What really happened to poor old Edgar Allan Poe in the end? I dug out an old biography and nosed around the Net and developed a tour for Google Earth attempting to track his meanderings in his final four months. And, hoping to infuse a little humour into a morbid tale, I incorporated pictures of him and the places where he lived and visited into original graphics with a comic-book look to them. I hope that’s okay with Edgar’s kin.

“Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?” Poe wondered. “Everything about him is controversial,” concedes the Poe Society of Baltimore, “literally from the place and date of his birth to the exact location and date of his burial.”

Poe himself toyed with the dates and places in his story and laid false claims to bolster his reputation and sell more of his writings, such as having joined the Greek fight for liberation in 1828. If Poe’s biography is a delicate house of cards, every card is ornately imprinted with intriguing clues left by him and others. The puzzle is as compelling as anything in his tales.

The bicentennial of his birth will be commemorated in 2009. There will be more research and perhaps more revelations about his life and, hopefully, his strange death, which has, to date, been blamed on too much booze alone, the resulting delirium tremens, opium, some sort of lesions on the brain, tuberculosis, epilepsy, diabetes, rabies, heart disease, a rare enzyme disorder, dipsomania, hypoglycaemia, epilepsy, carbon monoxide poisoning, a savage revenge beating and the brutal practice of fixing elections through “cooping”. By one of these means or something else, to use John Pendleton Kennedy’s words, “A bright but unsteady light has been awfully quenched.”

In need of some cash

In June 1849 Edgar Allan Poe was living with his aunt and mother-in-law, Maria Poe Clemm, in what is now the “Poe Cottage” but is referred to by scholars as the Fordham Cottage. He’d moved there in about May 1846 following the financial collapse of his newspaper, the Broadway Journal, where he’d been hired as an editor in February 1845, then became sole editor and then the owner.

The cottage, now maintained by the Bronx Historical Society, is where Poe wrote “The Cask of Amontillado”, and there too his wife Virginia died on January 30, 1847, no doubt fuelling the intense morbidity of his writing. Poe had married his cousin in 1836, when she was 13. The bed in which she died is preserved here.

Virginia’s death may also have caused Poe to drink more, though his supposed “weakness” for alcohol is in permanent dispute among biographers. It’s been claimed that since his youth he could never drink much without becoming either obnoxious or unconscious, and that alcohol greatly hindered his newspaper career.

Poe’s ambition in the summer of 1849 was to finally launch his long-planned magazine, the Stylus, and to raise money for it he embarked on a lecture tour on June 29, travelling to Philadelphia, Richmond and Norfolk. There’s more!

Tales of Talavara

Privately owned and bearing no historic plaque to distinguish it, Talavara at 2315 West Grace Street was the home of Thomas Talley, a local grocer whose daughter Susan was acquainted with Poe.

Here Poe gave what must have been his last public reading of “The Raven”, on September 25, 1849, and this is credited with having saved the 1838-vintage residence when so many other buildings long ago disappeared. It supposedly survived the Civil War because there was a wall of cannon surrounding it.

Social calls and late “suppers”

Having reunited with Elmira, Poe made plans to sail for New York (no doubt having second thoughts about train travel), probably to collect Maria Clemm and move their belongings back to Richmond. Just before his departure on September 27, 1849, he called on his friend Dr John F Carter at his office somewhere around at Seventh and Broad Streets. They chatted for awhile and then Poe went across the street to Saddler’s Restaurant for a late supper, mistakenly taking Dr Carter’s malacca cane and leaving behind his own. Edgar’s cane changed hands several times over the next decades, coming to rest in the Poe Museum.

In her 1907 biography, Susan Weiss, who actually knew Poe, said he met some acquaintances at Saddler’s “who detained him until late, and then accompanied him to the Baltimore boat. According to their account he was quite sober and cheerful to the last, remarking, as he took leave of them, that he would soon be in Richmond again.”

Yet another scribe, Bishop Fitzgerald, claimed that Poe left Richmond with as much as $1,500, earnings from his lectures that would finance his new magazine. This could have made him a target for muggers. No money was found on him when he was discovered semi-conscious shortly before his death.

