In her early thirties, between 1860 and 1863, Emily Dickinson wrote 663 poems. Amongst them were many of her greatest, rising to ‘My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun —’ late in 1863. The fiery output of four years produced more than a third of her complete works. What prompted this? In 1863, when the poet was thirty-two, she shows off that well-conducted woman tying her hat as she goes about the duties of her clock-bound day, with an air of having so much to do; yet mild domesticity guards the ‘Bomb’ in her breast for which no words exist but which she demonstrates with an explosion of dashes as she recounts how, some time back, ‘Existence — stopped — struck — my ticking through —’. This is thought to have been the transforming experience in three letters of 1858–61, addressed to an unidentified ‘Master’, which enter into a forbidden love, impossible in this world but directed at the next.
The three letters — drafted, maybe unsent — reveal that she cultivated a desire, if only in fantasy, for a married ‘Master’. He is bearded; he has a public face to maintain; and sickness disables him from time to time. Sickness is a bond for Dickinson, many of whose poems in the early 1860s have to do with the unexplained onset of dysfunction.
Both the love drama and the unnamed dysfunction play into a pervasive drama of secrecy. To ‘tell’ or not to tell: that is Dickinson’s repeated question. What she does tell, almost obsessively, is that a secret has shaped her Existence, an eventful hidden life of ‘Fire, and smoke, and gun’ at odds with her event-less visible life. It’s a secret often on her lips. Now, the poet’s lips are sealed; now, they crack open in ‘a quiet — Earthquake style —’. If open, the ‘lips’ are ‘buckled’ — distorted — by the remade landscape of her inner life. The curiosity of neighbours, the ‘praters’ and ‘babblers’, must go unsatisfied. ‘Tell the truth but tell it slant’ is her way. To ‘tell’ is a tease, for she’s often unintelligible, even if intensely confessional. Her more intimate communication is relayed in riddling, fragmentary terms which call into question our customary stories.
‘I am alive I guess’, she starts abruptly, lifting her head. ‘I felt my life with both my hands …’. She leans into the glass to judge her features, releasing the curl of her hair from its tight folds and pushing her cheeks with both hands to smooth away her mother’s dimples — gazing into a different face — before the dimples ‘twinkled back’.
Confessional gestures in the many poems starting with ‘I’ or ‘My’ beckon us towards an unseen life. He touched me … The intimacy is palpable. I groped opon his breast … Only, the confession comes missing what a biographer would see as the crucial fact: the identity of ‘Master’; or the diagnosis of a ‘sickness’ that makes the body ‘dangle’ or drop; or what exactly it was that ‘I’ knew when, after ‘dropping down’, she ‘finished knowing then —’. This tantalising (and characteristic) cutting off of confession with a dash invites us into a situation we have to imagine. Her earthquake style throws up fragments of buried life about, say, ‘Wild Nights — Wild Nights!’
Rowing in Eden —
Ah — the Sea!
Might I but moor — tonight —
In thee!
Does she mean a lover or the divine Guest? The one often means the other. To put such fragments together in order to compose a coherent story about a secret love affair with ‘Master’ is a dubious exercise. For these fragments are not biographic facts; they are states of being consequent on events closed to us. It’s uncomfortable not to know what the poet ‘knows’; and so uncomfortable to biographers and scholars, who pride themselves on knowing, that successive commentators have contrived to weave a romantic fiction around Charles Wadsworth, the Philadephia minister. Dickinson liked him enough to confide some distress, and he paid her one visit in 1860 (a good while before he moved to California in 1862) and another in 1880, but none of these facts adds up to much. Pasty-faced and beardless, with a beautiful, supportive wife, Wadsworth obliged her with a routine pastoral letter, signing it ‘in great haste’ — hardly the language of romantic love. He sounds kindly attentive, no more, too busy to share sorrows in the way Dickinson may have hoped. Those who plumped for Wadsworth had to believe in instant love (the poet spent only two weeks in Philadelphia), followed by chaste renunciation. Here, ready to hand, was a story fit for a proper New England spinster.
It’s a mistake to read the Master letters literally. The voice is too absurdly abject not to be a performance. It amuses her to prod the power relations between the sexes. Master’s skin is so swollen with self-absorption that it must be soothed with the balm of feminine humility and sacrifice, delivered to him in the modest manner of nineteenth-century ladies. Master does not notice that her words are over-the-top, just short of hilarity.
Prior to the first surviving letter to ‘Dear Master’, thought to be in 1858, the writer has tried to communicate in the language of flowers. If he cannot understand, she blames the flowers for failing to communicate. ‘They were disobedient. I gave them messages.’
In the second letter, written early in 1861, the writer names herself ‘Daisy’, the girl-in-waiting in the fantasy Emily had confided to Sue in their early twenties (three years before she encountered Wadsworth, and six years before she came to know the newspaperman Sam Bowles, another leading candidate for ‘Master’). Daisy’s freshness, like early-morning dew, will be drained by the rising sun of desire. As she lifts up her petals to the burning ray, her ‘dew’ gives way to thirst and she yields to ‘the man of noon’. That’s as far as the fantasy went in 1851. In this second letter, ten years on, ‘Master’ appears responsible for a ‘gash’ and drops of blood from Daisy’s body. Daisy refrains from explicit blame — though she’s on the verge of it — as ‘Master’ knows, and resents.
