Edgar Allan Poe: Love, Death and Women directed by Louise Lockwood

As the BBC4 documentary film Edgar Allan Poe: Love, Death, and Women begins, presenter and Scottish novelist Denise Mina hails Poe as "one of the world's greatest crime and horror authors," adding that "Poe's gruesome and tormented stories reflect an equally tormented life," instantly alleging his stories are autobiographical. Mina says she is "fascinated by Poe and how his private life fed into his work" especially with regard to "his tormented relationships with four key women. . . . As if cursed, Poe was rejected or bereaved by all of them." She continues to assert that in his entire literary career he was "striving to keep these women alive."

After this dubious comment, the film launches into a montage of black-and-white scenes, including a woman rising from the dead as a male voice begins to narrate: "In the excitement of my opium dreams, I would call aloud upon her name during the silence of the night, or upon the sheltered recesses of the glens by day, as if through the wild eagerness, the solemn, the passion consuming ardor for my longing of the departed, I could restore her to the pathway she had abandoned. Could it be forever upon the earth?" This passage is an excerpt from Poe's 1838 story "Ligeia," but with no title to accompany it, it appears as if Poe is speaking about himself, admitting to (as Mina has already alleged) an obsession with bringing dead women back to life as well as using opium, portraying Poe the man via the dialogue of the narrators from one of his fictional stories. It will be the premise of the entire film, as we will come to learn, and Mina begins Poe's story "in the final days before his bizarre death."

The circumstances surrounding Poe's death have been exhaustively investigated in Poe studies, with no evidence ever discovered to explain what exactly occurred; however, Mina is shown sitting inside the bar she claims Poe was last seen alive in, interviewing its proprietor, Vickey Mathaias. It's here in "The Horse You Came In On Saloon" in Baltimore (afforded a publicity shot of its exterior) that Mina says Poe went on "his last drinking binge." But Mathaias claims Poe went there to do more than just drink: "It was an opium and heroin bar," she says. "They did do drugs here." Mina asks Mathaias if she would have drunk in the bar "back then," and Mathaias replies, "I probably would have had to be a prostitute," and proceeds to laugh.

One thing we do know about the night of October 3, 1849, is that Poe was found "extremely ill at Cornelius Ryan's '4th Ward polls' at Gunner's Hall, 44 East Lombard Street,"¹ and taken to hospital. "The Horse You Came In On Saloon" is located on Thames Street, a mile and a half away from where Poe was found. Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum in Baltimore for thirty-three years, claims "there's no proof that Poe ever set foot in that tavern,"² and in a 2010 review of the book Too Much Moran: Respecting the Death of Edgar Poe by Michael A. Powell, Secretary of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, Jeffrey Savoye, elucidated, "The more I study and read about the events of September-October 1849, the more I come to see the wisdom of something Al Rose often remarked to me—that attempting to sort out the misinformation and to detect the pure cause of Poe's death and the time-line leading up to it is a fool's game, in part because there is no way to be sure if you should happen to stumble across the right answer."³ Mina concludes that Poe "died from congestion of the brain, a common euphemism for alcohol abuse. The actual cause of his death was never confirmed," but it hardly matters. Due to Mina and Mathaias's speculations, the audience is led to believe that Poe drank himself to death while high on opium, heroin, or both, probably in the company of prostitutes.

Incidentally, Mina failed to report the testimony of the doctor that treated Poe upon his arrival at the hospital who denied Poe was drunk: "He was immediately placed in a private room, carefully undressed and critically examined. I had not then any knowledge of his previous condition or what were his habits. There was no smell of liquor upon his person or breath. There was no delirium or tremor."⁴ Following Mina's biased reporting of Poe's death, another male voice-over immediately follows, once more unaccompanied by a title: "Thank heaven the danger, the crisis has passed, and the lingering illness is over at last, and the fever called living is conquered at last. The sickness the nausea the pitiless pain, have ceased with the fever that maddened my brain. With the fever called living that burned in my brain." These are stanzas 1 and 5 of Poe's poem "To Annie," narrated out of sequence by the "voice of Poe" to suggest that Poe brought on his own death. This is evident when Mina then asks, "What could have happened in his life to make death so welcome?" Mina's answer lies in looking back at Poe's "tragic" life and "exhuming his most significant relationships."

