A Loaded Gun

by Jerome Charyn

  Allegra wondered if he were prescient, since she did haunt thrift shops. But she refused to take part in his film, didn’t want to be his Ondine. “He was a little too engaged in his disengaged manner.” After that interview, she began receiving letters from him that entertained Allegra and aroused her interest. He’d included her in his “sendings,” his letter-collages, like captured butterflies.

  She looked forward to these letters from Joseph. “My favorite form of entertainment was receiving letters in a mailbox . . . a kind of little square present,” as it was for Dickinson, who fed like a voracious hawk on the letters she received, and thrived on the “pictorial letters” she herself created, her own constructivist art, which Jay Leyda talked about to Cornell.

  “He saw someone,” Allegra recalled in my interview with her, “and created a story about them, put them in a box, a setting. Cornell set little stages. . . . Balanchine did that, too.”

  “Maybe he was another box maker,” I said.

  Allegra wrinkled her nose. “The stage was his box.”

  I wondered if it was a form of entrapment, if Balanchine collected butterflies, like Nabokov (and Cornell), and put his human butterflies inside a box. But Allegra didn’t agree. “Mr. B. saw something in you, put you in an ethereal atmosphere,” as if he were looking for some ideal woman.

  Balanchine, she said, “could fall in love with the drop of a leotard,” and so could Cornell, who was also a master choreographer in his own way. And in 1969, he saw his favorite living ballerina again. She was in an odd state at the time. “I’d had an operation to get rid of stretch marks on my stomach, so I could do Bugaku again [in her white-flowered bikini bottom]. But they cut too much, and I had nerve damage.” And thus she couldn’t dance. So she went out to Utopia Parkway as an invalid, like Cornell’s brother. He asked her to bring a book of erotic art and a mocha cake, as if she were about to plunge through the looking glass with an androgynous, grown-up Alice who loved fées and had a sweet tooth.

  “He was very gentle . . . he’d stopped making boxes after his brother died. It was hot in his garden so I made a paper hat,” her own piece of constructivist art. The house was in a great mess, but his cellar workshop had its own internal order. He showed her box after box.

  He did quite a few collages for Allegra after that visit. And when he fell ill with prostate cancer in 1972, he wrote her letters from the hospital. “One I ripped up—it was too sexual [about his nurse]. I don’t think he wanted that to exist.”

  And then she ruminated about her own career. She’s probably the one Prima on the planet who had three children in her twenties and still managed to dance for Balanchine. “I loved being pregnant,” she said, almost as if she were defying Mr. B. and his own mercurial laws as a dancing master. “I was married to a madman, a drug addict [photographer Bert Stern]. And I wasn’t the most stable person.”

  But I wondered if some of the power she had as a ballerina had come from that same instability. “The way Mr. B. communicated with me was almost the way a human relates to wildlife. Some people are good with untamed animals. They don’t startle the creatures,” Kent declared in her autobiography. She intuited her own raw grip over the audience when she wrote, “Some excellent technicians were so used to being perfect that they didn’t astonish themselves. They might astonish the audience, but it wasn’t quite the presentation of the unknown.”

  And I realized how much she resembled Dickinson, who also sought to present the unknown.

  He fumbles at your Soul

  As players at the Keys

  Before they drop full Music on—

  He stuns you by degrees—[Fr477A]

  Dickinson may be addressing the Prince of Death here, but she’s also talking about the nature of her art, the “One—imperial—Thunderbolt—/That scalps your naked Soul—” And Allegra danced with the same imperial fire. She’s brutally shy, frightened of people, she says, and so was Dickinson, who fled from strangers. Their art, like Cornell’s, leaps into the unknown.

  SIX

  Phantom Lady

  1

  IT WAS A RUDE PROCESS THAT FRACTURED the face, revealed your mirror image, so that your cheeks were reversed on the silvered copper plate, and your left eye was where your right eye ought to be—the daguerreotype, invented by some French lunatic in 1839. And still Emily sat for her Mold as she called the making of the image. Emerson had called it a kind of rigor mortis when he was daguerreotyped in 1841, keeping “every finger in place with such energy that your hands became clenched for fight or despair, and in your resolution to keep your face still, did you feel every muscle becoming every moment more rigid, the brows contracted into a Tartarean frown, and the eyes fixed in a fit, in madness, or in death?”

