The Circe Spell

by Joe Andriano

120.






18. Eureka!

 
New York—Philadelphia    

January 1848—July 1849
 

Eddy did not touch a drop for several months. Sobriety was the only way he could re-establish himself in the literary world, no easy task as he'd been ostracized from all the salons. He told everyone who would listen that Virginia's long illness was the main cause of his drinking problem.

"I have found a permanent cure," he claimed to Rufus Griswold, "in the death of my wife." He was a new man. For the first time he even grew a mustache, which he waxed and curled up just a bit. He had occasional lapses, but for a while he was admitted back into literary circles, partly out of pity he supposed, and partly because he actually looked and was even acting like a gentleman again when he came into town. He got support from solid backers for the new magazine he was planning, which he hoped to launch in a matter of months. While thus reestablishing himself in the mundane, he wrote his prose poem about the universe, and managed to schedule a lecture at the Society Library on the corner of Broadway and Leonard Street, almost exactly a year after Sissy's death.

Unfortunately it was a stormy night, and no more than sixty people were scattered about the lecture-room. Eddy wore his coat tightly buttoned across his slender chest for the whole two-and-a-half hours, and he spoke in an intense rhapsodic tone he hoped would capture the exertion of the Divine essence created throughout immeasurable space. After explaining that the universe of stars must be a finite system within an infinite universe of space, he continued on, letting the booms of thunder punctuate his sentences, to the systems and clusters of systems astronomers have described—all celestial bodies bound by gravitation, seeking their original unity, to coalesce eventually into a point of light and then burst forth anew, another Universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding again into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart Divine.

He scanned the audience, many of them captivated, some nodding off. A few had already escaped. "And now, this Heart Divine, what is it?" A pregnant pause. "It is our own." Looking for Loui. There she was in the front row, a worried smile on her face.

            There is no Lord, Loui, there is only the soul.  "No thinking being lives who, at some luminous point of his life, has not felt himself lost amid the surges of futile efforts at understanding, or believing, that anything exists greater than his own soul. The utter impossibility of anyone's soul feeling itself inferior to another; the intense, overwhelming dissatisfaction and rebellion at the thought;—these, with the omniprevalent aspirations at perfection, are but the spiritual and material struggles towards the original Unity—are, to my mind at least, a species of proof far surpassing what Man terms ‘demonstration’, that no one soul is inferior to another—that nothing is, or can be, superior to any one soul—that each soul is, in part, its own God—its own Creator:—in a word, that God—the material and spiritual God—now exists solely in the diffused Matter and Spirit of the Universe; and that the regathering of this diffused Matter and Spirit will be but the re‑constitution of the purely Spiritual and Individual God."




121.

Seeing Loui cover her face with her hands, he continued undaunted. "In this view, and in this view alone, we comprehend the riddles of Divine Injustice—of Inexorable Fate. In this view alone the existence of Evil becomes intelligible; but in this view it becomes more—it becomes endurable. Our souls no longer rebel at a Sorrow which we have imposed upon ourselves. Mourning for the departed? Bear in mind that all is Life—Life within Life—and all within the Spirit Divine."

Most of the applause was merely polite. Loui’s hands were now in her lap.

 

Although many reviews of the lecture were enthusiastic, several saw it as ludicrous, hyperbolic nonsense, "arrant fudge," absurdly inappropriate for a popular lecture meant to raise funds for Poe's new magazine. A friend of Loui's, a student of theology who had attended the lecture with her, felt that "Mr. Poe’s pantheist heresy" was poison and strongly urged that she distance herself from "the hopeless infidel." Whether it was the financial failure of the lecture or the imp's inevitable return, Eddy started drinking again. This was the last time Loui would help him recover from a binge. When she came to the cottage, she was very formal, addressing him as Edgar. Worse yet, the divinity student accompanied her, smiling and bowing at the lunatic Poe.

