![[Critical Mass]](/archives/cmlogo.gif)
![[dot]](/archives/cmdot.gif){kind=small}
September 6, 2008
![[feather]](/archives/feather.gif){kind=small}
Nevermore
Edgar Allan Poe is buried in Baltimore, where he did a lot of writing and where he died. But a Philadelphia-based Poe scholar is arguing that Poe's resting place is more rightly the inaptly named City of Brotherly Love:
...last year Edward Pettit, a Poe scholar in Philadelphia, began arguing that Poe's remains belong in Philadelphia. Poe wrote many of his most noteworthy works there and, according to Mr. Pettit, that city's rampant crime and violence in the mid-19th century framed Poe's sinister outlook and inspired his creation of the detective fiction genre."So, Philadelphians, let's hop in our cars, drive down I-95 and appropriate a body from a certain Baltimore cemetery," Mr. Pettit wrote in an article for the Philadelphia City Paper in October. "I'll bring the shovel."
So far, no one has taken up Mr. Pettit's call for Philadelphia's best grave robbers to bring home the city's prodigal son before the bicentennial of Poe's birth in January 2009. But the ghoulish argument between the cities over the body and legacy of the master of the macabre has continued in blogs and newspapers, and on Jan. 13 Mr. Pettit is to square off with an opponent from Baltimore to settle the matter in a debate at the Philadelphia Free Library.
"Philadelphia can keep its broken bell and its cheese steak, but Poe's body isn't going anywhere," said Jeff Jerome, the curator of the Poe House in Baltimore and Mr. Pettit's opponent in the debate.
"If they want a body, they can have John Wilkes Booth," Mr. Jerome added, referring to Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, who is also buried in Baltimore.
[...]
'The Fall of the House of Usher,' 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue,' 'The Masque of the Red Death,' 'The Tell-Tale Heart,' 'The Black Cat,' and 'The Gold-Bug,'" Mr. Pettit said breathlessly, listing the works written by Poe while he lived in Philadelphia. "That's why we deserve him."
The Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site in Philadelphia, in one of the houses where Poe lived, gets about 15,000 visitors a year, compared with about 5,000 a year that go to the Baltimore Poe House, Mr. Pettit said.
When Poe died in Baltimore, only a handful of people showed up at his funeral. He was buried in a grave that had no headstone for more than two decades.
"Is that really the mark of a city that loves Poe?" Mr. Pettit said.
I love the idea that Philadelphia should get the credit for shaping Poe's imagination--and should thus get custody of what's left of Poe--because it's such a horribly violent place to live. That resonates. I lived there from 1995 through the first half of 2007. I lived in an apartment in a nice area just off Rittenhouse Square. And during that time, there were two murders on the street directly below my second-floor window, and another just three blocks to the west. In the fall of 1995, a lady jogger out for a morning run was found dead at the bottom of a stairwell on Pine Street. In the fall of 1997, I was awakened one night by shots outside my window: it was a muggee dispatching the mugger. One afternoon in the spring of 2004, I was working in my living room when I heard shots--again, right outside my window. A car had been stopped at a red light at the corner--which had afforded an armed pedestrian the opportunity to point, shoot, and succeed. The dying driver managed somehow to inch his car down another block before expiring from the wound to his head. This was the nice part of town, and these were just the murders that I knew about, and felt personally connected to by virtue of their proximity to my home. My point here is that there was absolutely nothing special or shocking about my experience. There's about a murder a day in Philly, and the city is often described as the nation's murder capital. So ... it's both amusing and chilling to see Pettit trying to own that fact, and that history, in the name of art.
On the subject of Poe's remains: Poe has already been exhumed and moved once. Twenty-six years after his death, he was dug up and moved to a more prominent part of his cemetery. And during his removal, it was observed that his brain had hardened into a lump, and was visible within his skull. Of course, brains don't harden into lumps, and they do disappear after a quarter century of interment. But tumors can calcify--and can thus last.
