Philadelphia Gothic

Poe-Land: The Hallowed Haunts of Edgar Allan Poe (2015) by J. W. Ocker

is a refreshing look at Poe's life and career. Its author recounts visits to the eight cities where Poe lived and struggled. Each chapter explores the author's years in each city: some he lived in more than once, and J. W. Ocker does a fine job of tracing the vicissitudes of his career geographically. Along the way, we are given a richly detailed history of the antebellum republic.

The most interesting chapter of Poe-Land deals with Poe's years in Philadelphia, and the place Philadelpphia occupied at the time as the "first city" of the United States.

[....] from about 1838 to 1844, he lived and he wrote. But, boy, did he write. Let me tell you what he wrote in Philadelphia (or at least first published when he lived in Philadelphia): "The Black Cat," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Gold-Bug," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Purloined Letter," "The Cask of Amontillado," "A Descent into the Maelstrom," "William Wilson," "The Man of the Crowd," and "The Oval Portrait."

     Basically, Poe came into his own as a short-story writer in Philadelphia—although, strangely, none of them took place in this city that loves brothers.

The most interesting part of Ocker's Philadelphia chapter details his interview with local scholar Edward G. Pettit,

"writer and a part-time teacher at La Salle University . . . and he just happens to have a beard that's a foot long." 

[....] Pettit's point rests on the literary tradition of Philadelphia, something he described to me, when we finally met, with a phrase he didn't actually use in the article: "Philadelphia Gothic."

It turns out Poe was part of a small nexus of Philadelphia horror writers Americanizing Europe's gothic literary tropes, and forging a uniquely U. S. topics for horror fiction.

        "Well, Poe was so in tune with the literary culture, and Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were the literary centers of the country at the time. Boston was all about poetry, and if you want to be a great poet, you needed to go there. That's where the poets are in America in the 1830s and 1840s. New York was becoming a big publishing center, but was still not as big a one as Philadelphia. In the late 1850s and beyond, New York becomes the place, but Philadelphia was the magazine capital at the time in the country. That's why Poe came here, to be in that culture and have a better chance at success.

     "Philadelphia literary history is just absolutely ignored in any literary history written now. It's all about Boston transcendentalists and the growth of New York. That's become the entire literary history story for the nineteenth century. Philadelphia gets ignored. It's crazy because what was being published during Poe's time was immensely important for what people were reading at the time. And you could say for the works that shaped all of culture because Poe wrote most of his big stuff here."

     "You seem to be skipping over the southern chapters of his work."

     "Poe is not a southern writer at all. People talk about Southern Gothic all the time, which is ridiculous. There is no such thing as Southern Gothic before the Civil War. There are gothic writers in the south at the time, but their writing is European-style Gothicism that has nothing to do with the South.

     "The primary thing about Southern Gothic is that sense of lost culture, of a past curse, and that only comes out after the Civil War. Southern Gothic is really a twentieth-century thing, I think. O'Connor, that's Southern Gothic. Faulkner, that's Southern Gothic. It's then that the South really starts discovering this sense that something has been lost and that it is cursed by its past . . . the slave culture, of course.

     "But there is a Philadelphia Gothic back then. Few, maybe even no literary historians recognize it and only recently have academics, only a few of them, started to write about it as a kind of genre or movement. But Gothic . . . you could even say horror literature in America . . . starts in Philadelphia."

     "That's a big statement. I can't even name a Philadelphia horror writer off the top of my head . . ." and then I interject before he could correct me, "besides Poe."

     "Charles Brockden Brown. He was from Philadelphia, from a Quaker family back in the late 1700s, early 1800s. He does live for a time in New York, but even then, when he's writing his early Gothic novels, they were all set in Philadelphia or just outside it. That's the American Gothic, and it starts with Charles Brockden Brown. Poe knows this. Poe reveres the guy. Wanted to write a history of American literature, and Brockden Brown would've been his first chapter.

     "Brockden Brown's novels are the first gothic novels different from the European novels. European Gothic almost always involves the supernatural, or if it's not supernatural, you think it is until the very end—like a Scooby Doo ending. It's about curses, sins of the father, sins of the past coming down and hurting you. The aristocracy and the religious orders are the villains against the common man.

     "That all changes in America. We don't have an aristocracy, and we're against that idea. And the past is no more. Literally, we got to start over, so we don't have a past to hurt us anymore."

     He then told me about Brockden Brown's 1798 novel Wieland, generally considered the first American Gothic novel. It's about a guy who thinks God is talking to him, tells him to kill his wife and kids, which, of course, Abraham and Isaac set the precedent for. So he takes an axe and butchers his family. "That's a very American horror, and the ending makes it more so. I'll give it away." That last statement was a spoiler alert in the moment for me concerning that two-century-old book, and now it's one for you before you read the next sentence. "By the end he discovers it was a guy playing a trick, somebody who could throw his voice." I'd find out later that the story was actually based on a real-life event in New York.

     Another Brockden Brown novel Pettit described to me was Arthur Mervyn, which came out the year after Wieland. This one was set in Philadelphia during the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 and tells the story of a country boy who comes to the city and ends up trapped by its horrors. "It's a murder mystery with a half-deserted, disease-ridden city. Very Gothic. But it's in a city, not in a castle or out in the countryside. We're talking about an urban environment in the New World. This is all new stuff."

     "So what you're saying is when people talk about American Gothic, they're really talking about something that started as Philadelphia Gothic."