‘Oh did I offend it — [Did’nt it want me to tell it the truth]’.
Daisy puts on an apologetic act, calculated to placate Master even as she shames him by the overdone abasement he seems to require. Daisy, who once sat on Master’s knee, now kneels to him. ‘Low at the knee that bore her once … Daisy kneels a culprit … but punish don’t banish her’. A coloratura voice soars to a top note as she asks Master to kill her if he thinks she deserves this.
It’s a non-stop act. Daisy is not really cowed. She points to the wound by boasting that, on parting, she contrived to hide it. Daisy ‘never flinched’. The noble pathos is operatic; her letter, in effect, an aria. She has at her command an abundance of affecting words, and after she’s abased herself for long enough, and told Master that he fills her brown eyes with tears, the moment arrives for a dramatic gesture: she uncovers a weapon.
‘I’ve got a Tomahawk in my side’.
It now comes out that so long as she’s been brave enough to conceal the tomahawk, Master has been taking advantage: ‘her master stabs her more’. The tomahawk and blood suggest a virgin’s defloration. (There is similar violence in Dickinson’s botanical dramas: ‘My Fuschzia’s Coral Seams / Rip …’, Dickinson observes as she tends her garden, ‘My Cactus — splits her Beard / To show her throat —’.) Master’s stabs continue though he’s aware how small she is. He did see that she ‘had no pounds to spare’.
It’s by no means certain that this protest comes from the writer herself, even though Emily Dickinson herself was small and thin, weighing about 107 pounds. She is as capable of entering into the elation of ‘Wild Nights!’ as of lending herself to sexual fear. The Dickinson parents would never have mentioned sex. Her most likely source would have been ‘Sister’. When Sue confides to ‘Sister’ of the thorn in her flesh, it’s not the voice of a contented wife.
The scene switches from the tomahawk assault of frontier narrative to Wuthering Heights and strains of deathless love. ‘Let me in!’ pleads Catherine Linton from the other side of death. In Dickinson’s second letter, a ghost voice pleads with the wrongly married Master to take her in for ever. Heaven is not for her ‘because it’s not so dear’. In the background the twenty-third psalm wafts into the airwaves: ‘I shall not want’. This love is heaven-sent, the only heaven worth having.
The third letter, supposedly a month or two later, in the summer of 1861, imagines togetherness at night. Instead of the marital ‘frost’ Master must endure, Daisy would breathe beside him. Her mood is now playful, rather cosy. She would then be nearer than his new coat, but this is ‘forbidden me’. If this love is heaven-sent, adultery is not at issue. The true reason it’s forbidden she can’t say.
‘Vesuvius don’t talk — Etna — don’t — one of them — said a syllable — a thousand years ago, and Pompeii heard it, and hid forever — She could’nt look the world in the face, afterward …’.
This voice erupts in a blaze of destructive scenarios, flashing too fast for coherence: a woman in white — a bride it may be — could be shut in a chest; alternatively, there’s the dungeon of Chillon, Byron’s scene of long-term imprisonment; a ‘bullet’ hits a Bird; a ‘gash’ stains Daisy’s bosom. Master seems impervious to the damage in his vicinity, so Daisy offers to exhibit a tell-tale drop of blood. To tell or not to tell? Dickinson herself concealed what she called, in confidence to her cousin Loo Norcross, ‘that old nail in my breast’ (like Susan in her role as the nightingale who sings with a thorn in its breast). What’s genuine in the hidden pain of ‘bullet’, ‘nail’ or ‘tomahawk’ should not obscure the bravura of the poet’s professionalism: the way these letters draw on a dazzling array of historical and literary models. What appeared to be love letters may in fact be closer to exercises in composition.
Though the Master letters play variations on the romance plot, they also confirm Dickinson’s aversion to weddings and marriage. ‘Master’ is neither tender nor considerate. Nor can he hear what his correspondent is saying.
All the same, there was huge benefit from ‘Master’: what Dickinson gained was fuel for a new phase of her oeuvre. As Yeats would say of his unrequited love for Maud Gonne, there was an advantage to so much effort to verbalise his feelings: ‘I have come into my strength, / And words obey my call.’ Since, in this sense, the poet’s life is there, what links may be found between the facts of Dickinson’s life and her leap between setting up her private poetry base in 1858 and the poetic immortality she knew she had achieved by the end of 1863?
