Not in Vain
If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain:
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
— Emily Dickinson
Showing posts with label Emily Dickinson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Emily Dickinson. Show all posts
Saturday, August 31, 2024
Not in Vain by Emily Dickinson
Friday, August 30, 2024
When Emily Dickinson Mailed It In
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| Emily Dickinson |
When Emily Dickinson Mailed It In
The supposed recluse constantly sent letters to friends, family, and lovers. What do they show us?
On March 5, 1853, while her family ate breakfast, Emily Dickinson addressed four envelopes to Susan Gilbert, a woman with whom she seemed to be in love. The envelopes were empty. Though Emily had already written Sue several letters—and would, over the decades to come, write her hundreds more—these particular envelopes would not carry her words. Instead, Emily left the envelopes for her brother, Austin, who wanted to write to Sue in secret, and who happened to be in love with her himself.
Austin and Sue may already have been engaged at this point, though they wouldn’t announce it until Thanksgiving—and wouldn’t marry until 1856. They would eventually have three children. On the day that Emily addressed the envelopes for her brother, she and Sue were just twenty-two years old; Austin, on his way to law school, was a month from turning twenty-four. And yet, in a separate letter to Sue, Dickinson claimed to be imagining a future well beyond their earthly years:
Neither the distance between them nor their time apart seems commensurate with yearning on such a grand scale: Sue wasn’t across the sea, just in New Hampshire for a month. Perhaps Dickinson was responding, instead, to a separation on the horizon: the one augured, paradoxically, by the growing intimacy between her brother and her friend. But why, then, would Emily address those envelopes for her brother, and facilitate the courtship that would put Sue out of reach?
Consider the fantasy described by Dickinson at the end of the letter—one of more than thirteen hundred in “The Letters of Emily Dickinson” (Harvard), a new, definitive edition that collects, reorders, and freshly annotates every surviving letter that Dickinson sent (or drafted) to someone else, along with the handful of surviving messages that she received. What Dickinson wants is not simply to have Sue to herself, here and now. Her desire extends past any single object or fixed span of time; she wants nothing less than “Eternity,” a golden state that is presently silent and hidden, but one that will nevertheless, inevitably, unfold its arms in welcome. Those arms, in Dickinson’s fantasy, will gather together not only Emily and Sue but also Austin, along with everyone else who matters to her: “us all—all.”
For Dickinson, writing letters offered a way of making a life out of this fantasy; this is why the genre so appealed to her. When, for instance, she addressed the envelopes for her brother to send to Sue, she was of course helping the couple by hastening their courtship, but she was doing something else, too. She was insinuating herself into its private scenes. Letters untether words from bodies; they loosen and redraw the bonds of time and space, and for that matter of sexuality, marriage, and blood relation. A week later, she wrote to Sue again, describing the pleasure she had taken in arranging her friend’s correspondence with her brother: “So Susie, I set the trap and catch the little mouse, and love to catch him dearly, for I think of you and Austin, and know it pleases you to have my tiny services.”
One gets the sense that Dickinson’s desires for these kinds of tangled intimacy frequently exceeded her correspondents’ interest in satisfying them. Almost all of the letters that Dickinson received were destroyed after her death, but her own surviving letters frequently complain about epistolary neglect. To Austin, in this same stretch, she writes, “I have not heard from Sue again, tho’ I’ve written her three times.” And yet such frustration did little to curb her desire. On March 23, 1853, Austin and Sue met in the parlor of the Revere Hotel in Boston. The next day, Emily wrote to her brother: “I did ‘drop in at the Revere’ a great many times yesterday. I hope you have been made happy. If so I am satisfied. I shall know when you get home.” Hard to imagine that Austin and Sue were thinking of Emily as they sat together in the Revere. But she was thinking of them.
***
Two tendencies animate Dickinson’s letters, two ways of imagining what writing might do. On the one hand, and especially as she entered adulthood, writing could feel like a mode of retreat from the world. This way of imagining Dickinson—as an eccentric recluse—became part of her mythology even in life, and it was an image that she played no small part in promoting. In 1869, when Dickinson was thirty-eight years old, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the man who (through the mail) had become her poetic mentor, asked her if they could meet: “if I could once see you & know that you are real, I might fare better.” Dickinson’s response suggested that she preferred a state of slight unreality: “A Letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.”