  She wasn’t enthralled by the tinted ghostly double that stared back at her from the copper plate, and neither was anyone else among the Dickinsons. “It was too solemn, too heavy. It had none of the play of light and shade in Emily’s face,” the future poet’s brother and sister believed. “To capture the flow of movement and grace in a single photograph of the dance” [would be no less impossible] “than it was to produce by any means then known a satisfactory likeness of Emily Dickinson,” according to Millicent Todd Bingham. Dickinson posed for the daguerreotype in 1847; she was sixteen years old, an adolescent with a long neck and beautiful long hands. She looks serious and slightly cockeyed, and reminds me of Emmeline Grangerford, the graveyard poet in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. “The young woman in the picture had a kind of a nice sweet face, but there were so many arms it made her look spidery, seemed to me,” Huck tells us in his own sympathetic and bemused portrait of Emmeline.

  Dickinson has no extra arms in the daguerreotype, but she does have a spidery design in her dark cotton dress and her ribbon bracelets and the dark ribbon around her neck. We can imagine how uncomfortable she must have been before this “Daguerrian Artist,” whoever he was. Polly Longsworth and most other critics believe he was Otis H. Cooley, who had his own studio in Springfield, Massachusetts, from 1844 to 1855, whereas Millicent Todd Bingham informed her loyal readers in Emily Dickinson’s Home (1955) that the daguerreotype had been taken by some unremembered wisp of an itinerant photographer who visited Mount Holyoke near the end of 1847 and photographed as many seminarians as he could. But Dickinson declined his overtures—possibly. “With Dickinson the story is never finished,” writes Polly Longsworth.

  And Mary Elizabeth Kromer Bernhard, in “Lost and Found: Emily Dickinson’s Unknown Daguerreotypist,” has another story to tell. She’s convinced that the two Emilys—the poet and her mother—sat for William C. North, “Daguerrian Artist,” at Amherst House sometime between December 1846 and March 1847. Advertising in the Hampshire and Franklin Express, North noted that he had taken rooms at the Amherst House for the sole purpose of executing “Daguerreotype Miniatures” in his superior and substantial style. “Secure the Shadow ere the substance fades,” he warned his potential clients.

  We might never really know the identity of the phantom photographer who posed Dickinson and prepared the silvered copper plate. But it has become one of the most iconic portraits in American history, even though it was despised by the Dickinsons themselves and was later dismissed as “flat, itinerant work.” The daguerreotype had a subterranean journey through the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth—misplaced by the poet, who denied it had ever existed, it was “found” by Maggie Maher, returned to Vinnie, who had a Boston miniaturist, Laura C. Hills, repaint a “cabinet photograph” of the original daguerreotype, correcting the poet’s astigmatic eye, and giving her a white dress and ruffled collar, so that she was part angel and part circus clown (this is the face we see on the cover of Rebecca Patterson’s book); then, in cavalier fashion, she gave the daguerreotype away and it didn’t surface again until it fell into Millicent’s hands, like some magical quotient.

  And now it’s everywhere, whether it’s fastened to the poet’s mythic white dress and appears as
a giant-size balloon in Being John Malkovich (1999), Spike Jonze’s zany, surreal film that moves with the “spasmodic gait” Colonel Higginson once saw in the volcanic lines of his half-cracked poet and could almost be an elliptical reconstruction of “I started early—took my dog” [Fr656], where we are all taken on some interior voyage, with mermaids swimming at our feet, and where our waking life is never as memorial as our moments inside the mind of Emily Dickinson (or John Malkovich); or her own image is cleaved in two, with Nefertiti on the left and Dickinson on the right, wearing bold red lipstick, on the cover of Camille Paglia’s Sexual Persona (1990), or else we can catch her on dozens of other book jackets in the daguerreotype’s original chaste form; and she’s the first face that appears, in her gussied-up clown’s collar, whenever I light up my Kindle.

