A Loaded Gun (9 page)

Father says in fugitive moments when he forgets the barrister & lapses into the man, says that his life has been passed in a wilderness or on an island—of late he says on an island.

But Father's island wasn't her “Blue Peninsula,” where one could “perish—of Delight.” [Fr535] It was much starker and mundane. She never judged that Earl. And we have to be cautious when we judge Emily Dickinson, much more cautious than R. P. Blackmur, who wrote with blind bravura in 1956:
“We cannot say of this woman in white that she ever mastered life.” She was born and died a Dickinson, and the white wrappers she began to wear were the costume of a gardener, a baker, and a poet who had little time for corsets and fanciful clothes. She was always the mistress of her own life, and the agoraphobia we prescribe to her is our own facile way to deal with the mystery of creation. She was the “blonde Assassin” who turned her mother's silent pain into her own “noiseless noise” [Letter 271], a language that stuns and mutilates, even while it soothes. There's nothing else remotely like it. Dickinson sings to us from another time, yet her Yellow Eye seems much more modern than our own baffling and bewildered image in the mirror—we are its steady target.

THREE

Daemon Dog

1

N
ONE OF US CAN REALLY SAY
how reclusive Dickinson was, but one thing is certain: She had a companion for sixteen years—a big, slobbering brown dog named Carlo, a Newfoundland as tall as she was, Dickinson loved to boast, and who must have weighed a 150 pounds. Soon after her poems were published and Higginson deified her as the virgin recluse, a note appeared in the
Commercial Advertiser,
dated August 23, 1893. Dickinson had acquired her own sudden fame, like a thunderclap across New England, and a certain Grace Smith, now Mrs. Luther W. Bodman of Chicago, summoned up the walks she once took with the poet when she was a little girl, while Dickinson's
“huge dog stalked solemnly beside them. ‘Gracie,' said Miss Dickinson, ‘do you know that I believe that the first to come and greet me when I go to heaven will be this dear, faithful old friend Carlo?'”

This was one of the first bits of apocrypha about the poet, half her fire already swallowed up by Mabel Todd, who was deeply bothered by Dickinson's
“carelessness of form. . . . I admired her strange words and ways of using them, but the simplest laws of verse-making were ignored, and what she called rhymes grated on me.”

It would take more than half a century to undo the damage Mabel had done; and in all this time, Dickinson remained the virgin recluse, who talked about eternity to little girls while she “bribed” them with
baskets of gingerbread hanging down from her window. But her letters reveal another picture of the poet. She was never fond of yapping about eternity. As she told Higginson on June 9, 1866:

You mention Immortality.

That is the Flood subject. I was told that the Bank was the safest place for a Finless Mind.
    
[Letter 319]

Grace Smith might have accompanied Carlo and his mistress across Amherst more than once, but I suspect she told readers of the
Commercial Advertiser
what they wanted to hear about a woman who took a carriage ride to eternity in one of her poems. I doubt Dickinson would ever have talked about the “Flood subject,” even to a little girl.

Yet it was Jay Leyda who unearthed this bit of apocrypha, and other tales about Emily Dickinson and her prodigious dog—by recapturing Dickinson's days and hours, he was quick to understand the dog's worth. It seems she was mesmerized by Maj. E. B. Hunt, a Civil War hero and husband of Helen Fiske Hunt, who had first met Dickinson when both were schoolchildren and would become a celebrated poet and novelist after Major Hunt was killed in an accident at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Dickinson was reintroduced to Helen Hunt and the major at one of her father's receptions for Amherst College, sometime in the 1860s.

Major Hunt interested her more than any man she ever saw. She remembered two things he said—that her great dog “understood gravitation” & when he said he should come again “in a year. If I say a shorter time it will be longer.”

Most Dickinson scholars have paid scant attention to Carlo, even though that big brown dog haunts her letters and her poems. Carlo isn't even listed in the index of Cynthia Griffin Wolff's six-hundred-page biography. And John Cody, who spends page after page analyzing Dickinson's psychic dilemma as a love-starved woman and poet,
mentions him only once.
“Carlo seems to have accompanied Emily on all her rambles, and it is clear that she became fond of him.” But he finds no connection at all between Carlo and the poet's “inner life.”

