Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [29]
My guess is that in January 1850, when Emily received her ‘beautiful’ copy of Emerson’s poems from Newton, together with a letter, she underwent an Emersonian conversion. She found heaven in her own soul, reversing the sense of depravity that chastened the faithful around her and claimed her sister and father later that year. Privately she questioned her society’s abasement before its image of a paternalistic Omnipotence who shames disobedience and prompts the polarising of the saved and the sinners: ‘bright halos’ on one side; cast-down eyes on the other. Whatever Ben Newton meant to her as a man, he certainly backed her individualistic hotline to the colossal substance of Immortality. In Emersonian terms, that godlike character was latent in all beings, be it man or woman or child, with the courage and imagination to elicit a transcendent being.
Then, a bolt. Newton contracted tuberculosis in 1851 and then, on 4 June, he made a move that took Emily aback.
‘B.F.N. is married’, she broke the news to Austin. His choice was Sarah Warner Rugg, a woman twelve years older than himself. As an ill man he needed steady care more than the excitements of twenty-year-old Emily Dickinson, who was periodically ill herself. This is no more than a guess. In truth, we know nothing beyond the fact that the bond with Emily Dickinson existed, that he ‘often wrote’ and that what he said was formative for the future poet. Ben Newton was a master of phrases, with the power to imprint themselves on her memory. Nine years after his death she recalled proudly, ‘My dying Tutor told me that he would like to live till I had been a poet . . .’. She must, then, have shown Newton her poems, none of which survive from this period (though conceivably she recopied some when she started to store her work in the late 1850s).
Newton sent her a message from Worcester in the last week of his life. She could quote his words twenty-three years later: ‘If I live, I will go to Amherst - if I die, I certainly will.’
For a married man to figure Amherst - that is, Emily - as his heaven confirms her secret status. ‘Title divine—is mine! / The Wife—without the Sign! . . . / Betrothed—without the swoon / God sends us Women—. . .’. We can’t be sure what biographical experience lies behind this later poem, only that the poet cultivated this kind of possessiveness and that Newton’s message seems to license the first instance. There was no communication between Mrs Newton and Emily, who seems not to have expected Newton’s death on 23 March 1853.
‘Oh Austin, Newton is dead’, she wrote when the news reached Amherst four days later.
Nine months later she still longed to find out his final state of mind. Possibly she hoped for a deathbed message. Not wanting to contact his wife, Emily approached Newton’s distinguished minister, Edward Everett Hale. It was a determinedly disarming letter that she mailed to the minister in January 1854, presenting herself as a passive recipient of manly instruction. It’s an overdone performance. She had been ‘but a child’ at the time of her tie with Newton, she insists, though in fact she had been an eligible young woman and he an eligible young man whose tastes were congenial beyond anything she had so far known. She pictures a humble little innocent, at the knee, as it were, of a ‘gentle, yet grave Preceptor’, teaching her what to read, which authors to admire, ‘and that sublimer lesson, a faith in things unseen’. These truths mingle with her child-fiction.7
If, at fourteen, Emily had gazed at the dying Sophia, a death that brought home to her the fact of mortality, so at twenty-two she had to take in the silencing of Newton’s voice, another who had seen and sanctioned the creature she felt herself to be. ‘My life closed twice before its close’, she wrote. ‘Parting