A Loaded Gun (19 page)

Yet “homelessness” was not only the condition of the poet's fugitive fragments but of Dickinson herself, a nomad within her father's house, and within the nineteenth century, with its wholesale prescriptions upon her sex—no woman could deny her husband the rights to her body—and its pinch upon her purchasing power that kept her a child, as Susan Howe suggests. She was “voiceless” within a male hierarchy, and therefore had to create a coded voice of her own. Dickinson became the master of this voice, and if there is a secret motor to her very best verses, it is the lyrical lash of rebellion. She needed to inflict pain, often upon herself, but also upon the culture that had created her. And for Dickinson, it was a culture of words. If her Lexicon was her only friend, it was also her chief adversary, the historical script of her bondage to males that was packed into every epigram, every narrative, every word. There were no female narrators in the Bible, and no Judith Shakespeare to lend a voice to Elizabethan drama. And that's why she idolized Barrett Browning and the Brontës, and devoured the novels of George Eliot, who had to hide her ferocious intelligence under a
male mask, or her own writing might never have been taken seriously. Women were toys, the playthings of Victorian plutocrats, as Dickinson knew in her bones.

3

Y
ET ONE OF THE KEYS TO
deconstructing
Dickinson (as much as we will ever be able to dislodge her codes) lies at the peripheries, where we don't have scripted books, but scatterings, where we have to try and fathom her radically flying birds. Dickinson's fragments, Werner tells us,
“depict the beauties of transition and isolation at once.” They might stand
positionless
or migrate to another text, appear in a letter or as variant lines in another poem. “Belonging to a chronology of the instant, vulnerability is the mark of their existence.” They are here and nowhere, like wandering ghosts, leaving their trace upon a particular text,
“as if poems, letters, and fragments communicated telepathically, a line or phrase from a fragment re-appears, often altered, in the body of a poem, a message, or even another fragment.” But such ghosts are almost impossible to define—“neither residents nor aliens, neither lost nor found . . . they require that we attend to the mystery of the encounters between fragments, poems, and letters,” and these radical scatters can suddenly take asylum in a text, and then pull away into some boundless space and time.

And this is where our study of the poet ought to begin—at the edges and outer borders, Werner insists. Her scatterings
“are the latest and furthest affirmation of a centrifugal impulse, a gravitation away from the center, that is expressed at every level of her work.” And perhaps we even have to abandon the traditional notion of a poet's “work,” in Dickinson's case—her poems, her letters, and manuscript books—and consider a new definition, without beginnings or endings, “
a work in throes.” This is why Dickinson seems so different from any other poet, because her writing is in constant crisis, where contradictions abound from line to line, or within a line, like sonar booms that hurt the ear as
we try to listen to each bolt of melody. Werner reminds us again and again of the unhomeliness of her poetic condition—
“as well, of course, as our own.” And perhaps that is why we are addicted to Dickinson and can never seem to get enough of her. We cannot locate who we are or where we are in relation to her poems, since the speaker can be male and female, or some glacially sexless creature, murderer or angel, Goliath or gnome, as we move from line to line. Allen Tate scoffed at her as a lyric poet who could never have written a novel.
“She cannot reason at all. She can only
see
. It is impossible to imagine what she might have done with drama or fiction.” Well, he's wrong. Reading the best of Dickinson is like being stuck inside
Gulliver's Travels
and
Alice in Wonderland
at the same time, where our psyche seems to spill into some wonderland of “noiseless noise” as we follow the speaker's traces, that deceptive
I
who can ride on a carriage to an eternity that's limbed with the little houses of hell, or cast her
Yellow Eye
upon us all, her uninvited guests, who have intruded upon her hunting grounds, the private sanctuary of her poems, where we have little purchase and will never be able to “unriddle” her.

But most of all, Dickinson's “radical scatters,” with their
“turbulence of mind”—those mysterious angled dashes, pen tests and other scratchings, and question marks that seem to float across a particular scrap of paper—offer us a glimpse of something we could never have in a
finished
poem, our own secret desire
“to register the progress of the hand/mind across the page.” We have rendered her naked for a moment, have caught her in the act of writing, as if we could shatter time and had some kinetic power to catch that pencil in her hand, and that “emphatic Thumb” as it moves with the terrible lightning of thought. Or, as Werner tells us, all the wanderings and deletions, and the additional scrawls that move like some magnificent crab across the very borders of a page, seem to mirror
“the hand in the present tense of writing.”

4

O
NE OF THE MOST PUZZLING PIECES
of “work in throes” is a fragment that appears on a scrap of brown wrapping paper.

Credit: Fr1599A; manuscript: “A 112,” Amherst College Archives and Special Collections.