Dickinson did eventually consent to see Higginson in person. After their second (and final) meeting, he wrote to his sister, “I saw my eccentric poetess Miss Emily Dickinson who never goes outside her father’s grounds & sees only me & a few others. She says, ‘there is always one thing to be grateful for—that one is one’s self & not somebody else.’ ” Never going outside your father’s grounds may be a way to insure that you do not become somebody else. Dickinson’s writing, in this way of thinking, created a simulated world that took the place of the real one. She once responded to a social invitation from Sue by writing simply, “We meet no Stranger but Ourself.” Thomas H. Johnson, the editor of the standard 1958 edition of Dickinson’s letters which this new volume supersedes, took this view to its extreme when, in his introduction, he stated, as fact: “she did not live in history and held no view of it.”
The nearly seven decades of scholarship that have followed Johnson’s pronouncement of Dickinson’s reclusiveness—scholarship to which Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell, the new volume’s editors, have contributed and from which they adroitly draw—have revealed it to be a crude caricature, one that says as much about men’s fantasies about women (and about poetry readers’ fantasies about poets) as it does about the actual person who wrote those thousand-odd letters. What that scholarship helps us to see is the countervailing tendency behind Dickinson’s epistolary practice: again and again, she set her thoughts to paper and then sent those sheets of paper out into the world, where they found the hands of someone else. Writing letters could therefore be for Dickinson not only a withdrawal from the world but also a way of extending herself into many worlds, all at once.
She took great delight in imagining the varied routes that her words would take, the worlds they’d help her inhabit. In 1852, when Sue was teaching in Baltimore, Dickinson lamented that she could not close the distance between them, that she could not make their diffuse intimacy into something compact, like a poem. And yet that lamentation, as Dickinson offered it, turned into its own form of consolation:
The scholar Virginia Jackson has taken this passage as emblematic of Dickinson’s persistent attention to the “material circumstances of writing,” which produce their own kind of intimacy. The predicament faced by every letter writer is that they cannot, at the time of their writing, share a world with their reader. But, when Dickinson sets her world to paper, and mails it to Baltimore, the page itself becomes a shared object, a bit of the world that writer and reader will have had in common, though separated in time. Because the letter is itself a material object, because that object begins in Emily’s hands and ends in Sue’s, the very distance between them becomes an image of their intimacy, now manifested in the postal route that gets the sheet of paper from writer to reader.
“Mother is frying Doughnuts,” Dickinson wrote, at around this time, in a postscript to her brother, who was teaching in Boston. “I will give you a little platefull to have warm for your tea! Imaginary ones—how I’d love to send you real ones.” She can’t send Austin the doughnuts and expect them to arrive warm, but in their place she sends folded paper that bears ink from her pen—with the expectation that, when Austin unfolds it and reads, he will have been connected in a very literal way to the domestic scene from which he had been absent. Epistolary writing offered Dickinson a way to draw tenderness from separation, to make distance an image of love. In 1866, a decade after Sue and Austin were married, Dickinson sent her sister-in-law a folded sheet of paper that contained only these pencilled words:
***
That sheet of paper did not have far to go. When Sue and Austin married, they moved into the Evergreens, a house on the lot adjacent to the Dickinson family home, where Emily still lived with her mother, father, and sister, Lavinia. Dickinson sent Sue more letters than any other correspondent—this edition contains nearly three hundred to her alone—and yet, for most of that correspondence, Sue was just next door. Out of view but close at hand, Sue became an ideal recipient for the poems that Dickinson, on the verge of her great outburst of creativity, increasingly began to write:
Dickinson sent the poem that begins with this stanza to the Evergreens on the occasion of Sue’s twenty-eighth birthday. The two women, born just nine days apart, had not become close friends until 1850, when they would both have been nineteen, but the poem maintains its own logic. To claim Sue as “sister,” to feel in the present the intensity of that affection, was to bring a notionally shared childhood within reach:
In her letters, Dickinson often refers to childhood nostalgically. To Austin, she writes, “I wish we were children now. I wish we were always children, how to grow up I dont know!” At other times, though, “childhood” names a world to come. Writing to Higginson, in a letter she drafts in 1870, Dickinson refers to “immortality” as “the larger Haunted House it seems, of maturer Childhood—distant, an alarm—entered intimate at last as a neighbor’s Cottage—”
***
Dickinson’s father died four years later, when she was forty-three. The event arrives with a terrible poignancy in the “Letters.” The only surviving note from Dickinson to her father was written just before his death—and is blank:
Between the salutation and the signature, the editors point out, are two pinholes. They suggest that the note held an object—likely a flower—which is now gone. The next letter in the volume is from Dickinson to her two younger cousins, Louisa and Frances Norcross, and tells the story of the Dickinson children receiving word that their father had died:
Dickinson did not attend her father’s burial, and, according to the “Letters,” she never visited his grave, though her siblings did. A friend of hers, Elizabeth Holland, picked a sprig of clover from the grave and gave it to Emily, who pressed it between the pages of her Bible. A letter may indeed, as Dickinson wrote to Higginson, feel like immortality, but there is something profoundly elegiac in this circuit of exchange: the flower now missing from the note to her father, the brute fact that he cannot receive the flowers his children now bring him, the flower preserved from the grave never visited. Letters circulate such traces of organic matter, even as they implicitly bemoan their insufficiencies.
