The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe-1
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Imagine Poe in the Republic! when he possesses none of its virtues; no Spartan, he. Each time he tilts the jug to greet the austere m, his sober friends relutly cur: "No man is safe who drinks before breakfast." Where is the black star of melancholy? Elsewhere; not here. Here it is always m; stern, democratic light scrubs apparitions off the streets down which his dangerous feet must go.Perhaps. . . perhaps the black star of melancholy was hiding in the dark at the bottom of the jug all the time. . . it might be the whole thing is a little secret between the jug and himself. . .
He turns back to go and look; and the pitiless light of on day hits him full in the face like a blow from the eye of God. Struck, he reels. Where he hide, where there are no shadows? They split the Republi two, they halved the apple of knowledge, white light strikes the top half and leaves the rest in shadow; up here, up north, in the levelling latitudes, a man must make his own penumbra if he wants cealment because the massive, heroic light of the Republic admits of no ambiguities. Either you are a saint; or a stranger. He is a stranger, here, a gentleman up from Virginia somewhat down on his luck, and, alas, he may not ihe Prince of Darkness (always a perfect gentleman) in his cause since, of the absolute night which is the antithesis to these days of rectitude, there is no aristocracy.
Poe staggers uhe weight of the Declaration of Independence. People think he is drunk.
He is drunk.
The prin exile lurches through the new-found land.
So you say he overacts? Very well; he overacts. There is a past history of histrioni his family. His mother was, as they say, born in a trunk, grease-paint in her bloodstream, and made her first appearan any stage in her ninth summer in a hiss-the-villain melodrama entitled Mysteries of the Castle. On she skipped to sing a ballad clad in the pretty rags of a ballet gypsy.
It was the evening of the eighteenth tury.
At this hour, this very hour, far away in Paris, France, in the appalling dungeons of the Bastille, old Sade is jerking off. Grunt, groan, grunt, onto the prison floor. . . aaaagh! He seeds dragoh. Out of each ejaculation spring up a swarm of fully-armed, mad-eyed homunculi. Everything is about to succumb to delirium.
Heedless of all this, Poes future mother skipped on to a stage in the fresh-hatched Ameri republic to sing an old-world ballad clad in the pretty rags of a ballet gypsy. Her dancers grace, piping treble, dark curls, rosy cheeks -- cute kid! And eyes with something i, something appealing ihat struck directly to the heart so that the smoky auditorium broke out in raucous seal cheers for her and clapped its leather palms together with a will. A star was born that night in the rude firmament of fit-ups and dle-footlights, but she was to be a shooting star; she flickered briefly in the void, she tihe iable trajectory of the meteor, downward. She hit the boards and trod them.
But, well after puberty, she was still able, thanks to her low stature and slim build, to tio personate children, clever little ducks and prattlers of both sexes. Yet she was versatility personified; she could do you Ophelia, too.
She had a low, melodious voice of singular sweetness, an excellent thing in a woman. When crazed Ophelia handed round the rosemary and rue and sang: "He is dead and gone, lady," not a dry eye in the house, I assure you. She also tried her hand at Juliet and Cordelia and, if necessary, could persohe merriest soubrette; even when racked by the nauseas of her pregnancies, still she would smile, would smile and oh! the dazzling dour of her teeth!
Out popped her firstborn, Henry; her sed, Edgar, came jostling after to share her kh her scripts and suckle at her bosom while she learned her lines, yet she was always word-perfect even when she played two parts in the one night, Ophelia or Juliet and then, say, Little Pickle, the cute kid ierpiece, for the audiences of those days refused to leave the theatre after a tragedy uhe players ged es and came back to give them a little somethira to cheer them up again.
Little Pickle was a trousers role. She ran back to the green-room and undid the top buttons of her waistcoat to let out a sore, milky breast to pacify little Edgar who, wakened by the hoots and catcalls that had greeted her too voluptuous imitation of a boy, likewise howled and screamed.
A mug of porter or a bottle of whisky stood on the dressing-table all the time. She dipped a plug of cotton in whisky and gave it to Edgar to suck when he would not st.
The father of her children was a bad actor and only ever carried a spear in the many panies in which she wor<q>?</q>ked. He often stayed behind in the green-room to look after the little ones. David Poe tipped a tumbler of gin to Edgars lips to keep him quiet. The red-eyed Angel of Intemperance hopped out of the bottle of ardent spirits and snuggled down in little Edgars longclothes. Meanwhile, on stage, her final child, in utero, stitched its flesh and boogether as best it could uhe corset that preserved the theatrical illusion of Mrs Elizabeth Poes eighteen-inch waist until the eleventh hour, the tenth month.
Applause rocked round the wooden O. Loving mother that she was -- for we have no reason to believe that she was not -- Mrs Poe exited the painted se to cram her jewels on her knee while tired tears ran rivers through her rouge and splashed upon their peaky faces. The monotonous clamour of their parents argumehem at last to sleep but the unborn one in the womb pressed its transparent hands over its vestigial ears in terror.
(To be born at all might be the worst thing.)
