21

Emily Dickinson. Despite her reputation (probably the most loved and certainly the greatest of American poets, according to the back of Habegger’s biography), Dickinson wrote an awful lot of lazy rhyming quatrains, doggerel as far as she was concerned. She leafed through the Collected Poems, earth under her fingernails. It was night, pitch black outside but for the odd light in the distance. She drank a glass of wine and smoked a cigarette. Downstairs, a pan sat on the draining board with quite a bit of food left in it. The fire was burning. Never stung by a single bee, she mused. Bees everywhere: on a gentle breeze or in the clover. She thought of her university office: the cold computer containing all of her Dickinson notes and a very rough plan of her thesis, which was supposed to be about the plethora of lesser poems and Dickinson’s all-too-eager canonisation; the pot plants; the steel filing cabinets; and, through the window, which looked out on a long, narrow street, snow. Habegger’s indigestible biography – a doorstop full of question marks and nonsensical little theories (so exhaustive it even cites a coughing fit Dickinson’s great-great-uncle suffered in the spring of 1837 as a possible explanation for a certain sensibility in her poetry) – had delayed her work for months.

She screwed up the piece of paper on which she had written ‘curtains’ (the window in the small bedroom was still uncovered) and picked up the soft pencil. She imagined herself outside in the daylight with her back to the front door, and sketched the lawn, the gently winding stream, the low stone wall forming an L around the grass, the pigsty diagonally opposite the house, the new, straight path along the front wall, the three alders and the three shrubs. Pity she didn’t have any coloured pencils. There’d be a new path: from the front door straight through the grass, ending at the wall. There’d be flower beds. She tried to draw a rose arch, which proved much more difficult than she’d imagined. It ruined the sketch and she didn’t have a rubber. She screwed up this piece of paper too. Sticking a new cigarette in her mouth instead, she picked up the Collected Poems and opened it at the contents page. She’d had this book for more than a decade – there were notes in it, the pages were stained, the dust jacket was torn – and now noticed for the first time how short the section titled LOVE was and how long the last, TIME AND ETERNITY. She started to cry.