A Loaded Gun (25 page)

“If I ask, will there be a planet like Earth with a person in Santa Cruz sitting at this colored desk, with every atom, every wave function exactly the same, if the universe is infinite the answer has to be yes.”

This wouldn't have stunned Emily Dickinson, who would have stared out her window overlooking the Dickinson meadow and waited for her doppelgänger to arrive. There may be variants as well, an idiot savant who can play Bach like Glenn Gould, an Oliver Sacks who has
become his own patient, or an Emily Dickinson who married a church warden, had five daughters, and never wrote a line in her life.

As science writer Natalie Angier reminds us, “The finite is nested within the infinite, and somewhere across the glittering, howling universal sample space of Buddha Field or Babel, your doppelgänger is hard at the keyboard, playing a Bach toccata.”

We're almost back in Joyce Carol Oates' world of EDickinson-RepliLuxe, of variants and replicants, of a doll with a suede vagina and a relentless human heart. And if Dickinson's
immensity
is still out there, and we inhabit one finite speck of that “infinite bubble bath,” then the poet may still be at her desk. And how shall we imagine her, writing poems that we still puzzle over, and she the greatest puzzle of all: an apprentice who was a master of her art. She had no vanity, no smallness of mind.

I'm tempted to compare her with van Gogh, who may have his doppelgänger in the heavens with the same missing ear. Like Dickinson, he was a master and a student at the same time. But he had a much shorter apprenticeship, and painted most of his masterpieces in the last year and a half of his life, often while he was locked away in the madhouse at Saint-Rémy.

He'd gone to Arles in 1888 to paint in the sun. He invited Gauguin to stay with him in the Yellow House, which he'd rented in hope of forming a little fraternity of painters. They quarreled, and in a drunken stupor, Vincent cut off his own ear. That wouldn't have seemed strange to Emily Dickinson, who often wrote about acts of self-mutilation, in order to sculpt herself as a man.

After his confinement at Saint-Rémy, he packed up and moved to a humdrum hotel, the Auberge Ravoux, in Auvers-sur-Oise, outside Paris. I went on a pilgrimage to Auvers-sur-Oise several years ago. The humdrum hotel is still there, much more pretentious now, and one can eat in the same café where Vincent ate, perhaps even sit at his table in the back. And for the price of a few euros, collected by
a ticket taker at a little kiosk in the rear yard, I climbed upstairs and visited van Gogh's room. It was barren, with a tiny skylight and a cane-back chair; the walls were full of crust, the floor was made of barren boards, and I couldn't stop crying. I imagined him alone in that room, his mind whirling with colors, and his psychic space as primitive and forlorn as a lunatic's world. He might as well have remained in Saint-Rémy. He'd written to his sister Willemien while he was still in the madhouse. He mentioned his lost years, and his isolation, as hard to bear as exile—he was always alone.

And yet he completed seventy paintings in the seventy days he was in Auvers-sur-Oise. And the paintings he did in the fields beyond his tiny room and at the madhouse have an illumination, a wild rush of color, we had never seen before. They're like visual songs that could accompany Dickinson's lyrics on the page.

Adam Gopnik sees a kind of lesson in van Gogh's fate.
“It is the moral luck of making something that no one wants in the belief that someone someday will.” It is a long shot in a society of sure things. But this “moral luck” of van Gogh remains at odds with our own liberal civilization “that always, and usually intelligently, prefers compromise to courage.”

And isn't it also the lesson of Emily Dickinson, that she was the longest of long shots, a poet who was thrust out of obscurity in spite of herself? Would we love her as much, revere her, if we hadn't encountered her first as the reclusive waif in the white dress, with tales of renunciation and unrequited romance, with butchered, bowdlerized versions of her poems that transformed her into an asexual nymph? We cannot dislodge or
dislimn
her from her own history, or the history of her poems, how they arrived, when they arrived, with all their accompanying myths. Perhaps we wouldn't summon her up in the same way without all those accoutrements that few other creators have. Van Gogh had his missing ear, the madhouse in Saint-Rémy, his claustrophobic room upstairs at the auberge in Auvers-sur-Oise, his brother
Theo, who lies next to him in a little boneyard beside the fields where Vincent's colors ran rampant, while the
limbs
of his suffering stick to us like Stations of the Cross.

