“Abyss has no Biographer—,” Dickinson wrote to Sue’s sister, Martha Gilbert Smith, in 1884. [Letter 899] But perhaps it does, since the daguerreotype takes us into the landscape of “My life had stood a loaded gun.” [Fr764] And we now can stare into the “Abyss” of the poem. It’s darker than we might ever have imagined. The Master and his Loaded Gun share the same persona. The Doe they hunt is for a different kind of winter meat—sexual prey. They’re a couple of cavaliers. The speaker identifies with the cruelty of her Master, with his sense of sexual play. To seduce is to plunder, to feel the mindless joy of a Loaded Gun. And isn’t Condor Kate Dickinson’s “prey” in the daguerreotype, her conquest, whom she’s sharing with the camera and with us? And this is what is so disturbing about the image: Dickinson feels more contemporary than we are, even in her fluffed-out clothes. Kate is somewhere back in another time, tentative, forlorn, frightened of a shadow box that can capture her image and suck at her soul. But Dickinson is much more comfortable with the black magic of technology. We can only see four of her fingers; the “emphatic Thumb” of her hunter-killer’s hand is hidden. She’s no picture out of the poem. She is the Loaded Gun.
SEVEN
Within a Magic Prison
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IF A SINGLE DAGUERREOTYPE PLUCKED OUT of a scavenger sale in Springfield can twist our imagination so and reveal Dickinson as a huntress rather than a shy Kangaroo, then we might have to admit that the more we learn about the Belle of Amherst, the more mysterious and ungovernable she becomes. What do we really know about her after gathering all her texts and every variant—the letters, sent and unsent, the anthologies of her poems that she stitched together like some seamstress of mind and soul, the fragments that suddenly appeared on the backs of envelopes and bits of brown paper bags in her last two decades and were largely ignored by her earliest editors, since all of them believed that protean as she was, Dickinson was well beyond the “White Heat” of her most productive period? And if we pin together the details of her life, as she often pinned the lines of one poem onto the lines of another, or examine every pinning or poem like some celestial jeweler, can we discover a significant shape for Dickinson other than the ragged outline of one iconic lie after the other? We cannot really determine why she began to wear a white dress, or when she began her subterranean existence as a mermaid-poet in that frigate of hers on the second floor, or even if Vinnie slept with her in the same narrow sleigh bed? And can we speak of a Dickinson canon when each poem (or letter) with all its variants, is utterly isolated, a canon all its own?
“Except for Shakespeare,” Harold Bloom tells us, “Dickinson manifests more cognitive originality than any other Western poet since Dante.” Like Shakespeare, her language is “dragonish,” shifting shapes while it dislimns, as words fly out of nowhere—little dragons that caress and kill at the same time. But I doubt that Dickinson would ever have believed in a “Western Canon,” even if it commenced with her beloved Shakespeare and included George Eliot, a novelist she adored. She would have said that language began in Arctic bliss, with icicles under her tongue, that all words were “Zero at the Bone.” Dickinson believed in violent shifts of landscapes and language—the volcano was her natural home, with all its molten lava and centuries of sleep. If Lear represents the unraveling of civilization, the wild ravages of an old man’s heart, Dickinson would never have sided with him, but with the Fool, who asks, “Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?” And Lear answers with all the canonical pomp of kings: “Why, no, boy; nothing can be made out of nothing.”
But Dickinson knew otherwise. Language came from the abyss; hers was a dragon’s lair. And she composed, almost until the very end, with that mordant humor of hers, like a bird in mid-flight. To her favorites, Fanny and Loo, she wrote just before her death, in May of 1886.
Little Cousins,
Called back.
Emily.[Letter 1046]
It was the very last missive she would ever send.
