And this was the creature Julie Harris inhabited in 1976—with her freckles and black cake—until that other Emily, seductive, spiteful, cruel, with the reckless anger and eruptions of a volcano, was swept under the carpet.
2
STILL, SOMETHING HAPPENED around the time The Belle of Amherst was first produced. Adrienne Rich, who had won the National Book Award for her poetry in 1974, was utterly obsessed with Dickinson. “For months, for years, for most of my life, I have been hovering like an insect against the screens of an existence which inhabited Amherst, Massachusetts, between 1830 and 1886.” But Dickinson was hard to capture. “Narrowed-down by her early editors and anthologists, reduced to quaintness or spinsterish oddity by many of her commentators, sentimentalized, fallen-in-love with like some gnomic Garbo, still unread in the breadth and depth of her full range of work, she was, and is, a wonder to me when I try to imagine myself into that mind.” Rich didn’t see any quaintness at all. This gnomic Garbo had to find the means to survive. There was nothing pathological about her life as a hermit in her father’s house: her self-styled isolation was her survival kit as a poet. She was, as Rich says, a most practical woman, who understood her gifts. “I have come to imagine her as somehow too strong for her environment, a figure of powerful will, not at all frail and breathless, someone whose personal dimensions would be felt in a household.”
As much as she was frightened of her father, he must have been a little wary of her smoking intelligence and wit. And in 1975, a year before Julie Harris broke through as The Belle of Amherst, mesmerizing audiences in her white dress, Rich published “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson,” an essay that dynamited many of the shibboleths about the Belle of Amherst. The gnomic Garbo was suddenly gone, and in her place was a woman who had to exercise a good deal of cunning in a society where most men, including her father, often considered females little more than voluptuous, intelligent, child-bearing creatures with their own mysterious charm; Emily might go to school, but she had to remain outside history. She could not even carry her father’s name into marriage—daughters were swallowed up by husbands, fathers, brothers. Is it any wonder Dickinson never married? Her elder brother, Austin, was Edward Dickinson’s favorite. Father and son fought all the time, but Edward missed him the moment he was out of sight. He cherished his son’s school compositions, called them better than Shakespeare, and wanted to have them published in a morocco-bound book, while his daughter’s poems would always be invisible to him. And when Austin considered moving to Chicago with his bride (Susan Dickinson was Emily’s dearest friend and perhaps her greatest love), Edward bribed him to remain in Amherst by building a house for him and Susan—the Evergreens—next door to the Homestead.
Those were the confines of Emily’s world; she baked her father’s bread, she gardened, and was able to wheedle the best room in the Homestead from him, in the southwest corner, where she could look at the Dickinson meadow from her writing desk. Adrienne Rich made a pilgrimage to that room. “Here I became, again, an insect, vibrating at the frame of the windows, clinging to panes of glass, trying to connect. The scent here is very powerful. Here in this white-curtained, high-ceilinged room, a red-haired woman with hazel eyes and a contralto voice wrote about volcanoes, deserts, eternity, suicide, physical passion, wild beasts, rape, power, madness, separation, the daemon, the grave. Here, with a darning needle, she bound these poems—heavily emended and often in various versions—into booklets, secured with darning thread, to be found and read after her death.” And somehow she thrived. She might call Higginson her Preceptor, but she had none. She was utterly self-taught, self-schooled. She had her Bible and her Lexicon, but she couldn’t have learned much about the “Whip lash” of words from her favorite authors—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Brontë sisters, Dickens, Emerson, George Eliot, George Sand, Keats. (Perhaps Shakespeare was her Master—her only one). Her poems were like hymnals, but they didn’t come from any church. That strange polyphony was born inside her head. But she lived with all the constraints—“the corseting of women’s bodies, choices, and sexuality [that] could spell insanity to a woman genius.” She could out-Puritan the Puritans in her poems. She was fierce—and cruel—like some rebel preacher in their midst. God was terrifying and aloof, but he was also impotent and maimed.
