Text: John C. Miller, ed., “Entry 054: Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram, June 2, 1874,” Poe's Helen Remembers (1979), pp. 161-164 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 161, continued:]

54. Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram. Item 156

My dear Mr. Ingram,

Your anxiously looked-for letter [May 19] has just reached me & leaves me still more anxious. I knew before I opened it that it would tell me of your illness. I had made three attempts to answer your letter of May 5th, but was unequal to the effort. I, too, have been ill — prostrated by the effects of ivy poisoning. On the 17th of May, I ignorantly gathered a spray of ivy, thinking it woodbine, & held it for a long time in my hand. The poison seemed to produce a universal feeling of languor & inertia, from which I am very slowly recovering.

Oh, I hope you are quite well now — but I shall be so anxious till I know that you are.

I will write to Mr. Eveleth today about the continuation of the “Marie Rogêt” story. I cannot think that anything further on the subject [page 162:] has ever been published. There was a paragraph in “The Round Table,” written by Mr. Eveleth, giving an explanation about the story, from a letter of Poe's to Eveleth — very brief.(1) I think this must be what Eveleth alluded to.

Graham's Magazine, I think, was discontinued about the time when Harper's commenced.(2) In your last letter you asked me about the cottage in Fordham. I was inside the house. There was a parlor with two windows in front. An entry & stairway with a small bedroom behind them, and a room used as a dining room, which you descended two steps to reach. It may also have been used as a kitchen. It was in the addition to the left of the house, as you see it in the woodcut in Harper's. It had a window in front & behind, I think. Upstairs there was a room over the bedroom, & one over the parlor. There may have been a kitchen also in the basement, as Mrs. Lewis described it, but I think not. When I was there, there was, I believe, a window to the north, opposite the two front windows. Miss Blackwell told me that there was a straw matting on the parlor floor, two small pine tables, made by Mr. Poe, & very neatly & tastefully covered by him with fine green baize nailed down with two rows of brass-headed nails. The window curtains of white muslin were of snowy purity & delicacy, & the effect of the whole charming in its simplicity & neatness.

Mrs. Locke of Lowell, also, told me much of the neatness & comfort of the cottage menage. Mrs. Locke passed a day there in the summer of 1848. It was in the month of June.(3)

I am so glad that anything you may have found in the Broadway Journal will enable you to refute Griswold. Poor Griswold! I wonder how he feels about it all now. I wonder if it is true that Mrs. Osgood endorsed his estimate of Poe as regards Poe's intercourse with men. Griswold asserts that she did. But his assertion proves nothing. If she did read & approve this, she could not have been a loyal & true friend to Poe.

Mr. Davidson writes that he has found & mailed to you the Graham's vol. for 1850. I am glad that he is helping you. You will have learned from my last letter that the “Life in Death” story is the same with “The Oval Portrait.” You will have seen, too, how much I liked your notice of the poems. Could Mrs. Lewis, do you think, tell you when & where “Landor's Cottage” first appeared? How much I long to know more of the sister you loved so well!

What you tell me of Mr. Powell's account of Miss Poe is certainly very sad. But if Mr. Powell is to be her agent in the matter, would it not be well to obtain some reliable information about him? Or have you already done so?

I cannot but think there is a mistake about Miss Poe's having lived with her brother “within a few years of his death.” It could not have [page 163:] been after he removed to New York. Does Mr. Davidson know anything of Mr. Powell? Miss Poe's letter is dated from Washington at the Epiphany Church Home. Has she found a permanent asylum there, I wonder?

What you have quoted from Miss Poe's letter about her not having known that she had “a brother, or brothers, until she was a good-sized girl” seems very, very strange! Where had the poor child been, then, & with whom? Mrs. Clemm, I have been told, professed to believe that she was not the child of her brother, but of the nurse who had the charge of Rosalie in her infancy. Don’t speak of this.

It is all very strange, but Mrs. Clemm is herself an enigma.

You ask me what I think of Mrs. Clemm. I have no reason to think ill of her, yet I cannot say that she inspired me with confidence in her sincerity. I felt that she loved Poe devotedly, and that he, at least, believed in her. He often spoke of her kind & tender care of Virginia in her illness, & of her self-sacrificing & more than motherly devotion to both of them. I think she could love & hate with great intensity. I should accept cum grano salis the impressions of Mrs. Lewis with regard to her; doubtless there was blame on both sides.

I did not understand the motive of Mrs. E[llet] in abstracting the letter, which would have been so valuable to Mrs. L[ewis]. Could Mrs. E[llet] have used it herself, or did she take it simply to annoy the other lady? Did you ascertain to what motive the act was ascribed?

I must not write another line today, for I have still to write to Mr. Eveleth about “Marie Rogêt,” but I fear it will be of no avail.

I shall be delighted to receive Baudelaire's Essays on Poe.(4) A gentleman who was in Paris three years ago vainly sought to procure them for me.

I am very tired & will answer other portions of your letter as soon as I am strong enough. I have so much to say & ask, but goodbye now & take rest & get well soon.

Ever & gratefully your friend,

 

1. Poe's letter to George W. Eveleth, dated New York, Jan. 4, 1848, can be found in John Ward Ostrom, ed., The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1948), II, 355[[354]]-56. The Round Table paragraph was published in Vol. 5, Jan. 26, 1867, p. 62.

2. Harper's New Monthly Magazine began in June 1850; Graham's Magazine stopped with the Dec. number, 1858.

3. Mrs. Jane Ermina Locke (d. ca. 1859) was a minor poet of Lowell, Mass. She was instrumental in having Poe invited to deliver a lecture in Lowell on July 10, 1848, and expected to be his hostess at her home, Wamesit Cottage, during his visit. On the night of his lecture, Poe met Mrs. Nancy Locke Heywood Richmond, a relative by marriage of Mrs. Locke's, as Mrs. Frances Osgood was also her cousin by marriage. After meeting Mrs. Richmond and finishing his lecture, Poe transferred his baggage and person to Mrs. [page 164:] Richmond's home that night. Mrs. Locke never forgave him, and she became, if it is possible to measure enmity by rank and degree, perhaps next after Griswold and Mrs. Ellet, Poe's bitterest enemy.

4. Charles Pierre Baudelaire, Histoires Extraordinaires (Paris: Michel Levy Freres, 1865).