A Loaded Gun (17 page)

The husband comes home from his Manhattan office—Madelyn and Emily are gone. In his study, he discovers two lines written in a strange, slanted hand, in purple ink that has the look of an
“antique.”

       
Bright Knots of Apparitions

       
Salute us, with their wings—

These two lines are from another of Dickinson's enigmatic poems, this one about ghosts who are far more vivid than we are.

       
Of nearness to her Sundered Things

       
The Soul has special times . . .

       
The Shapes we buried, dwell about,

       
Familiar, in the Rooms . . .

       
The Grave yields back her Robberies—

       
The Years, our pilfered Things—

       
Bright Knots of Apparitions

       
Salute us, with their wings
—
    
[Fr337]

The dead welcome the living, as Helen Vendler reminds us,
“as if we were the ones who had perished. . . . The ghosts, like a
corps de ballet,
move in and out of their ‘Knots'” . . . and perform for us, while they pity us, since they are the mourners and we are the mourned.

Oates' tale is as puzzling and apocalyptic as some of Dickinson's best poems; no one is spared— not the reader, not the author and her characters, not the 1847 daguerreotype, not Dickinson and all her hagiographers and devotees (including myself), and not our modern culture, with its desire to rouse the dead and make us immortal with one gadget after the other. It's the poems that survive in
EDickinsonRepliLuxe
; they are the “Bright Knots of Apparitions” that continually haunt our heads. And Oates has fashioned a brutal tale about the mystery that surrounds the poet and the one image we have of her; she's become a doll in a culture that worships dolls. And if “EDickinsonRepliLuxe” represents the way popular culture has come to
read
the poet and all the apocryphal tales about her—the consumptive adolescent who morphs into a wraith in a white dress—then this doll with flat breasts and a metallic smell is the monster we have made of Emily Dickinson.

2

T
HERE HAVE BEEN OTHER
“
SIGHTINGS
,” of course, discoveries of daguerreotypes that would supposedly
revolutionize
Dickinson scholarship and offer us a brand-new Emily. Two recent sightings caused quite a stir. One was a 3" by 1¾" photograph purchased at an undisclosed date by Mr. Herman Abromson from a Greenwich Village bookseller; “Emily Dickinson 1860” is scribbled on the back of the photograph. The other is an albumen print of a daguerreotype discovered in 2000 by Professor Philip Gura of the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. Neither of these prints has any real “provenance,” and after much research, most scholars do not consider them authentic images of the poet. But in some disturbing way, their authenticity doesn't matter, since the face that stares out at us in both images has the bland, dollish demean of a RepliLuxe. And artist-photographer Nancy Burson (born in 1948) used her own computer-morphing technology to “age” the poet in the 1847 daguerreotype and create her own silver print,
Emily Dickinson at age 52
(1995). Nancy Burson's Age Machine might be a miraculous rendering of the poet in her fifties, but her prunelike look reminds me of the mannequin in Oates' tale near the end of EDickinsonRepliLuxe's twenty-five year life span. Yet, as Polly Longsworth tells us, Dickinson's
polar privacy
helped create
“a vortex of compelling mystery, which, with all the energy of a black hole, draws the public into a quest for her identity.”

And at a meeting of the Emily Dickinson International Society in Cleveland on August 3, 2012, Martha Nell Smith revealed the existence of a new daguerreotype,
possibly
of the poet, taken around 1859, where for the first time she doesn't have that undernourished, wizened look of a replicant, and also for the first time she's posing with another woman, possibly Kate Scott. Martha Nell Smith makes no extravagant claims, nor does she insist upon any miraculous discovery.
“Whether this picture turns out to represent Emily Dickinson or not,” she says, “it has enabled audiences to imagine her as an adult Emily.”

