And Conrad Aiken found in Fletcher both a friend and a literary stimulus.
On 3 January 1886, John Gould Fletcher was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, the only son of John Gould Fletcher (a banker, cotton broker, and Confederate veteran, of Scotch-Irish descent) and Adolphine Krause Fletcher (a musically and artistically inclined woman of German-Danish descent, with a passion for literature). John Fletcher senior was fifty-five and his wife was twenty-four years younger. There were two other children, both girls: Adolphine and Mary.
In 1889 the family moved into the Albert Pike Mansion in Little Rock--a large square white house with a pillared front, built by an Arkansas settler. The house, in which Fletcher lived until preparatory school, made a deep impression on him, which he recorded after a visit in 1915 in a series of twenty-four poems called "The Ghosts of an Old House." "No sun ever seeks/Its six white columns,/ The nine great windows of its face," he wrote. The house faced north and his descriptions emphasize its gloomy eeriness. The poems do not suggest a happy childhood: "I cannot go to this room,/Without feeling something big and angry/Waiting for me/To throw me on the bed,/And press its thumbs in my throat," he says of the room where his father died; the nursery brings memories of "A boy crying"; and the back stairs remind him of his mother who would "sit all day and listlessly/Look on the world that had destroyed her." Images of death, decay, anger, and sadness predominate.
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