The starting point must be the fact that Emily Dickinson wasn’t required to earn her living in the drudging ways then open to women; she was also relieved of the pressure to marry. In her domestic seclusion, white dress, and Daisy manner, hers seems a womanish life, but it hides another, as proved by the lifetime’s work discovered after her death. ‘I cannot dance upon my toes’, she writes in 1861, ‘No man instructed me’, and then continues with a long list of all the things she can’t do. Untaught by men, she can perform none of the acts of female contortion: no platform for her; no applause. Not for her the ‘claw upon the air’, the wilted arabesques of the ghosts in the white act of Giselle, who have lost their lives to lovers’ betrayals. They glide across the stage like snow on wheels, automatons with frozen hearts. Dickinson will not line up as one of them. Yet though no one knows her ‘art’, it’s ‘full as Opera —’. Affirmation comes from herself alone, shooting down negations from the public arena. Her complete works — not a mere opus, but ‘Opera’ in the plural — are filling an inward space, stretching to the full, in the pregnant silence of the final dash.
I think she spoke the truth when she said ‘no man’. For a long time biographers and critics empowered a ‘Master’ with responsibility for her output. They speculated about his identity, choosing one or other from seven candidates, none of whom seems right. My sense is that Master was largely, though not completely, a stirring fantasy, all the more intriguing for what it reveals about a passionate woman who played games of femininity but kept herself free from sexual artifice. I don’t think any existing man in her circle of recognisable husbands — a kindly minister and three literary authorities hooked on trite rhymes — could have lent himself to the royal extravagance of her desire.
This does not necessarily mean that Emily Dickinson did not see potentialities in a man (or men) she knew. It is clear from her draft letters to ‘Master’ that she had a real man in mind, and the critic Judith Farr has made a convincing case for newspaperman Sam Bowles. If we put the Master letters side by side with the twenty-five letters, many with poems, sent to Sam Bowles between 1858 and 1864, it’s plain that Bowles provided a model for at least some aspects of ‘Master’. Bearded, opinionated, with a close stare, he looked the part (‘You have the most triumphant Face out of Paradise,’ Dickinson told him), and he had a way with intelligent women, drawing them out, rereading Shirley and backing women’s rights.
In the summer of 1858, Austin and Sue welcomed him to The Evergreens as a friend of Austin’s father, an habitué of Washington and the political world beyond the confines of Amherst, informed on state secrets and in touch with other editors, college presidents and notable writers such as Bret Harte. Sue was stimulated by Bowles’s ‘free and shaggy manner’, iconoclastic, robust, struggling. His talk excited Austin to combats lasting long after midnight.
It’s likely to have been Sue who sent Bowles one of Sister’s poems, ‘Nobody knows this little rose’, without divulging her name, and he printed it in the Springfield Daily Republican in August 1858. The explanatory heading plays up the intrigue: ‘To Mrs.—, with a Rose [Surreptitiously communicated to The Republican.]’
‘Has girl read Republican’ — Sue, triumphant, sent a note to Emily across the grass, settling an appointment to meet next day. They had to talk ‘without witnesses’.
Though Sue was party to Sister’s greater poems, she had wisely chosen a modest verse. Bowles also published Emily Dickinson’s earliest surviving poem, a humorous valentine of 1852. These came closest to the anodyne verse Bowles put out for mass consumption, while nourishing himself on lasting words. Sue introduced him to the Brownings, while he read aloud his favourite passage from The Mill on the Floss: ‘The great problem of the shifting relation between passion and duty is clear to no man who is capable of apprehending it …’.
His first duty was to his wife. In 1850 he had married Mary Schermerhorn, whose family had a home in Geneva, the town where Sue and her sisters grew up. There’s no sign that their paths had crossed, and Sue would hardly have found it appealing to read of Mary’s most recent childbirth in one of Bowles’s earliest letters. It had come on 15 May 1859 after a ghastly day ending in the delivery of a dead boy (Mrs Bowles’s sixth birth and third stillbirth in the nine years since her marriage). What’s odd about this letter is that instead of comforting his wife with every bit of love he can offer, Bowles is tucked away in his study asking pity from the Dickinsons with whom he and his wife are not yet on first-name terms. All his letters to the Dickinsons lean to confession.
No letters to Emily have survived. Those to The Evergreens are scrawled fast, almost illegibly, in a large, cramped hand, as though he were coiled in upon himself as he raced in his many directions. Why so forthcoming a man should have picked an unforthcoming wife like Mary is hard to understand. Bowles was unusually adept at drawing women out. Mary may have presented the hardest challenge and he may have been won by his own success with unpromising material. Sadly for Mary, such efforts did not survive marriage. She became a poor creature, asthmatic and so constantly giving birth that she took to the role of chronic invalid, vying with her husband for attention.
Mary Bowles had a washed-out face and a thin plait tightly coiled, like a platter glued to the back of her head. The side hair was flattened to her forehead like colourless drapes. A photograph exudes unhappiness, not a passing mood but a gutted self. Because she felt unloved and therefore unlovable, Mrs Bowles was prickly in company. Late in 1858, Emily had been at the gate to greet her when Bowles had brought his pregnant wife to visit Sue and Austin. It had been meant to cheer her. It hadn’t. Bowles’s correspondence with The Evergreens reveals the surge of emotional excitement he exercised in contact with others, and the trouble this caused in his marriage. Mrs Bowles was forced to hear Sue’s answering claims for ‘the higher life of humanity’, as befitted an admirer of Maggie Tulliver.
