The Raven, a highly enjoyable piece of gothic hokum, purports to reveal the truth about Edgar Allan Poe’s last days, but it begins with a statement that’s patently false. After a mysterious disappearance, the opening title informs us, Poe was found delirious on a park bench in Baltimore on October 7, 1849. Director James McTeigue fades in on a close-up of the title bird, perched on a tree branch above the ailing Poe (John Cusack), and the eerie image is typical of a movie that favors macabre atmosphere over established fact (or even common sense). The record shows that Poe turned up in Baltimore not on a park bench on October 7 but in a building called Gunner’s Hall on October 3, and clung to life for four days before he gave up the ghost at age 40. The Raven is hardly the first wild story to spring up around Poe’s death, though; for years his biographers indulged their imaginations as much as he ever did.
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Nobody knows what happened to Poe between the morning of September 27, when he left Richmond, Virginia, for a business trip to New York City, and October 3, when a printer named Joseph Walker encountered him at Gunner’s Hall and summoned help. The first published account of Poe’s last days came from Rufus Griswold, a Philadelphia editor and critic, whose biographical essay “Memoir of the Author” appeared in an 1850 collection of Poe’s works. “Arriving in Baltimore,” wrote Griswold, “he gave his trunk to a porter, with directions to convey it to the cars which were to leave in an hour or two for Philadelphia, and went into a tavern to obtain some refreshment. Here he met acquaintances who invited him to drink; all his resolutions and duties were soon forgotten; in a few hours he was in such a state as is commonly induced only by long-continued intoxication.”
Adding to the multiplicity of stories, a physician named John J. Moran, who’d attended Poe on his deathbed, came forward in 1875 to claim that Poe had not been drunk or suffering from delirium tremens. “He succumbed to an overdose of opium,” Moran told the New York Herald, “which he had taken to allay the excitement of his very sensitive nervous system.” Moran’s continual embroidering of Poe’s last days has been widely attacked, and Walsh considers his story a whitewash, given that tincture of opium was then a socially acceptable over-the-counter drug. But Poe’s medical records have not survived, and over the years his death has been attributed to everything from diabetes to syphilis to epilepsy to cholera to heart disease to lead or mercury poisoning. After carefully debunking the major theories about Poe’s death, Walsh goes bananas in his last chapter with a wildly speculative tale in which Poe is ambushed in Baltimore by his fiancee’s three brothers and force-fed a fatal bottle of whiskey.
Directed by James McTeigue
