Enduring words offer peek into world of Amherst's recluse

AMERICA:Speculation about the life of Emily Dickinson, a true American eccentric, continues to fascinate

I LIKE waking up with a poem, so one of the best things about living in America is Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, on National Public Radio at 6.30 every morning. For the days when one oversleeps, American Public Media e-mails Keillor's column free of charge.

That’s how I learned that yesterday was the 180th birthday of Emily Dickinson, one of the country’s favourite poets and a true American eccentric. Few authors have been the object of so much speculation.

Dickinson was born and died at The Homestead, a grand house in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her paternal grandfather founded Amherst College. Her rather severe father became the college treasurer, a state legislator and US Congressman.

Though Dickinson’s story continues to be interpreted in different ways, the prevalent image is that of a reclusive spinster who, after a romantic disappointment, grew flowers, dressed in white and squirrelled away the 1,800 poems she wrote.

Generations of American schoolgirls have committed Dickinson’s poems to memory, and fantasised about a similar fate for themselves.

Amherst College bought The Homestead in 1965 and turned it into a museum where a replica of Emily’s white, pleat-front dress is displayed in a glass case, and you can stand in the upstairs corner bedroom where she wrote her poems at a tiny desk. Thousands of people visit the museum each year.

This year has seen something of a Dickinson revival. Last February, Jerome Charyn published a novel entitled The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson,in which he appropriated the poet's voice ("literary body-snatching," the New York Timescalled it) and invented fictional lovers for her, including an illiterate handyman and an academic, as well as a treacherous maid who stole Emily's men.

In July, the Oxford professor Lyndall Gordon published Lives Like Loaded Guns – Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds, an astonishing account of the goings-on at The Homestead. Gordon took her title from a typical Dickinson poem: "My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun — / In Corners — till a Day / The Owner passed — identified — / And carried Me away." Though she often refused to meet people, especially in later life, Dickinson was a prolific writer of letters, corresponding with more than 100 people.

Asked if she missed human company, Dickinson replied: “I never thought of conceiving that I could ever have the slightest approach to such a want in all future time.” If that wasn’t clear, she added, “I feel that I have not expressed myself strongly enough.”

Mabel Loomis Todd, who was for 13 years the mistress of Dickinson’s married brother Austin, conferred a form of immortality upon Emily, by publishing her poems and lecturing about her.

Mabel and Austin met several times a week in the front room of The Homestead for sexual trysts. It seems extraordinary that such a thing could happen in Victorian New England, but Mabel’s husband, an astronomy professor at Amherst, gave his blessing and sometimes joined in. Austin’s wife Susan, who was extremely close to Emily and lived next door in a house called Evergreens, suffered because of the liaison.

In 1998, the literary historians Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith theorised that Dickinson was in love with her sister-in-law Susan. In one of Emily’s 300 letters to the woman she called “Susie”, the poet wrote, “I ought to be working now – but I cannot deny myself the luxury of a minute or two with you . . . Oh my darling one, how long you wander from me, how weary I grow of waiting and looking, and calling for you; sometimes I shut my eyes, and shut my heart towards you, and try hard to forget you because you grieve me so, but you’ll never go away.”

Mabel, the brother’s mistress, and Emily never met face-to-face, but communicated by letter. Each time Mabel, a musician, was scheduled to perform for the Dickinson family, Emily withdrew to her room. Mabel was fascinated by Emily, whom she called “The Myth of Amherst”. When Emily died in 1886, her sister Lavinia, known as Vinnie, discovered her poems, many of them sewn into books. Vinnie asked their sister-in-law Susan to have them published. Out of grief for her son’s recent death, or respect for Emily’s privacy, Susan did not follow up. Mabel edited the poems, in many cases changing their strange punctuation and rhythm to suit Victorian taste, and censoring anything that was overtly sexual. This first, posthumous collection sold 11,000 copies in 1890, the year it was published.

It was not until 1955 that Dickinson’s poems were published as she wrote them, complete with sexual innuendo and a multitude of dashes – which Gordon says “push the language apart to open up the space where we live without language.”

The latest theory about Dickinson, put forward by Gordon, is that she suffered from epilepsy. This might explain her reclusiveness, and poems like “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,/And Mourners to and fro/Kept treading — treading — till it seemed/ That Sense was breaking through . . .”