A Loaded Gun: The Real Emily Dickinson

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

                                                 "... Emily Dickinson, 
never far away ..." (Gravity's Rainbow, p. 28)

 > ... Suppose the keys weren’t missing at all, but were part of some 
private, internal structure. And suppose her definition of poetry was 
different from ours, and she was a very different kind of poet, more 
like an explorer and discoverer, who meant to subjugate her Lexicon, 
rather than juggle words. She would share some of her discoveries in her 
letter-poems, sing a verse or two to a favorite cousin, but she shared 
her hand-sewn fascicles with no one; these were very private catalogues, 
complete in themselves, meant for her own consumption; and the variants 
to a particular word that she wrote in the margins were like magical 
flowers, not meant to cancel one another, but to create a cluster, or 
bouquet. That “omitted center” was less a mask than the sign of her 
modernity. For those critics who swear she was /feminizing/ a 
male-dominated culture of language constructions, I would say that 
there’s something strange about the femininity of her attack. Camille 
Paglia best describes the force and “riddling ellipsis” of Dickinson’s 
style. “Protestant hymn-measure is warped and deformed by a stupefying 
energy. Words are rammed into lines with such force that syntax shatters 
and collapses into itself. . . . The brutality of this belle of Amherst 
would stop a truck.”

...

She played the role of little girl that nineteenth-century women were 
meant to play. But she was far from a little girl, even if she told 
Higginson, “I have a little shape—it would not crowd your Desk—nor make 
much Racket as the Mouse, that dents your Galleries—” [Letter 265] It 
was one more act of seduction. She must have sensed her own monstrous 
powers—this Vesuvius at Home. The Brain, she would write, is wider than 
the Sky.

    The Brain is just the weight of God—
    For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—
    And they will differ—if they do—
    As Syllable from Sound— /[Fr598]/

She may have sent her letter-poems to favorite friends like little bombs 
of love, but I don’t believe she ever meant to share her own 
“experiments” with anyone else. Higginson was reluctant to unclasp her 
Portfolio—poems plucked up from the roots of her mind. But she wasn’t 
boasting when she said—twice—that he had saved her life, not because he 
had much to say about her poems. He didn’t. But he cared for his 
half-cracked poetess, must have sniffed her greatness and her suffering. 
He wasn’t a fool. He just couldn’t read the future very well, couldn’t 
have seen that the twentieth century would soon explode into slant 
rhymes that would render him obsolete. Yet Dickinson desperately needed 
him. He was her lifeline—not to the literary culture of Boston; she 
wasn’t much interested in that. But she could /practice/ her own 
intelligence—and her craft—on him. And so much of what we will ever know 
about her comes from her letters to Higginson; with him, she could wear 
the mask of a poet.

    If I read a book /[and]/ it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever
    can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the
    top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the
    only way I know it. Is there any other way. /[Letter 342a, Higginson
    to his wife]/

Not as far as Dickinson’s poetry is concerned. And that’s why we pay 
homage to this outlaw. She wasn’t one more madwoman in the attic. She 
was the mistress of her own interior time and space, where she delivered 
“Dirks of Melody” that could delight and stun. She was the blonde 
Assassin who could dance with “the man of noon” and walk away at will—in 
her poetry.

“I cannot dance opon my Toes—/No Man instructed me—” she declared in one 
of her most striking poems. But she needed no instruction. Dickinson was 
dancing all the time. Few people in Amherst ever caught that dance, not 
even Sue. She danced right past her father’s eyes, made herself 
invisible in her white dress. And Allen Tate, one of a handful of poets 
and critics who rediscovered Emily Dickinson in the twentieth century, 
paid her the highest sort of compliment when he said: “Cotton Mather 
would have burned her for a witch.”

...

Benfey agrees with W. H. Auden “that language finds certain people and 
lives through them, almost the way a virus lives by finding a host, I 
think language lives by finding hosts. . . . It found a way to live in 
Shakespeare. Infested him. Got all it could out of Shakespeare and then 
moved on.”

“It didn’t disappear,” I say. “It went into the ground—”

“For a long time, and found Emily Dickinson.”

