A Loaded Gun (18 page)

In act 4, scene 14 of the play, Antony dwells upon his own
captivity
to Cleopatra and wonders if he himself has disappeared into the clouds.

       
Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish,

       
A vapour sometime like a bear or lion . . .

       
That which is now a horse, even with a thought

       
The rack dislimns and makes it indistinct

       
As water is to water.

And the
second
daguerreotype helps clarify one of the little secrets of Dickinson's life—that no matter what crag Condor Kate is on, or where she travels from Blue Peninsula to Blue Peninsula, she will never
dislimn.

In one of her later poems, circa 1877, Dickinson speaks to us, as she often does, from heaven:

       
I shall not murmur if at last

       
The ones I loved below

       
Permission have to understand

       
For what I shunned them so—

       
Divulging it would rest my Heart

       
But it would ravage their's—

       
Why, Katie, Treason has a Voice—

       
But mine—dispels—in Tears.
    
[Fr1429]

Nothing in this poem is clear. If it is about
“erotic loss or betrayal undergone,” as Helen Vendler suggests, it's still hard to determine the difference between the ravaged and the ravager. Is Kate's “Treason” that she married for a second time, in 1866? Or is Dickinson herself the “Treasoner?” As usual, the ground shifts so rapidly from line to line that the speaker sounds like some ventriloquist hurling her voice right from heaven.

Kate, it seems, was still gnawing at her mind. Did Dickinson shun Katie, or was it Katie who ended whatever bits of passion they once shared? Dickinson might have had five or six years of fury on account of Kate, where poem followed poem, like an endless avalanche, but there's scant evidence that Kate's constant wanderlust ruined Dickinson's life, whether or not it filled her with “Infinites of Nought” [Fr693] and “that White Sustenance—/Despair—”[Fr706]. She was writing poems before Kate arrived in Amherst and continued to scratch other poems in her Pearl Jail long after Kate had fled to her Blue Peninsula.

Still, whatever happened between Kate and Emily may have been more than Sue Dickinson could bear. She grew more and more mercurial. She adored her children but was cold to Austin in his copperish wig, and her relations with Emily no longer had the same ebullient charm; she was now mistress of the Evergreens, a woman who entertained Bret Harte and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The eroticism of Emily's poems must have disturbed her, aroused her own dormant—and ambiguous—sexuality. She seems utterly asexual in her later photographs. Yet Sue was much more sensual than either Emily or Kate in the images we have of her as an adolescent, with luminous dark eyes and a ripe mouth.

An orphan from another social caste—her father was a ne'er-do-well who owned a tavern—she struggled in a way that Emily never
had to struggle. Sue was voluptuous, moody, brilliant, and bisexual, which wasn't all that uncommon in nineteenth-century America, where women had deep emotional ties among themselves, and men were often like extraterrestrials, as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has pointed out in “The Female World of Love and Ritual.” It's likely that a woman's first sexual experience in a middle-class culture was with another woman, since women often slept in the same bed as adolescents, kissed, and fondled one another freely. A woman knew more about another woman's body than a man ever would, unless he visited the town brothel or read the Marquis de Sade.

Sue arrived in Amherst almost like an indentured servant, lived with a married sister and a brother-in-law who never really appreciated her. Unlike the local belles, she didn't have an abundance of clothes. But she was cultivated and also as dark as a Gypsy. Emily fell in love with Sue—they were poets in a land of prose, but Sue didn't have the time or the means to luxuriate in language. Austin pursued her for years like a patient, bumbling hawk. And when Sue finally succumbed, she married the whole tribe of Dickinsons—she sorely needed a tribe of her own. Austin couldn't fathom the Cleopatra he had on his hands, but Emily could. If she herself was Vesuvius, then there was an even greater volcano living right next door.

And we have to imagine the jealous rage Sue might have hidden, perhaps even from herself, when she realized how drawn Emily and Kate were to each other, as if Sue were harboring a kind of criminal in her own house, someone who could upset her tranquil borders at the Evergreens. I suspect she scared Katie off. Condor Kate's visits grew less and less frequent, until Emily felt like a mermaid stranded in her own private sea.