But there were also poems and fragments, scraps she wrote on the sly, and might pin to a poem, or use to accompany some doodle, as if she were liberated from the strictness of meter or the imprisonment of a page. They were like the excretions of a snail, a few words on the back of some recipe, or the strip of a used envelope, or a handbill, on every kind of colored paper, like a fortune-teller’s cards, with words spilling onto an envelope with her very own slant or some other inscrutable design, as if she were building her own rickety enterprise, as David Porter might say, or examining words as a carpenter would, with every curve and mark. And I suspect that these markings, often written with a pencil she carried at her side like some gunslinger, offer as much of an entry point as we will ever have to the silent music and constant chaos of her life and her work.
2
DICKINSON SCHOLAR MARTA L. WERNER has devoted a good portion of her own life to these fragments, or “radical scatters,” as she calls them. And the archive she has assembled about these fugitive scraps has migrated from one electronic library to the next, like isolated, lonely birds that Dickinson herself might have coveted. Werner reveals how she happened upon the name for her electronic archive of the poet’s late fragments—it was in a book by British ornithologist G. V. Matthews about the strange and irregular migratory patterns of birds. While trying to determine the flight paths and homing instincts of certain birds, Werner tells us, an expert—called a liberator—“throws several birds into the air one at a time” in different directions. “The birds are then watched until they are out of sight, and the points at which they disappear from view are recorded.” A “scatter diagram” is then drawn up. And for reasons that are still unclear, “some birds on the outward course drift widely across the migration axis”—that is, their moves are utterly unexpected. “These drifts, called ‘radical scatters,’ both solicit and resist interpretation.” And Werner is convinced that Dickinson’s late fragments “are textual counterparts of the scattered migrants”—they often migrate from text to text, appear and disappear, and fly beyond their own limits, where readers can no longer capture them.
I saw several of these “fugitives’ in the archives of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College; and nothing else I had ever seen of Dickinson’s—the fascicles, the 1847 daguerreotype, which was much tinier and more fragile than the icon I had imagined, or the letters with their different scrawls, some careful, others chaotic—excited and disturbed me as much as these fugitive fragments, with their crosshatches, their lines that could spill in every direction, their erasures, the wiggle marks of the poet trying out a new pen, the ascending and descending dashes, like private musical notes that no army of scholars could ever interpret, the words that broke the tyranny of a line and seemed to shimmer in front of your eyes, or stared out at you with the boldest pen strokes on a tiny strip of paper:
Graspedby
God—[PF 76; manuscript: “A 169”]
Credit: PF 76; manuscript: “A 169,” Amherst College Archives and Special Collections.
It was as if we were watching the poet in the act of creation, in some eternal present tense, with not a soul to step between us and mediate. I felt like that “liberator” flinging birds with a blind abandon, and knowing that no two flight patterns would ever be the same, that Dickinson would always startle, always run rampant.
These fragments were mostly ignored when Thomas H. Johnson first published some of them over sixty years ago as a kind of appendage to his collection of Dickinson’s letters. He called them “Prose Fragments” and “Aphorisms.” It was, Johnson insisted, impossible to say very much about Dickinson’s “unformed, worksheet jottings.” They must have unnerved him a little with their almost accidental, anarchic appearance, and their bold declarations, like some wild telegraphic operator tapping at his keys:
I don’t keep the Moth part of the House—I keep the Butterfly part[PF 80]
A something overtakes the mind—we do not hear it coming[Like her own cataclysmic acts of creation]. [PF 119]
What Lethargies of Loneliness[PF 120]
With the sincere spite of a Woman [PF 124]
Johnson tells us that the final “Aphorism” above, composed on a scrap of stationery, was unique among all the fragments “in that it is in the ink and in the handwriting of about 1850.” She could have been talking about Sue here, or some unfaithful friend, but since all discussions about the evolution of Dickinson’s handwriting are imprecise, she might also have been talking, ten years later, about some sudden lurch in her love affair with Condor Kate.
Perhaps I misread Dickinson’s purpose and intent in this fragment, and it has nothing to do with Kate. Still, what’s important is that Johnson assigned all such fragments to oblivion, and they “disappeared from view almost in the very moment they had first appeared in print.”