  The daguerreotype can also be seen in some kind of pale Technicolor in Topps 2008 American Heritage Baseball Trading Card # 6, as if her image is as much a piece of American folklore as Babe Ruth’s flaring nostrils and Shoeless Joe Jackson’s mystical bat, Black Betsy. Dickinson—and her picture as an adolescent—have become “a cultural palimpsest of our emotions, desires, opinions, and literary histories,” according to scholar Martha Nell Smith, who launched the Dickinson Electronic Archives in 1994. Dickinson’s daguerreotype has entered our world in a way that few images ever have. And, says Polly Longsworth, its tantalizing power “has played a role in shaping the iconography of and critical thinking about the poet,” as it offers us a glimpse into the poet’s almost invisible life. “Her face is as familiar as a mask and holds the mask’s elusive promise that if we knew what she really looked like, underneath it, we could have the key to her enigmatic poetry.”

  There is no such key, as we have all come to learn. But one of the most poignant meditations on the daguerreotype and the doll-like power it has provoked is Joyce Carol Oates’ futuristic tale, “EDickinsonRepliLuxe,” in Wild Nights! (2008), her own brutally etched portraits concerning the last days of Dickinson and four other iconic American writers—Hemingway, Poe, Mark Twain, and Henry James.

  The title of the collection comes from one of Dickinson’s most enigmatic poems.

  Wild Nights—Wild Nights!

  Were I with thee

  Wild Nights should be

  Our luxury!

  Futile—the winds—

  To a Heart in port—

  Done with the Compass—

  Done with the Chart!

  Rowing in Eden—

  Ah—the Sea!

  Might I but moor—tonight—

  In Thee![Fr269]

  Oates, who came late to Dickinson (in her twenties), has turned this “love poem” into a crazy, passionate, and cruel dance with the sirens of love and death. And they’re often the very same sirens. Harold and Madelyn Krim are a loveless couple who live in the suburban village of Golders Green, New York, and have been married for what seems to be nineteen years, yet is only nine. Maddie feels as if she’d never been kissed. Harold’s a tax accountant and she’s a housewife who had once wanted to become a poet. They decide to purchase a pet—not a cat or dog—but a RepliLuxe, a computerized replicant of some fabulous cultural icon. And this quasi-human pet will cost only a fraction of what it would cost to raise a real human child. Maddie has her heart set on a poet, but Sylvia Plath and Robert Frost are not yet in the public domain. And like a sleepwalker she suddenly says, “Emily Dickinson!”

  EDickinsonRepliLuxe has certain restrictions. She’s programmed from age thirty to fifty-five (when Dickinson died). But the Krims, who own all rights to the “Emily” mannequin, can accelerate those last twenty-five years of the poet’s life however they wish. The RepliLuxe is a brilliant distillation of Dickinson, as if her soul had been sucked out and reinstalled in a replicant without intestines or sexual organs or blood. But the Dickinson doll can talk, write poetry, and bake brown bread with molasses. Yet the Krims are deeply disappointed when the mannequin arrives and is unpacked. She looks like a malnourished girl of ten, rather than the brilliant poet of thirty they had paid for. The RepliLuxe is an almost exact model of the 1847 daguerreotype.

  Her eyes were large, dark, and oddly lashless, her skin was ivory-pale, smooth as paper. Her eyebrows were wider than you’d expect, heavier and more defined, like a boy’s . . . . Her dark hair had been severely parted in the center of her head and pulled back flatly and tightly into a knot of a bun, covering most of her unusually small ears like a cap. In a dark cotton dress . . .with an impossibly tiny waist, EDickinsonRepliLuxe more resembled the wizened corpse of a child-nun than a woman-poet of thirty.

  The Krims are woefully disappointed in this mannequin (and they mirror the reaction of some Dickinson devotees to the 1847 daguerreotype, feeling that it offers a very pale glimpse of the future poet and her radiant red hair). Madelyn had raided antique stores to find replicas of the furnishings in the poet’s mythic bedroom on Main Street; she comes up with an authentic sleigh bed of the 1850s that looks like a child’s crib, a milk-glass kerosene lamp, a maple bureau, and an impossibly small writing desk. Madelyn could be Joseph Cornell, assembling a giant-size shadow box that will serve as a kind of prison for Emily, who is forbidden by law to leave the Krimses’ house, since these mannequins might run amuck, and the world could have entire teams of ‘Babe Ruth’ and poetry slams filled with EDickinsonRepliLuxe.

