Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [27]
I pass with yonder comet free,
Pass with the comet into space.
Power resides in the act of transition from one inward state to another. It refuses to settle or be defined - consistent with Emily’s refusal to define herself in the expected way. In his poem ‘Merlin’, Emerson conjures up an American poet more forceful and innovative than he himself. He prophesies a poet who will strike the chords ‘rudely and hard’, one of the roughs taking his passage through the American scene. Whitman answered this call, saying famously, ‘I was bubbling, bubbling, and Emerson brought me to the boil.’ Towards the end of ‘Merlin’ Emerson calls up a ‘sister’ poet, a spinner of words who uses rhymes ‘with ruin rife’. Did this encourage Emily Dickinson to devise the off-rhymes unknown - and unacceptable - to her time?
Newton, acting in effect as Emerson’s emissary to the untried Emily Dickinson, urged her to become a poet. He spoke to her secret self, not in an alluring Rochester manner but more as an elder, or so she later gave out, together with protestations of deference to his wisdom. After Newton left Amherst to set up a legal practice in Worcester, Massachusetts, he wrote to her. At first her parents put a brake on her side of the correspondence: she was not to write for at least three weeks. When that time was up, she confided to Jane in January 1850, ‘I shall.’
She was just nineteen, raring to write to Newton and seething with unused dramas during this particular month. It was the same month as she wrote her ‘wicked’ letter to Abiah as well as an even weirder letter to a Monson uncle, Joel Norcross, who had recently visited Amherst. He was a young uncle, about the same age as Newton, but unlike the high-minded Newton he was an importer of fancy goods. Emily relays a ‘vision’ of young men who ‘kept gay stores, and deceived the foolish ones who came to buy’ and, amongst these, ‘one man [who] told a lie to his niece’.
What the lie was she doesn’t say, but her letter mounts two dark dramas. First comes the Puritan drama of depravity. Here, she plays up the power of its warning voice and in a frenzy denounces her mother’s brother for crimes that will hurl him into hell. In her dream he’s already there: ‘up from the pit you spoke’. There’s a punitive relish in unmasking this merchant: ‘You villain without a rival - unparraleled [sic] doer of crimes - scoundrel . . . promise-breaker . . . I call upon all nature to lay hold of you - let fire burn - . . . and hungry wolves eat up - and lightning strike - and thunder stun - let friends desert . . .’ and so on until murder is justified: ‘I shall kill you’.
Having sentenced her uncle, the voice calms a little and contemplates the consequences. Her dear Aunt Lavinia will miss her brother, to be sure, ‘but trials will come in the best of families - and I think they are usually for the best - they give us new ideas - and those are not to be laughed at.’ Laughed at? Further calm is in order, for she’s on the verge of rampant hilarity. Instead, a deliberate exercise in forethought firms up for the kill, the dramatic sequel. Where Macbeth displaced responsibility on to the supernatural - the witches who incite him to murder - Emily displaced responsibility on to the weapon. She does it airily, almost comically, amused by this mental trick. If she were to stab her uncle while he slept ‘the dagger’s to blame - it’s no business of mine’. It would be different if she wrenched out his heart with her own hands. She concocts a corroborating story in which a man pointed ‘a loaded gun’ at another and ‘it’ killed him. People hanged the gun’s owner ‘for murder’. This is misplaced justice for, Dickinson argues, a gun has an independent existence, if only the ‘stupid’ world could understand. ‘My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—’, composed thirteen years later, originates in this fantasy.
What sounds mad in prose works as poetry, where the gun acts for its ‘Master’ - acts as a divine agent who tracks the Master’s targets. The speaker’s life, loaded with shot and chosen for that reason, stands