“Exactly,” I said again. “People who knew her said that’s how she talked, too—in little bursts. But quietly.”
“She capitalizes like a madwoman,” M noted approvingly. “I notice they changed that, too.”
“They changed everything,” I said.
M glanced at me sideways. I thought she was going to ask me who “they” were, and then we’d have been up all night as I struggled to explain how big a lie the usual Dickinson story is.
There was no sweet sheltered girl hiding in her room jotting down secret verses. There was instead a sly, sophisticated poet who was friends with bigwig editors and best-selling writers. There were piles of poems found in her room after her death, true; but dozens of those had been slipped into letters over the years, and booklets of them stowed in her maid’s trunk.
Everyone knew she was a genius and a poet. She was a legend in her own time, and she was good at it.
And then after Dickinson died, her married brother’s married lover decided that God had chosen her to bring Dickinson’s genius to the wider world. She typed and edited and “corrected” the poems—and when this would-be Mrs. Dickinson overstepped her bounds and got her editing role slapped away by the courts, she avenged herself by hiding away a sheaf of Dickinson’s poems.
It took decades to sort it all out, and it’s about as easy to explain as what started World War I.
But M didn’t ask, so I didn’t have to answer. Instead, she said, “It’s strange that there are different versions of the same poems. I mean, they’re in English. They aren’t even very old. It’s not as if they have to be translated.”
“Well—” I hesitated. “Partly, it was because when they first decided to try to publish her, the editors didn’t want to turn people off. I mean, Dickinson’s poems weren’t like anyone else’s. They’re still not. They don’t have titles. They do have all those random capital letters.” I don’t think they’re actually random, but that was another story I didn’t feel like telling.
“So the editors didn’t want to kill off her audience before she even had one.”
I was beginning to think Brianna had a point about M’s ever so tactful word choices. “Something like that,” I said. “But also—well, here.”
I carefully opened my favorite book of all. I love it because it isn’t important in the usual way. It isn’t all of her poems, or a selection of the best ones. It’s just a big collection of photos of the old envelopes Dickinson jotted poetry down on.
That sounds ugly, and I guess in a way it is. They’re all scrawled in pencil, which doesn’t make her indifferent handwriting any easier to decipher. The envelopes themselves have turned a sort of sickly yellow-brown with age.
But when I want to be mesmerized by Dickinson, this is where I go.
“Here,” I said again, turning to a favorite page. “Look at this.”
M stared, seeming both impressed and alarmed. “Goodness,” she said. “You can read this?”
“Not always,” I admitted. “Never easily. But never mind that for now. They have the words typed up over here if you need it. Just look at this part.”
This is the part of the poem I love—the part where Dickinson refuses to decide which word she likes best.
She writes a phrase: “But nearer to Adore.” And then she wonders on the page if “nearer” is the word she really wants.
She doesn’t cross it out. She simply stairsteps a list of alternative choices under it, so it looks like this:
But nearer to
Adore—closer
further
simply
merely
finer
She left a huge space on the page for all those possible words before she started the next line of the poem. She didn’t cram them in or write them in the margin.
That staircase is part of the poem.
“That’s the kind of thing you lose when you read a neat little typed-up book like the one you were looking at,” I said. “And you don’t even know you’re losing anything, because you don’t know what it was really like in the first place. You figure if they say, ‘Here’s a poem she wrote,’that must be what she wrote. It must be all she wrote. And it isn’t.”
“But—all writers do this, don’t they?” M asked. “Jot down first drafts?”
“That’s different,” I said fiercely.
“How?”
“You’re talking about authors writing to get published. Then when their stuff’s in print, you can see what they ended up deciding to say. Dickinson isn’t like that. She wasn’t trying to get published. She was just writing. We don’t know if she would have changed anything if she’d known other people would be reading her work. This is all we have—what she left behind in her own writing. If she didn’t make up her mind about a poem, it’s lying for an editor to say she did.”
“Lying is a strong word,” M said gently.
“It’s the right word,” I said. “It’s the only word.”
M sat very quietly, her head bowed over the book before her, and I realized I was nearly shouting. I didn’t care how that made her feel, but I did worry about waking someone up and having a big scene, so I lowered my voice. A little.
“Look, most of her poetry isn’t like this,” I said. “But the stuff that is—it’s as much like art, visual art, as it is like writing. That stack of words is wild. It isn’t neat or tidy or simple. Nobody should pretend it was. Nobody should pretty up her work and try to domesticate her. Especially when she isn’t alive to speak for herself.”
I was glaring at M now. I realized to my furious terror that I was just plain talking to her about something I love.
And M was smiling, looking amused. Was she laughing at me?
No—good God, she looked affectionate.
“I think I understand,” she said. Very gently, as if I were one of those tiny hyperactive brown birds that fly frantically away if you so much as look at them. Sparrows.
“It doesn’t matter,” I muttered, gathering up my books with clumsy haste.
“What doesn’t?”
