Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [73]
Mine—by the Right of the White Election!
Mine—by the Royal Seal!
Mine—by the sign in the Scarlet prison—
Bars—cannot conceal!
Mine—here—in Vision—and in Veto!
Mine—by the Grave’s Repeal—
Titled—Confirmed—
Delirious Charter!
Mine—long as Ages steal!
In her late teens Dickinson had declared herself wicked in the terms of her society; in her late twenties she had conceived her adulterous drama with ‘Master’ and morally deserved to wear the Scarlet Letter; nevertheless she had some unmistakable sign: a vision or visitation. ‘The Wife—without the Sign’ was to be saved at about the time she shut her door on Sam Bowles when he came to see her on his return from Europe. In 1873 Mr Dickinson was still preparing for election in his plain style: ‘I give myself to God.’
The New England Puritans, taking their moral pulse, made distinctions between church members, cutting off sinners from the chosen. This distinction is definitive for the Dickinson family (as for others of their kind, like Eliot). Exclusive habits of mind encouraged Dickinson’s freedom to choose her readers.
With poems copied in her own hand, Dickinson reached out to others. ‘I grope fast, with my fingers, for all out of my sight I own - to get it nearer - ’, she explained to Sam Bowles. I own. Her verbs assert her estate: ‘my friends are my Estate’, she declares, extending the boundaries of friendship as friends become her readers. Sue made her think of Peruvian mines; Bowles, the Roman mines in North Africa; each had gems for this poet. Sue had taught her, as the poet saw it, to ‘esteem’ her ‘poverty’ for the sake of ‘Life’s Estate - with you!’ Her reach is an act of possession. Lassoes of letters went whirling out from the Homestead to more than forty correspondents. A lifelong correspondent, Elizabeth Holland (whose Amherst family had been old friends of the Dickinsons), was tugged back when she slipped out of reach, retrieved with this lasso:
c. September 1873
. . . I have lost a Sister. Her name was not Austin and it was not Vinnie. She was scant of stature though expansive spirited and last seen in November - Not the November heretofore, but Heretofore’s Father . . .
Possibly she perished?
Extinction is eligible . . .
Emily
Mrs Holland, who had moved to New York a year earlier, and Jane Humphrey, teaching in the Midwest, took advantage of physical distance. Sue had tried to do so when she took refuge with her brothers in Michigan in 1854 and would not reply to Emily’s letters, but Austin managed to reel her back. From then on, the family possessed this restive orphan, an acquired Sister only ‘a hedge away’. The in-house sister and the reader-sister: both, the poet insists, ‘belong to me’. In 1877, she still exults to ‘own a Susan of my own’.
Poems were part of the owner’s letters, and the person to whom she sent a poem is part of its meaning: Bowles or Sue are imagined participants, not passive readers. The poems cast Sue as one who appears stranger the closer you get, flashing gifts of mind and shadowed by an un-acted part in another life she might have lived.
Sue believed that poems addressed and sent to her were written for her exclusively. Many were, but on occasion the poet would adjust the pronouns and send the same poem to Bowles or someone else. The intimacy was not always as exclusive as a recipient might have thought.
Her letters to Bowles cast him as consort to a ‘Title divine’. It was part of his appeal that he responded so readily, looked so ‘Arabian’ as he exercised his responsiveness, and appeared so romantically wretched in the misery he was making at home. Bowles, teased too far by the poet’s beckonings and refusals to see him, roared up the Homestead stairs in 1877, ‘I’ve travelled all the way from Springfield to see you. Come down at once, you damned rascal.’ She did come down, so the story goes, conversed with even more than her usual wit and signed her next letter ‘Your “Rascal”’ - leaving out the ‘damned’. A note