And this is the critical point. The other
resurrections
of the poet—Gura's or Abromson's or Burson's computerized metamorphosis—reveal nothing new; they cannot take us into the poet's “Wild Nights” of creativity; and we cannot glimpse the outlaw who invented her own linguistic logic, who twisted language around like some forlorn female Prometheus (as Susan Howe suggests), who would not melt away and dissolve into the silly conventions of her own time; and most of all, these images tell us nothing about her sexual and poetic powers. But the daguerreotype uncovered by a photography collector at a Springfield junk sale in 1995
does offer us a glimpse of what a
mature
Emily might have looked like. She defies all our expectations in the daguerreotype, all our stereotypes, all our myths, often perpetrated by Dickinson herself. The poet was, as Rebecca Patterson says in
The Riddle of Emily Dickinson,
“undeniably plain,” and “suffered morbidly on account of her plainness.” So we have been led to believe. That is how Higginson saw her, and that is the sense we often have of Miss Emily in her own letters.

She's the only Kangaroo among the Beauty, as she tells the colonel. She provides her own verbal
daguerreotype,
enlisting herself as small, like the Wren, etc. This is the Emily we have found comfort in for almost 125 years—the Kangaroo no man could ever want. And that's why she remained a spinster. Of course, Sue's daughter, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, talked about Emily's myriad suitors, but this was one more of Martha's
mangled
memories.

The new daguerreotype, first published in the
Guardian,
on September 5, 2012, “depicts two women seated side by side.” Both are staring into the camera. The woman at the left has a tight, enigmatic smile; she almost looks like some kind of predator, or at least a woman with a fierce will and a sharpshooter's
Yellow Eye,
as we picture her composing “My life had stood a loaded gun” and a hundred other apocalyptic poems. The other woman seems much more vulnerable and severe; her hands are folded upon her lap, like a schoolmarm. She's dressed in a widow's black garb. The anonymous collector who has assigned himself a code name—Sam Carlo—believes that the daguerreotype may have been taken by a certain J. C. Spooner, who flourished as a photographer in Springfield at the time.

The poet is wearing a dress that's out of fashion, and dates from the 1840s, when she sat for the earlier daguerreotype. But that doesn't disrupt the authenticity of her portrait in Springfield. Dickinson liked to describe herself as old-fashioned; it was one of the masks she wore when she wanted to avoid seeing someone. “I'm so old fashioned, Darling, that all your friends would stare,” she wrote to a former schoolmate,
Abiah Root, declining an invitation to visit. [Letter 166] She often clung to old friends, but could also be reckless in her abandonment of them when they failed to amuse her or provide a decent mirror for her own words. And the old-fashioned dress that the Dickinson figure wears in the new daguerreotype is remarkably similar to a swatch of blue-checked cloth found in the collections at the Emily Dickinson Museum. This in itself is no “provenance.”

But other evidence has been uncovered since “Sam Carlo” first surmised that the figure on the left might be Emily Dickinson. He concentrated on the other figure in the daguerreotype, and after several years of research into the poet's life, he settled on Kate Scott, identifying two moles, one more prominent than the other, on her chin in the new daguerreotype and in an earlier portrait of Kate. There was also a question of Emily's astigmatism. Dr. Susan Pepin, director of neuro-ophthalmology at Dartmouth School of Medicine, who had long been fascinated by the poet's eye problems, studied the distinct characteristics of the poet's astigmatic eye in both daguerreotypes and concluded that the woman in the 1859 portrait was the same woman identified in the Dickinson daguerreotype of 1847. But as Dr. Pepin noted, so much in her own report to determine Dickinson's own peculiar facial asymmetries was limited by image resolution and variation in lighting of the measurements she took, and the idiosyncratic nature of the daguerreotypes themselves. Even with twenty-first-century magical tricks, there may never be a perfect fit. Still, for the first time in over 150 years, we have what may be an image of Dickinson in her own prime as a poet, and with some sexual heat, rather than a recluse and a nun in white, or the RepliLuxe doll that our own mass culture has made of her.

