Susan Howe is correct, of course, when she says that even R. W. Franklin in his variorum edition of The Collected Poems (1998) was blind to the visual and acoustic fireworks of all the poems and, in particular, the late fragments, while Marta Werner and Jen Bervin, among a few other scholar-artist-poets, “have dared to show us the ways in which what we thought we saw was not really what was there.”
Howe talks about the sense of chance. “Viewing these ‘envelopes’ as visual objects, while at the same time reading her words for sound and sense, one needs to seize upon luck and accident—slips on paper slips.” And that’s what Marta and Jen Bervin have recorded, the mind in pure motion, Dickinson’s conscious and unconscious struggles to find the right envelope for her desires.
Dickinson scholar Jerome McGann insists that we must respect the “regular irregularities” of these texts, where each scrap becomes “an unrhymed shard of verse.” Or, as Marta Werner says, Dickinson displays an “astonishing recklessness” in these letter-poems and subverts all our expectations “by the snapping or short-circuiting of lyrical cables. In place of melody and measure come suddenness and syncope.”
Dickinson has her own magical eye and hand that map out the territory of the slit-open envelope as if she were a mountain climber creating ridge after ridge, sculpting each little mountain of words with her pencil, while she hears whatever she wants in a willful way. She hints at this in a letter to Higginson.
. . . The Ear is the last Face.
We hear after we see.[Letter 405, January 1874]
Marta and Jen Bervin have gone through the looking glass and brought us a very perverse Alice with a pencil in her hand. Dickinson’s pencil strokes, “often slanting to the right, give the impression of a hand pressed forward by some force external to it.” That rhythmic arrangement of words in a white field “promotes a curiously hypnotic effect, tranquil, without ever being still, and invites both eye and mind toward a prolonged act of gazing. . . . At last, these manuscripts function like mirages: The small squares of paper seem to dilate in space large enough to walk around in—or vanish through.”
“Nothing,” Bervin says, was a totemic—and defiant—word for Dickinson.
By homely gifts and hindered words
The human heart is told
Of nothing—
“Nothing” is the force
That renovates the World—[Fr1611]
Nothingness was her own divine condition in her manuscripts, both early and late; we can all imagine ourselves vanishing deep within her texts. That’s the hold she has on us. It’s dangerous to read Emily Dickinson, and it’s always been, even in the nineteenth century, when “The Snake” (“A narrow fellow in the grass”), was robbed from her and published in the Springfield Republican in 1866, without her knowledge or her punctuation and a title “pinned” to the text; the Republican’s readers must have been mesmerized a little, and some, at least, left “Zero at the Bone.” They had their own taste of nothing, and we still have it after 150 years.
4
IF THERE’S A MAGICAL MUSE BEHIND The Gorgeous Nothings, as Marta Werner suggests, and a battling scholar who has helped bleach out that reductive portrait of Dickinson as a spinster genius decked in white, it’s Susan Howe, a poet and critic who has dared with Emily Dickinson to dance at the edge of communicability in her own writing. Howe admires Melville and James Joyce, who shaped her sensibility, and who, like Dickinson, went to extremes and “worked away from audience. Sometimes they’re so far ahead of their times, they’re just nowhere—they’re out there . . . and there’s always a danger that you break off communication” and land in some cosmic space that’s akin to madness, Howe told me in 2013. But we both agreed that this risk was necessary, and that there would have been no Emily Dickinson—or Melville—without such risk.
“We were born the same year,” Howe reminded me. “We were born into the war.” Both of us grew up amid the rumble of World War II, with all its uncertainties and fears, and mythical demons and heroes. But Howe was from Boston, Cambridge, and Beacon Hill, and I was from the Bronx. Her father, Mark DeWolfe Howe, was a historian and Harvard law professor who went away to war. So she barely knew him when she was a little girl. “I was about nine when my father came back from the war. He was by then almost a stranger and his reading to me at bedtime took such a hold on me that I never lost the sense of awe and bedazzlement with his reading of Charles Dickens,” Howe told Tom Gardner in an earlier interview. And her own experience of sharing literature with her father wasn’t so different from Marta’s—“my father and I were undemonstrative shy New Englanders; the way we could best express affection was through reading aloud the words of others.”
