A Loaded Gun

by Jerome Charyn

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  THERE HAVE BEEN OTHER “SIGHTINGS,” of course, discoveries of daguerreotypes that would supposedly revolutionize Dickinson scholarship and offer us a brand-new Emily. Two recent sightings caused quite a stir. One was a 3" by 1¾" photograph purchased at an undisclosed date by Mr. Herman Abromson from a Greenwich Village bookseller; “Emily Dickinson 1860” is scribbled on the back of the photograph. The other is an albumen print of a daguerreotype discovered in 2000 by Professor Philip Gura of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Neither of these prints has any real “provenance,” and after much research, most scholars do not consider them authentic images of the poet. But in some disturbing way, their authenticity doesn’t matter, since the face that stares out at us in both images has the bland, dollish demean of a RepliLuxe. And artist-photographer Nancy Burson (born in 1948) used her own computer-morphing technology to “age” the poet in the 1847 daguerreotype and create her own silver print, Emily Dickinson at age 52 (1995). Nancy Burson’s Age Machine might be a miraculous rendering of the poet in her fifties, but her prunelike look reminds me of the mannequin in Oates’ tale near the end of EDickinsonRepliLuxe’s twenty-five year life span. Yet, as Polly Longsworth tells us, Dickinson’s polar privacy helped create “a vortex of compelling mystery, which, with all the energy of a black hole, draws the public into a quest for her identity.”

  And at a meeting of the Emily Dickinson International Society in Cleveland on August 3, 2012, Martha Nell Smith revealed the existence of a new daguerreotype, possibly of the poet, taken around 1859, where for the first time she doesn’t have that undernourished, wizened look of a replicant, and also for the first time she’s posing with another woman, possibly Kate Scott. Martha Nell Smith makes no extravagant claims, nor does she insist upon any miraculous discovery. “Whether this picture turns out to represent Emily Dickinson or not,” she says, “it has enabled audiences to imagine her as an adult Emily.”

  And this is the critical point. The other resurrections of the poet—Gura’s or Abromson’s or Burson’s computerized metamorphosis—reveal nothing new; they cannot take us into the poet’s “Wild Nights” of creativity; and we cannot glimpse the outlaw who invented her own linguistic logic, who twisted language around like some forlorn female Prometheus (as Susan Howe suggests), who would not melt away and dissolve into the silly conventions of her own time; and most of all, these images tell us nothing about her sexual and poetic powers. But the daguerreotype uncovered by a photography collector at a Springfield junk sale in 1995 does offer us a glimpse of what a mature Emily might have looked like. She defies all our expectations in the daguerreotype, all our stereotypes, all our myths, often perpetrated by Dickinson herself. The poet was, as Rebecca Patterson says in The Riddle of Emily Dickinson, “undeniably plain,” and “suffered morbidly on account of her plainness.” So we have been led to believe. That is how Higginson saw her, and that is the sense we often have of Miss Emily in her own letters.

  She’s the only Kangaroo among the Beauty, as she tells the colonel. She provides her own verbal daguerreotype, enlisting herself as small, like the Wren, etc. This is the Emily we have found comfort in for almost 125 years—the Kangaroo no man could ever want. And that’s why she remained a spinster. Of course, Sue’s daughter, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, talked about Emily’s myriad suitors, but this was one more of Martha’s mangled memories.

  The new daguerreotype, first published in the Guardian, on September 5, 2012, “depicts two women seated side by side.” Both are staring into the camera. The woman at the left has a tight, enigmatic smile; she almost looks like some kind of predator, or at least a woman with a fierce will and a sharpshooter’s Yellow Eye, as we picture her composing “My life had stood a loaded gun” and a hundred other apocalyptic poems. The other woman seems much more vulnerable and severe; her hands are folded upon her lap, like a schoolmarm. She’s dressed in a widow’s black garb. The anonymous collector who has assigned himself a code name—Sam Carlo—believes that the daguerreotype may have been taken by a certain J. C. Spooner, who flourished as a photographer in Springfield at the time.

