A Loaded Gun (5 page)

And this is the dilemma we all have, that impossible plunder of capturing whoever she was. We fling out words like a chorus of arrows to find some mark, to
brand
Emily Dickinson, mythologize her in some way, and she hints at all the dangers, gives us a wicked slap in the face.

       
Finding is the first Act

       
The second, loss,

       
Third, Expedition for the “Golden Fleece”

       
Fourth, no Discovery—

       
Fifth, no Crew—

       
Finally, no Golden Fleece—

       
Jason, sham, too—
    
[Fr910]

5

B
ENFEY AGREES WITH
W. H. A
UDEN
“that language finds certain people and lives through them, almost the way a virus lives by finding a host, I think language lives by finding hosts. . . . It found a way to live in Shakespeare. Infested him. Got all it could out of Shakespeare and then moved on.”

“It didn't disappear,” I say. “It went into the ground—”

“For a long time, and found Emily Dickinson.”

And then the virus moved on. “You listen to those early songs of Bob Dylan, and you think, Whoa, how could he have written them? But he doesn't know. Just as Dickinson wouldn't have been able to say,
‘Well, I first thought of the loaded gun image when I was sitting in my father's room and there was a gun in the corner and I thought, I'm like that gun.'
We have no idea.”

And the letters she wrote were as puzzling as that loaded gun.

“We still don't know how to read them,” Benfey says. “We assume the difficulty of the poems. And we assume the availability and relative intelligibility of the letters. It's gotta be the opposite, because with the poems, we have some idea what rhyme and meter are. But with the letters, we have no fucking clue what the rules for reading and writing letters are. The ‘Master Letters' have gotten a ton of attention, but it's the other letters . . .”

We talk about the cunning and the craft of her letters to Higginson. “She doesn't need him as a mentor,” I say, and Benfey agrees.

“That's where we get the sense of her as a performance artist. She walks downstairs to see Higginson, carrying the two day lilies, and says, ‘These are my introduction' in a breathy voice, and it was the most amazing sort of ballet imaginable. You know. The white dress . . .”

Higginson served as “a mirror, a conduit, a messenger—a publicist. Somehow she identifies both [her] publicists, Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd. And damned if they don't pair up and sell her to the world.

“She performs for both of them. She gives them just the amount they need; she withholds access in just the right way.” She tantalizes Mabel, never reveals herself. “‘You may see me when I'm in my ultimate box, in my coffin. That's when you'll see me for the first time, in my box.'”

She “micromanaged” her own funeral, like another ballet, “with the Irish Catholic men carrying her out through the open barn—and put her in another box, the tomb, another box on top of it. The whole thing was orchestrated beyond belief.”

Yet I'm not convinced that her final performance was to have a pair of messengers, Mabel and Higginson,
entomb
her poems in yet another box and publish them. The “phosphorescence” of her poems was from a very private glow. She spelled the way she wanted to spell, constructed her poems like hieroglyphics with all the weird minuscules and majuscules of her own hand, until you could no longer tell the difference between them; it was the deepest sort of play.

       
My Basket holds—just—Firmaments—

       
Those—dangle easy—on my arm,

       
But smaller bundles—Cram.
    
[Fr358]

She had no time for those “smaller bundles” of recognition and career. It's not that she disregarded her own worth as a poet, but she saw that worth in a messianic way.

       
The Poets light but Lamps—

       
Themselves—go out—

       
The Wicks they stimulate

       
If vital Light

       
Inhere as do the Suns—

       
Each Age a Lens

       
Disseminating their

       
Circumference—
    
[Fr930]

And she was out “opon Circumference,” where she wasn't hindered by custodians of culture, and could explore as she pleased.
“Finite—to fail, but infinite—to Venture
—” [Fr952] She tore language from its roots, created an internal Teletype that is still difficult for us to comprehend.
None
of us knows her motives. We have to pry, like clumsy surgeons. We attach ourselves to whatever clues we can. And we try to listen, crawl into that hole in time where her creativity began.

       
The Clock strikes One

       
That just struck Two—
    
[Fr1598D]

TWO

The Two Emilys—and the Earl

1

I
N
1956, R. P. B
LACKMUR
, who was as much of an autodidact and outsider as Emily Dickinson, and grew up less than fifty miles from where she was born, wrote about her in
The Kenyon Review:
“One exaggerates, but it sometimes seems as if in her work a cat came at us speaking English.” This is what Colonel Higginson must have intuited, without ever being able to articulate it—this strange woman, who had
“the playful ambiguity of a kitten being a tiger,” according to Blackmur. She must have scratched Higginson many a time with her “claws,” while she called herself his Scholar and his Gnome; she crawled right under his skin. She bombarded him with letters and poems, even while he was away at war. He returned from battle like a wounded ghost, settled in Newport, had to take care of his sick wife. He tried three times to lure Emily out of her
carapace
and have her come to Boston, where she could listen to him lecture, converse with other poets, and attend meetings with other women at the aristocratic and exclusive Women's Club. And Dickinson refused him three times. “. . . I do not cross my Father's ground to any House or town,” she wrote to the colonel in 1869. It's Dickinson's credo of defiance and probably her most famous line. [Letter 330, June 1869]