After being disinherited by his foster father John Allan, Mina says Poe moved in with relatives in Baltimore in 1831, where he became "particularly attached to his young cousin, Virginia Clemm." Nineteen-year-old English actress Lucille Sharp appears on-screen portraying Virginia, who was just nine years old at this time. However, it is an adult Virginia we see playing with a doll, an image concocted to support Mina's theory Virginia was Poe's "virginal maiden." Another narration by the male voice ensues, this time accompanied by its title, "Berenice," which includes the lines: "We grew up together, yet differently we grew. I, ill of health and buried in gloom . . . She roaming carelessly through life with no thought of the shadows in her path."

These lines from "Berenice" help bolster Mina's theory that the story is about Virginia and that Poe was depressed. That the woman mentioned in the story lived life without the thought of "the shadows in her path" alludes to Virginia's illness that led to her death in 1847, but Virginia did not become afflicted with tuberculosis until 1842 and "Berenice" was published in 1835, the year of its publication having been conveniently omitted. Then Mina declares, "'Berenice' was "Poe's first short story . . . a surreal tale of love, death, and madness about a man's obsession with his cousin," but "Berenice" was not Poe's first story at all. In fact, Poe had five short stories published in 1832, and it is well-known that Poe won a short story competition for "M.S. Found in a Bottle," which was published, along with his name, on the front page of Baltimore's Saturday Morning Visiter on October 19, 1833.

Mina goes on to report that the publication of "The Raven" (1845) brought Poe fame and a slew of swooning female admirers, the most influential being poet Frances Osgood. Mina alleges that Poe fell desperately in love with Osgood while he was married to Virginia, but Osgood rejected him, thus becoming Poe's "unobtainable icon." This segment of the documentary indicates a strong attempt to portray Poe as an adulterer.

First, Mina spends a considerable amount of time hypothesizing that Poe fathered Osgood's child (a slanderous allegation made by the poet Elizabeth Ellet, whose advances Poe had spurned) when there is insufficient evidence to establish any truth to the speculations of a Poe-Osgood affair. Second, Mina fails to mention that Osgood's husband demanded an apology from Ellet for her spiteful allegation. Finally, the documentary misleads the audience into believing that Poe's feelings upon meeting Osgood mirrored her own romantic ones: first with an excerpt narrated by "the voice of Poe" from "Morella" (a story published in 1835, ten years before Poe had even met Osgood), and by presenting the excerpt out of context.

To demonstrate the deliberate distortion of Poe's work and the fabrication of his personal feelings, below are the opening passages of "Morella." The lines in italics represent those narrated in the documentary alongside footage of the female actor portraying Osgood:

With a feeling of deep yet most singular affection I regarded my friend Morella. Thrown by accident into her society many years ago, my soul, from our first meeting, burned with fires it had never known. But the fires were not of Eros—and bitter and tormenting to my eager spirit was the gradual conviction that I could in no manner define their unusual meaning, or regulate their vague intensity. Yet we met, and Fate bound us together at the altar, and I never spoke of love, or dreamed of passion. She, however, shunned society and attaching herself to me alone rendered me happy. It is a happiness to wonder. It is a happiness to think. Morella's erudition was profound. As I hope for life her talents also were of no common order—her powers of mind were gigantic. I felt this, and in many matters became her pupil.⁵

After portraying Osgood as a woman who was desirable to Poe because she possessed a superior intellect to Virginia, Mina then presents another of Poe's "four key women," the poet Sara Helen Whitman, as the "mother figure" that Poe apparently spent his entire life attempting to resurrect. Mina claims that following Virginia's death, Poe pursued many women, but Whitman was most receptive to his "desperate" advances—an absurd allegation, when Whitman had become enamored with Poe years before, evident in letters she wrote to friends and poems she dedicated to Poe that were publicly recited as well as published.