     "That's right. It's not really American, it's Philadelphia-based. What drives a lot of Brockden Brown's work are his experiences in what was at the time the most important city in the country. It was the capital of the country at the time, and all the big stuff was happening here. Brockden Brown was very political in his books. He sent a copy of Wieland to Jefferson, who had just been elected president. He didn't like Jefferson's politics, and it was almost a statement of 'This is what your country is like or going to become. We're going to have nightmares here, just different nightmares than we had in the past.'

     "Brockden died at thirty-nine, but really influenced American literature and writers in the nineteenth century. And he changed Gothicism. It's no longer about the supernatural. It's about the madman with the axe."

     That sounded like Poe's own story, almost to the death.

     "And then you've got George Lippard, who writes the most important and popular American Gothic novel in antebellum America, The Quaker City, or the Monks of Monk Hall. That's everything about American Gothic crammed into one massive, weird book, all set in Philadelphia. It came out in 1845, and was the biggest selling novel in America until Uncle Tom's Cabin, seven years later."

     Lippard's name I recognized. I had come across it before, but not for his writing. He was a friend of Poe's, one of the fellows who helped him out after the weirdness of his Moyamensing incident. In a letter to Maria Clemm, Poe names Lippard (L in the letter) as one of the friends he was "indebted for more than life" who "comforted me and aided me in coming to my senses."

     The Monks of Monk Hall is, like Wieland, based on a true and strange crime, this one happening on a ferry between Philadelphia and Camden, New Jersey. In that case, a man named Singleton Mercer shoots another man for trapping his sixteen-year-old sister in a brothel and having his way with her. Mercer is then acquitted on an insanity defense. Lippard spins that story through a larger, chaotic one that involves an entire corrupt enclave of city leaders and gutter creepers who nightly commit murder and torture and sexual depravity in a labyrinthine old mansion in South Philadelphia that sounds eerily similar to the Murder Castle of H. H. Holmes.

     "What Lippard really introduces to the general public is not only this new kind of Gothic novel that is specific to America, but also that Philadelphia is the place where that kind of stuff comes from. I mean, Boston and New York publish Gothic novels, but they're more the European-style Gothic. Philadelphia will publish those, but also this new American Gothic. Philadelphia becomes so well known for it that some of the bylines from the time are 'by a Philadelphian' because publishers recognize the value of these things coming from a citizen of Philadelphia. Philadelphia becomes like the horror capital of the country for at least the antebellum years. "

     "And that's the city E. A. P. comes to."

     "That's it. All his Gothic tales prior to Philadelphia are European—'Ligeia,' 'Morella,' 'Metzengerstein'—and then he comes to Philly and, well, first gets 'The Fall of the House of Usher' out of his system, but then his work changes. We get 'The Tell-Tale Heart,' 'The Black Cat,' even the 'Masque of the Red Death,' which does have a European setting, but is about the plague . . . and Philadelphia had cholera epidemics all the time." Again, I was reminded of the Moyamensing incident and the hallucinated black bird named Cholera. "But his horror works change from supernatural to the guy with the axe who kills you for no reason. Because your eye bothered him. That's American Gothic. That's American horror.

     "And that change happens, I think, because Poe is in Philadelphia. If he'd been in New York instead of Philly for those years, he would've continued writing European Gothic."

     "And now you want his corpse. Or you did six years ago. I listened to an audio recording of one of the debates, actually, the one in Philadelphia. Sounded like a great time. How come there were only three of you?"

     "When I started the whole Poe War, Jeff Jerome immediately jumped in, and we wanted to get all five Poe cities involved." Yes, "Poe cities" was the exact phrase he used. "Paul Lewis got involved, so that was great. I sent copies of the City Paper article to the Richmond Poe Museum and to the people who run the New York Poe Cottage . . . not a peep."

     "Why do you think that was?"

     "Well, New York, that's just because it's New York. They've got enough to do. 'There's an old writer's house here? So what? We have a million.' With Richmond, it's because they're snobs. They're like, 'We have the Poe Museum. He was raised here.' They know they're the center of the Poe universe. They won't even engage a fun argument in the press. They do a great job with Poe, but they don't seem to want to engage in anything else. Jerome wasn't like that. Lewis wasn't like that. We all saw it as this great opportunity to talk about Poe, while genuinely disagreeing with each other and having fun."

     And Pettit did seem to be having a lot of fun with claiming Poe for Philadelphia. But, in getting to know him, I think the secret of Edward G. Pettit, the Philly Poe Guy, is that, given the chance, he would actually dig Poe up, or the "dark earth" that is left of him, and inter his remains in Philadelphia.

     Of course, if Pettit ever did, there's a great spot for it right on 7th Street….

Poe-Land recalls another excellent "geographical biography" I read this summer: City of the Beast: The London of Aleister Crowley (2022) by Phil Baker.

Both Baker and Ocker take apart the chronologies of their subjects, giving us fruitful new angles for observation and summation. This is particularly useful in Poe's case, since he has been the subject of dozens of biographies, an hour-long episode of A&E's Biography, and two hour-long documentaries on PBS: here

and here.

Ocker's skill is in never losing the thrust of the artist's life while he climbs around the bell towers and cottage basements where our favorite dreamed his dreams no mortal ever dreamed before.

It's a warm and tantalizing book that gives us Poe the creator, not the beset sufferer and victim.

Jay

14 October 2022