Tracing the “N’s” of Poe’s Pen.

Forget the screenplays of Woody Allen, untouched by even his own witty ink marks, and the wispy letters in the letters written by old money bags, Henry James. These plastic protected artifacts at the Morgan were clearly inferior when set out on the same table as the handwritten, timeworn papers of the grossly romanticized and mythologized poet and writer, Edgar Allen Poe.

It was all in the “N’s,” I thought.

I imagined black clothes clad Poe at a rickety writing desk in the garret of some brownstone off Third Street and Thompson (where the NYU law school library now dully replaces his once historical quarters) getting bleary-eye in a slow drunk, pen in hand, paper laid out on the desk in front of him in the dimness of the ending of another afternoon. He reaches over and dips the tip of his pen in black sticky ink, holding it in his hand, pausing, the tip drips the black onto his dented and already stained desk top and he meets the pen to the paper in short, careful sweeps. Up-right, down-over, right-back-left, up-down-up-over, but with unexpected control and the clever preciseness of an unshaking pen. Poe’s perfected script is nothing like the scrawls and scratches his character would lead you to believe.

His “N’s,” I couldn’t believe.

I took out a notebook sheet on the train and traced like Poe’s “N,” black, felt tip pen.

There’s something that gets stuck inside a piece of crummy paper once someone puts a pen to it. Obviously words and letters make sentences or nonsense, depending, but there’s the ink of the pen, the handwriting. Something about the hand script in ink seems more tangible. It’s like touching hands with someone who’s been dead six times as long as you’ve lived, or at least that’s what it’s like for me. I’ve never liked the mythical man, Poe, his poetry or his short stories much, but holding his handwriting right then was horribly captivating. Hanging onto someone else’s history with your own hands is a strange feeling. It connects you to a time, a person or a place that no longer exists, except in your own mind and, only then, through the brown faded ink and the “N’s” that once flooded from their unshaking, poem preaching pen.


--nicole wallace.