implicit belief in ghosts. Byron also told me that Mr. Shelley's specter had appeared to a lady, walking in a garden, and he seemed to lay great stress on this. I was at first doubtful that Byron was serious in his belief as he assumes a grave and mysterious air when he talks on the subject.”

In the wake of Shelley's death, his widow, Mary Shelley, continued to write. She did her feminist mother proud: Mary became well-known in her time as a short-story writer, novelist, and political writer. She succumbed to a brain tumor at the age of fifty-three.

When novelist Lady Blessington met Lord Byron in 1823, the year after his friend Percy Shelley's death, she found him a broken man. “
The impression of the first few minutes
disappointed me, as I had, both from the portraits and descriptions given, conceived a different idea of him,” she wrote in her journal. “I had fancied him taller, with a more dignified and commanding air; and I looked in vain for the hero-looking sort of person with whom I had so long identified him in imagination.” His nose was well shaped but “a little too thick,” she continued, and his coat and garments were ill-fitting and worn. By this time Byron had been in exile from his homeland some four years.

He was still on the run—from his critics, from his ex-wife, from the law, from everyone. Following a failed love affair with a married Italian countess, Byron declared himself “
done with women
. For though only thirty-six, I feel sixty in mind, and am less capable than ever of those nameless attentions that all women require. I like solitude, which has become absolutely necessary to me.”

Despite such melodramatic declarations of loving solitude, the truth was that his exile from England had only served to deepen his depression. Writing to his friend, the poet Thomas Moore, Byron said, “I should, many a good day,
have blown my brains out
, but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law; and, even then, if I could have been certain to haunt her.” Perhaps a bit more honestly, he wrote that he had thought about killing himself on occasion but was “too lazy” to shoot himself.

He was still writing poetry, but admitted in a letter that writing was “a torture. I think
composition is a great pain
.” Byron, who described himself in letters as “the apostle of affliction,” believed that poets and writers, with their eyes trained toward the heavens, were more likely to stumble. “
Those who are intent only on the beaten road
” have it easy.

Byron escaped the clutches of death for far longer than even he expected. He may have lived as a poet, but he died a warrior on the battlefields of Greece in 1824 at the age of thirty-six. Though he had no nationalistic reasons to fight for Greek independence, his involvement satisfied his taste for adventure. Byron once told his wife that he preferred “action, war, the senate, and even science to all the
speculations of those mere dreamers
of another existence [i.e., poets].”

In the end, he dismissed all of his accomplishments in life as being more trouble than they were worth. “
If I had to live over again
, I do not know what I would change in my life—unless it were not to have lived at all.”

What is known about Lord Byron's misadventures is scandalous enough, but what he recorded in his unpublished autobiography may have been even worse. A group of his friends and family burned the manuscript after his death. It is, perhaps, for the best. “
Genius, like greatness
, should be seen at a distance, for neither will bear a too close inspection,” he once said, no doubt with a knowing wink.

“
Men have called me mad
; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence—whether much that is glorious—whether all that is profound—does not spring from disease of thought.”

—
EDGAR ALLAN POE

E
ven if writing was still a profession unfit for upper-class gentlemen, the idea that an author could make a living from sales of his work was certainly gaining ground on the European continent. Things were very different in America, however, where copyright laws didn't cover works created outside of the United States. This meant that American publishers could make an easy profit by simply pirating European books. Publishers were less likely to take a chance on American authors, because that would mean they would have to pay royalties or other remuneration.

“
The history of American writers
starting as early as the nineteenth century has been marked by unnatural strain, physical isolation, an alienation from the supposedly sweet and lovely aspects of American life,” literary critic Alfred Kazin wrote. While the United States was always a land of hope and opportunity for immigrants from its founding onward, it was also a harsh wasteland of despair for the poor. Few were as foolhardy as the “starving artist,” who appeared to be destitute by choice.

Success demanded thick skin and determination.

Success demanded publicity and controversy.

Success demanded someone like
Edgar Allan Poe
(1809–1849).

Poe best illustrates the idea of the American writer-as-pioneer in the nineteenth century. He was fiercely opinionated, a trait that would come back to repeatedly bite him on the ass. He was also an alcoholic who drank for the same reasons he wrote: to push back the depression that he was constantly waging a war against. His French translator, Charles Baudelaire, said that Poe used alcohol as a weapon to kill “
a worm inside that would not die
.”

Regarding his drinking and drug use, Poe wrote, “
I have absolutely no pleasure
in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.” While some critics have blamed his black moods on drinking, Poe believed the inverse: “My enemies referred the insanity to the drink rather than the drink to the insanity.”

Where did Poe's darkness come from? Was it, as some biographers have posited, there from the beginning? “
I do believe God gave me a spark of genius
,” Poe once said, “but He quenched it in misery.” His father, a drunken stage actor, abandoned his family when Poe was a toddler; his mother died the next year after a long battle with tuberculosis. John Allan, a Scottish-born merchant, took in Poe as a foster child. Even though Poe was too young at the time to remember the details of his mother's passing, death would never be far from his thoughts. Indeed, when he was six, he passed a graveyard and screamed in terror that the dead would run after him and drag him into the ground. Unsurprisingly, Poe's early attempts at poetry were drenched in the macabre. Take this line from one of his teenage journals, for example: “
I could not love except where
Death was mingling his with Beauty's breath.”

