Text: Lida Rose McCabe, “A Pilgrimage to Poe's Cottage,” Book Buyer (New York, NY), Vol. 25, no. 6, January 1903, pp. 592-598

[page 592:]

AFTER more than half a century of misrepresentation, uncertainty, and distrust, Edgar Allan Poe, unquestionably the most elusive genius, the most complex, evasive personality in all American literature, assumes, in the new” Poe of the complete edition of the poet's work by the University of Virginia, a tangible entity.[[*]]

Important and exhaustive is this scholarly, painstaking contribution to Poe literature. Most fitting that it should emanate from the poet's Alma Mater, and in taking the title “Virginia edition” unwittingly perpetuate the name of his child-wife — the beautiful, spiritual Virginia Clemm.

The edition includes seventeen volumes, pocket size, the first given to a biography of Poe, in which Professor [column 2:] James A. Harrison, the editor of the whole, dispels many deep-rooted illusions and prejudices, while in his exposure of the treachery of Dr. R. W. Griswold, to whom Poe intrusted his literary remains, tardy vindication is given to the poet, the critic, and the man, and unenviable reproof to the treacherous friend.

For the first time is collected in book form the scattered correspondence that passed between Poe and his contemporaries, relatives, and friends. The key to the Virginia edition is found in the poet's own statement: “I am naturally anxious that what I have written should circulate as I wrote it, if it circulate at all.”

Haloed in childhood's Valhalla had been the elusive, delusive Edgar Allan Poe. In the years when one sees visions and dreams dreams” he had been variously pictured in the tiny Dutch cottage — the antiquated little home at Fordham, perched on the top [page 593:] of a picturesque hill and half hidden in fruit-trees — a pretty, romantic spot, cool, quiet, and far, far away from the noises and vexations of the great metropolis. From numerous Poe biographies, memoirs, and reminiscences, this composite picture had presumably been conjured, and in all probability it would have remained inviolate had not curiosity, quickened by the Poe literary renaissance, sent us for to see.”

It was a Sunday in mid-September — a veritable Poesque day. Clouds hung low, harbinger of the melancholy hovered over the autumnal world. With umbrella in lieu of staff, a kodac for breviary, and rosary strung of jewels of the poet's own making, we set out on what proved to be a realistic pilgrimage in search of the ideal.

In interest of time, this modern pilgrimage was accomplished by the Third Avenue Elevated. After more than an hour's speed through a high-way densely flanked with stores and tenements, undreamed of in the poet's day, Fordham was reached.

Past cosey homes with scarcely more breathing-place between them than is given to city lots, we came at length to a three-storied bay-windowed house, the front yard luxuriant in autumnal bloom — so luxuriant that it almost hid the tiny white-boarded, gabled cottage, pressed against its side not unlike some unseaworthy derelict in the tow of an ocean liner.

On the humble façade, between two tiny attic windows, hung prophetically a rudely painted Raven over a tablet inscription:

O, the pity of it! O, the pain of it! To be thus rudely hurled from the [page 594:] haunting rhythm of “Nevermore “ to a dentist chair!

It recalled a similar disenchantment at Victor Hugo's home in Paris, when in a cabinet of souvenirs was encountered a huge molar labelled, “Extracted in 1867.” Dr. Chauvet, son of the owner of the cottage, is a Frenchman and a dentist. Could father have substantiated more convincingly his son's Americanism than by proclaiming his business calling from the famous cottage's hallowed boards?

Twenty years ago Poe's cottage was offered gratis to the city by its owner, a Mr. Cary. It was rejected. In 1895 it came into the possession of the Chauvets, who erected on the adjacent ground to the rear and south of the cottage the modern edifice in whose shadow it now humbly basks.

“I got a permit from the city the day Grant's tomb was dedicated,” said the elder Chauvet, “to move the cottage from its original site, seventeen feet in front of where it now stands. The survey for the widening of the road would have cut through it. The city would have put it up at auction. had it not been removed. Fearing to lose it, I moved it within my fence- line.”