***
Again and again, one feels the pathos of this collection. The editors have performed a monumental act of labor—consulting historical weather reports, diaries, and newspaper archives to reconstruct chronology; painstakingly restoring words erased by later hands—but inevitably there are things we just cannot know with any certainty about the person who produced these texts.
Nowhere is that pathos more acute than in the love letters that suddenly appear near the end of Dickinson’s life. Addressed to Otis Lord, a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court judge whom Dickinson described as “my Father’s closest friend,” the twenty letters survive only as drafts. Lord was a widower, eighteen years Emily’s senior. The romance between them began sometime around 1880; Dickinson would have been nearly fifty. They agreed to write to each other every Sunday. “Tuesday is a deeply depressed Day,” Dickinson complained in a draft to Lord; “it is not far enough from your dear note for the embryo of another to form, and yet what flights of Distance.”
According to Alfred Habegger, one of Dickinson’s biographers, Lord asked her to marry him late in 1882. Here, again, it’s impossible to know the details of what happened between the two. But, throughout Dickinson’s drafts to Lord, we have evidence of that same twinned impulse that guided her earlier letters to Sue. On the one hand, amorous withdrawal: “Dont you know you are happiest while I withhold and not confer—dont you know that ‘No’ is the wildest word we consign to Language?” On the other, an oddly chaste kind of eros: “It is strange that I miss you at night so much when I was never with you.” In the same breath, Dickinson seems to voice regret about having missed a life with Lord (“Oh, had I found it sooner!”) and an otherworldly sense that, in the face of such strong feeling, chronology is beside the point (“Yet Tenderness has not a Date—it comes—and overwhelms”). Lord died in 1884; Dickinson two years later, at the age of fifty-five. At the poet’s funeral, her sister, Lavinia, laid two flowers by her hand, “to take to Judge Lord.”
Three decades earlier, while Emily was assisting in her brother’s courtship, she wrote to Sue, “There are lives, sometimes, Susie—Bless God that we catch faint glimpses of his brighter Paradise from occasional Heavens here!” Her own life was lived in that terrestrial “here,” and also in her writing. What glimpses of paradise it gives. Very near the end of the letters collected in this volume, there is a note marked by the editors as “unsent.” Its recipient is unknown: “Were Departure Separation, there would be neither Nature nor Art, for there would be no World—”. The slip of paper has been folded once and is signed “Emily—”. The woman who signed her name there has gone away. Her note is not addressed to us. And yet, in having found our hands, it tells us that we share a world with its author.
***
Kamran Javadizadeh is an associate professor of English at Villanova University and the author of the forthcoming book “Institutionalized
Thursday, June 21, 2018
Obe Postma and Emily Dickinson’s bees
| Portrait of obe Postma from his collection Fan wjerklank en bisinnen (Drachten, 1957) |
Obe Postma and Emily Dickinson’s bees
In 2018 Leeuwarden is not only capital of the province of Friesland, but also European Capital of Culture.
To celebrate this special year I shall be writing a series of blog posts on our holdings of Frisian literature throughout the year. As it happens today (29 March) is the 150th anniversary of the birth of one of Friesland’s best known and most prolific poets: Obe Postma.
He was the son of a farmer from Koarnwerd, Friesland. The Frisian landscape in which he grew up became his life-long inspiration for his poetry, even when he moved to Amsterdam to study mathematics and physics. He would never live in the countryside again, teaching mathematics and mechanics at the HBS (Higher Civil School) in Groningen for his whole working life. After retirement he moved to Leeuwarden, where he died in 1963.
