A Loaded Gun (10 page)

Dickinson can bear it as long as Sue is also sacrificed to the man of noon and “scorched” by him. But she cannot bear it when Sue is out of reach—“your absence insanes me so—” [Letter 107, March 12, 1853] And when she discovers that Sue is really out of reach, she loses all control—walks the streets alone at night—as her language gathers more and more control, and she will now “appear like an embarrassed Peacock, quite unused to its plumes.” [Letter 177, late January 1855]

But 1855 will be a fateful year. She has to leave her haven over the
cemetery—on North Pleasant Street—and move back to her father's house with all the other Dickinsons, while Edward has a ducal manor—the Evergreens—built for Austin and Sue, so he can bind them to him with an invisible cord. None of the Dickinsons will ever leave him now, not his
useless
daughters, nor his son, whom he has made a partner in his law firm.

We have fewer letters from Emily in 1856—only five or six—and none at all in 1857. Some scholars, including Cody, see this as evidence of a breakdown—a kind of psychic paralysis over Sue's marriage to Austin and final abandonment of her. But I don't see this at all. Sue has become one more Phantom in her box of Phantoms, no matter how often Emily visits the Evergreens with her lantern and her dog.

Something else happened in 1857. Emily was different—she knew that, had a much quicker wit than the men and women around her, and a rage she couldn't reveal. She was a Gnome with red hair who wanted to be Bearded, like a man. Why should she become another man's cow, and carry his children? She wanted to father her own progeny—and she did. And it was her mountain of a dog who gave her a bit of courage. Dogs, as Adam Gopnik tells us,
“are the only creatures that have learned to gaze directly at people as people gaze at one another, and their connection with us is an essential and enduring one.”

She must have gazed into Carlo's eyes and seen a mirror of her own wants—Carlo was her one ally, clever and dumb at the same time. He didn't have strings of language in his skull, but he had something better: He could listen to her recite. Aífe Murray believes that from the moment Carlo appeared in her life, she was much more creative, and that
“tramping abroad with her dog might have shown this aspiring writer how walking can loosen the subconscious and become a way to compose.”

Language must have come to her in its own enigmatic flash, or we couldn't have that “Whip lash” of images. She speaks of her creativity, I think, and how it controls her, when she writes:

       
I felt a Cleaving in my Mind—

       
As if my Brain had split—

       
I tried to match it—Seam by Seam—

       
But could not make them fit—

       
The thought behind, I strove to join

       
Unto the thought before—

       
But Sequence ravelled out of Sound—

       
Like Balls—opon a Floor
—
    
[Fr867B]

Her genius had little to do with logic and order, but with Sequence—the cohesion and coherence of a poem—
ravelling
out of Sound, twisting and tearing asunder, beyond the reach of Sound, she says, “Like Balls—opon a Floor.” But are these balls of yarn that unwind and ravel out into silence? I'm not convinced of that.
Ravel
is too strong a word; it feels like a scratch, a rip that we can taste and hear. And those could also be billiard balls that echo without end, as if a poem could ricochet into eternity,
Beyond the Dip of Bell
—
    
[Fr633]

She doesn't give us much room for resolution. Dickinson never did. And that deep silence of 1857 was like going into a dark well. Her genius might always have been there, perhaps even from the first words she spoke, with her Aunt Lavinia, when she was riveted to the thunder and lightning on her voyage to Monson and called it “the fire.” But did she have that aggression Sontag talks about, that
violence
to nurse her own creative gifts, the ability to declare herself as a poet? The simplest act of aggression in women was frowned upon, and so she masked herself as the woman-child, whispered like a child, ran from the door when a stranger knocked. But it was part fear, part performance. As she would declare to her cousin Loo: “Odd, that I, who run from so many, cannot brook that one turn from me.” [Letter 245, December 31, 1861]

She had what she needed: a room of her own, a writing desk, a conservatory for her winter plants and perennials, and a big brown
dog. She was akin to the village clown, the eccentric daughter of Squire Dickinson. She confided in no one but Carlo, and Carlo nuzzled her and never talked back.