‘I cherish you for keeping up my faith and hope in the higher, future woman!’ That’s the encouraging way Bowles spoke in letters to Sue Dickinson.
Mrs Bowles felt her deficiency. With an animated woman her husband would be all attention, resting his head on one hand and stretching out the other to touch hers. His wife’s misery left him a little guilty from time to time, but not so guilty as to change his ways.
‘I have made [women] shed many tears,’ he owned, ‘hated myself for it, — and that was not the least of the wrong they did me. A man does not enjoy hating himself.’
Mary Bowles was conspicuously ungrateful towards her pale cousin, Miss Whitney, who came to nurse her for long stretches. Maria Whitney was the same age as Emily Dickinson, born in November 1830, the daughter of a Northampton banker, Josiah Dwight Whitney, and related to Mrs Bowles through the Dwights. She had the intelligent eyes of a reader, large, grey eyes with a steady, rather sombre expression and level brows. Her hair was drawn back over the tips of her ears in a clean line, setting off a decided chin above a narrow, round collar. Sam Bowles rewarded Miss Whitney with his usual attentions, and it was whispered that she was in love with him. Mrs Bowles had reason to be jealous, for her cousin carried herself with sophisticated elegance. She was Europeanised in a serious way, having made a study of Old High German and steeped her mind in the German higher criticism of the scriptures. Her two bachelor brothers were professors at Harvard and Yale, and eventually, when Smith College was founded, she became its first teacher of French and German in the spring semester of 1876. Soon after, she and Emily Dickinson would begin to exchange heartfelt memories of Bowles.
Maria Whitney was attached to the house she shared with her brothers, adjoining the old house of Jonathan Edwards in Northampton. But duty compelled her, as a single woman, to be on call whenever married people had need of help. When she left Mrs Bowles to nurse another needy member of her family, Sam Bowles said: ‘Her going has been a trial to me.’ She had left him bereft, he complained to the Dickinsons, ‘a day of torture and blueness’.
At The Evergreens his gaze had followed Sue’s schoolfriend Kate Scott Turner (‘the late flirtatious widow’) who came on another visit. He hoped to meet her again and, to Austin, mulled over the moral question of pursuit.
‘Mrs Bowles is very liberal at her government. Would it be fair to take advantage of it to go forty miles to see beauty & grace … in that most enticing of mortal packages, which the elder Weller has so immortally warned all susceptible Samuels against?* I put it to you, as a loyal husband — would it do?’
While Kate took no notice of his signals, the Dickinsons urged Bowles to forget her.
‘I would not, if I could, — & could not if I would,’ was his quick comeback.
Later, when his life seemed to limp along, he asked wistfully to be commended to ‘the two Utica schoolgirls’ (Kate and Sue). His were emotional infidelities, arguably as bad if not worse than physical adultery. As his flirtations stacked up, he began to fear the Dickinsons might come to think him ‘wanton & fickle’.
The Dickinson sisters he referred to collectively as ‘the girls from the paternal mansion’ or simply ‘the girls’. The few times he singled out Emily, his messages were distanced, rather jocular, as though wary. It’s the tone of a man who wants to signal appreciation — or more — yet does not want to be drawn too far into the dramas her poems devised. She was sending him many of her poems at this time.
He teased her in lieu of encouragement: ‘to the Queen Recluse my especial sympathy — that she has “overcome the world.” — Is it really true that they sing “Old Hundred” & “Aleluia” perpetually, in heaven … and are dandelions, asphodels, & maiden’s [vows] the standard flowers of the ethereal?’
A printing office allowed little opportunity for the ‘spiritual manifestations’ the Dickinsons discussed. Bowles wanted them to know these did ‘live ever & for an age in me’. He must have made this known also to Emily, for he sent remembrances (via Austin) ‘for the sister of the other house who never forgets my spiritual longings’. He was not without an affinity for her, as he once confessed to Austin: ‘I have been in a savage, turbulent state for some time — indulging in a sort of divine disgust at everything & everybody — I guess a good deal as Emily feels.’
At the time she drafted the second Master letter, in the spring of 1861, her poems began to heighten the romantic stakes. Once, when Bowles was next door, she assumed her Daisy character in a poem dispatched along the path between the houses. ‘If it [you] had no pencil’, came wrapped around the stub of a pencil, inviting Bowles to try hers, worn out though it was with ‘Writing much to thee’. Daisy’s voice is as arch as in the Master letters, and plays the same Little Me role.
If he can return no word, she asks, would he draw her a daisy as diminutive as she’d been when he’d ‘plucked’ her?
Her ways of reaching out for dramatic material, though more secluded and intense, are essentially no different from the habits of any number of writers who work up the dramas in their lives. As Henry James said, ‘art makes life’. We have no way of knowing what, if anything, lay behind a poem about a fight to the death, apart from the curious fact that Dickinson gave the poem to one person only, saying, ‘I cant explain it, Mr Bowles —’.
Two swimmers wrestled on the spar
Until the morning sun —
When One turned, smiling, to the land —
Oh God! the other One!
