‘A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe’
By Mark Dawidziak
St. Martin’s Press, 288 pages

There will never be enough biographies of Edgar Allan Poe, as Mark Dawidziak’s title suggests. Here is a biography that does not purport to solve the mystery of its subject’s death but to make the mystery more mysterious: A delirious Poe was discovered at Baltimore on October 3, 1849, and died four days later, unable to give an account of what had happened to him. 

Mr. Dawidziak reports that at last count at least 22 theories have been advanced on how and why Poe died at age 40. By the end of his book, the biographer does disclose which hypothesis he favors, but it would not be nice of me to share what it is.

While dissecting the major theories of Poe’s death and the days that led up to it, Mr. Dawidziak provides the crucial details of the writer’s upbringing, career, and private life. For one, Poe suffered the debilitating effects of alcohol and seemed especially susceptible to inebriation even after just one drink, but the evidence for dipsomania as the proximate cause of his death is problematic.

Also ruled out, or held in abeyance, are the adherents of mercury poisoning, environmental pollutants, brain fever (the catch-all term of the time), diabetes, influenza, hypoglycemia, epilepsy, apoplexy, an enzyme deficiency, liver disease, and meningeal inflammation due to a viral or bacterial infection.

What is the point, you might wonder, of this survey of so much supposition? Many diagnoses, as Mr. Dawidziak points out, depend on a reading of Poe’s character, first denigrated after his death by the infamous Rufus Griswold, who fabricated the myth of Poe as drug addict and immoralist.

Aided by movies, Poe in the popular imagination has the reputation for being as mad as the characters in his phantasmagorical fiction, Mr. Dawidziak shows. That Poe was nothing like these portrayals — of a febrile genius holed up in the dreadful hollow of his own demented sensibility — will come as no surprise to Poe scholars.

Indeed, Mr. Dawidziak’s book is stoutly buoyed by his continual discussion of Poe scholarship. Consequently, we have an informed sense of entering into a world of thinking about Poe, as the biographer consults the Poe adepts and aficionados who have done so much to separate fact and fiction.

“A Mystery of Mysteries” hones in on the last three years of Poe’s life, in which his physical deterioration is evident in several daguerreotypes.  This Poe is a sight different from the athletic, robust figure with a military bearing that impressed his contemporaries.

What seems evident — no matter what diseases may have contributed to Poe’s decline and death — is his penchant for self-defeat. He could ruin a triumph by indulging in the legal drugs of the day, including laudanum (powdered opium dissolved in alcohol), or by insulting even his benefactors and leaving himself in parlous circumstances, deprived of nourishment.

Poe never seems to have doubted his genius — not only his tales of grotesque and arabesque but also his exquisite poetry and prescient literary criticism. It irked him that the world paid so little attention to his achievement, and that he was reduced to soliciting help from family members, friends, and editors of the magazines that employed him.

At this late date, it is probably not necessary to point out that Poe, a consummate craftsman, did not write while drunk or under the influence of other drugs. Mr. Dawidziak shows that Poe had no need of stimulants other than his own imagination and reason, which produced those tales of ratiocination that had such profound impact on Arthur Conan Doyle and the other creators of mystery and detective fiction.

A word also has to be said about “Eureka,” a book Poe regarded as his masterpiece, and which perhaps does not get enough attention in an account of the mystery of mysteries. In that book about cosmogony, Poe went beyond crime solving to take on the riddle of the universe’s creation.

Bear “Eureka” in mind when reading “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which has as its subtext a dread not merely of death but of the very idea of dissolution — the mystery of mysteries, which like Poe’s own, links life and death in what “Eureka” posits as part of one irreversible process.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Biography.”