A Loaded Gun

by Jerome Charyn

  Leyda was already anticipating The Belle of Amherst, years before it was produced. But he believed that Dickinson was no more isolated from the world than most other artists, that “she wrote more in time, that she was much more involved in the conflicts and tensions of her nation and community, than we have thought.” Yet she remained a riddler, like Leyda himself. Perhaps that’s why he was able to penetrate her personality—crawl right under her skin—before any other critic. It’s difficult to uncover where Leyda was born, or who raised him. Leyda’s “omitted center” is as elusive as Dickinson’s. He still believed that hers was recoverable.

  I’m not so sure. Leyda understood the limits of his “rag-picking method . . . most of our biggest questions about her must remain unanswered.” But he still persisted, like some magnificent collagist, still hoped to find the missing keys.

  Suppose the keys weren’t missing at all, but were part of some private, internal structure. And suppose her definition of poetry was different from ours, and she was a very different kind of poet, more like an explorer and discoverer, who meant to subjugate her Lexicon, rather than juggle words. She would share some of her discoveries in her letter-poems, sing a verse or two to a favorite cousin, but she shared her hand-sewn fascicles with no one; these were very private catalogues, complete in themselves, meant for her own consumption; and the variants to a particular word that she wrote in the margins were like magical flowers, not meant to cancel one another, but to create a cluster, or bouquet. That “omitted center” was less a mask than the sign of her modernity. For those critics who swear she was feminizing a male-dominated culture of language constructions, I would say that there’s something strange about the femininity of her attack. Camille Paglia best describes the force and “riddling ellipsis” of Dickinson’s style. “Protestant hymn-measure is warped and deformed by a stupefying energy. Words are rammed into lines with such force that syntax shatters and collapses into itself.” It’s that same Yellow Eye of the blonde Assassin. “The brutality of this belle of Amherst would stop a truck.”

  But more than a century after Higginson first introduced Emily Dickinson to her public, we’re still having a hard time unraveling most of her riddles. We’ve examined her in every sort of context, have peered into her culture and seen how women behaved with other women, and how nineteenth-century courtship rites distanced them from the language of their male suitors. We’ve seen Dickinson’s own sexual ambiguity. Sam Bowles seemed to have a crush on Sue’s former schoolmate Kate Scott, but so did Emily Dickinson, who knit a pair of garters for the ravishing young widow, and had the garters sent over to the Evergreens (while Kate was in residence), with the following lines:

  When Katie walks, this simple pair accompany her side

  When Katie runs unwearied they travel on the road,

  When Katie kneels, their loving hands still clasp her pious knee—

  Ah! Katie! Smile at Fortune, with two so knit to thee!

  It’s hard to imagine that Dickinson was unconscious of how erotic these lines were—it’s almost as if she were caressing Kate with her own “loving hands,” but whether she was conscious or not, the garters still leap out at us like a pair of seductive spiders.

  Yet all her puzzles didn’t have such keys, no matter what Leyda said. We may have Kate’s reminiscence (in 1917) of Emily at the Evergreens in 1859, “with her dog, & Lantern! often at the piano playing weird & wonderful melodies, all from her own inspiration, oh! She was a choice spirit!” These “weird and wonderful” riffs do mirror the music of her poems, and we can see how Dickinson loved to improvise, but she remains a moving target, hard to find. “Biography first convinces us of the fleeing of the Biographied—” she wrote to Higginson in 1885. [Letter 972]

  I believe she suffered horrendously as a woman; dream brides drift in and out of her poems like a continual nightmare—yet she did not want to be “Bridalled.” Sometimes she was married to God, with her “Title divine,” sometimes to the Devil. Like Sue herself, she had a genuine fear of male sexuality, that infernal “man of noon,” who scorches and scalds every little virgin flower—“they know that the man of noon, is mightier than the morning and their life is henceforth to him. Oh, Susie, it is dangerous, and it is all too dear, these simple trusting spirits, and the spirits mightier, which we cannot resist! It does rend me, Susie, the thought of it when it comes, that I tremble lest at sometime I, too, am yielded up.” [Letter 93, 1852]

  She had a plan for Sue and herself, a lifetime of love and devotion to the one craft that was open to women—“we are the only poets, and everyone else is prose.”[Letter 56, October 9, 1851] Together they might defeat or outfox “the man of noon.” But Sue was an orphan in search of a home. She couldn’t practice her craft in the poorhouse. And so she yielded herself up to Austin, this willful girl who seemed to have such a sway over Emily all her life. So many of Dickinson’s poems and letters are like dream songs, where she had to borrow from Shakespeare to change her sex, morph into some Marc Antony trying to conquer that Cleopatra who lived next door. . . .

  I believe that her rebellion against the culture of nineteenth-century Amherst was of another kind. She was promiscuous in her own fashion, deceiving everyone around her with the sly masks she wore. She was faithful to no one but her dog. Her white dress was one more bit of camouflage, to safeguard the witchery of her craft. It may have been an act of impersonation, as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar suggest in The Madwoman in the Attic, but I don’t agree that Dickinson, decked in white, became “a helpless agoraphobic, trapped in her room in her father’s house.” There’s a different tale to tell.