After a tumultuous childhood he later described as sad, lonely, and unhappy, Poe left his foster family's home in Richmond, Virginia, to study law at the University of Virginia. With only $100 in support from his foster father, Poe turned to gambling to try to meet the $450 yearly tuition.

Poe soon fell into debt and took up drinking. Luckily for Poe's pocketbook, he was a lightweight drunk. A single glass of wine was said to have been enough to unleash the dark forces within his heart. “
His whole nature was reversed
,” newspaper editor N. P. Willis said. “The demon became uppermost.”

Poe lasted less than a year at the University of Virginia. He had no interest in becoming a lawyer, anyway: his true passion was for writing. “Literature is the most noble of professions,” he wrote as only an impetuous American could. “For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path, even for all the gold in California.”

He returned to Richmond, and, following a fight with his foster father, left home again, this time for Boston. He published his first chapbook,
Tamerlane and Other Poems
. It sold poorly and failed to garner him any critical attention. All the gold in California had to look tantalizing at this point—he needed to support himself some way, and literature couldn't put food on his table (not that he even had a table to call his own).

Upon turning eighteen, he enlisted in the U.S. Army as “
Edgar A. Perry
.” He was about as good a fit for the military as Samuel Coleridge. Poe's five-year military career ended with a discharge from the West Point Military Academy for missing drills, parades, classes, and church.

“
I left West Point two days ago
and traveling to N. York without a cloak or any other clothing of importance,” he wrote to his foster father—a lie, it should be said, since he kept his cadet's overcoat for the rest of his life. “I have caught a most violent cold and am confined to my bed—I have no money—no friends—I have written to my brother—but he cannot help me—I shall never rise from my bed—besides a most violent cold on my lungs my ear discharges blood and matter continually and my headache is distracting—I hardly know what I am writing.” He asked for money from his foster father but never received a response.

Following his discharge, Poe was more determined than ever to support himself with his pen. He won a fifty-dollar literary prize from a Baltimore newspaper. It was just enough to encourage him to strike out on his own without his foster father's support.

In one of his darkest moments, he needed more than his pen—and alcohol—to stave off the demons. “
I went to bed and wept through
a long, long, hideous night of despair,” he wrote in a letter. “When the day broke, I arose and endeavored to quiet my mind by a rapid walk in the cold, keen air—but all would not do—the demon tormented me still. Finally I procured two ounces of laudanum.” While it was still legal in the United States at the time, it was well known as an addictive substance thanks in part to Thomas De Quincey's
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
, a work that Poe was familiar with. Unlike De Quincey, however, Poe used the drug only occasionally and never became hooked on it.

Poe continued to write his foster father for funds. “
I am perishing
—absolutely perishing for want of aid. And yet I am not idle—nor addicted to any vice,” he wrote, leaving out any mention of his alcohol and laudanum use. “For God's sake pity me, and save me from destruction.”

Again, his requests went unanswered.

John Allan died in 1834, leaving nothing to his twenty-five-year-old foster son in his will. This came as no surprise to Poe, who was living with his aunt, Maria Clemm, and her nine-year-old daughter, Virginia.

Still, Poe pledged to support his aunt and cousin, whom he married when she turned thirteen. While minors were allowed to marry in Virginia at the time with a guardian's consent, it was certainly unusual—to say nothing of the fact that they were first cousins.

Poe moved his wife and aunt around with him as he worked for various magazines on the East Coast, writing short stories in his free time. His drinking cost him more than one job, including one in Richmond at the
Southern Literary Messenger
. “
Mr. Poe was a fine gentleman when he was sober
,” one of the printers at the
Messenger
said. “But when he was drinking he was about one of the most disagreeable men I have ever met.”

In 1842, Virginia was playing piano when she began coughing up blood. Doctors diagnosed her with tuberculosis, the same disease that had killed Poe's mother, father, and brother. Poe, distraught at the prospect of losing another family member, ramped up his drinking and soon found himself on the doorstep of an old girlfriend, Mary Deveraux. He accused her of not loving her husband; she promptly sent her drunken visitor on his way. Poe was located a few days later, wandering the woods of rural New York distraught and disheveled, hundreds of miles from home.

Poe returned to his family, and buried himself in his work to get his mind off Virginia's condition. He dreamed of launching a magazine of his own,
Penn Magazine
. In 1843, he was invited to lecture in Washington, D.C., and hoped to meet the president while in town. “
I believe that I am making a sensation
which will tend to the benefit of the magazine,” he wrote to a partner in his venture. The “sensation” that he had made, however, did little to benefit the magazine: his heavy drinking upon arrival in Washington caused the organizers of the lecture to cancel his speech. Poe never received the audience with the White House that he had been counting on.