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Emily Dickinson In his Preface, Sewall compares the difficulty of solving the mystery of Emily Dickinson’s life with our endeavours to appropriate the experiences of certain great figures in drama: ‘She is not yet OUTS, and she will not be until her hopes and fears and mysteries become as plain to us as Antigone’s or Hamlet’s are, and with much the same claim on us.’ One cannot help feeling that this is a dangerous line for a biographer to take, although one can see why Emily Dickinson’s self-consciousness and elusiveness should tempt him to it. When- ever a writer chooses to live deliberately (Sewall compares Dickinson and Thoreau in this respect) he or she inevitably tempts the reader to wander over the boundary between life and art; it is unquestionably enjoyable to try to extract the author from the persona. However, as Sewall himself points out in Volume Two of his Life , any attempt to squeeze literal biography from Dickinson’s poems (or Thoreau’s Wulden for that matter) will ultimately lead to the loss of one’s critical bearings, and perhaps the best way to guard against that danger is to remember that life, unlike art, tends to be just a matter of one thing after another, so that living deliberately is likely to involve not doing things rather than doing them: Melville’s Bartleby is perhaps closer to home than the great figures Sewall invokes. There is, after all, something essentially undramatic about retiring into the recesses of one’s family house in a small town in Massachusetts; there could in fact be something absurd about it, as when visitors like Mabel Loomis Todd, later to become Dickinson’s first editor, were asked to sing to an empty room for the benefit of the concealed poet:

It was odd to think, as my voice rang out through the big silent house, that Miss Emily in her weird white dress was outside in the shadow hearing every word. . . . When I stopped Emily sent me in a glass of rich sherry and a poem written as I sang.

This is at best melodrama with comic overtones; drama itself can be left to the poetry, where it manifests itself in a number of ways: which only goes to show that there is a distinction to be drawn, after all, between life and art.

Actually, Sewall totally fails to fall into the trap he appears to have dug for himself on the first page of his massive work, Despite the temptation - one of Dickinson’s poems begins: ‘It’s easy to invent a Life’ - her biographer does not try to make the poet up as he goes along. His concern is to cut through the The Life of Emily Didtinson. By Richard B. Sewall. 2 vols; pp. xxxiv, 821. Faber, €17.50 the set. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson. pp. xiii, 770. Faber, €3.95.

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accretion of Dickinson myth - even the one positively identified daguerrotype of her was almost unrecognisably touched up for the benefit of readers in the 1920s - and leave us with nothing but hard fact and sensible speculation. It may seem perverse to congratulate a biographer for what he doesn’t tell us about his subject, but when that subject is Emily Dickinson, reticence can be a hard-won and admirable achievement. He doesn’t tell us that her father was an ogre; he doesn’t tell us that her love-life was wholly imaginary, perverted, or destroyed by tragic external circumstances; he doesn’t tell us that she was, to use the expression of her bemused correspondent, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, ‘half-cracked’. Instead, Sewall follows in the footsteps of the poet herself, in more senses than one: he shares with Dickinson the ability to make something of value out of very little, without destroying the truth en route.

To do this Sewall has had to follow the poet’s own advice: ‘Tell all the Truth but tell it slant- / Success in Circuit lies.’ We can learn a great deal about Emily Dickinson’s world, about the people who loomed largest in her life; the missing piece of the Dickinson jigsaw is always Emily herself. Sewall has discovered, though, that we can get a good idea of her configurations by putting all the other pieces in place. The first volume of the biography is therefore devoted to a series of studies, in roughly chronological order, of Emily Dickinson‘s family and friends. There are, of course, disadvantages in this approach, the principal one being that the same person - Joseph Lyman, for instance - or story - Austin’s and Susan’s marriage - recurs in different contexts without ever being quite dealt with head-on. One experiences multi- plicity of focus and inevitably awaits the resolution of Emily’s point-of-view in Volume Two, only to find, on arriving there, that she provides us with further fragmentation of perspective (her microscope), or an unnerving sense of inter- vening distance (her telescope); like Emerson she tends to swing from circle to circumference without quite encompassing the routine human terrain that lies in between. The different components of her world stand about slightly uneasily, like the participants in some ceremony where the principal guest has failed to turn up. Funerals, of course, are such Occasions, and Dickinson had a remarkable capacity for feeling funerals in her brain: few writers can have died so often in the course of their own poems. In a way her life can be regarded as an attempt to see what the world looked like when she wasn’t in it. Her preoccupation with ‘That bareheaded life under the grass’ was undoubtedly morbid but her values were those of life and, in their way, oddly practical - it was precisely because she was clamped with empirical fixity to what she knew that she tended to see death as a grotesque extension of life. One of Sewall’s most important points is that her isolation and privacy testified to more than coyness or emotional invalidism. They represented a strategy for survival.

Sewall analyses Dickinson’s grandfather, father and brother. Each was, for

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most of his life, a successful public man; each, apparently, was being gnawed away by private anxieties. Samuel Fowler Dickinson, the grandfather, helped to found Amherst College; towards the end of his life he suffered an abrupt collapse of both will and competence and died, a miserable failure, out west. The father, Edward Dickinson, suffered no such breakdown, but it may be that he paid a high price to avoid it. To all appearances he was dour, conventional, busy ; a dull nineteenth-century puterIfumilius : he didn’t, for example, like his children to read novels. Such a fact does not make him a Barrett of Wimpole Street, however, as Emily’s comment to T. W. Higginson makes clear: ‘He buys me many Books - but begs me not to read them - because he fears they joggle the Mind.’ The power of the last phrase clearly derives from Emily’s experience as well as her father’s - the difference being that she had enabled herself to cope with the threat while he had net. Her brother Austin continued the pattern: small-town lawyer, treasurer of Amherst College, he fulfilled the social responsibilities of a male Dickinson as required, but drew the line at, or well before, his wife’s provincial salon. He was a lonely, introspective, turbulent man, and, like his grandfather before him, could not prevent the public image from cracking during his last years. He too thought about going west to start a new life at the age of sixty - in his case, to escape the local scandal created by his passionate involvement with the young Mabel Lmmis Todd.