  The poet is wearing a dress that’s out of fashion, and dates from the 1840s, when she sat for the earlier daguerreotype. But that doesn’t disrupt the authenticity of her portrait in Springfield. Dickinson liked to describe herself as old-fashioned; it was one of the masks she wore when she wanted to avoid seeing someone. “I’m so old fashioned, Darling, that all your friends would stare,” she wrote to a former schoolmate, Abiah Root, declining an invitation to visit. [Letter 166] She often clung to old friends, but could also be reckless in her abandonment of them when they failed to amuse her or provide a decent mirror for her own words. And the old-fashioned dress that the Dickinson figure wears in the new daguerreotype is remarkably similar to a swatch of blue-checked cloth found in the collections at the Emily Dickinson Museum. This in itself is no “provenance.”

  But other evidence has been uncovered since “Sam Carlo” first surmised that the figure on the left might be Emily Dickinson. He concentrated on the other figure in the daguerreotype, and after several years of research into the poet’s life, he settled on Kate Scott, identifying two moles, one more prominent than the other, on her chin in the new daguerreotype and in an earlier portrait of Kate. There was also a question of Emily’s astigmatism. Dr. Susan Pepin, director of neuro-ophthalmology at Dartmouth School of Medicine, who had long been fascinated by the poet’s eye problems, studied the distinct characteristics of the poet’s astigmatic eye in both daguerreotypes and concluded that the woman in the 1859 portrait was the same woman identified in the Dickinson daguerreotype of 1847. But as Dr. Pepin noted, so much in her own report to determine Dickinson’s own peculiar facial asymmetries was limited by image resolution and variation in lighting of the measurements she took, and the idiosyncratic nature of the daguerreotypes themselves. Even with twenty-first-century magical tricks, there may never be a perfect fit. Still, for the first time in over 150 years, we have what may be an image of Dickinson in her own prime as a poet, and with some sexual heat, rather than a recluse and a nun in white, or the RepliLuxe doll that our own mass culture has made of her.

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  EVEN JAY LEYDA, PROBABLY THE MOST enlightened student of Emily Dickinson we’ve ever had, felt that Dickinson’s relation to Kate Scott had been obscured by Rebecca Patterson’s construction of a “fictitious set of sexual circumstances.” But what are we to make of Patterson’s book in light of the 1859 daguerreotype? Emily holding her right arm around Kate (in the daguerreotype’s own mirror image), coveting her, protecting her perhaps from the camera’s prying eye. Whatever Patterson might have told us about Kate as the dark-eyed seductress of Cooperstown, Dickinson is in control here, Dickinson is in delight, and Kate is the widow with a vacant look.

  Perhaps now we can comprehend Sue’s mercurial behavior—her cooling off to Emily—once the widow came to town. Sue was more involved with Kate than she herself might have realized. Androgynous in her own secretive fashion, Sue may have been as much in love with Kate as Dickinson would ever be, though she had married Dickinson’s brother and presided over the Evergreens as a kind of prisoner-queen. The most intense involvement the three women ever had was probably with one another. I suspect Sue never really loved Austin and never cared much for his or any “man’s requirements.” And she couldn’t have felt much joy when she watched Emily and Kate fall in love in her own parlor, as if she had pulled them together and played some willful, unconscious Cupid.

  How will we ever know whether Kate and Emily spent one or more “Wild Nights” in Emily’s corner room at the Homestead, that Pearl Jail where the poet perfected her craft? Patterson is much too willing to seize upon particular poems to narrate the stations of their romance—Dickinson wasn’t serving out her biography on a silver plate, she was lashing at herself and others with her own language, writing about volcanoes, deserts, rape, as Adrienne Rich reminds us in “Vesuvius at Home,” about madnes
s, suicide, murder, angels, wild beasts, the end of the world, and the tender violence of love and hate. And yet we can feel the presence of Kate, or some other female siren, like a maddened whisper, in a few of the poems.

  When I hoped, I recollect

  Just the place I stood—

  At a window facing West—

  Roughest Air—was good—

  Not a Sleet could bite me—

  Not a frost could cool—

  Hope it was that kept me warm—

  Not Merino shawl—

  When I feared—I recollect

  Just the Day it was—

  Worlds were lying out to Sun—

  Yet how the Nature froze—

  Icicles opon my soul

  Prickled Blue and cool—

  Bird went praising everywhere—

  Only Me—was still—

  And the day that I despaired—

  This—if I forget

  Nature will—that it be Night

  After Sun has set—

  Darkness intersect her face—

  And put out her eye—

  Nature hesitate—before

  Memory and I—[Fr493]

  Patterson limbs this poem into an unforeseen encounter with Kate in mid-March 1859. “Unquestionably she was standing in her bedroom, when something occurred, so unexpected, so exciting, that it engraved on her memory every detail of the weather and even of the spot where she had stood.”

