Man Who Was Poe, The

Genre: Fiction
Publication Date: 1989

About the Author

Overview

Setting

Themes and Characters

Literary Qualities

Social Sensitivity

Topics and Discussions

Ideas for Reports and Papers

Related Titles/Adaptations

For Further Reference

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Avi has dysgraphia, a handicap that affects his writing: He transposes words and letters. His manuscripts are often covered with red marks that indicate corrections in syntax and spelling. When his dysgraphia was diagnosed, he was told that he would never become a writer, but Avi had always been an avid reader, and in spite of once flunking out of school because of his bad writing, he strived to become a writer. In the meantime, he took up another seemingly unlikely career, that of librarian.

After earning Bachelor's and Master's degrees in 1959 and 1962 from the University of Wisconsin, he earned a Master's in Library Science from Columbia University. He worked as a librarian in the Performing Arts Research Center at the New York Public Library from 1962-70, then as an assistant professor and librarian at Trenton State College (New Jersey) from 1970-86.

While attending Antioch University, before going to the University of Wisconsin, he avoided English courses but took playwriting courses. He had a strong-minded teacher who showed how to put together a plot and how to develop characters, and Avi credits him with providing a structural foundation for his own writings.

He was born Avi (pronounced Ah-vee) Wortis in New York City on December 23, 1937, into an artistic family. His father was a psychiatrist and his mother a social worker, both of whom loved the arts and populated their home with books. Avi's relatives includes other artists and writers, and he seems to have been part of lively discussions of arts and artistic enterprises all of his life. Further, he had a great attachment to books, saying that he learned more from reading on his own than he did in school. His love of the written word transcended his dysgraphia and the efforts of his elders to discourage him from pursuing writing as a career.

His becoming a librarian may have been a compromise between his passion for reading and his difficulty writing clear prose, although he wrote plays continually. On November 1,1963, he married Joan Gabriner (they later divorced) and they had two children. Avi found himself telling his children stories, letting them pick a subject. Out of this grew his career as a writer for young readers. Slowly, he was able to illustrate other writers' books, then illustrate his own books, and then move on beyond picture books to long fiction for young adults and middle-school youngsters. His picture books brought him renown, and he quickly became anthologized in textbooks on children's literature.

He has won a number of awards, and in 1990, The Man Who Was Poe was a Library of Congress best book. Avi lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with his wife Coppelia (nee Kahn), a college professor; he sets much of his fiction in Providence, as he does the events of The Man Who Was Poe.

OVERVIEW

In Providence, Rhode Island, in the late 1840s, a boy and his sister have been abandoned by their aunt and are going hungry after a few day without food. The have come from London in search of their mother, who disappeared after coming to America. The boy, Edmund Brimmer, leaves his sister locked in their rooms while fetching some food. When he returns, the door is still locked, but his sister, Sis, is gone. He wanders the streets in search of help and bumps into an odd man who calls himself Auguste Dupin, who says he will solve the mysteries of the missing sister, aunt, and mother. Dupin is brilliant, quick to draw conclusions from small clues, but there are disturbing parallels between what he says of his own family and the family of Edmund—parallels all ending in death.

SETTING

The Man Who Was Poe is set in the port city of Providence. It is recreated by Avi in rich images of old neighborhoods and wooden ships that traded with the other ports of the world. Woven into the images of the city are historical figures such as Edgar Allan Poe and Mrs. Whitman, the woman he hoped to marry. Fog plays an important role in events, hiding or disguising figures who move about dark streets and across the city's piers.

THEMES AND CHARACTERS

The character in The Man Who Was Poe who is likely to spark the most interest is Edgar Allan Poe, the author who is often regarded as the greatest short story writer of all. The facts of his life are disputed; he did not help matters by sensationalizing some of his life in his letters. After his death, those who first wrote of his life, especially Rufus W. Griswold, Poe's literary executor, depicted him in a bad light. They did this to to sully his reputation—of which they were envious—but also to sell newspapers, sensational stories attracting large audiences then as they do now.

Poe was depicted as man thrown out of the army for drunkenness, as is mentioned in The Man Who Was Poe, and as a drug abuser whose drug-induced delusions inspired his tales and poems such as "The Raven." There seems little room for doubt that he did sometimes behave oddly in public, stumbling as if drunk, and he did have trouble holding down jobs, although was a good and moderately successful newspaper editor for many years. Beginning with Arthur Hobson Quinn's Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography, published in 1941, researchers began to reassess Poe's life; Quinn pointed out significant flaws in the depictions of Poe's dissolution.

