THE ELUSIVE EMILY:
Maloff, Saul
ELUSIVE EMILY SAUL MALOFF The Life of Emily Dickinson RICHARD B. SEWELL Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30 "Our Emily," the "Queen Recluse" of Amherst, the dotty priestess dressed all in white, a...
...Her girlhood letters to Susan Gilbert (later Mrs...
...The facts we reach for are the myths we make...
...When she was twenty she wrote her beloved Susan of the "fancy that we are the only poets, and every-one else is prose...
...But no, nothing, she declines our least request, will accede to nothing we ask of her-not a single misbegotten affair, not even a proper chaste passionate friendship of the nineteenth-century sort, an ill-fated operatic love, for a "left-over of the Brontes," as someone said of her...
...Higginson, "feels to me an oblique place...
...Alone in her room, she was "Our Emily...
...Who were her ancestors...
...Having no other, she cast in the role poor, plodding phil-istine Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who couldn't begin to make heads or tails of her or her poetry and could only scratch his head, wither in her fires...
...And yet, however oblique, secretive, elusive, spectral to the world she was, Emily Dickinson, as Richard Sewell, her latest and by far her most authori-tative biographer, remarks, "establishes an intimacy with her readers as do few other poets," an intimacy which "leads to possessiveness...
...beyond our circumferences...
...The world rubbed her the wrong way -and we are the rubbing world...
...She had as little to say of it as Jane Austen did of the Napoleonic Wars...
...How better to account for her, espe-cially then, than simply to reduce her to that stock character, the lovelorn lady pining her life away, and thereby making her our familiar, a pitiable absurd figure, but our own-conde-scend to while standing in awe of her...
...her de-cent, ineffectual, nondescript mother...
...Sewell presents all the possible evi-dence and maintains a judicious neu-trality...
...For years I thought / owned her, and at moments I still think so...
...and she herself played all the parts, all the parts...
...I, however, cannot...
...Why can't she be like us instead of sitting upstairs day after day, year after year, scribbling those impenetrable little poems, writ-ing her letters to the world...
...Always one must make allowances for the perfervid, flamboyant epistolary style and sentimental conventions of the day-see, for an example unsettling to the contemporary ear tuned to hear the dissonances of unconscious self-revelation, the letters of her female votaries to George Eliot, to us nothing less than flaming avowals of adoration, the language of decidedly sexual love...
...Barrett of Wimpole Street (though he was nothing of the sort, as Sewell makes clear...
...As the letters to Susan vibrate with the intensities of adolescent crush, no less do the letters of the later years-despite the rises and falls, an astonishing consistency in the nature, quality, level of feeling...
...Her advent is prepared for by small-scale biographies of her paternal grandfather, who died when she was a child and was the first notable Dickinson, a founder of Am-fierst College, a prominent lawyer and man of affairs, and finally a pathetic failure...
...yet even he, in possession of all the avail-able materials, everything now known flowing directly from or impinging on her life, must proceed toward her by indirection, by encirclement, by deduc-tion and inference, cautious surmise and measured speculation-by the mul-tiple perspective provided by the poems and letters, diaries and journals, hers and others', by overviews of the town and time, background and family, affinities and sympathies, sources and influences, warp and woof, the era's pervasive ideas and events private and public...
...Evidence of powerful feel-ing abounds in her writings, most vio-lently in the so-called "Master" letters found among her papers...
...but that that feeling was directed at any of the leading candidates for the role-or at anyone else in the actual world-seems most unlikely...
...we must always grasp beyond our reach for explanatory "facts," as if facts account for states, outer for inner...
...She thought she owned her...
...It simplifies even while seeking to enrich...
...How nearly can we ac-count for this wayward, bizarre, un-accountable poet and woman...
...Todd came to the house to sing for her, for her alone, Emily listened unseen from the next room...
...Sewell, that exemplary man and biographer, is confident scholars will yet stumble on new ma-terial...
...In fact, Sewell, a scrupulous, tactful, reticent scholar decently re-luctant to transgress the bounds of the known, inundates us with everything, anything remotely bearing on the life of bis subject, in a massive attempt to fix and demythicize her once and for all-to force the mysterious "Isolato" out of her closet and into, if not the glare of light, then at least some pen-etrable shadow where in our presence we can hear a recognizable voice and discern a substantial figure...
