A Loaded Gun (2 page)

Symbols Used in the Text

A L
OADED
G
UN

Emily Dickinson for the 21
^st
Century

Young Emily, circa 1847

Courtesy of Amherst College Archives and Special Collections

ONE

Zero at the Bone

1

W
HEN
J
ULIE
H
ARRIS DIED
at eighty-seven of congestive heart failure on August 24, 2013, she was remembered most of all as an “unprepossessing anti-diva,” who had a waiflike, invisible presence outside the roles she played, according to her obituary in
The New York Times.
Though she would inhabit Mary Lincoln, Joan of Arc, and Sally Bowles on Broadway, she continued to haunt the nation as “shy Miss Emily” for almost forty years. In his obit, Bruce Weber marveled at her portrait of Dickinson as a “fiercely observed, proudly literary and deeply self-conscious near-agoraphobe.” Harris had played her to the hilt.

Dressed in white, like a nurse or a nun, the anti-diva appeared at the Longacre Theatre in 1976, as the Belle of Amherst, in William Luce's play. She won her fifth Tony Award and would repeat her performance in a public television special that seemed to enchant most spectators. She went on tour year after year, until Julie Harris
became
Emily Dickinson.

Such was Harris' mimetic power and the ferocity of her talent. She was like a hologram of the poet visiting us from the past.
The Belle of Amherst
presents the poet with a persona that is often funny and capricious as quicksilver. Harris was gnomic and red-haired, like Dickinson herself, and one could feel the patter of the poet's footsteps while Julie
Harris was onstage. “I first fell in love with Emily Dickinson when I read her letters,” the anti-diva once wrote. “It's like listening to her heart.”

Luce has her sit on a low chest, “excited. Her mind is running on one track only—publication.” She's lured one of the most eminent essayists and literary critics of her time, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, into the house. But she's no Scheherazade.

“I've been waiting to hear from your own lips what you're planning for my poems. I have them right here.”

She's ready to show him her entire stash, poems not even her sister knew about. And it's a pity that Higginson can't sing his own lines, else we might have had a bit of fireworks, or a wonderful comic moment. But Luce doesn't give us a single
hair
of Higginson's actual visit to her father's house, the Homestead, in 1870. Dickinson descended the stairs with two day lilies in her hand. In a letter to his wife, written that very night of his visit to Amherst, Higginson offers us one of the few genuine glimpses of Dickinson we have, without the least bit of embellishment.

A step like a pattering child's in entry & in glided a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair & a face . . . with no good feature—in a very plain & exquisitely clean white pique & a blue net worsted shawl. She came to me with two day lilies which she put in a sort of childlike way into my hand & said “These are my introduction” in a soft frightened breathless childlike voice—& added under her breath Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers & hardly know what to say—but she talked soon & thenceforward continuously—& deferentially—sometimes stopping to ask me to talk instead of her—but readily recommencing.
    
[Letter 342a]

It was the most critical encounter of her life—or at least that portion of her life we can glean from letters that still survive. She'd been waiting to meet Colonel Higginson for eight years. She had first written to him
in 1862, pretending she was a neophyte—an
unborn
poet—while her letters and poems had a bewildering mastery. Yet she pretended to be his pupil, seeking his advice, sending him four of her poems like soft, seductive bombs. “Mr. Higginson, /Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” [Letter 260] She didn't even sign her poems, but hid her name inside a little card. The colonel was bewitched. He wrote her right away. Dickinson replied, “I made no verse—but one or two—until this winter—Sir—” Meanwhile she'd been assembling her poems into little packets, stitched together by her own hand—close to five hundred poems, if not more. He called her poetry “spasmodic,” but she hadn't really come to him for advice. She needed his intelligence, having had so few correspondents with his stature and scope. She was vampirizing the colonel, sucking at the blood inside his head.

Luce's Emily dreams on her feet about all the future editions of her poems. “And I would prefer morocco-bound.” Higginson speaks, but we don't hear his voice, of course, in this “One-Woman Play.” What he says unsettles her. “But my meter is new, experimental,” she tells him with a decidedly twentieth-century tick. She recites to the audience:

       
A great Hope fell

       
You heard no noise

       
The Ruin was within . . .
    