  The problem here is that Patterson is partially right. Something did happen “At a Window facing West,” but the psychic landscape shifts so rapidly that it’s hard to locate the speaker or where we can locate ourselves in the poem. The speaker moves with a whiplike recall from hope to anxiety to deep despair—from a Sleet that cannot bite her to a soul that’s Prickled Blue—from all the lure and possibility of love to a kind of eternal night that will maim and obliterate all memory of her beloved.

  There’s a much clearer signal of Dickinson’s devotion to Kate in her letters. Sometime during the summer of 1860, she wrote to her Condor Kate, who had been long gone from Amherst, pleading for her to come from her crags again in Cooperstown. “You do not yet ‘dislimn,’ Kate . . .” [Letter 222] Dislimn might utterly baffle us here were she not echoing Antony and Cleopatra, her favorite among all of Shakespeare’s plays (she loved to see herself as Antony, wooing her own Cleopatra—whether Sue or Condor Kate).

  In act 4, scene 14 of the play, Antony dwells upon his own captivity to Cleopatra and wonders if he himself has disappeared into the clouds.

  Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish,

  A vapour sometime like a bear or lion . . .

  That which is now a horse, even with a thought

  The rack dislimns and makes it indistinct

  As water is to water.

  And the second daguerreotype helps clarify one of the little secrets of Dickinson’s life—that no matter what crag Condor Kate is on, or where she travels from Blue Peninsula to Blue Peninsula, she will never dislimn.

  In one of her later poems, circa 1877, Dickinson speaks to us, as she often does, from heaven:

  I shall not murmur if at last

  The ones I loved below

  Permission have to understand

  For what I shunned them so—

  Divulging it would rest my Heart

  But it would ravage their’s—

  Why, Katie, Treason has a Voice—

  But mine—dispels—in Tears.[Fr1429]

  Nothing in this poem is clear. If it is about “erotic loss or betrayal undergone,” as Helen Vendler suggests, it’s still hard to determine the difference between the ravaged and the ravager. Is Kate’s “Treason” that she married for a second time, in 1866? Or is Dickinson herself the “Treasoner?” As usual, the ground shifts so rapidly from line to line that the speaker sounds like some ventriloquist hurling her voice right from heaven.

  Kate, it seems, was still gnawing at her mind. Did Dickinson shun Katie, or was it Katie who ended whatever bits of passion they once shared? Dickinson might have had five or six years of fury on account of Kate, where poem followed poem, like an endless avalanche, but there’s scant evidence that Kate’s constant wanderlust ruined Dickinson’s life, whether or not it filled her with “Infinites of Nought” [Fr693] and “that White Sustenance—/Despair—”[Fr706]. She was writing poems before Kate arrived in Amherst and continued to scratch other poems in her Pearl Jail long after Kate had fled to her Blue Peninsula.

  Still, whatever happened between Kate and Emily may have been more than Sue Dickinson could bear. She grew more and more mercurial. She adored her children but was cold to Austin in his copperish wig, and her relations with Emily no longer had the same ebullient charm; she was now mistress of the Evergreens, a woman who entertained Bret Harte and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The eroticism of Emily’s poems must have disturbed her, aroused her own dormant—and ambiguous—sexuality. She seems utterly asexual in her later photographs. Yet Sue was much more sensual than either Emily or Kate in the images we have of her as an adolescent, with luminous dark eyes and a ripe mouth.

  An orphan from another social caste—her father was a ne’er-do-well who owned a tavern—she struggled in a way that Emily never had to struggle. Sue was voluptuous, moody, brilliant, and bisexual, which wasn’t all that uncommon in nineteenth-century America, where women had deep emotional ties among themselves, and men were often like extraterrestrials, as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has pointed out in “The Female World of Love and Ritual.” It’s likely that a woman’s first sexual experience in a middle-class culture was with another woman, since women often slept in the same bed as adolescents, kissed, and fondled one another freely. A woman knew more about another woman’s body than a man ever would, unless he visited the town brothel or read the Marquis de Sade.

