Poe
The myth that there is a monument to Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore is widely believed; there are even person who, stopping off in Baltimore to eat oysters, go to look at it. As a matter of fact, no such monument exists. All that the explorer actually finds is a cheap and hideous tombstone in the corner of a Presbyterian churchyard - a tombstone quite as bad as the worst in Pere La Chaise. For twenty-six years after Poe's death there was not even this: the grave remained wholly unmarked. Poe had surviving relatives in Baltimore, and they were well-to-do. One day one of them ordered a local stonecutter to put a plain stone over the grave. The stonecutter hacked it out and was preparing to haul it to the churchyard when a runaway frieght-train smashed into his stoneyard and broke the stone to bits. Thereafter the Poes seem to have forgotten Cousin Edgar; at all events, nothing further was done.
The existing tombstone was erected by a committee of Baltimore schoolmarms, and cost about $1,000. It took the dear girls ten long years to raise the money. They started out with a "literary entertainment" which yielded $380. This was in 1865. Six years later the fund had made such slow progress that, with accumulated interest, it came to but $587.02. Three years more went by: it now reached $627.55. Then some anonymous Poeista came down with $100, two others gave $50 each, one of the devoted schoolmarms raised $52 in nickels and dimes, and George W. Childs agreed to pay any remaining deficit. During all this time not a single American author of position gave any aid. And when, finally, a stone was carved and set up and the time came for an unveiling, the only one who appeared at the ceremony was Walt Whitman. All the other persons present were Baltimore nobodies - chiefly shool teachers and preachers. There were three set speeches - one by the principal of a local high school, the second by a teacher in the same seminary, and the third by a man who was invited to give his "personal recollections" of Poe, but who announced in his third sentence that "I never saw Poe but once, and our interview did not last an hour."
This was the gaudiest Poe celebration ever held in America. The poet has never enjoyed such august posthumous attentions as those which lately flattered the shade of James Russell Lowell. At his actual burial, in 1849, exactly eight persons were present, of whome six were relatives. He was planted, as I have said, in a Presbyterian churchyard, among generations of honest believers in infant damnation, but the officiating clergyman was a Methodist. Two days after his death a Baptist gentleman of God, the illustrious Rufus W. Griswold, printed a defamator article upon him in the New York Tribune, and for years it set the tone of native criticism of him. And so he rests: thrust among Presbyterians by a Methodist and formally damned by a Baptist.
From H.L. Mencken's selected Prejudices - bits and pieces plucked from his immense and voluminous larger work. This one happens to have a lovely cover by Paul Rand.
There's a rather absurdist story in there to be written. A handful of seeds in a notebook from last year that are currently waiting for soil and sun: Man (straight teeth, bland warddrobe, divorced, constant gastroenteritis, thin wrists) attends a seminar at work explaining the benefits of a sundry of insurance policies offered by his employer for both long term assistance in the event of a disability and a new policy that is a sort of future funeral plan. Man begins to contemplate his own funeral, trading options and staging the lighting and so on. Never one to succomb to vanity, he begins to worry about his recent bout of introspection and cannot turn from the light he begins to shed on his own self when imagining his many possible ends. But what if it is a sudden and accidental death? That would require a much, much different ceremony. But what if it is a long life followed by slow separation from the earth thus outliving all friends and relatives? It spirals outward into many loose threads while knotting inward. He should die, in the story, of course. He does, but only slightly, and hangs around (hovers above?) to watch the disgusting spectacle that is assembled against every one of his wishes (due to a mistake in his paperwork) by those that knew him. Even the flowers are all wrong. "Oh, he'd've loved this!" they might say, while gnashing food between their teeth and missing a person they hardly knew.
Mainly, though, that bit of Mencken was an absolutely astounding gem among many lesser jewels. Just the right mix of poor circumstance, insensitive outsiders, and an eternally sad little victim; the makings of a wonderful story.