Howe graduated from the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts in 1961, with Dickinson already in her blood. Her maternal grandfather knew Colonel Higginson, had letters from him, and the New England side of her family was steeped in Dickinson lore. Howe was seduced by Dickinson when she began to incorporate words into her own paintings, and sensed how palpable and tactile Dickinson’s images were, as if the poet had scratched words upon her own skin. She would come to Dickinson once again through another act of reading, many years later. It was 1974, and she was living on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village as an artist who had begun to shift from painting to poetry. Her aunt, Helen, who lived uptown, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Ninety-seventh Street, was bedridden and about to die. Sewall’s biography of Dickinson had just been published, and Aunt Helen was much too feeble to read the book on her own. “I felt vividly how tiny and birdlike she was in that solid Manhattan building,” as birdlike, perhaps, as Emily Dickinson.
So Howe immersed herself in Sewall and felt “called” to the Dickinson clan; her own father could have been Edward Dickinson—“not only was he a lawyer, but he was a representative of the old New England type. . . . I understood her sense of awe and devotion in relation to him. I understood why she couldn’t leave home.”
But it was still hard for me to grasp that Howe, who had done so much to revitalize the poet and deflect that image of the “spidery recluse” spun by so many other critics, still believed in the catchword of Dickinson’s crippling agoraphobia.
“I’m slightly agoraphobic,” she said in protest. “So I sympathize. But I really have a problem. I can hardly travel.” She smiled and we wondered if all Dickinson inebriates, including Marta and myself, were turning into recluses, like that Prometheus on the second floor.
I asked her about the 1859 daguerreotype of a possible Dickinson sitting beside a possible Condor Kate.
Howe had a devilish grin. “I hope it’s her. I love the old one! But I hope it’s her, because she kind of looks powerful. She doesn’t look like this grim thing.”
And that is the “daguerreotype” of Dickinson that Howe has projected in her own work about a riddling poet of ruthless and mysterious power. “She isn’t comforting.” Dickinson never holds our hand. We have to leap into the dark with her. “She is a robber, as all great writers are. She read and read and read.” She stole from Emerson, Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Shakespeare, the Bible, and her dictionary. “Noah Webster’s pages bristle with brackets, dots, dashes, and slashes,” she told Tom Gardner. Yet, I had to admit—there was no Lexicon for song, at least none that I knew of.
Her music and her topography were utterly her own. We’ll never fathom why she wrote on one surface or another. “Did she simply grab something at hand to write an idea down as it flashed through her mind?” Did she choose to write her riddles on brown wrapping paper by pure chance? “Or is there something about the surface that matches the thought?”
All we will ever have are her strokes and her murmurs on the back of some envelope or other paper missile. “Every mark on a page is acoustic,” Howe insists. The relationship “between sound, sense, and sight” is absolute. “She pushes that, so we cannot separate them.” And what are we left with as readers? “The sound of what you say sings in your head at the moment you read. I don’
t care what the cognitive scientists say—the mind is theatre.”
And that is the deepest delight we will ever have—with Dickinson.
“Emily Dickinson in a sense had a happy life. To accomplish that amount of work, at that fever pitch, you must have privacy, you must have shelter,” Howe insisted. And she used every stratagem she had to protect that privacy. She was an artist “with ink on her hands. And fierce. A Calvinist.” And a warrior.
The three “Master Letters” were a turning point for her, according to Susan Howe. She perfected her craft while writing them, that bewildering, satanic sense of play. “They’re erotic,” but there never was any identifiable suitor, any suitor at all. These letters were a supreme act of willfulness, where she finally “admitted to herself that she was Versuvian. It was like a conversion experience. Once she crossed that crisis, she was off. She was one with the Muse.” And her poems flourished in that marvelous theater of her mind. “She went underground—or she took off and flew.” And we’ve been looking for signs of her ever since.