“All of this. Any of this.” My heart was racketing like a hummingbird’s wings. Does it hurt to flap so fast?
It hurts to be the cage to those wings.
“Please don’t go,” M said. “I like to hear you tell me things. It’s almost as good as talking myself, and I never thought I’d like anything more than that.”
That was supposed to make me laugh, I guess. “I keep telling you to leave me alone,” I said. I was almost shouting again, but this time I didn’t care. “Why won’t you listen to me?”
“Emily—”
“Leave me alone! I mean it!”
She didn’t try to stop me as I barreled out. Good. I think I would have hit her if she’d so much as touched my sleeve.
Why the hell was she reading Dickinson, anyway?
If she’d been in the lounge in the middle of the day, or waving her book in my face at the breakfast table, I could believe she was just being her usual annoying self; but it was the middle of the night, and she was obviously surprised to see me.
Can it happen here?
It happened to Stephen James.
—but that was outside, and tidy, and he was a stranger.
Either a coincidence, or a waste of a murder.
Your bond to your brother reminds me of mine to my sister—early, earnest, indissoluble. Without her life were fear, and Paradise a cowardice, except for her inciting voice.
Dickinson’s sister Lavinia took care of everything Emily couldn’t or didn’t want to do. Emily did the baking; Lavinia made sure there was more to eat at the Homestead than bread and cake. Emily wrote poetry; Lavinia wrote notes to the butcher. When Emily withdrew from the world completely, Lavinia offered her own body to be measured by the dressmaker for Emily’s dresses.
Emily couldn’t have lived the life she did without Lavinia, because Emily was the point, the center, the reason for everything Lavinia did. Every move Lavinia made w
as an answer to the question, “What does Emily need?” Marriage might have been casual by comparison.
I think of Lavinia a lot—the sister who lived on long after her parents and siblings died, who was beautiful when she was young, who never married in spite of having suitors, who kept cats Emily despised and wrote mediocre poetry of her own after Emily’s death even as she recognized her sister’s genius and insisted on showing it to the world.
Was she deprived of a life of her own? Or was she one of those people who live for others and prefer it that way?
Her talents were for organizing, socializing, and making the household run smoothly. If she’d been born a hundred years later, she could have gone pro and commanded a terrific salary as someone’s personal assistant. Heck, she could have run a company.
No one would have thought she was deprived if she’d lived that life. So why is it seen as a sacrifice that she gave her gifts to those around her just because she was born too soon to take them to the market?
She was the one who had faith in Emily’s talents, right from the start. It was her determination that metamorphosed sheets and bundles of almost illegible handwriting into published poetry and forced the world to see that her sister had been the great poet of the nation. And it was her cheerful hard work that made the life that allowed her sister to create that poetry in the first place.
No wonder Emily loved her so much.
Did Dickinson ever wonder if she was worthy of such a sister? Did she work so hard in order to prove herself worthy of that gift?
It’s hard for me to believe Lavinia was the younger of the two. Only by two years, but still. She seems so much a stereotypical big sister, bustling in and telling everyone what to do.
I can imagine a life where my parents didn’t die, but when I try to think of having brothers and sisters, they seem like an alien species. Not unwelcome, exactly; just unnerving.
But I was very young when it happened, and I suppose that means my parents were, too. In a basic biological sense, at least.
There could have been more of us, in time.
What would life have been like if I hadn’t been an only child?
Am I the one singled out for this doom, or would a brother or sister have shared it with me?
Would I be less alone if
But none of it would make sense that way. Considering what the rules were, up until Stephen James.
I followed those rules as soon as I figured out what they were. I never even argued with them.
And still this happened.
Maybe it wasn’t about me.
Maybe some deaths just happen.
Maybe people just get shot in the head sometimes.
And are dragged to my school and left at the gate.
God, I’m so tired.
I notice where Death has been introduced, he frequently calls, making it desirable to forestall his advances.
One more girl went home and one’s thinking about it.
“I want to stay,” she said at lunch. Katia, her name is.
“So stay.” Gosh, I wonder what tactful soul said that. I don’t even have to hear M’s voice to know when she’s talking—I can just go by her I Am The Boss Of All I See dialogue.
“My parents say it’s up to me,” Katia went on. She has honey-brown hair and somehow manages to look about ten years older than she really is. “But I can tell they feel weird about my being here. If—” She glanced around and lowered her voice. “If only the police could figure out who did it, you know? I thought they would have by now.”
I put my fork down.
“It hasn’t been that long,” another girl said. Then she added, “Has it? I mean, in terms of figuring out that kind of thing? How long does that usually take?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know.”
“I think if they haven’t figured it out by now, they’re not going to.”
“Ever? That’s a little dire, isn’t it?”
I stared at my plate, wishing there was some way I could go to my room without it being loud and obvious. Unfortunately, we’d only just sat down.
“Well, I don’t know anything about that,” Katia said. “All I know is, my mom offered me a trip to England if I come home. We can leave as soon as I want and stay as long as I want.”
“To go to school there?”