And the Queen of Calvary? We have the Scarlet prison where she worked, now a shrine that's the main attraction of a museum devoted to her memory, but isn't it just as terrifying as Vincent's room,
barren
in its own way, with its bureau and sleigh bed? It was here, alone, in the turbulence of her own mind, she created poems and pictograms that are works of art, like some cave dweller of the nineteenth century with her own hieroglyphics. However unstable she might have been, moment by moment, she was fearless in her own work, or investigations, as we might call them, since she was as much an explorer as a poet, delving into landscapes where no one else had gone. And it's futile to define Dickinson in terms of gender or social station, or the topography of her own time. She was male and female, as we all are, at least in our dreams and acts of creation, and that's why her poems resonate with such force. She will continue to fuel our hunger and to baffle us, no matter how many portraits of her we uncover, or how many interpretations we have of every image. She's still out there “opon Circumference,” where she'll always be hard to find.

CODA

Sam Carlo

I
'
D BEEN TRYING TO TRACK DOWN
S
AM
C
ARLO
for the past several years, but I didn't have Dickinson's Yellow Eye or her Loaded Gun, and of course I failed. I wanted to know more about the second daguerreotype, how Sam Carlo had happened upon it. At least I could smile at the very mask of his name: Sam obviously stood for Sam Bowles, and what Carlo could he have had in mind other than Dickinson's dog? I liked his playful bent, but that didn't get me any closer to Sam.

Then, in January 2015, I wrote to Mimi Dakin, archivist at Amherst College, asking her permission to reproduce several items in the Dickinson collection for
A Loaded Gun.
Since a copy of the second
dag
was also housed in the same collection, I asked Mimi if she could put me in touch with Sam, the owner of the daguerreotype. I wanted to interview him. Mimi tried. The answer came back swiftly, like some damaging angel. Sam said no to my request, and his answer was irrevocable—he wanted nothing to do with me or my book. I wondered why. I e-mailed Mimi, saying that the second
dag
was critical to my argument about Dickinson's apocalyptic powers as a poet, that I coveted the second dag, and looked favorably upon Sam. Mimi passed my message on to him. He sent a message back that he
might
be willing to talk. And thus our elliptical dialogue began, with its own staccato rhythm.

He'd been burnt so many times, he said, ridiculed, told that the
dag
was a fake, and that he was a fraud. He called himself “partially cracked.” Again I smiled, and knew I was entering that country of the Queen Recluse, as her “Tutor,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson, had called Emily his half-cracked poetess. Finally Sam and I did talk on the phone one Friday morning. I was surprised to learn that he'd had no interest at all in Emily Dickinson before 1995. He was a daguerreotype collector who lived in the wilds of Vermont. His background was in economics and finance. He was sixty years old, he said.

He'd found the daguerreotype at a junk shop outside Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The junk shop's owner would buy “big house lots,” clean out a place, and auction off an entire lot. “I wasn't out looking for Emily Dickinson stuff,” Sam said. For him it was always a question of “trash and treasure,” and often he could hardly tell the difference. He bought the
dag
for twenty-five bucks, found it at the back of a shelf. “Bingo!” Because he was involved in the nineteenth century in his daguerreotype hunts, he had a hunch that the woman on the left might be Dickinson. “The similarities were there. . . . She did look just like her to me. I'd seen the earlier daguerreotype. I'd devoured all my research books,” Sam told me.

He quizzed the junk dealer about the new daguerreotype. “Where did you get this?”

“I got it from a house clean-out over by Springfield.”

That's all the junkman would reveal.

“I ain't no writer,” Sam would later declare in an e-mail. “I'm a detective basically,” and he did a lot of detectiving: He dove into Dickinson's archives, studied the 1847 daguerreotype, and compared it to his own. He scanned both images, and the deformity in her right eye seemed a bit too similar. The young, almost tubercular Emily of 1847 and the older, powerful woman on the left in the 1859 daguerreotype have a misshapen, flattish cornea, “and the dot of the ocular reflection to the light is way up and to the right” in both images.

