Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [227]
134 ‘crumb’: (c. late May 1877). L501.
134 ‘scintillation’: To Mrs Holland (c. early 1877). L491.
134 Mattie and WAD ashamed of each other: L492.
135 MLT on epilepsy and WAD’s nervous make-up: Journals, V (18 Oct 1891), 98-9. Yale.
135 broken crockery: Reported to MLT when she was preparing the first edition of ED’s letters (1894).
136 ‘Loaded Gun’: op. cit.
136 ‘power to kill’: Benfey, Hummingbirds, notes the source in Byron, ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’, a poem to which ED alludes in her ‘Master’ letters.
6: TELLING
137 ‘rearrange’; ‘Amputate . . .’; ‘bandaged’: ‘Rearrange a “Wife’s” Affection!’ (c. late 1861). J1737/Fr267.
138 ‘as Firmament to Fin’: L265.
138 ‘’Tis so appalling . . .’: (c. summer 1862). J281/Fr341.
138 Men dying ‘externally’ etc: ‘We dream—it is good we are dreaming’ (c. summer 1863). J531/Fr584. This poem is discussed by Miller, A Poet’s Grammar, 80. I’m indebted to Linn Cary Mehta for an observation that ED wrote more death poems during the Civil War.
139 ‘perfectness’; ‘situates’: ‘Perception of an Object costs’, op. cit: ch. 5.
139 ‘surge’ in the brain: Philip Davis, ‘The Shakespeared Brain’, Literary Review (July 2008).
139 John Adams and ED: Thanks to music critic Philip Clark for playing Harmonium.
139 Adams’s objective treatment of ED: I owe this again to Philip Clark.
139 pop stars: M. Ward, for one (in Post-War); the Italian Carla Bruni, for another. The latter’s album released in 2007 included adaptations of ED, Yeats and Auden, sung ‘in a smoky, quivering English accent’. M.Ward is one of the singer-songwriters discussed by Laura Barton in ‘This be the verse’, Guardian (13 Oct 2006). Portrait of Bruni’s pop career (before marrying the French premier Sarkozy) in the London Times (19 Dec 2007).
139 Doherty nicking ED and Dostoyevsky: ‘Emily Dickinson? She’s hardcore’, interview with Laura Barton, Guardian (3 Oct 2006).
140 ‘I took one Draught of Life . . .’: J1725/Fr396.
140 ED resented editorial interference: ‘The Snake’, she said, was robbed of her.
140 poems provisional, with continued alterations in booklets: Wineapple, White Heat, 74.
141 a persuasive case: EDC as part of the Dickinson Electronic Archives. Led by Martha Nell Smith, the Dickinson Editing Collective has an ongoing project to publish thirty of ED’s MSS (together with transcription and commentary) on the internet. The idea is to eliminate editorial interventions between ED and her readers.
141 ‘Caxton killed Anon’: ‘Anon’, ed. Brenda Silver, in the Virginia Woolf issue of Twentieth Century Literature (fall/winter 1979).
141 ‘. . . some trace of her’: The Cottesloe at the National Theatre, London (Oct 2008).
141 alternative to publication: Martha Nell Smith, Rowing in Eden. See too Petrino, 20.
142 ‘Publication . . . is the Auction . . .’: (c. late 1863). J709/Fr788.
143 ‘donkeys’: LL, 81. ‘Donkeys, Davy,’ she said, alluding to David Copperfield where David’s eccentric aunt Betsy Trotwood gives this alarm when donkeys stray into her garden.
143 ‘The Soul selects . . .’: op. cit.
143 ‘Rare . . .’; ‘sovreign People’: (c. 1865). L336/Fr893.
143 ‘altitude of me—’: ‘’Twas just this time . . .’ (c. summer 1862). J445/Fr344.
143 ‘Mine . . . White Election!’: J528/Fr411.
144 ‘I grope’: To SB (early summer 1862). L266.
144 SHD and Peruvian mines: (c. 1862). L258.
144 Bowles and North African mines: (c. 1875). L438: ‘your Numidian Haunts’. At the time of the Roman Republic, the province of Numidia stretched across present-day Algeria and Tunisia. Cited by Farr, 188, as amongst ED’s erotic metaphors.
144 ‘I have lost a Sister . . .’: L395.
144 ‘a hedge away’: See poem celebrating SHD’s birthday, end ch. 3.
144 ‘own a Susan of my own’: L531 is a letter-poem sent to SHD and signed ‘Emily’. Fr1436. Farr, 128, surmises that ED’s phrase was only a gesture of acknowledgement of their amorous past.
145 Sue as stranger: (c. 1877). L530.
145 so the story goes: Remembered by Gertrude Graves, ‘A Cousin