Werner doesn’t blame Johnson; she blames it on the “Cold War” mentality of the 1950s, when our own hysteria over national borders also enclosed us within “textual borders—a need to define and contain texts,” so that we were blinded to the originality of fragments that seemed “an embarrassing excess.” But this blinding occurred long before Johnson; there had been a “Cold War” in relation to Dickinson’s texts from the moment they were discovered in the poet’s mahogany drawer. Perhaps Sue was the only one who understood the poet’s subversive powers, but her secretiveness pushed her away from shepherding the poems into print; and Dickinson’s first “discoverers,” Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, who felt that half her poems were fugitives, fragmented the poet’s voice and created their own borders.
Even Johnson’s monumental editing of the poems and the letters couldn’t really repair a misconception that had haunted us for over half a century, that overriding image of the Queen Recluse. But at least we had her own full closet of poems, without fake titles and “improvements” upon her syntax, and letters that revealed a complex tapestry of purpose we had never seen before. Their riches dazzled and overwhelmed, and perhaps none of us, including Johnson, was prepared to examine the outer edges of that tapestry, where her own narrative seemed to unravel into a tatter of words. And then came Jay Leyda’s The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson (1960), which talked about “the omitted center” of Dickinson’s design, that elusive shorthand of her letters and poems, where she had her own elliptical language with certain recipients, such as Sue.
Leyda and the poet were a perfect fit. His entire life was elliptical. It’s not even certain where he was born, or what name he was born with. He grew up in Dayton, Ohio. His father was a circus performer, and he was raised by a grandmother who pretended to be his mother. He went to Moscow to study with Sergei Eisenstein, returned to the United States, was an assistant curator of film at the Museum of Modern Art (it was here that he probably met Joseph Cornell); accused of being a Soviet secret agent, Leyda was driven out of the museum in 1940, but he still went to Hollywood in 1942, where he served as a technical adviser at Warner Bros. and MGM on films about the Soviet Union, such as Mission to Moscow (1943), and later landed at the Folger Library in Washington, D.C., and up at Amherst, working as an archivist on the chaotic collection of Dickinson papers and poems that Millicent Todd Bingham had inherited from her mother and given to Amherst College—he’d already written The Melville Log, a compilation of the days and hours of Herman Melville, originally intended as a birthday present for Eisenstein. And Leyda was one of the first to examine Dickinson’s late fragments; he shared some of his thoughts with Joseph Cornell, and wrote to literary critic Alfred Kazin (and others) about his adventures of wandering through the Homestead, of standing in the poet’s room, dreaming of her vistas. And he did his own Dickinson log, gathering the minutiae around her life like a pile of compost that he could sift through, but even Leyda—the ultimate Dickinson detective—couldn’t intuit the relationship of the fragments to the rest of her work.
It took another kind of detective, Marta Werner, searching for migrations rather than minutiae, to reexamine the fragments almost forty years after Leyda. And she has bolted us into a recognition of Dickinson’s habits as a huntress of words that we might never have had without her own electronic archive. These “radical scatters,” she tells us, were never meant to be seen by anyone but the scriptor herself, and “are not so much ‘works’ as symptoms of the processes of composition.” And her discoveries were no accident. These fragments could not become visible until a brand-new century, when our notions of stability have changed, and we are all nomads in a sense. “Homelessness is our inheritance and our condition,” according to Marta Werner. “A poetics of exile, of the margin, is our rejoinder.”
