Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [52]
While Kate took no notice of his signals, the Dickinsons urged Bowles to forget her.
‘I would not, if I could, - & could not if I would,’ was his quick comeback.
Later, when his life seemed to limp along, he asked wistfully to be commended to ‘the two Utica schoolgirls’ (Kate and Sue). His were emotional infidelities, arguably as bad if not worse than physical adultery. As his flirtations stacked up, he began to fear the Dickinsons might come to think him ‘wanton & fickle’.
The Dickinson sisters he referred to collectively as ‘the girls from the paternal mansion’ or simply ‘the girls’. The few times he singled out Emily, his messages were distanced, rather jocular, as though wary. It’s the tone of a man who wants to signal appreciation - or more - yet does not want to be drawn too far into the dramas her poems devised. She was sending him many of her poems at this time.
He teased her in lieu of encouragement: ‘to the Queen Recluse my especial sympathy - that she has “overcome the world.” - Is it really true that they sing “Old Hundred” & “Aleluia” perpetually, in heaven . . . and are dandelions, asphodels, & maiden’s [vows] the standard flowers of the ethereal?’
A printing office allowed little opportunity for the ‘spiritual manifestations’ the Dickinsons discussed. Bowles wanted them to know these did ‘live ever & for an age in me’. He must have made this known also to Emily, for he sent remembrances (via Austin) ‘for the sister of the other house who never forgets my spiritual longings’. He was not without an affinity for her, as he once confessed to Austin: ‘I have been in a savage, turbulent state for some time - indulging in a sort of divine disgust at everything & everybody - I guess a good deal as Emily feels.’
At the time she drafted the second Master letter, in the spring of 1861, her poems began to heighten the romantic stakes. Once, when Bowles was next door, she assumed her Daisy character in a poem dispatched along the path between the houses. ‘If it [you] had no pencil’, came wrapped around the stub of a pencil, inviting Bowles to try hers, worn out though it was with ‘Writing much to thee’. Daisy’s voice is as arch as in the Master letters, and plays the same Little Me role.
If he can return no word, she asks, would he draw her a daisy as diminutive as she’d been when he’d ‘plucked’ her?
Her ways of reaching out for dramatic material, though more secluded and intense, are essentially no different from the habits of any number of writers who work up the dramas in their lives. As Henry James said, ‘art makes life’. We have no way of knowing what, if anything, lay behind a poem about a fight to the death, apart from the curious fact that Dickinson gave the poem to one person only, saying, ‘I cant explain it, Mr Bowles -’.
Two swimmers wrestled on the spar
Until the morning sun—
When One turned, smiling, to the land—
Oh God! the other One!
The stray ships—passing, spied a face
Opon the waters borne,
With eyes, in death, still begging—raised,
And hands—beseeching—thrown!
Part of a poem’s meaning lies with its recipient, in this instance Bowles, yet to pursue biography is not what this poem asks us to do. The conflict is perfectly distilled from the context of its composition and designed to terminate in us, her readers, dredging up our own, sometimes silenced confrontations - anything we might have experienced of damage and abandonment.
Dickinson’s counter-drama against abandonment is a series of poems where ‘I’ is knit to a Master figure. It’s an imaginary drama about an intruder on a marriage, told from the intruder’s point of view. ‘I’m “wife” . . . I’m Czar—I’m “Woman” now—’. She posits an alternative marriage as a permanent translation from earth to heaven. While Dickinson draws on a long poetic convention in which human and divine love explain each other, the