Books

The woman in white

Hilary Spurling

The Life of Emily Dickinson Richard B. Sewell (Faber, Two volumes, £17.50) The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson edited by T. H. Johnson (Faber paperbacks, £3.95)

Richard B. Sewell's Life of Emily Dickinson is almost as eccentric as Emily Dickinson herself. Its structure is rash and its conclusions tentative in the extreme. Its length is as off-putting as its exorbitant price. Its manner is hesitant, its material meagre and its subject irreducibly elusive. Its attempts to assign so much as a date or name to the key events and persons in her life are nearly always unsuccessful. It raises more problems than one would have thought possible, even for this most problematic of poets, and it solves practically none of them. It is without doubt the boldest, one of the most gripping and ultimately among the most satisfying biographies I have ever read.

Most Lives start with birth and end with death: Emily Dickinson's birth is held up until the first page of the second volume of this one, and her death is nowhere described (though its cause, Bright's disease, may be inferred from a footnote part way through). She makes only fleeting appearances in the first volume which deals with the history and institutions of her home town, her ancestry, her family and friends, and various disconcerting or discreditable incidents which took place after her death. This is pushing what might be called the ecological approach to a point where one wonders if the result can properly be termed biography at all ; but Mr Sewell's scheme becomes logical enough in the light of the peculiar difficulties with which he has had to contend. The first of these is Emily Dickinson's own nature, for which secretive seems too weak a word. The second is the myth which grew up in her lifetime, and has obscured or sentimentalised her achievement ever since.

Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, and after one visit as a girl to Washington and Philadelphia, and two more to a Boston doctor, never left home again. By her late twenties she was already becoming a recluse, and she spent most of the second half of her life in her bedroom writing poems. She saw almost nobody, communicated with her brother and his wife in the house next door by passing notes, refused admittance even to her dearest friends and, on the rare occasions when she did grant interviews, conducted them invisibly from behind doors or round a bend at the top of the stairs. She relaxed her rule occasionally in favour of children to whom she would let down cream puffs from her window on a string. A visitor who reached Amherst in 1881 left a vivid account of 'the lady whom the people call the Myth': 'She has not been outside of her own house in fifteen years, except once to see a new church, when she crept out at night, and viewed it by moonlight. No one who calls upon her mother and sister ever see her. ... She dresses wholly in white, and her mind is said to be perfectly wonderful.'

This summary does scant justice to the labyrinthine ramifications of so strange a life; scarcely less fascinating are the simplifications, suppressions and distortions of the legend (which, roughly speaking, attributes the poet's withdrawal to a broken heart, due to her father's tyranny, a disastrous love affair and/or failure to publish her work) whose various stages Mr Sewell charts alongside the new facts yielded by his own research. These reveal a tangle of guilt, strain and tensions deeply embedded in the Dickinsons' New England puritan background (the first English ancestor settled, like Nathaniel Hawthorne's, in Massachusetts in 1630 and the family remained pure stock, 'without even a wife in seven generations outside New England') The anguish and frustration of Emily Dickinson's poems, which commentators have tried for nearly a century to reconcile with her apparently uneventful life, were cruelly active in the undergrowth beneath the vigorous public careers of her father and her brother. Both were lawyers, both pillars of the church and the community. The father's history is one of sombre self-repression; the son led a double life which closely involved Emily, the greater part of whose existence now proves to have been spent in an atmosphere of duplicity and vicious local gossip.

Her brother Austin, the closest to her in temperament of all the family, married with Emily's enthusiastic approval a girl to whom Emily had herself addressed a series of passionate love-letters. The move proved ruinous for all three parties from the start. Austin and his wife settled into a relationship of sexual frustration, mental (perhaps even physical) violence, hatred on the one hand, drink and hysteria on the other. Austin, a champion snob like his father before him, eventually turned (again with Emily's full approval and connivance) to an adulterous passion which lasted at white heat for thirteen years. The object of his affections was Mabel Todd, the young visitor who had been so much intrigued by Amherst's Myth in 1881. The affair wrecked her life and her family's, as well as Austin's and his, and its repercussions on Emily Dickinson's posthumous reputation are only now apparent. It was Mabel who pieced together and published selections from the baskets full of poems discovered in Emily's bedroom when she died. Rival biographies, each falsifying or concealing crucial facts, were written by Austin's daughter and Mabel's grandchild, the last of whom also left a secret paper published for the first time in the second of Mr Sewell's five appendices: a grim document which still gives off the reek of ancient smalltown bitterness and scandal.