Loui's farewell letter, a week later, cut him to the quick, even though he had known since Christmas that she could never be his love. He felt abandoned once again. Writing back, he expressed regret that his so-called heresies had offended her, for she would always be what Sissy had first called her, an angel—to his forlorn and darkened nature. He wallowed again in self-pity: "your loyal unselfish womanly heart will now vanish from my door like all those I have loved or desired. . . . Unless some true and tender and pure womanly love saves me, I shall hardly last a year longer, alone."

But she had become his conscience, he could still hear her voice urging him on to succeed. He quickly prepared the manuscript of his lecture, called it Eureka, and took it to George Putnam's office on Broadway. When Putnam’s secretary informed him that the Raven had come rapping at his door, Eddy cringed, but he did get an immediate interview. Fame but not Fortune, as always. Eureka will change all that. He carefully placed the manuscript on Putnam's huge desk.

"It is a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Poe." He gestured toward the chair in front of his desk. "Please sit down. What have we here? Another 'Gold Bug,' I hope. That was a brilliant article indeed."

"Hackwork compared to this, sir. This is my magnum opus." Eddy was too excited and nervous to sit down. "My theory, my vision of the universe. Newton's gravitation is a mere incident compared to this." He was pacing in zigzags in front of Putnam’s desk.  It puts positive science back on track, instilling it once again with imagination, the kind of imagination Kepler had when he intuited his laws and wrote his mystical visions. You heard about my lecture?"

"I heard the rain kept many away. Reviews were mixed."

Eddy stood still now, steadying himself by grabbing an arm of the offered chair. "Ever the fate of the text ahead of its time."

Thumbing through the manuscript, Putnam nodded. "I am willing to give it a go, Mr. Poe."

"An edition of fifty thousand copies might be sufficient to begin with."

Putnam laughed. "Let's try five hundred."

"Can you give me an advance?"

Putnam got up and handed him fourteen dollars.

Reviews and sales were disappointing. Nobody cares about the throbbing universe. Give us the Tell-Tale Heart! 




122.

The heart beats ten and intermits. Unless some true and tender and pure womanly love saves me, I shall hardly last a year longer, alone.

In 1848 Edgar Poe courted three different women, two of them simultaneously—Annie Richmond of Lowell and Sarah Helen Whitman of Providence. Then the last who had been the first, Elmira Royster Shelton of Richmond. Annie was uncomplicated and sisterly like Virginia; Helen was sophisticated and sensual like Fanny Osgood.  Eddy had courted Elmira as a young man, until her highborn kinsmen intervened. To all three ladies he professed his undying love. All, in different ways, loved him back, but he knew that deep down they all suspected he was hopeless, liable to lapse at any time, driven toward drink as though perversely seeking an early grave. He had to convince them—and himself—otherwise.  Since Annie was happily married, she wasn't about to leave her husband for the likes of him. Helen and Elmira were both longtime widows, fairly well-off. Surely he would be better off, he thought, with southern belle Elmira rather than Yankee bluestocking Helen. But Helen was just a quick train-ride away, so he decided to propose to her first. Elmira was too far away, in both space and time. Courting his childhood sweetheart in Richmond would be like traveling backward in time. Can’t do that, must forge ahead, he thought.

Helen was a respectable poet who had actually made the first move, publishing a Valentine poem addressed to him last year, after which they started corresponding. Her beauty was as fragile as Virginia's, but womanly rather than girly. Like Sissy (and, for that matter, Eddy) Helen was chronically ill—with a weak heart, for which she habitually sniffed ether, its sweet aroma merging with the perfume she used in vain attempts to conceal it. She was steeped in mysticism, magnetism, spiritualism—and looked the part, with her dark brown hair in abundant curly tresses, her colorful shawls, black lace veils, flowing scarves. So desperate was Eddy that he told her, in a long letter, what he thought she wanted to hear: With you I’ve felt for the first time in my life the existence of spiritual influences altogether out of the reach of reason. My Helen of a thousand dreams, whose visionary lips have so often lingered upon my own in the divine trance of passion.

So desperate was he that when she hinted that her heart was too fragile for physical love, he assured her that he would cast away all merely human desire and clothe them both in the glory of a pure, calm and unexacting affection. He actually began denying that he had ever truly loved Virginia, except in a brotherly way, selflessly agreeing to become her husband so that he could take care of her and her mother. He even claimed that their marriage had never been consummated. A total fabrication.  "Helen, I love now—now—for the first and only time."

