Dickinson's Misery (22 page)

This is to say that where or who “you” are makes a difference in, among other things, historical questions of genre. If we thought that Sappho's object of address was sitting before her as she played this particular song on her lyre, we would still think of her fragment as a lyric. But if we thought that Dickinson's object of address was sitting before her as she spoke these words, we would not think of her letter as a letter. And if we thought that the “you” of and to whom Dickinson wrote was a fictive person, an object of imagination, and we printed her lines like this:

we would think that she had written a lyric poem.
³
Yet if we thought that Sappho had written her lyric first as a letter, it would not be a lyric in the strict sense for her place and time—though, of course, such enticing printing as Carson's is how Sappho's letters have survived as lyrics, or as evidence of the “artifact” she has become. The difference between Sappho's
lyric and Dickinson's lyric would then also be a difference in genre, since as Carson puts it, “Sappho was a musician,” whose verse was (or so the story goes) meant to be heard in performance, and Dickinson was a writer, whose verse was intended for performance by a reader.
⁴
But what sort of performance by what sort of reader? The Dickinson letter cited by Carson is not a lyric, yet in it Dickinson worries over and over that it will be read as if it were. Why would Dickinson
not
want to be read as if she were writing lyrics?

Dickinson's letter begins by lamenting that she cannot offer Susan a particular lyric, “this ‘sweet silver moon.'” Since the letter goes on to invoke other publications that were all the rage in 1850, a likely candidate for the allusion is a song that Tennyson added to
The Princess
(1847) in 1850.
The Princess
, a poem in several genres that Tennyson called “A Medley” and that Isobel Armstrong has succinctly described as “a burlesque and a feminist tract,” was read by both young women in 1848, and by Susan with particular interest.
⁵
Yet Dickinson's letter does not allude explicitly to the poem's vexed treatment (and elaborate story) of the issues of female education and equal rights (issues that formed so much of the exchange between Dickinson and Gilbert at the time), invoking instead one of the interpellated songs that seems to have little to do with the narrative parts of the poem—except that it insists on affectionate attachment, which in Tennyson is woman's proper sphere. The song is a lullaby, and it begins with the line “Sweet and low, sweet and low” (which later became the song's title), and ends with the lines,

Tennyson's song may have been influenced by an English folk song, “Roll on Silver Moon” (often called just “Silver Moon”), that was published as sheet music for the piano in both England and the United States in 1847. The song begins,

Given Dickinson's reputation as a pianist, and her home's collection of popular sheet music, “Silver Moon” is just the sort of thing she would have played—and, given her reputation for musical improvisation, may have played variations on. In any case, the slight mention of “the ‘sweet silver moon'” at the beginning of the letter summons a lyrical presence (of the moon, of domestic tranquility, of literate conversation, of music, of poetry)
that the letter quickly (and rather pathetically) forswears. Unlike the moon in Tennyson or in the folk song, the presence of the moon over the heads of the separated friends marks distance rather than union: “it goes so far before it gets to you … you never told me if there
was
any moon in Baltimore.” The reassuring personification of the moon's “sweet face” that
would
be apparent to Susan if such a lyrical illusion of presence were possible is in doubt in Dickinson's letter, though for it she substitutes another fanciful personification, an extended simile. The pathos of the simile is that a fairy moon “with stars for gondoliers” cannot, of course, give Dickinson a lift to Baltimore, so although the moon “smiled to herself” and thus finally did assume an imaginary face, she “went sailing on” away from both writer and reader rather than, as in the songs, sailing or rolling “this way.”

The distance between Dickinson and Baltimore surely required no further elaboration, so why does the letter keep returning to it? In the second paragraph, what Carson dubs “daylight's fecundity” takes another fanciful form, the “patter—patter, patter” of the rain on the leaves. Unlike the moon's face, the sound of the rain is not a wishful or imaginary effect; this time, the trope is not prosopoeia but onomotopoeia, and it represents, in cliché (or perhaps in a variation on Longfellow's “pitter-patter”), what Dickinson heard, not what she could not pretend Susan heard or saw, or what she pretended to see. Yet the letter is still anxious: “
Did
you hear it, Susie—or was it
only
fancy?” The question is rhetorical, and banal; if it rained in Baltimore at the same time that it rained in Amherst, then the answer would be yes, and if not, no. There is no poetry here. The shift, then, to the 1850 bestseller
Reveries of a Bachelor
by “Ik Marvel” (Donald Grant Mitchell) may be a way of putting fiction in its proper place, between the covers of a book. Indeed, Marvel's (or Mitchell's) book is all about the difference between imagining and living, and especially about the difference between fantasizing about the desired other and touching her. In the book's first three chapters, the Bachelor thinks of the reasons not to marry, then imagines the sort of woman he
would
marry if he were to do so, and then laments the death of the woman he ends by being glad he did not marry after all (all the while “smoking his cigar”).
⁸
Against such fireside fancy, Dickinson places the “far more profitable” intimacy that she and Susan “would
try
to make” between them, “if you were only here.” That intimacy is not only something that Dickinson cannot write about because it is queer, or can only share, as Carson puts it, “in the dark,” but something that she wants, for some reason, not to turn into literature.
⁹

The fact that Dickinson's letter itself
is
now literature—a footnote to a famous poet's translation of a famous poet, several pages in this and several other books of literary criticism—makes Dickinson's distinction between
her writing and at least some kinds of literature harder for us to see, or to read. But in passages not cited by Carson, the letter goes on to insist upon that distinction:

Longfellow's “golden Legend” has come to town I hear—and may be seen
in state
on Mr. Adams'[s] bookshelves. It always makes me think of “Pegasus in the pound”—when I find a gracious author sitting side by side with “Murray” and “Wells” and “Walker” in that renowned store—and like
him
I half expect to hear that they have “
flown
” some morning and in their native ether revel all the day; but for our sakes dear Susie, who please ourselves with the fancy that we are the only poets, and everyone else is
prose
, let us hope they will yet be willing to share our humble world and feed upon such aliment as
we
consent to do! You thank me for the Rice cake—you tell me Susie, you have just been tasting it …

The letter's rehearsal of the women's exchange over and through books (their own version of Tennyson's ill-fated women's college in
The Princess
) takes an interesting turn here, not accidentally when it gets to Longfellow. If “Marvel” was popular romance (what Dickinson's upstanding father later called, as she phrased the condemnation, “‘somebody's
rev-e-ries,
' he didn't know whose they were, that he thought were very ridiculous”), Harvard's Professor Longfellow was the modern classic.
¹⁰
His translation of
The Golden Legend
, or
Lives of the Saints
(Jacobus de Voragine, 1260) was offered to the American reading public in 1850 as a sort of crash course on medieval European culture (crash courses on European culture being Longfellow's specialty). Dickinson's use of the phrase “
in state
” to describe the book's appearance as if it were a dead body parodies the consequences of admission to the print public sphere, a condition in which the display of the body (or book) is also a kind of disembodiment, or selfabstraction.
¹¹
Since such abstracted disembodiment was also the fate of the saints, the joke may seem to elevate Longfellow, but cultural elevation, especially as disembodied transcendence, itself turns out to be the joke.

Dickinson's invocation of “Pegasus in Pound,” the proem to
The Estray
(1847), associates Longfellow's allegory of the visit of “the poet's winged steed” to “a quiet village” with the book's visit to the bookstore in Amherst. In the proem, “the school-boys” find Pegasus “upon the village common,” and “the wise men, in their wisdom, / Put him straightway into pound.” In Dickinson's letter, the book's analogous captivity is represented by its place on the shelf alongside Murray's
English Grammar
(1795), Wells's
A Grammar of the English Language
(1846), and Walker's
A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, and Expositor of the English Language
(1827).
¹²
Between quotation marks, the names of the lexicographers are
personified “sitting side by side” with Longfellow, as if to imprison literature in a lesson on grammar (a relevant issue, not only because of the theme of imaginative or imaginary education that runs through the letter, but also because Susan was in Baltimore to teach grammar school). The sense of the rest of the sentence must be that “a gracious author” can, like Pegasus, break free of such mundane constraint, but “Murray” and “Wells” and “Walker” would not approve of the grammar of the analogy. “Like
him
[Pegasus? Longfellow?] I half expect [I and he both expect? I expect that they will be like him?] to hear that they [the grammarians? Pegasus and Longfellow?] have ‘
flown
' some morning and in their [whose?] native ether revel all the day.” The confusion between pronouns probably will not bear too much scrutiny, which may be one of the problems with reading a twenty-year-old's personal letter to her girlfriend as if it were a literary text.
¹³
But it is a letter
about
reading literary texts, and finally about not wanting to be read in the ways those were read. For we “who please ourselves with the fancy that we are the only poets, and everyone else is
prose
,” know the difference, and know, too, that the fancy cannot cheat so well that one should be mistaken for the other, or that the moon could take someone from Amherst to Baltimore, that sexual fantasy is as good as sex, or that rice cakes are available in print.

The elaborate relation between the pleasures of private embodiment and the perils of public disembodiment could also be the stuff of lyric, as we shall see in the last chapter of this book when we turn to Dickinson's relation to nineteenth-century female lyric sentimentalism. But in the early letter to Susan, which is so often cited as evidence of the young poet's literary aspirations, the allusions point beyond the letter's text toward readings or conversations or jokes or songs the correspondents had shared in what is ordinarily referred to as private life. That is a generic convention, of course, but Dickinson seems particularly anxious to call attention to it. Like the leaf attached to the early letter to Austin or the dead cricket folded within the square of paper within the letter to Mabel Todd, or the flowers sent with her notes to everybody, the “you” addressed by Dickinson's letter has more in common with Baltimore and rice cakes than with the moon or fairies or gondolas or reveries or flying horses—or lyric poetry. Perhaps this is because as long as the addressee is elsewhere, she is not like the fading leaf or disintegrating cricket or dying flowers
or
“Pegasus in Pound.” In order to keep the pathos of life's appropriation by literature from becoming the pathos
of
literature, Dickinson makes it into something else. But what
is
that something else—a letter or a poem? Poetry or prose? Like Sappho's fragment, Dickinson's letter to Susan is missing its last page so, like the genre of the Sapphic fragment, the genre of Dickinson's fragmentary letter may now be up to us. Yet unlike Sappho's
fragment, in which the “you” is tantalizingly indeterminate, Dickinson's letter's address is historically determined, with a vengeance: this letter is for Susan and no one else. Thus the generic poles with which this comparison began—Sappho performed her own lyrics, Dickinson's writing is performed by a reader—can now be reversed: when we now read Sappho, we can (like Marvel's Bachelor) imagine “you” as anyone we like (usually ourselves), but only Susan knew what to make of most of Dickinson's letter, and she is not the one who made it into poetry.

Or prose. Since the time of Dickinson's publication, the distinction between the two has been at issue, as has the distinction between poems and letters, life and literature, privacy and publicity. As we have seen, Dickinson's early editors claimed to know the difference, as does the most recent editor of the two three-volume Harvard sets of the
Poems
and
Letters
. But lots of readers in between, especially readers of Dickinson's manuscripts, have been more confused. Reviewing Johnson's 1955 variorum edition of the
Poems
, John L. Spicer commented in 1956 that