Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's FeudsBy Lyndall Gordon Virago, 491pp. £20
CLANDESTINE TRYSTS on the black, horsehair sofa of the dining room downstairs; love letters smuggled through a go-between; an established husband who threw himself into an affair with the kind of woman who liked to hand-paint sweet-peas on her cuffs; a rejected wife who, one furious night, scrapes the wallpaper entirely off the homestead hall: not quite, any of it, the background circumstances we expect of Emily Dickinson’s family life.
Lyndall Gordon’s biography is a somewhat surprising page-turner. If ever we have had an idea of Dickinson as a fey woman dressed in white who lived a reclusive life that featured mainly the baking of bread, the writing of poems and a somewhat gothic obsession with death, then this is the book to show us what a narrow mistake we have made.
In truth, it was always difficult to reconcile this image of a dusty spinster with the author of “Wild nights! Wild nights / Were I with thee / Wild nights should be / Our luxury!” There is something about Dickinson’s fierce examination of the physical world that won’t sit easily with the notion of a sequestered imagination. Her poems are full of passion, danger, rapture and desire.
That Gordon offers us a biography of a life defined neither by eccentricity nor exaggerated delicacy comes as a relief. The Emily Dickinson that emerges from this book is a deftly intellectual, empathetic and humorous woman.
Her bent towards independence had been indulged by her father from an early age, albeit with some ambivalence. He bought books for her but begged her, she said, not to read them lest they would “joggle the Mind”. At the age of 16, she entered the first women’s college, Mount Holyoke, where she studied science courses. When her peers returned home to a predictable life of housekeeping and husband-searching, Emily’s father provided for her a room of her own with a cherry table, 18 inches square, at which she wrote most of the 1,700 or so poems accomplished in her lifetime.
His indulgence seems based more on the poet’s ill-health than on his interest in her writing talents. Based on extensive research into Emily’s medical consultations and records of prescriptions made out to the Dickinson family, Gordon identifies this ailment as, most likely, epilepsy. That it ran in the family is known, as is the fact that Emily suffered blackouts. Epilepsy, the “falling sickness”, was considered a shameful ailment which needed to be concealed from all but immediate family. Gordon, ingeniously, finds hints of the poet’s condition in poems such as “I felt a cleaving in my Mind” (in which she reads the word “fit” in the fourth line as an example of the poet’s declared resolve to “tell the truth but tell it slant”.)
Epilepsy, if it was indeed Emily’s ailment, would naturally have made her nervous of public appearance. She did not, however, withdraw from an active, imaginative engagement with the world of writing. She kept abreast of new books, snapping up new editions of the Brontë sisters and George Eliot. She had a small but significant circle of admiring readers to whom she circulated hundreds of copies of her poems.
“Obtrude no more”, Dickinson wrote of the “divine majority”, and Gordon sees in this guarded privacy a creative project that is to do with imaginative freedom; with a life dedicated to “theorems of experience” and the distillation of “the creative charge and detachment just short of freezing”. Dickinson simply recognised that her inner life was more vivid than the dainty lull of civic Amherst. Her avoidance of salons and dinners was not, then, a refusal of life; instead, Gordon reads it as the sensible choice of an efficient, dedicated artist who valued the world and word too much to fritter them away on social niceties.
Love, however, was a different matter. Dickinson was in love at least twice, most profoundly later in her life, when at the age of 47, she was wooed by Otis Lord, a judge of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, (in whose arms she was found, to mild scandal, in the drawing room). Her self-assured, flirtatious letters to him hint at marriage. In the event, it seems a recurrence of her illness may have forced her to withdraw.
Far from being a stranger to passion, Emily was unwillingly close to the centre of a demanding love affair between her brother Austin, (who was married to Emily’s best reader and closest confidante, Susan), and Mabel Loomis Todd.
Gordon’s descriptions of how Austin (who paid Emily’s household bills and consequently assumed a free run of the house) commandeered Emily’s dining room for frequent and protracted afternoon meetings with Mabel, make uncomfortable reading. Emily and her sister Vinnie were sequestered in their bedrooms during these sessions, while their Irish maid, Maggie Maher, listened on from the kitchen, paying enough heed to proceedings to be able to testify against Mabel in a subsequent court case.
Gordon makes an effort to be fair to all parties, and does credit Mabel’s editorial tact in her responses to Emily’s poems, but ultimately, there is little to be said for a woman who styled herself “The Queen of Amherst”, or for her proclaimed “King”, who renounced whichever of his children would not approve his liaison.
It’s a lurid story, and a sad one: after Emily’s death, it amounts to a bun-fight between Mabel, Vinnie and Sue for the rights to represent and edit her work. Within one generation, Emily’s bloodline, and all its concerns and warring camps, had died out.
What remains is a life restrained in the living, that let fly in art. And Dickinson’s breathtaking poems. And the knowledge that were it not for them, the folk and facts of Dickinson’s life – despite even this stylish, compelling biography – would mean precious little to us.
Vona Groarke's most recent collection of poetry is Spindrift,published by Gallery Press. She teaches at the Centre for New Writing in the University of Manchester