“I spent a lot of time with an eye surgeon at Dartmouth,” Sam said,
and that surgeon, Dr. Susan Pepin, director of Neuro-Ophthalmology at the Dartmouth School of Medicine, who has an abiding interest in Emily and her eye problems, seemed to support Sam's thesis that the woman in the 1859 portrait bears startling similarities to the woman in the 1847 daguerreotype—both have a similar astigmatism and a similar corneal curvature.

“I've got Emily! I've got her eyes,” he said.

But now Sam Carlo had a deeper problem—to identify the
other
woman in the
dag.
“For ten years I was stymied. It just gnawed at me. It was eating at my insides.” And one night in 2005, while having a glass of wine, he opened Sewall's biography of Dickinson and landed right on a picture of Kate Anthon (i.e., Kate Scott). “I glanced down at the chin—that lady's got two moles on the side of the chin.” Kate Anthon and the dark lady of the daguerreotype “had two of the exact same moles.” This was “the bingo moment!” He now had a complete tale—Emily and Kate—even if he had no real provenance. He poured through Emily's letters and discovered that in an 1862 letter to Sam Bowles, Emily spoke about a mysterious image:

When you come to Amherst, please God it were
Today
—I will tell you about the picture—if I
can,
I will
—
    
[Letter 252]

Sam believes that this “picture” was the second daguerreotype, taken when the young widow, Kate Anthon, arrived in Amherst in 1859 to visit Sue and fell in love with the poet. But now it's 1862; Kate has abandoned Emily, who writes to Bowles in Springfield “about a picture that's upsetting her tremendously.” We get a glimpse of this anguish, according to Sam, in the penciled lines on the outside folded surface of an 1873 poem she had written to Kate but never sent:

       
We shun because we prize her Face

       
Lest sight's ineffable disgrace

       
Our Adoration stain
    
[Fr1430A]

“Sam Bowles was gaga over Kate Anthon,” and would have prized the daguerreotype, but he couldn't reveal its existence to his children or his wife. “It goes into a box.” Enter Sam Carlo, 133 years later. Sam is convinced that the
dag
he had snatched up, almost by accident, had come from a drawer in the Bowles' family house in Springfield, which the junkman from Great Barrington had cleaned out in 1995. And in a way, Sam's been sorry ever since. The
dag
has been driving him “fairly insane—I told Mimi [Dakin] it was a curse that I found it, really. A curse.” But that didn't dampen his detective work.

Sam believes that the Dickinson clan—Austin, Sue, and Mattie—plotted to hide the poet's affection for Kate, but the chief culprit was Mabel Todd's daughter, Millicent, who in
Bolts of Melody
did hint at Emily's “
disappointment in a too-much-loved woman friend.” Yet after Rebecca Patterson published her book about the “riddle” of Emily's romance with another woman, Millicent cobbled together
Emily Dickinson: A Revelation
(1954), about Judge Otis Lord's courtship of Emily Dickinson. Lord was only one more in a very long line of mysterious and not so mysterious male suitors. Whether or not Emily's letters to Lord, which were never sent, may have been spliced together from bits and pieces, I still liked the idea of Emily manipulating that thunderous man, and used it in my own novel about Dickinson (I had not read Patterson's book at the time, since it had virtually disappeared, and the second
dag
had not surfaced yet.)

Still, my own fondness for Lord doesn't weaken Sam's argument. Otis Lord may have indeed been a “beard,” used to cover up Emily's fling with Kate. How will we ever find out? So much of Dickinson's life has been redressed, like the first daguerreotype. We know her through her letters, poems, and fragments, which are every bit as deceptive as the deceptions that have been built around her. The fabric always tears as we try to approach her life through her lines. She's already gone by the time we get near. That's why Joseph Cornell's boxes on Dickinson are so revealing. They leave us with all the sadness of an empty room,
all the scratches and violent pull of flight. Dickinson has not only fled; she's taken our entrails with her.

Almost none of us recover from reading Dickinson, Sam Carlo included. And I'm grateful that he's gone deep into the well, like some merman, and dredged up the second
dag,
which has its own miraculous provenance. Dickinson is a predator, and poor Kate seems to fall into some private infinity as she sits near the Loaded Gun.