Shortly after that declaration made in Rhode Island, he courted Annie in Massachusetts. In her he found the perfection of natural grace. Nothing artificial in her. And in the spritely gray of her deep-set eyes such enthusiasm for life it was infectious.

 "My darling, my Annie, my own sweet sister Annie, my pure beautiful angel—wife of my soul, I love you madly. Can you bear to think I might be another's? Please tell me you cannot bear it."

Annie didn’t take his romantic effusions seriously. "I am always your friend, Eddy."

His attempts to win Annie away from her husband, who actually liked Eddy and knew him as no threat, alternated with his attempts to win Helen away from her controlling mother, Mrs. Power, who disliked and distrusted Mr. Poe, whose scandalous reputation always preceded him, and who clearly wanted to fund his projected literary magazine with Helen's inheritance.

            He wasn't really torn between Annie and Helen, and he knew that he couldn't have them both, especially not in the idealist version of the wife/mistress arrangement he envisioned.  It hadn't worked with Sissy and Fanny, and it was less likely to work now that he was even more of a physical wreck. He just figured that if he ardently pursued both women, one of them would come around, ultimately won over, compelled by his charisma. He was wracked, however, with guilt—not for the underhanded simultaneous courtship but for the inexcusable betrayal of Sissy. A new low. To say that I never loved her.




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Helen turned him down at first, because she believed his enemies.  He was visiting Providence, expecting an acceptance, since she had never said anything but admiring and affectionate words to him. They sat on the porch on the side of her mother’s mansion on Benefit Street. After about five minutes of small talk and hedging, Helen got to the point. "I have heard men and even women say of you that while you have great intellectual power, you have no moral sense. Several people whom I respect. How can I marry a man with no moral sense?"

"No moral sense!" Eddy was instantly livid, but since he was also sober, he maintained decorum. "My whole life I've been plagued by guilt, tormented by my conscience relentlessly reminding me that my misery is at least half self-inflicted. I am not one of my narrators, Helen. I am not William Wilson, who killed his own conscience. I can assure you, mine is alive and well."

"But isn't he an alter-ego, Edgar?"

"It was a tale, Helen.  Who told you I have no morals? Elizabeth Ellet? A vindictive little—" He wisely shut up.

"More than one person, Edgar. That is my concern."

"How can you believe all that gossip?" He couldn't help it now, he let it fly. "I guess if you believe all that other drivel—spirit-rapping and mesmerism—you'll believe anything."

"That's another problem. You hold in contempt everything and everyone I believe in."

"Bluestockings and transcendentalists?"

"And abolitionists. You support slavery, don't you, Edgar? How moral is that?"

Make it a metaphor. "We're all slaves, Helen. I to the bottle—I admit that—it's in my blood, my father had the same problem. But don't believe everything you read about me, I beg of you."

"My mother thinks you are after my fortune. That you need it for your magazine."

That accusation was the final blow. It made him speechless for a moment, after which he shook his head, and spoke in a civil, steely tone. "That so many persons have declared to you that I am wanting in honor, forbids me to insult you with my love."

"I do love you, Edgar, don't talk like that. I love your genius, your poetry. But I don't think we should get married." She put her hand to her heart, which he thought might renew his hope. "I have palpitations. You should leave now, Edgar. Farewell."

It didn't take him long, however, to write to her again and profess his eternal love. A love not of the consuming fires of Eros but of the calming waters of devotion, which he knew could cure the ailments of her heart and his head. But if the cure failed, he wrote, then at least would I clasp your dear hand in death, and willingly—joyfully, joyfully go down with you into the Night of the Grave. Be mine, mine only, if not now, then at least hereafter and forever, in the Heavens.

On his way to Lowell to give a lecture on American poets, he stopped in Providence to continue groveling and begging Helen in person. Agreeing to see him again on her porch, she softened a bit when he showed her a page or two of his lecture, in which he favorably compared her poetry to Fanny Osgood's.

"Can I get a copy of this?" she asked, touching his forearm.

