For a number of reasons – including an
upcoming trip to Baltimore next month - I’ve been re-reading some Edgar Allan
Poe short stories. Last night’s bedtime tale was “The Man of the Crowd” – which
is either the greatest ever fictional depiction of night walking, urban
exploration and psychogeographic drifting; or not.
The plot is simple enough: our convalescent hero,
looking at the crowds in the street through his hotel window, spots an
evil-looking old man and for no very good reason (but then who needs one?)
follows him all over London for the next twenty-four hours.
I thought I was reasonably familiar with the
story but I’d forgotten these lines: “Once more he strode onward with elastic tread. Suddenly a corner was
turned, a blaze of light burst upon our sight, and we stood before one of the
huge suburban temples of Intemperance one of the palaces of the fiend, Gin.”
As so often with Poe, you kind of wish
he’d tone it down a bit, but then if he toned it down a bit he wouldn’t be Poe.
But just the term Gin Palace – it sounds
so wonderful, so mythical. It’s a
palace! And it’s full of gin! The term of course was ironic, although some
so-called gin places looked more much appealing than others.
The old man dashes inside and the
narrator follows him, but neither takes a drink, and both remain sober
throughout the adventure.
Then there’s Poe’s story “The
Black Cat” in which the narrator, when violently drunk, gouges out the eye of
his pet cat: something that today strikes me as far more disturbing than some of Poe's more lurid fantasies.
“My original soul seemed,
at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence,
gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.” “Gin-nurtured” – well, aren’t we all at one
time or another? And then he finds a
replacement cat. “One night, as I sat
half-stupefied in a den of more than infamy, my attention was suddenly drawn to
some black object, reposing upon the head of one of the immense hogsheads of
gin or of rum, which constituted the chief furniture of the apartment. I had
been looking steadily at the top of this hogshead for some minutes, and what
now caused me surprise was the fact that I had not sooner perceived the object
thereupon. I approached it, and touched it with my hand. It was a black cat—a
very large one—fully as large as Pluto.”
He takes the cat home with him and, as you can guess even if you don’t know,
it doesn’t end well.
There’s also a column in the form of a letter, one of a series written for the
Columbia Spy under the title “Doings of Gotham,” in which Poe refers to the
closing down of the “Rum Hovels” of Philadelphia, which he thinks may be a good
thing, though he considers it unconstitutional.
So yes, Poe was familiar
with gin and rum, at least as literary tropes, and you could say the same for
casks of Amontillado: “I broke and reached him a flagon
of De Grave. He emptied it at a breath. His eyes flashed with a fierce light.
He laughed and threw the bottle upwards with a gesticulation I did not
understand.”
It’s easy enough to find something absurd and overwrought
about Poe’s descriptions of alcohol and its effects. but Poe’s own battles with
the demon drink were real enough, destructive to himself and others, and
sometimes downright fiendish. He
belonged to the “one drink’s too many and a thousand’s not enough” school of
drinking. One of his more tolerant
supporters, Thomas A. Clarke wrote, “if he took but one glass of weak wine or
beer or cider the Rubicon of the cup was passed with him, and it almost always
ended in excess and sickness.”
A certain amount of
walking and drifting, and no doubt staggering, seems often to have been
involved, sometimes ending in Poe having to be carried home by more or less
sympathetic friends and acquaintances.
But what did Poe actually
drink? I think the essential answer is:
anything he could get his hands on. When
he went to West Point military academy in 1830 he was known as having a taste
for brandy. His roommate Thomas W. Gibson, recalled in Harper’s Magazine that
he was “seldom without a bottle of Benny Haven’s best brandy. I don’t think he was ever intoxicated while at
the Academy, but he had already acquired the more dangerous habit of constant
drinking.” Benny Havens (Harper’s or
Gibson got the spelling wrong) ran a tavern that was strictly off-limits to
cadets but that only made them want to go there, obviously. Getting there was either a trudge through the
woods or a float down the river but Poe (and many other’s too) thought it was
worth the risk.
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| Benny Havens - not a man to tangle with. |
Poe also claimed that other
people forced him to drink, the poet William Ross Wallace, for instance, “who
would insist upon the juleps, and I
knew not what I was either doing or saying.”
This was in a letter to his publisher J and HG
Langley, explaining why he’d arrived at their New York office in a drunken
state.
There’s also an extant Poe
family recipe for eggnog but however indiscriminate Poe’s tastes, I can’t
imagine that eggnog ever be the number one choice for a serious drinker. Maybe this would have been better:
