Fallen Angel by Robert Morgan;

Author:Robert Morgan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)
Published: 2023-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

12

WASHINGTON, DC

BY 1842–43 POE UNDERSTOOD THAT AMONG ALL HIS GIFTS AND achievements, he harbored within himself a self-destructive flaw he would call “the imp of the perverse.” In the story of that title, and in the classic “The Black Cat,” he would dramatize a kink of character that he knew well. On a visit to Philadelphia in September 1842, Frederick Thomas, as we have seen, persuaded Poe that Robert Tyler, the president’s son, was enthusiastic for Poe to be appointed to a post in the Customs House in Philadelphia. Poe knew that Thomas was arriving for a visit, but he’d been drinking, and late in the morning he was just getting up. The usually well-groomed Poe was disheveled. Thomas later recalled, “His dark hair hung carelessly over his high forehead, and his dress was a little slovenly.”

Poe confessed he had been drinking, but he agreed to meet Thomas the next morning at the Congress Hall Hotel. The following day Poe did not show up and later explained that he’d been so ill Virginia and Muddy forbade him from going out. Even so, Poe later called at the Philadelphia Customs House, expecting news of his appointment. The collector told him to come back later. When Poe did return, the collector brushed him off with, “I will send for you, Mr. Poe.” For all Thomas’s lobbying, and with the apparent support of the president’s son, no position at the Customs House materialized.

Desperate to find new sources of income for his projected magazine, Poe hunted for a wealthy patron once more and applied to the poet Thomas Holley Chivers, a Georgia plantation owner (fig. 18). But Chivers was mourning the death of his three-year-old daughter and had little interest in funding a magazine in Philadelphia.

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