            He tore out a leaf and handed it to her. "A peace offering," he said. "Please, Helen, give me another chance. Ask all my friends—Willis, Griswold, Thomas, Sartain, Snodgrass, Fanny too, and Annie, all of them will insist that I am a man of honor, with a high moral sense."




124.

Whether or not it was merely to get him to leave, since her mother was hovering in the parlor inside with eyes glaring, she whispered to him, "Very well, Edgar. I will think about it."

"I'll be in Lowell. Send your letter to the post office there."

He visited Annie, of course, and confided that he had proposed to Helen. She was happy for him.

"So you can bear to think I might be another's," he said.

She smiled. "Of course, Edgar. I am devoted to my family, you know that. You and Helen are soul mates, I can tell from your poems to each other."

"She already turned me down once. She's been listening to my enemies. But now she's reconsidering. She may contact you, I told her you are my friend."

"You know I will vouch for you."

"I need you to do more than that, Annie. I feel myself slipping again. Promise me you will come to me when I am on my deathbed."

"Don't be morbid, Edgar. There is much to live for. You still have so much to give. Your poetry lecture was marvelous."

"I've already written my masterpiece. After Eureka, there is nothing more to write. Your fair angelic face, my dear sweet Annie, let it be the last thing I ever see. Promise me."

"Very well, if it will make you feel better. I promise I will try, if it is humanly possible, to be there—on that distant future day." She smiled.

The brief letter he got from Helen was no help. She wrote that she still needed more time, that she would give him an answer when he came again to visit. They settled on the first Saturday in November. On that cold clear day he boarded the train to Providence. Soon after sitting he nodded out for only a moment, and felt the hooded phantom in the empty seat beside him. Eddy could see his beaklike nose jutting out from his monkish cowl. He was petting something on his lap.

She can sense that you're on the edge. Your love/death date with Annie, she can smell it! He placed the black cat on Eddy's lap. Stroking her long thick fur, her cold ears and her scarred nose, he knew the purring cat could only be Circe. What are you, he asked, angel or demon? Once again, I am not sure.

           Neither, said the phantom monk. Eddy woke up. Nothing was on his lap, and the seat next to him was empty. When he got to the Providence station, he started walking rapidly in the cold, crisp air. After only a few steps he thought he saw the cat out of the corner of his eye by the railroad track. He decided he needed a drink to settle his nerves before visiting Helen, so he checked in to his hotel room, unpacked a flask from his valise and took a few swigs of port. Then another, and another, missing his appointment with Helen.

         He was not exactly sure when he first became aware of a tremulous muffled sound, was it in the wall? No, under the bed. He took another swig before he looked, and there she was, purring. He reached in, grabbed her by the scruff. I am awake, and not that drunk. "I have no idea how you did it, but you found me once again. You have come back! But you are not welcome. I don't care what he says. You are a demon, leading me to perdition. I know it." He tossed her in the corner, where she landed on all fours and scurried again under the bed. He polished off the port and spent a long, hideous night in agony over Helen's indecision, terror over the thing under the bed, and despair over Annie's inevitable abandonment. By morning his head was splitting. After checking out, he tried to ease the pain with a long walk, but when he looked over his shoulder he saw Circe following him at a safe distance. The demon torments me still. The poor student in my poem had his raven, the Raven now has his Black Cat. He found an apothecary and bought two ounces of laudanum, for the pain.




125.

Back on the street, he spotted her again, still pursuing. Panicking now, he started running in the general direction of the train station, then boarded an omnibus, from which he saw her sitting on the sidewalk watching, her fluffy black tail curled. "What a beauty!" said a stranger on the bus, looking in Circe's direction. Eddy found he could not speak. She can't be real. He's talking about something else. I don't want to know.

Knowing that he couldn't face Helen in his present state he got off at the station and took the train to Boston. When he arrived, he found a room in a tavern, where he wrote to Annie, telling her where he was staying. I will not propose to Helen again. What was I thinking? I love you to distraction, Annie, to madness even. I called you sweet sister but that was a pose. I love you as a man loves a woman. Helen I love only as a poet loves a poet. I cannot bear to live without you. Which means I cannot bear to live. I am in the city where I was born, where my mother found her best and most sympathetic friends. Be that to me, my love, since you cannot be more. Remember your promise.