I suspect that Carlo occupied more psychic and physical space than any other creature; she couldn't have thrived without him. With all her aristocratic mien, she was little more than an expensive chattel who couldn't even buy her own writing paper and pens without her father's funds. She and Vinnie were kept on an invisible leash and were the real pets of the family, not Carlo. That brown dog was Dickinson's one and only possession . . . if we're willing to admit that anyone can ever “own” a dog. Not according to Adam Gopnik, who got a caramel-colored Havanese named Butterscotch for his daughter and wrote about this experience in
The New Yorker:
“Dog Story: How Did the Dog Become Our Master?”

Gopnik ventures back into ancient history.
“Dogs began as allies, not pets, and friends, not dependents.” Prehistoric man didn't steal cubs from wolf packs and tame them—wolves will always return to the wild. But certain breeds of wolves began to collect around human garbage dumps, and these
“tamer, man-friendly wolves produced more cubs than their wilder, man-hating cousins.” Such “willing wolves” morphed into dogs who became our hunting companions and the playmates of our children. For Gopnik, dogs chose us and chose to become dogs. He deconstructs the whole man-dog relationship. The best of dogs are neither kind nor heroic.
“The dog will bark at a burglar; but the dog will also bark at a shirt.”

I wonder if Gopnik's Ur-dog really describes Carlo. He doesn't believe in dogs of mythic proportion. But it's hard to imagine Carlo in any other way. Perhaps it's because of Carlo's prodigious size, and the fact that the Newfoundland was the archetypical dog of the nineteenth century, great swimmers who were known to rescue men from the sea with a wide flick of their webbed paws. Lord Byron had a Newfoundland called Boatswain. The most notorious poet of his time, he swam
the Hellespont despite his “clubfoot,” had love affairs with married women, Greek boys, and his own half sister, Augusta Leigh, and was adored and reviled by the men and women of New England—there had never been a New Englander remotely like him. Byron's dog died of rabies in 1808, and Byron wanted to be buried in the same tomb with Boatswain; the dog was five years old. Boatswain's anniversary is still celebrated more than two hundred years after his death.

There was also a Newfoundland in Charlotte Brontë's
Jane Eyre,
a novel Dickinson adored. “A lion-like creature with long hair and a huge head . . . with strange pretercanine eyes,” the dog, whose name is Pilot, belongs to Jane's own moody master, Edward Rochester. She's a governess at Rochester's mansion on the Yorkshire moors, while Rochester's mad wife lives in the attic—Jane has come to a haunted house. Still, Pilot remains loyal to Rochester and loyal to her. Yet Dickinson named her own Newfoundland after
another
dog in the novel—old Carlo, a pointer who belongs to St. John Rivers, a stern, unsmiling missionary—“cold as an iceberg”—who doesn't love Jane but wants to marry her and make her his missionary wife.

Dickinson read the novel in 1849, and her dog must have arrived in the late autumn or early winter of that year. Vinnie was away at school in Ipswich, Austin attended Amherst College and caroused with his friends and classmates, and Emily felt abandoned. “I am very puny alone,” she confessed to a friend. [Letter 32, early 1850?] And her father gave her the dog to console her and watch after her while he was away. The first mention of Carlo was in a mock Valentine sent to George Gould, one of Austin's classmates; there is some speculation that Gould was in love with Emily but was rejected by her father as a possible suitor.

Sir, I desire an interview; meet me at sunrise, or sunset, or the new moon—the place is immaterial. . . . Don't be afraid of it, sir, it won't bite. If it was my
Carlo
now! The Dog is the noblest work of Art, sir.
I may say the noblest—his mistress's rights he doth defend—although it bring him to his end . . .
    
[Letter 34, February 1850]

Carlo must have been more than a puppy by this time, though an enormous puppy could have defended Dickinson's “rights.” But it's still puzzling why she named her dog after St. John River's pointer rather than Rochester's noble Newfoundland. Perhaps Rivers reminded Dickinson of her father in his cold, relentless manner. She was the consummate puzzle master, as Jay Leyda reminds us. And a loveless missionary and his pointer might have appealed to her in some perverse way.