Similar to the previous segment that involved poet Frances Osgood, an excerpt from Poe's writings is narrated to insinuate that Poe's feelings toward Whitman were as Mina has alleged—that he was attracted to her because she was older than he was and more mature. It comes from Poe's short story "The Spectacles," published in 1844 (four years before Poe and Whitman had met), and is narrated alongside footage of the woman portraying Whitman in the documentary, ending with the line, "I revolved in my mind a thousand schemes by which I might obtain the elder lady."

In this instance, the documentary has reached libelous proportions. In "The Spectacles," this sentence appears eighteen sentences after the one that precedes it in the narration, and it appears thus: "I revolved in my mind a thousand schemes by which I might obtain, hereafter, an introduction to the elder lady, or, for the present, at all events, a more distinct view of her beauty."⁶ This is a deliberate misquoting of Poe's work to portray his feelings in a manner that supports Mina's suggestion that Poe desperately wanted Whitman because she was older, and hence the archetype of the "mother figure." Whitman was not renown for her beauty; hence, the sentence was distorted. Mina then introduces the fourth and final of Poe's women, the one she says "represents all the archetypes in one"—Poe's mother, Eliza, who died shortly before Poe's third birthday.

Mina claims her death is "the one defining incident that inspired all his great stories," and that Poe spent his entire life "searching for women to fill the void his mother left." A scene is presented of a beautiful young woman holding and caressing a baby boy in her arms, and the first four lines of Poe's sonnet "To My Mother" are narrated over the poignant image of mother and son, Eliza and Edgar:

The angels in the Heavens above,Devoutly singing unto one another,Can find, amid their burning terms of love,None so devotional as that of mother.

Very touching. However, Poe did not pen these lines to his birth mother, Eliza Poe, but to his mother-in-law, Maria Clemm. Here is the remainder of the poem:

Therefore by that sweet name I long have called you;You who are more than mother unto me,Filling my heart of hearts, where God installed you,In setting my Virginia's spirit free.My mother—my own mother, who died early,Was but the mother of myself; but youAre mother to the dead I loved so dearly,Are thus more precious than the one I knew,By that infinity with which my wifeWas dearer to my soul than its soul-life.⁷

The remainder of the poem proves that what Mina has attempted to project as truth for the entire documentary—that Poe spent his entire life mourning the death of his mother and that it formed the basis for all his relationships with women as well for all his stories—is only Mina's personal interpretation of Poe's works, which have been misrepresented and fabricated to support her theories. This sonnet, along with any proper research into Poe's biography, indicates that Poe did have the presence of a mother figure in his life in Maria Clemm, and that he was devoted to and loved his wife deeply—a love this documentary has attempted to dismiss with innuendos that Poe committed adultery and that his union with Virginia was never physically consummated.

Another focal point of the documentary is the persisting notion that Poe's written works were shaped not only by these four women but also by a dependence on alcohol and drugs. Mina claims that following Osgood's rejection of him, Poe began "taking the powerful drug laudanum" and that following Virginia's death, Poe was in a state of "drug-addled grief." She also claims twice in the documentary that Poe attempted suicide. None of the claims of drug use or suicide attempts is supported with more details or evidence to substantiate its truth. Rather, they are made throughout the documentary as if they are universally known facts about Poe and need no further explanation or clarification. Indeed, this couldn't be more further from the truth.