A Frisian landscape: ‘Nieuwebrug ‘, oil on canvas by Bonne Dijkstra, reproduced in Sjouke Visser (ed.) Het Friese landschap (Harlingen, 1986) LB.31.b.309
Postma’s career as a poet took off relatively late, at the age of 34, but continued right up to his last days, spanning six decades. In 1918, at the age of 50, he published his first collection of poetry:Fryske Lȃn en Fryske Libben
Cover of Fryske Lȃn en Fryske Libben (Snits, 1918) 011557.l.33
His early career is characterised by poetry about the Frisian landscape, which earned him the accolade of ‘Poet of the Frisian Landscape’. Postma is sometimes seen as a ‘naïve’ and nostalgic, even ‘provincial’ poet, but this ignores the fact that he was deeply influenced by literature and philosophy, as well as by his scientific background. He knew what was going on in the world of poetry, both in Friesland and beyond. He combined a sharp eye for the simple day-to-day realities, such as a flower meadow, with a feeling for the sublime, with ‘beauty as living principle within the cosmos, the infinite that penetrates the finite, the absolute in the relative.’
Postma saw in Emily Dickinson a kindred spirit. He placed her alongside Elizabeth Browning, Christina Rossetti and Emily Brontë as one of the greatest female poets. Dickinson’s lack of sentimentality, her sober choice of words, range of subject matter, but perhaps most of all her love of nature appealed to him. In his literary notes Postma writes: ‘She has played a unique role in restoring to poetry those important characteristics of simplicity, sensuousness, and passion.’ Like no other poet Dickinson expressed most clearly his ideas about what ‘nature’ is and what ‘culture’. He writes that in order to grasp this, ‘ I need to go to Emily Dickinson’s bees.’
Above: Emily Dickinson’s ‘The Murmuring of Bees’, from The complete poems of Emily Dickinson (London, 1975) X.909/40625. Below: Obe Postma’s translation, ‘Ut Natûr’, from Samle fersen (Baarn, 1978) X.950.11642.
The British Library holds one anthology of Postma’s poems in English translation, published in 2004. ‘Easter Monday’ is an example of Postma’s early work in which he shows signs of his later philosophy, setting his senses wide open to the wider context in which his beloved Frisian landscape sits.
‘Easter Monday’, originally published in 1927, in De Ljochte Ierde (Snits, 1929) X.909/88993. Translated into English by Anthony Paul and published in What the Poet Must Know (Leeuwarden, 2004) YK.2006.a.1764.
Marja Kingma , Curator Germanic Collections.
References/further reading:
De dichters en de filosofen, ed. Philippus Breuker en Jan Gulmans. (Leeuwarden, 2008). YF.2009.a.25393
Emily Dickinson in leven en dood, ed. Philippus Breuker and J. Gulmans. (Leeuwarden, 2009) YF.2011.a.6038. I am particularly indebted to Albertina Soepboer’s article on Postma and Dickinson in this collection (pp. 62-75)
In útjefte ta gelegenheid fan de ûntbleating fan de búste fan de dichter en wittenskipsman Obe Postma (1868-1963) ed. Geart van der Meer, Jan Gulmans. (Ljouwert, 2014). YF.2017.a.9947
Posted by Susan Reed at 1:16 PM
Saturday, June 4, 2016
Quotes / Emily Dickinson
QUOTES
by Emily Dickinson
Adversity
Boldness
Death and Dying
Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality.
Dissent
Assent -- and you are sane -- , demur -- you're straightway dangerous -- , and handled with a Chain -- .
Home
Joy
'Tis so much joy! 'Tis so much joy! If I should fail, what poverty! And yet, as poor as I Have ventured all upon a throw; Have gained! Yes! Hesitated so this side the victory!
Mind
Poetry and Poets
Present
Success
Words
A word is dead when it is said. Some say. I say it just, begins to live that day.
Thursday, November 12, 2015
A bomb in her bosom / Emily Dickinson's secret life
A bomb in her bosom: Emily Dickinson's secret life
Beneath the still surface of the poet's life lay a fiercely passionate nature and a closely guarded secret, argues her lastest biographer
Lyndall Gordon
Saturday 13 February 2010 00.05 GMT
Emily Dickinson was a great poet whose life has remained a mystery. The time has come to dispel the myth of a quaint and helpless creature, disappointed in love, who gave up on life. I think she was unafraid of her own passions and talent; that her brother's sexual betrayal and subsequent family feud had a profound effect on the Dickinson legend that has come down to us; and perhaps most significantly, I believe that Emily had an illness – a secret that explains much.
It was Emily herself who helped to devise the blueprint for her legend, starting at the age of 23 when she declined an invitation from a friend: "I'm so old-fashioned, Darling, that all your friends would stare." In place of the tart young woman she was, she adopted this retiring posture. Born in 1830 into the leading family of Amherst, a college town in Massachusetts, she never left what she always called "my father's house". Townsfolk spoke of her as "the Myth".