3

E
VEN
J
AY
L
EYDA
,
PROBABLY THE MOST
enlightened student of Emily Dickinson we've ever had, felt that Dickinson's relation to Kate Scott had been obscured by Rebecca Patterson's construction
of a
“fictitious set of sexual circumstances.” But what are we to make of Patterson's book in light of the 1859 daguerreotype? Emily holding her right arm around Kate (in the daguerreotype's own mirror image), coveting her, protecting her perhaps from the camera's prying eye. Whatever Patterson might have told us about Kate as the dark-eyed seductress of Cooperstown, Dickinson is in control here, Dickinson is in delight, and Kate is the widow with a vacant look.

Perhaps now we can comprehend Sue's mercurial behavior—her cooling off to Emily—once the widow came to town. Sue was more involved with Kate than she herself might have realized. Androgynous in her own secretive fashion, Sue may have been as much in love with Kate as Dickinson would ever be, though she had married Dickinson's brother and presided over the Evergreens as a kind of prisoner-queen. The most intense involvement the three women ever had was probably with one another. I suspect Sue never really loved Austin and never cared much for his or any “man's requirements.” And she couldn't have felt much joy when she watched Emily and Kate fall in love in her own parlor, as if she had pulled them together and played some willful, unconscious Cupid.

How will we ever know whether Kate and Emily spent one or more “Wild Nights” in Emily's corner room at the Homestead, that Pearl Jail where the poet perfected her craft? Patterson is much too willing to seize upon particular poems to narrate the stations of their romance—Dickinson wasn't serving out her biography on a silver plate, she was lashing at herself and others with her own language, writing about volcanoes, deserts, rape, as Adrienne Rich reminds us in “Vesuvius at Home,” about madness, suicide, murder, angels, wild beasts, the end of the world, and the tender violence of love and hate. And yet we can feel the presence of Kate, or some other female siren, like a maddened whisper, in a few of the poems.

       
When I hoped, I recollect

       
Just the place I stood—

       
At a window facing West—

       
Roughest Air—was good—

       
Not a Sleet could bite me—

       
Not a frost could cool—

       
Hope it was that kept me warm—

       
Not Merino shawl—

       
When I feared—I recollect

       
Just the Day it was—

       
Worlds were lying out to Sun—

       
Yet how the Nature froze—

       
Icicles opon my soul

       
Prickled Blue and cool—

       
Bird went praising everywhere—

       
Only Me—was still—

       
And the day that I despaired—

       
This—if I forget

       
Nature will—that it be Night

       
After Sun has set—

       
Darkness intersect her face—

       
And put out her eye—

       
Nature hesitate—before

       
Memory and I—
    
[Fr493]

Patterson limbs this poem into an unforeseen encounter with Kate in mid-March 1859. “
Unquestionably she was standing in her bedroom, when something occurred, so unexpected, so exciting, that it engraved on her memory every detail of the weather and even of the spot where she had stood.”

The problem here is that Patterson is
partially
right. Something did happen “At a Window facing West,” but the psychic landscape shifts so rapidly that it's hard to locate the speaker or where we can locate
ourselves in the poem. The speaker moves with a whiplike recall from hope to anxiety to deep despair—from a Sleet that cannot bite her to a soul that's Prickled Blue—from all the lure and possibility of love to a kind of eternal night that will maim and obliterate all memory of her beloved.

There's a much clearer signal of Dickinson's devotion to Kate in her letters. Sometime during the summer of 1860, she wrote to her Condor Kate, who had been long gone from Amherst, pleading for her to come from her crags again in Cooperstown. “You do not yet ‘dislimn,' Kate . . .” [Letter 222]
Dislimn
might utterly baffle us here were she not echoing
Antony and Cleopatra,
her favorite among all of Shakespeare's plays (she loved to see herself as Antony, wooing her own Cleopatra—whether Sue or Condor Kate).