That Poe was addicted to or used opium to influence his writing is a most compelling rumor, but there is no evidence to support it. George E. Woodberry's 1885 biography that claimed Poe "ate opium and drank liquor"⁸ resulted in a rebuttal from Poe's nemesis, Dr. Thomas Dunn English, who wrote in "Reminiscences of Poe" (1896), "Mr. Woodberry charges boldly that Poe was an opium eater. . . . Had Poe the opium habit when I knew him, I should, both as a physician and a man of observation, have discovered it, during his frequent visits to my rooms, my visits at his house and our meetings elsewhere. I saw no signs of it, and believe the charge to have been a baseless slander."⁹ Jeanette Marks claimed in Genius and Disaster (1926) that "Poe . . . died in the gutter—narcomania often leads there,"¹⁰ a sentiment supported heavily in the documentary by Mina. Hervey Allen also claimed Poe took drugs in his popular biography of Poe, Israfel (1935), substantiating his claim not with evidence but with the statement that "Ligeia had become Poe's reality."¹¹

One reason Poe is accused of being an opium user is to devalue his literary merit by attributing the original and fantastical elements of his tales to the effects of opium-fueled dreams, rather than to his own imaginative insight and artistic ability. Intrigued by a recent report published in a scientific journal claiming Poe took opium, without any evidence to support its allegations, I tracked the article's sources to assess the validity of its claims. The report in question, "Balancing Between Sensitization and Repression: The Role of Opium in the Life and Art of Edgar Allan Poe and Samuel Taylor Coleridge," was published in the journal Substance Use and Misuse in November 2011 and claimed that "in Poe's works, the signs of opium usage are easy to find. Several of his works are believed to reveal opium visions, such as the tale Ligeia (1838) in which an opium-dependent narrator appears (Patterson, 1992)."¹² The citation denotes an article published in a Canadian medical journal in October 1992 by Calgary surgeon Robert Patterson titled "Once upon a Midnight Dreary: The Life and Addictions of Edgar Allan Poe," which claims Poe used opium because "his life was full of misfortune and disappointment" and the "evidence of his [Poe's] mental anguish and addictions is reflected in his writings."¹³ But where is the evidence to substantiate that Poe actually took opium? There is none.

Another claim in the 2011 Substance Use and Misuse report is that Poe "started using substances in adulthood, at the age of 23."¹⁴ This is followed with a citation that led me to an article titled "Did All Those Famous People Really Have Epilepsy?" published in Epilepsy and Behavior in March 2005. It includes a highly sensationalized biographical segment about Poe in which author John Hughes claims Poe's "periods of abstinence from alcohol were periods of indulgence in opium,"¹⁵ which has a footnote citing the 1978 book by Wolf Mankowitz The Extraordinary Mr. Poe.

I have traced three articles published in medical journals alleging Poe was an opium user to a book that has absolutely no credibility in Poe scholarship, one where the author has succumbed to his own imagination, conjuring incidents of Poe's life of which he couldn't possibly have any knowledge. In the book, Mankowitz claims that Poe began using opium for a stomach ailment, just like the English writer Thomas De Quincey. According to Mankowitz, Poe soon became aware that the drug not only increased his flights of imagination but also "masked hunger, warmed the body, and extended the sense of time." Hence Mankowitz fantasized that "Poe, writing in the long, cold, lonely nights in the attic,"¹⁶ would have welcomed the comforts offered by the drug, and the opium-fueled dreams of dying women would have had provided the inspiration for his horror stories.

Further, Mankowitz's likening of Poe's alleged use of opium to that of De Quincey suggests narrowness in his knowledge of both Poe and De Quincey's lives and works. First, Poe was very familiar with De Quincy's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and even mentioned it by name in a letter in 1835 as an example of what types of literary works were proving most popular in Britain. Robert Morrison, author of "Poe's De Quincey, Poe's Dupin" (2001), wrote that De Quincey provided Poe with both literary and creative inspiration, being "for many years of the leading writers with Blackwood's, the most popular and influential magazine of the first half of the nineteenth century, and a publication that Poe read devotedly."¹⁷