NINE
Cleopatra’s Company
1
I’D FOUND THE BOOK IN A GARBAGE BARREL, with its battered green cover and gaudy gilt edges, like some mischievous archive or heirloom that dated right back to Dickinson. It seems that in 1869 one of the most celebrated authors on the planet, Harriet Beecher Stowe, had published with her sister Catherine a self-help book for women of a certain caste. The two sisters considered their book a compendium of household truths, born out of their own experiences as genteel ladies from one of New England’s most brilliant clans—the Beechers, a brood of educators, ministers, abolitionists, writers, and editors.
The American Woman’s Home represents the dreams and desires of the two sisters’ social class. They warn their readers to be on guard against Irish servants, since these “daughters of Erin” can establish such “a reign of Chaos” in the kitchen that nothing will ever be restored.
The worst sin of all in creatures of good breeding is the “excessive exercise of the intellect and feelings,” which can lead to derangement, idiocy, and an early grave. Beware of constant mental stimulus, such as novel reading, the sisters warn.
Emily Dickinson may have shared some of the sisters’ prejudices—she also had problems with the Irish until Maggie Maher came along—but she could never have fit inside their cosmology. She was much too closeted, a witch of the Imagination obsessed with words, though she did bake her father’s bread—“& people must have their puddings.” [Letter 342a] Yet it’s odd to hear Harriet Beecher Stowe rail against novel reading, when she herself wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), the most popular novel of the nineteenth century. She met Lincoln at the White House ten years later, and it’s become part of America’s string of myths that he bowed to her, took her hand in his paws, and said, “So this is the little lady who made this big war.”
It no longer matters whether Lincoln actually uttered that remark. Harriet Beecher Stowe did help fire up the Civil War. She had moved in 1832 with all her clan to Cincinnati, Ohio, where her father, Lyman Beecher, was appointed head of Lane Theological Seminary. She was twenty-one at the time, and would meet her future husband, a widower, Calvin Stowe, who taught with Lyman Beecher at Lane. Cincinnati had become a providential place for Harriet Beecher Stowe. It was on the Ohio River, right across from Kentucky, a slave state; and for a while it seemed as if Kentucky and Ohio, a free state, would have their own civil war, as fugitive slaves fled across the river and seemed to melt right into the atmosphere. But not all Ohioans were abolitionists, and Harriet witnessed several race riots in Cincinnati, where black men were beaten to death. And then, in 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, which made a criminal of any man or woman who harbored such fugitives. Harriet felt outraged and decided to write her own antislavery novel.
Personal tragedy would weave itself into the fabric of the novel. Her eighteen-month old child, Charley, had died of cholera in the summer of 1849. “It was at his dying bed and at his grave that I learned what a poor slave may feel when a child is torn away from her. . . . I allude to this here because I have often felt that much that is in that book [Uncle Tom’s Cabin] had at its root in the awful scenes and bitter sorrow of that summer,” she wrote in 1852.
Edmund Wilson was one of the first literary critics to resurrect Harriet Beecher Stowe in his book about Civil War writing, Patriotic Gore (1962). Wilson admits that Harriet had no interest in literature. “Her writings flowed onto the paper with little more punctuation than Molly Bloom’s meditations in Ulysses.” But Uncle Tom’s Cabin had its own special lament and fierce, electric charge, as if God had written the book, said Harriet Beecher Stowe, and she was some silent witness to His power while in her own trance. And most of her characters seem under that same spell. “They come before us arguing and struggling,” Wilson says, “like real people who cannot be quiet.” Beecher Stowe hurls at us, under enormous compression, “a flock of lamenting and ranting, prattling and preaching characters, in a drama that demands to be played to the end.”
2
FOR ALL HIS ASTUTENESS ABOUT Harriet Beecher Stowe, Wilson was deaf, dumb, and blind to Emily Dickinson, convinced that she’s “the tragic case of a poet who was never allowed to emerge.” He bought into every conventional and clichéd notion we have of her, perhaps encouraged by the poet herself, who preferred her subterranean existence in Amherst, the woman in white who conspired in her own vanishing act.