  She played the role of little girl that nineteenth-century women were meant to play. But she was far from a little girl, even if she told Higginson, “I have a little shape—it would not crowd your Desk—nor make much Racket as the Mouse, that dents your Galleries—” [Letter 265] It was one more act of seduction. She must have sensed her own monstrous powers—this Vesuvius at Home. The Brain, she would write, is wider than the Sky.

  The Brain is just the weight of God—

  For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—

  And they will differ—if they do—

  As Syllable from Sound—[Fr598]

  She may have sent her letter-poems to favorite friends like little bombs of love, but I don’t believe she ever meant to share her own “experiments” with anyone else. Higginson was reluctant to unclasp her Portfolio—poems plucked up from the roots of her mind. But she wasn’t boasting when she said—twice—that he had saved her life, not because he had much to say about her poems. He didn’t. But he cared for his half-cracked poetess, must have sniffed her greatness and her suffering. He wasn’t a fool. He just couldn’t read the future very well, couldn’t have seen that the twentieth century would soon explode into slant rhymes that would render him obsolete. Yet Dickinson desperately needed him. He was her lifeline—not to the literary culture of Boston; she wasn’t much interested in that. But she could practice her own intelligence—and her craft—on him. And so much of what we will ever know about her comes from her letters to Higginson; with him, she could wear the mask of a poet.

  If I read a book[and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way.[Letter 342a, Higginson to his wife]

  Not as far as Dickinson’s poetry is concerned. And that’s why we pay homage to this outlaw. She wasn’t one more madwoman in the attic. She was the mistress of her own interior time and space, where she delivered “Dirks of Melody” that could delight and stun. She was the blonde Assassin who could dance with “the man of noon” and walk away at will—in her poetry.

  “I cannot dance opon my Toes—/No Man instructed me—” she declared in one of her most striking poems. But she needed no instruction. Dickinson was dancing all the time. Few people in Amherst ever caught that dance, not even Sue.
She danced right past her father’s eyes, made herself invisible in her white dress. And Allen Tate, one of a handful of poets and critics who rediscovered Emily Dickinson in the twentieth century, paid her the highest sort of compliment when he said: “Cotton Mather would have burned her for a witch.”

  4

  I WANTED TO FOLLOW THE WITCH’S WAKE, so I went on a pilgrimage to Mount Holyoke College, in western Massachusetts, to breathe in some of the atmosphere the poet had breathed for two semesters, in 1847 and 1848, and to interview Dickinson scholar Christopher Benfey, who teaches a course on Emily Dickinson’s time at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, as the college was then called. But it was like trafficking in ghosts, since the seminary’s main building, with its elaborate portico and line of chimneys, no longer exists. And from the window of Benfey’s office near the main gate, I looked out upon the little serene pockets and hills of the college lawn. “We did an archaeological dig,” he said, “so where you see that oak tree”—in a lacuna on the lawn—“is perhaps the footprint of the building. . . . And the road you came in on is the same road. So Dickinson was right here. Dickinson stood right here where you’re sitting—lived right here.”

  Most scholars, including Alfred Habegger, dismiss the importance of Dickinson’s stay at Mount Holyoke. “We know of no new friends she kept up with after leaving. In later years she hardly mentioned the place.” Yet I’m convinced that her grounding as a poet started here, in South Hadley. It was Dickinson’s first extended leave from Amherst as an adolescent—it troubled her, made her feel horribly homesick, but she found a kind of solace in words; there’s a sudden thrill in language itself as she writes letter after letter to Austin, and we can sense her plumage gather, like some songbird startled by the sound and texture of its own song.

  A Menagerie performs outside her window, with its pet monkeys and bears. “The whole company stopped in front of the Seminary & played for about a quarter of an hour, for the purpose of getting custom in the afternoon I opine. Almost all the girls went & I enjoyed the solitude finely.” [Letter 16, South Hadley, October 21, 1847]

  She needed that solitude—and the distance from her family, so that she could lick her own feathers. As Benfey says about Dickinson, “We put that little mountain range between ourselves and our mother and our father and our sister and our brother, and we think, I’m separate from them. I’m alone with language in a new way. I’m writing letters with a new intensity. For the first time, we have that sense of Dickinson writing these letters that go across mountains and across rivers. And for the first time, she has the sense that words travel, that they have wings,” like the hummingbird and its “Route of Evanescence” that Dickinson loved to write about.

  And every Blossom on the Bush

  Adjusts its tumbled Head—

  The Mail from Tunis—probably—

  And easy Morning’s ride—[Fr1489A]

  But it wasn’t simply her solitude that sharpened her. She met her first real antagonist, Mary Lyon, within the school’s walls. Lyon was a formidable foe. The founder and headmistress of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, Lyon came from a much humbler background than the poet and believed in educating rich and poor alike as female soldiers in Christ. But no matter how wily she was, the headmistress in the severe white bonnet couldn’t get Dickinson to profess her faith, couldn’t rescue her soul. Emily Dickinson was one of the few “unsaved” seminarians. The battle was less about God and the Devil than about two women with strong wills, one of them a sixteen-year-old girl whose father was almost as tyrannical as Mary Lyon. None of Lyon’s little Christian soldiers could persuade the poet. She learned whatever she wanted to learn, and discarded all the rest.

