By Stuart Mitchner

To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device upon the margin, or in the typography of a book…

—Edgar Allan Poe, from “Berenice”

I love Poe. He’s always there, the shadowy Kilroy of American literature. Last week my attention was “riveted” by the chapter subheaded “Berenice the Barefoot Queen: Revolution” in Jerusalem: The Biography (Knopf 2011). Holding Simon Sebag Montefiore’s 650-page historical epic open in both hands like a gigantic hymnal, I read the first two sentences of the chapter on the Death of Jerusalem AD 66-70, in which barefoot Berenice walked “the same route Jesus would have taken from Herod Antipas back to Pilate thirty years earlier. The beautiful Berenice — daughter and sister of kings and twice a queen — was on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to thank God for her recovery from an illness, fasting for thirty days and shaving her head.” In the next chapter, she’s become the “Jewish Cleopatra,” of whom it was said that Titus “had a general murdered for flirting with her.”

According to an online National Library of Israel article titled “The Queen Who Loved the Destroyer of the Second Temple,” Berenice’s pilgrimage had a nobler goal, which was to plead with Florus, the procurator of Judea, for “the lives of the city’s residents.” The article about “a Jewish woman, a queen” whose “dramatic life story might resemble something out of Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon” is accompanied by Queen Berenice, a painting by Charles Landelle (1821-1908).

Berenice Up Close

For several days now I’ve had an enlarged image of Landelle’s sublime Berenice on my computer screen. Best known as an Orientalist who made yearly trips to Algeria, Landelle was 16 when he was admitted to the École des Beaux–Arts in Paris, where he had his first exhibit in 1841. Although I’ve been unable to establish the exact date, Queen Berenice was presumably painted in the 1840s when Balzac was writing his Scènes de la vie parisienne. With Landelle’s haunting portrait close at hand, I’ve been speculating on which of Balzac’s heroines the nameless model might have posed for. I can see her as the Jewish courtesan Esther Gobseck, whose eyes “could drive a painter to despair.”

My guess is that Landelle was undespairingly in love with his Berenice. There’s something wistfully, humanly, benignly indeterminate about her expression; she seems unsure whether to pray or weep, save or be saved, love or be loved. She looks at once wise, spiritual, caring, lonely, and vulnerable, and I’m beginning to feel neurotically protective of her since I’ve been reading the hideous tale of Poe’s doomed Berenice (“Oh gorgeous yet fantastic beauty! Oh, sylph amid the shrubberies of Arnheim! Oh, naiad amid its fountains!”). Just now I pulled the shade in my study to make room for Poe even though I’m wary of being in close proximity to the monomania he describes as that “nervous intensity of interest” in which “the powers of meditation busied and buried themselves in the contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe.”

Posing for George Eliot

Poe’s “Berenice” was nowhere to be found under “Berenice in the Arts” on her Wikipedia page. But I did find George Eliot among the Berenice-related operas (Mozart, Gluck), plays (Racine, Corneille, Masefield), ballets (Franchi, Angiolini), novels (Maurine Baring, Lion Feuchtwanger, Howard Fast), and films (Raoul Ruiz). The listing that caught my eye refers to Eliot’s final novel Daniel Deronda (1876), “in which a set of drawings of Berenice’s story is an important symbolic element.”

The model employed by the artist Hans Meyrick in the novel is an impoverished Jewish girl he’s fallen in love with. The first drawing of the series shows Mirah as Berenice clasping the knees of the procurator Gessius Florus “beseeching him to spare her people.” In another drawing she’s entreating the Jews of Jerusalem “not to injure themselves by resistance.” When Daniel Deronda tells Meyrick he hopes that the girl “knows nothing about Berenice’s history,” the painter says that in fact Mirah thinks of her as “a fervid patriot” who was “beguiled by love and ambition into attaching herself to the arch-enemy of her people … Mirah takes it as a tragic parable, and cries to think what the penitent Berenice suffered as she wandered back to Jerusalem and sat desolate amidst desolation.”