...Although she was anything but a widely celebrated figure herself (seven poems were pub-lished during her lifetime, all of them anonymously), she was a conspicuous local girl, eldest daughter of one of the most prominent families in town and a "character" by any reckoning...
...I don't care for roving...
...Include us, if not others, in her society...
...In your half-cracked way you chose," writes Adrienne Rich in a 1964 poem, "silence for entertainment, chose to have it out at last/on your own premises...
...more so...
...Half-cracked," the perplexed Hig-ginson said of her, in consternation...
...and, above all, her brother Austin, his wife Susan, their cata-strophic marriage, and the Todds, Mabel the mistress of Austin's last years, Todd the complaisant husband who to alert the adulterous lovers of his approach whistled an air from "Martha" on his return home from the observatory at Amherst...
...riven, she was a kind of her-oine-of Victorian melodrama, the stuff of banal myth, in any case domes-ticated, a co'irful landmark for pro-vincial ladies of "dimity convictions" (her own scathing characterization...
...her father, also a prominent lawyer and politician, Treasurer of the College and a celebrated figure in her legend-the stern, tyrannical autocrat, a kind of Mr...
...By critical mass appears to be Sewell's reply: to rout the shadows, shrink the zone of the unknown by thickly popu-lating it...
...but in dealing with her, one may be for-given...
...New Eng-land in the decline of Puritanism...
...We can't tolerate the blank wall, the closed door, so we repair to the keyhole, only to find there is none...
...How was she perceived by others...
...The great and abiding mystery is the canon itself-the poems and the letters: that, in a poetic age of "mes-sage and uplift and . . . lilting matters" better attuned to Longfellow, she con-trived her weird, stately, haunting, un-precedented music and created reso-nances which, a century later, are still beyond our circumferences...
...In her early twenties she wrote her brother after first meeting some cousins: "The Newmans seem very pleasant, but they are not like us...
...The failed poems (and many of them fail, many of them fail ludicrously) are filled with billow-ing feeling and nothing anywhere in sight on which it can alight...
...No town would want to be without one...
...Immediately following the appearance of the post-humous 1890 Poems, she became a cult figure...
...You prefer brown, she white...
...Asked incessantly why, her sister Vinnie, not quite understanding the world's be-wilderment, said it was "only a hap-pen"-early on Emily saw less and less of the world and by gradual stages over the whole of her adult life saw hardly anything of it...
...you bustle about, she stays indoors, which was world enough, "but the Grounds are ample...
...the dim Judge Lord, twenty years her senior, rather stodgy and married to boot over much of the span of their friendship...
...The weakness is ours, of course- our voyeurism, our prurience...
...Todd's daughter, Mil-licent Todd Bingham, who in her turn made a career of Emily, once said acerbicly of the devotees, 'They all think they own her...
...but naturally, the de-sign can only make us more acutely aware of the space she occupies in the frame, though that space vibrates and commands our attention, as it does theirs...
...Stevens...
...Marianne Moore-though here interesting cor-respondences present themselves...
...she was as much "in love" then as later...
...She chose not to, and we won't have it...
...No matter that the men were im-probable: the preacher Charles Wads-worth, whom she couldn't have seen more than a few times...
...We cannot and will not bear this...
...Impenetrable...
...Conversely, in the great poems and in the great letters, emotion is miraculously con-tained...
...It's not merely that Wadsworth, Bowles, Lord won't, no matter how we glaze or chisel them, plausibly sit for the por-trait...
...By this strategy, Emily doesn't get born until the beginning of the sec-ond volume...
...Invited to Boston by Hig-ginson to meet other writers she said, in her uppity way: "I never thought of conceiving that I could ever have the slightest approach to such a want in all future time...
...Or, for that matter, Sappho...
...Similarly, in the second volume, herself perceived in relation to others, the others solid presences, herself glimpsed fiickeringly, those glimpses adding to rather than clarifying the mystification...
...Plath...
...Another time she spoke of the "campaign inscrut-able of the Interior...
...What makes a few of us so different from others...
...Can anyone imagine owning Yeats...
...Owned her: all mine...
...Pound...
...Her immediate family...
...America in the middle decades of the 19th Century...
...Why won't she open the door for us after we've come all this way...
