Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [55]
Bowles told Austin he must withdraw from the Dickinsons. His health, he said, required him to abstain. ‘You ought to know without my explaining, ’ he added, unwilling to specify his reasons. ‘You are certainly not ignorant of them. I must respect them; so must you.’ He was probably recalling a confidential outburst to Austin, when they had been riding on their own on the outskirts of Amherst.
‘My nature revolts at a divided, contradictory loyalty,’ he had said. ‘But my life, to be happy & harmonious at home, must have friends abroad, - & yet it must be happy at home.’
The future of the tie, as Bowles spelt it out, is similar to Emily Dickinson’s prospect in her Master poems: to see a special person less and yet to ‘have as much as ever, or rather more, in eternity’.
Many of her letters to Bowles contained poems pertinent to what she had to ‘tell’ - not just anyone, but what she had to tell this heartfelt man, this susceptible husband, this editor with a national reach. During these brilliant years she composed poems with an eye to him: the exultation of the ‘Wife without the Sign’; the divine furore of the ‘soul’s superior instants’; the sickness, collapse and longing. Message after poetic message had flown his way. Could he understand her? Could he - while continuing to publish verse with a sugar-coating of sentiment - wake up to these blasts of candour?
One poem she sent him appears to be resigned to her failure to quicken his interest: ‘I’ve nothing Else, to bring, you know—/ So I keep bringing these—/ Just as Night keeps fetching stars—/ To our familiar eyes.’ Was she too familiar for him to see the star quality? Perhaps Bowles would only mind [notice] these poems if they didn’t come.
Privately, Bowles disliked ‘Lady-writers’ and counted himself lucky they wrote at home and out of sight: ‘it is treading upon eggs all the time to deal with them,’ he grumbled, ‘they receive the unvarnished truth as if it were a red-hot bullet’. Could this be the sort of bullet that hit the Bird in a Master letter?
Dickinson went on trying for quite some time because Sam Bowles exuded promise, attracted as he was to intelligence in women. In conversation, in person, his attentiveness, his ‘Arabian’ looks and a feminine quality appealing in a man who is unafraid of it, made Bowles unlike the local pedants, whom she called ‘manikins’. A welcome gesture from Bowles was a message to the poet to send him one of her ‘little gems’. If he did pause to read, truly read, the poems Dickinson sent, she thought he’d be as ‘puzzled’ as she - wouldn’t he just - to find their stars pointing ‘Our way Home!’ Home to her? Or to an eternal home? Home is one of her words that carry a residue of private connotation.
She sent some of her wildest poems to Bowles at this time and he published five, including the emotional intoxication of her ‘little tippler / Leaning against the—Sun’ (4 May 1861) and her mockery of a deadly heaven in ‘Safe in their alabaster chambers’ (1 March 1862). The newspaper preserved the poet’s anonymity, but imposed banal or misleading titles like ‘The May Wine’, as well as chiming rhymes. Editorial fiddling ‘robbed’ her, she said, of her Snake sliding across his boggy acre. Her indignation is legendary.
One problem with Bowles is that he employed a literary editor called Fidelia Cooke, who was clueless about poetry. It was typical of Bowles’s public support for women that he appointed a woman (the second ever, after the Boston writer on women’s rights, Margaret Fuller) to be on the staff of an influential daily newspaper; unfortunately, Cooke published the kind of sentimental tosh that far from advancing women’s intelligence kept it and readers in their place. It could be that Bowles, impressed with public excitement over Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Charlotte Brontë, was lending himself to a new fashion for women’s writing, albeit without much discernment. Bowles himself was content with ‘tit-bits’ of poetry, the staple of The Household Book of Poetry, his gift to Sue and Austin. He thought every household