Poe in La-La Land

Edgar Allan Poe never visited L.A. But, the Father of the Detective Story would have been at home in the city of Dragnet and L.A. Confidential. 

L.A. might as well have been the “desert land enchanted” in which Poe set his melancholy masterpiece, “The Raven,” and its goth house of purple curtains and velvet-lined cushions could have been some grunge rocker’s mansion in the Hollywood Hills. 

Poe foreshadows the West Coast entertainment Mecca in his poem “Dream-Land,” in which he seems to describe a C.G.I. vision a century ahead of its time, as an imaginary landscape of “Mountains toppling evermore/Into seas without a shore.”  The place in Poe’s vision, like our City of Angels, is different things to different people: “For the heart whose woes are legion/’Tis a peaceful, soothing region —/For the spirit that walks in shadow/’Tis — oh ‘tis an Eldorado!” Poe’s dream-scape is true to La-La Land, down to the brooding waifs finding solace behind their designer shades: “And thus the sad Soul that here passes/Beholds it but through darkened glasses.”

Relegated to a life of tragedy, Poe would have seen L.A. as a destination of spiritual exile, a place for “respite and nepenthe” (forgetfulness) that the protagonist of “The Raven” longs for.  Ed Poe would have shuffled with familiarity down the “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” He would have negotiated its world of addicts and junkies. James Russell Lowell famously likened the hard-drinking Poe to a nice beer: “Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.” Poe could have died from alcohol poisoning – an overdose.

Poe’s parents were actors—theater actors in Boston. His mother, Eliza, had been the brightest star in the American stage. Poe himself was a gifted singer and dancer. So, he would have been at ease in Hollywoodland. It is no wonder that Tinseltown has been a friend to Poe, making several of his visions into images for the masses, through film. Jack Nicholson, who gained notoriety with the noir classic Chinatown and Boris Karloff, the master of gothic horror, only ever worked together in one film; you  guessed it—a screen adaptation of “The Raven,” directed by Roger Corman, in 1963.

Poe was attracted to the big cities: born in Boston, he lived in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and New York City. Baltimore, the place where Poe married, where he started his literary career, and where he died and was buried, was the closest thing to Los Angeles that existed in Poe’s day. In the early 19th century, Baltimore was the 3rd largest city in the United States. Throughout that century, it was second only to Ellis Island as a point of entry for immigrants coming to the U.S. More than half of the population were foreign-born: German, French, Italian, Greek and Yiddish were heard alongside British accents, as two thirds of the city’s residents had been in the country less than ten years. A rail and port city, it was one of the largest garment manufacturing centers in the nation and a hub city for commerce. All, just like L.A.

It was in Baltimore that the 20-year old Poe penned his poem “Alone” in 1829, in which he embraces his psyche of being an outsider. “From childhood's hour,” Poe confesses “I have not been/As others were---I have not seen/As others saw.” In the poem, Poe tells of a tormented childhood, haunted by clouds, “that took the form/When the rest of Heaven was blue/Of a demon in my view.” Two years earlier, Poe had published his first collection of anonymous poems, paid for with his own money. Only 50 copies were commissioned, of which 14 are known to exist today, making it one of the rarest “first editions” in American literature. The last copy of the nondescript pamphlet to be sold at auction went for $662,500. Sadly, an amount vastly exceeding what Poe earned during his entire life.

Poe struggled in the big city, like a fly attracted to the light, but burned by it. In 1831, he sent a job inquiry to a Baltimore paper:

I write to request your influence in obtaining some situation or employment in this city. Salary would be a minor consideration, but I do not wish to be idle. Perhaps ... you might be so kind as to employ me in your office in some capacity. If so I will use every exertion to deserve your confidence.

He does not even get a reply. In 1834, Poe was working as a laborer in a Baltimore brickyard. In 1835, he applied to be a teacher in the Baltimore Public Schools, but he did not get the position. For most of his life, Poe remained at the margins, watching the urban parade of success from the sidelines, while he frequently had difficulty paying his own debts.

His poem, “The Conqueror-Worm,” could have been set outside one of the glamorous night spots on the Sunset Strip, with Poe watching the opulent spectacle from afar: “Lo! ‘tis a gala night/Within the lonesome latter years!” He describes an “angel throng,” decked out in fine threads, who flock to a theater to watch “A play of hopes and fears.” Resorting to Shakespearean themes of a play which mirrors life or the human condition, and worms who represent the triumph of death and morbidity, Poe paints a “motley drama” of almost absurd and meaningless chaos, “Sin,/And Horror the soul of the plot.” Poe’s own life had been a devastating series of tragedies, involving the loss of his loved ones – first his parents, then his only brother, then his wife (and 13 year-old cousin) Virginia. Poe had come to believe that all life was a cruel and endless cycle of horror: “With its Phantom chased for evermore,/By a crowd that seize it not,/Through a circle that ever returneth in/To the self-same spot.”

One powerfully suspects that Poe would have been fascinated by Hollywood’s movies. He repeatedly expressed the view that the image in his mind’s eye was more valid than the cruel reality he saw around him. To Poe, waking reality was counterfeit: “Everything that we see or seem,” he wrote, “Is but a dream within a dream.” By contrast, dream reality was the ultimate truth: “What could there be more purely bright/In Truth’s day-star?” Director Ingmar Bergman famously said that “the nature of film” is that it “captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.” Film’s ability to present an alternate vision of reality, the parallels between musical counterpoint and film montage, and the development of a philosophy of film criticism would all have been attractive to Poe, who imbued his poetry with a lyrical musicality and who dabbled in literary criticism. Even the formulaic guy-gets-girl story arc would have pleased Poe, who wrote that, “It is the soul-elevating idea, that no man can consider himself entitled to complain of Fate, while, in his adversity, he still retains the unwavering love of woman.”

The mind races to conceive which films Poe would have fancied — from the grandiose (Citizen Kane — though, obviously, substituting “Rosebud” for “Nevermore”) to the unexpected (Jacob’s Ladder (1990), for its pathos and existential horror).

While divining those possibilities is bound to be guesswork and conjecture, one thing seems more sure: Had he lived today, Edgar Allan Poe would gravitate to L.A., where he might actually find himself as embraced and accepted, as surely as he was overlooked and marginalized in the places where he lived during the 19th century.