We could crush an entire universe into those four words, and consider all of Dickinson's writing “A Woe/of Ecstasy.” But the fragment exists both “
as an autonomous lyric throe” and as a variant to the final line of a particular poem:

       
A Sloop of Amber slips away

       
Upon an Ether Sea,

       
And wrecks in Peace a Purple Tar,

       
The Son of Ecstasy
—
    
[Fr1599C]

“Please accept a Sunset,” she wrote coyly to the poem's possible recipient, Edward Tuckerman, professor of botany at Amherst College. She is, of course, describing that elusive and violent sinking of the sun, and she captures the moment in a deeply lyrical portrait that no one else could ever have painted. And her last line, “The Son of Ecstasy,” in the version she may have sent to Tuckerman, lends the poem a
Christ-like sense of awe, and a playfulness about the repetitive patter of “Son” and “sun.” But the variant of “A Woe/of Ecstasy” changes the discourse as it migrates into the poem, and it holds us and the poem “spellbound” for an instant, as Werner suggests. Suddenly that “Sloop of Amber” is a bit more ominous as it “slips away.” And we now have a poem about Apocalypse; Dickinson's “Sloop of Amber” might well be the poet's craft, with its delicate and delightful color, as it ripples, or “wrecks [the] Peace,” of that “Purple Tar,” and drops the poet into the nothingness of eternal night—hence, “A Woe/of Ecstasy,” as if beauty and destruction arrive in the same breath, like some irritable angel, and leave without one last trace of awe.

Dickinson's fragments are
“solitary outriders” that often gallop right into the middle of a letter, and “may at any moment revolt against the sovereignty of singular address,” so that the letters of her last two decades are as “undomesticatable” as the scraps themselves, and live in some borderland between poetry and prose. In one particular draft of an 1885 letter to Helen Hunt Jackson, we have all the beats and line breaks of a poem.

       
Who
    
could
    
be

       
ill
    
in
    
March—

       
that
    
Month
    
of

       
proclamation?

       
  
Sleigh
    
Bells
    
and

       
Jays
    
contend
    
in

       
my
    
Matinee,
    
and

       
the
    
North
    
surren—

       
ders
    
instead
    
of

       
the
    
South,
    
a

       
reverse
    
of
    
Bugles
—
    
[Letter 976; manuscript: “A 976”]

And one of her
crafted
poems migrates right into the shivering lines of the letter like some magnificent fugitive that barely creates a rift.

       
Of God we ask one favor, that we may be forgiven—

       
For what he is presumed to know—

       
The Crime, from us, is hidden—

       
Immured the whole of Life

       
Within a magic Prison

       
We reprimand the happiness—

       
That too competes with Heaven
—
    
[Fr1675B]

Jackson herself was a kind of fugitive—a female author—who begged Dickinson to publish her poems. A writer with little suppleness of her own, and a clubfooted gait, she still understood Dickinson's angular style and relentless music. And why, we would have to ask again, didn't the poet have any genuine male preceptors, even if she liked to pretend that Colonel Higginson posed as one? None of the males around her, neither Higginson nor Sam Bowles, had the least clue of what her poetry was about. Both were prominent editors who championed women's causes, yet they'd never have recognized that rage within the poet, or the Vesuvius she had become. They couldn't sift through her volcanic ash. Sue had become her part-time preceptor, had dealt with this ash and some of her “Snow,” but Helen Hunt Jackson was a
huntress
with her own Yellow Eye, searching for other poets, and would have made Dickinson dance and sing in public—she who was only a Prima within the shadow box of her mind. And that's why those two lines—“Immured the whole of Life/Within a magic Prison”—flew into her letter like some strange missile, torn from a poem about human guilt, and some hidden Crime, as she must have seen herself as a criminal in that undecorated room with its minuscule desk and sleigh bed, where she became an alchemist of sorts, firing her Woe of Words, like pellets that weren't meant for public consumption, but to wound herself perhaps, or to shatter her Lexicon, to break and break and break, though her violence went unseen, sequestered as she was, a homebound waif in a white dress, sentencing herself to” a magic Prison.”

“Agoraphobia was her alibi,” Werner reminds us in
Emily Dickinson's Open Folios,
“ ‘I' was her alias.” She had many personas, more than one. And we, like ghouls, try to toy with her biography, to link her language with her life. We cannot master her, never will, as if her own words skate on some torrid ice that is permanently beyond our pale, yet we seek and seek, as if somehow that soothes us, as if we might crack a certain code, when all we will ever have is “A Woe/of Ecstasy.”

5

T
HE DEFIANT ONES
,
SUCH AS
M
ARTA
W
ERNER
, match fire with fire, as if some of their own sparks will bring us a little closer to Dickinson—language is the one witchery we have at our disposal to deal with a witch. And this is what Marta Werner does in
Radical Scatters.
She has found a lexicon to examine the Lexicon of Dickinson's late fragments, and has revealed the radical heart of Dickinson's writing: This poet was not a
finisher
; everything she wrote was always involved in its own entangled process and growth, like one of her perennials, and she moved with such a nimble violence between poetry and prose, until their lashing rhythms were almost identical.