Free Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living (Icons) by Paul Collins

two words in (“Who’s there ?”) and the arresting officers none, for we are trapped in the first-person present-tense narration of an insane, monumentally self-regarding man who claims he is absolutely sane . . . even as the guilt of his crime begins to blot out his senses.
    It is an unnerving mimicry of madness that resonates in any time or place—any, at least, save Boston in 1842. “The Tell-Tale Heart” was coldly rejected by the editor of Boston Miscellany , who sniffed that he might buy something “if Mr. Poe would condescend to furnish more quiet articles.” This was the bitter fruit of Poe’s reviewing: a year earlier he had publicly dismissed the same editor’s work as “insufferably tedious and dull.” Instead, he sold the piece for the launch of a new magazine, Pioneer . “The Tell-Tale Heart” took pride of place in the magazine’s first issue, but went unpaid, as Pioneer collapsed almost immediately after its publisher, James Russell Lowell, fell ill.
    Poe, uncharacteristically, did not insist on getting paid. “As for the few dollars you owe me . . . I may be poor, but must be very much poorer, indeed, when I even think of demanding them,” he assured Lowell. For in Lowell he could see his own plight: a frightening portent, as Poe struggled to start Penn amid his own wife’s illness. He renamed his effort The Stylus and wrote another prospectus, but what Poe needed now was not another magazine, but the kind of steady life that writing could not give him.
    What he needed, in short, was a desk job. His mind turned to a friend’s letter from the year before.
    “How would you like,” fellow writer Frederick W. Thomas had corresponded from Washington, D.C., “to be an office-holder here at $1,500 per year payable monthly by Uncle Sam who, however slack he may be to his general creditors, pays his officials with due punctuality. How would you like it ? You stroll to your office a little after nine in the morning leisurely, and you stroll from it a little after two in the afternoon homeward to dinner, and return no more that day.”
    Poe liked it very much indeed: a patronage job as a clerk would pay twice what he earned at Graham’s and sounded like an artist’s idyll. Thomas was a friend of President Tyler’s son and might be able to swing Edgar a Customs House job. And so it was on March 8, 1843, that Edgar Allan Poe left Philadelphia with all the nervous hope of an interviewee seeking a new job.
    But when Poe got nervous, he drank.
    The trouble began soon after he arrived at his hotel. Thomas was sick. Even worse, some twelve hundred applications had poured in for jobs at the Customs House. Left largely to his own devices in a strange city, Poe began to unravel.
    “On the first evening he seemed somewhat excited, having been persuaded to take some Port-wine,” wrote one friend. Although Poe stayed sober the next day, he soon began drinking again, woozily wearing his cloak inside-out and insulting Thomas and other potential allies—including, in one case, committing the grave error of making fun of an editor’s moustache. An acquaintance, chancing upon him in the street in Washington, recalled that he was “seedy in appearance and woe-begone. . . . Hesaid he had not had a mouthful to eat since the day previous, and begged me to lend him fifty cents to obtain a meal.”
    Another friend of Poe’s, Jesse Dow, had now seen quite enough.
    “I think it advisable for you to come and safely see him back to his home,” Dow wrote to a publisher in Philadelphia. “Mrs. Poe is in a bad state of health, and I charge you, as you have a soul to be saved, not to say a word to her about him until he arrives with you.”
    Returning home to Philadelphia sick with regret, Poe wrote embarrassed letters of apology—“Don’t say a word about the cloak turned inside out, or other peccadilloes of that nature . . . Forgive my petulance and don’t believe I think all I said.” If he got a