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| Emily Dickinson |
On the face of it, the life of this New England poet seems uneventful and largely invisible, but there's a forceful, even overwhelming character belied by her still surface. She called it a "still – Volcano – Life", and that volcano rumbles beneath the domestic surface of her poetry and a thousand letters. Stillness was not a retreat from life (as legend would have it) but her form of control. Far from the helplessness she played up at times, she was uncompromising; until the explosion in her family, she lived on her own terms.
Her widely spaced eyes were too keen for the passivity admired in women of her time. It's the sensitive face of a person who (as her brother put it) "saw things directly and just as they were". At 17, as a student at Mount Holyoke in 1848 (the same year that the women's movement took a stand at Seneca Falls), she refused to bend to the founder of her college, the formidable Mary Lyon. At this time Massachusetts was the scene of a religious revival opposed to the inroads of science. Emily, who had chosen mostly science courses, makes her allegiance clear:
"Faith" is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see –
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.
When Miss Lyon pressed her students to be "saved", nearly all succumbed. Emily did not. On 16 May, she owned, "I have neglected the one thing needful when all were obtaining it." It seemed that other girls desired only to be good. "How I wish I could say that with sincerity, but I fear I never can." When Miss Lyon consigned her to the lowest of three categories – the saved, the hopeful and a remnant of about 30 no-hopers – she still held out.
During a creative burst in the early 1860s, she invited a Boston man of letters to be her mentor, but could not take his advice to regularise her verse. Helpful Mr Higginson, a supporter of women, who thought he was corresponding with an apologetic, self-effacing spinster, 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: she had smooth bands of red hair and no good features; she had been deferential and exquisitely clean in her white piqué dress and blue crocheted shawl; and after an initial hesitation, she had proved surprisingly articulate. She had said a lot of strange things, from which Higginson deduced an "abnormal" life.
There was an increasing divide between people she wished to know and those she didn't. Her clarity could not endure social talk instead of truth; piety instead of "The Soul's Superior instants". Her directness would have been disconcerting if she did not "simulate" conventionality, and this was "stinging work". But a more threatening challenge, deeper below the surface, fired the volcanoes and earthquakes in her poems – an event, as she put it, that "Struck – my ticking – through –".
Something in her life has so far remained sealed. The poems tease the reader about "it" and her almost overwhelming temptation to "tell". I want to open up the possibility of an unsentimental answer. If true, it would explain the conditions of her life: her seclusion and refusal to marry. Once we know what "it" is, it will be obvious why "it" was buried and why its lava jolts out from time to time through the crater of her "buckled lips".
During the poetic spurt of her early 30s, Dickinson transforms 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 –
Sickness is always there, shielded by cover stories: in youth, a cough is mentioned; in her mid-30s, trouble with her eyes. Neither came to much. In her poems, sickness can be violent: she speaks of "Convulsion" or "Throe". There's a mechanism breaking down, a body dropping. It "will not stir for Doctors". "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain", she says, and "I dropped down, and down". Allowing for the poet's resolve to tell it "slant", through metaphor, are we not looking at epilepsy?
In its full-blown form, known as grand mal, a slight swerve in a pathway of the brain prompts a seizure. As Dickinson puts it, "The Brain within its Groove / Runs evenly", but then a "Splinter swerve" makes it hard to put the current back. Such force has this altered current that it would be easier to divert the course of a flood, when "Floods have slit the Hills / And scooped a Turnpike for Themselves".
Since the falling sickness, as epilepsy used to be known, had shaming associations with "hysteria", masturbation, syphilis and impairment of the intellect leading to "epileptic insanity", it was unnameable, particularly when it struck a woman. In the case of men secrecy was less strict, and fame in a few – Caesar, Muhammad, Dostoevsky – overrode the stigma, but a woman had to bury herself in a lifelong silence. If this guess is right, it's remarkable that Dickinson developed a voice from within that silence, one with a volcanic power to bide its time.
Prescriptions (one from an eminent physician, others in the records of an Amherst drugstore) show that Dickinson's medications tally with contemporary treatments for epilepsy. The condition, which has a genetic component, appeared in two other members of the Dickinson family. One was Cousin Zebina, a lifelong invalid, immured at home across the road, whose bitten tongue in the course of a "fit" is noted by Emily in her first surviving letter at the age of 11. "I fit for them," she announced in a poem of c1866. Then her nephew, Ned Dickinson, turned out to be afflicted. He was the son of Emily's brother Austin and his wife Susan Dickinson, who lived next door. To the family's dismay Ned, aged 15, had an epileptic fit in 1877. Horrendous attacks continued, about eight a year, recorded in his father's diary.
