Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [47]
And I will enfold!
Deathless love, like the ‘rocks beneath’ in Wuthering Heights, is invisible to a society based on marriage and procreation, in which the affinities of twin souls have no institutional habitation.
Whether this attachment was physically erotic as well as ardent and infinite remains in question. What is unquestionable is the primacy of this relationship for the genius that began to show itself in the late 1850s. ‘No Words ripple like Sister’s,’ Emily told Sue in later years. To a poet nothing had mattered so much as words, and their genealogy was ‘very sweet to trace’. Far back, at the start, Sue’s words had been ‘Silver’ to ‘the lone student of the Mines’.
Their bond was a day-to-day affair, reinforced as a family and neighbours’ tie that was to last thirty-six years. But what was formative for a poet starting out in her twenties was to find (or induce) in ‘Sister’ a response to light her fire.
4
‘WIFE WITHOUT THE SIGN’
In her early thirties, between 1860 and 1863, Emily Dickinson wrote 663 poems. Amongst them were many of her greatest, rising to ‘My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—’ late in 1863. The fiery output of four years produced more than a third of her complete works. What prompted this? In 1863, when the poet was thirty-two, she shows off that well-conducted woman tying her hat as she goes about the duties of her clock-bound day, with an air of having so much to do; yet mild domesticity guards the ‘Bomb’ in her breast for which no words exist but which she demonstrates with an explosion of dashes as she recounts how, some time back, ‘Existence—stopped—struck—my ticking through—’. This is thought to have been the transforming experience in three letters of 1858-61, addressed to an unidentified ‘Master’, which enter into a forbidden love, impossible in this world but directed at the next.
The three letters - drafted, maybe unsent - reveal that she cultivated a desire, if only in fantasy, for a married ‘Master’. He is bearded; he has a public face to maintain; and sickness disables him from time to time. Sickness is a bond for Dickinson, many of whose poems in the early 1860s have to do with the unexplained onset of dysfunction.
Both the love drama and the unnamed dysfunction play into a pervasive drama of secrecy. To ‘tell’ or not to tell: that is Dickinson’s repeated question. What she does tell, almost obsessively, is that a secret has shaped her Existence, an eventful hidden life of ‘Fire, and smoke, and gun’ at odds with her event-less visible life. It’s a secret often on her lips. Now, the poet’s lips are sealed; now, they crack open in ‘a quiet—Earthquake style—’. If open, the ‘lips’ are ‘buckled’ - distorted - by the remade landscape of her inner life. The curiosity of neighbours, the ‘praters’ and ‘babblers’, must go unsatisfied. ‘Tell the truth but tell it slant’ is her way. To ‘tell’ is a tease, for she’s often unintelligible, even if intensely confessional. Her more intimate communication is relayed in riddling, fragmentary terms which call into question our customary stories.
‘I am alive I guess’, she starts abruptly, lifting her head. ‘I felt my life with both my hands . . .’. She leans into the glass to judge her features, releasing the curl of her hair from its tight folds and pushing her cheeks with both hands to smooth away her mother’s dimples - gazing into a different face - before the dimples ‘twinkled back’.
Confessional gestures in the many poems starting with ‘I’ or ‘My’ beckon us towards an unseen life. He touched me . . . The intimacy is palpable. I groped opon his breast . . . Only, the confession comes missing what a biographer would see as the crucial fact: the identity of ‘Master’; or the diagnosis of a ‘sickness’ that makes the body ‘dangle’ or drop; or what exactly it was that ‘I’ knew when, after ‘dropping down’, she ‘finished knowing then—’. This tantalising (and characteristic) cutting off of confession with a dash invites us into a situation we have to imagine. Her earthquake style throws up fragments of buried life about,