By placing Emily in this family context, Sewall sheds light on two facets of her life. The first is her privacy: those closest to her had not been as comfortable as might at first seem in the world from which she withdrew. She continued to admire people who were robust enough to succeed on the larger stage: in fact, the men who attracted her - Bowles, Higginson, Wadsworth, Lord - all made a name for themselves as public figures of one kind or another. Emily Dickinson of course had her own public to deal with, but she deferred that transaction to a later, posthumous, date. By doing so she resolved at least one of the tensions that beset her, the inherited conflict between public and private roles. It is one of Sewall’s most valuable points that her reticence was more than a sulky response to the cruel treatment meted out by the literary philistines of her day. It is true, of course, that Higginson, to whom she turned for advice and encouragement, never really understood her achievement, although he began to get glimmerings after her death. Nevertheless he was loyal to her by his own lights, and it is quite clear that although Dickinson enjoyed pretending he was her master, she did not in fact require an imprimatur from him or anyone else. She was a thoroughly committed and self-confident poet, extraordinarily so, because in her own way the was beyond criticism. In any case there were Thomas Niles and Helen Hunt Jackson, who tried and failed, admittedly late in Dickinson’s career, to bring her work to

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the public. Undoubtedly Emily Dickinson felt rejected at times; however she was basically deeply suspicious of the effect of publication on the practising poet: ‘Publication - is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man - ’. It was left to Mabel Loomis Todd to do the dirty work. She had never fulfilled her ambition of seeing the poet face to face but providentially - yet somehow inevitably - she took up the task of editing her work after her death. It is easy to mock Todd for allowing ‘improved’ versions of the poems to see the light of day and in general for failing to come up to the standards of modem editorship - the standards of the Johnson edition. Sewall does her justice, however, showing that in its way her response to the poems was a sensitive one and reminding us that without her faith and her labours, Dickinson’s poetry would almost certainly not exist today.

The second illumination that comes from Sewall’s study of the Dickinson family balances the first. If she was as vulnerable as the rest of them, she was also as practical and as dogged as they were; and once her vulnerability was shielded, she was able to settle down to an exacting and strenuous career as a poet. Vaporous maidens may put pen to paper, but they don’t, on the whole, leave behind them a body of nearly two thousand poems. It is easy to emphasise the intensity and concentration of Dickinson’s poems, and to underplay their range and quantity. It is for this reason that one welcome’s Faber’s paperback edition of Thomas H. Johnson’s The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. The other Faber edition, Ted Hughes’ Choice of Emily Dickinson ’s Verse, has its merits, not the least of which is cheapness (both the Johnson edition and the Sewall biography are obviously going to be beyond the reach of many), but perhaps inevitably fails to give us a completely well-balanced view of the poet. In fact, Hughes seems rather unsure of his ground in his Introduction, making bckinson a contemporary of Jonathan Edwards, who preceded her by more than a century, and establishing her in the context of ‘radical Puritan revivals’ when really, as Sewall makes clear, it is more accurate to think of her as resisting small-town religiosity. The selection itself is not an unreasonable one, although a perusal of the Complete Poems makes one wish Hughes had included more of the love poetry. But the main effect of the Johnson edition is of richness: we become aware of Dickinson’s imaginative scope, verbal dexterity, and variety of attack. The very brevity of Hughes’ selection tends to enforce a view of the pared-down poetess, spiralling inexorably downwards towards disaster. It is perhaps rather Pavlovian, and unfair to Hughes, to invoke Sylvia Plath, and yet the two poets have enough in common to make the comparison both tempting and dangerous. Dickinson’s use of the ‘common measure’ of hymn tunes has a counterpart in Plath’s echoes of nursery rhymes; they both explore anxiety and the fear of death; Dickinson can be ‘pierced’ by daffodils, Plath stifled by ‘excitable’ tulips. And yet there is a

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crucial difference between their achievements. Plath’s strategy is to draw the reader, often unawares, into the very centre of her dilemma:

What a thrill - My thumb instead of an onion. The top quite gone. , . .

She is the poet of the ‘big strip tease’, she spells out what others bury beneath polite silence. Dickinson tends to leave the silence where it was, but, genius as she was at not saying things, she puts it under extraordinary pressure. Her dashes often serve as props to keep a ramshackle language from collapsing completely :

‘Speech’ - is a prank of Parliament - ‘Tears’ - a trick of the nerve - But the heart with the heaviest freight on - Doesn’t - always - move -

When her light is blocked by a fly or she falls through the floor of her reason, Dickinson doesn’t insist on empathy: she simply disappears behind the obstacle. When the flowers turn hostile, and the pianos in the woods begin mangling, the Queen of Calvary presents herself as a suffering but childish, indeed almost absurd figure, revealing an irony and self-knowledge that make her impact very different from that of the pathetic hidden poet described by Mabel Loomis Todd - and we are closer to the Berryman of the Dream Songs than to Plath. At her most extreme moments Dickinson doesn’t challenge normalcy; she just recedes beyond it. It is this sort of perspctive that makes one think of Hamlet. She is able to place her experiences with dramatic flair partly because her life was so rich in them, despite its paucity of actual events. She devoted herself to monitoring the universal life that is available within the confines of the individual :

It were infinite enacted In the Human Heart - Only Theatre recorded Owner cannot shut -