A Loaded Gun (23 page)

          
1861:
  
“
Noticeable change in appearance: letters elongated and uneven, as if written with excess of nervous energy . . .

          
1871:
  
“Capitals are larger. Fewer ligations . . .

          
1874:
  
“Writing in ink reaches maximum size—sometimes only one word on a line.

          
1885:
  
“Further exaggeration of all characteristics described in 1884; letters further apart and irregular.

          
1886:
  
“Large, loose, and badly formed, showing physical weakness.”

We could be hovering over Dickinson, watching her flourish and watching her die with a brutal, regular logic. But, as Werner reminds us, there's a music to the poet's script that defies any logic: poems morph into
“word-paintings” that cannot be so easily categorized; her alphabet is like “a drift of birds” out of a dream, where “dashes become waved or wandlike, the streaming ascenders and descenders of the
ds
and
ys
resemble lighted wicks,” and we are far removed from a world where Dickinson is trying to mimic pages of print, as Ward seems to suggest. Graphologist Susanne Shapiro believes that Ward was on “a
dangerous mission” the moment she attempted to date the poems in terms of the size and slant of Dickinson's script, that she's utterly in the dark when confronted with an unusual trait and doesn't know how to interpret the “non script”—that is, the spacing between individual letters and words.

Shapiro is no foreign intruder or neophyte in regard to the poet. She delivered a paper—“Secrets of the Pen: Emily Dickinson's Handwriting”—before a conference of the Emily Dickinson International Society at Mount Holyoke College, in August 1999, in which she analyzes a late letter-poem to Sue [Letter 910, about 1884] where
“the spaces between the words often exceed the size of the words themselves.”

       
Banquets
          
have

       
no
      
Seed,
      
or

       
Beggars
            
would

       
sow
      
them   —
     [Letter 910; manuscript: ”HCL B 88”]

The graphologist's term for this peculiar spacing is “
rivers
.” And such rivers reveal a drifting away, as if each letter were its own private
cosmos, or, as Shapiro says, “an island of its own.” According to Shapiro,
“She was like a wounded animal.” This has nothing to do with her precarious mental state, as Shapiro believes, but with the almost aggressive joy of her
wound
as a writer. Her own words had sundered her. “You cannot solder an Abyss/With Air—” [Fr647] She was rampant, as she strove through that private domain of her calligraphy, her Sahara of endless patches, where the world of print and pagination had no meaning and no place.

It isn't clear when she got into the habit of scratching her little syncopations on slivers of paper, slit-open envelopes, etc. Dickinson's earliest “envelope-poem” dates from around 1864, the year she ended her habit of “stabbing” her poems into little booklets, and embarked on less ambitious projects. But I suspect the reverse was true, that her mind was taking her along another route, toward a different kind of rapture—the dissolution of language, as if her mind was much too quick for the trappings of meter, for poetry itself, and all she could encode was the stuttering of words.
“The cometary pace of her thought determines her choice of materials—whatever lies close by—and is registered in the disturbance of the scribal hand,” as if writing itself had become a form of stutter—and she was ripping the notion of the lyrical into shreds.

In several scraps that may have been meant for Judge Lord, she writes:

[Antony's remark]

       
to a friend
    
,
    
“
    
since

       
Cleopatra
    
died
    
”

       
is
      
said
      
to
      
be

       
the
    
saddest
        
ever

       
lain
        
in
    
Language —

       
That
        
engulfing

       
‘Since
    
”
    
—
    
[Letter 791, about 1882; manuscript: “A 741b”]

Dickinson is referring to her favorite Shakespearian duet, the saga of Antony and Cleopatra that keeps knocking around in her head. Enraged, fearing that Cleopatra has betrayed him, Antony vows to kill her. Cleverer than he is, Cleopatra pretends to have slain herself. And Antony cannot recover.

                                    
  
Since Cleopatra died

       
I have lived in such dishonour that the gods

       
Detest my baseness. I, that with my sword

       
Quarter's the world, and o'er green Neptune's back

       
With ships made cities, condemn myself to lack

       
The courage of a woman . . .

After a bit of flamboyant posturing, he falls upon his sword,
womanish
in his own way, only to learn that Cleopatra is still alive. And all we can do is ponder how Dickinson, the Antony of her own isolated court, must have identified with his lines:

       
That
            
engulfing

       
‘Since
    
”
. . .

What were the circumstances around this “radical scatter”? Was she feeling slighted by her own Cleopatra—Sue? Or had Language itself become “Cleopatra's Company,” a kind of hopeless retinue, and she herself engulfed within its snares? So she had to disembowel her own Lexicon, sing with stutters like that lone songbird “in the centre of Dissolution.” She was the new queen of Pompeii, her staccato arias falling into a void.

Pompeii—All its (the) occupations crystallized—Everybody gone away.
    
[PF 100]

3

B
UT THERE WAS STILL
S
UE
, a most enigmatic queen of Amherst, the commissar of culture, who enraptured and puzzled Emily Dickinson for over thirty years.

Susan knows she is a Siren—and that at a word from her, Emily would forfeit Righteousness . .
. [Letter 554, mid-June, 1878]

Susan was restless her entire life. She may have had a “fling” with Kate Scott at Utica Female Academy, may have been in love with Sam Bowles, who was some kind of secret Lothario, and at times she was like Dickinson's own dominatrix, with the poet pleading for whatever little affection she could get (at least in the deep chill of Dickinson's letters and poems). Sue was a greater riddle than Emily or Kate, because we do not have any tickets to her wants and desires. She's
“a dead spot,” undecipherable, according to Christopher Benfey. It's as if she disappeared inside her own mantle as housewife, mother, and mistress of the arts, and seems like a somnambulist going through her traces, trapped in some hypnotic spell.

