Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [58]
Once she’d sent Bowles a rare first edition of the Brontë sisters’ Poems, their first book, self-published in 1846, which sold only two copies. ‘Keep the Yorkshire Girls, if you please, with the faith of their friend and yours.’ The message is plain: as a friend to the Brontës, he should take note of a parallel situation, the unrecognised poet who was at this moment writing to him.
Bowles missed the point when he returned the volume.
‘Please to need me . . . you denied my Bronte’, she’d reproached him. ‘Teach us to miss you less.’
Her letters to eminent men auditioned them for roles as master and mentor to the future star of the ‘Opera’, and further, these letters devised the blueprint for her legend. In the early 1860s people began to notice her shut door. The burning life of the ‘Ethiop within’ was belied by the façade of the woman in white: ‘Ourself behind ourself, concealed—’.
What does she conceal, and so fixedly that her lips are ‘soldered’? Intimate as she is with ‘Master’ (at least in fantasy), he does reproach her for holding back something she will not ‘tell’. Nor would she tell Sam Bowles why she would not see him on his return. What word cannot pass her lips or shape itself on paper, even in drafts for her eyes alone? If ‘Master’ was largely fantasy, what was it that ‘struck’ her ticking ‘through’? Legend had it that Dickinson closed off from life to languish over disappointed love. But there was a simpler reason for seclusion.
5
‘SNARL IN THE BRAIN’
The ticking of the hours as she folds her shawl about her shoulders and tends her flowers, at thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, has little to do with ‘the bolt’ of her ‘Existence’, to be found in the hinterland of the past or in what we might today call the DNA of the Dickinson family. Dickinson myth posits a wraith who is singular, but what if we tracked ‘the bolt’ into the plurality of family: the inescapable network of inheritance, the time-bomb of innate traits? DNA can be a form of tragedy. Yet during these blazing years of the early 1860s, Emily Dickinson transformed sickness into a story of promise:
My loss, by sickness—Was it Loss?
Or that Etherial Gain—
One earns by measuring the Grave—
Then—measuring the Sun—
Convalescing after another bout of sickness early in 1865, she mulls it over (‘As One does Sickness over’), still open to Gain: the ‘Chances’ of an emergent ‘Identity’ (as poet and visionary) which health (‘blessed health’) would have obscured.
Sickness is always there, unnamed, shielded by cover stories. In youth, a cough is mentioned; in her mid-thirties, trouble with eyes. Neither came to much. A love drama seems to explain her poems of collapse, but what if these dramas change places? What if the poems of collapse were the primary drama - what if sickness is the story? If so, her life shifts. A different reason for seclusion stares us in the face.
Collectively, in her poems, there’s a history of a mechanism breaking down, a body dropping, in one of her clock poems, when the ticking stops. It ‘will not stir for Doctors’. In ‘A Clock stopped’ it’s a clock with miniature figures who appear on the hour. The figures dangle, hunched in pain, like puppets bowing. Not the clock on the mantel, Dickinson says, pressing her point: it’s the body that seizes up.
‘Agony’ is her truth in a poem about telling the truth: ‘Men do not sham Convulsion, / Nor simulate, a Throe—’. Could her volcanoes and earthquakes, the unexploded Bomb in her Bosom and her life as Loaded Gun, repeat this truth? The capitals, like the distinctive nature of her ‘Existence’, are deliberate: ‘Convulsion’, she says, ‘Throe’. ‘Transport’ is taught ‘by throe’. Even without her explicitness we hear the jolting rhythms of poems with protracted