The stray ships — passing, spied a face
Opon the waters borne,
With eyes, in death, still begging — raised,
And hands — beseeching — thrown!
Part of a poem’s meaning lies with its recipient, in this instance Bowles, yet to pursue biography is not what this poem asks us to do. The conflict is perfectly distilled from the context of its composition and designed to terminate in us, her readers, dredging up our own, sometimes silenced confrontations — anything we might have experienced of damage and abandonment.
Dickinson’s counter-drama against abandonment is a series of poems where ‘I’ is knit to a Master figure. It’s an imaginary drama about an intruder on a marriage, told from the intruder’s point of view. ‘I’m “wife” … I’m Czar — I’m “Woman” now —’. She posits an alternative marriage as a permanent translation from earth to heaven. While Dickinson draws on a long poetic convention in which human and divine love explain each other, the voice is cool. She exults to be rid of girlhood with its attendant pain. Now and for ever, she has her ‘comfort’: ‘I’m Wife! Stop there!’
The wedding night of this alternative bridal is rehearsed in a ‘Master’ poem of 1861, ‘A wife — at Daybreak I shall be—’, which Dickinson recopied with variations in 1862 and 1863. Midnight’s transforming hour is at hand with Master mounting the stair to where his destined mate awaits him in her room. This is the last moment she’s still a child; the next, she will be transformed for ever: ‘How short it takes to make it Bride!’ Is he a human bridegroom who’s approaching, or is it a ghost of a love that might have been, or is this a visionary encounter? The bride looks to her ‘Victory’ at sunrise, an elevating turn to the east. Here (in first draft) is what she’s thinking as the footsteps approach:
The Vision flutters in the door —
Master — I’ve seen the face before —
In the end this is not about a wedding night. It’s not about the love of man and woman. Dickinson was inspired by some more general conception where ‘I’, as a mortal being, meets an eternal force: in later drafts ‘Master’ is interchangeable with ‘Saviour’. Yet, as the dashes suggest, any sentence on this subject must remain unfinished. Her model could be Emily Bronte, who was not writing about ordinary human love when Catherine dies and her servant feels ‘an assurance of the endless … hereafter — the Eternity they [the dead] have entered — where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy …’. Dickinson too yearned for infinities and dreamt up a Master to yearn with her.
The real biographical question is not the identity of ‘Master’, who vanishes into an array of dramas, particularly as bridegroom of the spirit (a drama utterly beyond Bowles or any other of the candidates). No, what matters is when something happens that should not have happened, and that is when the control Emily Dickinson exercised over every detail of her life slipped. This was rare, but did happen. It happened when the imaginative life of poetry, feeding to some extent off ordinary life, spilt into an actual relationship on the ground. 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, as in her ‘gun’ letter to what must have been a bewildered Norcross uncle — a threat that belongs in our lawless fantasy life and nowhere else. Dickinson’s ‘wife’ poems celebrate an emotional bond that transcends social and legal ties. The bond prompts a breakthrough of the speaker’s buried fire, her private character as ‘Vesuvius at Home’. Fuelling the poetic eruptions from well below the surface there’s an adulterous fantasy, dangerous if let loose in real life, as it proved when Emily intruded on Mrs Bowles.
At the height of Dickinson’s ‘wife’ drama, between the second and third Master letters, Bowles again brought his wife to visit the Dickinsons. This, in early May 1861, turned out as much a disaster as her first visit in 1858.
‘You must make some allowances for her peculiarities,’ Bowles defended his wife to Austin. ‘Her very timidity & want of self-reliance gives her a sharper utterance. The porcupine I take it is really a very weak & … distrustful animal, & so puts out his fretful quills to hide his soft heart. — I think she was somewhat disappointed in her Amherst visit — it did not turn out so pleasantly, as she meant to have it.’
He did accept some of the blame: his wife, he owned, wished him to ‘manage’ her ‘as she wanted to be managed’, but this concession, coated in the mild language of the pleasant, leaves out the torment he inflicted on a wife whose face was drear, as though drained of life.
In the autumn of 1861, when Bowles was out of reach in a Northampton sanatorium, Emily turned her attention to his again pregnant wife, who found her ‘alarming’. Emily, amused, played up to Mrs Bowles’s alarm. She pretends to be advancing on this wife, alone and unprotected at home; scary Emily is on the road; she’s at the gate; she has her hand on the door.
Early in March 1862, when Sam Bowles once more went away, to Washington, a little earlier than expected, Emily wrote another strange letter to Mrs Bowles. It was an excuse for having sent ‘a little note’ to Mrs Bowles’s husband, which the wife would have intercepted. Her husband — Emily was now aware — would have left before the note in question arrived. It was his habit to keep Emily’s notes and letters, but this one has disappeared. Presumably Mrs Bowles did not see fit to pass it on when her husband returned.
The purpose of the note, Emily attempts to explain, had been merely to ask a favour. What she wants from Mr Bowles’s wife is reassurance that she has not been troubled. It’s the poet’s attempt to cover up her intrusion into Mrs Bowles’s legitimate space. To glance at another of Emily’s notes to Bowles at this time (many of them including poems or slipping into poetry) is to see why Emily felt uneasy. It’s filled with emotion, tensely intimate underlinings about the limitations of words, for the deepest feelings don’t ‘move’ into overt expression:
Dear Mr Bowles.