Near the door, by the trunk of the old cherry-tree — now covered with nasturtium vines — the trunk which we are told Poe had encircled with green turf and planted with mignonette and heliotrope — the cherry under whose. boughs he found a pleasant seat to muse and ponder, the old Frenchman told his story. “I put up a sign — ‘Twenty-five cents to enter Poe Cottage.’ In two months I had fifty cents! The people had not interest in the poet when asked to pay, but as soon as I got a tenant they flocked to the cottage until the [column 2:] family had no peace, no privacy, and now they will let no one enter. I doubt, if he himself came back in the flesh, the mistress would let him in.”

Undaunted, the latch of the picket fence was lifted, and across that weather-beaten porch, now vineless, the porch Mrs. Clemm tells us Poe paced the coldest winter nights contemplating the stars and pondering over the problems of the universe embodied in that extraordinary prose poem, “Eureka,” went the pilgrim.

“By saying ‘No’ to one and all is my only protection,” said the mistress, the half-open door giving glimpse of the kitchen where good Mrs. Clemm was so often sorely pressed to find something to eat for “her children.”

“When I first came here to live, I let people come in. It wouldn’t do. It's my home. There is nothing here that belonged to Poe. Everything is mine. Why should my home be subject- ed to the scrutiny of a museum?” Sensible woman!

“Are you bothered now with visitors?”

“Some time ago they came frequently, but there is little interest in the cottage late years.”

At the parlor window we lingered, despite the drawn blind. Was it not Poe's study where he wrote in his. lonesome later years “Ulalume,” “The Belles,” “Annabel Lee,” “To My Mother,” and other productions that will live when his unhappy life has been forgotten — wrote them while a huge tortoise-shell cat purred on his shoulder?

“The Raven on the cottage front is misleading,” says one of the poet's few surviving contemporaries. “Poe did not write The Raven’ at Fordham;” but he lived there at the time it was published. Likewise untrue is the story that the houri-eyed child-wife [page 596:] died in the room off the parlor. It was over the Poe study, in the tiny chamber, the southwest corner, where the doll-like house windows still im- prison the fitful sunshine. Gone with the snows and loves of yesterday is the cherry bloom, the orchard shade the study's west window commanded while Poe wrote and rewrote in quest of that perfection of form in verse inherited, no doubt, from some old Latin rhymster of his Italian ancestry — De la Poe.

Happily the octopus stride of Greater New York will never subject this most notable of American literary shrines to a frontage of sky-scraping apartments or city tenements. The poet's study looks out to-day upon Poe Park, verdant in sward and floral bloom. When the authorities pay the owner his price — $10,000 — the cottage will again take up its foundation and cross Kingsbridge Road to a final resting-place in Poe Park.

The Shakespeare Society of New York was instrumental in securing Poe Park to Fordham. A bill passed the Legislature in 1898 appropriating $200,000 for the park and preservation of the cottage.

“We’ll give $6,000 for the cottage,” said Authority. “It's only fit for kindling-wood.”

“Nay,” said Monsieur.

Meanwhile the citizens of Fordham, after the manner of all good New York taxpayers, marvel as to the whereabouts. of that appropriation!

In the Chauvet backyard, in sight of the cottage, is still preserved Poe's favorite haunt, “a ledge of rocky ground crowned with pine and cedar, under which he used to sit feasting his eyes upon the quiet beauty of the scene around him.”

Should he sit there as did the pilgrim that day, he would find the shade of the same old trees, and [column 2:] quaff of the aroma of descendants of the same hardy autumn bloomers; but to lift the eyes is to encounter the rears of very modern houses and barns, and have reverie broken upon by the din of the elevated encircling with iron embrace old Fordham College, to whose peaceful shade he was wont to stroll at the vesper hour, during those long, long summer evenings following the death of his beloved, when the Demon Despair sealed the beginning of the end of his unhappy life.

This now historic haunt has never before been photographed. To lend human interest to the scene a figure was posed on the topmost ledge.

“Must read a paper or book,” said the photographer.

The old Frenchman disappeared to return with what only his racial inheritance of fitness could have prompted — a volume of the Fordham edition of Poe!

Opening the volume at random, the eye fell, while the kodac did the rest, upon those lines in which Poe gives the key to his life's tragedy:

Beyond Poe Park lives Mrs. Mary Briggs, from whose adopted father the Poes rented the cottage. Mrs. Briggs was then a slip of a girl, but she retains vivid recollection of the poet and his stormy, ill-starred life at Fordham.

