Digging up and dusting off Poe
I see the City of Baltimore is burying Edgar Allan Poe again today, which might confirm the common wisdom that you can’t keep a good man down except that it’s the city that keeps digging him up every year. He’s still decent tourist bait in that economy-throttled town.
And who could blame them even if it were just for fun (which it also is)? Poe is dear to many readers’ hearts, including mine. Last year I tracked his final meanderings up and down the US Eastern Seaboard on Google Earth, wrote it all up and posted it on my personal blog, Dorseyland, with my own illustrations, a few of which appear here.
This is a specially good year for Baltimore’s perennial spadework, 2009 being the 200th anniversary of the great man’s birth.
Poe’s Funeral is the annual “Nevermore” anniversary re-creation of the original ill-attended event for the benefit of all who missed it. Today there are two afternoon services to accommodate the crowds at Westminster Hall, where Poe really is interred, with actors portraying his few friends and supporters and, strangely, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Alfred Hitchcock and HP Lovecraft.
Another actor, John Astin, will again officiate, though he no longer looks anything like Poe, as he certainly did in “The Addams Family”.
The burial followed last Wednesday’s open-casket viewing of “Mr Poe’s body” at his former home on North Amity Street, the all-night vigil that ensued at the Poe Monument outside Westminster Hall and a funeral procession involving an antique horse-drawn hearse.
Meanwhile the Baltimore Museum of Art is presenting “Edgar Allan Poe: A Baltimore Icon” through January 17, a collection of prints and drawings depicting him and his tales — with a bit of a surprise, for me at least: Among the artists who dabbled in Poe were Paul Gauguin, Édouard Manet and René Magritte.
Odilon Redon and Robert Motherwell are also represented, as are illustrations for Poe’s stories by Alphonse Legros, Alfred Kubin and Arthur Rackham.
The museum notes that Henri Matisse did a portrait of Poe too, though that one’s evidently not in the show.
This was during the early 1960s, after the previous decade’s horror and sci-fi B-movies had revived the popularity of the great Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff flicks of the ’30s.
Like all of its avid readers, I idolised the editor, Forrest J Ackerman, whose picture appeared often, usually in some fright pose and with one of the stars of the movies he was writing about. “Uncle Forry” died this past December 4 at age 92.
