Lyndall Gordon's new book is subtitled Emily Dickinson and her Family's Feuds. That gets the subject matter, and the order in which it appears, more or less right.
The first half of Lives Like Loaded Guns is an account of American poet Emily Dickinson's life. The second half deals with the complicated and vicious in-fighting that followed her death. Gordon (biographer of Virginia Woolf and Henry James, among others) has done her research. There's a generous bibliography and some 50 pages of notes, but Lives Like Loaded Guns – the title comes from a poem by Dickinson – is not in the least academic. It has a few interesting axes to grind and some theories to push, but it's never anything short of readable, its language, at times, just on the good side of “breathless,” as it tells its rather lurid story of sickness, inspiration, adultery, vendetta and even, briefly, group sex and voyeurism in 19th-century New England.
Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and her Family's Feuds, by Lyndall Gordon, Viking, 489 pages, $41
Both halves of Gordon's story are enthralling. Her Emily Dickinson is independent-minded, somewhat irreligious and cruel. She's not at all the naïve and innocent shut-in that her earliest biographers depicted. (In one instance, she drowns four “superfluous” kittens in a barrel of brine and forgets them there until they stink.) Gordon presents a plausible picture of a poet whose thinking is as complex as, say, T. S. Eliot's – Eliot was Dickinson's distant cousin.
But the surprise is Gordon's probing of the “role-playing” at the heart of Dickinson's work, a role-playing that allows the poet to create and inhabit the complex personae in her work, a work that begins in reality but moves to the strange symbol world at the heart of Dickinson's imagination. Clearly, Gordon's Dickinson is influenced by Camille Paglia's. She is sadomasochistic, violent, an earth daemon chained up in a spinster's drawing room. But she is also deeply philosophical, her poetry possessing the stillness and light of the natural world she turned to for solace. Like that of all great writers, Dickinson's work does not come when called.
Emily Dickinson in an undated portrait courtesy of the Amherst College Library.— AP
At the heart of Emily Dickinson's story there has always been a mystery. Why was she a shut-in, one who was allowed by her religious family to skip church whenever she felt like it? Why did she avoid the company of all but a very select few? What was there in silence and dim light that she needed?
The easiest answer – the most common – is that she was some variety of “neurotic”: lovesick, heartbroken, overly sensitive to stimuli, what have you. Gordon doesn't think so and she provides a believable cause for Dickinson's seclusion: epilepsy. Gordon has no positive proof of this. Epilepsy was thought a shameful affliction in the 19th century. As Gordon suggests, her family would have hidden her condition and even destroyed record of it, in order to preserve their Emily's reputation. But Gordon's case is well-presented. There was epilepsy in the Dickinson family, for one thing. There are records of Emily having unnamed “episodes” of illness, for another. And, then, we have some pharmaceutical records, in particular a prescription for drugs then given to epileptics. But what's elegant about Gordon's case is that, with little fuss, it makes sense of Dickinson's personal habits and her family's indulgence of her. Epilepsy, if Dickinson was epileptic, also grounds the visionary element in Dickinson's work in her physical experience, an interesting tack.
