A New Look At Emily Dickinson

I am extremely curious about this new biography of Emily Dickinson (Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds, by Lyndall Gordon), that speculates (with good reason, apparently) that Dickinson was an epileptic. Wow. As always, Ted, I would be fascinated to hear your take on this. The book hasn’t been published yet, but the review I link to gives a good idea of where the book goes.

The legend and myth of Emily Dickinson persists – it is one of the most perfect of literary legends, second only, perhaps to Shakespeare – because the biographical details are so slim. Well, not slim, in terms of Dickinson – but there is, indeed, a “smoking gun” there somewhere, which is one of the reasons why the seemingly dashed-off poems are so frightening when read in bulk. I tried to read a bunch of them, in succession, while on Block Island, and had to put it down. I can only deal with her in small doses. She is so dazzling. But it’s almost like you can feel the presence of something else there, THE thing (it’s like reading Shakespeare’s sonnets, which can send any reader into a tailspin – it’s all there, but what ISN’T there, what the hell is this guy saying??) Dickinson’s poems satisfy, and yet deny satisfaction. There has GOT to be a secret there. Some motivating factor. Dickinson was tight-lipped about it, although she hints at things in letters. In a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higgins, from April 25, 1862, she writes:

I had a terror – since September – I could tell to none – and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground – because I am afraid –

Glimpses, if you squint hard enough, what do you see?? In the same letter, she writes:

— had no education when a Little Girl, I had a friend, who taught me Immortality – but venturing too near, himself – he never returned.

This stuff is awesome, this stuff is maddening.

It has never been satisfactorily explained what the hell happened to this woman. It has also never been successfully proven that any of that really MATTERS, in terms of the importance of the work. I happen to think (unlike some others) that biography CAN be important, in the shaping of an artist’s work – although it is not THE most important thing. Or, to put another way, if it is true that Dickinson was an epileptic, it certainly doesn’t explain her genius, it does not provide the wellspring of her talent – it’s not the END of the conversation, is what I am trying to say, it is the beginning. The work, and its scope and mystery, remains. (I am reading a book on Shakespeare’s plays right now, and “biographies” of Shakespeare are … well. I mean, what the hell is the point. Just admit you are SPECULATING, please, because the data MAY support your thesis that Shakespeare was gay/straight/Catholic/what-have-you – but it also very well may support the opposing thesis. You can’t really KNOW.) Additionally, focusing on biography, as a way of EXPLAINING the great and mysterious scope of Shakespeare’s work, has a way of diminishing the work somehow. I get it, believe me, I get it. But if Shakespeare was, actually, a secret Catholic, it doesn’t EXPLAIN the unsurpassable achievement of King Lear. It certainly would put Shakespeare’s strange (at least compared to his contemporaries) attitude towards religion in a new light, it would provide a key that would unlock one other aspect of the secret code, and all that. It still wouldn’t EXPLAIN Shakespeare himself.

Mysteries of this kind are fascinating and can keep my mind occupied for hours on end. It is one of the reasons why Possession is a book I love so damn much, because it addresses all of these esoteric academic questions in a potent and passionate way. In Possession, Maud Bailey says,

“You know, if you read the collected letters of any writer – if you read her biography – you will always get a sense that there’s something missing, something biographers don’t have access to, the real thing, the crucial thing, the thing that really mattered to the poet herself. There are always letters that were destroyed. The letters, usually.”

In another example from that book, scholar Beatrice Nest describes her “baffling” feeling as she studied the diary of Ellen Ash (wife of famous Tennysonian poet Randolph Henry Ash). Nest has made Ellen Ash her life’s work, she knows that diary better than anyone. Here she says:

“When I started on it, I thought, what a nice dull woman. And then I got the sense of things flittering and flickering behind all that solid – oh, I think of it as panelling. And then I got to think – I was being led on – to imagine the flittering flickering things – and that really it was all just as stolid and dull as anything. I thought I was making it all up, that she could have said something interesting – how shall I put it – intriguing – once in a while – but she absolutely wasn’t going to. It could be an occupational hazard of editing a dull journal, couldn’t it? Imagining that the author was deliberately baffling me?”

Of course, you recall in that book that Ellen Ash’s secret is something she took to her grave, leaving no record of it. We see her, in the century past, burning letters, and knowing her diary would be read by posterity, she kept it simple, with no mention of the secret. The secret that is the key to so much. Yet, even with deliberate withholding, a close-reading of the work tells you that something is there, behind the dull domestic prose. What is missing? What is she withholding, and is she doing it deliberately? You come to realize that yes, Ellen Ash was not just the boring housewife of a famous poet who kept a dull journal full of recipes and mentions of canning peaches. She had her own story to tell, invisible through the mist of time, and it was her goal in life to deliberately withhold that information from future generations. I believe Emily did this as well, and I believe in her case she withholds not because she was shy and insecure and so terribly wounded. I believe she withheld because she wished to dominate, something akin to Holly Hunter’s character in The Piano. That character had an ego the size the of the Siberian Steppe. I believe Dickinson did, too. Yet she refuses to elaborate, which, naturally, is her prerogative, and makes her all the more interesting. Dickinson’s poems are the opposite of ladylike. They are bleak, stark, terrifying, and breathless in their cadences. She seems at the same time to be totally in control of herself, and yet totally out of control. She uses the form of the poem (the short lines, the dashes) as a container in which to pour her own substance. It’s a mysterious process. I just thank God we have the poems, and that somebody had the foresight to save them!