Sue was visited with much the same dilemma after Dickinson's death. Vinnie, whom she considered a fool, wanted her to gather up Emily's
scratchings
and find a publisher for them. And Sue procrastinated. She planned to publish the poems for a private circle of friends,
thus burying them forever. She must have felt a kind of erotic pull toward Kate in every other line. And she now had entered a danger zone; Emily's poems had become live bombs dancing abroad, and might reveal Sue's bisexual past. But Vinnie, who had her own volcanic will, took back the poems and gave them to Sue's one great rival in Amherst, Mabel Loomis Todd. Sue held on to her own stash of letter-poems and did her best to neuter Emily, present her sister-in-law as Amherst's asexual genius. Also, she now had someone else to promote—her daughter, Mattie, had become a pianist and a poet, as if the creativity Sue has suppressed all these years could now
breathe
through Mattie's loins. But there were too many ghosts in her closets at the Evergreens, too much hidden heat that would rise up right out of the past. And like some stubborn, half-mad chancellor, she tried to eradicate all knowledge of the real or imagined liaison between two friends she loved most in the world, but all her machinations would spill onto her daughter's lap. Martha Dickinson Bianchi spent half her life manufacturing her own myths about Aunt Emily, nonsense about the poet's seductive charms.
“Nothing would be more delicious to me than to repeat by name the list of those whom she bewitched. It included college boys, tutors, law students, the brothers of her girl friends,—several times their affianced bridegrooms even; and then the maturer friendships,—literary, Platonic, Plutonic; passages varying in intensity, and at least one passionate attachment whose tragedy was due to the integrity of the Lovers, who scrupled to take their bliss at another's cost,” she wrote in her introduction to
The Single Hound
(1914).

Whole industries have been built around that “passionate attachment,” with novels, plays, and scholarly tomes identifying one candidate after the other as her phantom male lover—starting with her brother's Amherst classmate George Gould, moving on to her father's law apprentice, Ben Newton, continuing with the hypnotic Philadelphia preacher, Charles Wadsworth, whom some would like to identify as the Master in those three poignant, self-effacing, exuberant, and
sadly comic letters that are among her greatest works of art. And there's also the seductive editor of the
Springfield Republican,
Sam Bowles, or perhaps Colonel Higginson himself, or Thomas Niles, the Boston editor who first published Dickinson's poems with an almost shameful reluctance, or some unknown aeronaut, when all the time that one monumental attachment wasn't with a man at all, but with an obscure woman from Cooperstown, a wanderer whom Martha and her mother had wanted so desperately to hide.

4

A
ND SO WE
'
RE LEFT WITH ONE DAGUERREOTYPE
whose provenance we may never ascertain, which could be the deluded dream of some junk dealer in Massachusetts, but which, nonetheless, rides us right into the twenty-first century with Emily Dickinson, not so much because of the revelations about her and Condor Kate, but because of the
enchantment
of the daguerreotype itself, and the persona it reveals to us, Dickinson as a carnivore, a huntress, much taller than we had ever imagined: the
record book of the funeral director who buried Dickinson notes that she was five feet six inches. She protects Kate in the daguerreotype, stares at us with a slight astigmatism in her
Yellow Eye,
sits in her old-fashioned dress, with a confidant half smile, with the long fingers of a pianist—a hunter's hand.

“Abyss has no Biographer—,” Dickinson wrote to Sue's sister, Martha Gilbert Smith, in 1884. [Letter 899] But perhaps it does, since the daguerreotype takes us into the landscape of “My life had stood a loaded gun.” [Fr764] And we now can stare into the “Abyss” of the poem. It's darker than we might ever have imagined. The Master and his Loaded Gun share the same persona. The Doe they hunt is for a different kind of winter meat—sexual prey. They're a couple of cavaliers. The speaker identifies with the cruelty of her Master, with his sense of sexual play. To seduce is to plunder, to feel the mindless joy of a Loaded Gun. And isn't Condor Kate Dickinson's
“prey” in the daguerreotype, her conquest, whom she's sharing with the camera and with us? And this is what is so disturbing about the image: Dickinson feels more contemporary than we are, even in her fluffed-out clothes. Kate is somewhere back in another time, tentative, forlorn, frightened of a shadow box that can capture her image and suck at her soul. But Dickinson is much more comfortable with the black magic of technology. We can only see four of her fingers; the “emphatic Thumb” of her hunter-killer's hand is hidden. She's no picture out of the poem. She is the Loaded Gun.

SEVEN

Within a Magic Prison

1

I
F A SINGLE DAGUERREOTYPE PLUCKED OUT
of a scavenger sale in Springfield can twist our imagination so and reveal Dickinson as a huntress rather than a shy Kangaroo, then we might have to admit that the more we learn about the Belle of Amherst, the more mysterious and ungovernable she becomes. What do we really know about her after gathering all her texts and every variant—the letters, sent and unsent, the anthologies of her poems that she stitched together like some seamstress of mind and soul, the fragments that suddenly appeared on the backs of envelopes and bits of brown paper bags in her last two decades and were largely ignored by her earliest editors, since
all
of them believed that protean as she was, Dickinson was well beyond the “White Heat” of her most productive period? And if we pin together the details of her life, as she often pinned the lines of one poem onto the lines of another, or examine every pinning or poem like some celestial jeweler, can we discover a significant shape for Dickinson other than the ragged outline of one iconic lie after the other? We cannot really determine
why
she began to wear a white dress, or when she began her subterranean existence as a mermaid-poet in that frigate of hers on the second floor, or even if Vinnie slept with her in the same narrow sleigh bed? And can we speak of a
Dickinson
canon
when each poem (or letter) with all its variants, is utterly isolated, a canon all its own?