Second, the fictional protagonist's use of opium in "Ligeia" is used as a technique that allows him to keep the reader speculating at his true motives throughout the narrative. Nor are there any resemblances in the narrator's references to the effects of opium that allude to the distorted visions that De Quincey reported from his own opium-inflicted nightmares that occasionally led him to even fear falling asleep. Third, De Quincey claimed that "an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motion of time," and he often "existed in a dormant state,"¹⁸ something Poe did not have the luxury of doing. Poe was an avid lover of music who would accompany Virginia on the piano while playing his flute, and he wrote poetry renowned for its musicality; he was also able to conduct his editorial duties throughout his career while working in busy and noisy magazine environments, yet for De Quincey during his epochs of opium, "crowds become an oppression . . . music even, too sensual and gross."¹⁹

Finally, it should be noted that respected literary critic M. H. Abrams, who in his 1971 study The Milk of Paradise: The Effect of Opium Visions on the Works of De Quincey, Crabbe, Francis Thompson, and Coleridge, carefully observed "the imagery we have come to recognise as a consequence of addiction to opium," concluded that "there is no definite proof of addiction to opium in the lives of James Thomson and Poe."²⁰

The only reference to opium in Poe's life is found in a letter he wrote in 1848, eleven months before his death. This is the letter from which stems the suggestion that Poe attempted suicide—an allegation Mina makes twice in the documentary. Jeanette Marks also referred to this in her book to suggest Poe was a narcomaniac, claiming Poe admitted in a letter that "he had swallowed half a bottle of laudanum."²¹ In the actual letter to Annie Smith, Poe wrote:

I procured two ounces of laudanum. . . . I swallowed about half the laudanum & hurried to the Post-Office. . . . But I had not calculated on the strength of the laudanum, for, before I reached the Post Office my reason was entirely gone, & the letter was never put in. Let me pass over, my darling Sister, the awful horrors which succeeded—A friend was at hand, who aided & (if it can be called saving) saved me—but it is only within the last three days that I have been able to remember what occurred in that dreary interval—It appears that, after the laudanum was rejected from the stomach, I became calm.²²

Note that in her book, Marks deliberately misquoted Poe as taking "half a bottle of laudanum" instead of the "two ounces" of which Poe claims he ingested only half. Also, we do not know for certain that Poe did indeed ingest the drug, and according to the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, "the whole episode is too wildly romantic to be anything more than one of Poe's fanciful fabrications, created to impress his friend with the depth of his despair."²³

Two prominent Poe scholars have also elucidated their views on this letter. According to Thomas Mabbott, Poe not knowing the exact amount of opium he had consumed raises questions, such as "Did the druggist, observing his customer's condition, give him a diluted potion? I incline to think that Poe's 'attempted suicide' was not quite serious."²⁴ Similarly, John Ostrom observed that "the detail of 'a friend was at hand, who aided & . . . saved me,' may be the most unlikely and suspicious aspect of the episode."²⁵

Even if Poe had taken the laudanum at this moment, his admission that "I had not calculated on the strength of the laudanum" and "the awful horrors which succeeded" suggests that Poe was unfamiliar with opium and its effects, as does the sickness that betook him afterward. Hence, it would have been an isolated incident and hardly the foundations on which to base claims that Poe's use of drugs influenced his writing, almost all of which had already been published years before.

In the documentary Mina also claimed Poe was drinking from the age of nineteen, was "back on the drink" following his "rejection" by Osgood, and during the final three years of Virginia's life Poe was an alcoholic, at a time Mina also stated was Poe's most productive as a writer, in which he produced his most successful works: "Alcohol and writing are the only outlets for his suffering, he writes compulsively, channeling his emotional turmoil into his work." This implies Poe's works produced during this time, including "The Tell-Tale Heart," were written under the influence of alcohol.

That Poe drank alcohol at certain times in his life is known; however, Poe was not an alcoholic—that is, someone dependent on alcohol in a habitual manner, as he is often described. And it has been maintained, by Poe and others, that he could not write under the influence of alcohol; even one glass of wine incapacitated him.