With the shades still drawn for Poe, the Berenice on my computer screen appears all the more humanly appealing, although there’s a hint of Eliot’s “desolate amidst desolation” attitude as well as the quality in Meyrick’s drawings that made one viewer tell him, “your Jewess is pretty — there’s no denying that. But where is her Jewish impudence? She looks as demure as a nun. I suppose she learned that on the stage.”

Raise the Shades!

  I just raised the shades after finishing Poe’s “Berenice.” Yes, by all means let in some light, for Poe has outdone himself in cringe-inducing outrageousness with this tale. No wonder readers of The Southern Literary Messenger complained to the publisher so vigorously that four paragraphs had to be removed. And how typical that the scholar of darkness begins with a perversely misleading Latin epigraph, “Dicebant mihi sodales si sepulchrum amicae visitarem, curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas” — translated online as “My companions said to me, if I would visit the grave of my friend, I might somewhat alleviate my worries” — “alleviating his worries” as in grotesquely violating his wife’s corpse.

Melville’s Ahab sacrifices everything to his obsession with the white whale. Poe’s narrator is driven mad by “the white and ghastly spectrum” of his wife’s teeth. “Not a speck on their surface — not a shade on their enamel! …. The teeth! — the teeth! — they were here, and there, and everywhere, and visibly and palpably before me…. In the multiplied objects of the external world I had no thoughts but for the teeth. For these I longed with a frenzied desire.” And what does his monomania come down to? Ideas! But of course Poe can’t put it in plain English. “Of Berenice I more seriously believed que tous ses dents etaient des idées. Des idées! — ah, here was the idiotic thought that destroyed me!” Now comes the last twist, as the monomaniac drops a box “and from it, with a rattling sound, there rolled out some instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with thirty-two small, white, and ivory-looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor.”

Confronted with toxic ideas scattered here, there, and everywhere and to and fro in a polluted universe, the reader is taken back to the first sentence of the story: “Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform.” However grossly, Poe seems more in tune with the multiple mug shot, dying planet news of the day than George Eliot, Balzac, and Simon Sebag Montefiore. But so then seems Mary Shelley, who at the age of 18 would write a tale that encompassed all of Poe.

Time for Mary

I’m reluctantly removing the beauteous Berenice from my computer screen to make room for flame-haired Mary (shown here), who was born August 30, 1797, on the cusp of a new century, the same year the poem that haunted her childhood was being talked to life by Wordsworth and Coleridge on the rocky beach at Watchet. She was 13, hiding with her siblings under the parlor sofa the night Coleridge read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner aloud to her parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Although Mary is remembered by friends for “her large hazel eyes and the crowning glory of her astonishing hair,” the standard image is Richard Rothwell’s stately and severely formal portrait, which was shown at the Royal Academy a little over 10 years before her death in February 1851. The only portrait of the author of Frankenstein comparable to Charles Landelle’s Berenice is the miniature said to be drawn from her death mask, a circumstance Poe would appreciate. I’ve enlarged it and put it on my screen where she looms, maned like a lioness, radiant in the red-gold splendor of her hair.

Farewell Beauty Queen

What originally sent me to the history section of the Princeton Public Library and Montefiore’s Jerusalem was an interest in the place awakened by the Netflix series The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, which is based on the novel of the same name by Sarit Yishai-Levi. However often the melodramatic events of each episode evoked high-class, brilliantly directed soap opera, the place and the people were not easy to leave behind for, say, the modern-day Los Angeles of The Lincoln Lawyer. From what I can tell after glancing at the novel, the series takes a quite different course, ending as the title character bids her family goodbye to embark on a new life as a fashion designer in London. It tells you a lot about Beauty Queen that the performance you remember is not Swell Ariel Or’s spirited Luna Armoza or Michael Aloni’s remarkably rich depiction of her father Gabriel, but Irit Kaplan’s monstrous and magnificent matriarch Mercada Armoza, a creation Edgar Allan Poe himself would have admired.