Those—dying then,
Knew where they went—
They went to God’s Right Hand—
That Hand is amputated now
And God cannot be found—[Fr1581]
But from that amputation grew her own power, her power to summon her energies and to subvert. “It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealment—that explodes in poetry,” wrote Adrienne Rich. It was the poetry of a renegade, who could unsex herself if she had to, masquerade as a man, or shift from sex to sex, like Virginia Woolf in Orlando. She could be male or female, according to her desire. She was drawn to women and men with powerful minds and a particular beauty. Her letters read like a catalogue of seductions, and her poems are often fired up with pain, in the coded language of a failed love affair, real or imagined. She was in love with Susan Gilbert, however we may define that love.
Sue wasn’t a patrician like Dickinson herself, who could practice her craft like a spider with “a Silver Ball,” in her father’s house. [Fr513] Sue had run away to Baltimore and tried to support herself as a schoolteacher—the experiment failed. She had to find a suitor. She was dark, strong-willed, with an almost masculine beauty. She chose Emily’s brother, who was considered a catch. Austin was handsome and haughty, the son of the most powerful man in Amherst. And she was fond of his father. Both of them had become Christians on the same day in 1850, joined the First Church of Amherst as members of the “elect.” She had a nervous fit after her engagement to Austin. Her hair fell out. She stayed in bed a month. She had to have a nurse. Finally, she did marry Austin, though she remained dubious about male affection.
Her favorite sister had died shortly after giving birth, and Sue was suspicious of “a man’s requirements.” Still, she would have three children of her own, and soon had the finest salon in Amherst—Bret Harte and Ralph Waldo Emerson stayed at the Evergreens. And for a while, Emily visited with her dog, Carlo. She may have been in love with one of Sue’s guests, editor Samuel Bowles, with his “Arabian presence.” She would write to Bowles—a married man who enjoyed having a “menagerie” of women around him—with her own kind of cryptic passion. Scheherazade living under a vail of words. She had a weakness for married men who could test her own intelligence; with them she would weave her Silver Ball.
I suspect that Colonel Higginson was another one of her “suitors”; like Bowles, he had a sickly wife. And she revealed herself to him—and the foibles of her family—as she did with no other man. Ten days after her very first letter to Higginson, she writes, “I have a Brother and Sister—My Mother does not care for thought—and Father, too busy with his Briefs—to notice what we do—He buys me many books—but begs me not to read them—because he fears they joggle the Mind. They are religious—except me—and address an Eclipse, every morning—whom they call their ‘Father.’ But I fear my story fatigues you—I would like to learn—Could you tell me how to grow—or is it unconveyed—like Melody—or Witchcraft?” [Letter 261, April 25, 1862]
And Adrienne Rich resurrects a poem that baffled most critics in 1975 and was seldom discussed—a poem about Dickinson’s creative demon that was central to her “addiction” to male Preceptors, like Higginson and Bowles. “I think it is a poem about possession by the daemon, about the dangers and risks of such a possession if you are a woman, about the knowledge that power in a woman can seem destructive, and that you cannot live without the daemon once it has possessed you. The archetype of the daemon as masculine is beginning to change, but it has been real for women up until now. But this woman poet [in “My life had stood a loaded gun”] also perceives herself as a lethal weapon,” a weapon that guards her Master’s life.
[Fr764]
To foe of His—I’m deadly foe—
None stir the second time—
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye—
Or an emphatic Thumb—
The narrator of the poem—woman as Loaded Gun—has become a kind of Annie Oakley in her Master’s house, the “blonde Assassin” [Fr1668] with a murderous Yellow Eye. The poem whips between surrender and rage, as if Dickinson herself were caught in a sadomasochistic dream about her own identity. She is both the hunter and the hunted, has become her very own prey.
And now We roam in Sovreign Woods—
And now We hunt the Doe—
The gun, Rich tell us, speaks for her Master. “If there is a female consciousness in this poem it is buried deeper than the images: it exists in the ambivalence toward power, which is extreme. Active willing and creation in women are forms of aggression, and aggression is both ‘the power to kill’ and punishable by death.”
