Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [76]
No one could be more loyal to those she knit to her. At the same time, she felt words so keenly that she could not relay them in a tepid conversational temperature. This led her to write an occasional rejection letter. One went to Joseph Chickering, the professor of English at Amherst, who proposed to call on her.
‘I had hoped to see you,’ she said, ‘but have no grace to talk, and my own Words so chill and burn me, that the temperature of other Minds is too new an Awe -’.
As a young woman she had refused an invitation from Abiah, by saying that she never left home. As it happened, she had recently stayed with the Hollands - he, an editor. Dickinson may have hoped he would read her poems. In fact, he judged her poems ‘unsuitable’ for publication: ‘too ethereal’. He was fixed in the common view that ‘the genuine classics of every language [are] the work of men and not of women’. Jane Eyre and Aurora Leigh may have ‘set the world in a flutter’ for a time, but their appeal was bound to be ephemeral, for women could not create ‘the permanent treasures of literature’. Dr Holland’s belittlement of women shows up in his political judgements: after the Civil War he opposed legislative reform that gave wives control over their earnings and property; he was also against women’s suffrage. So, the most powerful editor in touch with Emily Dickinson was closed off, ideologically, to her greatness.
Did her chosen readers have anything in common beyond their attachment to the poet? Readers who knew of her sickness would have had biographic access to certain poems and metaphors. At the age of twenty-five, her first mention of her machinery getting ‘slightly out of gear’ was a half-joking plea to Elizabeth Holland: ‘p lease . . . some one stop the wheel’. She spoke to her Boston cousin Loo as one who had seen her through a lot, and later, in about 1873, she wrote to Loo’s sister Fanny: ‘I was sick, little sister, and write you the first that I am able.’ The sickness was so secret that those who cherished her felt all the closer. They need not have been adept as readers of poetry; it was closeness that mattered, that and the loyalty of secret-sharers, like Sue close at hand. ‘Sue makes sick Days so sweet, we almost hate our health,’ Emily told her. On such an occasion, early in 1873, she apologised for her untidy appearance.
‘I felt so sick,’ she excused herself. ‘How it would please me if you came once more, when I was palatable.’
An artist as original as Dickinson must create her audience. She would have chosen readers attuned to the inward life. While Julia Ward Howe was writing her ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ and Whitman his Drum Taps, Dickinson demolished feats of heroism: no golden fleece, and Jason a sham. Her friends shared or tolerated her repudiation of dead words, especially the sayings of unthinking faith: dull heaven, mindless obedience, meekness and blind belief in the resurrection were all targets. She told Higginson she shunned people ‘because they talk of Hallowed things, aloud - and embarrass my Dog’.
Higginson, who thought he had been corresponding with an apologetic, self-effacing pupil, was puzzled to find himself ‘drained’ of ‘nerve-power’ after his first visit to her in 1870. He was unable to describe the creature he found beyond a few surface facts: her light steps had pattered as she approached; she had two smooth bands of auburn hair and no good features; she had been deferential and exquisitely clean in her white piqué dress and short light-blue cape (crocheted with a drawstring neck); and after an initial hesitation she had proved surprisingly articulate.
‘Could you tell me what home is?’ she had asked. ‘Is it oblivion or absorption when things pass from our minds?’ She’d read Shakespeare and thought, ‘why is any other