Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [57]
This act of daring takes off from a logical argument along the tightrope of the quatrain. She flaunts her footsteps. Her poetic line is a high-wire act: a walker pretends to hesitate, stop, and sway; then, fleet of foot, skips to the end.
In April 1862 she claimed that her poetry had been impelled by ‘a terror - since September - I could tell to none’. She sings, she said, because ‘I am afraid’. The date is specific: September 1861. What happened to leave her with a sense of deadness - ‘palsy’, she called it?
It may or may not be relevant that in September 1861 Bowles found himself ‘a wreck’. It was the result of stress affecting his heart, as well as sciatica. A temporary measure was to retreat to Dr Denniston’s sanatorium in Northampton; a longer-term plan was for Bowles to visit Europe the following spring. The poet may have felt abandoned. If so, it was a repeat of her sense of abandonment by friends whom she’d bound to her with maximum intensity: when Jane Humphrey had left for Ohio and Susan had gone off to Michigan, their letters had stopped; distance had dissolved ties vital to her Existence; immured as she was at home, it seemed to her a kind of death. Now Bowles, on the receiving end of insistent dramas and unable to cope with the attachments he’d roused, was to go. Her ‘palsy’ does follow the final Master letter, undated but thought to have been written in the summer of 1861. What brought the series of Master letters to an end? Did long-suffering Mrs Bowles nerve herself to make a stand? Mary Bowles kept that wicked-witch letter and could have used it as a weapon against a rival ‘Wife’. Her husband came to see Emily as ‘half angel, half demon’.
Awaiting his farewell call before Bowles sailed, Emily, Vinnie and Sue sat together downstairs at the Homestead, listening for his knock. When a knock came Vinnie tipped Pussy off her lap in her haste to open the door, while Emily held tight to her chair, putting out a petal (in her Daisy character). Alas, the knock turned out to be a delivery. Bowles failed to come and Emily let him know that ‘Hearts in Amherst - ache . . . If we could only care - the less - it would be so much easier’. Tears, she said, were still dropping from black, blue and her own brown eyes.
Yet no sooner did Bowles sail, on 9 April 1862, than she found a new correspondent in a Boston man of letters, Thomas Wentworth Higginson. He was to be her lifeline to the publishing world Bowles had formerly represented. Her need - to her a matter of life or death - was the stimulant of sustained private contact with that public space. It was to this stranger, Higginson, that she blurted out the ‘terror’ since September that had nearly finished her. The date of this her first letter to him, 15 April 1862, is commonly explained as a response to Higginson’s tips for young writers in a recent issue of the Atlantic. True enough, but Bowles’s departure six days earlier could have been a keener incentive. Exit one leader of opinion. Enter another.
After seven months Bowles returned. On 17 November he came to the Homestead, expecting the heartfelt reception he had missed.
‘I cannot see you’, was the message Emily sent downstairs, though tuned to his voice below. But why, when one of her letters had cried out to him to return at once? Such agitated feeling could have led her protective father to ban further contact. She did not see Bowles face to face for the next twelve years - so long as her father lived. It was part of her image to be an obedient daughter, but she exercised