And then the virus moved on. “You listen to those early songs of Bob 
Dylan, and you think, Whoa, how could he have written them? But he 
doesn’t know. Just as Dickinson wouldn’t have been able to say, /‘Well, 
I first thought of the loaded gun image when I was sitting in my 
father’s room and there was a gun in the corner and I thought, I’m like 
that gun.’/ We have no idea.”

And the letters she wrote were as puzzling as that loaded gun.

“We still don’t know how to read them,” Benfey says. “We assume the 
difficulty of the poems. And we assume the availability and relative 
intelligibility of the letters. It’s gotta be the opposite, because with 
the poems, we have some idea what rhyme and meter are. But with the 
letters, we have no fucking clue what the rules for reading and writing 
letters are. The ‘Master Letters’ have gotten a ton of attention, but 
it’s the other letters . . .”

We talk about the cunning and the craft of her letters to Higginson. 
“She doesn’t need him as a mentor,” I say, and Benfey agrees.

“That’s where we get the sense of her as a performance artist. She walks 
downstairs to see Higginson, carrying the two day lilies, and says, 
‘These are my introduction’ in a breathy voice, and it was the most 
amazing sort of ballet imaginable. You know. The white dress . . .”

Higginson served as “a mirror, a conduit, a messenger—a publicist. 
Somehow she identifies both [her] publicists, Higginson and Mabel Loomis 
Todd. And damned if they don’t pair up and sell her to the world.

“She performs for both of them. She gives them just the amount they 
need; she withholds access in just the right way.” She tantalizes Mabel, 
never reveals herself. “‘You may see me when I’m in my ultimate box, in 
my coffin. That’s when you’ll see me for the first time, in my box.’”

She “micromanaged” her own funeral, like another ballet, “with the Irish 
Catholic men carrying her out through the open barn—and put her in 
another box, the tomb, another box on top of it. The whole thing was 
orchestrated beyond belief.”

Yet I’m not convinced that her final performance was to have a pair of 
messengers, Mabel and Higginson, /entomb/ her poems in yet another box 
and publish them. The “phosphorescence” of her poems was from a very 
private glow. She spelled the way she wanted to spell, constructed her 
poems like hieroglyphics with all the weird minuscules and majuscules of 
her own hand, until you could no longer tell the difference between 
them; it was the deepest sort of play.

    My Basket holds—just—Firmaments—
    Those—dangle easy—on my arm,
    But smaller bundles—Cram. /[Fr358]/

She had no time for those “smaller bundles” of recognition and career. 
It’s not that she disregarded her own worth as a poet, but she saw that 
worth in a messianic way.

    The Poets light but Lamps—
    Themselves—go out—
    The Wicks they stimulate
    If vital Light

    Inhere as do the Suns—
    Each Age a Lens
    Disseminating their
    Circumference— /[Fr930]/

And she was out “opon Circumference,” where she wasn’t hindered by 
custodians of culture, and could explore as she pleased. /“Finite— to 
fail, but infinite—to Venture—”/ [Fr952] She tore language from its 
roots, created an internal Teletype that is still difficult for us to 
comprehend. None of us knows her motives. We have to pry, like clumsy 
surgeons. We attach ourselves to whatever clues we can. And we try to 
listen, crawl into that hole in time where her creativity began.

    The Clock strikes One
    That just struck Two— /[Fr1598D]/

...

For many critics, Dickinson has remained the madwoman entombed in her 
own little attic. Even Alfred Habegger, one of her most subtle 
biographers, believes that Dickinson’s “great genius is not to be 
distinguished from her madness.” And for Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan 
Gubar, Emily Dickinson may have posed as a madwoman to insulate herself, 
but became “truly a madwoman (a helpless agoraphobic, trapped in a room 
in her father’s house).” Whatever theories we may hold about madness and 
art, or about some great psychic wound Dickinson suffered—a relentless 
blow that Dickinson herself described—

