Book review: Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds

Published on Friday 19 February 2010 19:14

LIVES LIKE LOADED GUNS: EMILY DICKINSON AND HER FAMILY'S FEUDS BY LYNDALL GORDON VIRAGO, 512pp, £20 Review by RONALD FRAME

THIS is a work of literary detection. In part it seeks to explain the workings of a unique mind: that of a poet long considered a sickly, melancholic New England spinster, toiling away in obscurity.

There is a contradiction here. Given that fewer than a dozen of her 1,789 poems were published in her lifetime, how is it that we got to know the name and eccentric oeuvre of Emily Dickinson? That is the other part of Lyndall Gordon's sleuthing brief: to tell us how rival parties within the Dickinson clan fought to control the image of their wayward genius – what was told to posterity and what was not, what was invented and what erased, how the myth was nurtured.

It begins as a somewhat daunting read. After the two and a half pages listing the illustrations and an Amherst village map and a spreading Dickinson family tree (49 characters) and the cast list ("In Order of Appearance") and the notes on typography and punctuation come the 18 chapters of dense text, followed by 17 pages of sources, 46 pages of chapter notes, three pages of acknowledgements and finally a 15-page index, all set between endpapers showing a manuscript page of the subject's surprisingly neat and orderly handwriting.

We start in 1885, when Emily Dickinson had only a year of life left, before we drop down through layers of the past (and now and then bob upwards again), until we eventually find ourselves in a more familiar linear biographical groove. Concentration is required.

Born as one of three children to outwardly conventional parents, Emily, as elder daughter, was given the advantages of a progressive education, boarding away from home in an era of rigid social codes and quiet domestic duty.

In Amherst, Massachusetts, her bedroom window looked on to a graveyard. But in her mind she searched far beyond it. At school she rated religious instruction bottom of the list: it couldn't compare with rhetoric or other ancient history or algebra and geometry.

"Have you said your prayers?" Miss Lyon, a teacher, demanded.

"Yes," she answered, "though it can't make much difference to The Creator."

Thus, with her "private revolt against dogmatism", a teenager – "different" and "bold" – honourably fits into the "long line of American dissent".

She became precociously attuned to the goings-on in hidden corners of faraway England, mentally inhabiting George Eliot's Warwickshire. The Bronts – Charlotte and, even more, Emily – became imagined intellectual kin.

Gordon is particularly illuminating on all the volcanic imagery, the lava-flow seethings in Dickinson's poetry. Only a poet determined to re-invent language, riding metaphors that carry her to the frontier of a buried life, could articulate an "unmentioned" thing: a submerged self, "fathoms beneath the sea".

In order to set up the latter portion of the book, where the literary estate is being fought over, Gordon goes into the family relationships in exacting detail. The author generously commends a predecessor for "refusing to lose the poet to biographical contexts", but I wondered if she might be teetering towards that cliff edge herself. We're being offered a great deal of information, certainly, but what can we know? The author gives us her "guess" about this or that, she "senses" something might have been the case, she hypothesises. But she is quite clear about the reason for needing to speculate.

Dickinson's poems, like Shakespeare's sonnets, occupy a mid-space between experience and imagination. As a formality, the two conditions have to be distinguished.

She was more scrupulous than other poets – Shelley and Byron, say, wreaking havoc around them – in holding herself apart from what we'd ordinarily call life. But now and then imagination crossed the boundary; and the land that lies beyond, so awkward for any biographer, is that of personal fantasy. A veritable quagmire, especially with such a fragile hothouse bloom as Dickinson.

But here things turn around. This book is also a "mystery". And it's now that Lyndall Gordon plays her ace.

She has a very compelling theory as to what the abiding sickness was that afflicted Dickinson. It wasn't disappointed love, but an inherited medical condition – a disease that would result in a patient's "languour"; "visual abnormalities" precipitated troubling visions. Even in clinical circles, some imputed a moral (or, rather, immoral) quality to those diagnosed: a lack of self-control, wantonness, hysteria.

At this point the book magnificently vindicates itself. The hard work getting here is rewarded. Gordon shows us how the ingenious but elusive imagery of the poetry emerges from the physical trauma, but also how it becomes the means of the poet's asserting herself, against everything that has tried to hold her down – thanks to the force of her intellect, she attains a pure transcendence of soul.

It's a little more complicated than that, and Gordon has to find a new and elegant critical vocabulary of her own to pin down Dickinson's consummate achievement. A number of sentences have to be read two or three times – concerning poems which look like so little on the page, but which (I would suggest) are absolute just as Japanese haiku are – but then, why should enlightenment ever be easy and snatched off-the-peg?

The Dickinson genius, courtesy of Gordon's dexterity, survives the hazards of "biographical contexts". Here is the definitive biography. At any rate it will be the Last Word for the next few decades.

Dickinson was wittier, more mischievous, more broken – and more resilient – than we have given her credit for being.

I can picture her – granted, through her verse, the immortality she always craved – managing to look down slyly over the author's shoulder, curious to see how we see her in our new century. She considers in her quiet way, then confers a wry nod of approval.