...She was all nerves and the world rubbed so abrasively upon them she couldn't bring herself to see a caller because "my own Words so chill and burn me...
...Richard Sewell has better claim...
...Crav-ing inclusion, needing her acceptance, presence and love all the more as she persists in disdaining ours, we're puz-zled and enraged, ourselves stricken by unrequited love, we are bereaved...
...Tremendous emotional pressure ex-pended itself in a poem or letter, often both, as her letters are filled with poems and poem-fragments...
...That's how Emily was...
...Friends and ac-quaintances...
...the elderly newspaper editor Samuel Bowles...
...When Mabel Loomis Todd, a close friend of the family, in fact her brother's lover, the woman who was her first editor and without whose devoted labors we might not now have the poems at all-when Mrs...
...What, when she wasn't writing or reading, did she doi What was Amherst like...
...Maddening hauteur...
...Why doesn't she come downstairs, get out of the house, take tea with friends and neighbors, receive visitors, accept invitations to the ball...
...Now that may seem a touch excessive, but it is not unrepresentative...
...Auden...
...Mentor...
...Jacob versus Esau," she once wrote a friend about something that was momentarily disturbing her, "was a trifle in litigation, compared to the Skirmish in my Mind...
...It's a question I often ask myself...
...Servants...
...the letters, typically, roil with emotion wildly in excess of the occasion...
...Ten thousand new letters will not bring us one phase-of-the-moon closer to the center of her turbulences...
...The essential drama of her life was the drama in and out of her mind...
...What did she read, say, listen to, think about-the Civil War, for example, which exploded in the mid-span of her life...
...Eliot...
...If Sewell is to avoid the grossness of pop psycho-analysis, the blandishments Of wild self-indulgent speculation and senti-mental fictionalizing, which can only perpetuate the myth in other forms, how then, since so little can be solidly known of her and she everywhere eludes the grasp, is he to conduct what Henry James called the "devilish art of biography" which is, James added in italics, so "thinning...
...In the sanctum of her room, which was her world ('To shut our eyes is Travel," she once said) Emily Dickin-son's soul, in the language of the fa-mous poem, selected its own society, then shut the door...
...ELUSIVE EMILY SAUL MALOFF The Life of Emily Dickinson RICHARD B. SEWELL Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30 "Our Emily," the "Queen Recluse" of Amherst, the dotty priestess dressed all in white, a spinster of course, doubt-less a virgin, peering invisibly from behind the curtains of the upstairs window, conversing with a rare guest from the safe distance of another room or unseen from the other side of a half-open door or from the head of the staircase, the maiden lady, Auntie Emily, who went so far in her pas-sionate avoidance of contact with the world as to lower sweets on a string to the waiting children below, who left her house one time only in the last twenty years of her life and then only to call at the house next door to join her brother and his wife in mourning the death of their young son, her be-loved nephew, a brief visit that left her in a state of prolonged nervous prostration...
...Given .her aristo-cratic temperament, her disdain of the run of her townspeople, that "society" was severely exclusive, peopled by those near at hand who could be transfigured by the forge of her need into the dramatis personae she required: Friend, Sister, Soulmate, Father, Mentor, Lover, Master...
...In the face of enduring mystery there is something in us that will not let it be...
...An impossible child-woman...
...far more than that, cast in that role, they violate one's sense of her...
...Save for one marvelous, enigmatic remark: "War," she wrote to Col...
...If only she had gratified us by marrying- marrying someone, anyone, even Judge Lord, having so much as one child, stillborn or doomed to die young, there would never have been myth or mys-tery, and we could forgive her her strange voyage from vault to vault...
...This is fanciful and hyperbolic...
...Around the blurred white space of the densely composed painting the vivid figures of the group portrait cluster, all of them turned at various angles in her direction as if their own concentrated mass and volume could evoke the obscurely-drawn, missing central figure...
...Austin Dickinson) are as much love letters as any she wrote in later life...
...No, they simply won't do, not a one of them, not a demon lover in the lot...
...her loyal, devoted, eccentric sister La-vinia...
...From the beginning, immediately after the 1890 Poems, indeed during her lifetime, the myth of the appari-tion in white required another figure- a man: unrequited love, her stricken heart, utter desolation...
Vol. 102 • May 1975 • No. 4