Someone at the door

Poe sailed by steamship from Richmond to Baltimore overnight on September 27 and 28, 1849. What exactly he did in the few days remaining to him are as befuddled as he seems to have been. “Where he spent the time he was here, or under what circumstances, I have been unable to ascertain,” his cousin, Neilson Poe, wrote to Maria Clemm. No one else has figured it out either. There’s more!

The isthmus of Phi Phi Island is battered by the biggest wave in this hilltop shot by JT and Caroline Malatesta, as featured on WaveOfDestruction.net.

Three years is a long time to retain any sense of shock when the human mind’s built-in defence mechanisms are constantly at work restoring normalcy with coat after coat of fresh paint in incrementally more soothing tones. I have to wonder if the outrage that the world feels over the Holocaust might have long ago faded into ochre had not the survivors done such a commendably effective job of reminding us year after year. It’s only unfortunate that their core intention — to prevent massive atrocities from recurring — hasn’t been as as effective.

At my newspaper I wince every time a reporter gives me a story to edit that alludes to “the December 26, 2004, tsunami”. The first thing I do is cross out the date. In almost all circumstances for these articles, the smaller ones that have occurred in this region since then simply don’t count. With absolute respect for the victims of the waves that have since pounded Sumatra, there was only one tsunami. We all remember it, and I certainly have no problem remembering the date.

There is little that’s new to say about it three years on. The operative phrase in the Thai media is “Thailand’s tourism industry, which is now fully recovered / well on its way to recovery”. Last month The Nation ran a confusing story about the Thai Red Cross and Chulalongkorn University planning — with Norway’s help, since a lot of Scandinavians died in the catastrophe — to set up “rescue centres” in the affected provinces “to restore tourists’ confidence”. The centres would train the locals in tourism services, it said without explaining, “particularly water activities [and] how to help injured people and how to use rescue equipment”.

One story that didn’t appear in The Nation was reported, though just as abysmally, by the Press Trust of India: This past December 8 the United States Agency for International Development got the relevant agencies together in Bangkok for a workshop on the Indian Ocean tsunami warning system. Delegates reported “that warning centres were now getting the information they needed [and] critical decision-making and communications protocols were in place”.

“As a result of these efforts, people feel much safer than three years ago,” the story quoted US embassy deputy chief in Bangkok James Entwistle as saying, but the account closed with this statement, also unexplained: “The workshop identified several sustainability challenges facing warning-system efforts.”

In July seven of the warning sirens set up on towers on the coast of Thailand’s Krabi province went off, frightening the daylights out of everyone. The cause of the false alarm was to be investigated. I heard nothing more. A few days earlier there had been a successful drill.

Nor was there any follow-up after American Ambassador Ralph Boyce sparked a furore in February by publicly demanding to know what happened to all the money donated to help the victims. Boyce had received no answer from the national police chief the previous November, so he tried again with the top cop’s successor. Some Bt88 million had been handed over to the agency called Thai Tsunami Disaster Victim Identification. This half-story in The Nation ended with the lament, “An inside source said it was highly likely the probe would find nothing suspicious.” There’s more!

Passingly strange that Brian Jones and Winnie-the-Pooh should share the same lodgings, the bacchanalian star of hard rock and the children’s companion who is softness defined. On the other hand, for a while they both led enchanted lives in an enchanted place, enjoying lifestyles of the sort that are never meant to last forever.

The Sussex downland, as it’s called for some good reason, even though there are many ups, has been home to lots of poets and novelists and playwrights, several of whom were fond of fairies, not least Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who would have been Brian Jones’ close neighbour in a different time.

I missed out on Winnie-the-Pooh when I was growing up. Milne’s books never found their way into my realm — though Lewis Carroll and Hans Christian Andersen did, and JM Barrie’s Peter Pan was around someplace. Later Pooh always struck me as far more juvenile that any of the others. By the time the first Disney film came out in 1966 (crazy old Uncle Walt gave all the characters American accents!), I was past cartoons and taking an interest in the enchantment of drugs.

Winnie came from the same part of Canada as me, actually, though he was from northern Ontario, I from the south. The original Winnie was an orphaned black bear cub that Harry Colebourn of the Second Canadian Infantry Brigade bought in White River, Ontario, when his regiment was on its way to Europe in 1914 to fight the Hun. Colebourn came from Winnipeg so he named the bruin Winnie.
There’s more!

