Maryland

May 23-25, 1997: Baltimore

We came to Baltimore for the American Literature Association's national conference, where scholars from the United States and other countries congregate to discuss strategies for interpreting and teaching works by Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and dozens of other American writers. After arriving Friday morning, we went to lunch at Edgar's Billiards Club, one of the many local businesses that capitalize on Edgar Allan Poe's association with Baltimore. Although we went to the restaurant just for fun, we actually found some interesting items on display, including a copy of a drawing of Poe's wife, Virginia, and a poem that she wrote for him a year before her death. I was amused to see that the original drawing of Virginia is stored at the Lilly Library on the Indiana University campus in Bloomington. I studied English at IU for four years, but didn't come across this treasure until I wandered into a billiards club in Baltimore.

After lunch, I went right to work, serving as chairman of a session on Thomas Wolfe at the conference. My professor and friend Joe Flora asked me to run the session on Wolfe, who grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The four speakers I introduced all provided helpful perspectives on reading Wolfe's work. I particularly enjoyed a presentation by John Griffin, who recently has published Memories of Thomas Wolfe: A Pictorial Companion to Look Homeward, Angel. Using a slide projector, Griffin shared photographs from Wolfe's family and talked about the people in them. Lisa and I had been reading Look Homeward, Angel, which is highly autobiographical, on the way up to Baltimore, and I really enjoyed seeing the family members he describes in the book, as well as learning more about them. In the novel, for example, Wolfe describes the character Eugene Gant's long, curly hair. Griffin showed us a picture of Wolfe when he was about 10 years old, and, surely enough, there are those long, curling tresses framing his small face.

While I was busy with Wolfe, Lisa shopped at some of the numerous stores around the Inner Harbor. We then returned to our hotel room, which offered a great view of Oriole Park at Camden Yards, where the Baltimore Orioles play. The Orioles were not in town that weekend, but we already had seen a game at the stadium, which is a beautiful and fun place to watch baseball. While Lisa rested, I explored downtown Baltimore, which is celebrating the bicentennial of its incorporation as a city this year. Although Maryland was settled by Native Americans thousands of years ago and by Europeans in the 17th century, the city of Baltimore is much younger. In 1752, it had only about 100 settlers. It grew rapidly, however, and by 1800 was the third largest city in the United States. Between 1800 and 1850, it was the site of booming industry, particularly in the areas of cabinetry and silversmithing. Canals and the Baltimore and Ohio railroad allowed merchants in Baltimore to make a living selling goods to the rural residents who lived farther from the sea.

I started my walking tour at the Shot Tower, an unusual structure build in 1829. Before the Civil War, workers made shot here by climbing up to the top, 234 feet above the ground, and pouring molten lead through sieves. Thanks to the laws of physics, the drops became spherical while falling and then cooled and solidified when they hit the water at the bottom of the tower.

While in this area, I also walked by the house where a woman named Mary Pickersgill sewed the flag that later would fly over nearby Fort McHenry and inspire Francis Scott Key to write "The Star-Spangled Banner." Circling back toward the north, I came across the Baltimore City Life Museums and couldn't resist taking a picture of the giant statue of "Nipper," RCA's mascot, which sits in the museums' courtyard. A guard explained that the sculpture used to sit atop the RCA building in Baltimore. The rest of America knows Nipper from RCA's decades-old logo of a dog listening to a Victrola, accompanied by a caption reading "His master's voice"--or perhaps from the more recent television commercials featuring both adult and puppy versions of Nipper watching a big-screen TV. Lisa and I have been in love with Nipper even since we saw one of those commercials.

Walking further, I stumbled upon St. Vincent de Paul Church, an impressive white building with a tall, cylindrical tower. Although the building goes back only to 1841, when it was dedicated, the congregation that meets here is the oldest Catholic parish church in America. Maryland, which England's King Charles I gave to Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, as a haven for Roman Catholics in 1632, has a rich Catholic history. In fact, a few blocks away I visited the stunning Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, America's first Roman Catholic Cathedral. Finally, I stopped by the striking Baltimore City Hall before returning to the hotel.

For dinner, we took a water taxi across the Inner Harbor to Fells Point, where we had an excellent Italian meal at Piccolo's. In fact, we probably had a little too much. When the waiter asked if he could bring us anything else, Lisa said: "A stretcher." He didn't get the joke. After dinner, we took a walk around the community of Fell's Point, which was settled in 1730. For decades, William Fell and other shipbuilders prospered here, making sloops, frigates, and Baltimore clippers, which became infamous in England for their ability to outmaneuver British vessels. After taking the water taxi back to the Inner Harbor, we explored a few stores in the shopping area and then returned to our hotel for the night.

We awoke early Saturday morning to attend another ALA session, "Writing and Rewriting the Frontier Experience in Early America." This time Lisa, who likes to read diaries and other accounts of women settling the American frontier, joined me. We both enjoyed the first speaker, who discussed the role of eating in Mary Rowlandson's 18th-century account of her captivity by Indians, as well as the second speaker, who analyzed the use of Pocahontas as a domestic icon by 18th-century Americans.

