A Loaded Gun

by Jerome Charyn

  That is the Flood subject. I was told that the Bank was the safest place for a Finless Mind.[Letter 319]

  Grace Smith might have accompanied Carlo and his mistress across Amherst more than once, but I suspect she told readers of the Commercial Advertiser what they wanted to hear about a woman who took a carriage ride to eternity in one of her poems. I doubt Dickinson would ever have talked about the “Flood subject,” even to a little girl.

  Yet it was Jay Leyda who unearthed this bit of apocrypha, and other tales about Emily Dickinson and her prodigious dog—by recapturing Dickinson’s days and hours, he was quick to understand the dog’s worth. It seems she was mesmerized by Maj. E. B. Hunt, a Civil War hero and husband of Helen Fiske Hunt, who had first met Dickinson when both were schoolchildren and would become a celebrated poet and novelist after Major Hunt was killed in an accident at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Dickinson was reintroduced to Helen Hunt and the major at one of her father’s receptions for Amherst College, sometime in the 1860s.

  Major Hunt interested her more than any man she ever saw. She remembered two things he said—that her great dog “understood gravitation” & when he said he should come again “in a year. If I say a shorter time it will be longer.”

  Most Dickinson scholars have paid scant attention to Carlo, even though that big brown dog haunts her letters and her poems. Carlo isn’t even listed in the index of Cynthia Griffin Wolff’s six-hundred-page biography. And John Cody, who spends page after page analyzing Dickinson’s psychic dilemma as a love-starved woman and poet, mentions him only once. “Carlo seems to have accompanied Emily on all her rambles, and it is clear that she became fond of him.” But he finds no connection at all between Carlo and the poet’s “inner life.”

  I suspect that Carlo occupied more psychic and physical space than any other creature; she couldn’t have thrived without him. With all her aristocratic mien, she was little more than an expensive chattel who couldn’t even buy her own writing paper and pens without her father’s funds. She and Vinnie were kept on an invisible leash and were the real pets of the family, not Carlo. That brown dog was Dickinson’s one and only possession . . . if we’re willing to admit that anyone can ever “own” a dog. Not according to Adam Gopnik, who got a caramel-colored Havanese named Butterscotch for his daughter and wrote about this experience in The New Yorker: “Dog Story: How Did the Dog Become Our Master?”

  Gopnik ventures back into ancient history. “Dogs began as allies, not pets, and friends, not dependents.” Prehistoric man didn’t steal cubs from wolf packs and tame them—wolves will always return to the wild. But certain breeds of wolves began to collect around human garbage dumps, and these “tamer, man-friendly wolves produced more cubs than their wilder, man-hating cousins.” Such “willing wolves” morphed into dogs who became our hunting companions and the playmates of our children. For Gopnik, dogs chose us and chose to become dogs. He deconstructs the whole man-dog relationship. The best of dogs are neither kind nor heroic. “The dog will bark at a burglar; but the dog will also bark at a shirt.”

  I wonder if Gopnik’s Ur-dog really describes Carlo. He doesn’t believe in dogs of mythic proportion. But it’s hard to imagine Carlo in any other way. Perhaps it’s because of Carlo’s prodigious size, and the fact that the Newfoundland was the archetypical dog of the nineteenth century, great swimmers who were known to rescue men from the sea with a wide flick of their webbed paws. Lord Byron had a Newfoundland called Boatswain. The most notorious poet of his time, he swam the Hellespont despite his “clubfoot,” had love affairs with married women, Greek boys, and his own half sister, Augusta Leigh, and was adored and reviled by the men and women of New England—there had never been a New Englander remotely like him. Byron’s dog died of rabies in 1808, and Byron wanted to be buried in the same tomb with Boatswain; the dog was five years old. Boatswain’s anniversary is still celebrated more than two hundred years after his death.

  There was also a Newfoundland in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, a novel Dickinson adored. “A lion-like creature with long hair and a huge head . . . with strange pretercanine eyes,” the dog, whose name is Pilot, belongs to Jane’s own moody master, Edward Rochester. She’s a governess at Rochester’s mansion on the Yorkshire moors, while Rochester’s mad wife lives in the attic—Jane has come to a haunted house. Still, Pilot remains loyal to Rochester and loyal to her. Yet Dickinson named her own Newfoundland after another dog in the novel—old Carlo, a pointer who belongs to St. John Rivers, a stern, unsmiling missionary—“cold as an iceberg”—who doesn’t love Jane but wants to marry her and make her his missionary wife.

