THE POE TOASTER IS NOT MARK FELT

Baltimore, Maryland--Does anyone really believe this man is the real "Poe toaster"? He might be, but the press is acting too credulous here. This writer grants that his age of 92 fits the timeline--the mysterious visitor to Poe's, Virginia Clemm's, and her mother's grave, reportedly began his cognac toasts to the dead on January 19th of 1949 (on the 100th anniversary of Poe's peculiar death).

This is interesting, since it signifies both Poe's birth and death. I have known of the Poe toaster since 1982, and the story has always been that an older, frail man began his vigils in 1949, but Sam Porpora--a "Poe historian"--is saying he began in 1967. Ostensibly, it was to save a nearby church by bringing in tourists, which sounds dodgy. Does this all sound familiar?

The claim is hard to verify, especially considering by most accounts the so-called “Poe Toaster” has been visiting the grave since 1949. Jeff Jerome, curator of the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum in Baltimore, said it started in 1949, but he started watching for the mystery man in 1977. “I drove to the cemetery that morning, and lo and behold there were roses and liquor there. I just about collapsed. I couldn’t believe it was still going on,” he said. (The Examiner, 08.15.2007)

Do you think Mr. Porpora ever enjoyed telling his grandchildren there was no Santa? To be polite, it might be added here that old men sometimes claim to be something they are not as the years go by, particularly in taverns. But it all has an air of Mark Felt's self-outing as the legendary "Deep Throat" who informed Bob Woodward on the Watergate break-in at a parking garage.

As we know, Felt was no hero, but a man who had felt spurned by the appointment of Patrick Gray as director of the FBI after the timely death of J. Edgar Hoover in 1972. Seeing the timeline better now?

At 92, you might feel that you never left your mark on the world.

Porpora's claim is very lofty and should be viewed with some suspicion, particularly the aspect where he claims to have begun the practice in 1967. This writer is unaware of any account of the Poe toaster where this year is given as the starting-date. Maybe it is true, maybe it is not, but not one article on this story appears to have any real foundation for the claim, just the man's word.

In recent years, a number of bumbling morons have tried to unmask the stranger, without any luck. Many have been chased out of the Westminster Burying Grounds. Good show. The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore contends that the Poe toaster pre-dates 1967:

Since 1949, on the night of the anniversary of Poe's birth, a mysterious stranger has entered this cemetery and left as tribute a partial bottle of cognac and three roses on Poe's grave. The identity of the stranger, referred to affectionately as the Poe Toaster, is unknown. The significance of cognac is uncertain as it does not feature in Poe's works as would, for example, amontillado. The presumption for the three roses is that it represents the three persons whose remains are beneath the monument: Poe, his mother-in-law (Maria Clemm) and his wife Virginia. Out of respect, no attempt is made to stop or hinder him. Several of the bottles of cognac from prior years are on display in the Baltimore Poe House and Museum. (http://www.eapoe.org/balt/poegrave.htm)

Why 1967? Because he is mistaken in his contention? Or is it that he is just someone else who began another passing of the torch that year? There could be a half-truth here--a mystery--that appropriately extends what is hidden here. Legends die hard. It is unlikely that Mr. Porpora's "confession" will end the Occult nature of this story, nor should it. Life should have some mysteries to it, and sometimes it is a necessary food for the human soul. We do not need to understand everything. The nature of things is to hide their nature.

If thine eye offends thee... : http://www.examiner.com/a-881772~Poe_historian__I_started__toasting__tradition.html

Masters of Horror: The Black Cat DVD (2006) review

"I've read two or three biographies of his, and one of the things that really interested me is that he's a Southerner. A lot of people don't think of him that way. He wasn't even from Baltimore. I mean, there's a football team named after him and he spent some time in Baltimore, but his formative years were spent in Richmond, Virginia, and in England. Richmond, Virginia is where he came from. During his entire literary career, he had to go where the work was, which was Philadelphia and New York. At the time, this was ten years before the Civil War, all that tension between the North and South didn't come out of nowhere." --Jeffrey Combs (UGO.com, 2006?)

I cannot fathom it, but somehow, some way, Stuart Gordon just improves as a director with each film. This is the atypical view of movie making, which usually tells us that a director does their best work when they're in their 30s-40s. It's being trashed here, in what is the best translation-to-screen of Edgar Allan Poe's short story, "The Black Cat" to date.