In 1852 Poe's close friend, author Chauncey Burr, attested, "I may safely say, that, in his whole life, he never drank so much as many of his enemies swallow down in a single month."²⁶ Similarly in 1866, Charles Leonard Moore asserted there was no evidence to support the rumor that Poe was addicted to alcohol: "All the testimony actually produced—all the witnesses who give their names and addresses, people who lived with him and knew him best, deny it."²⁷ Even Richard Stoddard agreed, claiming that the fact that Poe "was not a confirmed drunkard . . . [is] testified to by all his friends and acquaintances, and proved by the excellence and bulk of his writings."²⁸

Poe shared his problematic encounters with alcohol in his letters, admitting to occasionally befalling to the temptation of drink and being unable to work during that time. When Poe became drunk in public, he would become extremely embarrassed of his actions afterward, and any gossip that followed hurt Poe immensely. Alcohol was not some dirty secret or habit that Poe hid; he spoke of it openly to his close acquaintances and was courageous enough to seek help when it threatened to get out of control. When Poe went months, even years without drinking, he was extremely proud of himself and often reported it to his friends.

Some of Poe's feelings regarding the rumors he was an alcoholic are illustrated in a letter to Joseph Snodgrass in 1841: "You are a physician, and I presume no physician can have difficulty in detecting the drunkard at a glance. You are, moreover, a literary man, well read in morals. You will never be brought to believe that I could write what I daily write, as I write it, were I as this villain would induce those who know me not, to believe."²⁹ Poe went on to reveal that his high intolerance to alcohol was one of the reasons he attempted to avoid it, but he was regularly exposed to it and placed in the position to accept it because of Southern social etiquette. But Poe didn't only discuss his problems with alcohol privately—he also discussed it with the public in July 1845. In a response to a series of papers published in the New York Mirror, Poe's rebuttal to allegations he was a drunkard were forceful. Poe denied the widespread belief of what was perceived as a "crime," describing it instead as a "calamity" he had recently overcome: "The errors and frailties which I deplore, it cannot at least be asserted that I have been the coward to deny. Never, even, have I made attempt at extenuating a weakness which is (or, by the blessing of God, was) a calamity, although those who did not know me intimately had little reason to regard it otherwise than as a crime."³⁰

The parts of the BBC4 documentary that dishonorably portrayed Poe's character, and the Poe myths it presented as facts without evidence that I have analyzed, are but a small portion. Denise Mina also suggested Poe had violent tendencies, that he was expelled from university for gambling and fighting, and that his death was a result of his own actions. In an article published in The Guardian in 2007, the director general of the BBC stated that a documentary must "never deceive the public."³¹ In this instance, however, we can confidently concur that it is exactly what it has done. We must ask, why were such extreme lengths taken to portray Poe in such an unfavorable way? Perhaps more recent comments about Poe by Mina can shed light on this query.

In December 2011 Mina was a speaker on a panel called Interlude: Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, broadcast as part of the Sci-Fi-London Festival, where she passionately expressed how "rubbish" and "rotten" Poe's work is and that "we don't assume that if hundreds of idiots are thoughtlessly engaging with a piece of art, then it somehow were valid." Mina also admitted she had gone "off" Poe until she was approached by the BBC to make the documentary, lamenting that she had to "read everything about him . . . six or seven biographies," all that she had since forgotten. Of Poe's definitive story, "The Fall of the House of Usher," Mina said, "The thing about 'The Fall of the House of Usher' is the end is a bit rubbish . . . having read far too much about Poe as a man you do get the impression that he was reaching a deadline and that he was a bit pissed."³² One month after Edgar Allan Poe: Love, Death, and Women had aired on BBC4, Mina's graphic novel A Sickness in the Family was published: a story about a family that lives in a house that might be cursed and whose surname is "Usher," borrowing unashamedly from the story, and very man, she had ridiculed.