Ever since her death in 1886, Emily Dickinson has been the biographical equivalent of a bar of soap. The more hands that have tried to grab hold of her, the more elusive she has become. Only her legend has remained constant, caught in a strange middle ground between fact and myth. A thin, pale poet, rarely venturing outside her family home in the small Massachusetts town of Amherst, she has achieved fame as a real-life Lady of Shalott, a singing bird who lived in a cage of her own making.
The poems she wrote are equally hard to pin down. Though frequently sent to “secret sharers” among her friends, they are far from being simply chatty or confessional. Instead their surfaces are crazed by long dashes, creating fragments that advance spasmodically across the page, as if unsure whether to confide in their readers or recoil into silence: “The Soul selects her own Society –/Then – shuts the Door –”. In poem after poem, she beckons us to the threshold of revelation and then slams the door in our faces. Her poems are secrets she could bring herself neither to keep nor to tell.
Dickinson herself is an even bigger riddle, not least because the figure of the word-happy but unworldly spinster has lodged itself so firmly in the popular imagination. This is the winsome creature who featured in the 1976 Broadway play The Belle of Amherst – “shy”, “chaste” and “frightened” – and in Joyce Carol Oates’s 2008 story “EDickinsonRepliLuxe”, in which a half-sized robot version of the poet, complete with neat dimity apron, is created to console bored housewives.
Lyndall Gordon’s Dickinson, by contrast, is a far more spirited character, whose visionary flights do not prevent her from taking part in such down-to-earth activities as slamming doors, baking (“people must have puddings”) and drowning “superfluous” kittens in a barrel of pickle brine. Despite being the daughter of a man whose heart was “pure and terrible”, and who dolefully informed his fiancée that “I do not expect or wish for a life of pleasure”, Emily seems to have grown up surprisingly well-adjusted. As a young woman she was quick to poke fun at stale conventions, and had a tongue as sharp as her mind. In middle age she had a thrilling but unconsummated (possibly thrilling because unconsummated) love affair with an older man, still feeling his touch when she lay alone in bed. And throughout her adult life there were her poems, which dealt with subjects as diverse as frogs and sex changes, and which she likened to volcanic eruptions: little spurts of speech that bubbled up through an unstable crust of silence.
According to Gordon, even Dickinson’s withdrawal from public life had a logical cause: epilepsy. Whatever she might have thought about marriage as an institution – and her anxious punning about women who were “bridalled” suggests a certain wariness – as an epileptic, marriage would have been discouraged by medical opinion and possibly prohibited by law. Family history, prescription records, references to “Dying in the night” or “the snarl in the brain”: for Gordon, it all points to epilepsy as one of the sad private rhythms underlying Dickinson’s life. “There is a Fitting – a Dismay”: while Dickinson may have started by thinking of her fits as something external to her, like a set of clothes, she gradually reconciled herself to them as “Being’s Malady”. Given the traditional association of epilepsy with visionary experiences, she may even have considered her malady as “fitting” in another sense too, although Gordon seems to be thinking rather more about the needs of posterity when she claims that it was “fortunate” that Dickinson lived at a time when her brain was not “dulled” by drug treatment.
Given the sane and sensible woman who emerges from this biography, how did the legend of the Amherst belle develop? This is where Gordon’s biography really sparks into life. Unpicking the knotty tangle of relationships at the heart of the Dickinson family, she shows that the poet’s work was not simply an unmediated “letter to the world”. After her death, almost everyone involved in her life felt that they had some special claim on her, and as they continued to produce their rival versions of the poet – biographical reminiscences, letters, editions of the poems – so the real woman became shrouded in gossip and hearsay.
The villainess of the piece here is Mabel Todd, a pert young singer who came to Amherst in 1881 and set her sights on the Dickinson family with all the cunning of a cuckoo sizing up a nest. Soon she had started an affair with the poet’s grimly respectable brother Austin, encouraged by her own priapic husband, and then tried to muscle her way into Emily’s life. Even from a distance – they never met – Emily’s quick eyes saw right through her, but this did little to dent Mabel’s ambition. Having replaced Austin’s wife, Sue, in his affections, and secured a parcel of Dickinson land on which to build a house, she started dropping hints as to how much neater things would be for everyone if Sue were to die. When Sue proved unwilling to make this sacrifice, Mabel set about replacing her in the eyes of posterity instead, by taking most of the poems Emily had hidden away in a trunk, removing all references to her rival, the woman Emily had considered a second heart, and publishing them to great acclaim.
Mabel’s actions split the family down the middle, creating a fault line that spread through the 20th century. On one side was her daughter, Millicent, who inherited her cache of poems and loyally perpetuated her jealous hatreds. On the other was Sue’s daughter, Martha, who interrupted her career as a romantic novelist to publish a rival hoard of papers, prompting Millicent to some furious marginalia: “Bosh!”, “ugh”, “Oh, yeah?”. Both enlisted powerful allies in publishing and academia. Both wielded the past like a weapon.
As Gordon tells it, this story of the terrible fascination Dickinson exerted on her heirs is as rich as a novel by Henry James. There is the same complexity of motives, the same grim comedy, and even places where the writer seems to be caught up in the world of her characters. At its best, as when Gordon describes Dickinson as “a writer who speaks – blasts – directly to the soul”, this produces a style in which the biographer becomes another “secret sharer”, who not only writes about the poet but tries to write like her, too. At other times, in lines such as Gordon’s comparison of Emily’s love to “a volley of buckshot or a beam of light picking out a doe in the dark”, the writing is coloured less by poetic sympathy than by big splodges of purple prose.
But this is a minor grumble when compared with the achievement of the book as a whole. “Tell the truth but tell it slant” was Dickinson’s advice to herself. In showing how the public image of “Emily Dickinson” has been built up over the years, alternately embroidered by fantasies and barnacled with lies, Gordon does something much more important. Perhaps for the first time since Dickinson’s death, she invites us to meet the poet head-on.
Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds
by Lyndall Gordon
491pp, Virago, £20
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