“Except for Shakespeare,” Harold Bloom tells us, “Dickinson manifests more cognitive originality than any other Western poet since Dante.” Like Shakespeare, her language is “dragonish,” shifting shapes while it
dislimns,
as words fly out of nowhere—little dragons that caress and kill at the same time. But I doubt that Dickinson would ever have believed in a “Western Canon,” even if it commenced with her beloved Shakespeare and included George Eliot, a novelist she adored. She would have said that language began in Arctic bliss, with icicles under her tongue, that all words were “Zero at the Bone.” Dickinson believed in violent shifts of landscapes and language—the volcano was her natural home, with all its molten lava and centuries of sleep. If Lear represents the unraveling of civilization, the wild ravages of an old man's heart, Dickinson would never have sided with him, but with the Fool, who asks, “Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?” And Lear answers with all the canonical pomp of kings: “Why, no, boy; nothing can be made out of nothing.”

But Dickinson knew otherwise. Language came from the abyss; hers was a dragon's lair. And she composed, almost until the very end, with that mordant humor of hers, like a bird in mid-flight. To her favorites, Fanny and Loo, she wrote just before her death, in May of 1886.

       
Little Cousins,

                 
Called back.

                        
Emily.
    
[Letter 1046]

It was the very last missive she would ever send.

But there were also poems and fragments, scraps she wrote on the sly, and might pin to a poem, or use to accompany some doodle, as if she were liberated from the strictness of meter or the imprisonment of a page. They were like the excretions of a snail, a few words on the back of some recipe, or the strip of a used envelope, or a handbill, on every
kind of colored paper, like a fortune-teller's cards, with words spilling onto an envelope with her very own slant or some other inscrutable design, as if she were building her own
rickety
enterprise, as David Porter might say, or examining words as a carpenter would, with every curve and mark. And I suspect that these markings, often written with a pencil she carried at her side like some gunslinger, offer as much of an entry point as we will ever have to the silent music and constant chaos of her life and her work.

2

D
ICKINSON SCHOLAR
M
ARTA
L. W
ERNER
has devoted a good portion of her own life to these fragments, or “radical scatters,” as she calls them. And the archive she has assembled about these fugitive scraps has migrated from one electronic library to the next, like isolated, lonely birds that Dickinson herself might have coveted. Werner reveals how she happened upon the name for her electronic archive of the poet's late fragments—it was in a book by British ornithologist G. V. Matthews about the strange and irregular migratory patterns of birds. While trying to determine the flight paths and homing instincts of certain birds, Werner tells us, an expert—called a
liberator
—
“throws several birds into the air one at a time” in different directions. “The birds are then watched until they are out of sight, and the points at which they disappear from view are recorded.” A “scatter diagram” is then drawn up. And for reasons that are still unclear, “some birds on the outward course drift widely across the migration axis”—that is, their moves are utterly unexpected. “These drifts, called ‘radical scatters,' both solicit and resist interpretation.” And Werner is convinced that Dickinson's late fragments “are textual counterparts of the scattered migrants”—they often migrate from text to text, appear and disappear, and fly beyond their own limits, where readers can no longer capture them.

I saw several of these “fugitives' in the archives of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College; and nothing else I had ever seen of
Dickinson's—the fascicles, the 1847 daguerreotype, which was much tinier and more fragile than the icon I had imagined, or the letters with their different scrawls, some careful, others chaotic—excited and disturbed me as much as these fugitive fragments, with their crosshatches, their lines that could spill in every direction, their erasures, the wiggle marks of the poet trying out a new pen, the ascending and descending dashes, like private musical notes that no army of scholars could ever interpret, the words that broke the
tyranny
of a line and seemed to shimmer in front of your eyes, or stared out at you with the boldest pen strokes on a tiny strip of paper:

       
Grasped
    
by

       
God
    
—
        
[PF 76; manuscript: “A 169”]

Credit: PF 76; manuscript: “A 169,” Amherst College Archives and Special Collections.

It was as if we were watching the poet in the act of creation, in some eternal present tense, with not a soul to step between us and mediate. I felt like that “liberator” flinging birds with a blind abandon, and knowing that no two flight patterns would ever be the same, that Dickinson would always startle, always run rampant.

