Exhibitions: A Paean to Poor Poe
America's tormented master of horror stories is remembered in a multimedia tribute in Prague
Time Magazine
October 25, 1999 — Vol. 154 No. 17
By Roderick Usher
— With reporting by Jan Stojaspal/Prague

INSANITY, ALCOHOLISM, POVERTY, sickness, obsession, lack of recognition, premature death-many artists bear crosses, but Edgar Allan Poe managed to compress all that misery into a single life. For all his torment, Poe's tales of mystery and horror have had a deep influence on the creativity of others, both in his native America and even more so in Europe: Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Kafka, Conrad, Mann, Stevenson, Conan Doyle and many others benefited from his forays into the dark reaches of fear and the contradictory way terror at once repels and attracts.

Opinions about Poe's literary worth have always been divided. Referring to his poetry, Emerson dubbed him "the jingle man," but it was precisely Poe's poem The Bells that inspired Rachmaninov to compose his choral symphony of the same name. One man who has no doubts is Peter Fawn, a 37-year-old Englishman who was captivated when he read Poe's gruesome story The Black Cat as a 10-year-old. Fawn fell so far under Poe's spell that he later spent most of his first paycheck on a stuffed raven, the foreboding bird of Poe's best-known poem. Today, the second name of Fawn's six-year-old son is Vincent, after Vincent Price, the star of many Poe-based movies, and his five-year-old daughter's middle name is Ligeia, after the heroine of one of the various Poe stories where the protagonist dies, only to make a spine-chilling comeback.

Fawn, a Brighton-based executive with a credit card company, has now single-handedly mounted a three-month Poe festival in Prague. The biggest tribute yet to his life and work, it runs to the end of this month, and coincided with the 150th anniversary of Poe's death, on Oct. 7. The festival centerpiece is an exhibition filling two levels of Charles University's Carolinum, one of them, appropriately, its 14th century cellars.

The exhibits include a working model of the lethal device in The Pit and the Pendulum, posters and stills from Poe-inspired films, and some of his few belongings-such as his walking stick and a pair of stockings. Suitably macabre, there is a piece of Poe's coffin which fell off when he was reburied many years after his death. Also on display is a rare copy of Poe's first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, published in 1827, its authorship given only as "by a Bostonian."

One room is dedicated to The Raven, with Fawn's own stuffed bird perched, as in the poem, atop a bust of Pallas. "The reproduction of the bust I got as a wedding present from a former boss," says Fawn, whose obsession has led him to invest more than $250,000 of his own money in the celebration.

The festival has also offered opera, concerts and theater, including one-man Poe shows by American actors Kevin Mitchell Martin and David Keltz. One of the highlights on Oct. 7 was at Prague Castle, with the European premiere of Russell Currie's opera based on The Fall of the House of Usher. It is Roderick Usher, the owner of the house, who perhaps most clearly captures Poe's idea that perception of life's beauty and depth often provokes, or requires, a degree of madness.

Why Prague? Fawn's job had him setting up credit card business in post-communist central and eastern Europe, and he was based in the Czech capital between 1993 and 1998. "During communism very few foreign authors were allowed to be taught in schools," says Fawn. "Poe was one, and he influenced many Czech artists."

But despite the fact that Prague's best-known writer, Franz Kafka, is said to have been inspired by The Pit and the Pendulum for his short story The Penal Colony, the choice of city seems to have been a bad one. Attendance has been poor. "The weather was unusually good in Prague in August and September, and tourists and others weren't going to any exhibitions," says Fawn, who admits he's likely to lose all his $250,000 stake.

Poe was only 40 when he died in 1849. He was found in a Baltimore street, wearing clothes that were not his own, and in a semi-conscious state that might have been provoked by alcohol or by a condition such as epilepsy. His enemies accused him of incestuous tendencies, opium addiction, even of being a "sadonecrophiliac." His supporters reply that he's been the victim of amateur shrinks unable or unwilling to separate a turbulent life from a terrifying fiction.

Although the 150th anniversary of the end of that life has left Peter Fawn in debt, he laughs and says that the 200th anniversary of his hero's birth comes around in 2009. "That's when I'm going to do something really spectacular."