Dickinson scholars love to toss this credo back at us as hard evidence of her growing agoraphobia. But it's evidence of nothing more than her
swagger, her delight in shocking the colonel. Meanwhile, she plotted in her own way, kept inviting Higginson to Amherst. Finally, after corresponding with her for eight years, he did go to see his half-cracked poetess, in August 1870. The death of an older brother, who had lived nearby, gave him the excuse to visit. It was one of the great encounters in American literature. A gentle soul who swore he loved danger walked right into Emily Dickinson's lair and met the Satanic, catlike sibyl whom R. P. Blackmur would write about almost a century later. She glided down the stairs of her father's house and said, “Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers & hardly know what I say—” [Letter 342a, Higginson to his wife] and talked continuously for an hour, sucking all the energy out of the colonel.

And when Higginson finally got a word in and asked the reclusive sibyl “if she never felt want of employment, never going off the place & never seeing any visitor,” the sibyl said, “‘I never thought of conceiving that I could ever have the slightest approach to such a want in all future time' (& added) ‘I feel that I have not expressed myself strongly enough.'” [Letter 342a]

That sounds more like a poet plucking her feathers and pruning her resources than an agoraphobic who was careening out of control.

And then she uttered something that was even odd for a sibyl. She asked Higginson if he could tell her what “home” is. “I never had a mother,” she said. “I suppose a mother is one who to whom you hurry when you are troubled.” [Letter 342b] She was thirty-nine years old. And in not one of her previous letters—to Higginson or any other correspondent—had she ever spoken of herself as a motherless child. Nor had she said
anything
unkind about her mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson—Emily Sr., as some scholars call Mrs. Dickinson to distinguish her from her poet daughter. She appears in one of Dickinson's very first letters, where she helps save Austin's sick rooster from oblivion. She's a whirlwind of activity—cooking, sewing, gardening, and going off to “ramble” with her neighbors, bringing them crullers or another
delight, and “she really was so hurried she hardly knew what to do.” [Letter 52, September 23, 1851] Sometimes she suffers from neuralgia, where one side of her face freezes up. And in 1855, after Edward Dickinson moved his family back to the Homestead,
his
father's former house, she fell into a funk that lasted four years. But her daughter was just as uneasy about the move. “. . . I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.” [Letter 182, about January 20, 1856]

Both mother and daughter had frequent bouts of melancholy. Both took part in Amherst's most publicized event, the annual Cattle Show, where they baked pies and bread and served on committees. And even after her sibyl-like remark to Higginson, she still recognized the presence of her mother, as she wrote to her cousins Louise and Frances Norcross: “. . . Mother drives with Tim [the stableman] to carry pears to settlers. Sugar pears, with hips like hams, and the flesh of bonbons.” [Letter 343]

Then, in 1874, she wrote to Higginson:

I always ran Home to Awe when a child, if anything befell me.

He was an awful Mother, but I liked him better than none.
    
[Letter 405]

Here she was doubly unkind. Not only didn't she have an anthropomorphic mother, but the mother she did have—
Awe
—had a male identity. She was now forty-three, long past her most productive period, as most Dickinson scholars believe. And why did she suddenly parade in front of Higginson with one of her letter bombs and
annihilate
her own mother? But it wasn't only Mrs. Dickinson who was in her line of fire. In 1873, while both her parents were still alive, she wrote to Mrs. J. G. Holland, one of her most trusted friends:

I was thinking of thanking you for the kindness to Vinnie.

She has no Father and Mother but me and I have no Parents but her.
    
[Letter 391]

It had to have been more than some momentary crisis. She adored her father—and feared him. He was constantly present in her mental and material life. She'd become a creator in her father's house, in that corner room, with her Lexicon, her lamp, and her minuscule writing desk.

       
Sweet hours have perished here,

       
This is a timid
    
[mighty]
room—
    
[Fr1785A]

But the two biting remarks to Higginson about her mother would have a scattergun effect. In 1971, psychoanalyst and Dickinson scholar John Cody published
After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson,
a five-hundred-page study that presents Dickinson as a mental case whose only manner of survival was writing her cryptic and very private poems. Cody argues that Dickinson could never have become a poet without her
delinquent
mother—she was indeed a motherless child, emotionally abandoned by a woman who was
“shallow, self-centered, ineffectual, conventional, timid, submissive, and not very bright.” Mrs. Dickinson was utterly responsible for her daughter's “
infantile
dependence . . . and compulsive self-entombment.” And, says Cody,
“one is led to conclude that all her life there smoldered in Emily Dickinson's soul the muffled but voracious clamoring of the abandoned child.”