“I laid Virginia Poe out for burial,” said Mrs. Briggs. “She was a frail, [page 597:] beautiful woman, and Poe was a devoted husband. The family were in dire poverty. Neighbors furnished the burial clothes, and we laid the body in our family vault — the old Valentine vault in the Reformed Church graveyard. There it remained until removed [column 2:] in 1875 to Baltimore, and laid beside Edgar Allan Poe, where Mrs. Clemm is also buried.”

“Is it true that Virginia — the ‘Lost Leonora ‘ — died on a bed of straw spread only with a sheet, no blankets — died wrapped up in her husband's over-coat, [page 598:] with a large tortoise-shell cat in her bosom — coat and cat the only warmth the sufferer had except when her mother would chafe her feet and her husband her hands?”

“It was not a nice thing to publish,” was the guarded reply, “but the family could not have been poorer. They were in our cottage four years and never paid but the first month's rent. I had Poe's calling card-plate and his manuscript copy of “The Raven,” said Mrs. Briggs, “and when gentle- men from the University of Virginia came to see me before they published the new work, I tried to find them, but they have disappeared.” All Ford- ham, it would seem, knows of the “Virginia edition.”

Mr. W. H. Valentine, who moved with his parents into the Poe cottage after the departure of Mrs. Clemm, in 1849, has Poe's Bible, the chair in which he sat while writing his best- known poems, and the family clock, which has never ceased to tick since the poet's untimely passing.

“Often have I heard my grandmother recount Mrs. Clemm's regret that she was not with Poe during his last illness,” said Mr. Valentine. ‘Poor Eddie,’ she would sigh in her grief, ‘he often had such spells, and I was the only one who knew how to pull him safely out of them.’”

Not a few are the Poe relics sequestered in the once quaint Dutch village.

Three years ago Christopher Walton's tavern, where Poe never failed to slack his thirst, however depleted his purse, gave way to a modern structure.

“All the country round in Poe's day was farmland,” said John Briggs, the last of the old settlers. Past fourscore is Mr. Briggs. Picturesque in black stock, such as Poe's pictures preserve, the old man turned memory back to Walton's tavern, where often the poet was met. “The farmhouses [column 2:] could be counted on the fingers of both hands. All between Poe cottage and Rose Hill manor was meadow and orchard and forest.”

Twilight was deepening. With impressions gathered from living sources scarcely less contradictory than those in Poe literature as to the moral weaknesses, the personal appearance of the man, the poet, the husband, and the lover, we retraced our steps across the trolley under the roaring elevated, to old Rose Hill manor, now St. John's College, where tarried General Washington and celebrities of Revolutionary days.

On the vine-clad portico we stopped to rest, as had many a pilgrim before; stopped to drink in, as often had the unhappy Poe, that “peace in the world but not of it,” that broods over St. John's.

“Yes,” said the Jesuit Fathers, “Poe was a frequent visitor to our college. He was an intimate friend of Father Doucet, to whom he poured out his inmost thoughts. He came generally in the afternoon or at the close of day when the faculty had leisure to entertain him. He seemed to crave sympathy, and when it was time to go, he lingered as if dreading to return to his grief-stricken home. Frequently he spent the night at the college. He had access to the library, a privilege he fully appreciated. With Father Doucet, Poe generally conversed in French, finding in that cultured Parisian the scholarship and congeniality denied him at Fordham.”

On went the Fathers, each contributing something complimentary to the vanished poet — his charm of manner, his brilliant conversational power, his handsome presence, his attractive personality — while the shadows deepened in the spot where once Poe had poured forth to sympathetic listeners all he thought and felt and dreamed.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 592, column 1:]

[[*]] THE COMPLETE WORKS OF EDGAR ALLAN POE. Edited by James A. Harrison, Professor of the University of Virginia. With Textual Notes by R. A. Stewart, Ph.D., and Introductions by Charles W. Kent, Ph.D., and Professor Hamilton W. Mable. 17 vols., pocket size (4x6 inches), and De Luxe. Library style (5 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches). New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.