A Loaded Gun

by Jerome Charyn

  She was a hunter of words—with her Yellow Eye, her emphatic Thumb, lost somewhere in language, with a killer’s instinct. “Freedom to roam poetically means freedom to hunt,” says Susan Howe. “The poet is an intermediary hunting form beyond form, truth beyond theme through woods of words tangled and tremendous.” It also means that the Loaded Gun of Dickinson’s ruthless, aggressive art had to stare right back at “the aggression in God’s yellow eye of Creation” without blinking once. Yellow was a fearsome color for Dickinson, a color that could freeze the bones. And she lived with it much longer than most writers did.

  Her apprenticeship was lifelong. That’s why she’s unlike any other poet. She never really left her workshop. And why should she? Never mind the oddities of her script—“in holograph,” says Martha Nell Smith, “Dickinson’s poems visually control the page, while in print the white space of the page practically consumes the poems, minimizing them,” and emasculating the words and her line breaks. She wasn’t her own printer, unlike William Blake. Nor was she her own editor—the variants were part of her poetic stream. The fascicles were a strategy, not a form of self-publication. She had no need for that. They were a poet’s private catalogue, her inventory, her stock. Perhaps she had to halt her own “yellow eye of Creation” to codify her poems in what Martha Nell Smith calls her “presentation script.” But that flourish was for no one but herself. She never shared these packets of poems with her sister, her brother, or with Sue, her closest collaborator. There’s a hint of this deep isolation in a poem of hers that Franklin attributes to the second half of 1863. It’s found in Fascicle 32:

  The Tint I cannot take—is best—

  The Color too remote

  That I could show it in Bazaar—

  A Guinea at a sight—

  The fine—impalpable Array—

  That swaggers on the eye

  Like Cleopatra’s Company—

  Repeated—in the sky . . .[Fr696]

  We could juggle the meaning of these lines forever as we assemble Dickinson’s clueless clues. Art versus Nature, or the soul’s “Moments of Dominion” that fracture the poet and leave her soul “with a Discontent/Too exquisite—to tell—”?

  But the Tint she cannot take is the public avowal of her poetry, with its “impalpable Array” that she could show “A Guinea at a sight.” Her tint of color would swagger in the eye “Like Cleopatra’s Company”—the retinue of a queen—“Repeated—in the sky,” until it fades and disappears into the dark; or mutates, as Helen Vendler suggests, “into the blank and unfeeling ‘Prank’ of Snow.” Cleopatra is the poet’s catchword for Sue, as we know. And Dickinson often becomes a cross-dresser in her letters and poems, a forlorn Antony, wooing an implacable queen with words as her only device. But she isn’t wooing Cleopatra in the poem. She’d distancing herself from the public retinue of publishers and queens.

  Like some meticulous truant and weaver of webs, she was building her own labyrinth, with the finest silken cords. She wasn’t looking for illumination, but for something else. “Writing traces the way to get lost: in the aftermath of logic, on the moor-body of imagination,” writes Marta Werner, who has followed these illusive, contradictory traces as best she can. We must enter the labyrinth with Emily Dickinson, which means we can never really trust the dating of her untitled and undated poems, or have a definitive reading of her script, as Theodora Ward attempts to do in “Characteristics of the Handwriting.” Ward gives a year-by-year account of the changes in her script from 1850 to 1886, the year of Dickinson’s death. For example:

  1861:“Noticeable change in appearance: letters elongated and uneven, as if written with excess of nervous energy . . .

  1871:“Capitals are larger. Fewer ligations . . .

  1874:“Writing in ink reaches maximum size—sometimes only one word on a line.

  1885:“Further exaggeration of all characteristics described in 1884; letters further apart and irregular.

  1886:“Large, loose, and badly formed, showing physical weakness.”

  We could be hovering over Dickinson, watching her flourish and watching her die with a brutal, regular logic. But, as Werner reminds us, there’s a music to the poet’s script that defies any logic: poems morph into “word-paintings” that cannot be so easily categorized; her alphabet is like “a drift of birds” out of a dream, where “dashes become waved or wandlike, the streaming ascenders and descenders of the ds and ys resemble lighted wicks,” and we are far removed from a world where Dickinson is trying to mimic pages of print, as Ward seems to suggest. Graphologist Susanne Shapiro believes that Ward was on “a dangerous mission” the moment she attempted to date the poems in terms of the size and slant of Dickinson’s script, that she’s utterly in the dark when confronted with an unusual trait and doesn’t know how to interpret the “non script”—that is, the spacing between individual letters and words.

