The Man of the Crowd at the Inauguration

Edgar Allan Poe’s bicentennial birthday passed unremarked by this publication January 19. For the most part I considered Poe useful mainly as a horrible example of how not to write. Every so often, though, something characteristic took shape in his odd imagination. One of his lesser-known stories, ” The Man of the Crowd ,” is worth re-reading in context of the Presidential Inauguration this week.

A first-person narrator is seated at a London coffee house, observing the evening pedestrian traffic, amusing himself by guessing the occupation and errand of passers-by. “With my brow to the glass,” the narrator continues,” I was thus occupied in scrutinizing the mob, when suddenly there came into view a countenance (that of a decrepit old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age)—a countenance which at once arrested and absorbed my whole attention, on account of the absolute idiosyncrasy of its expression.”

Curiosity compels the narrator to grab his coat and pursue this strange person, following him through every alley and by-way of London for twenty-four hours without stopping, in and out of shops, gin-mills, and so forth. At length the narrator writes, “As the shades of the second evening came on, I grew wearied unto death, and, stopping fully in front of the wanderer, gazed at him steadfastly in the face. He noticed me not, but resumed his solemn walk, while I, ceasing to follow, remained absorbed in contemplation. ‘This old man,’ I said at length, ‘is the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd . It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds. The worst heart of the world is a grosser book than the Hortulus Animae , and perhaps it is but one of the great mercies of God that es lasst sich nicht lesen .’”

That is a rather Baroque way of portraying a person for whom there is no “there” there, whose inner life is so tormented that it cannot endure its own company. The idea of a twenty-four hour march in search of this man was a clever device, despite the turgid prose. After twenty-four hours of unrelieved Inauguration coverage, I felt at one with Poe’s narrator, who learned no more of his quarry than the rest of us learned about Barack Obama.