    A Death blow— is a Life blow— to Some
    Who, till they died,
    Did not alive—become— /[Fr966A]/

her letters and poems are not the work of a madwoman, or someone trying 
to cover up her own debilitating tremors and attacks. In a letter to 
Colonel Higginson, Sue wrote that Emily “hated her peculiarities, and 
shrank from any notice of them as a nerve from the knife.” Why don’t I 
believe her? Dickinson’s entire life was a singularity; she could have 
been one of Melville’s “isolatoes,” living in the interior continent of 
her own mind. How else could she have thrived? But Sue had a terrifying 
need to normalize her sister-in-law, turn her into one more village 
poet, scribbling about unrequited love. She couldn’t bear to look at 
Emily’s deep rage and urge to destroy. Dickinson never shrank from any 
knife—she loved knives. It was her task at Mount Holyoke to clean the 
knives and collect them, like some kind of knife thrower in the making. 
She could wound us all with “Dirks of Melody.” [Fr1450] Mutilation had 
become a central motif in her letters and poems. “Here is Festival,” she 
wrote to Sue in 1864, exiled in Cambridge for nearly eight months while 
a Boston ophthalmologist dealt with her irritated eyes. “Where my Hands 
are cut, Her fingers will be found inside—” [Letter 288]

It’s one of Dickinson’s most disturbing images, as if Sue and Emily were 
sisters bound together by mutilation, but where had this mutilation come 
from? Had Emily cut herself, or had Sue crept inside her like some 
ghoul, with a dirk of her own? There’s a lot of bile and savagery in 
that image. And perhaps it might help us understand her own sudden, 
brutal remarks to Higginson about her mother, like Blackmur’s cat 
breaking into English. Dickinson wasn’t a madwoman, but she was 
/maddened/ with rage—against a culture that had no place for a woman 
with her own fiercely independent mind and will. Yet that annihilation 
of Emily Sr. was also about something else. Dickinson had to reinvent 
herself, or be stifled and destroyed by all the rituals around her—she 
was the daughter of the town patriarch. Cody believes that Dickinson was 
doomed to become a spinster because she was “too uncertain of her 
attractiveness and too fearful of heterosexuality to consider marriage.” 
That hardly stopped most other women of her class, and it wouldn’t have 
stopped the Belle of Amherst. I suspect that what disturbed her more 
than giving in to the “man of noon” was the notion of having to give up 
the Dickinson name. She could only become “The Wife—without the Sign!” 
[Fr194A] Her brother was the adored one, the pampered one—he would 
perpetuate the Dickinson line. Emily and her sister were household pets. 
Edward would school the girls, send them both to a female seminary, but 
he never mapped much of a future for them. Born into a genteel caste, 
the two sisters “suffered the tormenting paralysis of women deadlocked 
by a culture that treated them as both servant and superior,” according 
to Susan Howe in /My Emily Dickinson/, a kind of love song from one poet 
to her nineteenth-century sister. And so we have the picture of Emily 
Dickinson as the perpetual child, a pose she often adopted with 
Higginson and others as one of her many masks. But that childish whisper 
of Emily’s wasn’t her natural voice—her own hoarse contralto wasn’t a 
whisper at all. She was, as Howe insists, a woman “with Promethean 
ambition.” She would remain a Dickinson, but parent herself, become a 
creature of both sexes, defiantly original and androgynous.

    A loss of something ever felt I—
    The first that I could recollect
    Bereft I was—of what I knew not
    Too young that any should suspect

    A Mourner walked among the children
    I notwithstanding went about
    As one bemoaning a Dominion
    Itself the only Prince cast out— /[Fr1072]/

And it was as “the only Prince cast out” that she lived her life, 
searching for the “Delinquent Palaces” of her childhood—and her art. We 
can feel that streak of rebellion when she unconsciously sympathizes 
with a maverick student at Mount Holyoke. She had only been there a 
little longer than a month and was still homesick when she wrote to Austin:

    A young lady by the name of Beach, left here for home this morning.
    She could not get through her examinations & was very wild beside.
    /[Letter 17, November 2, 1847]/

It was this wildness that frightened and attracted Emily, a wildness 
that would haunt the dreamscape of her poems. We never learn what 
happened to Miss Beach, whether she settled down with some “man of noon” 
or remained a maverick—another “Prince cast out.” But Dickinson had to 
rebel in a much more secret and convoluted way, as the village 
Prometheus, who stole whatever she could from her Lexicon and the local 
gods of Amherst, and manufactured her very own fire. <


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