  Madelyn is a bit more sympathetic to her Dickinson doll. “Emily could have no idea where she was, who the Krims were, if she was awake or dreaming or if there was any distinction between wakefulness and dreaming in her transmogrified state.” Curious about the workings of her RepliLuxe, who flutters through the house like a forest animal and scribbles words on scraps of paper, she clicks off activate on her remote control and Emily tumbles into the sleep mode. Madelyn summons up the courage to touch the mannequin, with its papery skin and metallic smell. She’s aroused by Emily, has the urge to kiss her on the lips, and realizes that it’s been a very long time since she’s kissed anyone or anyone has kissed her. Madelyn resists the urge, but she removes one of the scraps of paper from Emily’s pocket and reads the poem written on it, replete with Dickinson’s signature dashes.

  Why am—I—

  Where am—I—

  When am—I—

  And—You?—

  It’s the lament of an amnesiac, or is it? She shows it to Harold, who’s enraged. “It’s some sort of computer printout, words arranged like poetry to tease and to torment.”

  Harold has imprisoned the RepliLuxe but feels like a prisoner in his own house. Meanwhile, the poet begins to wear a white dress “that looked like a bridal gown, smelling of must, mothballs, melancholy.”

  He’s even more enraged, with a deluxe doll haunting his house in her ghostly gown. And one starry midnight, he burgles his way into her bedroom, with its antique hurricane lamp and candles in wooden holders that flare up like firelight. He looms over the doll like a grotesque swaying bear, kisses Emily on the mouth, rips away her nightgown, pawing at her flattened breasts, fumbles between her legs, sees “a shallow indentation where a vagina should have been,” and excited and repelled at the same time by a doll woman without a hint of pubic hair, he slaps Emily, and has to flee this room, “where flames fluttered as in an anteroom of Hell.”

  Later, when Madelyn shyly enters the bedroom, it feels as if a tornado had visited it, and she finds the poet all disheveled. The RepliLuxe begs for her own freedom.

  “Accelerate, Mistress. Lift the wand and—there’s freedom.”

  The accelerate mode on the remote control will push her beyond the doll-like look of the daguerreotype and deeper into the wildness of her poetry.

  The husband comes home from his Manhattan office—Madelyn and Emily are gone. In his study, he discovers two lines written in a strange, slanted hand, in purple ink that has the look of an “antique.”

  Bright Knots of Apparitions

  Salute us, with their wings—

  These two lines are from another of Dickinson’s
enigmatic poems, this one about ghosts who are far more vivid than we are.

  Of nearness to her Sundered Things

  The Soul has special times . . .

  The Shapes we buried, dwell about,

  Familiar, in the Rooms . . .

  The Grave yields back her Robberies—

  The Years, our pilfered Things—

  Bright Knots of Apparitions

  Salute us, with their wings—[Fr337]

  The dead welcome the living, as Helen Vendler reminds us, “as if we were the ones who had perished. . . . The ghosts, like a corps de ballet, move in and out of their ‘Knots’” . . . and perform for us, while they pity us, since they are the mourners and we are the mourned.

  Oates’ tale is as puzzling and apocalyptic as some of Dickinson’s best poems; no one is spared— not the reader, not the author and her characters, not the 1847 daguerreotype, not Dickinson and all her hagiographers and devotees (including myself), and not our modern culture, with its desire to rouse the dead and make us immortal with one gadget after the other. It’s the poems that survive in EDickinsonRepliLuxe; they are the “Bright Knots of Apparitions” that continually haunt our heads. And Oates has fashioned a brutal tale about the mystery that surrounds the poet and the one image we have of her; she’s become a doll in a culture that worships dolls. And if “EDickinsonRepliLuxe” represents the way popular culture has come to read the poet and all the apocryphal tales about her—the consumptive adolescent who morphs into a wraith in a white dress—then this doll with flat breasts and a metallic smell is the monster we have made of Emily Dickinson.