  Shapiro is no foreign intruder or neophyte in regard to the poet. She delivered a paper—“Secrets of the Pen: Emily Dickinson’s Handwriting”—before a conference of the Emily Dickinson International Society at Mount Holyoke College, in August 1999, in which she analyzes a late letter-poem to Sue [Letter 910, about 1884] where “the spaces between the words often exceed the size of the words themselves.”

  Banquetshave

  noSeed,or

  Beggarswould

  sowthem — [Letter 910; manuscript: ”HCL B 88”]

  The graphologist’s term for this peculiar spacing is “rivers.” And such rivers reveal a drifting away, as if each letter were its own private cosmos, or, as Shapiro says, “an island of its own.” According to Shapiro, “She was like a wounded animal.” This has nothing to do with her precarious mental state, as Shapiro believes, but with the almost aggressive joy of her wound as a writer. Her own words had sundered her. “You cannot solder an Abyss/With Air—” [Fr647] She was rampant, as she strove through that private domain of her calligraphy, her Sahara of endless patches, where the world of print and pagination had no meaning and no place.

  It isn’t clear when she got into the habit of scratching her little syncopations on slivers of paper, slit-open envelopes, etc. Dickinson’s earliest “envelope-poem” dates from around 1864, the year she ended her habit of “stabbing” her poems into little booklets, and embarked on less ambitious projects. But I suspect the reverse was true, that her mind was taking her along another route, toward a different kind of rapture—the dissolution of language, as if her mind was much too quick for the trappings of meter, for poetry itself, and all she could encode was the stuttering of words. “The cometary pace of her thought determines her choice of materials—whatever lies close by—and is registered in the disturbance of the scribal hand,” as if writing itself had become a form of stutter—and she was ripping the notion of the lyrical into shreds.

  In several scraps that may have been meant for Judge Lord, she writes:

  [Antony’s remark]

  to a friend,“since

  Cleopatradied”

  issaidtobe

  thesaddestever

  laininLanguage —

  Thatengulfing

  ‘Since”—[Letter 791, about 1882; manuscript: “A 741b”]

  Dickinson is referring to her favorite Shakespearian duet, the saga of Antony and Cleopatra that keeps knocking around in her head. Enraged, fearing that Cleopatra has betrayed him, Antony vows to kill her. Cleverer than he is, Cleopatra pretends to have slain herself. And Antony cannot recover.

  Since Cleopatra died

  I have lived in such dishonour that the gods

  Detest my baseness. I, that with my sword

  Quarter’s the world, and o’er green Neptune’s back

  With ships made cities, condemn myself to lack

  The courage of a woman . . .

  After a bit of flamboyant posturing, he falls upon his sword, womanish in his own way, only to learn that Cleopatra is still alive. And all we can do is ponder how Dickinson, the Antony of her own isolated court, m
ust have identified with his lines:

  Thatengulfing

  ‘Since” . . .

  What were the circumstances around this “radical scatter”? Was she feeling slighted by her own Cleopatra—Sue? Or had Language itself become “Cleopatra’s Company,” a kind of hopeless retinue, and she herself engulfed within its snares? So she had to disembowel her own Lexicon, sing with stutters like that lone songbird “in the centre of Dissolution.” She was the new queen of Pompeii, her staccato arias falling into a void.

  Pompeii—All its (the) occupations crystallized—Everybody gone away.[PF 100]

  3

  BUT THERE WAS STILL SUE, a most enigmatic queen of Amherst, the commissar of culture, who enraptured and puzzled Emily Dickinson for over thirty years.

  Susan knows she is a Siren—and that at a word from her, Emily would forfeit Righteousness . . . [Letter 554, mid-June, 1878]

  Susan was restless her entire life. She may have had a “fling” with Kate Scott at Utica Female Academy, may have been in love with Sam Bowles, who was some kind of secret Lothario, and at times she was like Dickinson’s own dominatrix, with the poet pleading for whatever little affection she could get (at least in the deep chill of Dickinson’s letters and poems). Sue was a greater riddle than Emily or Kate, because we do not have any tickets to her wants and desires. She’s “a dead spot,” undecipherable, according to Christopher Benfey. It’s as if she disappeared inside her own mantle as housewife, mother, and mistress of the arts, and seems like a somnambulist going through her traces, trapped in some hypnotic spell.