Gordon and his frequent co-writer Dennis Paoli have given us a wonderful gift: the finest version of a Poe tale, and an illuminating look at the misery that was his life (though tinged with a little joy). Besides his screenwriting work with Gordon, Paoli is a noted Poe scholar, and even star Jeffrey Combs did an enormous amount of research into our greatest writer's peculiar life. This is evident in the use of Poe's favorite song throughout the film, as well as the little details such as his continued wearing of his West Point jacket (its silken-lining worn inside-out--he was expelled from the academy for gambling).

By now, most Americans understand how horrific the 1840s were, largely-thanks to Martin Scorsese's "Gangs of New York." A good dose of Poe's horror springs from his own specific time-and-place, and his constant displacements weren't uncommon. The vast-majority of Americans were impoverished at this time, slavery was still firmly in-place, the frontier was still young and dangerous, the Indian wars were still raging (with the trail of tears coming during Poe's last years), there was rampant criminality and banditry, rampant corruption, rigged elections, labor violence, unhygienic conditions, an impending war with Mexico, extreme contentions over immigration, and much more. It was a bloody time that echoes our own.

Therefore, it should be unsurprising that horror is popular again, as it would be by the end of Poe's lifetime. America is horror. Contrary to popular belief, Edgar Allan Poe was experiencing reasonable success as a writer at the time of his mysterious disappearance--and reappearance--in Baltimore during October of 1849. He was the only show in town who wrote tales of horror and of the fantastic.

If you've read the short story, you'll know that it's rarely been done well. There are a number of them that literally have nothing to do with the original, and several elements are generally left-out due to how graphic the original short story still is, even today. Edgar J. Ulmer's 1934 version is great, but it's not the same story at all. The same can be said for Lucio Fulci's 1981 film. Roger Corman's take is much closer, but couldn't show us a number of crucial actions (the removal of the cat's eye with a penknife, as well as the protagonist burying an axe in his wife's brain).

The Argento version in "Two Evil Eyes" (1990) has been one of the best until this version. Simply doing the story proud would have been enough, but Gordon and Paoli did-one-better--they fused the facts of Poe's tortured life with the tale itself! This elevates this film to that of a timeless classic, and it's unlikely to be outdone anytime soon, if ever. Coupled with this, cinematographer Jon Joffin's photography is just breathtaking, with a sepia-tone look of an old 19th century tintype. The only tinges of color we see are scant, usually being blood & alcohol, as well as a cat's eye. The effect is dramatic, and the end-result is genuine horror.

Poe's life with Virginia Clemm--his first cousin--was only troubled by their poverty and her tuberculosis, and their love for each other was uninterrupted by her untimely death. She is the muse of "The Raven," and "Annabel Lee," the ghost that would haunt him until the day he died. One could imagine that even in his last moments of delirium, he was thinking of her. Death would not part them, even after Poe remarried and continued to write. The cat in his short story is the guilt and the specter of death (hence, the name "Pluto," the lord of the underworld and death) that haunted he and Virginia throughout their poverty-stricken years together, and she was one of his great champions.

Their love was unconditional, a rarity in this life, but also a part of that romantic "Southern gentility" of the time that would be felled by the Civil War. Poe, after all, was a Southern "gentleman," and part of a fallen aristocracy (like Lovecraft, though he was of Rhode Island extraction) that didn't understand the new industrial order arising in the Northern and Eastern states. He was of a dying feudal order, a pre-capitalist romantic watching his world die. No tears should be shed for the ending of slavery, but other great things were lost in the destruction of the Antebellum South.

This is probably part of why we got such stories of decline and decay from Poe. He was seeing a lot of it during his lifetime, and the beginnings of what he would have rightly seen as a horrible new order in America (you don't have to be a Marxist to dislike bourgeois capitalism). Poe had other problems--mental ones. Jeffrey Combs captures Poe's self-destructive perversity well, and it's going to be a surprise to many how truly Southern his portrayal of the writer's dialect is. But what may come as the greatest surprise is just how tortured his imagination was, and we get some great references to "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Telltale Heart," and more, woven throughout the biographical details and The Black Cat's plot.

Poe had an interesting insight into the minds of killers, and The Black Cat seems very prescient today, considering the link between animal torture that has been found in the biographies of serial killers. Viewers will meet an Edgar Allan Poe that they never knew existed, and hopefully, they will grow to empathize with his difficult life (and those of the living). This isn't one for the squeamish. It's pretty bloody, and filled with madness and obsession--it is Poe in all his glory, and our ongoing American nightmare. Bravo.