I may owe the good people of Cavan an apology for suggesting here last week (Diary, September 19th) that Edgar Allan Poe’s achievement in getting paid twice for one of his most famous short stories was in some way a reflection of his paternal heritage in the Breffni County.
Alas for stereotypes, as I have since learned, the writer’s last Irish-born forebear, his grandfather David Poe Snr, was a conspicuously generous man, at least during one notable episode of his life, which has been well recorded for posterity.
The eldest son of a family that emigrated to Baltimore in 1755, he grew up to be a wheelwright and later to run a dry goods store. He also became an avid republican during the revolutionary wars. And in 1779, he was commissioned as Assistant Deputy-Quartermaster General for the City of Baltimore.
In this role, the Edgar Allan Poe Society notes (summarising in present-tense bullet points): “He spends 40,000 silver dollars of his own money to help provide supplies for the Revolutionary War, money which the Continental Congress neglects to repay.”
Breffni Benefactor – Frank McNally on the revolutionary largesse of Edgar Allan Poe’s Irish ancestor
Goodness and Guinness – Tony Corcoran on pioneering doctor Sir John Lumsden
Coughing up: Alison Healy on the strange and surprising world of online marketplaces
Much Ado About Nothing – Frank McNally on the Shakespearean subtext of a great Anglo-Irish battle that never happened
He died in 1816. But his reputation for patriotic largesse was to be further immortalised 200 years ago next month, when another hero of the revolution, the Marquis de la Fayette, returned from his native France for a triumphant tour of the US, then preparing for the 50th anniversary of its declaration of independence.
Visiting Baltimore in October 1824, La Fayette recalled that David Poe had once sent him “500 dollars” to help clothe and feed his troops. And that for good measure, Poe’s wife had helped make them “with her own hands 500 pairs of pantaloons.”
Among those who welcomed Lafayette back to American was a teenage Edgar Allan Poe. And as noted here last week, that Poe would later sell his most successful story to a Philadelphia magazine for $52, then withdraw it for a competition where it won $100, without refunding the original fee.
In light of his Ulster ancestor’s contribution to the American cause, however, he can hardly now be blamed for holding on to the $52, not even by a jury from Monaghan.
Next month also marks the 175th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s still mysterious death in Baltimore. He was only 40 at the time and it seems that his already fragile constitution was fatally undermined by an alcoholic binge that, on October 3rd, 1849, left him to him being found semiconscious and “in great distress”.
But there was a potential political subtext, via an election held the same day and the 19th-century custom of “cooping”, prevalent on both sides of the Atlantic.
This involved voters being locked up somewhere in advance of a ballot and plied with drink or sometimes beaten before being released to exercise the franchise, often multiply, with costume changes as required.
That, combined with the claim of his doctor (one John Joseph Moran) that Poe had repeatedly called out the name “Reynolds” in his final delirium created the sort of intrigue for which the writer’s own stories were known.
Theories included the possibility that he had been trying to identify the real-life murderer in a case he had fictionalised as the Mystery of Marie Roget. A more prosaic explanation concerned a known election agent called Reynolds.
More prosaic again, and to the disappointment of romantics probably true, is the possibility that Moran had simply misremembered the name he heard. In later versions, he appeared to concede it might have also been “Herring”, one of Poe’s in-laws.
Cavan jokes aside, it’s questionable whether even national stereotypes can be applied to children of the diaspora. One of Poe’s biographers, Arthur Hobson Quinn (1941) agreed, although it didn’t stop him trying.
“Whether the Irish strain in Edgar Poe was responsible for any imaginative quality would be difficult to establish,” Quinn wrote. “The Celtic flame in literature does, however, kindle into a mysticism which concerns itself with those dim regions in which the relations of man and the supernatural are depicted.”
He continued: “One Irish trait – of a more tangible quality – may more certainly be attributed to his Poe ancestry. As any descendant of that race knows, there is a tendency to refuse to conform to what appears to be one’s best interests at the moment in favor of another course which will provide more spiritual, or emotional, satisfaction at a later time.”
As evidence, he pointed to the writer’s father, also David Poe (a son of the emigrant) who not only passed up a career in law to become a struggling actor but was also known occasionally to have “threatened with physical violence the theatrical critics upon whose favor his very livelihood depended.”
Similar perversity dictated much of Edgar Allan Poe’s career, Quinn suggested. For a more general conclusion on the theme, he quoted “another brilliant American of Irish descent”, Philip Barry, who wrote of the type: “You can usually tell them by their eyes, which have a way of looking past the instant day, the immediate objects in it, the present quick concerns of it, and past the night of the day as well. As a rule they are not happy people.”