           He sealed the letter and swallowed half the laudanum. The ounce was at least twenty times the medicinal dosage, but not enough, he thought, to be fatal. He hurried to the post office, thinking he could make it there and back before the opiate took effect.  I'll take the other half as soon as Annie arrives to keep her promise. His calculations were off. By the time he got to the post office he was so far gone he forgot why he was there, then he forgot where he was. Staggering out the door, he saw the phantom just ahead of him, beckoning with his arm. "You better get back to the hotel before you make a scene. This way."

He followed. "You are my friend, aren't you?"

"Look behind you." Among the city throng winding her way between passersby, Circe continued her relentless pursuit. Eddy started to run and began retching as he ran. The phantom ran with him. "She is your friend, she means you no harm, don't you understand? She was supposed to make you remember. To trigger the memory of who you were in past lives."

"Poe. Is that you?" A familiar voice and face but he could not place him. Long dark hair and short beard. "What are you doing in Boston? Giving a lecture? Not in that condition. Let me help you, my man."

The phantom vanished. "Do you see a black cat there?" Eddy asked the man he couldn’t place. But Circe had already darted off.

"Where are you staying? Let me get you out of the street at least." His arm now firmly supporting Eddy’s back. All the way to the tavern Eddy kept trying to place the familiar face, but he couldn’t.

"You don’t remember me, do you? James Lowell? I published ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’."

"Of course I remember. In The Pioneer. It went under, though, didn’t it?"

"As do most magazines of any quality these days. Mamby pamby puerile love stories, that’s all that sells."

           "I mourned the journal’s demise, Mr. Lowell." They arrived at the tavern and shook hands. "Good taste will be resurrected in The Stylus, my new magazine. Send me a poem."

            "I will indeed. Take care of yourself, Mr. Poe."


 When Annie came she brought her husband. Together in the next few days they nursed Eddy back to some semblance of health and sanity, and urged him to go on to Providence, then get back to Fordham, where Muddy must be frantic with worry. Early on Tuesday morning he called on Helen, but only got as far as her mother. "I am sorry, Mr. Poe, she is quite unable to see you, having passed several restless nights after your failure to see her on Saturday."

       "I am so sorry, Mrs. Power, but I was ill, very ill."

  "I will ask her when she can see you." She closed the front door behind her. Returning after a minute, she said, "She will meet you at noon, at the Athenaeum."

"She wants to talk in the library?"

"Perhaps she feels there will be no histrionics there."

So he met her at the Athenaeum, which was only a few blocks from Helen's house on Benefit Street. The building, with its Greek Revival columns, looked like a small temple, a temple of learning set behind several young elms, all almost skeletally bare. Helen and Eddy found a quiet corner and sat at a small table.




126.

Eddy launched right into his apology. "I am sorry, Helen, but your terse note upset me, so vague and elusive, and I felt a little sick anyway, so when I arrived in Providence Saturday I found a druggist and took a bit too much laudanum, which made me even sicker. So I went back to Boston to convalesce, and came as soon as I felt up to it."

"I am still undecided, Edgar."

"Please, I'm begging you, you must marry me at once! You're my only hope. And I am yours. Together we can heal each other."

But she had received more reports of his binges and sprees in Philadelphia and New York, even Richmond. Rather than endure listening to the calumny, he walked out of the library and went straight to the barroom of his hotel, from which he sent her a note of renunciation and farewell. A friend of Helen's, a Mr. Peabody, was there eating dinner, he helped Eddy up to his room. "Be sure to shoo away," Eddy drunkenly exhorted the bartender, waving his free hand in the air, "any black cat you might see."