  Dickinson read the novel in 1849, and her dog must have arrived in the late autumn or early winter of that year. Vinnie was away at school in Ipswich, Austin attended Amherst College and caroused with his friends and classmates, and Emily felt abandoned. “I am very puny alone,” she confessed to a friend. [Letter 32, early 1850?] And her father gave her the dog to console her and watch after her while he was away. The first mention of Carlo was in a mock Valentine sent to George Gould, one of Austin’s classmates; there is some speculation that Gould was in love with Emily but was rejected by her father as a possible suitor.

  Sir, I desire an interview; meet me at sunrise, or sunset, or the new moon—the place is immaterial. . . . Don’t be afraid of it, sir, it won’t bite. If it was my Carlo now! The Dog is the noblest work of Art, sir. I may say the noblest—his mistress’s rights he doth defend—although it bring him to his end . . .[Letter 34, February 1850]

  Carlo must have been more than a puppy by this time, though an enormous puppy could have defended Dickinson’s “rights.” But it’s still puzzling why she named her dog after St. John River’s pointer rather than Rochester’s noble Newfoundland. Perhaps Rivers reminded Dickinson of her father in his cold, relentless manner. She was the consummate puzzle master, as Jay Leyda reminds us. And a loveless missionary and his pointer might have appealed to her in some perverse way.

  What we do know is that the tiny, freckled woman and her big brown dog soon became a fixture in Amherst. She would be out exploring with her lantern and Carlo. Her schooling was over. She’d become close to Sue. Her father, Sue, and Vinnie would profess their faith and join the First Church that same year—1850. Her mother had professed her faith nineteen years earlier, in 1831, when Emily was six months old. And much of her sadness had come from the fear that she would not meet her own family in heaven. Austin would also join the Church, but Emily was the one who remained adamant all her life. She would keep her own Sabbath within her mind, locking the doors of her “election,” as she hovered somewhere between God and the Devil. She herself was a fallen angel. But she had few antecedents as a writer, almost none. And it’s not clear when she turned from being the village rhymester without a real vocation—like a hundred other poets in a hundred other villages—and grew into that aberration we know as Emily Dickinson. It never should have happened. Every idiot has her lexicon, her own book of words. Dickinson’s experiences weren’t richer or any more vital than those of other aristocratic New England daughters.

  And it was almost impossible for a woman to declare herself, secretly or not, as a writer. As Susan Sontag reminds us almost a century and a half after Dickinson’s own struggles, silence had become the female writer’s bitter reward. “Silent not merely for want of encouragement. Silent because of the way that women are defined and therefore, commonly, define themselves. For the obligation to be physically attractive and patient and nurturing and docile and sensitive and deferential to fathers (to brothers, to husbands) contradicts and must collide with the egocentricity and aggressiveness and the indifference to self that a large creative gift requires in order to flourish.”

  Sontag offers up the example of Alice James, the brilliant sister of Henry and William, who fell into a deep depression at nineteen, dreamt of suicide, traveled abroad, and lived most of her life in bed, suffering from the “all too common reality of a woman who does not know what to do w
ith her genius, her originality, her aggressiveness, and therefore becomes a career invalid.” Cody sees Dickinson as much the same “career invalid,” who could have occupied Alice James’ bed, and who turned her own bedroom into a hermitage—and a mausoleum. And a host of other scholars agree with him. Sewall himself says that her unwillingness to leave her father’s house can be regarded “as an unfortunate eccentricity or as a symptom of profound psychic fear.” But suppose it was neither of the above. What choice did she really have? She was a birdlike woman with red hair who had to summon up her own powers. Critics talk of her breakdowns but can never point to a single one.

  Brenda Wineapple, in White Heat, her narrative about the complicated and curious ballet between Higginson and his half-cracked poetess, seems to understand that most of Dickinson’s tentative dance steps were strategies of survival and maneuvers of a woman at war—“her backbone made of steel, she pretended fragility.” Dickinson, Wineapple says, “seems to exist outside of time, untouched by it. And that’s unnerving. No wonder we make up stories about her: about her lovers, if any, or why she turned her back on ordinary life . . .”