  Sue arrived in Amherst almost like an indentured servant, lived with a married sister and a brother-in-law who never really appreciated her. Unlike the local belles, she didn’t have an abundance of clothes. But she was cultivated and also as dark as a Gypsy. Emily fell in love with Sue—they were poets in a land of prose, but Sue didn’t have the time or the means to luxuriate in language. Austin pursued her for years like a patient, bumbling hawk. And when Sue finally succumbed, she married the whole tribe of Dickinsons—she sorely needed a tribe of her own. Austin couldn’t fathom the Cleopatra he had on his hands, but Emily could. If she herself was Vesuvius, then there was an even greater volcano living right next door.

  And we have to imagine the jealous rage Sue might have hidden, perhaps even from herself, when she realized how drawn Emily and Kate were to each other, as if Sue were harboring a kind of criminal in her own house, someone who could upset her tranquil borders at the Evergreens. I suspect she scared Katie off. Condor Kate’s visits grew less and less frequent, until Emily felt like a mermaid stranded in her own private sea.

  Sue was visited with much the same dilemma after Dickinson’s death. Vinnie, whom she considered a fool, wanted her to gather up Emily’s scratchings and find a publisher for them. And Sue procrastinated. She planned to publish the poems for a private circle of friends, thus burying them forever. She must have felt a kind of erotic pull toward Kate in every other line. And she now had entered a danger zone; Emily’s poems had become live bombs dancing abroad, and might reveal Sue’s bisexual past. But Vinnie, who had her own volcanic will, took back the poems and gave them to Sue’s one great rival in Amherst, Mabel Loomis Todd. Sue held on to her own stash of letter-poems and did her best to neuter Emily, present her sister-in-law as Amherst’s asexual genius. Also, she now had someone else to promote—her daughter, Mattie, had become a pianist and a poet, as if the creativity Sue has suppressed all these years could now breathe through Mattie’s loins. But there were too many ghosts in her closets at the Evergreens, too much hidden heat that would rise up right out of the past. And like some stubborn, half-mad chancellor, she tried to eradicate all knowledge of the real or imagined liaison between two
friends she loved most in the world, but all her machinations would spill onto her daughter’s lap. Martha Dickinson Bianchi spent half her life manufacturing her own myths about Aunt Emily, nonsense about the poet’s seductive charms. “Nothing would be more delicious to me than to repeat by name the list of those whom she bewitched. It included college boys, tutors, law students, the brothers of her girl friends,—several times their affianced bridegrooms even; and then the maturer friendships,—literary, Platonic, Plutonic; passages varying in intensity, and at least one passionate attachment whose tragedy was due to the integrity of the Lovers, who scrupled to take their bliss at another’s cost,” she wrote in her introduction to The Single Hound (1914).

  Whole industries have been built around that “passionate attachment,” with novels, plays, and scholarly tomes identifying one candidate after the other as her phantom male lover—starting with her brother’s Amherst classmate George Gould, moving on to her father’s law apprentice, Ben Newton, continuing with the hypnotic Philadelphia preacher, Charles Wadsworth, whom some would like to identify as the Master in those three poignant, self-effacing, exuberant, and sadly comic letters that are among her greatest works of art. And there’s also the seductive editor of the Springfield Republican, Sam Bowles, or perhaps Colonel Higginson himself, or Thomas Niles, the Boston editor who first published Dickinson’s poems with an almost shameful reluctance, or some unknown aeronaut, when all the time that one monumental attachment wasn’t with a man at all, but with an obscure woman from Cooperstown, a wanderer whom Martha and her mother had wanted so desperately to hide.

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  AND SO WE’RE LEFT WITH ONE DAGUERREOTYPE whose provenance we may never ascertain, which could be the deluded dream of some junk dealer in Massachusetts, but which, nonetheless, rides us right into the twenty-first century with Emily Dickinson, not so much because of the revelations about her and Condor Kate, but because of the enchantment of the daguerreotype itself, and the persona it reveals to us, Dickinson as a carnivore, a huntress, much taller than we had ever imagined: the record book of the funeral director who buried Dickinson notes that she was five feet six inches. She protects Kate in the daguerreotype, stares at us with a slight astigmatism in her Yellow Eye, sits in her old-fashioned dress, with a confidant half smile, with the long fingers of a pianist—a hunter’s hand.