Before we start talking about the 159th anniversary of the death of Edgar Allan Poe, let’s make one thing clear: Philadelphia will never get Poe’s body out of Baltimore.
They don’t call us Mobtown for nothing.
If Philly did manage to rob the grave, they might wind up with the wrong box of bones.
A faction of Poe disciples have long argued that the corpse below the family monument in Westminster churchyard at Fayette and
Greene streets is not the writer but — due to a long ago disinterment mix-up — James Mosher, a veteran of the War of 1812 killed in the Battle of North Point.
“Perfect for Poe,” said George Figgs, a library educated-polymath devoted to the manifold oddities of Crabtown. “He’s not even buried where he’s supposed to be.”
In the municipal dogfight, Jeff Jerome, curator of Baltimore’s Poe House, will take on Poe scholar Edwart Pettit of Philadelphia early next year, the 200th anniversary of the great man’s birth.
Jerome will meet Pettit in the squared, scholarly ring of bare-knuckled debate on Jan. 13, 2009 at the Philadelphia Free Library.
“I will stand at Poe’s grave and dare anybody to bring a shovel,” said Jerome, adamant that the weathered marker bearing the poet’s name at the front of the churchyard is where Poe is buried, despite persistent stories of the body mix-up.
He is not, however, taking his opponent lightly.
“Pettit is articulate, very intelligent and knows his literary history,” said Jerome. “But I’ve got the facts on my side. No city has ever stood up for Poe like Baltimore.”
‘He never came back’
Today we reflect upon Poe’s mysterious death, an early passing at age 40 , which George Figgs is convinced was the result of a kidnapping motivated by greed, resentment and literary envy.
“Poe was set up!” declares Figgs, author of “The Poe Mystery,” a play for screen and stage he hopes to see produced during the bicentennial celebrations.
Figgs, 60, has been obsessed with Poe since discovering the joy of books as a kid at the No. 7 branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, 3641 Falls Rd. in has native Hampden.
“By strange quirks of fate, he wound up in Baltimore in the clutches of enemies,” said Figgs, who purports to have filled in holes in the final week of Poe’s life using original letters from and to the writer archived at the University of Virginia.
“I had to wear cotton gloves and a face mask,” said Figgs. “I cross referenced footnotes from all of the [legitimate] biographies with the letters.”
Like many a big idea launched along the shores of the Patapsco (as late as the 1950s reluctant seamen were still being shanghaied out of Miss Irene’s bar at the corner of Thames and Ann streets), Figgs’ scholarship began in Fells Point.
“It started about 20 years ago with a bar bet — ‘Where in Baltimore was Mr. Poe found just before he died?’” said Figgs. “I started digging and found out a lot of things I didn’t want to know.”
On Oct. 3, 1849 — after about a week of bouncing from Richmond to Baltimore to Philadelphia and back to Baltimore instead of getting to New York as intended — Poe was found unconscious and wearing someone else’s clothes near the intersection of Albemarle and Lombard streets near the edge of what is now Little Italy.
He died of complications from exposure on Oct. 7 at a hospital most Baltimoreans know as Church Home, formerly at North Broadway at Fayette Street.
Figgs contends that Poe — an erratic soul already sick with the remnants of cholera and possibly suffering a brain tumor — was gotten drunk by men in the employ of his enemies and left outside to die.
“He knew he was being followed when he left Richmond,” said Figgs, “He was headed to Philly to make some money editing the poems of a friend’s wife and then he was going to New York to see his mother-in-law.
“Because of the cholera, his doctor told him to take it easy. He said he was just going across the street to a restaurant. He even took the doctor’s cane with him, which he would have brought back.
“Two men joined Poe, and there were many plates of oysters and lots of drinks. One of the waiters said the men ‘took Mr. Poe out of here.’
“He never came back . . .”
The villain of the story is a known forger named Rufus Wilmot Griswold. Figgs contends that Griswold — a minor, self-important writer who hated Poe because Edgar eviscerated his work in print — was behind the collaring of Poe.
After Poe’s death, Griswold spread the first of many libels: the caricature of a drunken madman and dope fiend that clings to the writer to this day. In that pre-copyright era, Griswold also became Poe’s literary executor after the writer’s death.
A current fight to preserve artists’ copyrights is under way, as writers, musicians and filmmakers join to oppose H.R.5889, the Orphan Works Act of 2008.
Griswold profited greatly from the posthumous works of Poe, inserting into them his own “Memoir of the Author,” a slander that Poe’s friends were unable to prevent from becoming gospel.
“Poe was beginning to make a real name for himself — both Baudelaire and Dickens championed him,” said Figgs. “And his mortal enemy was Rufus Griswold.”
Asked if mainstream scholars had accepted his findings, Figgs said that Jeff Jerome — Charm City’s heavyweight Poe champion due to defend the Bard’s rightful resting place — was holding out for proof.
“I’m not ready to show my research to him,” said Figgs, standing at the spot behind the church hall where he believes Poe is buried.
“It’s just as well, because right now I can’t even find it.”
Poe is Halloween
The allure of Edgar Allan Poe is bigger than his extraordinary body of work, from the insightful scholarship of “Eureka” to mid-19th century pop jingles like “The Raven.”
It seems that he endures for the general public in the same way that soul singer Screamin’ Jay Hawkins had trouble drawing a crowd if he wasn’t emerging from a coffin to shout “I Put A Spell On You.”
Today, Edgar Poe is almost synonymous with Halloween.
“Gloomy stuff,” said Gary Blankenburg a Baltimore poet who sent generations of students from Catonsville High School into the world with more than a bit of Poe in their psyches. “I think children are pretty miserable in general, and Poe confirms for them that their misery is well taken.”
When Blankenburg landed in Baltimore from Illinois in 1963 to take his first teaching job at Sparrows Point High School, the first thing he did — even before unpacking his Volkswagen — was visit Poe’s grave.
“There were winos laying around, and some of the graves were broken into. A troop of Boy Scouts were cleaning up — throwing away empty liquor bottles,” said Blankenburg.
“The wrought iron gate was locked out front. I shook it, and a grotesque, misshapen groundskeeper came out to let me in.”
Ah yes, the good old days, said David Michael Ettlin, a lifelong Baltimorean who encountered all manner of Poe legends in his 40-year career as a local reporter.
“Back when corpses were found in the catacombs, and the burial crypts were open so you could see the stiffs in their more-than-a-century-old Sunday-laying-out bests.”