2

Y
ET
C
ARLO REMAINED MOSTLY INVISIBLE
in her correspondence—until 1858, when he appears all of a sudden in a letter to Sue, appears in a comic, almost pathetic way.

Vinnie and I are pretty well. Carlo—comfortable—terrifying man and beast, with renewed activity—is cuffed some—hurled from piazza frequently, when Miss Lavinia's “flies” need her action elsewhere.
    
[Letter 194, September 26, 1858]

It's hard to imagine anyone cuffing Carlo and hurling him off the Dickinson porch, except in some mock fashion, as if Emily's Newfoundland had become a captive clown, like the poet herself. And now Carlo will appear in other letters, as Emily's sidekick and alter ego, her voiceless voice, and one of her many masks. On December 10, 1859, she writes to Mrs. Sam Bowles:

I cannot walk to the distant friends on nights piercing as these, so I put both hands on the window-pane, and try to think how birds fly, and imitate, and fail. . . . I talk of all these things with Carlo, and his eyes grow meaning, and his shaggy feet keep a slower pace.
    
[Letter 212]

But the tenor shifts in 1862, once she starts her correspondence with Colonel Higginson—these letters are part of her poet's blood, no matter how she masks herself, and how many plumes she wears. She will send him her poems, play the amateur, the village crank, but what she really wants to talk about is her craft, that subterranean life of hers—and Carlo is part of that life.

You ask of my Companions. Hills—Sir—and the Sundown—and a Dog—large as myself, that my Father bought me—They are better than Beings—because they know—but do not tell
    
[her secrets]—
and the noise in the Pool, at Noon—excels my Piano.
    
[Letter 261, April 25, 1862]

She tells Higginson an outright lie that August, says she had no “Monarch” in her life, when her father ruled her and all the Dickinsons from the day she was born, kept his wife and Vinnie as aging, grown-up children, and harmed Austin—tethered him—by holding him as an exalted prisoner next door. Austin never crept out from under his father's shadow, even after his father's death. And his poet sister's only escape was to crawl inside her own head and crumble half of Squire Dickinson's world in her poems, attack God and the Devil, and twist the entire universe into her own
“prophetic vision of intergalactic nothingness.” Language itself was a kind of Ice Age for Dickinson, utterly autistic—soundless sounds.

The colonel asks her why she shuns “Men and Women,” and she answers—“they talk of Hallowed things, aloud—and embarrass my Dog—He and I don't object to them, if they'll exist their side. I think Carl[o] would please you—He is dumb, and brave—” [Letter 271, August 1862] Carlo has become a mirror of her wants, a silent
medallion.
She mentions her dog in almost every letter to Higginson, is eager to have him know how essential Carlo is to her.

One of her next letters to the colonel is critical—he's gone off to war without even telling her, and she barks at him—like her “Shaggy Ally,” as she now calls Carlo.

I should have liked to see you, before you became improbable. . . .

I found you were gone, by accident, as I find Systems are, or Seasons of the year, and obtain no cause—but suppose it a treason of Progress—that dissolves as it goes. Carlo—still remained . . .

She continues to bark and bite—lets him know that Carlo is loyal to her, even if he is not. But she relents a bit and calls herself his Gnome. [Letter 280, February 1863]

She writes to him from Cambridge in early June of 1864; she's staying with her Norcross cousins while having her eyes looked at by a noted Boston ophthalmologist, Dr. Henry Willard Williams—“The Physician has taken away my Pen.” Fanny and Loo read Shakespeare to her while she writes in secret with her pencil. Higginson had received a mysterious wound in July 1863 and had to leave his regiment.

Are you in danger—

I did not know that you were hurt . . .

I was ill since September, and since April, in Boston, for a Physician's care—He does not let me go, yet I work in my Prison, and make Guests
    
[poems]
for myself—

Carlo did not come, because that he would die, in Jail . . .
    
[Letter 290]

Her next letter to the colonel isn't until late January 1866—it's one line long, with a salutation and a postscript.