Yet “homelessness” was not only the condition of the poet’s fugitive fragments but of Dickinson herself, a nomad within her father’s house, and within the nineteenth century, with its wholesale prescriptions upon her sex—no woman could deny her husband the rights to her body—and its pinch upon her purchasing power that kept her a child, as Susan Howe suggests. She was “voiceless” within a male hierarchy, and therefore had to create a coded voice of her own. Dickinson became the master of this voice, and if there is a secret motor to her very best verses, it is the lyrical lash of rebellion. She needed to inflict pain, often upon herself, but also upon the culture that had created her. And for Dickinson, it was a culture of words. If her Lexicon was her only friend, it was also her chief adversary, the historical script of her bondage to males that was packed into every epigram, every narrative, every word. There were no female narrators in the Bible, and no Judith Shakespeare to lend a voice to Elizabethan drama. And that’s why she idolized Barrett Browning and the Brontës, and devoured the novels of George Eliot, who had to hide her ferocious intelligence under a male mask, or her own writing might never have been taken seriously. Women were toys, the playthings of Victorian plutocrats, as Dickinson knew in her bones.
3
YET ONE OF THE KEYS TO deconstructing Dickinson (as much as we will ever be able to dislodge her codes) lies at the peripheries, where we don’t have scripted books, but scatterings, where we have to try and fathom her radically flying birds. Dickinson’s fragments, Werner tells us, “depict the beauties of transition and isolation at once.” They might stand positionless or migrate to another text, appear in a letter or as variant lines in another poem. “Belonging to a chronology of the instant, vulnerability is the mark of their existence.” They are here and nowhere, like wandering ghosts, leaving their trace upon a particular text, “as if poems, letters, and fragments communicated telepathically, a line or phrase from a fragment re-appears, often altered, in the body of a poem, a message, or even another fragment.” But such ghosts are almost impossible to define—“neither residents nor aliens, neither lost nor found . . . they require that we attend to the mystery of the encounters between fragments, poems, and letters,” and these radical scatters can suddenly take asylum in a text, and then pull away into some boundless space and time.
And this is where our study of the poet ought to begin—at the edges and outer borders, Werner insists. Her scatterings “are the latest and furthest affirmation of a centrifugal impulse, a gravitation away from the center, that is expressed at every level of her work.” And perhaps we even have to abandon the traditional notion of a poet’s “work,” in Dickinson’s case—her poems, her letters, and manuscript books—and consider a new definition, without beginnings or endings, “a work in throes.” This is why Dickinson seems so different from any other poet, because her writing is in constant crisis, where contradictions abound from line to line, or within a line, like sonar booms that hurt the ear as we try to listen to each bolt of melody. Werner reminds us again and again of the unhomeliness of her poetic condition—“as well, of course, as our own.” And perhaps that is why we are addicted to Dickinson and can never seem to get enough of her. We cannot locate who we are or where we are in relation to her poems, since the speaker can be male and female, or some glacially sexless creature, murderer or angel, Goliath or gnome, as we move from line to line. Allen Tate scoffed at her
as a lyric poet who could never have written a novel. “She cannot reason at all. She can only see. It is impossible to imagine what she might have done with drama or fiction.” Well, he’s wrong. Reading the best of Dickinson is like being stuck inside Gulliver’s Travels and Alice in Wonderland at the same time, where our psyche seems to spill into some wonderland of “noiseless noise” as we follow the speaker’s traces, that deceptive I who can ride on a carriage to an eternity that’s limbed with the little houses of hell, or cast her Yellow Eye upon us all, her uninvited guests, who have intruded upon her hunting grounds, the private sanctuary of her poems, where we have little purchase and will never be able to “unriddle” her.
But most of all, Dickinson’s “radical scatters,” with their “turbulence of mind”—those mysterious angled dashes, pen tests and other scratchings, and question marks that seem to float across a particular scrap of paper—offer us a glimpse of something we could never have in a finished poem, our own secret desire “to register the progress of the hand/mind across the page.” We have rendered her naked for a moment, have caught her in the act of writing, as if we could shatter time and had some kinetic power to catch that pencil in her hand, and that “emphatic Thumb” as it moves with the terrible lightning of thought. Or, as Werner tells us, all the wanderings and deletions, and the additional scrawls that move like some magnificent crab across the very borders of a page, seem to mirror “the hand in the present tense of writing.”
A Loaded Gun Page 15