She’s been a moving target from the moment she was first published in 1890 by Colonel Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd. The colonel couldn’t make up his mind about Dickinson and the “fossil bird-tracks” she left on the page in that peculiar script of hers, and the piecemeal publication of her poems also resembles prehistoric bird tracks, with every sort of mystery and mutilation of texts. Even in 1955, when Thomas H. Johnson gathered all her poems in three volumes, not as a combatant in the Dickinson wars, but as a renowned scholar, he left us with his own “imprint” of partial truths.
“Emily Dickinson,” he writes in his foreword, “was born to her talent but she felt no dedication to her art until she was about twenty-eight years old, in 1858. By 1862, her creative impulse was at flood tide, and by 1865 the greater part of her poetic energies were spent.”
I suspect she was honing her craft long before 1858; we can feel this preening art in her early letters to Sue. And we shouldn’t be misled by the fascicles as the mark of her seriousness and devotion. No one can really tell us why she copied out her poems on gilt-edged paper, in her fairest hand, and “stabbed” them together into little booklets. The forty fascicles, Marta Werner reminds us, are “like forty locked doors.” And Martha Nell Smith writes in Rowing in Eden: “The primary project of the fascicles may well be to expose the failure of any narrative to sustain that which is outside itself.” They could have been Dickinson’s own desperate desire to hermetically seal herself inside her poems and create some semblance of order. And they could have been written long before she began to encapsulate and embalm them with her needle and thread. We have this flurry of fascicles, this “flood tide,” as Johnson says, and then a waning of her powers, according to him. But after her second trip to Cambridge, in 1865, and her suspicions that she might go blind, and after Carlo died, her writing went underground. There were fewer fair copies, fewer and fewer poems, yet greater flourishes with the pen. “The handwriting is fierce,” according to poet Amy Clampitt. It is also more and more insular and secretive, as if, suggests Martha Nell Smith, these flourishes had little to do with the “expectations created by typeface” and “practically qualify as a new form of spelling,” and perhaps even a new, protean language and form of art. Dickinson herself gives us a hint of this inversion in one of her “radical scatters,” swooped up by Johnson as PF 30:
Did you ever read one of her Poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have—A something overtakes the Mind—
The “her�
�� referred to in this fragment is tantalizing and disturbingly ambiguous. Such a prescription couldn’t apply to Dickinson’s favorite female poet—that Dark Lady, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose meter was regular enough and who wouldn’t have to be read topsy-turvy. Dickinson could only be talking about herself. She was her own Dark Lady with brilliant red hair.
—A something overtakes the Mind—
That was the single mark of her composition; she had no other—the Mind moving at its own miraculous and irregular pace, even if she may have revised each poem to the end of her life. But she worked with her own sense of abandon, and we must shut our eyes and abandon ourselves to Dickinson’s votive powers, follow “the trajectory of her desire to inscribe herself outside all institutional accounts of order,” as Marta Werner herself has done in Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios. Like Susan Howe, Werner has entered that void where Dickinson seemed to thrive as a poet—
Emerging from an Abyss and entering it again—that is Life, is it not?[PF 32]
Poetry is precarious, Howe reminds us. “If you follow the word to a certain extent, you may never come back.” And that’s why none of us can claim her, and so few theories about her time or her gender reveal very much about her art. “I think she may have chosen to enter the space of silence, where power is no longer an issue, gender is no longer an issue, voice is no longer an issue, where the idea of a printed book appears as a trap.”
Dickinson was an outlaw from the day she began to scribble those strange, elliptical songs and scatterings. “One note from/One Bird,” she wrote in pencil on the torn seal of an envelope. [PF 97; manuscript: “A 320”] She was that bird, singing to herself and a select society—Sue, of course, and her Norcross cousins, Condor Kate for a little while, Sam Bowles. . . . But even her most intimate recipients may never have been part of the same ruthless voyaging with words—flights from her pencil or pen—where she was testing her plumage and the purposeful stutter of her songs, with each flight “a dart that returns immediately to the sender,” as Marta Werner warns us.
A Loaded Gun Page 18