A friends of mine, who has a lot of experience in music,literature,drugs, etc.. was telling me about absinthe and how Edgar Allen Poe was a constant consumer of drugs and alcohol and user of absinthe. We got onto the discussion of the detail he sometimes put into his work, and in particular the original version of the short story Bernice, where he describes removing the teeth of his cousin/wife with so much accuracy and detail that it was said a detective during that time said that only someone who had actually experienced that before could know some of those things. The things that had happened to him in his life are similar to those that happened to some famous serial killers, and he was in fact a very... strange guy. just wondering your thoughts on this.
Poe has gotten a bad rap over the years... portrayed as an alcoholic incestuous pedophile. According to witnesses during his life, he did not drink frequently but when he did, he really tied one on at the worst or at best, was a "cheap drunk" who couldn't handle even a bit of booze without getting sloshed. This has led some Poe apologists to speculate that he was actually an undiagnosed diabetic because that is a typical diabetic response to the sugars in alcohol. Others have suggested that, there being a large rabies outbreak at the time, Poe had contracted that disease, which would account for his erratic behavior. Who knows? I think there is a tendency to want to paint him as all good or all bad. As for Poe being an incestuous pedophile ... it was common (up until the 1980s at least) for girls in the South to marry as young as 12. Essentially, the onset of menses connotes womanhood in many cultures. First or second cousins frequently marry one another. I think that is from where the stereotype of Southern inbreeding comes. My sense is that since it was not uncommon in Britain for cousins to marry (probably due to inheritence laws), descendents of the British in the South maintained the custom. Too often people apply today's mores to people living in other times and cultures, though in general, I tend to shy away from moral relativism. All that being said about Poe, I have never heard it suggested that Poe was a serial killer. He was never a brick layer but he describes, in at least 2 stories, the narrator laying bricks. Several of his stories hint strongly at necrophilia yet there is no evidence that he went about violating corpses. Who knows what sort of research he did? He could have interviewed dentists or read dental manuals. He could also have an extraordinary amount of empathy. I write first person accounts of serial killers and chid murderers in my fiction yet I am a pacifist in "real life." I should hate for people to assume that I am a serial killer based upon my writings and neglectful, abusive childhood.