  In “Annals of the Evergreens,” the chronicle of her adventures as Amherst’s ruling matron, she summons up Harriet Beecher Stowe’s visit to Amherst in the summer of 1872; the novelist was benumbed, in a kind of perpetual shock; not only had she lost a son to cholera in 1849 but her daughter Georgiana had become a morphine addict, and her own favorite, her son Fred, an alcoholic captain who had been wounded at Gettysburg, sailed to California in 1871 on a ship bound for the Far East “and vanished into thin air.”

  So she’d come to Amherst to spend the summer and fall with Georgiana, who was married to the town’s new Episcopal rector, and still addicted to morphine. And, of course, the mistress of the Evergreens swooped up Harriet Beecher Stowe. “I remember her distinctly as the light from the chandelier [fell] upon her mobile face, her eyes twinkling with fun and merriment, her forehead covered with soft brown curls, confined with a band of black velvet, as seen in her pictures.”

  Harriet Beecher Stowe must have had Fred and Georgiana on her mind. “I knew she was taciturn at times,” Sue recalls, and invites Harriet on a carriage ride into the country. But there’s no mention of that other writer in town, Sue’s sister-in-law, the supposed agoraphobic who lived right across the lawn. And it’s hard to imagine that Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Queen Recluse ever met. What did they have in common other than their social caste? One had written a novel that was a tinderbox full of inflamed caricatures and operatic escapades that millions could recite, and the other was utterly unknown and unremarked, with a tinderbox inside her head. But Dickinson’s little cousin Loo found some resemblance between the two women. In 1904, after her own dead cousin had become a “public poet,” Loo would declare in a letter to the editors of the Boston Woman’s Journal:

  Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her most wonderful sentences on slips of paper held against the kitchen wall while she was hovering over culinary formations. And I know that Emily Dickinson wrote most emphatic things in the pantry, so cool and quiet, while she skimmed the milk; because I sat on the footstool behind the door, in delight, as she read them to me. The blinds were closed, but through the green slats she saw all those fascinating ups and downs going on outside that she wrote about.

  It almost sounds like a recital, the way Dickinson had once invented tunes on the piano for Kate and Sue, at the Evergreens. And considering her own sensitivity to sunlight, she would have skimmed the milk within that little dark wall of green slats, and scrawled a few lines on a scrap of paper, tapped them out like a timpanist to Loo, though her little cousin didn’t have an inkling of that staccato rage in her lines—no one did.

  Yet it was 1904, long past the furor over Harriet Beecher Stowe and her antislavery novel, and suddenly she was as subterranean as Emily Dickinson—more of a renegade and less of a Christian lady than we might have imagined. Her novel was practically out of print. She’d been so successful in 1852 because she appealed to a female audience of Christian mothers, who had suffered and lost children of their own, and could identify with Eliza Harris, a black Jane Eyre with “bright” skin, who leapt across the ice of the Ohio River with her son Harry in her arms, while the slave catchers pursued them with their dogs, always a couple of wrinkles behind in the plot. They all belong to a land of half-forgotten ghosts—the murderous and comic slave-catchers, the little Christian saints, and the evil plantation owners, such as Simon Legree. “The Lord never visits these parts,” says Cassy, the mysterious stranger who rises out of this heart of darkness.

  Legree is a nineteenth-century gargoyle, with his bullet head and hairy arms, but Cassy, his slave mistress, a refugee from a New Orleans brothel, is a much more modern ghost, and she haunts the novel in a way that none of the other characters ever can. Cassy’s lament wasn’t “written” by God, but by Harriet Beecher Stowe; it is her “work in throes,” and it contains a lexicon and a music that is absent from the rest of the novel, as if she had entered into that sumptuous and sexually charged world of New Orleans, with its quadroon balls, and gives us its splendor and degraded stink.

