Mount Holyoke professor Christopher Benfey has an essay up on Slate.com that posits the “wild nights” of Emily Dickinson may not have just been spinster fantasy.
“[Dickinson’s] exile on Main Street has seemed a necessary part of the Dickinson myth, so necessary, indeed, that contrary information—which happens to have been piling up lately—has often been discounted or ignored,” Benfey writes, “the notion of Emily Dickinson making out in her living room is so foreign to our conception of her that her autumnal tryst with Judge Lord has never become part of the popular lore about her.”
Do tell!
Benfey does, quoting from Dickinson’s piano teacher, sister-in-law, and the poet Genevieve Taggard, all of whom present evidence that the presumed dormouse was, in fact, a bit forward. But this information has been long-suppressed, says Benfey, by myth-tenders who prefer Dickinson shut up in her little room in Amherst.
“There is more to this tale, including some pretty convincing evidence that three mysterious love letters Dickinson drafted in the late 1850s—passionate, masochistic, and lyrical texts referred to as the ‘Master Letters’ for their unknown recipient—were actually addressed to Gould: ‘I’ve got a Tomahawk in my side but that don’t humor me much, Her Master stabs her more—Wont he come to her.’ After Dickinson’s death, Mabel Todd began collecting her letters for publication and wrote to Gould. He responded that he had ‘quite a cherished batch of Emily’s letters myself kept sacredly in a small trunk … which some 15 years ago mysteriously disappeared.’”
These revelations come on the heels of Brenda Wineapple’s book, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, which dissects Dickinson’s more traditional (in terms of Dickinson scholarship, anyway) relationship with editor, abolitionist and scholar Thomas Higginson. Both prove that unearthing Dickinson’s private life remains a cottage industry in America, in much the same way unearthing details of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath’s relationship is great fun in the U.K.
The British Library just bought a Hughes archive full of old notebooks and letters for a cool million, leading one Guardian blogger to plead (in vain, of course) for readers to lose interest in tawdry details.
The lives of poets, after all, are much more palatable for most than the poems themselves, which by nature remain veiled in secrecy. “Without secrecy,” Milan Kundera wrote, “nothing is possible.” But perhaps this is true only if you have something to hide.
Anyways, it all makes me think of the mania for “process” that often crops up in interviews with poets. As if understanding the physical acts a poet undergoes to write could somehow shed light on the mysterious metaphysical acts of the writing itself! If one could only perform the exact same physical procedure Ashbery does—typewriter just so, draft angled thusly, sweater vest bunched right to there–then one could create an Ashbery poem!
Fifty million Elvis impersonators can’t be wrong.
Wanna see Emily Dickinson’s snood? (scroll down a ways)
I can accept that ED loved Judge Lord, if y’all can accept that she loved Sue just as much, with the same kind of passion. And don’t forget it!
Nice snood.
I was afraid what this link might show: I thought “snood” referred solely to that fleshy protuberance on a turkey’s beak. It was alarming to think Emily Dickinson sported one of these.
Just for the record, Gould’s full name was George Henry Gould. I’ve sent Emily several emails over the past century – no reply as yet, sad to say. She may have moved on. I guess I’ll just have to accept that. Things change.