  Where else did Dickinson have to go? She didn’t have a novelist and a philosopher in her family, the way Alice James did. Her own father, brother, and sister were quite ordinary and wouldn’t be remembered for five minutes if they hadn’t been related to the Belle of Amherst—whatever fame they have comes from her twists and turns. Sue might have had some of Emily’s intellect, but she would grow much more conventional after her marriage. She would have buried Dickinson’s poems in a communal grave if she’d had her wish. She didn’t want to see them published. She’d rather have printed them privately. As she wrote to Higginson on December 23, 1890:

  I sometimes shudder when I think of the world reading her thoughts minted in heartbroken convictions. In her own words (after all the intoxicating fascination of creation) she as deeply realized that for her, as for all of us women not fame but “Love and home and certainty are best.” I find myself always saying “poor Emily.”

  Poor Emily indeed.

  We don’t have a whole lot of clues about where her brilliance came from. She may have been writing poems since she was fourteen, but the earliest ones don’t reveal very much. It’s only in her love letters to Sue that we feel a kind of genius; there’s a sudden thrust in her language, an urgency that’s shaped and defined—and filled with a kind of sexual somnambulism as Dickinson sees herself and Sue being yielded up to some union with a man.

  . . . how it will take us one day, and make us all it’s own, and we shall not run away from it, but lie still and be happy![Letter 93, early June 1852]

  Dickinson can bear it as long as Sue is also sacrificed to the man of noon and “scorched” by him. But she cannot bear it when Sue is out of reach—“your absence insanes me so—” [Letter 107, March 12, 1853] And when she discovers that Sue is really out of reach, she loses all control—walks the streets alone at night—as her language gathers more and more control, and she will now “appear like an embarrassed Peacock, quite unused to its plumes.” [Letter 177, late January 1855]

  But 1855 will be a fateful year. She has to leave her haven over the cemetery—on North Pleasant Street—and move back to her father’s house with all the other Dickinsons, while Edward has a ducal manor—the Evergreens—built for Austin and Sue, so he can bind them to him with an invisible cord. None of the Dickinsons will ever leave him now, not his useless daughters, nor his son, whom he has made a partner in his law firm.

  We have fewer letters from Emily in 1856—only five or six—and none at all in 1857. Some scholars, including Cody, see this as evidence of a breakdown—a kind of psychic paralysis over Sue’s marriage to Austin and final abandonment of her. But I don’t see this at all. Sue has become one more Phantom in her box of Phantoms, no matter how often Emily visits the Evergreens with her lantern and her dog.

  Something else happened in 1857. Emily was different—she knew that, had a much quicker wit than the men and women around her, and a rage she couldn’t reveal. She was a Gnome with red hair who wanted to be Bearded, like a man. Why should she become another man’s cow, and carry his children? She wanted to father her own progeny—and she did. And it was her mountain of a dog who gave her a bit of courage. Dogs, as Adam Gopnik tells us, “are the only creatures that have learned to gaze directly at people as people gaze at one another, and their connection with us is an essential and enduring one.”

  She must have gazed into Carlo’s eyes and seen a mirror of her own wants—Carlo was her one ally, clever and dumb at the same time. He didn’t have strings of language in his skull, but he had something better: He could listen to her recite. Aífe Murray believes that from the moment Carlo appeared in her life, she was much more creative, and that “tramping abroad with her dog might have shown this aspiring writer how walking can loosen the subconscious and become a way to compose.”

  Language must have come to her in its own enigmatic flash, or we couldn’t have that “Whip lash” of images. She speaks of her creativity, I think, and how it controls her, when she writes:

  I felt a Cleaving in my Mind—

  As if my Brain had split—

  I tried to match it—Seam by Seam—

  But could not make them fit—

  The thought behind, I strove to join

  Unto the thought before—

  But Sequence ravelled out of Sound—

  Like Balls—opon a Floor—[Fr867B]

  Her genius had little to do with logic and order, but with Sequence—the cohesion and coherence of a poem—ravelling out of Sound, twisting and tearing asunder, beyond the reach of Sound, she says, “Like Balls—opon a Floor.” But are these balls of yarn that unwind and ravel out into silence? I’m not convinced of that. Ravel is too strong a word; it feels like a scratch, a rip that we can taste and hear. And those could also be billiard balls that echo without end, as if a poem could ricochet into eternity, Beyond the Dip of Bell—[Fr633]

  She doesn’t give us much room for resolution. Dickinson never did. And that deep silence of 1857 was like going into a dark well. Her genius might always have been there, perhaps even from the first words she spoke, with her Aunt Lavinia, when she was riveted to the thunder and lightning on her voyage to Monson and called it “the fire.” But did she have that aggression Sontag talks about, that violence to nurse her own creative gifts, the ability to declare herself as a poet? The simplest act of aggression in women was frowned upon, and so she masked herself as the woman-child, whispered like a child, ran from the door when a stranger knocked. But it was part fear, part performance. As she would declare to her cousin Loo: “Odd, that I, who run from so many, cannot brook that one turn from me.” [Letter 245, December 31, 1861]

  She had what she needed: a room of her own, a writing desk, a conservatory for her winter plants and perennials, and a big brown dog. She was akin to the village clown, the eccentric daughter of Squire Dickinson. She confided in no one but Carlo, and Carlo nuzzled her and never talked back.

  2

  YET CARLO REMAINED MOSTLY INVISIBLE in her correspondence—until 1858, when he appears all of a sudden in a letter to Sue, appears in a comic, almost pathetic way.

  Vinnie and I are pretty well. Carlo—comfortable—terrifying man and beast, with renewed activity—is cuffed some—hurled from piazza frequently, when Miss Lavinia’s “flies” need her action elsewhere.[Letter 194, September 26, 1858]

  It’s hard to imagine anyone cuffing Carlo and hurling him off the Dickinson porch, except in some mock fashion, as if Emily’s Newfoundland had become a captive clown, like the poet herself. And now Carlo will appear in other letters, as Emily’s sidekick and alter ego, her voiceless voice, and one of her many masks. On December 10, 1859, she writes to Mrs. Sam Bowles:

  I cannot walk to the distant friends on nights piercing as these, so I put both hands on the window-pane, and try to think how birds fly, and imitate, and fail. . . . I talk of all these things wi
th Carlo, and his eyes grow meaning, and his shaggy feet keep a slower pace.[Letter 212]

  But the tenor shifts in 1862, once she starts her correspondence with Colonel Higginson—these letters are part of her poet’s blood, no matter how she masks herself, and how many plumes she wears. She will send him her poems, play the amateur, the village crank, but what she really wants to talk about is her craft, that subterranean life of hers—and Carlo is part of that life.

  You ask of my Companions. Hills—Sir—and the Sundown—and a Dog—large as myself, that my Father bought me—They are better than Beings—because they know—but do not tell[her secrets]—and the noise in the Pool, at Noon—excels my Piano.[Letter 261, April 25, 1862]

  She tells Higginson an outright lie that August, says she had no “Monarch” in her life, when her father ruled her and all the Dickinsons from the day she was born, kept his wife and Vinnie as aging, grown-up children, and harmed Austin—tethered him—by holding him as an exalted prisoner next door. Austin never crept out from under his father’s shadow, even after his father’s death. And his poet sister’s only escape was to crawl inside her own head and crumble half of Squire Dickinson’s world in her poems, attack God and the Devil, and twist the entire universe into her own “prophetic vision of intergalactic nothingness.” Language itself was a kind of Ice Age for Dickinson, utterly autistic—soundless sounds.

  The colonel asks her why she shuns “Men and Women,” and she answers—“they talk of Hallowed things, aloud—and embarrass my Dog—He and I don’t object to them, if they’ll exist their side. I think Carl[o] would please you—He is dumb, and brave—” [Letter 271, August 1862] Carlo has become a mirror of her wants, a silent medallion. She mentions her dog in almost every letter to Higginson, is eager to have him know how essential Carlo is to her.

  One of her next letters to the colonel is critical—he’s gone off to war without even telling her, and she barks at him—like her “Shaggy Ally,” as she now calls Carlo.