Since the mid-1970s, information has come to light that suggests that Poe was actually a fine, robust military officer who had to end his military career because illness. Medicine was barely becoming a science in Poe's day, and few physicians had a clue as to what was wrong with him, although modern researchers suggest that he had multiple sclerosis, a disease that often has its first onset when its victim is an adult, and which comes and goes, allowing its victim to speak and move about normally, sometimes for long periods, before resurfacing and restricting its victim's speech and mobility. In addition, there is evidence that Poe was allergic to alcohol and rarely touched it. Thus the alternative view of Poe is of a man who fought a poorly understood, debilitating disease with remarkable achievements, and who was far from being a whimpering man lost in a haze of drugs and alcohol, being instead a strong man of strong purpose who worked hard and responsibly all of his life. His death has been alternately described as the result of a prolonged drinking binge and the result of a seizure which left him prostrate and unable to coordinate his movements, leaving him to be made so ill by exposure to cold that he died shortly after being discovered. Those in favor of the latter view cite his recent marriage to a woman he had been unable to marry when young because he was poor and her father was rich and rejected him; he had every reason to live and to behave himself.

Regardless as to which view of Poe is true, Avi has chosen the traditional image of Poe as a tormented personality haunted by the deaths of close family members and of his wife. When Edmund meets him, Poe is in the throes of a delusion, and Edmund seems like a demon to him. Edmund's mystery may serve as a focus for Poe's mind, because he seems to straighten himself and grasp the reality of the situation. That he chooses to be his great fictional detective Auguste Dupin may be his way of pushing his inner demons aside; Dupin has the ability to focus his mind on facts and to exclude distractions. Poe declares himself to be Dupin and tries to behave as his character would. Too lost in his alcohol addiction, Poe is not able to stay focused for long, but he tends to think of himself as Dupin when alert and as Poe when drunk.

Edmund seems to be his best link to reality; the boy's problems excite his imagination and energize him, making him move when he might otherwise remain torpid. Edmund Brimmer is from London, England. His father died years ago and his mother then married Mr. Rachett, who took all her money and fled to America, where he used the stolen resources to pose as a well-to-do gentleman. At the opening of The Man Who Was Poe, Edmund is a docile, very obedient boy. He and his sister have gone hungry for a couple of days while waiting for their aunt to return, as she told them not to leave. Edmund spends much of the book reminding himself of his aunt's rules that tell him never to question adults and to accept that adults know what is best for children. As he struggles to keep "Dupin" active and himself fed and alive, he learns to take charge of himself. It is a sometimes painful process, but he learns to stand for himself and to trust in his own ability to think. His diving into the bay to rescue his sister is therefore not only a daring and heroic action, it symbolizes his break with the voices of grownups telling him what he cannot do.

Asa Throck and Fortnoy are significant figures, serving at first as red herrings (characters meant to mislead readers away from the real villains). Poe finds them looking at the body of a woman who may be Edmund's aunt or mother (they were twins and only Edmund can tell them apart); they match descriptions of a large man and a white-haired man who used an apartment to spy on Edmund and his sister. Eventually, Fortnoy proves to have been unable to have been the murderer, providing the crucial clue that allows "Dupin" to declare confidently, "Yes, I understand all." Throck plays an important role in the thwarting of the criminals' plans to escape with stolen gold, and he helps Edmund at a crucial time. He is well motivated and remains in character and is no last-minute savior. He wants the reward money for finding the missing woman, and he wants a good word from Edmund to his superiors; his interest all along has not only been in the money but in taking pride in his work, declaring often that he "sees it through" when he takes a job.

The villains themselves are not on stage much, but they are intertwined in the lives of Poe and Edmund. Rachett has been posing as Mr. Arnold, a man of a respected Providence family, and he has been courting Mrs. Whitman, Poe's love. Poe offers Mrs. Whitman an exciting intellectual life, a life of poetry and romance; Arnold offers money (which, as Rachett, he stole). Arnold is also Edmund's step-father. The presence of Edmund's mother in Providence creates problems for a man who intends to marry again; he will give her the divorce she wants, but he will not return her money. Squeamish, he will not do his own killing, but has another kill his wife for him (making a mistake when doing it). The children are merely tools for him. He kidnaps the first one who is left alone in the apartment, Sis, and forces her to help him steal the gold. A clever planner, he makes both the kidnapping and the theft of the gold seem impossible, not realizing that his rival in love, Poe, will find out his crime and prove more than a match for him in cleverness.

LITERARY QUALITIES

The Man Who Was Poe resembles a play, with its events taking place in discreet scenes such as Edmund's room and the cemetery; each setting serves as a stage, limiting the action to its boundaries. Within each setting are clues to be discovered. At first it is the mysterious Dupin (Poe) who spots the important details and interprets them, but the logic he uses seems to be a habit of thinking, because Edmund picks up on it and eventually is able to identify clues and make some conclusions of his own. Organizing The Man Who Was Poe as if it were a drama gives the novel a strong you-are-there tone, with characters and clues standing out in high relief from scene to scene, making the settings and people easy to visualize.

SOCIAL SENSITIVITY

The Edgar Allan Poe of The Man Who Was Poe is an alcoholic whose heavy drinking makes him abusive and delusional—he frequently mistakes people for the spirits of the dead. His alcoholism is ruining his life, making him seem like a lowlife to many who meet him. His emotional intensity is almost like insanity, wherein he imagines amazing events in his surroundings, but this socially acceptable artistic temperament is distorted by his alcoholic hazes, and he often forgets what he has been doing. As a portrait of how alcohol abuse can destroy even a great mind, Avi's Poe is a striking figure—one unlikely to make alcohol abuse appear to be anything better than stupid, and often downright sickening.

TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Why would Edmund choose to trust Dupin?
2. Why would Edmund not be able to go to the police?
3. If Poe was the half crazed alcoholic that he seems to be in The Man Who Was Poe, would that mean his writings would not be worth reading? Does a writer's character matter when onë reads his work?
4. Why does Poe insist that Sis must die?
5. Why can Poe not tell the difference between one of his tales and real life? Why does Edmund stick with him when it is clear that Poe has trouble telling the difference?
6. Is Avi fair to Poe? Is there any way you can tell?
7. What does Poe mean by "Lies have their own truth"? Why is it important to Edmund?
8. Why does Mr. Arnold (also Rachett) want to marry Mrs. Whitman even after stealing the gold?
9. If you did not know from the start that Auguste Dupin was a fictional character created by Poe, would The Man Who Was Poe still be fun to read?
10. Why is Poe reluc'ant to explain to Edmund what is going on?

IDEAS FOR REPORTS AND PAPERS

1. At present, there are two competing images of Poe the man. One depicts him as a dissolute alcoholic and drug abuser whose tales evoked his sexual fantasies. The other says that he was beset by a genetic disease, and that he was a strong, determined man whose reputation was ruined by people who disliked him. Why the disagreement? What is the evidence, either way?
2. Who is Poe's Auguste Dupin? Where may he be found? What is his historical importance? What is his importance to literature?
3. Edmund's Providence has a system of law enforcement that seems very different from modern ones. The events of The Man Who Was Poe take place between 1847 and 1849. How was law enforcement organized in Providence at that time? Where would Throck fit in?
4. Why would Edmund's mother have to come to America from London to get a divorce?
5. How close does The Man Who Was Poe come to reading like Poe's stories of Auguste Dupin? Does the character Poe use techniques similar to those of Dupin?
6. Where does Avi do his better work, in historical novels such as The Man Who Was Poe or in modern realistic novels such as Nothing but the Truth?
7. A few of Poe's stories of detection are mentioned in The Man Who Was Poe. Which ones? What is each about? Why would each stir the imaginations of readers, maybe even making them want to become detectives themselves?
8. Avi says that Poe died "under mysterious circumstances." What were these circumstances? What causes of death have been suggested? Which seems most probable?
9. Why is Edmund deferential to grownups? What were the customs regarding the relationships between youngsters and grownups in his day? What does it mean for his characterization when he questions Poe's conclusions and even, at the climax, defies him?
10. Throck and Fortnoy resemble the villains and are mistaken for them. In mystery writing, this makes them "red herrings," meaning characters meant to misdirect attention from the real guilty parties. What other techniques typical of mysteries are in The Man Who Was Poe?
11. Mr. Fortnoy is a watchman for ships in port. What was this profession and what were its duties? Is it still a profession in Providence or elsewhere?

RELATED TITLES

Avi has written several historical novels for young people, with eighteenth-century America being of particular interest to him. For instance, The Fighting Ground is an account of a day in the life of a thirteen-yearold boy during the Revolutionary War. His experience of battle is harrowing and dispels his romantic notions of combat. Since 1987, Avi's historical fiction has tended to focus on his adopted home town, Providence. In 1988, he set his ghost story Something Upstairs in Providence; where the ghost of a slave haunts an old house. The ghosts in The Man Who Was Poe are imaginary, products of Poe's feverish, alcohol-clouded mind, but in The Man Who Was Poe, Avi captures some of what early nineteenth-century Providence was like. The Man Who Was Poe also indicates some of Avi's interest in the history of seamanship: There is a daring chase across bay waters in a storm. In 1977's Captain Grey, a boy is kidnapped by pirates, and the novel indicates Avi's early interest in the sea. He revisits the sea more sweepingly in The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, 1991, in which a young woman learns to take charge of her life while surviving a mutiny, storms, and other dangers.

More Books by This Author:

Night Journeys, 1979
Encounter at Easton, 1980
Man from the Sky, 1980
The History of Helpless Harry, 1980
A Place Called Ugly, 1981
Who Stole the Wizard of Oz? 1981
Sometimes I Think I Hear My Name, 1982
Shadrach's Crossing, 1983
The Fighting Ground, 1984
Devil's Race, 1984
S.O.R. Losers, 1984
Bright Shadow, 1985
Wolf Rider, 1986
Romeo and Juliet—Together (and Alive!) at Last, 1988
Something Upstairs, 1988
The Man Who Was Poe, 1989
The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, 1991
Windcatcher, 1991
Nothing but the Truth, 1991
Who Was That Masked Man, Anyway? 1992
Blue Heron, 1992
Judy with Punch, 1993
The Barn, 1994
Tom, Babette and Simon: Three Tales of Transformation, 1995
Finding Providence: The Story of Roger Williams, 1997
What Do Fish Have to Do with Any-thing? (short stories) 1997
Perloo the Bold, 1998