Given when and where Dickinson lived, the amazing thing isn’t that she went on and on about death, but that she managed to be so happy about it in so much of her writing.
Three of Dickinson’s uncles had died before Dickinson was born—one when he was a baby, two in their twenties. Women died during childbirth. So did babies. Teenage girls might be asked to “watch” the sick at night, which meant spending a sleepless night with the terminally ill and hoping they survived until morning. Some of them didn’t.
Kids were taught that anyone of any age might die on any given day because that was the simple truth.
That’s still the truth, but these days most people can pretend it isn’t. Dickinson seemed to take it to heart, at least. She once wrote that she could not spend a week away from home, for fear that someone she loved would die after she left. And that was years before she started staying at home all the time.
I think part of the reason I read about Dickinson so much is that I feel more at home in her time. Not that I want to do without plumbing or electricity, and I’d hate to have to wear long dresses every day. Or any dresses ever.
But sometimes I wish I could live somewhere—somewhen—that death was more ordinary.
How I lost everyone I loved would be noteworthy no matter when it happened, but that I’ve racked up so many dead people wouldn’t be exceptional in Dickinson’s world.
And people would know without my having to say anything. Not just because the story would get around, but because back then your clothing spoke for you, at least on that subject. There were certain things you were supposed to wear for certain amounts of time depending on how close you were to the dead.
I guess I wouldn’t have been wearing black anymore anyway. You didn’t forever for parents, and I guess you didn’t at all for pets or friends.
And of course even in Dickinson’s time, there wasn’t a mourning dress to show you’d lost a spouse or child by never being allowed to have them at all.
Sunset at Night—is natural—
But Sunset on the Dawn
Reverses Nature—Master—
So Midnight’s—due—at Noon—
This murder can’t be related to my life. It doesn’t play by the rules.
This murder can’t be unrelated to my life. Either the rules have changed or they weren’t what I thought they were. Or there were never any rules and no one is safe anywhere.
Dreams—are well—but
Waking’s better—
If One wake at Morn—
Sleep runs away from me as if it thinks I’m going to hurt it.
Last night I couldn’t fall asleep until midnight, and then I opened my eyes at 3:30 and I knew that was all I’d be allowed to have.
This autumn has been unusually warm, so there wasn’t even anything cozy about lolling around in bed under piles of blankets.
3:30 doesn’t feel like part of night or morning. It’s kind of a lost time. Nobody sets their alarm to get up at 3:30, and anyone still awake at 3:30 is someone committed to staying up all night.
Waking up to that number felt like wandering into a stranger’s party.
I got up and made my bed in the hope that reverse psychology would take over and as soon as my mind saw some proof I shouldn’t go to sleep, I’d want to.
Of course it didn’t work, so I lay on top of my quilt reading until I couldn’t stand it anymore.
I grabbed my soft-soled boots and an energy bar and made my quietest way to the front door and out onto the huge, wooden front porch. Much too early to hope for sunrise, but the moon was pretty big.
I sat and looked at it while I ate. It’s funny how staring at some things is an activity in and of itself. Watching the moon or the ocean or even the patterns in a stucco ceiling is fine. Looking at a wall or a rock for twenty minutes is a cry for help.
I shoved the empty wrapper into my waistband and walked down the front steps slowly. Hawthorne is set in several acres of unapologetically raw outdoorsiness. Everything grows where it wants to. There’s no sense of a fight for survival—or maybe that fight was won and lost before I arrived. At any rate, the hulking trees and inquisitive herbs and occasional wildflowers seem to have settled things to their own satisfaction, and no one interferes with them.
Ms. Lurie tried to keep chickens once, for the eggs, but the stupid creatures kept getting eaten by local fauna.
I’ve always liked roaming around Hawthorne’s grounds, so I know my way well enough that the moonlight was more help than I needed. I was heading over to my favorite tree when Ms. Lurie surprised me, silently seeming to appear out of nowhere.
I suppose it might be more fair to say I surprised her, since I’m not the one who’s all about the predawn walks.
She put her finger to her lips and gestured me away from the house and toward the path I had wanted anyway. “Did I wake you, dear?” she asked softly when we were far enough from Hawthorne that even waking ears couldn’t have heard us.
I shook my head. “I couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d get some air,” I said.
She smiled. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Not quite night and not quite day.”
I didn’t answer, just breathed in some of the aforementioned atmosphere. It was cool and clean and strangely empty, as if all scents were still asleep. Ms. Lurie slowed to a standstill and I stopped with her, not wanting to be rude. She gazed lovingly up at the moon.
“Gorgeous,” she said. And then startled me by adding, “‘How much can come, and much can go, and yet abide the world!’ ”
I stared at her, and she smiled mischievously back. “You’re not the only one who loves Dickinson,” she said. “She’s saved my sanity on any number of occasions.”
I felt guilty for being another reason her sanity needed saving, and also for not recognizing the poem she’d quoted.