Consider Byatt’s description of how scholar Roland Michell feels after discovering the draft of a letter by Randolph Ash to fellow poet, Christabel LaMotte:

He could not identify the Fairy Topic, either, and this gave him a not uncommon sensation of his own huge ignorance, a grey mist, in which floated or could be discerned odd glimpses of solid objects, odd bits of glitter of domes or shadows of roofs in the gloom.

What would happen if a secret cache of letters was discovered that “explained” Emily Dickinson? Or at least explained what her secret heartache was, the one she refers to in a couple of letters, and why she decided to live in her room for decades on end? That would be a phenomenal discovery and would have to put her entire body of work into a new light. Not necessarily the RIGHT light, it is all, after all, just interpretation – but it sure would be fascinating. You can see why people devote their entire lives to such things. You can see why people have, quite literally, gone mad in their pursuit of Shakespeare the Man. There is something about the focus on biography that can serve as a distancing technique, and I suppose that that might be, in some unconscious way, deliberate. The work as a whole is so powerful, and it can make you feel so inadequate just trying to take it all in – it’s like trying to look at an entire galaxy and understand what you are looking at, so all of the focus on biographical details can be a way of trying to contain Shakespeare. Keep him manageable. Genius is awesome, but it can make everyone feel inadequate, so if you can find something tangible to explain it, it makes everyone feel better about themselves and their lesser accomplishments. “He had syphilis – THAT’S why his late work was so brilliant!” The smoking gun theory lets us off the hook in some way. Shakespeare was a genius not because he had a direct line to the poetry of the spheres sent down from heaven, not because he had an uncanny and unprecedented freedom with language and what it could do, not because he could operate on multiple dizzying levels of meaning at the same time consistently – but because he had a corn on his foot that never healed, or some such nonsense. This is what the Shakespeare book I am devouring right now is all about (it is called The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups, by Ron Rosenbaum).

As I said, I do think biography is important. I want to speculate about it ALL. But there is a certain freedom in recognizing that you cannot really know. As Stephen Booth, the preeminent scholar of Shakespeare’s sonnets wrote:

Shakespeare was almost certainly homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. The Sonnets provide no evidence on that matter.

Booth is so good because of his full (and rare) acceptance of not “either/or” ambiguity – but “both/and” ambiguity – something that is very difficult to grasp, especially for scholars who devote their lives wanting to KNOW.

I mean, please. If Shakespeare’s secret diary was suddenly uncovered, and it was authenticated beyond a shadow of a doubt, and we could hear his voice, directly, telling us about his love life, his rehearsal processes, his thoughts before creating Hamlet, I probably would actually weep tears of joy and excitement and pre-order it in a frenzy. I would actually take a moment to thank God that I had lived long enough to see this day. I’m not even kidding.

It doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy Hamlet or The Tempest WITHOUT knowing these things. Of course not.

It’s not either/or, people. It is both/and.

I have strayed far from my topic, mainly because the “Shakespeare Wars” is much on my mind right now. Fantastic book, I’ll be writing more about it when I finish it.

It was all brought on by that fantastic review of the new biography of Emily Dickinson – the book sounds revisionist, yes (in a similar manner, I suppose, to Ron Chernow’s biographies of Alexander Hamilton and John Rockefeller. There is an accepted narrative and interpretation about these people, which is regurgitated in different ways through the decades. He’s in favor, he’s out. Chernow tries to go deeper, tries to get at something universal – tries to embrace “both/and”, as opposed to the more partisan “either/or”, which will probably date a book pretty quick, even if it makes a big splash originally.) but unlike a lot of revisionist books, it also sounds well-researched and exhaustive. The author has dug up transcripts of trials involving land disputes, for example, which adds to her theory about some of the more unsavory aspects of Dickinson’s family.

None of this, obviously, touches the poetry itself, which has stood on its own for over a century now. The mystery of her adds to the consciousness that one is in the presence of something great, something original, something that actually cannot be explained.

If Emily Dickinson were an epileptic (and sounds like the author makes a pretty good case for it), it is a fascinating aspect of her, and her confinement, that needs to be taken seriously – not only for its biographical interest, but how it can impact how we LOOK at the poetry, the filter we choose for it.

She still scares the shit out of me.