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The Belle's Letters
Newly published correspondence reveals the beloved friend who nourished Emily Dickinson's art.
By Graham Christian
NOVEMBER 9, 1998:
OPEN ME CAREFULLY: EMILY DICKINSON'S INTIMATE LETTERS TO SUSAN HUNTINGTON DICKINSON, Compiled by Martha Nell Smith and Ellen
Louise Hart. Paris Press, 316 pages, $39.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.
There is an extraordinary photograph from the 1860s by Clementina, Lady
Hawarden, that shows two women on a stone balcony, their huge hemispherical
dresses dominating the air around them. One of them looks out over what might
be a residential square in London, and her face is almost completely concealed
from us; her companion, however, clutching her friend's waist, looks at the
photographer, and us, full face, with astonishing balefulness and hatred,
willing us to be gone. The privacy, the interiority, of their friendship is
inviolable, as were the truths that defined the friendships of Alice James,
Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary Ann Willson; they would have seen all our efforts
toward the reconstruction of their lives, however sympathetic, as intrusion and
even violation. It has been whispered for some time in academic circles that
Emily Dickinson's emotional life belonged to the history of women's intimate
friendships, and now the case has been made most forcefully by this new
gathering of Dickinson's writings to her sister-in-law and lifelong friend,
Susan Huntington Dickinson.
Emily Dickinson and Susan Gilbert met in their later teens, and by 1850, the
date of the first letter, their friendship was already in full flower; Susan
was her correspondent's "darling one," her letters to Emily read to pieces.
After Susan's marriage to Austin Dickinson, and despite the differences in
their religious views, Emily's expressions altered but scarcely diminished --
"I held her hand the tighter." Susan, herself a writer, became a first reader
for many of Dickinson's poems, often replying only to praise -- "I was all ear"
-- but also at times to emend. "Sue" was Dickinson's "Lily" and "Rose" and
"Dollie"; they met in a back passage of Emily's house to exchange gifts,
writings, and books. Susan is now seen to have been the addressee of many of
Dickinson's most impassioned lines, including "Your -- Riches --/taught me --
poverty!" long read as though addressed to God. As they aged, Emily's apparent
ardor found more-vivid expression: Sue was "Only Woman/in the World" and
"Siren": "I would have come out of Eden to open the Door for
you. . . ." Susan nursed her friend in her final illness,
arranged her body for burial, and wrote her obituary for the Springfield
Republican. Her letters to Emily were destroyed, as Emily had asked.
To say that Emily loved Susan is to say no more than she said herself, but to
get at the meaning of that love may be beyond us. Wishful thinking will not
turn Emily Dickinson, whose life was circumscribed by the rhythms and needs of
two families, into Gertrude Stein; but the substantial record of this constant,
deep, and mutually affectionate relationship makes speculation about
Dickinson's putative love for Samuel Bowles or Otis Lord or the possibly
fictive "Master" to whom she wrote unsent letters seem no more than vapor. What
we know is that Susan Gilbert Huntington Dickinson gave one of our greatest
poets the nourishment her gifts required; as Dickinson herself said, "With the
Exception of Shakespeare, you have told me of more knowledge than any one
living -- To say that sincerely is strange praise." Beyond that certainty, the
sisters-in-law, like Lady Hawarden's subjects, do not encourage us to pass.
For more than a century, since the first book-length appearance of Dickinson's
poems in 1890, four years after her death, the heart-rending and digestible
image of Emily has prevailed: the recluse, the Protestant nun, the lonely and
misunderstood poetess; in the last generation, a sugary-sweet coating was
brushed over this figure by William Luce's play The Belle of Amherst. As
a result, we think that we know her life: utter seclusion in a white dress, an
asexual dedication to poetry, rejection by the ignorant editors of her day. As
her enormous mass of manuscripts now comes to light in forms more closely
resembling their originals (not only in this book, but also in the majestic
saint's-tomb of the new, complete Poems of Emily Dickinson just issued
by Harvard University Press), it becomes more and more clear how far from the
truth we have come.
Here was a woman born to a prominent and wealthy family, about whom there was
nothing extraordinary except that she herself was a genius; whose famous
withdrawal from society seems not to have been complete until her last years,
when illness may have aggravated a latent agoraphobia but still did not prevent
her from entertaining visits from her beloved sister-in-law. Far from being the
secret treasures of a hypersensitive soul, Dickinson's wit and her writing were
well known in Amherst. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to whom she sent a few of
her poems, hesitated over their quality -- but his fatheadedness is now seen to
have been a minority opinion. It seems to have been not so much fear as
diffidence that made her refuse help from the likes of novelist Helen Hunt
Jackson. Print is so final, but what's more, it's vulgar. The energy
with which she broadcast her poems and lyrical letters to friends and
relations, Susan Dickinson most of all, do not suggest a woman coy about her
mind and its efforts, but a serious poet who, disdaining the title and burdens
of a professional writer, guaranteed her work's survival in the hands of her
friends.
Even before her death, the struggle for control over Dickinson's work had
begun -- "love turned to larceny," as Susan Dickinson called it -- and the
result has been a profusion of competing editions, beginning with the
conventionalized typography and heavy-handed editing of Mabel Loomis Todd and
culminating now in presentations such as this, which honors not only
Dickinson's idiosyncratic punctuation but also the long two- and three-word
columns in which she wrote most of her later letters and poems. To look long at
this, or at the Harvard University Press edition of her poems, is to get a
queasy sensation of the un-fixity of Dickinson's texts: letters that
bubble into compressed poems, or half-verses, or sibyl-like sayings; not two
but perhaps as many as five versions of "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers,"
none of them final. Her words, like her life, have come to seem ever more
fluid, immediate, and personal.
If it is true, as many now assert, that every publication of Dickinson's work
that departs from the forms she chose for herself -- her impetuous handwriting,
the hand-stitched bundles of poems -- is a kind of violation, we confront a
paradox. One of the most poignant differences between the last century and our
own is the gradual inversion of the relationship between ambition and fame. In
the 19th century, ambition shaped one's destiny in the public realm, leaving
private life obscured; in our century, it seems more desirable to first attain
fame -- or, better yet, celebrity -- by discarding privacy. We don't like to be
seen to sweat -- but we always want to be seen. Emily Dickinson, whose
retirement -- and hunger for greatness -- well exceeded the expectations of
19th-century New England, rarely wished to be seen, but she longed to be known
-- on her own terms. She asked Thomas Higginson once if her poems "breathed,"
and Open Me Carefully, for all the questions it cannot and should not
answer, reminds us how incandescently brilliant almost all her writing was. He
ought to have said, "Yes."
Graham Christian is a writer and independent scholar living in
Somerville.

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