These fragments were mostly ignored when Thomas H. Johnson first published some of them over sixty years ago as a kind of
appendage
to his collection of Dickinson's letters. He called them “Prose Fragments” and “Aphorisms.” It was, Johnson insisted, impossible to say very much about Dickinson's
“unformed, worksheet jottings.” They must have unnerved him a little with their almost accidental, anarchic appearance, and their bold declarations, like some wild telegraphic operator tapping at his keys:

I don't keep the Moth part of the House—I keep the Butterfly part
    
[PF 80]

A something overtakes the mind—we do not hear it coming
    
[Like her own cataclysmic acts of creation]. [PF 119]

What Lethargies of Loneliness
    
[PF 120]

With the sincere spite of a
Woman [PF 124]

Johnson tells us that the final “Aphorism” above, composed on a scrap of stationery, was unique among all the fragments
“in that it is in the ink and in the handwriting of about 1850.” She could have been talking about Sue here, or some unfaithful friend, but since all discussions about the
evolution
of Dickinson's handwriting are imprecise, she might also have been talking, ten years later, about some sudden lurch in her love affair with Condor Kate.

Perhaps I misread Dickinson's purpose and intent in this fragment, and it has nothing to do with Kate. Still, what's important is that Johnson assigned all such fragments to oblivion, and they
“disappeared from view almost in the very moment they had first appeared in print.”

Werner doesn't blame Johnson; she blames it on the “Cold War” mentality of the 1950s, when our own hysteria over national borders also enclosed us within
“textual borders—a need to define and contain texts,” so that we were blinded to the originality of fragments that seemed “an embarrassing excess.” But this
blinding
occurred long before Johnson; there had been a “Cold War” in relation to Dickinson's texts from the moment they were discovered in the poet's mahogany drawer. Perhaps Sue was the only one who understood the poet's subversive powers, but her secretiveness pushed her away from shepherding the poems into print; and Dickinson's first “discoverers,” Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, who felt that half her poems were fugitives, fragmented the poet's voice and created their own borders.

Even Johnson's monumental editing of the poems and the letters couldn't really repair a misconception that had haunted us for over half a century, that overriding image of the Queen Recluse. But at
least we had her own full closet of poems, without fake titles and “improvements” upon her syntax, and letters that revealed a complex tapestry of purpose we had never seen before. Their riches dazzled and overwhelmed, and perhaps none of us, including Johnson, was prepared to examine the outer edges of that tapestry, where her own narrative seemed to unravel into a tatter of words. And then came Jay Leyda's
The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson
(1960), which talked about “the omitted center” of Dickinson's design, that elusive shorthand of her letters and poems, where she had her own elliptical language with certain recipients, such as Sue.

Leyda and the poet were a perfect fit. His entire life was elliptical. It's not even certain where he was born, or what name he was born with. He grew up in Dayton, Ohio. His father was a circus performer, and he was raised by a grandmother who pretended to be his mother. He went to Moscow to study with Sergei Eisenstein, returned to the United States, was an assistant curator of film at the Museum of Modern Art (it was here that he probably met Joseph Cornell); accused of being a Soviet secret agent, Leyda was driven out of the museum in 1940, but he still went to Hollywood in 1942, where he served as a technical adviser at Warner Bros. and MGM on films about the Soviet Union, such as
Mission to Moscow
(1943), and later landed at the Folger Library in Washington, D.C., and up at Amherst, working as an archivist on the chaotic collection of Dickinson papers and poems that Millicent Todd Bingham had inherited from her mother and given to Amherst College—he'd already written
The Melville Log,
a compilation of the days and hours of Herman Melville, originally intended as a birthday present for Eisenstein. And Leyda was one of the first to examine Dickinson's late fragments; he shared some of his thoughts with Joseph Cornell, and wrote to literary critic Alfred Kazin (and others) about his adventures of wandering through the Homestead, of standing in the poet's room, dreaming of her vistas. And he did his own Dickinson log, gathering the minutiae around
her life like a pile of compost that he could sift through, but even Leyda—the ultimate Dickinson detective—couldn't intuit the relationship of the fragments to the rest of her work.

It took another kind of detective, Marta Werner, searching for migrations rather than minutiae, to reexamine the fragments almost forty years after Leyda. And she has bolted us into a recognition of Dickinson's habits as a huntress of words that we might never have had without her own electronic archive. These “radical scatters,” she tells us, were never meant to be seen by anyone but the scriptor herself, and
“are not so much ‘works' as symptoms of the processes of composition.” And her discoveries were no accident. These fragments could not become
visible
until a brand-new century, when our notions of stability have changed, and we are all nomads in a sense.
“Homelessness is our inheritance and our condition,” according to Marta Werner. “A poetics of exile, of the margin, is our rejoinder.”