[J1123]

And she vanishes into her bedroom, the heart ripped right out of her. She keeps sending him poems.
“But always, from his polite replies, I get the uneasy feeling that they end up in some dusty drawer in his office.”

And we're back to Emily Dickinson, the baker of black cake and victim of unrequited love.
“But I'll have you know, plain or not, I had more than one suitor. And they were all married. And older than I. But there was really only one.” She's been pining half her life for a particular “Christ-like man,” the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, whom she'd heard preach in Philadelphia when she was twenty-four.
“His voice haunted me. I couldn't break off the enchantment, even after I returned to Amherst.” She only met the preacher twice, but he became her mysterious “Master,” to whom she addressed three funny, sad, heartbreaking letters that may never have been sent. All we have are the rough drafts.

Master.

If you saw a bullet hit a Bird—and he told you he was'nt shot—you might weep at his courtesy, but you would certainly doubt his word.
    
[Letter 233]

I've got a cough as big as a thimble—but I don't care for that—I've got a Tomahawk in my side but that don't hurt me much.
    
[If you]
Her master stabs her more.
    
[Letter 248]

Critics have been puzzling over these letters ever since they were first discovered. For Luce, Wadsworth has become the
lesion
around which she wrote her poems, the source of her sadness and ecstasy. She also admits that one man, Judge Otis P. Lord did propose to her, and glosses right over this proposal. But Judge Lord was much more material in Emily's life than any Christ-like man. And few readers in 1976 realized that Emily Dickinson had a fling with one of her father's old friends—or even knew that he existed. Lord was considered a lion in Massachusetts, a judge of the superior court. His blue eyes blazed like bullets, and no one could return his stare. But the judge was in her thrall. She wrapped herself around him like a sexual snake. How many spectators in the audience—male or female—could have tolerated the image of Julie Harris pretending to glide over Judge Lord's erection with the blade of her hand?

. . . to lie so near your longing—to touch it as I passed, for I am but a restive sleeper and often should journey from your Arms through the happy night . . .
    
[Letter 562, about 1878]

Instead we have a very different
erection
—the subterranean kind—as Luce's Emily recites to us her encounter with a garter snake with its “spotted shaft” that's like “a Whip lash/Unbraiding in the Sun.”

       
But never met this Fellow

       
Attended, or alone

       
Without a tighter breathing

       
And Zero at the Bone
—
    
[J986]

And that very last line defeats the whole panorama and spectacle of a play about a harmless maiden aunt who happened to write poetry. Neither the poems that weave through the monologue without much of a “Whip lash,” nor the monologue itself, provide a key to Emily Dickinson's art. We don't see her demonic side. She flirts with the audience, but Luce's Dickinson is never “Zero at the Bone”—she has too much of the
reasonableness
that Luce has pumped into the play. We'd never learn from Luce that her favorite creature was the spider, or that she loved to spin her webs with the silver thread of her Lexicon, and capture her prey—words or young widows and married men.

But it isn't Luce's fault. The Dickinson he offers us had been around for eighty-six years, ever since she was first published in 1890, half the deviltry of her language and punctuation rubbed out, some of it by Higginson himself, who thought he was doing Dickinson a favor by presenting her as a lovelorn recluse and village savant. She was half-forgotten by the turn of the century, a poet whose ragged lines had the registers of a spinster who pined away. But a war developed among Dickinson's heirs. Her brother's mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd, had a cache of letters and poems (she'd been Higginson's co-editor and was the first to transcribe Dickinson's manuscripts). Emily's sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson, had another cache. And their daughters, Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Millicent Todd Bingham, would become involved in the battle—whole new gatherings of poems suddenly appeared like “a Bomb, abroad.” [Fr360] But the myth of the recluse remained, the
half-cracked poetess who had to renounce her love. Few of us had read her letters. We knew her by a little “menagerie” of poems, memorized in high school. We'd never heard of Judge Lord, and we wouldn't have believed the tale of
our
Emily romping around on the family sofa with a man her father's age. We could only imagine the Queen Recluse in a virginal white dress.