Rich realizes that she cannot unravel the poem, crack all its essential codes. The speaking gun is too perverse, as if the very act of creation for a woman in the nineteenth century was impossible to bear and would have broken any other poet with a lesser will. Dickinson could not have survived without her own “Yellow Eye.” It was, for Dickinson, “an extremely painful and dangerous way to live—split between a publicly acceptable persona, and a part of yourself that you perceive as the essential, the creative and powerful self, yet also as possibly unacceptable, perhaps even monstrous.”
And that was Dickinson’s dilemma. The poet on the second floor was like a monster in her lair. And it shouldn’t startle us that there was a strange flutter about her—she was carrying bombs in her bosom, under the white dress that has tagged her as a harmless old maid for at least a hundred years, the very recluse we meet in Luce’s play, who spills all her secrets to an audience of strangers, when she was a woman with volcanic powers—whose lightning rhythms and ragged rhymes seem to mirror our postapocalyptic age, and whose lyrics grow more and more modern. We can barely keep up with her leaps of language.
Title divine—is mine!
The Wife—without the Sign!
Acute Degree—conferred on me—
Empress of Calvary! . . .
Born—Bridalled—Shrouded—
In a Day—[Fr194]
It’s as if she were sending us telegrams or tickets from the moon. Her finest poems often have the brutal starts and stops of a telegraphic “tongue” that’s difficult to decipher. Her dashes, which can curl up or descend like a cliff, seem to suggest some sort of violent rupture; her mind itself could be ripping as she moves from image to image. Her language is seldom stable, like the contours of our own world; shapes shift. And we’re hunters in the dark, looking for traces of Emily Dickinson, while she’s a target who never sits still.
3
COMMENTARIES ON HER POEMS began 125 years ago, when Colonel Higginson’s little article, “An Open Portfolio,” appeared in The Christian Union on September 25, 1890, two months before Dickinson’s first batch of poems was published by Roberts Brothers of Boston. It was meant to give readers a pre-taste of the poems. Perhaps Higginson was a nervous impresario and worried that his name was attached to a book that might be mocked, and that he himself might be ridiculed as the presenter of Emily Dickinson.
Emerson, he said, had once talked about “The Poetry of the Portfolio,” the work of poets who never sought public acclaim, but “wrote for the relief of their own minds.” Higginson damned and blessed such primitive scratchings—“there will be wonderful strokes and felicities, and yet an incomplete and unsatisfactory whole.” And thus he presented his own “pupil,” whom he had reluctantly rescued from oblivion. “Such a sheaf of unpublished verses lies before me, the life-work of a woman so secluded that she lived literally indoors by choice for many years, and within the limits of her father’s estate for many more—who shrank from the tranquil society of a New England College town.” And yet he was startled by what she was able to dredge up from “this secluded inland life.” And he presented a few of his pupil’s poems, regularizing them as much as he could. The ellipsis was gone; so was every single dash.
Yet he was also a shrewd observer. “Her verses are in most cases like poetry plucked up by the roots; we have them with earth, stones, and dew adhering, and must accept them as they are. Wayward and unconventional in the last degree; defiant of form, measure, rhyme, and even grammar; she yet had an exacting standard of her own, and would wait many days for a word that satisfied.” He saw her wildness, and didn’t really know how to deal with it.
He must have assumed that these “wayward” poems would be buried overnight. But “An Open Portfolio” had helped create the legend of the recluse in her inland village who could weave her verses “out of the heart’s own atoms.” Higginson’s article succeeded in ways he couldn’t have imagined—the book went through printing after printing and sold eleven thousand copies. The village poet had come right out of the cupboard.
In October 1891, in the thick of all this flurry of sales, Higginson received a letter from a wealthy banker-writer, Samuel G. Ward, who revealed this wild poet to her coeditor.