Poe's death, which featured raving dementia, has long been a mystery--some have said he died of rabies, or drink, or consumption (TB), or tertiary syphilis. But the truth may lie in that little calcified lump that the sexton saw when he moved the writer's remains decades after his death.
If you don't already know the story about how novelist Matthew Pearl put all of this together--and so brought a new dimension to the longstanding literary-historical question of Poe's demise--check this out.
Trackback Pings:
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.erinoconnor.org/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/1522
Comments:
There's something about Poe, isn't there?
When my daughter was about to start middle school we sat at the computer one day and started reading his short stories, which some kind soul had put on the internet. We started with "The Tell-Tale Heart". I let her scroll down as she read. The language is a bit archaic, so I asked her if she understood what was going on. "He's killing him because he thinks his eye is gross?" she said. Bingo. We read them all.
Sweet. "The Fall of the House of Usher" is on tap in my American Lit class Monday. Thanks for the heads-up on this story, Erin.
"We have put her living in the tomb!"
Eveningsun: A pleasure!
And Laura, I love your stories about reading with your daughter, and agree absolutely about the power of "The Telltale Heart" as an entree to Poe. It was mine as well--Mrs. Morrison, my ninth grade English teacher, brought in a recording of it and played it for our class. It had great, thumping heart beats--and was utterly chilling. When I co-taught a high school creative writing class a few years back, we read the story to the students. For most, it was their first contact with Poe. They were riveted. And it was such a delight to be able to introduce them to a writer they would remember and continue to enjoy.
One thing I've always loved about Poe is that the majority of his stories are comedic, that behind the gothic exterior is the heart of a prankster. And the more I read the clearly comedic material, the less I can tell what is meant to be purely serious in his writings. "Rue Morgue" is a great case in point, looking ahead as it does to Chesterton's own experiments in black comedy in the Father Brown stories. And, of course, Flannery O'Connor.
Erin, I'm glad. After I hit "post" I thought about how tedious people are who make everything about themselves.
I blathered a bit on my own blog today about fostering literacy in my child.
Laura, I too appreciate your stories about reading with your daughter. I envy you both, the reader and the read-to.
I'll never forget when I first read Poe. It was in the seventh grade, and our wonderful, blue haired old teacher was trying out something new. (I realize now that she was trying out inquiry-based learning via Nancie Atwell.) Rather than do the short story unit all together, she let the class rip through her countless textbook anthologies in search of stories we'd like to read. For two weeks, we read stories independently. For each story we finished, we had to write a brief report. We had to read twenty stories in class in those two weeks, which was, like, 15 more than we'd usually cover in whole-class instruction. And best of all, we could stop reading a story if we didn't like it. We chose our vocabulary lists, noted the author bio during library time, and described the various stages of the plot triangle, the conflict, the mood, and theme, etc. But it wasn't tedious, because I was able to choose the stories about which I wanted to write.
I discovered some of my now favorite writers over those two weeks: Poe, Hawthorne, Irving, and Melville among the 19th c. Americans; Hemingway, Toni Cade Bambara, Kurt Vonnegut, Flannery O'Connor, Donald Barthelme, and Katherine Anne Porter among the 20 c. Americans; Doris Lessing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Borges, Kafka, Nadine Gordimer, and Italo Calvino among the world writers.
This is why every English classroom should have wall to wall books, and in between whole-class units, there should be weeks for the children to run wildly to the books that call out their siren call to them. Every day I teach, one of my students flips through a copy of *Poems for the Millennium* on my shelves. It is an anthology of experimental poetry. She seems amazed by the crazy things artists do with words. But when she asked, "Are we learning this this year?" and I said, "No," she seemed crestfallen. I told her to take the book home and read it. We'll integrate it into her personal curriculum.
Next week, though, we begin *Antigone* and *Beowulf* with the sophomores and juniors. If I were still teaching college classes, I get to teach American literature from 1960 to now. Last week, instead, we finished Jane Austen and Julia Alvarez.
Post a comment:
