Nor would I be a Poet—
It’s finer—Own the Ear—
Enamored—impotent—content—
The License to revere,
A privilege so awful
What would the Dower be,
Had I the Art to stun myself
With Bolts—of Melody![Fr348]
This is Dickinson’s portrait of the artist—in the midst of a disappearing act. I don’t believe the poem is about painters, musicians, and poets, but concerns itself with the primacy—or “celestial—stir”—of image and sound. The speaker-poet does wonder how her fingers might feel had she that “bright impossibility” to paint a picture, and it evokes a “sumptuous—Despair.”
And she doesn’t want to be a Cornet, but would rather ride softly to the Ceilings with the sound, into “Villages of Ether,” while clothed as a Balloon, moored by some phantom metal string.
In the third stanza, Dickinson denies her own identity. She’d rather not be a Poet, but the poet’s instrument—her Ear—with all its contradictions and sweet torment: “impotent,” because the Ear cannot create, but has “the License to revere”; and the speaker wonders what her “Dower”—or divine reward would be:
Had I the Art to stun myself
With Bolts—of Melody!
Dickinson is teasing herself, of course, wearing yet another mask. She understood her own genius and the “sumptuous—Despair” of song.
“I would not paint a picture” is still a puzzle within a puzzle. A lot more than whimsy is at stake. If, as I believe, she was her own essential audience, then that Balloon in the Ether is more than a fanciful ride—balloons mattered to Emily Dickinson, as poet Susan Snively suggests: “balloons embody her imagination’s pilgrimages of discovery”—her means of travel. “Vehicles of beauty and danger—like poetry itself . . . balloons involve the dynamic pull of opposites: hope and disgrace, life and death, exultation and despair, renewal and destruction,” and the very breath of language, its rise and fall.
The poem itself is a long balloon ride through the Ether of her own intellect; she’d rather sail on the balloon of language, pelted by the brain’s own black mud and wind, and be the instrument of song, with a Metal lip, than be mangled and swallowed up in the persona of a poet.
3
THAT LEAVES MARGARET MAHER. And we shouldn’t take her for granted. “Surely,” says Aífe Murray, “Emily intuited that her maid would resist the order to burn her poems.” I’m not convinced. Lavinia burnt all the letters, as she had been told by her sister. But Margaret wasn’t a Dickinson. She was a maid, without a single right. This is quite apparent in the poet’s letter to her Norcross cousins in 1873:
Austin went this morning, after a happy egg and toast provided by Maggie, whom he promised to leave his sole heir.[Letter 394, September 1873]
Austin could promise Margaret half the world, and wind and rain, as any master might amuse himself with a servant—he left her nothing at all. The poet left her nothing, though she had little to leave, and Vinnie also left her nothing. Maids were always visibly invisible, no matter how valuable they were. She might have been the poet’s “muse, lookout, and beckoner,” as Murray insists, but we still aren’t sure how her last name was pronounced. It couldn’t have mattered much to the Dickinsons, since she was their Maggie.
And if she did salvage the poems, rescue them from oblivion, it might not have been as a favor to her dead mistress. She wasn’t tinkering with history. She returned the poems to her mistress’s drawer, and let her other mistress decide—“Miss Vinnia.” She also saved the daguerreotype we have of the poet—taken at sixteen—that no one in the family ever liked, not even the poet herself, who would deny to Higginson that she had ever had her portrait taken. Father, she said, “has Molds of all the rest—but has no Mold of me” [Letter 268, July 1862], and then proceeded to paint her own portrait, declaring that she was small, “like the Wren,” and had eyes “like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves—Would this do just as well?” It was perhaps her most artful bit of seduction.
The daguerreotype should have disappeared. But Margaret had a fondness for the picture, and wanted a memento of her mistress. It became known as “Maggie’s daguerreotype.” And once the poet was resurrected, brought back from the dead, her publishers, Roberts Brothers, craved a portrait of their rising star. Vinnie and Austin objected to the daguerreotype, considered it too solemn. Vinnie told Roberts Brothers that the daguerreotype did not represent her sister’s “most interesting & most startling face.” She had a Boston miniaturist create a “bowdlerized” version of the daguerreotype—the poet suddenly had curls and a high, ruffled collar; her image was altered again and again after Vinnie’s death, the curls washed with color, until Emily Dickinson looked like a cross-eyed Scarlett O’Hara. The original daguerreotype was found again in 1945, as if it had risen right out of Vinnie’s grave; the poet’s sister, it seems, had swiped the silvered copper plate back from Margaret Maher, then palmed it off on a distant cousin, who had kept it “in storage” for over fifty years and turned it over to Mabel Todd’s daughter, Millicent.
But behind this whole farrago stands Margaret Maher, without whom we’d never have had the poems or the silvered plate. While she was with the Dickinsons, she liked to sign her letters “your unworth but true Maggie Maher.” As Aífe Murray tells us, “unworth” was just a mask of meekness that servants often had to wear—a pretense for their masters. Margaret wasn’t meek at all. But she had to pick her way “with aplomb” over her mistress’s land mines. As Higginson realized after one hour, it was impossible to live around the poet. He had to flee Amherst as fast he could. But Margaret remained with Dickinson during the last seventeen years of her life. The poet was “making a loaf of cake with Maggie,” on June 14, 1884, when she fainted for the first time—it might have been a small stroke. [Letter 907, to Fanny and Loo, early August 1884] She kept to her bed much of the time after that. “The Dyings have been too deep for me,” she wrote that autumn. [Letter 939] Her mother, an invalid for years, had died in 1882. The Reverend Charles Wadsworth, whom many scholars still consider the most likely candidate for her “Master Letters,” also died in 1882. Gib, her favorite nephew, fell ill with typhoid fever in the fall of 1883. He was eight years old and might have sipped some water from a “poisoned” well; accompanied by Maggie, Dickinson went across the lawn for the first time in years to visit the dying boy, but the odor of carbolic acid in the house sickened her, and she had to return to her bedroom, more feeble than ever.
A year later, Judge Lord died. We cannot choreograph their romance; we have only the drafts of certain letters that may never have been sent. But that romance was real enough to upset the judge’s niece, Abby Farley, who might have lost her inheritance if Lord had ever married the poet. “Little hussy,” she said years later of the poet. “She was crazy about men. Even tried to get Judge Lord. Insane too.”
Abby Farley’s hostile image of the poet wasn’t unique. Dickinson had become “the most dangerous type of alien—a poet,” according to Jay Leyda. The town thrived on any “revelation” about her—“madness was one of the gentler accusations.” Hence, she and Maggie were both exiles of a sort in Amherst: the Irish maid and that eccentric spinster in white who was capable of any folly. It was Margaret who must have helped her when she was much too weak to wash, Margaret who might have sung Irish lullabies to her. We can feel the poet’s affection when Maggie herself fell ill with typhoid fever in 1882, and had to “abandon” both Dickinson sisters and stay with her own sister and brother-in-law. The poet played on that abandonment in a letter to Maggie:
The missing Maggie is much mourned, and I am going out for “black” to the nearest store.
All are very naughty, and I am naughtiest of all.
The pussies dine on sherry now, and humming-bird cutlets . . .
What shall I send my weary Maggie? Pillows or fresh brooks?
Her grieved Mistress.
[Letter 771, October 1882]
That’s the one and only letter we have from Dickinson to Margaret Maher. And we’re lucky to have it. How often was Margaret ill with typhoid, and how often was she away from the house? But we have nothing in return from Margaret—not a word about her mistress. We know that she hated Vinnie’s cats. When she first arrived at the Dickinson house, she wrote to her former mistress:
. . . one grate trouble that I have not half enough of work so that I must play with the cats to Plase Miss Vinny you know how I love cats . . .
But what did she really think of the poet? Did they plot together to ruin Vinnie’s empire of cats? Did they laugh in the kitchen? “To see is perhaps never quite the sorcery that it is to surmise,” Dickinson wrote in 1878. [Letter 565] Yet it’s hard to surmise Margaret’s untold story, even after Aífe Murray describes her as the poet’s muse. I can’t find much of Margaret’s lilt in Dickinson’s moosic—her lightning came from another source. But Margaret must have loved that lightning in her own way, guarded it, even if she hadn’t read a line. We’ll never know how she grieved for her mistress. But I can still imagine her in the sunlight, accompanying the bier carried by the six Irish workmen to the grave site. “. . . Maggie is getting corpulent,” Dickinson wrote to her Norcross cousins in 1881. [Letter 727] Corpulent Maggie was forty-five at the time of the funeral; there’s no record of her ever marrying or “keeping company” with a man. We know what she looked like—before she was corpulent; we have a photo of her from the early 1870s, taken with her one-armed brother-in-law and his own daughter, who also worked for the Dickinsons, and was known as “Little Maggie.”
Margaret looks into the camera with her dark eyes; her smile is half a frown, as if she had a much stronger will than the photographer; she’s wearing a white scarf and a silk three-piece dress; the hand she has on Tom Kelley’s shoulder is small and delicate. Her chin is very strong. She’s not a maid who could have been trifled with. And I wonder how she mourned her mistress. Was it with a brooding Irish eye?
We do have at least one record of their conversation. In 1880, two and a half years after Sam Bowles had died, Dickinson wrote to his son, “Samuel Bowles the younger”:
—A servant who had been with us a long time and had often opened the door for him[Sam Bowles], asked me how to spell “Genius,” yesterday—I told her and she said no more—Today, she asked me what “Genius” meant? I told her none had known—
She said she read in a Catholic Paper that Mr. Bowles was “the Genius of Hampshire”[Hampshire County], and thought it might be that past Gentleman—[Letter 651]
There’s more than a touch of snobbery as the poet trumpets Sam Bowles at Margaret’s expense. She’s back in the world of patricians, where her maid is left out. But we can forgive her as we understand the poignancy of Margaret’s remarks. She must have known that her mistress was also a “Genius,” even if she couldn’t spell the word. And it made her fiercely protective and proud. I like to think she would have cherished those seventeen years, even if the poems had never been removed from her trunk and Dickinson remained one more undiscovered poet, as invisible as Margaret herself.
FIVE
Ballerinas in a Box
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THOSE FORMIDABLE MALE POETS and critics—Conrad Aiken, Yvor Winters, Robert Frost, R. P. Blackmur, Archibald MacLeish, and John Crowe Ransom—who rediscovered Dickinson and rescued her in the first half of the twentieth century were always a bit condescending about the nature of her art, as if she were that strange cat who’d come out of a New England closet with her slant rhymes. “Most of us,” MacLeish admitted, “are half in love with this dead girl we all call by her first name.” Her genius, Aiken said, was as erratic as it was brilliant, and the reader had to adjust himself to that “spinsterly angularity” of the poet. Winters felt caught within the tangle of her poems, where beautiful lines were “wasted in the desert of her crudities. . . . In this respect, she differs from Melville, whose taste was rich and cultivated.”
Shrewd enough to grasp that they were in the presence of a master, they still couldn’t welcome her into their private pantheon of male poets, though not a single one of them, including Robert Frost, had her demonic powers and monstrous wit, nor would they haunt our new century the way she has done. She would remain for them the village spinster and virginal poetess who suffered through an unrequited romance with some mysterious male suitor.
Only Allen Tate, who with his fellow southerner, John Crowe Ransom, belonged to the Fugitives, a gang of agrarian poets that despised the avaricious heart of modern America, understood her worth as a poet. In a seminal essay on Dickinson that first appeared in 1932, Tate struck at the prejudice of male readers who were convinced that “no virgin can know enough to write poetry.” Her powers came with a certain mystery. “We shall never learn where she got that rich quality of mind.” But that didn’t seem to bother Allen Tate. Dickinson, “a dominating spinster whose very sweetness must have been formidable,” didn’t have to travel much farther than her upstairs room at the Homestead. “Her life was one of the richest and deepest ever lived on this continent.”
Still, most critics were completely unprepared when Rebecca Patterson, an obscure college instructor at the University of North Carolina, published The Riddle of Emily Dickinson (1951), a book that redefined this same village spinster as a sexual outlaw who had a romance with another woman, Kate Scott. Patterson was convinced that without Katie, Dickinson might never have become a poet. The book was mocked and reviled by most male critics. George Whicher, the preeminent Dickinson scholar of his time, called it “probably the worst book on Emily Dickinson yet written, and that is saying a good deal.”
Kate Scott Turner Anthon—she was widowed twice—was born on March 12, 1831, in Cooperstown, New York, the lair of novelist James Fenimore Cooper, whose father had founded the tiny village in 1786 on one of his own enormous tracts of land. Three months younger than Susan Gilbert and Emily, Kate was sent to Utica Female Academy when she was seventeen—a tall, voluptuous beauty with dark hair and dark eyes. It was hard for men and women to resist “Condor Kate,” as Emily would discover ten years later. But her history with Kate really began at this female academy, where Susan Gilbert had also been sent and was the first to feel Kate’s seductive twitch. Assigned as a new monitor at the academy, Sue stopped at Kate’s door as part of her duties, and without warning, Kate leapt out and kissed her on the cheek. Kate never recovered from that kiss:
Dear, dear Sue, I have loved you always, since the first night you were “monitoress.” And I hardly knew you, but kissed your dear face simply because I could not help it! Your sweet eyes looked into mine, and I could never forget them!
The two young women remained friends, but Sue was a bit of a rag doll, and she couldn’t reconnect with Kate on her own terms until after she married Austin and became mistress of the Evergreens. In 1855, Kate had married Campbell Turner of Cooperstown, a young medical doctor, sick with consumption, who died in 1857—Kate had been more nurse to him than wife, and after Campbell’s death, she began calling herself Kate Scott again.
This is how Patterson describes Kate’s first visit to the Evergreens:
On a day of early March, 1859, a tall young woman, swathed in long furs, her dark hair crowned by a fashionable black hat, her dark eyes brilliant behind a widow’s black veil, stepped down from Austin’s sleigh to the snowy driveway of the Austin Dickinson house.
She would stun both households, the Homestead and the Evergreens, and there’s little doubt that Sam Bowles, who was visiting Austin and Sue at the time, fell in love with “Mrs. Kate.” He kept asking about the tall goddess dressed in black who descended upon this puritanical town like some nineteenth-century femme fatale. But Kate wasn’t really interested in Mr. Sam. A certain freckle-faced poet appealed to her much more in Patterson’s novelistic rendering of Emily Dickinson. “Upon the dead, and somewhat desolate, calm of Emily’s twenty-ninth year, this lonely, emotional young widow broke with the destructiveness and terrible beauty of a
spring storm. For years afterwards Emily Dickinson was occupied in gathering up the wreckage of her life.”
And Patterson maps the progress of their romance. They met in March (actually, it was a couple of months before that), were immediately drawn to each other, and the young widow would return to Amherst at least four times in the next two years and bewitch the poet’s mind and imagination. Dickinson’s own letters reveal this intoxication. In a letter to Kate near the end of 1859, she writes:
Katie—
Last year at this time[before she met Kate at the Evergreens] I did not miss you, but positions shifted, until I hold your black in strong hallowed remembrance. . . . I am pleasantly located in the deep sea, but love will row you out if her hands are strong, and don’t wait till I land, for I’m going ashore on the other side—[Letter 209]
And in 1860, suffering through a spell without Kate, she conjures up Kate’s image in its own phantom niche. “I touch your hand—my cheek your cheek—I stroke your vanished hair, Why did you enter, sister, since you must depart? Had not its heart been torn enough but you must send your shred? Oh! our Condor Kate! Come from your crags again!” [Letter 222]
Cooperstown was far more sophisticated and sensual than a town of farmers, students, and hell-fire preachers, where young men and women had to dance or play cards and read novels in secret, and Katie would become the poet’s first—and last—genuinely sinful pleasure, according to Rebecca Patterson. “Having spent her entire capital on one venture, and suffered bankruptcy, she dared not try again.” Condor Kate flew from Emily and Amherst in 1861; she sailed off to Europe three years later, lived among the blue skies and waters of Barrett Browning’s beloved Italy, and in 1866 Kate married a rich lawyer and classical scholar, John Anthon, two years younger than she herself, and moved to Manhattan, where she immediately fell out of love with the metropolis.
Meanwhile, Emily mourned Kate, shrouded herself in white, and hovered close to insanity. Kate was the hulking condorlike shadow that looms behind every poem. Hence, we have the riddle of Emily Dickinson, who arrived at her craft by sheer accident, and was “stirred to poetry by a chance encounter”—with Kate. During one of her visits to Amherst in 1860, Kate talked to Emily about Aurora Leigh, Barrett Browning, and their own escape to the blue Italian seas, where they could defy the Calvinist codes of Amherst and live like outlaws, away from New England’s fierce inquisition. And out of this dreamlike, impossible longing for Italy grew the key poem that would unmask Dickinson’s desires, after Kate had abandoned her.
A Loaded Gun Page 10