MY DEAR MR. HIGGINSON,
I am, with all the world, intensely interested in Emily Dickinson. No wonder six editions have been sold, every copy I should think to a New Englander. She may become world famous, or she may never get out of New England. She is the quintessence of that element we all have who are of Puritan descent pur sang. We came to this country to think our own thoughts with nobody to hinder. . . . We conversed with our own souls till we lost the art of communicating with other people. The typical family grew up strangers to each other, as in this case. It was awfully high, but awfully lonesome. Such prodigies of shyness do not exist elsewhere.
Ward goes on to describe Dickinson’s poetry in perfect pitch. “She was the articulate inarticulate,” that lone voice out of the Puritan wilderness. And we haven’t gotten much closer to Dickinson’s puzzling rhymes, even after more than a century of criticism. We’ve put back into order the little bound booklets—fascicles—that Mabel Loomis Todd ripped apart. We’ve studied the shifts in her handwriting. We have her secret stash of poems and whatever letters we could find—Jay Leyda, a man almost as cryptic as Dickinson herself, believed that we may have uncovered only a minuscule portion of her letters—as little as one tenth. And her letters are every bit as bewildering as the poems, perhaps even more so, because they pretend to give us a clearer picture of the poet. We soon come to realize that’s she’s wearing an assortment of masks—sometimes she’s Cleopatra and an insignificant mouse in the same letter.
It wasn’t always like that; in her earliest letters, she’s chatty and reliable; the voice is never disembodied, never drifts. She’s like a female Mark Twain, a teller of tall tales. Here’s Emily at eleven and a half, writing to Austin:
—the other day Francis brought your Rooster home and the other 2 went to fighting him while I was gone to School—mother happened to look out of the window and she saw him laying on the ground—he was most dead—but she and Aunt Elizabeth went right out and took him up and put him in a Coop and he is nearly well now—while he is shut up the other Roosters—will come around and insult him in Every possible way by Crowing right in his Ears—and then they will jump up on the Coop and Crow there as if they—wanted to show that he was Completely in their power and they could treat him as they chose—Aunt Elizabeth said she wished their throats would split and then they could insult him no longer—[Letter 2, May 1, 1842]
With a bit more vernacular, Huck Finn could be talking here. And at fourteen, she writes to her friend Abiah Root: “I am growing handsome very fast indeed! I expect I shall be the belle of Amherst when I reach my 17th year.” [Letter 6, May 7, 1845]
But something happens to that chatty exuberance by the time she’s in her twenties. The letters grow shorter and shorter, have much more violent shifts. And when she first writes Higginson in 1862, seducing him with her poe
ms, compelling him with her leaps, she’s like a huntress with poison arrows.
“I had a terror—since September—I could tell to none—and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground—” [Letter 261, April 25, 1862]
Higginson didn’t have a chance. And neither do we. But it’s hard to grasp how and where that sudden mastery arose. It had to come from more than craft. It’s as if she had a storm inside her head, an illumination, like a wizard or a mathematical genius. Dickinson was reinventing the language of poetry, not by examining poets of the past, but by cannibalizing the words in her Lexicon. Jay Leyda was the only one who understood this. In his introduction to The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson (1960), he talked about the “omitted center” in her letters and poems—all the tiny ribs of language that were left out. But Leyda was much more optimistic than I am about where those ribs came from. She told riddles: “the deliberate skirting of the obvious—this was the means she used to increase the privacy of her communication; it has also increased our problems in piercing that privacy.” Leyda assumes she always had a reader in mind, that all the missing keys depended upon a specific audience, and that Sue or Austin would know what that “omitted center” was about. Hence he gives us the minutia surrounding Dickinson’s life. And The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson is a monumental book that reads like a musical composition or collage, filled with every sort of scrap. That sentimental legend of a lovelorn Emily “isolates her—and thus much of her poetry—from the real world. It shows her unaware of community and nation, never seeing anyone, never wearing any color but white, never doing any housework beyond baking batches of cookies for secret delivery to favorite children, and meditating majestically among her flowers.”
A Loaded Gun Page 2