I cant thank you any more — You are thoughtful so many times, you grieve me always — now. The old words are numb — and there a’nt any new ones …
When you come to Amherst, please God it were Today — I will tell you … — if I can, I will —
‘Speech’ — is a prank of Parliament —
‘Tears’ — a trick of the nerve —
But the Heart with the heaviest freight on —
Doesn’t — always — move — Emily.
Her manner to Mrs Bowles, by contrast, is commanding and at no loss for words. The poet does not wish this wife to have cause for complaint, so insists that Mary Bowles favour her with an exculpatory statement, a token of cordiality, which, she knows, Mrs Bowles won’t want to write. The tone then changes from insistence to menace as she reminds this wife, grieved by stillbirths, how vulnerable her new baby could be. Playfully, the poet moves into fairy-tale mode, sending a rose for the baby boy’s hand. His mother is to place it there when little Charlie goes to sleep, ‘and then he will dream of Emily — and … we shall be “old friends”’. She’s aware that Mrs Bowles might not wish her to take over Charlie’s mind, any more than she can bear Emily’s bombardment of her husband with letters and poems. Emily makes it clear to Mary Bowles that these aren’t about to stop.
Could you leave ‘Charlie’ — long enough? Have you time for me? … Don’t love [Charlie] so well — you know — as to forget us [Dickinsons] — We shall wish he was’nt there — if you do — I’m afraid — shant we?
I’ll remember you — if you like me to — while Mr. Bowles is gone — and that will stop the lonely — some — but I cannot agree to stop — when he gets home from Washington.
Goodnight — Mary —
You wont forget my little note — tomorrow — in the mail — It will be the first one — you ever wrote me in your life — and yet — was I the little friend — a long time? Was I — Mary?
Emily.
Her punctuation should never be underestimated. The inverted commas around ‘Charlie’ were a reminder to the baby’s mother that Emily wished the little boy to have a different name. Emily’s choice was Robert, after Browning, the rescuer of the poet Elizabeth Barrett from her invalid seclusion in her father’s house. Emily was reminded of this drama at just this time when Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in Florence, leaving behind a little boy, the son of the two poets, whose name was Robert. Emily’s insistence on her right to name the Bowleses’ child is further evidence of a poet’s fancy intruding on poor Mrs Bowles, alone and unprotected from this onslaught of words. In this period Dickinson sent Bowles ‘Title divine is mine! / The Wife — without the Sign!’
‘Here’s what I had to “tell you”—,’ she added beneath her transcript. ‘You will tell no other?’
It’s one answer to Master’s complaint, ‘You do not tell me all.’ Since ‘all’ was a tall order for a ‘reticent volcano’, telling remains a tease. She would always hold a deeper secret in reserve.
Bowles told Austin he must withdraw from the Dickinsons. His health, he said, required him to abstain. ‘You ought to know without my explaining,’ he added, unwilling to specify his reasons. ‘You are certainly not ignorant of them. I must respect them; so must you.’ He was probably recalling a confidential outburst to Austin, when they had been riding on their own on the outskirts of Amherst.
‘My nature revolts at a divided, contradictory loyalty,’ he had said. ‘But my life, to be happy & harmonious at home, must have friends abroad, — & yet it must be happy at home.’
The future of the tie, as Bowles spelt it out, is similar to Emily Dickinson’s prospect in her Master poems: to see a special person less and yet to ‘have as much as ever, or rather more, in eternity’.
Many of her letters to Bowles contained poems pertinent to what she had to ‘tell’ — not just anyone, but what she had to tell this heartfelt man, this susceptible husband, this editor with a national reach. During these brilliant years she composed poems with an eye to him: the exultation of the ‘Wife without the Sign’; the divine furore of the ‘soul’s superior instants’; the sickness, collapse and longing. Message after poetic message had flown his way. Could he understand her? Could he — while continuing to publish verse with a sugar-coating of sentiment — wake up to these blasts of candour?
One poem she sent him appears to be resigned to her failure to quicken his interest: ‘I’ve nothing Else, to bring, you know — / So I keep bringing these — / Just as Night keeps fetching stars — / To our familiar eyes.’ Was she too familiar for him to see the star quality? Perhaps Bowles would only mind [notice] these poems if they didn’t come.
Privately, Bowles disliked ‘Lady-writers’ and counted himself lucky they wrote at home and out of sight: ‘it is treading upon eggs all the time to deal with them,’ he grumbled, ‘they receive the unvarnished truth as if it were a red-hot bullet’. Could this be the sort of bullet that hit the Bird in a Master letter?