“Just to hang out.”
“Is that even legal?”
“Sure. We can just say we’re homeschooling.”
A pause. Then:
“So, when you say you want to stay at Hawthorne,” M said, “what you mean is you want to stay at Hawthorne if Ms. Lurie will relocate to London.”
Katia smiled, not offended. “That would be pretty cool.”
M shook her head dismissively. “Too rainy.”
“You’ve been?”
“Of course.”
I don’t know what’s so of coursey about that. I’ve never been to London.
Of course, I’ve never been much of anywhere.
Still—plenty of the other girls looked a little embarrassed when M said that. M noticed me noticing their expressions, and smiled impishly. God. She can’t shut up even when she isn’t saying anything.
“How long did you stay?” someone asked.
“Long enough to learn that the food’s as bland as everyone says.”
“Oh, come on,” Katia said. “You went to London and all you bothered to notice was boring food?”
“I went to school in London,” M corrected, “and I noticed the boring food because, trust me, it was the most exciting part of any given day. I got myself kicked out as soon as I could.”
I rolled my eyes. Gosh, what a shock.
“What did you do?”
“One of the teachers was big on making us take bracing walks in the rain. Right out of Jane Eyre, I tell you.”
“And?”
“I took her twenty-pound tomcat out for a bracing walk in the rain.”
A chorus of kitty-sympathetic ohs. I found myself fighting back sudden hysterical giggles, and didn’t dare look up for fear of meeting M’s eye.
“Oh, lighten up,” she went on. “He was a nasty piece of work. Scratched me up good and proper.” She sounded a little British as she said that, and I wondered if she’d had to stay at the school long enough to pick up the occasional bit of accent. “And, anyway, he was only out for a minute. I made sure to get caught right away. I didn’t want to drown the stupid beast. I just wanted to teach my parents a lesson about shipping me off to places I don’t want to be.”
If my life were a young adult novel, this would be the part where the nerd-girl becomes best friends with the rebel blonde by telling her about how Emily Dickinson once dropped four kittens into a jarful of pickle brine while the rest of the family was at church.
M would love that story, but she’s just going to have to find it for herself. And I happen to know for a fact that the one book that talks about it isn’t in Hawthorne’s library.
I have it in mine, of course, but she’s not exactly welcome to browse there.
“Look, it’s your life,” M was now saying to Katia. “Do what you want. That’s how I live, as you may have noticed. But before you decide anything, I think you should check and see if England will still be open for business after you graduate, and then think about how easy it might or might not be to come back to Hawthorne if you leave.”
Katia, who’s a senior, said nothing, but her face was very thoughtful. She wants to be a poet, and I was sure she was thinking about what a poetry country England is compared to America, but also about how leaving Hawthorne behind would also mean leaving Bianca Young, who’s Katia’s mentor and who’s pretty famous considering she’s a poet and alive. Ms. Lurie was lucky to get her. Katia’s lucky to be able to work with her.
But to work you have to be able to concentrate, and that may be hard to do with her parents giving her a hard time.
And then there’s the memory of a dead man messing wi
th her head, of course. But isn’t that the kind of creepy thing poets love to work with?
Maybe Katia wasn’t thinking about any of this when M gave her unrequested advice. Maybe she was just hoping someone would change the subject.
I know I was.
Did you know there had been a fire here … ?
… Vinnie came soft as a moccasin, “Don’t be afraid, Emily, it is only the fourth of July.”
I did not tell that I saw it, for I thought if she felt it best to deceive, it must be that it was.
… Vinnie’s “only the fourth of July” I shall always remember. I think she will tell us so when we die, to keep us from being afraid.
Even when nothing but a lucky shift in the wind kept their house from being destroyed by fire, Lavinia was calm and soothing, taking care of Emily. And Emily knew very well what she was doing, and was grateful even when Lavinia lied. Especially when she lied.
I used to think that if I could be allowed to have just one person to be my family, it would be a sister—one who would take care of me. Someone who would stand in for an older sister even if she were younger. Like a parent, but better. Parents are required to die, after all.
I never felt at Home—Below—
People think Dickinson was obsessed with death, and in a way she was. Plenty of her poems are about death. Some of them even have the narrator reminiscing about back when he or she died, which is weird to write about even once, let alone multiple times.
What’s really weird is how cheerful some of those death poems are—jaunty, almost:
If I should die—
And you should live—
And time sh’d gurgle on—
—and then she starts talking about the birds building their nests the same time of day as usual, and the bees “bustling,” and she’s practically humming and skipping on the page at the thought of dying while a friend lives on.
Or the poem where she really does die—the poem-teller does, anyway—and then starts wondering how everyone’s doing without her, and which member of the family misses her least, and whether it will bum any of them out at Christmas to think that her stocking hangs too high now “for any Santa Claus to reach.” But since that’s too gloomy for a proper dead person, she ends the poem cheering herself up with thinking about how one day they’ll all come and see her. Because, you know. Death.
The Letting Go Page 8