“It’s a relief to come out here and be among so many living things that can’t know or care about my petty problems,” Ms. Lurie went on. “Sometimes it can seem terrible to see the world going about its business as if nothing had happened. As if what had happened didn’t matter. But then to realize that what happened to you didn’t stain the whole world—that the sun will still set beautifully if you’re willing to wait, and the constellations will rise and dance and sink just as they always have—it can be a comfort. If you learn to let it be one.”
She paused. “I didn’t always think that, of course. I used to find it infuriating, truth be told.”
“You did?” Ms. Lurie could be infuriated?
“Oh, yes. When I was much younger, I used to come out here and storm at the heavens.” She laughed. “They stormed back once. That cooled me off. Literally.”
The image of a young, angry Ms. Lurie shouting at the sky was so vivid it felt like a shared memory. “What happened?” I asked before I could stop myself.
“The time I got rained on was when one of my daughters was very young and very sick. I was pretty young myself, and terrified. Nothing really bad had ever happened to me, and I guess I’d figured nothing ever would.”
“But—did she—”
“She healed up just fine. But having to leave her at the hospital like that—being told there was nothing I could do but wait and hope—it shook me up. And I’m glad. I needed shaking up. Strange as it sounds, I think that frightening night helped me later, when my husband was killed.”
“Killed?”
Ms. Lurie looked startled at my yelp, and then her expression became apologetic. “In a car accident, sweetheart,” she said quietly. “He died in a car accident. Nobody’s fault, just bad weather and bad luck. He wasn’t murdered. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have phrased it that way. Especially now.”
I couldn’t say anything.
“Don’t worry, Emily,” Ms. Lurie said. “We aren’t living in a haunted house. I promise. This is still the home my husband and I built together, the place where we raised our daughters, the place where I try to help bring up other people’s daughters. This is stil
l a good place. One evil person can’t change that.”
“But—” I couldn’t manage the rest of the question.
“But?” Ms. Lurie asked encouragingly.
“Are you going to have to close Hawthorne?”
She looked faintly surprised. “I haven’t done anything wrong. Keeping Hawthorne open is up to me. There’s no ‘have to’ about it.”
“Well—are you going to?”
Ms. Lurie smiled. She made a gesture as if she was about to take my hand, but she knows how I am about physical contact so she clasped her own hands together instead. She looked like she was praying, or sealing a bargain with herself.
“As long as even one girl wants to be here,” she said, “Hawthorne will welcome her.”
Work is a bleak redeemer, but it does redeem.
So that’s that.
Ms. Lurie doesn’t lie, and she isn’t often wrong.
Maybe Hawthorne really isn’t going to close, and I’ll be able to finish out my last year here. If nothing else goes wrong. If everyone leaves me alone and I return the favor. If that murder really was just one of those terrible things that happens sometimes.
Right.
Well, there’s nowhere else for me to go. I’m not eighteen. I wouldn’t go back to Aunt Paulette even if she’d have me. And just because I’m emancipated doesn’t mean there are a lot of people out there willing to rent a place to a seventeen-year-old.
And that’s okay. I don’t have to think about it just yet.
I don’t have to think about
I simply have to think about Emily Dickinson and pretend I’m just another Hawthorne student.
I measure Every Grief
I meet
That’s one of my favorite poems. The whole thing, I mean—not just those first few words.
I love it so much I learned it by heart—which was tough, because I have a hard time memorizing any poem, and this one’s really long.
I learned it back when I was still reading Dickinson in a pretty haphazard fashion. I hadn’t learned much about her life. I certainly hadn’t started to unsnarl the tangled mess of how and when and why her poems were published.
It took a long time to learn that whole poem, and I was proud of myself for doing it. So I was startled and annoyed one day, much later, when I was leafing through a collection I’d grabbed from the library and found a totally different version of the poem I thought I knew.
They got it wrong was my first thought.
My second, when I read this new version again, was Wait—I got it wrong.
The new version had ten verses. The one I’d learned only had nine.
It made more sense to assume that some editor had cut a verse than to think someone had added one.
But how? Why? And why were some of the words in this version just plain different from what I’d managed to teach myself?
Why did she measure grief with analytic eyes in the poem I’d learned, but narrow, probing ones in the poem I’d just found?
That was when I started really studying Dickinson, instead of just reading her.
I went online and ordered all the really pricey editions of her poetry I could find, and when they arrived I learned why they’d cost so much.
There was a huge, ugly-on-the-outside set that turned out to be a careful collection of photos of all those handwritten booklets Dickinson sewed together. There was an elegant, ugly-on-the-inside boxed set that turned out to be a typed-up collection of every poem Dickinson ever wrote, along with a record of every known variation of each poem.
Sometimes there were different versions because Dickinson played around with her poems and then sent them in undated letters to various friends. Sometimes it was more complicated than that.
Last night I was working late in the library again—mercifully alone—with all my books spread out around me.