In “Annals of the Evergreens,” the chronicle of her
adventures
as Amherst's ruling matron, she summons up Harriet Beecher Stowe's visit to Amherst in the summer of 1872; the novelist was benumbed, in a kind of perpetual shock; not only had she lost a son to cholera in 1849 but her daughter Georgiana had become a morphine addict, and her own favorite, her son Fred, an alcoholic captain who had been wounded at Gettysburg, sailed to California in 1871 on a ship bound for the Far East
“and vanished into thin air.”

So she'd come to Amherst to spend the summer and fall with Georgiana, who was married to the town's new Episcopal rector, and still addicted to morphine. And, of course, the mistress of the Evergreens swooped up Harriet Beecher Stowe.
“I remember her distinctly as the light from the chandelier [fell] upon her mobile face, her eyes twinkling
with fun and merriment, her forehead covered with soft brown curls, confined with a band of black velvet, as seen in her pictures.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe must have had Fred and Georgiana on her mind.
“I knew she was taciturn at times,” Sue recalls, and invites Harriet on a carriage ride into the country. But there's no mention of that other
writer
in town, Sue's sister-in-law, the supposed agoraphobic who lived right across the lawn. And it's hard to imagine that Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Queen Recluse ever met. What did they have in common other than their social caste? One had written a novel that was a tinderbox full of inflamed caricatures and operatic escapades that millions could recite, and the other was utterly unknown and unremarked, with a tinderbox inside her head. But Dickinson's little cousin Loo found some resemblance between the two women. In 1904, after her own dead cousin had become a “public poet,” Loo would declare in a letter to the editors of the Boston
Woman's Journal:

Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her most wonderful sentences on slips of paper held against the kitchen wall while she was hovering over culinary formations. And I know that Emily Dickinson wrote most emphatic things in the pantry, so cool and quiet, while she skimmed the milk; because I sat on the footstool behind the door, in delight, as she read them to me. The blinds were closed, but through the green slats she saw all those fascinating ups and downs going on outside that she wrote about.

It almost sounds like a recital, the way Dickinson had once invented tunes on the piano for Kate and Sue, at the Evergreens. And considering her own sensitivity to sunlight, she would have skimmed the milk within that little dark wall of green slats, and scrawled a few lines on a scrap of paper, tapped them out like a timpanist to Loo, though her little cousin didn't have an inkling of that staccato rage in her lines—no one did.

Yet it was 1904, long past the furor over Harriet Beecher Stowe and her antislavery novel, and suddenly she was as subterranean as Emily
Dickinson—more of a renegade and less of a Christian lady than we might have imagined. Her novel was practically out of print. She'd been so successful in 1852 because she appealed to a female audience of Christian mothers, who had suffered and lost children of their own, and could identify with Eliza Harris, a black Jane Eyre with “bright” skin, who leapt across the ice of the Ohio River with her son Harry in her arms, while the slave catchers pursued them with their dogs, always a couple of
wrinkles
behind in the plot. They all belong to a land of half-forgotten ghosts—the murderous and comic slave-catchers, the little Christian saints, and the evil plantation owners, such as Simon Legree. “The Lord never visits these parts,” says Cassy, the mysterious stranger who rises out of this heart of darkness.

Legree is a nineteenth-century gargoyle, with his bullet head and hairy arms, but Cassy, his slave mistress, a refugee from a New Orleans brothel, is a much more modern ghost, and she haunts the novel in a way that none of the other characters ever can. Cassy's lament wasn't “written” by God, but by Harriet Beecher Stowe; it is her “work in throes,” and it contains a lexicon and a music that is absent from the rest of the novel, as if she had entered into that sumptuous and sexually charged world of New Orleans, with its quadroon balls, and gives us its splendor and degraded stink.

Cassy is already used up when we first meet her at the plantation, with her gaunt body and dark eyes. But her mystery and her musk pervade Legree's mansion. Harriet Beecher Stowe paints her as a wild woman, bewitched, half mad, but reveals her own witchery, her own mad song, as if she has inhabited Cassy's demons, Cassy's pain, not as a ventriloquist, or an adept puppeteer, but as someone who has found that soft, violent poetry at the edge of madness. Cassy had to “rescue” her own little boy from the torment of slavery by suckling him to death with laudanum. And I wonder how much of Harriet's own unconscious despair was compressed into Cassy's tale, with a murderous rage she would never reveal again.

That rage reminds me of Dickinson, where language explodes like terrifying splinters. It's as if Miss Emily, the patrician poet from a privileged and protected New England town, were Cassy's secret sister. She was no quadroon, of course, never visited New Orleans and its midnight balls, never had any children to lose, and she had freckles, rather than Cassy's creamy white complexion, but both seemed to erupt out of a similar void. Simon Legree can descend into hell, but Cassy has nowhere to go. She's lost in the maelstrom, like that defiant Belle of Amherst with her amber eyes. And Cassy is much too defiant in her strange absence-presence to be just another victim in a novel about victimization. She's outside Harriet's evangelical reach. She's a poet-witch who's as violent and mercurial as history. And we, as readers, are caught between her outbursts and her moody withdrawals.