Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [24]
Emily turned to him. ‘Wouldn’t you like to have the Declaration of Independence to read? Or the Lord’s Prayer repeated?’
Mrs Dickinson would have taken pride in the spotlessness of her house, its welcoming fires and the home produce on the table. It was customary for middle-class women to work alongside their servants, in keeping with the New England work ethic. Reproving elders urged Emily to sweep if her spirits were low, and visit the halt and lame, the old and infirm, the ugly and disagreeable ‘- the perfectly hateful to me - all these to see - and be seen by - an opportunity rare for cultivating meekness - and patience - and submission’.
There was an alternative: after Commencement, Jane Humphrey, like her sister before her, took up a teaching post at Amherst Academy. Over the following school year, 1848-9, she and Emily drew close. They would sit of an afternoon on the doorstep of the Dickinson house, their voices too low to disturb the birds singing in the tall cherry trees. The birds took fright only at their brushing dresses. Emily was blissfully unaware that Jane had a job to do. Her friend was to be a ‘rock, support’ for Emily who pours out her anger against the demands of housekeeping. This lava, carried by molten bursts of ardour, burns out friendship’s need for reciprocity.
It could not escape Emily that she lost one friend after another. Sarah Tracy and Sarah Pynchen had moved away, leaving a mysterious silence. She wondered with ‘inexpressible regret’ what it was that prevented their answering her letters. Nor was there acknowledgement of a paper she sent to Hatty Merrill. It’s the unique character of the personal letter to reflect the correspondent, and though Emily’s letters are wonderfully imaginative and amusing, they do not often call up her correspondent. Jane, for one, remains a faceless ‘darling’. Not for long. Without warning, Jane ‘ran away’, and her departure to take up other posts provoked Emily to a comic explosion of outrage, as much about retrieving control over Jane as about loss.
She caricatures her own incredulity and mounting fury to find Jane ‘gone - gone! Gone how - or where - or why - who saw her go - help - hold - bind - and keep her - put her into States-prison - into the House of Correction - bring out the long lashed whip - and put her feet in the stocks -and give her a number of stripes and make her repent her going!’
Emily then cools off with a humorously defiant self-characterisation as a tempter to be avoided. ‘. . . I didn’t mean to make you wicked - but I was - and am - and shall be - and I was with you so much that I could’nt help contaminate. Are you ever lonely in Warren [Massachusetts] - are you lonely without me . . . I want to know.’
The shift to tenderness is compelling, especially Emily’s whisper about a secret script: ‘silent’, unwritten letters, full of affection and confidence. She will try, she says, a pen-and-paper letter, ‘though not half so precious as the other kind. I have written those at night.’ Silent letters are more vehement, since there’s no need to whisper or shut the door. She wonders if Jane is awake and writing to her at the same moment ‘with that spirit pen - and on sheets from out the sky. Did you ever - and were we together in any of those nights?’
Expressiveness, intelligence, intimacy, all these Emily offers Jane, as she had offered the same to the Amherst girls who had roused her feelings. She saw herself storing ‘treasures’ for them. Yet, sooner or later, they contrived to escape an emotional power venting itself and catching them up in its whirlwind.
Since Emily Dickinson rejected distortion with huge courage, her delight in the genuine was correspondingly intense. She would have been on the look-out for it. ‘Experiment to me / Is every one I meet / If it contain a Kernel?’ She regarded others in the light of nourishment, as a squirrel regards a nut: ‘. . . Meat within, is requisite’. No kernels to be had at Holyoke,