Commentary &SpornFilms 13 May 2012 07:12 am
A letter from Mrs. Gove Nichols
- We’re coming down the home stretch for our Indiegogo campaign to raise money for a sampler of the work from POE, the animated feature I’m trying to put together. It’s going wonderfully, and I hope we’ll be able to raise the money in these next two weeks. This has all given me a new lease on life in the project, and I expect it’ll help kick things off. One positive thing has been my writing these Sunday pieces about Edgar. I enjoy doing it.
This week, I’d like to write about a little sidebar note from the ever-revising script. A letter from a Mrs. Gove Nichols, an acquaintance of the Poes, telling about her trip to their final home in the Bronx.
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- One of the features of the film we’re doing about Edgar Allan Poe is that it provides us with the opportunity of including a number of letters from acquaintances of the little Poe family. One I particularly enjoy is this letter from Mrs. Gove Nichols. In it she tells of the arduous journey to reach the family in the Fordham section of the Bronx. It took several hours for the trip from midtown NY (and would take about 30 mins. today by subway.)
Here are several short excerpts from that letter:
- We found him, and his wife, and his wife’s mother who was his aunt living in a little cottage at the top of a hill.
The house had three rooms – a kitchen, a sitting room, and a bed chamber over the sitting-room. There was a piazza in front of the house that was a lovely place to sit in the summer, with the shade of cherry-trees before it.
On the occasion of my first visit, the poet had somehow caught a full-grown bob-o-link. He had put him in a cage, which he had hung on a nail driven into the trunk of a cherry-tree….
The cottage had an air of gentility that must have been lent to it by the presence of its inmates. So neat, so poor, so unfurnished, and yet so charming a dwelling I never saw. The floor of the kitchen was white as wheaten flour. A table, a chair, and a little stove it contained seemed to furnish it completely.
Later it continues:
He was at this time greatly depressed. Their extreme poverty, the sickness of his wife, and his own inability to write sufficiently accounted for this. We spent half an hour in the house, when some more company came, which included ladies, and then we all went to walk.
. . . someone proposed a game at leaping. I think it must have been Poe, as he was expert in the exercise. Two or three gentlemen agreed to leap with him, and though one of them was tall and had been a hunter in times past, Poe still distanced them all. But alas! his gaiters, long worn and carefully kept, were both burst in the grand leap that made him victor. … I was certain he had no other shoes, boots, or gaiters. Who amongst us could offer him money to buy a new pair?
Eventually, Poe’s mother-in-law convinces one of the guests to buy a poem he’d written for publication. This gives them enough money to purchase a new pair of shoes for Poe.
There’s so much material in this man’s life, it’s almost hard to eliminate some of it without making too long a film. Of course with Poe’s name, you also have to keep the film thrilling. Hopefully, it’ll have all this.