  Cassy is already used up when we first meet her at the plantation, with her gaunt body and dark eyes. But her mystery and her musk pervade Legree’s mansion. Harriet Beecher Stowe paints her as a wild woman, bewitched, half mad, but reveals her own witchery, her own mad song, as if she has inhabited Cassy’s demons, Cassy’s pain, not as a ventriloquist, or an adept puppeteer, but as someone who has found that soft, violent poetry at the edge of madness. Cassy had to “rescue” her own little boy from the torment of slavery by suckling him to death with laudanum. And I wonder how much of Harriet’s own unconscious despair was compressed into Cassy’s tale, with a murderous rage she would never reveal again.

  That rage reminds me of Dickinson, where language explodes like terrifying splinters. It’s as if Miss Emily, the patrician poet from a privileged and protected New England town, were Cassy’s secret sister. She was no quadroon, of course, never visited New Orleans and its midnight balls, never had any children to lose, and she had freckles, rather than Cassy’s creamy white complexion, but both seemed to erupt out of a similar void. Simon Legree can descend into hell, but Cassy has nowhere to go. She’s lost in the maelstrom, like that defiant Belle of Amherst with her amber eyes. And Cassy is much too defiant in her strange absence-presence to be just another victim in a novel about victimization. She’s outside Harriet’s evangelical reach. She’s a poet-witch who’s as violent and mercurial as history. And we, as readers, are caught between her outbursts and her moody withdrawals.

  Dickinson was another poet of outbursts. “Why don’t we talk about Dickinson and violence?” Christopher Benfey asked while I was with him at Mount Holyoke. “What does she say? ‘I measure every Grief I meet/With narrow, probing eyes’ [Fr550]—it’s all violence, all the time.” But there’s a contradiction, a rupture in all that agony. “She is the great poet of pauses, the great poet of rest, the great poet of silence. . . . She knows what silence is.”

  We cannot imagine Dickinson as another Julia Ward Howe, going to sleep one night in November of 1861 at Washington’s Willard Hotel and waking up with the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” bouncing inside her brain.

  “Unto the Dead/There’s no Geography—”[Fr476], Dickinson sings in her own battle hymn of apocalyptic thunder. There’s no redemption, no healing, only a world of tin behind God’s “terrible swift sword.” We’ve all sunk into “Miles on Miles of Nought—” [F
r522] And she herself “Went out opon Circumference,” where no one could listen, no one else could see. She was all alone, “too proud—for Pride.” [Fr705] Suddenly the world itself has vanished, with all its battles and its watch fires.

  “He lived the Life of Ambush” [Fr1571B], she wrote, talking about herself and the “Yellow Whip” [Fr1248] of her own words. And finally we come back to the most apocalyptic of all her poems. “My life had stood a loaded gun” may be a woman’s war cry, a chant about Dickinson own aggression, her own sexuality, but it’s also a poem about the end of the world, masquerading as a fairy tale about a huntsman who carries off a bride he’s never even met—his Loaded Gun—on a honeymoon that’s also a massacre, a shooting spree in those “Sovreign Woods” the Master owns. We can call him God or the Devil. It’s of no real consequence—it’s a godless world, fraught with evil, a slaughterhouse, ruled by the Master and his surrogate, the speaker’s “Sovreign” Yellow Eye.

  And Dickinson’s “Whip lash” music, the violence of her images, her ability to stun us with “A perfect—paralyzing Bliss—” [Fr767], and with sounds “Soft as the massacre of Suns” [Fr1146]—seem outside morality, untamed, untouched. She may have seen “New Englandly” [Fr256], but with a wilder heart.

  TEN

  The Witch’s Hour

  1

  ADRIENNE RICH COMES CLOSEST to understanding the dilemma that Dickinson faced most of her life in a village where any female without the “Title divine” of marriage and motherhood was looked upon with suspicion and deep distrust. “For motherhood,” Rich tell us, “is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.” But that entanglement comes at a great risk, as Dickinson must have known. Women who were neither wives nor mothers in nineteenth-century Amherst fell afoul of the quasi-religious belief that female creativity could only exist “within the mothering role.” Everything else was considered mere decoration or some kind of witch’s work. Once Dickinson lost Carlo, and morphed into an old maid, she was often mocked as the half-cracked village muse, and had to pay a price for that unholy power in the pencil at her side.