this lecture at several forums over the years. Occasionally he looked down at the notes and noticed something he’d quite forgotten, but for the most part he simply spoke from memory. This was an accomplished group: the feminist Solinger was there and the critic McMurphy, the French scholar Jean-Yves Rémy, who worshipped Baudelaire as well as Poe, Christopher Hindle from Yale and Dorothy Turman from Harvard and Columbia’s Professor Windower, the conference organizer. Hindle waslooking a little dotty. His head bobbed badly and his mouth yawned, as if the old man had lost control of it. A new professor from Oxford was there, Saddle-something, a doublebarrelled name. And many others he didn’t know, the younger generation of Poe enthusiasts.
Sienna sat in the front row. She had changed at the hotel into a micro-skirt and ankle boots, and was not always managing to keep her long legs together. Sometimes she shifted in her seat and revealed … well, a darkness that Bob refused to stare at but which occupied his thoughts nonetheless, fuzzy as she was beyond the range of his reading glasses.
Something wasn’t quite right. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but perhaps it had to do with his traumas at the customs booth and in the airplane. The universe felt tilted in a way, nothing exactly where it should have been. His breathing was a little ragged; he was more nervous than usual delivering his lecture; he had a feeling that something dramatic was going to happen but he didn’t know what.
“Poe’s wife and young cousin,” he said, “Virginia –
Sissy –
dies of consumption in early 1847. They had been living in abject poverty with Sissy’s mother, Muddy, in the little cottage at Fordham. Muddy was a frequent visitor to publishing houses begging for money for the family. After Virginia’s death, Poe, who has just turned thirty-eight, is lost for a time, then seems to shift gears and quixotically starts to court three different women more or less simultaneously: Jane Locke, Nancy Richmond, and Sarah Helen Whitman, then later a fourth, his old flame Elmira Royster. He is clutching at straws, hoping a good marriage can provide him the financial stability that has eluded him his entire life. And yet, being Poe, nothing is simple and he seems to throw himself in all directions at once, to create the conditions in which, as Silverman has pointed out,failure is the only possible outcome. Jane Locke writes to him expressing sympathy for Virginia’s death. They correspond, feel one another out. Poe thinks she’s a widow but can’t be sure. He goes to visit her in Lowell, Massachusetts, and to his horror finds her matronly and middle-aged, married to an attorney, mother of five, a doggerel-writing parlour poet desperately fantasizing about him. So he flees to their friends the Richmonds and here he does fall in love with Mrs. Nancy Richmond, also married but twenty-eight, beautiful, tall, simple, a Christian, charitable woman, mother of a three-year-old girl. Her husband, a paper manufacturer, does not seem to mind having this vagabond poet of uncertain reputation sit by the fire night after night holding hands with his wife. She becomes Poe’s ‘Annie,’ his ethereal creature.”
Bob took another sip of water. Hindle was completely asleep, his eyelids fluttering now and again from some dream. It was a bad sign, but the rest were with him. He had, usually, a natural ease in telling a story. His voice was deep and resonant and he loved his material. Sienna was hanging on every word, rocking slightly with the rhythm of his delivery.
“If Jane Locke was a mistake, then, and Nancy Richmond unattainable, Sarah Helen Whitman –
Helen –
remained Poe’s best chance at a favourable union, one with an intellectual peer, a poet and critic in her own right, a bona fide widow six years his senior but handsome, with financial security enough for the two of them. She lived in Providence and they carried out a careful,