Sometimes I like to pretend someone bought them for me.
I was frowning over that poem again.
Every editor has messed with it one way or another.
Her first editor—that mistress—made the punctuation and capitalization boring, but she did keep the word changes Dickinson handwrote into her own little booklet version—changes she obviously made after writing out the first draft.
But then the mistress made some word changes of her own, and cut a verse seemingly at random.
The editor I like best is a man who put Dickinson’s booklets back together after the mistress pulled them apart and scrambled the order they’d been in.
He kept Dickinson’s wild punctuation and strange sprinkles of capital letters and put that missing verse back in, but he left out the word changes she made.
Why?
That’s always the question with Dickinson.
She was born. She was a genius. She wrote. She shut herself away from the world. She died.
Nobody knows the why of any of that, but plenty of people pretend to. I learned that when I started reading every biography I could get my hands on.
Sometimes what she didn’t do is stranger than what she did. She could have tried to publish her work. She had the chance to marry a man she loved. She didn’t do either of those things.
I looked at the poem again and sighed.
The thing is, I actually kind of like the bit about “narrow, probing eyes.” It’s creepy.
But is it fair to keep what you like and say that’s what the poet wrote when she made a clear revision?
Once you start down that path, wouldn’t it be all too easy to start “correcting” the text with, say, words you think would be a better choice?
The mistress did that sometimes.
And then there’s the capitalization. Dickinson’s handwriting is so tricky, there are plenty of times it’s hard to tell whether or not she meant a letter to be capital.
Maybe she didn’t care.
The last four words of this poem all look capital to me, but even the editor I like best left them as shorties.
I had a sudden feeling of power.
If I look at her writing and see capital letters, and I can say why I think that (look, this T is taller and the crossbar is on top rather than cutting through the middle, and this M has that special squiggle she uses for the uppercase), my opinion is as valid as anyone else’s.
That’s the beauty of Dickinson’s work: she never published it, so it belongs to everyone.
Including me.
Maybe I’ll never be a real scholar with letters after my name, but I can learn as much as anyone else can about her and I can say what I see.
Maybe I can write a book of my own about her. Why not? I could publish it myself if no one else wants to. And if no one wants to read it—well, it’s not hurting anyone by existing.
Especially if I don’t sign my name to it. That would be a very Dickinson thing to do.
I glanced up, smiling triumphantly at the thought of strangers wondering who this brilliant anonymous literary theorist was.
—and I met the eyes of M, who’d just come in and who seemed to accept my smile as a gift.
I cannot see anything to prevent a quiet season. Father takes care of the doors and mother of the windows, and Vinnie and I are secure against all outward attacks. If we can get our hearts “under,” I don’t have much to fear—I’ve got all but three feelings down, if I can only keep them!
Dickinson wrote this when she was twenty years old and Lavinia was eighteen. So far as I can tell, her parents weren’t afraid of “attacks” from wolves or bears or burglars. They seemed to be locking up against gentlemen callers who might steal their daughters’ hearts.
Later in this same letter she describes spending the afternoon visiting friends. When she got home, her mother was weeping and wailing and her father threw a fit about how long she’d been gone and how late she was getting home.
Nine o’clock does not seem terribly late for a twenty-year-old woman to be out visiting her friends. Even a twenty-year-old woman in nineteenth-century New England.
>
To be fair, everyone’s parents were a little weird back then, apparently.
I have a copy of the child-rearing manual Dickinson’s parents read. There’s all sorts of advice about when (not if) you should hit your kid, because keeping your offspring terrified of you was a crucial part of parenting.
It says so in as many words: “Fear is a useful and a necessary principle in family government.”
Apparently some parents were known to overdo it on the fear front, because there are also some this-really-happened stories in the manual about children getting so scared they spent the rest of their lives morons, or else they literally died of fright.
Doesn’t seem likely, but of course I wasn’t there.
In spite of what she said in this letter and some others, I don’t think Dickinson was afraid of her father.
One time when her father wanted her to go to church, she just kept saying no. I don’t think she’d have done that if she were afraid of him. Certainly she wouldn’t have done what she did next, which was to drop the argument, leave the room, and hide until church was over.
They went without her, which seems an odd thing to do when one of your daughters has gone missing; but they did have another daughter to spare, and, anyway, everyone knew Miss Emily had her odd ways and would turn up in her own sweet time. Which she did.
Dickinson most definitely wasn’t afraid of her mother. I’m not sure anyone ever was. Even the houseflies probably relaxed when she was the only one in the room—no swatting today, not from such a sickly, weary, faint-voiced worrier as Emily Dickinson, Senior.
I don’t remember ever feeling afraid of my mother.
Most of my memories are tinges of sweetness—flashes of fun.
Once I picked a dandelion and my mother told me to “blow on it, darling—blow as hard as you can, like a birthday candle!” and then she burst out laughing at the look on my face when the tiny gray cloud burst apart and took to the wind.
The Letting Go Page 9