However, born at last this last child was, one July afternoon in a cheap theatrical b-house in New York City after many hours on a rented bed while flies buzzed at the windowpanes. Edgar and Henry, on a pallet on the floor, held hands. The midwife had to use a pair of blunt iron tongs to scoop out the relut wee thing; the sheet was tented up over Mrs Poes lower half for modesty so the toddlers saw nothing except the midwife brandishing her dreadful instrument and then they heard the shrill cry of the new-born in the exhausted silence, like the sound of the blade of a skate on ice, and something bloody as a fresh-pulled tooth twitched between the midwifes pincers.
It was a girl.
David Poe spent his wifes fi in a nearby tavering the babys head. When he came bad saw the mess he vomited.
Then, before his sons bewildered eyes, their father began to grow insubstantial. He unbecame. All at once he lost his outlines and began to waver on the air. It was twilit evening. Mama slept on<big></big> the bed with a fresh mauve bud of flesh in a basket on the chair beside her. The air shuddered with the beginning of absence.
He said not one word to his boys but went on evaporating until he melted away, leaving behind him in the room as proof he had been there only a puddle of puke on the splintered floorboards.
As soon as the deserted wife got out of bed, she posted down tinia with her howling brats because she was booked for a tour of the South and she had no money put away so all the babies got to eat was her sweat. She dragged them with her in a trunk to Charleston; to Norfolk; then back to Rid.
Down there, it is the foetid height of summer.
Stripped to her chemise in the airless dressing-room, she milks her sore breast into a glass; this latest baby must be weaned before its mother dies.
She coughed. She slapped more, yet me on her now haggard cheekbones. "My children! what will bee of my c?９９lｉｂ?hildren?" Her eyes glittered and soon acquired a febrile brilliahat was not of this world. Soon she needed ne at all; red spots brighter than rouge appeared of their own accord on her cheeks while veins as blue as those in Stilton cheese but muscular, palpitating, promi, lithe, stood out of her forehead. In Little Pickles vest and breeches it was not now possible for her to create the least suspension of disbelief and something desperate, something fatal in her distracted playing both fasated and appalled the witnesses, who could have thought they saw the liviures of death itself upon her face. Her mirror, the actresss friend, the magic mirror in which she sees whom she has bee, no longer aowledged any but a deaths head.
The moist, sullen, Southern winter signed her quietus. She put on Ophelias madwomans nightgown for her farewell.
When she summoned him, the spectral horseman came. Edgar looked out of the window and saw him. The soundless hooves of black-plumed horses struck sparks from the stones in the road outside. "Father!" said Edgar; he thought their father must have restituted himself at this last extremity in order to transport them all to a better place but, when he looked more closely, by the light of a gibbous moon, he saw the sockets of <q>99liｂ.</q>the ans eyes were full of worms.
They told her children that now she could e back to take no curtain-calls no matter how fiercely all applauded the manner of her going. Lovers of the theatre plied her hearse with bouquets: "And from her pure and uncorrupted flesh May violets spring." (Not a dry eye in the house.) The three orphaned infants were dispersed into the bosoms of charitable protectors. Each gave the clay-cold cheek a final kiss; theoo kissed and parted, Edgar from Henry, Henry from the tiny one who did not move or cry but lay still a her eyes tight shut. When shall these three meet again? The church bell tolled: never never never never never.
Kind Mr Allan of Virginia, Edgars own particular beor, who would buy his bread, henceforward, took his charges little hand and led him from the funeral. Edgar parted his name in the middle to make room for Mr Allan i. Edgar was then three years old. Mr Allan ushered him into Southern affluence, down there; but do not think his mother left Edgar empty handed, although the dead actress was able to leave him only what could not be taken away from him, to wit, a few tattered memories.
TESTAMENT OF MRS ELIZABETH POE
Item: nourishment. A tit sucked in a green-room, the dug snatched away from the toothless lips as soon as her cue came, so that, of nourishment, he would retain only the memory of hunger and thirst endlessly unsatisified.
Item: transformation. This is a more ambivalent reliething like this. . . Edgar would lie in prop-baskets on heaps of artificial finery and watch her while she painted her face. The dles made a profaar of the mirror in which her vague face swam like a magic fish. If you caught hold of it, it would make your dreams e true but Mama slithered through all the s which desire set out to catch her.
She stuck glass jewels in her ears, pinned back her nut-brown hair and tied a muslin bandage round her head, looking like a corpse for a mihen ohe yellow wig. Now you see her, now you dont; bruurns blonde in the wink of an eye.
Mama turns round to show how she has ged into the lovely lady he glimpsed in the mirror.
"Dont touch me, youll mess me."
And vanishes in a susurration of taffeta.
Item: that women possess within them a cry, a thing that o be extracted. . . but this is only the dimmest of memories and will reassert itself in vague shapes of uionable dread only at the prospect of al e.
Item: the awareness of mortality. For, as soon as her last child was born, if not before, she started to rehearse in private the long part of dying; once she began to cough she had no option.
Item: a face, the perfect face of a tragic actor, his face, white skin stretched tight over fine, white bones in a final state of wonderfully lucid emaciation.
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