Small Worlds
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry SMALL WORLDS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL when Emily Dickinson died in 1886, her relatives began to fabricate a legend to explain why, from the age of 22 onward, she refused to leave the...
...Wolff reads these lines as an argument against William Paley's well-known proof of the existence of God, in which a clock presumes a clockmaker, and so on along a logical chain to the Supreme Creator...
...In doing so he has captured a good bit of that delight himself, making The Sixth Continent a book that is sure to enliven the winter months...
...Virtually all the stories about James can be found in Leon Ed-el's giant biography...
...She has researched the textbooks studied in Dickinson's schools to track down ideas familiar to the poet, and is thus able to illuminate many allusions...
...The abdication of Belief I Makes the Behavior small— I Better an ignis fatuus / than no illume at all," she commented tartly...
...Behold, what curious rooms...
...By middle age, however, he settled down in Rye, where he found the gossipy, female-dominated social life grist to his satiric pen...
...Was Dickinson simply agoraphobic and her verse a fictional exercise (as has turned out to be the case with stories of tragic passions in the works of Emily Bronte and Christina Rossetti...
...Wolff writes: "Probably in 1850 when she first embarked upon her defiant mission, [she] did not recognize the deep belief that led her to suppose the combat could be forever sustained...
...Some of Wolff s ideas may need nuancing, but her portrait will remain an invaluable corrective...
...Cynthia Griffin Wolff, whose The Triumph of Edith Wharton laid bare the vulnerability beneath one formidable faipade, now proposes a novel solution to the riddle of Emily Dickinson (Knopf, 641 pp., $25.00...
...Finlayson demonstrates that the villages dotting Romney Marsh were ideal places for writers to cultivate the sense of delight in the ordinary needed to create their works...
...many hardly knew one another, and most had retired to this isolated area to get away from literary social life...
...in fact, many years after she became a recluse, she and a widowed friend enjoyed a mutual love...
...Wolff's book will forever dispel that notion...
...Finlayson is not the first to discuss the effect the salubrious atmosphere of Romney Marsh seems to have had on novelists...
...Dickinson "was given more instruction in current mathematics and science than the average schoolboy is given now...
...She preferred to listen from the staircase, and occasionally sent the visitor a cryptic poem with a glass of sherry...
...While most others preferred to concentrate on the Church's promise that the saved would enjoy blessedness, Dickinson could not forget the other face of reality...
...How, then, do we account for the traumatic shock expressed in poem after poem...
...For almost a century afterward, biographers sifted through possible (and sometimes impossible) candidates—boys next door, rakehells, married clergymen, even a few women—in search of the cause of a broken heart...
...The grandfather gave so zealously to the Calvinist cause that he bankrupted himself...
...Before she became a hermit, Dickinson, the lively daughter of a Congressman and granddaughter of a founder of Amherst College, was brilliantly educated at a local academy connected with the school and subsequently at Mount Holyoke...
...Heaven's promise might materialize, but the grave was sure: What Inn is this Where for the night Peculiar Traveler comes...
...Benson, who memorably captured its quaint, crooked streets and petty provincialism in his Lucia novels...
...Yet agoraphobe or no, she certainly used her privacy to craft a "letter to the world" so powerfully reasoned and original that many readers still shy away from its full message...
...The image of rapacious Death's head "could be found in graveyards throughout New England, and it took many highly stylized forms...
...Her stubborn strength of will, and her nunlike devotion to her craft stand in sharp contrast to the romantic, lovelorn figure of legend...
...Benson, son of an austere Archbishop of Canterbury, was a lightweight author of 100 books...
...yet all retain the same primitive, dehumanized, masklike quality...
...Instead, Finlayson concentrates on telling amusing anecdotes—some new, many old chestnuts...
...The traditional English novel (even when done by Americans like James, Crane or Aiken) is an exploration of the minutiae of everyday life...
...In 1974, Richard B. Sewall quashed this line of speculation with an exhaustive study that proved Dickinson's life contained no disastrous romance...
...I have never read Russell Thorndike's mysteries about the smuggler-parson, Dr...
...probably it did not occur to her to wonder what would happen if she won her wrestle with the Lord...
...A child of Calvinism, her sense of language had been based on faith in universal significance...
...In Group Portrait (1982), Nicholas Delbanco tried—with mixed success in the eyes of scholars—to show how collegial-ity based on proximity sprang up between James, Crane, Ford, Conrad and Wells...
...To take one example, I had always wondered why the poem beginning, "A clock stopped—Not the Mantel's" referred to "Geneva's farthest skill...
