Dickinson's Misery (25 page)

What the movement of this letter makes explicit—and I want to maintain that it is very much what is implicit in the movement of several of Dickinson's texts that we now know as lyrics and that, like the letters to Susan, take the direction and destination of address as their subject—is that “
this
solitude” in which I am not alone but “alone with” has everything to do with the material circumstances of writing and little to do with what that writing will be taken to (figuratively) represent. Representation as mimesis, especially in the ideal terms that “I may poeticize,” would be inevitably elegiac (in Dickinson's pun, “I mourn this morning,” its distance from the “sweet sunset” of which Susan may have written). Rather than send a metaphorical “here” there, Dickinson asks her reader to imagine the “romance in the letter's ride”—that is, to retrace the deferral of the letter that Susan now holds in her hands. From Dickinson's hand through the hands of “the drivers and conductors” to Susan's hand, the letter becomes “a poem such as can ne'er be written.” It does so, paradoxically, because rather than “poeticize” the celestial it remains “down, down, in the terrestrial” within an economy of hands, hills, dales, rivers, drivers, conductors, and literal letters rather than within an idealized universe of gilded pages, “thoughts of heaven,” sunset, stars, “a bit of
twilight
.”

The intimacy established in the physical exchange of the letter, the intimacy that makes of its transfer a “romance,” is a privacy encompassing the public circle already inscribed upon it with the writer's admission of what makes “
this
solitude” of the written page something of our's. What writer and reader mutually possess are not identical solitudes (my sunset like your sunset, my stars like your stars, my little “chamber way up in the sky, as your's is”) but is rather the letter itself. That letter substantiates the otherwise purely metaphorical relation between writer and reader. It embodies the separation between their two bodies. But since it is not a metaphor, this third, literal body is also always insufficient, radically contingent.
As Dickinson writes at the end of her letter, “Susie, what shall I do—there is'nt room enough; not
half
enough, to hold what I was going to say. Wont you tell the man who makes sheets of paper, that I hav'nt the
slightest respect
for him!” The epistolary convention of complaining that one's time to write has run out has turned here to a mock protest against the page that will not “hold what I was going to say.” What the page does hold, however, is what Susan holds and is (thanks nevertheless to “the man who makes sheets of paper” and, like the “drivers and conductors,” adds another pair of hands to the letter's history) held within it. The object of address has become its subject, as the letter has implicated everyone “outside” the writer's solitude within the “sheets of paper” that hold not “what I was going to say” but only what can be written, read, held.

The early letters to Susan allow Dickinson to displace the plane geography of here and there, outside and inside, self and other, with the more complex discursive field available to reading and writing because they begin in a pathos of distance or isolation that they then revise by revising the very conditions or media of address. In both letters, the conditions of intimate address are explicitly opposed to the conditions imagined as “poetic.” The earnest wit of those letters makes the desire for such revision and the imagery of such opposition especially graphic, but it is a desire evident in almost everything Dickinson wrote. About ten years after the letters to Susan, in 1861, Dickinson sent a note to Samuel Bowles, editor of the
Springfield Republican
, and pinned it around the stub of a pencil (
fig. 18
):

The note was printed as poem 654 in 1945 in
Bolts of Melody
, under the heading, “Poems Personal and Occasional.” It was then included in Johnson's 1955 edition of the
Poems
as number 921 and in Franklin's 1998 edition of the
Poems
as number 184. None of these twentieth-century publications of the letter as a lyric could, of course, include the pencil—but in any event that was for Bowles's and not for later readers' use. He was meant to write back, or if he could not write (Bowles was ill at the time), at least
draw
in response to the direct address of a personal code in which Dickinson sometimes signed herself “Daisy.” The “it” with which Dickinson addressed Bowles in this note is grammatically impersonal but rhetorically intimate in the context of their exchange, and a later reader like Vendler would have a hard time identifying herself as the “speaker” of that pronoun. This note is not an overheard soliloquy or “a script to say,” but an invitation to written exchange. It is not self-addressed and therefore addressed to all of us; it is—or was—addressed to Samuel (or perhaps Mary) Bowles. Now, that address may be why Todd and Higginson did not publish the note as a lyric, and Mill and Vendler might also argue that it does not qualify for their definition of the genre. Yet as we have seen, once printed by Bingham and Johnson and Franklin as a lyric, the text is likely to be read as if it were intended for performance by an anonymous reader, difficult as that performance might be to imagine.
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Between Bowles and Dickinson, on the other hand, the relation between personal and public address, between writing letters and reading poems, between genre and medium, between poetry and the paper it is written on, was already an old joke by 1861, at least since Bowles published Dickinson's first poem in the Springfield
Daily Republican
in February 1852, just days before Dickinson's letter to Susan about the “poem such as can n'er be written.” The editor prefaced the valentine that Dickinson had originally addressed to William Howland with a playfully impersonal address to Dickinson, and an invitation to inaugurate a “more direct” correspondence with the print public sphere:

