Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [56]
There is yet another fact which rules out Bowles as the sole source for Dickinson’s ‘Master’: his home in Springfield, Massachusetts. ‘Master’ lives at a greater distance, for Daisy suggests he come ‘to New England’ to see her.
Dickinson’s poems, like Shakespeare’s sonnets, occupy a mid-space between experience and imagination. The same with Shelley who, as Ann Wroe has shown, fills his poems with scenes and figures that ‘begged to be decoded’, but which are likelier to be figments or symbols ‘than actual fragments of his past’. In Dickinson’s letters to ‘Master’, the emotional force of ‘I’ seems to authenticate her confessions, but though, as readers, we lend ourselves to the intimacy of this voice, we can’t forget that Dickinson’s letters are as close as letters come to the inventiveness of the poems that are her ‘letter to the World’. An erupting voice burns away the life/art distinction. The fact that Dickinson placed the Master letters with her poetry rather than with her correspondence suggests he was largely invention.
Instead of plumping for an actual Master, we might feel our way into a woman’s desire for character. The poet is enlivened by the imagined harshness of Master’s character in a way that stimulates fertile imaginings of a potential situation that might have grown out of an initial situation we aren’t meant to recover. Biography is not exactly irrelevant, but bound to be misleading with poems that throw the onus of introspection back into the lap of the reader: they compel us to recognise how our cherished emotion of love - even (or especially) deathless love - is largely imagined, a fictitious vessel for our tastes and dreams. If this is so, then friendship, and the kind of love that grows through friendship, are bound to prevail over a master-love in a woman’s daily heartland. That back-door track between Emily and Susan, the path worn, step after step, day after day, by the poet’s feet, could have been in reality more compelling than the perhaps tenuous contact behind her Master letters.
In the third Master letter she imagines herself as queen, sleeping beside ‘Plantagenet’, their bodies breathing together. Why Plantagenet, rather than another royal name? A Plantagenet is a member of a royal line opposed to the line of Lancaster in the civil wars of fifteenth-century England. The name implies strife ahead, the Wars of the Roses. Dickinson was enthralled with Shakespeare’s Henry VI, which re-creates these wars. Crookbacked but active and pitiless in Henry VI is the future Richard III who murders his kin, other Plantagenets who stand between him and the crown. He will fight to the death, the last of an embattled line of killers and victims.
Daisy, meanwhile, is enthroned on Master’s knee. There are no scruples about his legitimate wife and no inhibitions. All the same, she continues to conceal something she cannot communicate to Master. Her secret outlasts the Master letters.
Vinnie said, ‘Emily never had any love disaster.’ So long as the lovelorn image holds sway, Vinnie’s statement sounds like a cover-up, but could she be right? With strong-willed imaginations it’s vital to stress the gains that accompany the pains of denial and longing. During these extraordinary years the poet is distilling theorems of experience from her life: desire, parting, death-in-life, spiritual quickening, the creative charge and creative detachment just short of freezing. I want to propose that her poems work when a theorem is applied to a reader’s life. It’s a mistake to spot Dickinson in all her poems; the real challenge is to find our selves. She demands a reciprocal response, a complementary act of introspection. For the poem to work fully we have to complete it with our own thoughts and feelings. Her dash is not casual; it’s a prompt, bringing the