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ON THE
OUTSKIRTS
A. N. DEVERS
(Excerpt)
The many homes of Edgar Allan Poe
I do not know whether pilgrimages to the shrines of famous men ought not to be condemned as sentimental journeys.
—Haworth, November 1904, Virginia Woolf.
When I gave the address of the Poe House, 203 N. Amity Street, to my taxi driver, he repeated it several times, muttering to himself as if he didn’t mean for me to hear him. Then he asked for the address again. Thinking he didn’t know his way, I unfolded my tourist map of Baltimore and tried to make sense of it.
“Are you sure you want to go there?” he asked.
“It’s the Edgar Allan Poe House,” I said. “Funny, it’s not on this map.”
“That’s because they don’t want you to go there.”
I thought to myself, who are they? “Is it near his grave? I see the grave on the map.”
“It’s OK,” the driver said, “I know how to go. It’s not far from the grave, but you wouldn’t want to walk there.”
Before my visit, I knew little about Baltimore’s Poe House. That was because I didn’t want to know too much; I wanted to see it with untarnished eyes. So I didn’t know that the Poe House was located inside the boundaries of the Poe Homes, the city’s oldest housing projects. Nor did I know that the projects were built on the remains of historic homes that were controversially demolished in the 1930s. It was a last-minute public outcry that spared Poe’s house itself from the bulldozer. A couple of weeks after my Baltimore visit I sat down to watch the first episode of The Wire. Twenty minutes into the show, two homicide detectives discuss the discovery of a John Doe in West Baltimore:
McNulty: Hey, it’s a decomp. Maybe
it comes back a natural death.
Landsman: You think?
McNulty: In the Poe Homes, no
fucking way.
At the time of my visit, just three days before Halloween in 2007, Baltimore was important to me only because Poe had lived there and died there. I was studying Poe’s life as conveyed by existing historic landmarks for an essay on writers’ homes; I was tracking Poe’s remains. A few years before that, I quit my job to go to grad school, and in the interim I circumnavigated the United States on a thirty-day train trip. I discovered that I sleep easier on a train than I do in my own bed. In the span of my life I have lived in twelve houses, five apartments, three dorms, two tents, and one park ranger station. Since I’m thirty-three, this averages out to a move every 1.5 years of my life. My many childhood moves as an Air Force brat seem to have instilled in me a deep, unsettling wanderlust in adulthood. And yet, many of my stories are fixated on space: my characters find themselves consumed or trapped by their homes, flummoxed by the mysterious properties of architecture. Perhaps this explains my penchant for visiting writers’ houses. If my own memories of home are inaccessible, then maybe visiting a long-dead writer’s home is my way of reminding myself of a home’s integral role in writing; maybe I’m searching for another writer’s secrets, often feeling that I don’t have access to my own. I’ve become increasingly obsessed with all sorts of writers’ houses, but particularly with the homes of Edgar Allan Poe, whose life of dispossession is, to me, a familiar story.
Soon after my first Baltimore visit I went on a Wire jag looking for Poe House references, the most significant of which appears in the opening of “All Due Respect,” from season three. Two young men are standing on the porch of a West Baltimore row house. One says to the other:
| This old white motherfucker and his wife rolls up. He’s like, “Young man, do you know where the Poe house is?” I’m like, “Uh, you kiddin’ me? Look around, take your pick.” So the old man, he’s like, “The Poe House, The Edward Allan Poe House.” I’m like, “I don’t know no Edward Allan Poe.” The man looked at me all sad and shit like I let him down. |
Popular tourist destinations, in general, don’t develop in impoverished neighborhoods. Whatever the historical record, we want our landmarks to reflect our best selves and we want our historical figures’ homes to have curb appeal. We don’t mind humble roots and humble homes as long as they are wholesome, like Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin—as long as they represent humble beginnings that led to something greater, a story that embodies the realization of part of the American Dream. This, we know, is not Poe’s story.
Our romantic need to idealize historic places presents a particular challenge for writers’ homes, for so many of our best writers lived in obscurity or led notoriously dysfunctional lives. They often didn’t have much money, if any at all—certainly not enough to invest in exceptional real estate. Or, if they did manage to have an estate, like Mark Twain’s gingerbread confection in Hartford, Connecticut, it often represents only a sliver of a life story. Rare are our writers who, like Edith Wharton and Henry James, were born into wealth.
Mark Twain’s marvelous house somehow makes it harder to remember that he once went bankrupt and was often penniless. (Though for different reasons than Poe: he led an opulent lifestyle, overextended his finances, and made poor business decisions, while Poe never had any finances to overextend.) Perhaps it’s partly for this reason—our need to create heroes out of our writers, our propensity to judge success by economic measures—that the United States has relatively few (fifty or so) writers’ homes operating as historic destinations. Compare this to France’s two-hundred and ninety tourable homes. Even considering France’s considerably longer literary history, it’s a stark contrast, and suggests to me that the upkeep and running of writers’ houses might be a measure of the literal value a culture places on literature.
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