Dickinson went on trying for quite some time because Sam Bowles exuded promise, attracted as he was to intelligence in women. In conversation, in person, his attentiveness, his ‘Arabian’ looks and a feminine quality appealing in a man who is unafraid of it, made Bowles unlike the local pedants, whom she called ‘manikins’. A welcome gesture from Bowles was a message to the poet to send him one of her ‘little gems’. If he did pause to read, truly read, the poems Dickinson sent, she thought he’d be as ‘puzzled’ as she — wouldn’t he just — to find their stars pointing ‘Our way Home!’ Home to her? Or to an eternal home? Home is one of her words that carry a residue of private connotation.
She sent some of her wildest poems to Bowles at this time and he published five, including the emotional intoxication of her ‘little tippler / Leaning against the — Sun’ (4 May 1861) and her mockery of a deadly heaven in ‘Safe in their alabaster chambers’ (1 March 1862). The newspaper preserved the poet’s anonymity, but imposed banal or misleading titles like ‘The May Wine’, as well as chiming rhymes. Editorial fiddling ‘robbed’ her, she said, of her Snake sliding across his boggy acre. Her indignation is legendary.
One problem with Bowles is that he employed a literary editor called Fidelia Cooke, who was clueless about poetry. It was typical of Bowles’s public support for women that he appointed a woman (the second ever, after the Boston writer on women’s rights, Margaret Fuller) to be on the staff of an influential daily newspaper; unfortunately, Cooke published the kind of sentimental tosh that far from advancing women’s intelligence kept it and readers in their place. It could be that Bowles, impressed with public excitement over Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Charlotte Bronte, was lending himself to a new fashion for women’s writing, albeit without much discernment. Bowles himself was content with ‘tit-bits’ of poetry, the staple of The Household Book of Poetry, his gift to Sue and Austin. He thought every household should have such a collection of tit-bits. Then, too, Bowles exercised his empathy with a number of women besides Emily: Susan Dickinson and Maria Whitney were his favourites. He really had too many soulmates to qualify for the kind of commitment the poet had in mind.
There is yet another fact which rules out Bowles as the sole source for Dickinson’s ‘Master’: his home in Springfield, Massachusetts. ‘Master’ lives at a greater distance, for Daisy suggests he come ‘to New England’ to see her.
Dickinson’s poems, like Shakespeare’s sonnets, occupy a mid-space between experience and imagination. The same with Shelley who, as Ann Wroe has shown, fills his poems with scenes and figures that ‘begged to be decoded’, but which are likelier to be figments or symbols ‘than actual fragments of his past’. In Dickinson’s letters to ‘Master’, the emotional force of ‘I’ seems to authenticate her confessions, but though, as readers, we lend ourselves to the intimacy of this voice, we can’t forget that Dickinson’s letters are as close as letters come to the inventiveness of the poems that are her ‘letter to the World’. An erupting voice burns away the life/art distinction. The fact that Dickinson placed the Master letters with her poetry rather than with her correspondence suggests he was largely invention.
Instead of plumping for an actual Master, we might feel our way into a woman’s desire for character. The poet is enlivened by the imagined harshness of Master’s character in a way that stimulates fertile imaginings of a potential situation that might have grown out of an initial situation we aren’t meant to recover. Biography is not exactly irrelevant, but bound to be misleading with poems that throw the onus of introspection back into the lap of the reader: they compel us to recognise how our cherished emotion of love — even (or especially) deathless love — is largely imagined, a fictitious vessel for our tastes and dreams. If this is so, then friendship, and the kind of love that grows through friendship, are bound to prevail over a master-love in a woman’s daily heartland. That back-door track between Emily and Susan, the path worn, step after step, day after day, by the poet’s feet, could have been in reality more compelling than the perhaps tenuous contact behind her Master letters.
In the third Master letter she imagines herself as queen, sleeping beside ‘Plantagenet’, their bodies breathing together. Why Plantagenet, rather than another royal name? A Plantagenet is a member of a royal line opposed to the line of Lancaster in the civil wars of fifteenth-century England. The name implies strife ahead, the Wars of the Roses. Dickinson was enthralled with Shakespeare’s Henry VI, which re-creates these wars. Crookbacked but active and pitiless in Henry VI is the future Richard III who murders his kin, other Plantagenets who stand between him and the crown. He will fight to the death, the last of an embattled line of killers and victims.
Daisy, meanwhile, is enthroned on Master’s knee. There are no scruples about his legitimate wife and no inhibitions. All the same, she continues to conceal something she cannot communicate to Master. Her secret outlasts the Master letters.
Vinnie said, ‘Emily never had any love disaster.’ So long as the lovelorn image holds sway, Vinnie’s statement sounds like a cover-up, but could she be right? With strong-willed imaginations it’s vital to stress the gains that accompany the pains of denial and longing. During these extraordinary years the poet is distilling theorems of experience from her life: desire, parting, death-in-life, spiritual quickening, the creative charge and creative detachment just short of freezing. I want to propose that her poems work when a theorem is applied to a reader’s life. It’s a mistake to spot Dickinson in all her poems; the real challenge is to find our selves. She demands a reciprocal response, a complementary act of introspection. For the poem to work fully we have to complete it with our own thoughts and feelings. Her dash is not casual; it’s a prompt, bringing the reader to the brink of words; there is the need to speak, if only to ourselves. This can be especially effective when we are in touch with feelings as intense as the poet’s own: it might be abandonment or grief or fear of losing control. A Dickinson poem can open out into any number of dramas to fill its compelling spaces. As a woman unmodified by mating, a stranger to her time, speaking for those who are not members of the dominant group, Dickinson’s dashes push the language apart to open up the space where we live without language.