Cody isn't the only culprit. For many critics, Dickinson has remained the madwoman entombed in her own little attic. Even Alfred Habegger, one of her most subtle biographers, believes that Dickinson's
“great genius is not to be distinguished from her madness.” And for Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Emily Dickinson may have posed as a madwoman to insulate herself, but became
“truly a madwoman (a helpless agoraphobic, trapped in a room in her father's house).” Whatever theories we may hold about madness and art, or about some great psychic wound Dickinson suffered—a relentless blow that Dickinson herself described—

A Death blow—is a Life blow—to Some

Who, till they died,

Did not alive—become
—
    
[Fr966A]

her letters and poems are not the work of a madwoman, or someone trying to cover up her own debilitating tremors and attacks. In a letter to Colonel Higginson, Sue wrote that Emily
“hated her peculiarities, and shrank from any notice of them as a nerve from the knife.” Why don't I believe her? Dickinson's entire life was a singularity; she could have been one of Melville's “isolatoes,” living in the interior continent of her own mind. How else could she have thrived? But Sue had a terrifying need to normalize her sister-in-law, turn her into one more village poet, scribbling about unrequited love. She couldn't bear to look at Emily's deep rage and urge to destroy. Dickinson never shrank from any knife—she loved knives. It was her task at Mount Holyoke to clean the knives and collect them, like some kind of knife thrower in the making. She could wound us all with “Dirks of Melody.” [Fr1450] Mutilation had become a central motif in her letters and poems. “Here is Festival,” she wrote to Sue in 1864, exiled in Cambridge for nearly eight months while a Boston ophthalmologist dealt with her irritated eyes. “Where my Hands are cut, Her fingers will be found inside—” [Letter 288]

It's one of Dickinson's most disturbing images, as if Sue and Emily were sisters bound together by mutilation, but where had this mutilation come from? Had Emily cut herself, or had Sue crept inside her like some ghoul, with a dirk of her own? There's a lot of bile and savagery in that image. And perhaps it might help us understand her own sudden, brutal remarks to Higginson about her mother, like Blackmur's cat breaking into English. Dickinson wasn't a madwoman, but she was
maddened
with rage—against a culture that had no place for a woman with her own fiercely independent mind and will. Yet that annihilation of Emily Sr. was also about something else. Dickinson had to reinvent herself, or be stifled and destroyed by all the rituals around her—she
was the daughter of the town patriarch. Cody believes that Dickinson was doomed to become a spinster because she was
“too uncertain of her attractiveness and too fearful of heterosexuality to consider marriage.” That hardly stopped most other women of her class, and it wouldn't have stopped the Belle of Amherst. I suspect that what disturbed her more than giving in to the “man of noon” was the notion of having to give up the Dickinson name. She could only become “The Wife—without the Sign!” [Fr194A] Her brother was the adored one, the pampered one—he would perpetuate the Dickinson line. Emily and her sister were household pets. Edward would school the girls, send them both to a female seminary, but he never mapped much of a future for them. Born into a genteel caste, the two sisters
“suffered the tormenting paralysis of women deadlocked by a culture that treated them as both servant and superior,” according to Susan Howe in
My Emily Dickinson,
a kind of love song from one poet to her nineteenth-century sister. And so we have the picture of Emily Dickinson as the perpetual child, a pose she often adopted with Higginson and others as one of her many masks. But that childish whisper of Emily's wasn't her natural voice—her own hoarse contralto wasn't a whisper at all. She was, as Howe insists, a woman
“with Promethean ambition.” She would remain a Dickinson, but parent herself, become a creature of both sexes, defiantly original and androgynous.

       
A loss of something ever felt I—

       
The first that I could recollect

       
Bereft I was—of what I knew not

       
Too young that any should suspect

       
A Mourner walked among the children

       
I notwithstanding went about

       
As one bemoaning a Dominion

       
Itself the only Prince cast out
—
    
[Fr1072]

And it was as “the only Prince cast out” that she lived her life, searching for the “Delinquent Palaces” of her childhood—and her art. We can feel that streak of rebellion when she unconsciously sympathizes with a maverick student at Mount Holyoke. She had only been there a little longer than a month and was still homesick when she wrote to Austin:

A young lady by the name of Beach, left here for home this morning. She could not get through her examinations & was very wild beside.
    
[Letter 17, November 2, 1847]

It was this wildness that frightened and attracted Emily, a wildness that would haunt the dreamscape of her poems. We never learn what happened to Miss Beach, whether she settled down with some “man of noon” or remained a maverick—another “Prince cast out.” But Dickinson had to rebel in a much more secret and convoluted way, as the village Prometheus, who stole whatever she could from her Lexicon and the local gods of Amherst, and manufactured her very own fire.

Self-born, self-tutored, she had to tear apart all ties to her mother, the one creature who had done the most to shape her sensibility. Emily Dickinson's own elliptical songs are like a hymn to her mother's repeated silences and melancholy. But who was Emily Norcross Dickinson and why do we know so little about her?