We can't know whether Emily Dickinson suffered as her nephew did. There are many forms of epilepsy, and the mild petit mal does not involve convulsions. The mildest manifestations are absences. A schoolmate remembered that Emily dropped crockery. Plates and cups seemed to slide out of her hands and lay in pieces on the floor. The story was designed to bring out her eccentricity for, it was said, she hid the fragments in the fireplace behind a fireboard, forgetting they were bound to be discovered in winter. This memory is more important than the schoolmate realised, because it suggests absences, either accompanying the condition or the condition itself.
Her violent images, the "spasmodic" rhythms Higginson deplored, and the sheer volume of her output show that she coped inventively with gunshots from the brain into the body. She turned an explosive sickness into well-aimed art: scenes with "Revolver" and "Gun". Contained in her own domestic order, protected by her father and sister, Dickinson saved herself from the anarchy of her condition and put it to use.
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| emily dickinson by maria menshikova |
The mystery the poet was not to "tell" continues to this day to be encased in claims put out by opposed camps who fought for possession of her greatness. These camps go back to the feud. It began with adultery between Emily's brother Austin, in his 50s, and a newcomer to Amherst, a young faculty wife of 27, Mabel Loomis Todd. After the poet's death, the feud came to focus on Emily as her fame grew: who was to own her unpublished papers? Who had the right to claim her?
Both camps proceeded to wrap the poet in legends that stress her pathos: where Dickinson legend built up a bereft Emily in a dimity apron turning away the one and only man she loved, Todd legend built up a pitiful Emily "hurt" by her "cruel" sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson. How can we crack through the sad-sweet picture to find what Dickinson called the red "Fire rocks" below?
One way is to go back to acts of adultery that changed utterly those who were to be the first keepers of her papers. The advantage of approaching the poet through the feud is the entrée it provides to emotional currents in the family. Assignations – sometimes "with a witness" – are on record, recounted precisely as to time and place in the lovers' corroborating diaries. The impact of adultery on the family is plain – and not so plain, for the riddles in the poet's notes to her brother's mistress must be solved if we are to understand where she stood.
A recurring fact during the first years of the affair is crucial to the poet's position. Because it was difficult to keep adultery secret from the tattle of a small town, the safest place was the irreproachable home of the Dickinson sisters. There, the lovers would occupy the library or the dining-room (with its black horsehair sofa) for two to three hours. The door would be shut, blocking the poet's access to her second writing table in one room or to her conservatory via the other.
Austin Dickinson blew apart his family when he rejected his wife, Susan, who had long been the poet's keenest reader. Who had they been before this happened, and why, earlier, did Dickinson speak of a "Bomb" in her bosom? The Bomb may refer to periodic explosions in the brain, but emotionally both Austin and Emily had an eruptive vein, which Emily channelled into poetry. Her letters show that she cultivated adulterous emotions, if only in fantasy, for an unnamed "Master". How did this affect her response to her brother's sudden outbreak into active adultery?
In September 1881, David Todd and his wife, Mabel, had arrived in Amherst from Washington. She was a dressy urban beauty bent on maintaining standards in what appeared to her a negligible "village" full of retired clergymen and elderly academics. Mrs Todd, extending an immaculate white glove, her smile sliding up one cheek, was invited everywhere and was in a position to choose whom to favour. In Amherst, the Dickinsons were like royalty: Mrs Todd was taken with "regal", "magnificent" Austin Dickinson and his wife's dark poise, set off by a scarlet India shawl, when they called on her. Behind Austin's back, Amherst children mocked his auburn hair, arrayed like a fan above his head, and his sniffy walk, tapping his cane as he went.
At first, all the Dickinsons (bar Emily, who kept to her room) warmed to Mrs Todd's accomplishments: her solos soared above the church choir, she painted flowers to professional standard and published stories in magazines. She soon won the friendship of the bookish Susan Dickinson, before it became apparent that she was flirting with Susan's son, 20-year-old Ned, who fell painfully in love. This happened just before his father became a rival. Austin's love for Mabel Todd was to last for the rest of his life.
The result was what came to be known as "the War between the Houses". Austin turned against his children when they sided with their distraught mother. New evidence reveals that, far from withdrawing from the feud, Emily Dickinson took a stand. Unlike her sister Lavinia, who sided with the lovers, she refused to oblige her brother by signing over a plot of Dickinson land to his mistress. In August 1885 the poet wrote to her nephew Ned, confirming her resistance. "Dear Boy," she starts her letter assuring him he would find "no treason". "You never will, My Ned." This letter ends: "And ever be sure of me, Lad – Fondly, Aunt Emily.