             
To T. W. Higginson

                        
Carlo died—

                                   
E. Dickinson

                        
Would you instruct me now?
    
[Letter 314]

She never really recovered from Carlo's death. “I wish for Carlo,” she would write to Higginson later that year. [Letter 319, June 9, 1866] “I explore but little since my mute Confederate [died].”

We know that her long explosion of creativity continued in 1865, when she worked on 229 poems, even while she was stranded in Cambridge for seven months, exiled from her home and her dog, and half-blind. But the explosion
seemed
to end in 1866, when her output plummeted to ten new poems. Some scholars believe that Dickinson's
creativity collided with the Civil War, that some inner drama was worked out in the war's own drama and butchery, that she responded to the slaughter with a woman's
deeper
emotions. But I'm not convinced. She was always ambivalent about the war.

I shall have no winter this year—on account of the soldiers—Since I cannot weave Blankets, or Boots—I thought it best to omit the season . . .
    
[Letter 235, to Mrs. Sam Bowles, about August 1861]

She could cry over the “slaughter” of Lt. Frazer Stearns—“His big heart shot away by a ‘minie ball'” [Letter 255, late March 1862], but Frazer had been her brother's friend, was the son of Amherst College's president, and was part of her social class. Dickinson was hardly a democratic goddess; she'd always been an aristocrat and a snob. She didn't cry much for any common soldiers. “A Soldier called—a Morning ago, and asked for a Nosegay, to take to Battle. I suppose he thought we kept an Aquarium,” she wrote to Sam Bowles. [Letter 272, about August 1862] She was putting on her feathers, trying to shock Bowles a bit. But cruelty was one of her measuring sticks and part of her mental apparatus. It's not that she couldn't write about the war, and sing off charnel steps about “Battle's—horrid Bowl.”

       
It feels a shame to be Alive—

       
When Men so brave—are dead—

       
One envies the Distinguished Dust . . .
    
[Fr524]

Or when she writes to Higginson: “I can't
stop
to strut, in a world where bells toll.” [Letter 269, summer 1862?] Yet it's hard to decipher where her sympathies lay. Her father was an old-fashioned Whig, who couldn't have borne “Black Republicans,” those who wanted to end slavery at any cost. Her cousin Perez Dickinson Cowan was an Amherst College student from Tennessee. And Joseph Lyman, Vinnie's “lost” suitor, would spend the war fighting on the Southern side.

She didn't end her habit of stitching her poems into booklets on
account of the Civil War; it was rather because of rheumatic iritis—her irritated eyes didn't allow her to sew. And for her, the war ends in a kind of comedy—with the capture of Jefferson Davis, disguised as a woman, in “Skirt and Spurs” [Letter 308].

To the author of “My life had stood a loaded gun,” killing was a natural habitat. She was the “blonde Assassin,” after all. The universe had become an
“abattoir,” according to Camille Paglia. War was her own special landscape—she was also in rebellion, like the South, with Carlo as her “mute Confederate.” She'd been writing poems with a brutal intensity, the White Heat of “unanointed Blaze” [Fr401]. And suddenly some of that heat was gone.

“Magic, as it electrifies, also makes decrepit—” she would write to Higginson in 1879. [Letter 622] “A Spell cannot be tattered, and mended like a Coat—” [Letter 663, to Sue, about 1880] And she could not mend her own powers. She was in her mid-thirties the year Carlo died. And if we consider her language—her Witchcraft—as a kind of lyrical mathematics, then it shouldn't startle us. A lot of mathematicians have lost their own siren's call by the time they're thirty-five. Dickinson had stopped dancing “like a Bomb, abroad” [Fr360], or perhaps she was dancing in a different way, and all the carnage had used her up. Carlo's death had jolted her, and she would mourn him for the rest of her life. He was very old for a Newfoundland when he died—almost seventeen. Most Newfoundlands don't live beyond the age of ten; they're often born with defective heart valves; and so Dickinson had her big brown dog for a very long time.