And this was the creature Julie Harris inhabited in 1976—with her freckles and black cake—until that
other
Emily, seductive, spiteful, cruel, with the reckless anger and eruptions of a volcano, was swept under the carpet.

2

S
TILL
,
SOMETHING HAPPENED
around the time
The Belle of Amherst
was first produced. Adrienne Rich, who had won the National Book Award for her poetry in 1974, was utterly obsessed with Dickinson.
“For months, for years, for most of my life, I have been hovering like an insect against the screens of an existence which inhabited Amherst, Massachusetts, between 1830 and 1886.” But Dickinson was hard to capture.
“Narrowed-down by her early editors and anthologists, reduced to quaintness or spinsterish oddity by many of her commentators, sentimentalized, fallen-in-love with like some gnomic Garbo, still unread in the breadth and depth of her full range of work, she was, and is, a wonder to me when I try to imagine myself into that mind.” Rich didn't see any quaintness at all. This gnomic Garbo had to find the means to survive. There was nothing pathological about her life as a hermit in her father's house: her self-styled isolation was her survival kit as a poet. She was, as Rich says, a most practical woman, who understood her gifts.
“I have come to imagine her as somehow too strong for her environment, a figure of powerful will, not at all frail and breathless, someone whose personal dimensions would be felt in a household.”

As much as she was frightened of her father, he must have been a little wary of her smoking intelligence and wit. And in 1975, a year
before Julie Harris broke through as
The Belle of Amherst,
mesmerizing audiences in her white dress, Rich published “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson,” an essay that dynamited many of the shibboleths about the Belle of Amherst. The gnomic Garbo was suddenly gone, and in her place was a woman who had to exercise a good deal of cunning in a society where most men, including her father, often considered females little more than voluptuous, intelligent, child-bearing creatures with their own mysterious charm; Emily might go to school, but she had to remain outside history. She could not even carry her father's name into marriage—daughters were swallowed up by husbands, fathers, brothers. Is it any wonder Dickinson never married? Her elder brother, Austin, was Edward Dickinson's favorite. Father and son fought all the time, but Edward missed him the moment he was out of sight. He cherished his son's school compositions, called them better than Shakespeare, and wanted to have them published in a morocco-bound book, while his daughter's poems would always be invisible to him. And when Austin considered moving to Chicago with his bride (Susan Dickinson was Emily's dearest friend and perhaps her greatest love), Edward bribed him to remain in Amherst by building a house for him and Susan—the Evergreens—next door to the Homestead.

Those were the confines of Emily's world; she baked her father's bread, she gardened, and was able to wheedle the best room in the Homestead from him, in the southwest corner, where she could look at the Dickinson meadow from her writing desk. Adrienne Rich made a pilgrimage to that room.
“Here I became, again, an insect, vibrating at the frame of the windows, clinging to panes of glass, trying to connect. The scent here is very powerful. Here in this white-curtained, high-ceilinged room, a red-haired woman with hazel eyes and a contralto voice wrote about volcanoes, deserts, eternity, suicide, physical passion, wild beasts, rape, power, madness, separation, the daemon, the grave. Here, with a darning needle, she bound these poems—heavily emended and often in various versions—into booklets, secured with darning thread, to
be found and read after her death.” And somehow she thrived. She might call Higginson her Preceptor, but she had none. She was utterly self-taught, self-schooled. She had her Bible and her Lexicon, but she couldn't have learned much about the “Whip lash” of words from her favorite authors—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Brontë sisters, Dickens, Emerson, George Eliot, George Sand, Keats. (Perhaps Shakespeare was her Master—her only one). Her poems were like hymnals, but they didn't come from any church. That strange polyphony was born inside her head. But she lived with all the constraints—
“the corseting of women's bodies, choices, and sexuality [that] could spell insanity to a woman genius.” She could out-Puritan the Puritans in her poems. She was fierce—and cruel—like some rebel preacher in their midst. God was terrifying and aloof, but he was also impotent and maimed.