It’s been weird seeing OJ Simpson back in court, but I do think the Juice is right when he says this isn’t about sticking up some souvenir collectors. The Authorities (you know who you are) want his butt in jail, period. With that going on and Phil Spector haunting the streets again, I took another look at another unsolved “celebrity murder”, although in this one the celebrity was the victim.

If Brian Jones was murdered, though, there’s a halfway decent chance that his killer was a celebrity too (or working for one), so what a story, huh?

Yes, it happened way back in 1969, but evidence keeps floating up from the bottom of the pool, as recently as a year ago this month.

Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. The shy one. No, wait a minute, that was George of the Beatles, who was merely almost murdered. Brian Jones was the blond one, gripping his guitar close to his chest as if someone was going to steal it, and never moving around much onstage, probably because he was zoned. (After he died Bill Wyman had to take over all these characteristics as well as play bass, although he refused to bleach his hair.)

When I was a boy, I’ll tell my grandson, I remember the news coming over the wireless …

The what? my grandson will say.

Shut up, I’m telling a story.

The news came on that Brian Jones had drowned in his pool! It was the summer of ‘69.

Grandson: I’ve heard that song! It’s by Bryan Adams.

Me: Different Brian altogether, so shut it.

Brian had just been sacked by the Rolling Stones, which had originally been “his” band. He put it together and he gave it the name. Most of the other guys had come down from London to his ancient farmhouse in the Sussex countryside, a rambling stone pile where Winnie-the-Pooh once lived.

I pause expectantly, but grandson hasn’t clued in.

“Winnie-the-Pooh” was a very famous children’s story written by a man named AA Milne, and he used to live on this estate, called Cotchford Farm.

Still nothing.

So Mick Jagger and the boys come down on June 8 and tell Brian, “Your services are no longer required. Here’s some money to go away.” Brian says, “You can’t fire me — I quit!” “Fair enough,” says Mick.

Grandson: Why was he sacked?

Me: Well, officially, they parted ways over a difference in musical tastes, but I’ve never understood that. Some people say Brian wanted to keep on playing the blues, which is what the Stones played when they first got together, and the other Stones wanted to try and express what they were feeling when they got very, very high on drugs …

Grandson: What kind of drugs?

Me: Never mind. But if you listen to Brian playing guitar on his albums with the Stones, he sounds just as far out as every other Stone was, and probably moreso. He was interested in World Music even way back then. He even played the sitar!

Another blank look from the floor.

And anyway, a week hadn’t passed when the Stones introduced a replacement guitarist, Mick Taylor, who’d been in John Mayall’s blues band! And Mick Jagger says, “Oh, yeah, I almost forgot: We’re doing a free concert in Hyde Park on July 5.”

So everyone buys tickets for the show, and then two days before the show, on July 3, Brian’s “found dead” in his swimming pool. “Found dead” — that’s how they put it on the news. But he was swimming with his friends, so “found” doesn’t seem like quite the right word. Maybe they weren’t really “friends”!

The coroner looked over the former Brian Jones and decided that this bloke had swallowed pills and a bunch of booze and gone for a swim and died “by misadventure”, by which the British legal system meant he was asking for trouble but hadn’t really expected to get any. Thus Brian revived for the late ’60s a once-popular tradition among the famous and the foolhardy.

The Stones gig went ahead and Jagger paid tribute to Brian by reading “Adonais”, Shelley’s elegy for John Keats — “Life, like a dome of many-colour’d glass, stains the white radiance of Eternity, until Death tramples it to fragments” — and releasing thousands of butterflies*, which unfortunately didn’t get far because there were 350,000 people at the show, all smoking marijuana, and the butterflies were all turned back into cocoons.

Grandson isn’t paying the slightest bit of attention.

Anyway, Mick went straight from there to Australia to film “Ned Kelly” but he didn’t get to become a movie star because the Stones had just released “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”, and you can’t. As if that weren’t bad enough, he made another stupid decision in November when the lads were wrapping up their American tour: He hired a motorcycle gang to keep the fans at bay at their free show at Altamont Speedway outside San Francisco, and the bikers killed a fella.

People were dropping like butterflies* around Mick.

* Some people like to say “moths”. There’s more!