After breakfast, Lisa took a brief siesta at the hotel while I visited the Maryland Historical Society's museum, a fascinating collection of art, crafts, furniture, and other materials relevant to Maryland's history, such as ornate silver tea sets crafted by Baltimore silversmiths in the early 19th century, enormous and beautiful wardrobes attributed to noted cabinet-maker William Camp, a dollhouse that belonged to H.L. Mencken and his brothers, and several paintings by Charles Wilson Peale, Rembrandt Peale, Sarah Miriam Peale, Cornelius De Beet, Thomas Sully, and Joshua Johnson, the first black American to work as a professional portrait artist. One of the museum's highlights is the room devoted to the War of 1812. Here I saw the manuscript of "The Star-Spangled Banner," which Francis Scott Key wrote in Baltimore in 1814 after American forces successfully repelled British forces attacking nearby Fort McHenry. The manuscript shows a revision that Key made in his famous first line, changing "through the dawn's early light" to "by the dawn's early light." The room also contains a large painting of the Battle of Baltimore, along with a note and a video presentation explaining that local militia and volunteers defeated England's navy, the most powerful in the world.

We had lunch in one of the most beautiful parts of Baltimore, Mount Vernon Square. Similar to DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C., Mount Vernon Square is an appealing collection of tasteful sculptures, lawn, park benches, elegant rowhouses, interesting restaurants, and Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church, a striking Gothic church constructed in 1874. At the center of the square is a monument topped by a statue of George Washington. I later found the following story behind the monument in a brochure called Walk Mount Vernon Park:: "When Baltimoreans proposed this tall column in 1809, it was extraordinary--no American city had dreamed of anything like it. But the first proposed site, downtown, made residents afraid it might fall on their rowhouses. So it arose here in remote Howard's Woods, land given by one of Gen. Washington's officers, Col. John Eager Howard. Rising 178 feet on a hill 100 feet above sea level, it became a landmark for ships sailing upriver from Chesapeake Bay and a landmark on America's first urban skyline. As the first monument anywhere to honor the great Washington, it put Baltimore on the world map. . . . Laying its cornerstone on July 4, 1815, attracted an enthusiastic 20,000 citizens."

The Peabody Institute, home of the Peabody Library and the world-renowned Peabody Conservatory of Music, sits right on the square. George Peabody, who made millions of dollars selling dry goods in America and England and donated millions to various causes, dedicated the institute in 1866. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Mark Twain all lectured there.

We left Mount Vernon Square and drove to West Baltimore, where we visited a couple of sites associated with Edgar Allan Poe. The first, the Poe House, is located in ghetto more depressed than anything I have seen in New York City, Chicago, or Washington, D.C. We parked across from a pile of garbage and walked up to the house, which sits across the street from a row of abandoned buildings. We knocked and waited to be admitted by the curator, who apparently stands next to the front door all day, unlocking the door to let visitors in or out and then immediately locking it again after they have passed. Because of the neighborhood, which nearly scared us off, I would not recommend a visit to anyone only mildly interested in Poe. Because I do a lot of research on him, however, I felt that I should visit this house, and I am glad that I did.

Although short on exhibits or artifacts, the house is fascinating because of its size and shape. From 1832 to 1835, Poe shared remarkably cramped quarters here with his wife, Virginia, and her mother, Maria Clemm. Retracing Poe's own steps some 165 years ago, Lisa and I proceeded from the front parlor to the six-foot-by-six-foot kitchen, which was even smaller when Poe lived there. We then climbed a steep stairway only slightly wider than our shoulders from this kitchen up to the second floor, where Virginia slept in a room about six feet by five feet, and Maria shared a slightly larger bedroom with her paralytic mother, Elizabeth. The house contains no hallways, and, as my professor and friend Joe Flora has remarked to me, Poe would have had to go through nearly every room to reach his own, a miniscule garret on the third floor. Because of its sloping ceiling, this room--barely large enough for a bed and a desk--has only about four square feet of space in which I could stand. Joe told me that visiting this house helped him to understand a lot about Poe, and I agree. In particular, squeezing through the rooms and up the narrow staircases gave me a new perspective on stories such as "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Fall of the House of Usher," The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and other stories that feature characters who are buried alive.

After leaving the house, we drove to Westminster Graveyard, where Poe was buried in 1849. The cemetery actually contains two grave sites: one--marked by a tombstone with a raven engraved on it--where Poe originally was buried, and a second, marked by a large pillar and medallion, where his body was moved. Under the pillar, Poe's remains now rest alongside those of Virginia, who died of consumption in 1847, and Maria Clemm, who died in 1871.

Poe lived for much of his life in Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York, but Baltimore seems to have identified itself with him more than any of these other cities. In addition to Edgar's Billiards Room, where we had lunch on Friday, it is the home of the Edgar Allan Poe Townhouses, the Raven Nightclub, and a new professional football team, the Baltimore Ravens. Although many of these associations are artificial--I have read no accounts, for example, of Poe hustling Hawthorne in eight-ball or watching Monday Night Football with Melville--the connection is perhaps appropriate. It was here, after all, that the writer most associated with death met his own. En route to Philadelphia from Richmond in 1849, Poe stopped in Baltimore for reasons nobody knows. He was found unconscious on Lombard Street and taken to a hospital, where he died a few days later. People have speculated that Poe was beaten by strangers and, more recently, that he contracted rabies, yet no one has located conclusive evidence by which we can determine the cause of his death.

The following morning, I was able to indulge my interest in Poe one last time in Baltimore by attending an ALA session called "Second-Guessing the Anthologies: Poe Stories We Should Be Teaching." About a dozen other Poe scholars and I heard two insightful presentations, one on a Poe story called "Some Words with a Mummy" and the other on two Poe sketches, "Shadow" and "The Power of Words." After the presentations, we all discussed other works worthy of teaching, including "Hop-Frog," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and The Narrative or Arthur Gordon Pym. I left with some new ideas for teaching Poe's works to my own students.