Edgar winner John McAleer’s following essay, discussing Poe’s alleged obsession with premature burial, first appeared in the MWA’s Mystery Writers Annual (1984). Thanks to his son Andrew, this amusing piece makes its first appearance on-line exclusively for Mystery Readers International’s “Mystery Fanfare.”
Are You Astir, Mr. Poe? by Edgar Award Winner John McAleer
Variations on the theme of premature burial were constant with Edgar Allan Poe—“The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Black Cat,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “Thou Art Man,” and “Premature Burial” itself are some of the tales that come immediately to mind. Poe’s detractors count this theme as an obsession, affirming his morbidity. His admirers think it laudable. Allen Tate, indeed, said it proclaimed Poe’s belief in the survival of the soul after death. Maybe so but we should remember that in prior centuries no one could be absolutely sure he would not be shoveled under before his time had come.
When the body of the Christian mystic, Thomas à Kempis, was exhumed in the eighteenth century, it was observed that he had clawed the underside of the lid of his coffin and so, presumably had been buried alive. True enough he had already lived some ninety-two years before he was interred—but even so! Coming closer to the present, within the last dozen years when a nun in Ireland died at the age of one hundred, her story was retold in the world press. At eighteen she was thought to have died of the flu. While her funeral was in progress, an older sister arrived from a distant village and asked to look one last time upon her face. When the coffin was opened the “corpse” stirred. In gratitude for her preservation she gave the rest of her life to the service of humanity. Probably apocryphal, however, is the story of the man whose wife revived when her coffin collided with a pew as she was being borne into the church. Another three years went by before death claimed her. As once more her body was borne into the church, her husband cried out to the pallbearers—“Watch that pew!”
It was A.C. Bradley who suggested that King Lear died not of grief, but of joy because death came as, bending over the corpse of his beloved Cordelia, he thought of the feather he placed before her lips was bestirred by the breath of life. In the nineteenth century it was not unusual for people to exhume their dead long after their decease to ascertain that no mistake had been made. Emerson’s father personally dug up his father fifteen years after his death, and Emerson himself opened the coffins of both his first wife and his first son, on separate occasions, years after they had departed. Dumas’s Camille begins with her lover, Armand, bribing a cemetery attendant to let him see her corpse. Only then can he be sure death has claimed her.
Supposedly we find it hard to relate to Poe’s anxieties in that era when science has eliminated all the guesswork and a death certificate can be taken at its word. Sure, now and then you hear of an occasional slip-up. There was that case in New York City back in the 1930s when a morgue attendant sought to supplement his meager, depression era income by extracting the gold teeth from corpses given in his care. One night when he took a mallet to a client the guy sat up. The morgue attendant became an instant folk hero and even got interviewed by Robert L. Ripley on a nationwide broadcast. Lately, though, I’ve learned we have more to worry about than I thought we had. After my father’s funeral a few years back, I stopped back at the undertaker’s to settle up the bill. His assistant appeared from below stairs, an amiable fellow who looked like he could be Don Knotts’ kid brother.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said. “A case just arrived.”
“I guess he won’t mind being left on his own for a few minutes,” I said tentatively.
“Guess not,” young Knotts agreed. “In ten years I’ve only had a couple revive on me.”
My eyes bugged. “A couple…?”
“Yeah. One was a grandmother. Doctor had to be in surgery. Told the family she wouldn’t last the morning. ‘Send her along when she goes,’ he said, ‘and I’ll sign the certificate later.’ About eleven they decided she was gone. I came and got her. Had her on the slab when she burped. That ain’t unusual. Then she started batting her eyelids at me, like a vamp. I had an ambulance over here on the double. Got her back six hours later though so the business didn’t suffer.”
“That’s fine,” I lied. “You said there was another one?”
“Yeah. That was something else. Doctor signed the death certificate. That bird sat up on the litter as we were carrying him downstairs. We haven’t got him back yet and that was two years ago come Labor Day.”
And that’s what I learned debriefing just one embalmer. Think of the stories I could pick up at a mortician’s convention. Who was the guy who insisted on being buried with a bell in his coffin just in case the occasion arose when he could ring it? Is that what Edgar was talking about when he wrote about “The bells. The bells, bells, bells”? Me? I want to be buried with a CB radio, and maybe a tuba.
John McAleer – Edgar Allan Poe Award-winning author of the Henry von Stray British crime classics. His book The Sifted Few: Boston’s Blue Blood Murders will be released in December. www.henryvonstraymysteries.com ***
John McAleer – Edgar Allan Poe Award-winning author of the Henry von Stray British crime classics. His book The Sifted Few: Boston’s Blue Blood Murders will be released in December. www.henryvonstraymysteries.com