When Eddy awoke the next morning, Circe's pretty face was the first thing he saw, as she had snuggled between his head and shoulder. He threw off the covers, the cat tangled within them, threw on his clothes and ran out. In this state of wild and delirious agitation he arrived at Helen's mother's house. It's hers, not Helen's. Mrs. Power has all the power. Which is exactly what he said to the imperious lady when she appeared at the door. He pushed past her, entering the front porch uninvited. "Only Helen has the power to save me. Please let me see her at once. She didn't get my note, did she? Helen!" he shouted, his voice ringing through the house.

"Mr. Poe, you must calm down if you expect her to see you. Please, sit down. I will bring some strong coffee, it should counter the effects of whatever spirits you . . . smell of."

"The phantom said that Circe can smell the soul."

"I will be right back." A glare of utter disdain before she turned to go.

 After almost two hours and several cups of coffee, Eddy finally got to see Helen. The three of them stood on the porch, Mrs. Power guarding her daughter by putting an arm around her.

"My angel, sent to save me from perdition." Eddy clung to Helen so frantically he tore away a piece of muslin from her dress.

"Mr. Poe!" cried Helen’s mother. "Control yourself, please." She turned to her daughter. "The doctor will be here shortly."

"I don't need a doctor," Eddy assured her. To Helen, who was trying to smooth out her dress: "Only you can save me from impending doom. The demon is following me!"

"You most certainly do need a doctor, Mr. Poe," said Mrs. Power. "Have you looked at yourself lately in the glass? Your left eye is drooping, your lower lip as well." His face was puffy, too, and his mustache (no longer turned up) was uneven, having been trimmed by his own shaking hand.

The doctor found symptoms of cerebral congestion, probably the result of a lesion, and certainly exacerbated by drink. He advised that Eddy stay for a few days at Bill Peabody's house. Perhaps because there were several cats around, Circe did not appear. When he was presentable again, Eddy returned to Benefit Street, and after a solemn promise that he would never drink again, Helen, against her better judgment and her mother's wishes, agreed to a conditional engagement. If he would swear "never again to taste wine," she assured him she could get her mother's consent. In the meantime, he needed to return to Fordham. He took a steamer from Providence to New York, then a train, taking almost ten hours to arrive at the cottage, into his aunt’s welcoming arms.




127.

"You never wrote me once," said Muddy, "not from Lowell, not from Providence. I thought something dreadful had happened."

"I was very ill again, Muddy. I am well now."

"You look terrible! I hardly know you. Eddy, that bluestocking is no good for you. If only Annie weren't married!"

"You like Annie, I know you do." And so he wrote to her again while engaged to Helen: I would die for you, Annie, and would gladly die with you, I love you as no man ever loved woman. How can I marry another? I will die if I persist on this course. But how can I retract with honor? He knew, of course, how he could prevent the marriage dishonorably—by drinking again. But that was no way to convince Annie to be the angel he needed to keep the demon at bay. His letters amounted, he knew, to the same old song of love and death he always seemed to sing. Was he, despite all his denials, still longing so much for Sissy that he thought to bring her back to life by turning Annie into her? He knew this even as he wrote to her his ideal: to live with Muddy in a little cottage near Lowell, so that Annie could come every day, so often she would not be a visitor. Her husband Charles would understand, of course.

Then the pendulum swung back and he came to his senses, realizing Helen was his only hope. In letters he assured her he was being strong, fixed in his resolve to avoid the bottle, since it had been the source of so much agony—an agony so fierce it had burned away from his soul all that was weak. He told her she would so inspire him that The Stylus would finally come into being, indeed it would be their child. In this vision, Helen would be co-editor, and the marriage would be of her New England mind and his Southern soul—which could only be good for such a divided nation. True, Helen and Edgar were seriously divided themselves ideologically, but the Stylus would not be a political magazine. It would contain only literature of the highest order, no genteel embellishments, no poetasters, no hacks.

Along with abstinence from alcohol, the absence of Circe was also keeping him sane. She would not appear at the cottage, he was convinced, because Catterina was its queen. If Kate were to leave, she would come back. But Kate loves me too much to leave. She loves Muddy too, but the cat is all over me half the time, even on my shoulders when I write, like Circe used to do. But Kate lacks Circe’s power. I swear the black cat was enabling me somehow, infusing my soul. A spirit not a demon, not a demon . . . never a demon.