What we do know is that the tiny, freckled woman and her big brown dog soon became a fixture in Amherst. She would be out exploring with her lantern and Carlo. Her schooling was over. She'd become close to Sue. Her father, Sue, and Vinnie would profess their faith and join the First Church that same year—1850. Her mother had professed her faith nineteen years earlier, in 1831, when Emily was six months old. And much of her sadness had come from the fear that she would not meet her own family in heaven. Austin would also join the Church, but Emily was the one who remained adamant all her life. She would keep her own Sabbath within her mind, locking the doors of her “election,” as she hovered somewhere between God and the Devil. She herself was a fallen angel. But she had few antecedents as a writer, almost none. And it's not clear when she turned from being the village rhymester without a real vocation—like a hundred other poets in a hundred other villages—and grew into that aberration we know as Emily Dickinson. It never should have happened. Every idiot has her lexicon, her own book of words. Dickinson's experiences weren't richer or any more vital than those of other aristocratic New England daughters.

And it was almost impossible for a woman to declare herself, secretly or not, as a writer. As Susan Sontag reminds us almost a century and a half after Dickinson's own struggles, silence had become the female writer's bitter reward.
“Silent not merely for want of encouragement. Silent because of the way that women are defined and therefore,
commonly, define themselves. For the obligation to be physically attractive and patient and nurturing and docile and sensitive and deferential to fathers (to brothers, to husbands) contradicts and
must
collide with the egocentricity and aggressiveness and the indifference to self that a large creative gift requires in order to flourish.”

Sontag offers up the example of Alice James, the brilliant sister of Henry and William, who fell into a deep depression at nineteen, dreamt of suicide, traveled abroad, and lived most of her life in bed, suffering from the
“all too common reality of a woman who does not know what to do with her genius, her originality, her aggressiveness, and therefore becomes a career invalid.” Cody sees Dickinson as much the same “career invalid,” who could have occupied Alice James' bed, and who turned her own bedroom into a hermitage—and a mausoleum. And a host of other scholars agree with him. Sewall himself says that her unwillingness to leave her father's house can be regarded
“as an unfortunate eccentricity or as a symptom of profound psychic fear.” But suppose it was neither of the above. What choice did she really have? She was a birdlike woman with red hair who had to summon up her own powers. Critics talk of her breakdowns but can never point to a single one.

Brenda Wineapple, in
White Heat,
her narrative about the complicated and curious ballet between Higginson and his half-cracked poetess, seems to understand that most of Dickinson's tentative dance steps were strategies of survival and maneuvers of a woman at war—
“her backbone made of steel, she pretended fragility.” Dickinson, Wineapple says,
“seems to exist outside of time, untouched by it. And that's unnerving. No wonder we make up stories about her: about her lovers, if any, or why she turned her back on ordinary life . . .”

Where else did Dickinson have to go? She didn't have a novelist and a philosopher in her family, the way Alice James did. Her own father, brother, and sister were quite ordinary and wouldn't be remembered for five minutes if they hadn't been related to the Belle of
Amherst—whatever fame they have comes from her twists and turns. Sue might have had
some
of Emily's intellect, but she would grow much more conventional after her marriage. She would have buried Dickinson's poems in a communal grave if she'd had her wish. She didn't want to see them published. She'd rather have printed them privately. As she wrote to Higginson on December 23, 1890:

I sometimes shudder when I think of the world reading her thoughts minted in heartbroken convictions. In her own words (after all the intoxicating fascination of creation) she as deeply realized that for her, as for all of us women not fame but “Love and home and certainty are best.” I find myself always saying “poor Emily.”

Poor Emily
indeed.

We don't have a whole lot of clues about where her brilliance came from. She may have been writing poems since she was fourteen, but the earliest ones don't reveal very much. It's only in her love letters to Sue that we feel a kind of genius; there's a sudden thrust in her language, an urgency that's shaped and defined—and filled with a kind of sexual somnambulism as Dickinson sees herself and Sue being yielded up to some
union
with a man.

. . . how it will take
us
one day, and make us all it's own, and we shall not run away from it, but lie still and be happy!
    
[Letter 93, early June 1852]