Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [71]
This surge is said to be a kind of syncopation. In jazz, the jolt of syncopation interrupts the glide of musical pathways. This rhythm, as vital to jazz as to Dickinson’s start-stop lines, has made her appealing to composers, from John Adams’s Harmonium with its marvellously objective choral treatment of ‘Because I could not stop for Death’, to pop stars who adapt her lines. The British pop star Pete Doherty, interviewed on his release from prison in 2006, owned to stealing a copy of Dickinson from his Bedford school (as well as a copy of Crime and Punishment from Her Majesty’s Prison library).
‘Actually, I nicked one or two of [Dickinson’s] lines,’ he whispered, sipping a Guinness in London’s Boogaloo bar. ‘Aargh, she’s outrageous man! She’s fuckin’ hardcore! Can’t ignore her.’
What did he pinch?
‘I took one Draught of Life, paid only the market price,’ he quoted. ‘I added, “now I’m estranged”.’ He delivered each word with a point in the air, like an invisible karaoke ball. ‘Bom bom bom bom bom bom.’ He saw his present-day life - estranged, imprisoned, finding solace in words - in what Dickinson had to tell of her life in 1862:
I took one Draught of Life—
I’ll tell you what I paid—
Precisely an existence—
The market price, they said . . .
Curiously, Doherty expresses a Dickinsonian aversion to public eyes. To perform in public is a nightmare, like war, ‘but to sit down and write in solitude is like a dream’.
The lyrics of pop stars and the handwritten poems of Dickinson function outside the standardising rules of print. Polished as her poems are, they remain at odds with publication. Their explicit claim on immortality turns on the question of transmission. Dickinson famously resented editorial interference in the matter of a comma in one of the poems Bowles published. With so few poems printed in her lifetime and none of them reliably, there is the extraordinary phenomenon of an entire oeuvre without the finalisations of print. This leaves her poems provisional, as in fact they were.
The manuscripts exist in variant versions sent to different recipients. Many words keep in play a choice of variants listed at the bottom of her page. Even after Dickinson copied poems in her booklets she continued to alter them, dividing long stanzas into quatrains, shifting punctuation, substituting words. Her lineation too must remain in question as her hand reaches the right-hand edge of the page: is it a run-on line or the start of a new line? No one can be sure. Most debatable of all: what is the meaning of her idiosyncratic punctuation, the variegated dashes standardised in print?
The only solution would be to shun print culture. The Dickinson editor and critic Martha Nell Smith makes a persuasive case for reading Dickinson’s manuscripts as scans posted on the internet. From this point of view the standard three-volume edition with its laborious apparatus (and even more a ‘reading’ edition) becomes the unsatisfactory alternative: a construct of print conventions and editorial decisions which may or may not accord with the poet’s intention.
Dickinson’s distance from print retains the manner of improvisation. A confessional ferment invites reciprocity from readers who, ideally, will apply the ferment to our own lives. Dashes, pushing the language apart, create spaces for readers to fill. To join with her can give an ordinary mind an amazing surge. Print culture, by contrast, renders the reader more passive, an inert receptacle for the book trade. Virginia Woolf, a hands-on publisher who often set the type herself, suggests that Caxton’s press (established in 1478, the first in England) ended the improvisations of the anonymous. As she put it, ‘Caxton killed Anon’. The spontaneity of Anon is revived by Dickinson’s hand as it moves across her page. The brevity of her provisional statements, sustained