This is the story told in minute detail in Mr Sewell's first volume. It casts a lurid light on the enigmatic life he has scrupulously decoded in his second from EmilY Dickinson's own poems, letters, scraps and fragments. The only certainties seem to be that Emily conducted some sort of an affair with Austin's wife, with the newspaper editor Samuel Bowles who rejected both her poems and her person, and long afterwards with Judge Otis Lord, her father's closest friend and a leading light at the Massachusetts bar, who loved her in return. All that can be said for sure is that these and other more obscure but no less painful crises were the stuff from which she made her poems; and that renunciation of one sort or another was central to them all.

Mr Sewell himself compares his crabwise method to Conrad's Marlow stories; there is at least as close a parallel if one imagines a plot of Hawthorne's told in the tortuous, tangential manner of Henry James at his most thrilling. A mystery of these Proportions can, after all, hardly be approached head on. As Mr Sewell moves cautiouslY towards it, hazarding a guess here or provisional opinion there, weighing motives, assembling clues, testing alternative solu tions, the effect of so much precaution and surmise is to dispel rather than deepen the cloud of romantic mystification which has

so long surrounded Emily Dickinson. Her

retreat from normal life gradually becomes as inevitable, and as unsurprising, as it

seemed at the time to her brother and sister.

She was anything but unsociable in her giddy youth. For all the subsequent rumours of authoritarian gloom at home, she seenls to have felt more affectionate amusement than fear for her father ('He buys me manY

Books—but begs me not to read them':

because he fears they joggle the Mind'), anu she revelled in the endless parties of her Bur'!" hood ('Amherst is alive with fun this winter. ...'.) She baked excellent bread, like Emily Brontë, and won prizes for it at local cattle shows. Her wit, gaiety and dash were frequently remarked on, and she readily made friends with any number of eligible Young men. Indeed an exuberant love of the world, and reluctance to renounce it, make a constant theme in her early letters when, almost alone among her family and friends, She refused to make public confession of her sins in the many religious revivals which kept all Amherst in a state of pious ferment. Pressures of this kind bore down on Emily Dickinson from birth and, though nothing in her life was simple, it is at least Clear that her complexities were inextricahlY bound up with the Calvinist tradition. She is the quintessence of that element we all have who are of the Puritan descent pur Sang,' wrote an early admirer who knew her Only from her poems. 'We came to this Country to think our own thoughts with nobody to hinder. Ascetics of course, & this our Thebaid. We conversed with our own souls until we lost the art of communicating with other people ...' This comes very close to the heart of Emily Dickinson's mystery. I find I need more vail,' she said; and there can be no doubt either of the urgency of the need or the elaborate, teasing, sometimes Positively coquettish ingenuity with which She constructed her veils. It is this combination of passion with oPacity, directness with disguise, which perhaps best justifies Mr Sewell's novelistic technique. At all points in Emily Dickinso. n's story one comes up against rigid discipline controlling inner torment. Both are Present in the pale, fervent, tight-lipped faces of the men she loved: above all in the features of her father and her brother and the Revd Charles Wadsworth, who may or May not have been the 'Master' for whom She would have gladly died, and from whom She sought redemption: 'You remember I asked you for it—you gave me something eisIse. I forgot the Redemption in the fc,edeemed—I didn't tell you for a long time but I knew you had altered me—and Was tired — no more—'. If Charles Wadsworth bears an uncanny resemblance to Hawthorne's godly Arthur Dymmesdale, t_hen this confession is the very essence of the Scarlet Letter; and, though we may never know to whom the letter was written, 9r when, or even whether it was ever sent, it 18 worth noting that Hawthorne himself d. ellberately avoided laying bare his theme in language anywhere near so explicit. "r Sewell does not simply call in question ,`".e convention that biography moves from .birth to death. He raises the fundamental l_ssues of any attempt at literary portraiture in fact orfiction: how far outward events may be leconciled with inner feelings, whether it is apossible to impose shape and direction on nY.thIng so essentially amorphous as an .ndtvidual life, and at what point the most mate recesses of any human being must Inn the end resist analysis. Mr Sewell's Life is a_lmost i reader mPossible to put down, even for the rnDik

who knows nothing about Emily C inson , and it is an indispensable instruelm for any admirer of her poems.