...Her sister Vinnie captured the popular imagination by suggesting that a blighted love affair had caused the sudden withdrawal...
...Both institutions were strongholds of Calvinist orthodoxy, at the time engaged in battling the more liberal Unitarians and Emerson's Transcendentalism—doctrines that celebrated self-reliance, rather than demanding submission to an all-powerful deity...
...Where are the maids...
...On Poetry SMALL WORLDS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL when Emily Dickinson died in 1886, her relatives began to fabricate a legend to explain why, from the age of 22 onward, she refused to leave the grounds of the family house in Amherst, Massachusetts, and would not come downstairs to greet company...
...I like the look of agony," she wrote, "because I know it's True...
...Syn, but Finlayson has convinced me to look into them...
...Who are these below...
...More cautious than Delbanco, Finlayson does not claim these writers constitute a school...
...The strong emotional appeal of Dickinson's poetry and her curious seclusion encourage an image of some kind of spontaneous "natural," unaware of the world around her...
...I wish Finlayson had spent a little more time on some of the minor Romney Marsh writers he crams into the final chapter...
...Her most pervasive metaphor had been J acob wrestling with the angel...
...her withdrawal began after a religious revival at Mount Holyoke that left her unconverted...
...In addition to producing his never-ending stream of books, Benson served as Mayor of Rye—a medieval office involving as much pomp and circumstance as his father's archbishopric...
...Much of the material on Conrad, Ford, Wells and Crane will similarly be familiar to readers from other sources, though it is well retold...
...It has long been notable for its cutthroat smugglers and its picturesque seaside resorts: Folkestone (Noel Coward kept a house nearby for many years), Winchelsea (Ford Madox Ford), Sand-gate(H.G...
...Indeed, there is precious little about writing in The Sixth Continent...
...The Congregational Church of Dickinson's youth demanded an adult profession of faith...
...Her poems subtly ponder scientific and philosophical ideas culled from her voracious reading...
...she knew of them, but did not choose to follow their fashions...
...It is the least patronizing explanation to date of a tough-minded poet...
...Wolffs approach clarifies much that has been obscure in the verse...
...In this fishbowl world aging was "quite a pleasant process," he told his friends...
...There is nothing sentimental about this Emily Dickinson...
...Wells), and Rye—beloved of Henry James, Stephen Crane, Radclyffe Hall, Conrad Aiken, and E.F...
...But the chapter on Benson, who bought James' Lamb House in Rye and made it the stomping grounds for that alarming comic monster, Miss Mapp, is enthralling...
...Surely more was intended than poetic synecdoche for Swiss watchmaking...
...As a young man, he knew everybody in the literary world, and managed to combine writing and partying in a manner few could equal...
...Inevitably, the freshest material concerns the least famous...
...Landlord...
...Geneva in this context connotes not only Alpine mechanical ingenuity, but also Calvin—whose mechanical deity was repugnant to Dickinson...
...His history has one unifying theme beyond location...
...Who is the Landlord...
...In a family noted for its piety, Emily was the only rebel...
...Wolff uses evidence from poems and letters to show how hard it was for Emily to accept God as loving or just...
...Jocelyn Brooke's half novel, half memoir called The Orchid Trilogy (written in the late 1940s), contains wonderfully evocative accounts of growing-up and deserves to be better known...
...Romney Marsh lies on the coast of East Sussex and Kent...
...Nor did she become her own publicist in order to get published—a necessity in her day...
...Dickinson's quarrel with God came to an end, ironically, just as New England's religious fervor was lapsing into indifference...
...monstrous, hungry, and predatory...
...No ruddy fires on the hearth— No brimming Tankards flow— Necromancer...
...It is hard to think of Dickinson as a contemporary of Mark Twain, William Dean Howells and Whitman...
...I had expected that it would be a burdensome and joyless task, but it resolved itself into a pastime...
...The books of E. Nesbit, for instance, werealife-long passion of Noel Coward (one was found beside him when he died...
...In arelative world, she became God's champion...
...One of the principal tasks of women in the mid-19th century was to assist at "watches" with the dying, often close friends or relations...
...As Wolff sees it, "An enigmatic universe, tyrannized by brutality and destruction, provided the subject for Emily Dickinson's probing eye...
...IAIN FINLAYSON'S The Sixth Continent: A Literary History of Romney Marsh (Atheneum, 240 pp., $ 15.95) provides a beguiling glimpse of a world scarcely bigger than Emily Dickinson's room and equally fertile as a place to write...
Vol. 69 • December 1986 • No. 18
