Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and her Family’s Feuds – Lyndall Gordon

Alternative subtitle: why everyone Emily Dickinson knew was an utter loony.

When I was living in Amherst, I spent a lot of time flirting with unsuitable boys, visiting late night diners, and generally getting into the student lifestyle by going to eat pancakes in my pyjamas.  I was too busy figuring out how to smuggle alcohol into the dorm to pay any attention to the hugely significant literary landmarks all around me.  Robert Frost’s birthplace?  Emily Dickinson’s house?  Why would I go there, when I could go to Bueno y Sano for a burrito?

Oh 19 year old me, you are so blind.  I seem to spend a disproportionate amount of my late twenties compensating for books I should have read and things I should have done when I was much younger.  Youth is wasted on the young, people.  Wasted.

Anyway.  So, I have been looking for a good biography of Emily Dickinson for several years (ahem, am a loser) and was very excited (loser again) when this came out, because Lyndall Gordon always writes sound, common sense books.  This was another sound, common sense book.

Actually, it’s not really the best introduction to Dickinson’s life, because it assumes you know everything already, and so spends rather more time refuting the myths than telling the story.  Which is fine, but it means that the first half of the book isn’t especially smooth.

Gordon has three main theories.  First, that Dickinson suffered from epilepsy, which inspired some of her most glorious works but also accounts for her holing herself up and generally being mysterious and elusive.  Second, that the so-called ‘Master’ which has caused many academics to wet their pants over the years was largely invented and an hodge-podge of different characteristics of of different men.  And third, her seclusion was not the result of her being, in 19th century terms, a ‘disappointed woman’ pining away, but a positive choice, so that she could concentrate on her work and keep her epilepsy a secret.  In fact, instead of being the sexless spinster, she had a passionate connection with one of her Dad’s friends in her forties.

These are all credible theories, and Gordon makes them well, without overstating the evidence.  Emily comes across as the Queen of passive aggression: sitting upstairs and refusing to be seen but demanding constant attention.  It’s no wonder it was too much for many people.  But if you could bear the white-heat of her attention and could appreciate her work, the rewards were incredible.

So far, so good.  Bit more academicy and thematic than narration, but that’s fine.  But then Emily dies half-way through the book, and her family of crazies come to the fore.

Emily’s best friend was married to her brother, who late in life started a bizarre affair with a newcomer to the town, splitting the entire family and forcing everyone to choose sides.  This is what happens when social conventions mean that you can’t just have a stand-up row and get divorced: you have to engage in bitter and death-defying feuds.

In this particular family though, Emily’s work became used as a weapon: with both sides claiming ownership and constantly going to war over editions, letters, and even the story of her life.  The story of how Emily’s legacy was fought over and twisted for the next fifty years is the best part of the book (though it does tail off a bit after the 1950′s).  And if you are interested in this sort of thing, I’d recommend Janet Malcolm’s ‘The Silent Woman’ which tells a similar story about Sylvia Plath’s story, or Lucasta Miller’s ‘The Bronte Myth’.

A couple of criticisms.  I felt like Emily’s twenties were rather glossed over, so that the story moved very quickly from a precocious adolescent to suddenly this glorious explosion of work in her early thirties.  That’s really the part of the story which I find most intriguing: how does genius develop?

I also felt that though Gordon did say several times that we can’t interpret all her works in an autobiographical light, she then did exactly that.  And in a bit of an awkward way: quoting poems to make points about her life, but without saying what the poem was, or even whether it had been written at this time.

I suppose the point of any literary biography is to make you want to re-read the original work, and this book definitely succeeds.  There is just something so extraordinarily gut-wrenching about Dickinson’s poetry.  The fact that someone living more or less in their bedroom can see the depths of the soul and the breadth of the universe is utterly overwhelming.   I don’t know why British schoolchildren don’t have to read her – I think they would find it far more relevant than wandering lonely as a cloud or how there is some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England.

And yes, I did consider writing this review in the manner of Emily Dickinson, but I decided that would not be cool.  Though I do find that my thoughts keep arranging themselves in iambic meter.