Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [74]
Her claim on her readers does not evoke a fragile creature shut off from the world. She invited, even demanded, attention, passing on her ‘bolts’ to correspondents. Her most active year was 1863, when she sent out no fewer than 295 poems. Receiving a letter was an event to be relished to the full behind a closed door. Only through letters - many revised with the professionalism she gave to poems - was she able to control distribution to her audience, mainly ‘sisters’, an obscure form of life addressing other obscure forms of life. ‘Are you—Nobody—too?’ ‘Nobody’ was superior to a ‘Somebody’. Her Nobodies included Loo and Fanny Norcross in Boston. It was common at the time for private letters to be circulated to far-off confidantes (in the way Charlotte Brontë passed on letters to her friend Ellen Nussey for comment or Emily Dickinson was allowed to read Cousin Loo’s letters from Maria Whitney: ‘We will preserve them carefully,’ she promised Loo. Preserve. She expected no less from others.)
Her circle of Nobodies included, also, Sue’s schoolfriend Kate Scott Turner, whom Dickinson had approached as a ‘Candidate’ for her society of ‘strangers’. This is how she envisaged an alternative audience. ‘My heart votes for you,’ she’d told Kate, drawing her towards the deep-sea passage to her habitations. Love would row her out. Her letter ‘touches’ Kate’s face, puts a cheek to hers, strokes Kate’s hair. This tender love comes easily into being at the same time as the poet dreams up a wounded love for a stern ‘Master’ bound to her by drops of blood. To Bowles she offers a drama of Martyrs who, fixed in their destined course, resist ‘Temptation’ and ‘Convulsion’. What was he to make of this poem-letter that begins: ‘Because I could not say it - I fixed it in the Verse - for you to read’? The verse tells, yet does not tell, what ‘it’ is. The riddle did for a time exert its hold, but there’s a risk in refusing to solve a riddle. A busy journalist like Bowles, at first intrigued, was bound to turn away.
She understood her own ‘mad’ manner well enough to be suitably cautious with her new mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Her first letter included four poems, including her spoof of a deadly heaven in ‘Safe in their Alabaster Chambers’ (published in Bowles’s paper six weeks earlier).
‘Are you too deeply occupied’, she asked, ‘to say if my Verse is alive? The Mind is so near itself - it cannot see, distinctly - and I have none to ask.’
Higginson’s response to her originality was heady enough to bind her to him. She had ‘few pleasures so deep as your opinion’, she replied, close to tears. At the same time he warned against ‘spasmodic’ rhythms and idiosyncratic grammar. Though she thanked him for his ‘surgery’, she made none of the changes Higginson advised. When he invited her to join Boston’s literary society she declined. She could not tell him why she could not leave her house, not even to hear Emerson.
One of the first things she did tell Higginson was untrue. It was the same untruth she’d told Newton’s minister, Mr Hale, when she’d presented herself as a child-friend: the same cover of a harmless, humble Little Me. To Higginson she presented herself as an unambitious amateur in need of advice. She listened with apparent submission when he thought her poems uncontrolled, disorderly, ‘wayward’.
She needed, she nodded, to be ruled. ‘I had no Monarch in my life, and cannot rule myself, and when I try to organize - my little Force explodes - and leaves me bare and charred -’.
He chided her for owning to small mistakes, unaware of her larger ignorance.
She had only just then begun to write, she lied, warming to her role. ‘I went to school,’ she told Higginson, ‘but . . . had no education.’ She asked this new ‘Master’ to ‘punish’ her poems. It’s like the master-pupil drama in Villette: an accomplished teacher in one of the world’s great cities and a provincial young woman, unassuming, untrained in the way of formal discipline, who reveals an irresistible gift