A new and prolonged phase in the war between the houses began with the poet's death in 1886 and her sister's discovery of a lifetime's poems in her chest of drawers. Within a short time, Austin persuaded Lavinia to hand over the papers to his mistress. Yet Austin must have been aware that in his own home, his estranged wife treasured a separate collection – poems Emily had given her over the years. Fuelled by adultery, antagonism between Susan Dickinson and Mabel Todd mounted over possession of the poet, with the success of Todd's four editions of Dickinson (two co-edited with Higginson, two put out on her own) during the 1890s followed by the poet's growing stature in the course of the 20th century. Insistent legend continued to wrap her in the image of the modest, old-fashioned spinster. But the bold voice of the poems can't be categorised: "I'm Nobody," she says, "– who are you?" It's a voice we can't ignore, confrontational, even invasive, defying façades with a question about our nature.
The feud fed into a succession of increasingly public conflicts, starting with a court case in 1898 when Lavinia Dickinson changed sides and took a stand of her own against the Todds' further claim to Dickinson land. At the heart of the trial is Mabel Todd's assertion that this strip of land was due to her as compensation for her years of toil in bringing a great poet before the public. Poems (1890) had sold 11,000 copies in its first year. Her defence turned on her undoubted feat in transcribing, dating and editing piles upon piles of unpublished manuscripts.
Hatred did not die with the deaths of the first generation. The daughters of the feud, Susan's daughter Martha Dickinson and Mabel's daughter Millicent Todd, did battle through adversarial books during the first half of the 20th century. At its height in the 1950s, the feud turned into a conflict over the sale of the Dickinson papers.
When she died, Mabel got her land. Three weeks after the funeral the deed was signed and the Todds' house rose on the Dickinson meadow – a venue for future assignations.
This might have been a routine story of a femme fatale were it not for the presence of mysterious genius. As the feud sharpened its focus on the poet, it would be seen how Mabel had quickened to the poems of Emily Dickinson and how willing Mabel would be to undertake years of toil with difficult manuscripts. She was to show herself ready in other ways, one of only three people during the poet's lifetime to recognise Dickinson's genius. The name of Mabel Loomis Todd will always be associated with the poet.
Mabel appears to act out a familiar plot – the seduction of a man in power – but what differs here is the presence of another and grander form of power, that of a poet who selects her own society, then shuts the door. To Mabel Todd, with her discerning taste, that shut door, and the elect intelligence behind it, offered an irresistible challenge. So, on 10 September 1882, accompanied by Austin, Mrs Todd knocked on the Homestead door, and had herself admitted to the parlour where she sang to Lavinia and Austin. As she did so, Mabel imagined the poet listening in her fastness upstairs, captivated, as the trained voice trilled through the house.
Over the years to come Mabel was to re-enact this scene, fantasising a bond with the invisible poet. She would insist on this bond yet although she was in and out of the Homestead, she never once laid eyes on Emily Dickinson. On this initial occasion, the poet sent in a glass of homemade cordial together with a poem, which Mabel told herself had been composed spontaneously as a tribute to so pleasing a guest. Then, within 24 hours, on 11 September, there was a declaration of love for Austin – the "Rubicon" where he abandoned marital fidelity at the gate of his home before the pair entered to play a game of whist with the unsuspecting Sue.
Mabel's entry into the Homestead looks politely innocuous beside this initiation of adultery, but it was to present a parallel and more lasting threat to family peace. In time, Mabel would take possession of a large cache of Emily Dickinson's papers, and market them in her own terms, so that the strange nature of the poet would be obscured as a victim of Susan Dickinson. So it was that an eruptive poet sending out her "bolts", "Queen" of her own existence, would be subject to a false plot acted out in the unstoppable momentum of Todd's takeover.
The Dickinson camp appeared to win that round. But before Millicent Todd died in 1968, she set up a posthumous campaign that could not fail. Her plan was to co-opt a writer of impeccable credentials for a book she had in mind. To this end she appointed Yale professor Richard B Sewall as her literary executor, granting him exclusive rights to the Todd papers. Her partisan agenda was clear: this executor was to "set the whole network of Dickinson tensions in proper perspective". So it came about that Sewall perpetuated the Todd positions in a two-volume biography of Emily Dickinson that has remained standard for the last 36 years.
