Edgar Allan Poe

A Paris made out of books

Start with the honest fact, because the rest of the story depends on it: Edgar Allan Poe was never in Paris. He crossed the Atlantic once, as a boy — the Allan family, the Richmond merchants who raised him, lived in England and Scotland from 1815 to 1820 — and after coming home at eleven he never left the United States again. The Paris of his fiction was assembled at a desk in Philadelphia out of maps, memoirs, newspapers and other people's books.

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" appeared in Graham's Magazine, a Philadelphia monthly, in April 1841. In it a brilliant, impoverished Parisian named C. Auguste Dupin solves a double killing in a locked fourth-floor room by pure reasoning, while an admiring friend narrates. That arrangement — the genius, the ordinary companion telling the story, the baffled police, the solution laid out at the end — is the machine every detective story since has run on. Poe's editor Thomas Ollive Mabbott, who prepared the standard scholarly edition of the tales, judged that it "may not be the first detective story, but it is the first story deliberately written as such to attain worldwide popularity".

The street is imaginary. There is no rue Morgue in Paris and there never was; Mabbott found that the name was a late substitution, noting that "the name of the street, Rue Morgue, was a brilliant afterthought" and that it appears in the manuscript as a change from the earlier rue Trianon. Poe invented a street, named it after the Paris mortuary, and made it famous enough that visitors still look for it. Two more Dupin stories followed — "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" (1842), which transplants a real New York murder case to Paris, and "The Purloined Letter" (1844) — and their street names are largely invented too.

The life the stories came out of

Poe was born in Boston on 19 January 1809 to two travelling actors. His father left; his mother, Eliza Poe, died of tuberculosis in Richmond, Virginia, on 8 December 1811, when he was not yet three. He was taken into the household of John and Frances Allan, Richmond merchants, who gave him the middle name he kept and never formally adopted him. He went to the University of Virginia at seventeen, ran up gambling debts his foster father refused to pay, left after a year, and enlisted in the United States Army under the name "Edgar A. Perry". He published his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, in Boston in 1827, anonymously, by "a Bostonian".

Dismissed from the West Point military academy in 1831, he went to Baltimore and to his father's sister, Maria Clemm. In 1835 he joined the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond as an editor, and in 1836 he married Maria Clemm's daughter Virginia, his first cousin, who was thirteen. From 1838 he worked the magazine trade in Philadelphia and then New York — editing, reviewing savagely enough to make enemies, and publishing the stories that carried his name: "The Fall of the House of Usher", "The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Murders in the Rue Morgue".

"The Raven" made him famous in early 1845 and paid him, by most accounts, a few dollars. Virginia Poe died of tuberculosis at Fordham, then a village north of New York City, in 1847, aged twenty-four. Poe survived her by two years. On 3 October 1849, an election day, he was found in distress at a Baltimore tavern — Ryan's Fourth Ward polling place, also called Gunner's Hall — wearing clothes that were not his. He was taken to Washington College Hospital and died there on 7 October 1849, aged forty. No cause was ever established. The Poe Society of Baltimore, which has assembled the surviving evidence, concludes plainly that "the few tantalizing facts we have lead to no certain conclusion".

Then his reputation was attacked by the man in charge of it. Rufus Wilmot Griswold, an anthologist whom Poe had named his literary executor, published an unsigned obituary under the name "Ludwig" and followed it with a biographical memoir prefixed to the collected works. The memoir quoted letters Griswold had altered. It is, in the Poe Society's words, "chiefly responsible for most of the Poe myth as an irredeemable alcoholic and a person with an inherently immoral nature" — the portrait that shadowed Poe in English for a century.

Baudelaire finds his twin

While that was happening in America, a Paris poet in his late twenties was reading Poe in French magazine translations and recognising himself. Charles Baudelaire — later the author of Les Fleurs du mal, and at this point almost unknown — began translating, and did not stop. He kept at it for some seventeen years, often at the expense of his own writing, and he explained why in a letter that has become the founding document of Poe's French career: "Savez-vous pourquoi j'ai si patiemment traduit Poe? Parce qu'il me ressemblait." — "Do you know why I translated Poe so patiently? Because he resembled me." Opening a book of Poe's for the first time, he wrote, he had found with horror and delight not only subjects he had dreamed, but sentences he had thought, twenty years before.

Baudelaire's essay on Poe's life and work, published in 1852, was the first general study of Poe to appear in any language other than English. Revised in 1856, it became the preface to the first volume of his translated tales. The volumes that followed made Poe a French author: a reader in Paris met the stories in Baudelaire's prose, which is some of the best French prose of the century, and took them for a native classic. It is why Poe has been read for a hundred and seventy years in France as a major poet and metaphysician, and in the English-speaking world, for much of that time, as a writer for adolescents.

Do you know why I translated Poe so patiently? Because he resembled me.

Savez-vous pourquoi j'ai si patiemment traduit Poe ? Parce qu'il me ressemblait.

The poets who came after

Baudelaire had translated the tales; the poems were harder, and they went to Stéphane Mallarmé, the most demanding French poet of the next generation, who rendered them in rhythmic prose rather than force them into rhyme. In 1875 the Paris publisher Richard Lesclide brought out Mallarmé's version of "The Raven" as Le Corbeau, a large-format edition with English and French side by side and lithographs by the painter Édouard Manet, whose work had scandalised the Salon, the official annual art exhibition of Paris — an American poem, France's most exacting poet translating it and its most controversial painter illustrating it, in one book.

Mallarmé's other tribute was a sonnet, "Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe" — "The Tomb of Edgar Poe" — written at the invitation of Sara Sigourney Rice, the Baltimore teacher who raised the money for a proper monument over Poe's grave, and first printed in her Memorial Volume of 1877. Its opening line, "Tel qu'en Lui-même enfin l'éternité le change" — "Such as into Himself at last eternity changes him" — is among the most quoted in French poetry. Paul Valéry, the third of the great French poets to fall under Poe's influence, took less from the verse than from Poe's essay "The Philosophy of Composition", and built from it a whole theory of poetry as deliberate construction rather than inspiration.

The oddest testimony belongs to a Paris journalist. Writing in 1884, Lewis Rosenthal described Poe as the most celebrated American author in France, more read there than any of the revered New England authors who had outranked him at home, and put the paradox in one sentence: "Though in his lifetime, Edgar Allan Poe was destined not to dwell in a city that would have been so congenial to him, he lives there to-day." A man who never saw Paris wrote its most famous imaginary street, and Paris repaid him with the literary afterlife his own country would not give him.