  Benfey was still bemused by Dickinson as a young scholar. “I like to joke that she spent a year here and still thought i-t-apostrophe-s was the possessive of it, a word that she would write in a particular way.” But that allowed her to give any word “a color, a taste, a feel, a texture, an intensity” that no other poet could duplicate.

  Yet Benfey still broods over the year Dickinson spent at Mount Holyoke. He’s surrounded by the college’s earliest catalogues on his shelves, but insists, “We don’t really know what Mount Holyoke was like. I’m sitting in this office with a direct connection to Mary Lyon and Emily Dickinson. I think I know as much about that period as anyone alive and I know nothing. . . . I know more about the questions. I know that Mary Lyon is as mysterious a figure as Emily Dickinson, that if we could begin to understand who Mary Lyon was, we might begin to understand how complex that relationship was.

  “I speak as a biographer here, a self-torturing biographer. But every account of Dickinson feels wrong. I can’t pretend that I can say, ‘And then Dickinson entered Mount Holyoke, a really important transitional milestone’—it feels false from the first letter put down on the page.”

  And this is the dilemma we all have, that impossible plunder of capturing whoever she was. We fling out words like a chorus of arrows to find some mark, to brand Emily Dickinson, mythologize her in some way, and she hints at all the dangers, gives us a wicked slap in the face.

  Finding is the first Act

  The second, loss,

  Third, Expedition for the “Golden Fleece”

  Fourth, no Discovery—

  Fifth, no Crew—

  Finally, no Golden Fleece—

  Jason, sham, too—[Fr910]

  5

  BENFEY AGREES WITH W. H. AUDEN “that language finds certain people and lives through them, almost the way a virus lives by finding a host, I think language lives by finding hosts. . . . It found a way to live in Shakespeare. Infested him. Got all it could out of Shakespeare and then moved on.”

  “It didn’t disappear,” I say. “It went into the ground—”

  “For a long time, and found Emily Dickinson.”

  And then the virus moved on. “You listen to those early songs of Bob Dylan, and you think, Whoa, how could he have written them? But he doesn’t know. Just as Dickinson wouldn’t have been able to say, ‘Well, I first thought of the loaded gun image when I was sitting in my father’s room and there was a gun in the corner and I thought, I’m like that gun.’ We have no idea.”

  And the letters she wrote were as puzzling as that loaded gun.

  “We still don’t know how to read them,” Benfey says. “We assume the difficulty of the poems. And we assume the availability and relative intelligibility of the letters. It’s gotta be the opposite, because with the poems, we have some idea what rhyme and meter are. But with the letters, we have no fucking clue what the rules for reading and writing letters are. The ‘Master Letters’ have gotten a ton of attention, but it’s the other letters . . .”

  We talk about the cunning and the craft of her letters to Higginson. “She doesn’t need him as a mentor,” I say, and Benfey agrees.

  “That’s where we get the sense of her as a performance artist. She walks downstairs to see Higginson, carrying the two day lilies, and says, ‘These are my introduction’ in a breathy voice, and it was the most amazing sort of ballet imaginable. You know. The white dress . . .”

  Higginson served as “a mirror, a conduit, a messenger—a publicist. Somehow she identifies both [her] publicists, Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd. And damned if they don’t pair up and sell her to the world.

  “She performs for both of them. She gives them just the amount they need; she withholds access in just the right way.” She tantalizes Mabel, never reveals herself. “‘You may see me when I’m in my ultimate box, in my coffin. That’s when you’ll see me for the first time, in my box.’”

  She “micromanaged” her own funeral, like another ballet, “with the Irish Catholic men carrying her out through the open barn—and put her in another box, the tomb, another box on top of it. The whole thing was orchestrated beyond belief.”

  Yet I’m not convinced that her final performance was to have a pair of messengers, Mabel and Higginson, entomb her poems in yet another box and publish them. The “p
hosphorescence” of her poems was from a very private glow. She spelled the way she wanted to spell, constructed her poems like hieroglyphics with all the weird minuscules and majuscules of her own hand, until you could no longer tell the difference between them; it was the deepest sort of play.

  My Basket holds—just—Firmaments—

  Those—dangle easy—on my arm,

  But smaller bundles—Cram.[Fr358]

  She had no time for those “smaller bundles” of recognition and career. It’s not that she disregarded her own worth as a poet, but she saw that worth in a messianic way.

  The Poets light but Lamps—

  Themselves—go out—

  The Wicks they stimulate

  If vital Light

  Inhere as do the Suns—

  Each Age a Lens

  Disseminating their

  Circumference—[Fr930]

  And she was out “opon Circumference,” where she wasn’t hindered by custodians of culture, and could explore as she pleased. “Finite—to fail, but infinite—to Venture—” [Fr952] She tore language from its roots, created an internal Teletype that is still difficult for us to comprehend. None of us knows her motives. We have to pry, like clumsy surgeons. We attach ourselves to whatever clues we can. And we try to listen, crawl into that hole in time where her creativity began.