The hand that wrote the following amusing medley to a friend of ours, as “a valentine,” is capable of writing very fine things, and there is certainly no presumption in entertaining a private wish that a correspondence, more direct than this, may be established between it and the
Republican
:

Whatever we make of these lines, it would be difficult to make them a lyric. Bowles uses the Tennysonian term “medley,” and that seems about right, combined with the “valentine” that provided the lines' occasion. There are too many lines and they move in too many directions for me to have cited them all, and yet I have done so in order to make just that point: they do not conform to the protocols of critical citation, lyric reprinting, or lyric reading (it would be virtually impossible to offer a reading of them along the lines of de Man's reading of Baudelaire's sonnet). Though they fall into the alternating tetrameter/trimeter measure by which Dickinson's poems would become known, they do not
sound
like “Dickinson.” They appear to be what they probably were: a pastiche from various sources, most of them textbooks, one of them Shakespeare, and most of them fairly unmediated by anything we would recognize as a “lyric” perspective. This may in fact be Dickinson's earliest juvenilia.
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Unlike the letters to Susan, the valentine begins in a pathos of distance or isolation (“When I am
far
from thee!”) that is mediated by many, many things that are not the writer or the reader. But unlike the exfoliating allusions in the letter to Susan cited by Carson with which this chapter began, those allusions are not in-jokes between the writer and a particular reader (though Howland was a tutor at Amherst from 1849 to 1851, so some of them may be); they are a cultural grab bag of languages, texts, stories, myths, aphorisms, and bons mots. That is what makes them so
printable
in a daily paper, if not susceptible to the sort of close reading usually performed in a book of literary criticism. Yet the valentine that Bowles printed as newspaper copy may not have been so printable in another sense—or rather, the parts that the
Republican
could not print may already have been cut out of a paper or a book and turned into a material pastiche that accompanied the linguistic pastiche.

Or so one might imagine; there is no surviving manuscript of the valentine to Howland, but the specificity of its wild range of allusions invites the speculation that the copy sent to Howland may have looked very different than the
Republican
version, perhaps something like the valentine that Dickinson sent to William Cowper Dickinson at the same time (
fig. 19
). Unlike the valentine sent to Howland, the spare text on the valentine sent to Cowper Dickinson borrows from one old ballad called “The Batchelor's Delight,” which begins,

But like the valentine published in the
Republican
, the valentine Dickinson sent to Cowper Dickinson incorporated the materials of the schoolroom, this time actual printed materials intended to imprint the student. The small cut-out of the sleeping king, for example, was excised from Dickinson's family's copy of
The New England Primer
, and the other pictures (the man with a stick and the woman with a broom beating dogs, the boys and girls making bubbles, the little boat) were probably taken from primers as well. As Patrica Crain has argued, the domestic dissemination of such animated literacy characterized nineteenth-century American culture, installing the letters of the alphabet “as participants in the doings of everyday life, as players within or even generators of social and intimate life. Agents of action, affiliated with consumption, aligned with money and capital, the alphabetic letters had become ubiquitous [by the nineteenth century]. Bound with the passions and incorporated into personality, such letters produced a form of literacy in which the self is both mirrored and created through silent, solitary reading.”
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