Mabel Todd's persuasive grace in presenting her point of view was reinforced by the educated rigour of her daughter's voice on tape as she took Sewall through the legal history of the feud, bristling with facts and dates. These she laid out in the orderly manner of a scholar. To the unwary her testimony would appear objective and informed, and yet in every instance the Todds turn out to be the victims of Susan Dickinson and her fearsome daughter. To hear the tapes is to understand their impact on a biographer. Sewall felt "haunted" by Austin's statement that he went to his wedding as to his execution. Only no one can know what Austin said: the image of execution was transmitted by a mistress determined to oust his wife, and not only in the usual manner, but in various ways to obliterate Sue's centrality in the poet's life.
A biographer tempted by exclusive access to an archive of such eloquence is bound to be influenced, and though Sewall relayed what he found in a cautious manner, he passed on the trove of Todd untruths: that Emily Dickinson had favoured Mabel; that the poet's withdrawal into seclusion had been the result of a family split preceding Mabel's appearance; and that Austin (contrary to evidence in the trial) had "deeded" to the Todds a second strip of land. The biographer even outdoes the Todds when he suggests that Dickinson's "failure" to publish was a result of a family quarrel.
Legends of this kind spread to theatre and fiction. In 1976 an award-winning playThe Belle of Amherst reinvigorated the sad-sweet image: a "shy", "chaste", "frightened" poet hardly knows what she says, so keeps busy with baking. The playwright called it an "enterprise of simple beauty", backed by "audiences who have taken our 'Belle' to their hearts". In a novel of 2006 a spiteful Sue ends up "hating" Emily. In a novel of 2007 Sue becomes a death-dealing Lucrezia Borgia. She awaits her victims in the hall of her house, a vamp in décolleté black velvet waving her fan. Can evil go further? It can. Sue "could make mincemeat pie of the Dickinson sisters and eat it for Christmas dinner".
So the pathos has persisted even though Dickinson's words reveal a woman who was fun: a lover who joked; a mystic who mocked heaven. This woman was not like us: to know her is to encounter aspects of a nature more developed than our own. Her poems turn on the communicative power of the unstated between two people attuned to it. So, the question of contacts is crucial: for whom is she writing? Who is being trained in her unique mode of communication? Who provokes her to further communication? "Be Sue – while I am Emily – ", she commanded the friend of her youth who became her sister-in-law, "Be next – what you have ever been – Infinity".
An initiation in infinitude was the gift Dickinson offered to the few she admitted to intimacy. Sewall's assumption that men changed her has dated. It was she who operated on others for the brief periods they could bear it. She created certain people in the same way as she created her poems, many enclosed in letters as extensions of them. She half-found, half-invented a receptive reader in Sue to whom she sent 276 poems – more than twice the number sent to anyone else. In a similar way she created a deathless love for the person whom she called "Master".
Biographers have sought meaning behind the bearded and married "Master", who appears in three mysterious letters from spring 1858 to the summer of 1861. Evidence remains thin, and biographers have taken their pick from an array of unlikely candidates. These letters race from one literary drama to another, including Jane Eyre's encounter with her married "Master" and deathless love in Emily Brontë – in 1858 Dickinson had acquired a copy of an 1857 edition ofWuthering Heights – and it seems likely that the "Master" letters were as much exercises in composition as letters addressing a particular person. The most popular candidate originated in hearsay that the love of Dickinson's life had been the married Rev Charles Wadsworth, whom she met during a visit to Philadelphia in 1855 and then, supposedly, renounced. (Lugubrious, beardless, with stringy locks, Wadsworth sent Miss "Dickenson" a dull pastoral letter about her sufferings – without a clue what those sufferings were.)
In her late 40s and 50s, a new drama began when she turned to fierce Judge Lord of the Massachusetts supreme court. But though she thought of his touch at night, interrupted her writing to anticipate his weekly letter and played up to the comic character he assigned as "Emily Jumbo", she would not marry him. Epileptics in her time were not supposed to marry, and some American states passed laws against it. Drafts of her love letters have survived: they are witty, confident, open (not coded like letters to "Master"), and within the limits of her unrelenting control over her existence, abandoned – hardly the way 19th-century ladies were supposed to behave.
Dickinson found love, spiritual quickening and immortality, all on her own terms. One model remained: Wuthering Heights. Yet unlike the anarchic lovers of the Heights, Dickinson was a moral being, a product of upright New England: she grasped the potential destructiveness – to her sanity, for a start – of the "Bomb" in her bosom; and she witnessed the eruption of the feud – during her lifetime, another secret within the family. She refers repeatedly to a secret "Existence" – primarily her poetry – that must be seen in terms of New England individualism, the Emersonian ethos of self-reliance that in its fullest bloom eludes label. It's more awkward and less lovable than English eccentricity – dangerous, in fact, as Dickinson owned when she said, "My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –".
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