This act of daring takes off from a logical argument along the tightrope of the quatrain. She flaunts her footsteps. Her poetic line is a high-wire act: a walker pretends to hesitate, stop, and sway; then, fleet of foot, skips to the end.
In April 1862 she claimed that her poetry had been impelled by ‘a terror — since September — I could tell to none’. She sings, she said, because ‘I am afraid’. The date is specific: September 1861. What happened to leave her with a sense of deadness — ‘palsy’, she called it?
It may or may not be relevant that in September 1861 Bowles found himself ‘a wreck’. It was the result of stress affecting his heart, as well as sciatica. A temporary measure was to retreat to Dr Denniston’s sanatorium in Northampton; a longer-term plan was for Bowles to visit Europe the following spring. The poet may have felt abandoned. If so, it was a repeat of her sense of abandonment by friends whom she’d bound to her with maximum intensity: when Jane Humphrey had left for Ohio and Susan had gone off to Michigan, their letters had stopped; distance had dissolved ties vital to her Existence; immured as she was at home, it seemed to her a kind of death. Now Bowles, on the receiving end of insistent dramas and unable to cope with the attachments he’d roused, was to go. Her ‘palsy’ does follow the final Master letter, undated but thought to have been written in the summer of 1861. What brought the series of Master letters to an end? Did long-suffering Mrs Bowles nerve herself to make a stand? Mary Bowles kept that wicked-witch letter and could have used it as a weapon against a rival ‘Wife’. Her husband came to see Emily as ‘half angel, half demon’.
Awaiting his farewell call before Bowles sailed, Emily, Vinnie and Sue sat together downstairs at the Homestead, listening for his knock. When a knock came Vinnie tipped Pussy off her lap in her haste to open the door, while Emily held tight to her chair, putting out a petal (in her Daisy character). Alas, the knock turned out to be a delivery. Bowles failed to come and Emily let him know that ‘Hearts in Amherst — ache … If we could only care — the less — it would be so much easier’. Tears, she said, were still dropping from black, blue and her own brown eyes.
Yet no sooner did Bowles sail, on 9 April 1862, than she found a new correspondent in a Boston man of letters, Thomas Wentworth Higginson. He was to be her lifeline to the publishing world Bowles had formerly represented. Her need — to her a matter of life or death — was the stimulant of sustained private contact with that public space. It was to this stranger, Higginson, that she blurted out the ‘terror’ since September that had nearly finished her. The date of this her first letter to him, 15 April 1862, is commonly explained as a response to Higginson’s tips for young writers in a recent issue of the Atlantic. True enough, but Bowles’s departure six days earlier could have been a keener incentive. Exit one leader of opinion. Enter another.
After seven months Bowles returned. On 17 November he came to the Homestead, expecting the heartfelt reception he had missed.
‘I cannot see you’, was the message Emily sent downstairs, though tuned to his voice below. But why, when one of her letters had cried out to him to return at once? Such agitated feeling could have led her protective father to ban further contact. She did not see Bowles face to face for the next twelve years — so long as her father lived. It was part of her image to be an obedient daughter, but she exercised her own control. For the best part of a year Bowles had put himself beyond her reach. We can picture the fade-out of the attention her writing deserved and had to have. Here lies the real disappointment: not love, not visits. What she craved were letters in answer to hers, above all an editor’s signal of faith in her powers as a poet.
Once she’d sent Bowles a rare first edition of the Bronte sisters’ Poems, their first book, self-published in 1846, which sold only two copies. ‘Keep the Yorkshire Girls, if you please, with the faith of their friend and yours.’ The message is plain: as a friend to the Brontës, he should take note of a parallel situation, the unrecognised poet who was at this moment writing to him.
Bowles missed the point when he returned the volume.
‘Please to need me … you denied my Bronte’, she’d reproached him. ‘Teach us to miss you less.’
Her letters to eminent men auditioned them for roles as master and mentor to the future star of the ‘Opera’, and further, these letters devised the blueprint for her legend. In the early 1860s people began to notice her shut door. The burning life of the ‘Ethiop within’ was belied by the façade of the woman in white: ‘Ourself behind ourself, concealed—’.
What does she conceal, and so fixedly that her lips are ‘soldered’? Intimate as she is with ‘Master’ (at least in fantasy), he does reproach her for holding back something she will not ‘tell’. Nor would she tell Sam Bowles why she would not see him on his return. What word cannot pass her lips or shape itself on paper, even in drafts for her eyes alone? If ‘Master’ was largely fantasy, what was it that ‘struck’ her ticking ‘through’? Legend had it that Dickinson closed off from life to languish over disappointed love. But there was a simpler reason for seclusion.
* He alludes to Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers.