On the farm where she grew up, in Monson, Emily’s mother found her little brother dead in his cradle, like a little sugar loaf wrapped up by death the grocerwoman. Then she lost two other brothers and her father. Finally, one year before Emily’s birth, she buried her mother. She brought her daughter into the world under a sun spotted with mourning. A few days before giving birth she repapered the walls of the nursery, but it is not enough to redecorate the walls to ensure a newborn child of an open life. Ghosts bent over Emily’s cradle. They observed this child who would become their scribe; her radiant sensibility already permeated the wall of inattention that divides absent from present.
Poets are pretty when a century has gone by, when they’re dead and in the ground and alive through their texts. But when you have a poet in your home, a child who is in love with the absolute, shut away in her room with her books like some young wild animal in a divinely smoke-filled lair, how are you to raise her? Children know all there is to know of heaven until the day they begin to learn things. Poets are children who have not been interrupted; they are sky-gazers, impossible to raise.
Legend has it that Saint Christopher carried the Christ child across a river on his shoulders. The truth is that it is mothers who step bare-legged into the great black current of time, carrying their children on their shoulders, feeling the corset of cold around their waists, and they think only of keeping the child above water. Sometimes one of them lets go and sinks into the river. Then it is up to the child, drenched to the soul in fear, to become the mother of her mother and try to reach the opposite shore. From 1850 on, Emily’s mother’s brain was on fire. She became the prophetess of a migrainous God, and her silent oracles caused her entourage to tremble. Emily looked after her mother. She bustled about in the middle of the black river, not without a certain cheer when she spoke of that time in her late childhood when her mother dressed her in cloth so poorly cut that she felt as if she were “wearing excuses rather than clothing.” In 1880—for thirty years she had been carrying her on her shoulders—she let out a sigh: “the cricket of the hearth is a burden, because it is getting old.”
Melancholy mothers can never be thanked enough. Their throne is in the middle of the sky. They have tossed their shawl over the sun. From their eyes comes a night so deep that their children marvel at the tiniest spot of light. Emily went in search of daylight where it could be found, not far from the realm of mothers—in passionate nighttime discussions with her brother, for example, by the hearth in the kitchen with its apple-green walls, “while the righteous sleep.”
When he had finished his studies, Austin left for Boston to become a teacher and was beset with homesickness—although that home was nothing more than a brick house in Amherst, and that house nothing more than his mother’s slow-beating heart. He came back to Amherst, and his father offered him a job. He accepted. His mother observed her son’s return in silence. Silence is the sword of moody mothers. They plunge it into the nomad souls of their shattered children. Blessed are the mothers: whoever makes life impossible for us gives our heart every chance to become great.
With his disheveled ginger hair and turned out like a prince—a brightly colored riding jacket, a wide-brimmed planter’s hat, an orangewood walking stick—Austin strode up and down the streets of Amherst like a monarch in his tiny kingdom. He was the treasurer at the college, and like his father before him he decided upon the spirit of the education to be dispensed there. He liked painting, theatre, and horses. Swaggering and scathing, he was curt with everyone except Emily. His sister fascinated him. For him she was the “incarnation of good.” He needed her, even once he was married. Emily joked with him, mended his socks and shirts, asked him to go shopping for her, pressed him for the town gossip. She flattered, reassured, and encouraged him. She was his little mother. Emily watched over Austin, and Vinnie watched over Emily. The three children held hands and tried to cross the great river of life without drowning. They had no parents. No one has ever had parents, someone whose mere presence could keep one from dying—that does not exist.
Like the wind in the aspen leaves, life wrote its luminously contradictory texts on the face of Sophia Holland, Emily’s friend. Suddenly God creased the masterpiece of that adolescent face as if it were paper. When Emily learned that her friend was going to die, she asked to see her. Death is a potter spinning his work backward. Emily observed the body’s clay, its divine breath departing. That vision would make her forever the custodian of vanished lives, a dealer in stolen invisibility. Sophia’s soul dropped like an emerald into the jewel box of her red heart.
As a child, Emily heard a minister—thunderstruck by his own eloquence like a horseman thrown by his mount—exclaim: “Is the arm of our Lord so short that He can save no one?” The minister replied dully to his own question, yet he could not put out the fire lit in a child’s mind. Sophia buried, Emily entered the convent of depression on tiptoe. To help her recover, her parents sent her to her aunt Lavinia’s for a month. For the second time she would find peace there, even if she could not forget Sophia’s lesson: with every second, behold the end of the world.
Love and the void belong to the same terrible genus. Our soul is the terrain of their unsettled contest.
Whenever a young man showed an interest in the Dickinson daughters, their father would raise the Great Wall of his eyebrows, but he could not prevent Joseph Lyman from charming the sleek, witty, flirtatious Vinnie. The young man kissed her by her rosebushes then vanished, on the pretext that Vinnie could not have borne the thought of leaving her family home. Vinnie remained petrified among her roses, as if in a fairy tale, frozen in the fateful moment of a curse.
The rosebush deserter vanished into the distance. Beneath his horse’s hooves was stardust, the golden powder of a vision, a portrait of Emily that he would write in 1860: “A library dimly lighted [. . .] Enter a spirit clad in white, figure so draped as to be misty[,] face moist, translucent alabaster, forehead firmer as of statuary marble.” “Hazel” eyes that do not see what appears before them but “the core of all thi[n]gs”; “hands small, firm, deft but utterly emancipated from all claspings of perishable things, very firm strong little hands, absolutely under control of the brain [. . .] mouth made for nothing and used for nothing but uttering choice speech, rare thoughts, glittering, starry misty figures, winged words.”
In her lifetime, Emily would not see her forehead circled in a crown of genius; all her writing would sleep at the bottom of a drawer in her night table, along with her crown of thorns. While she wrote, Vinnie fed the cats that followed her everywhere through the house—little gold-eyed courtesans for a lady in black cashmere. She also swept the steps and did the shopping. She played the role of Martha in the Gospel; she had the sententious toughness for it. “[Emily] had to think—she was the only one of us who had that to do. Father believed; and mother loved; and Austin had Amherst.” As her sister no longer left the house, Vinnie acted as her dressmaker’s dummy, trying on the seraphic white dresses that Emily would wear. When shopkeepers asked her why she did not try to convince her sister to get some fresh air “for her own good,” she replied that Emily was gifted for a fervent life of reading and silence. Why on earth should she oblige her to do anything else?
During the night on Independence Day, 1879, a large warehouse in the center of town not far from the Dickinson home went up in flames. The bells woke Emily, and she ran barefoot to the window, saw a giant sun devouring the sky while a pale moon looked on in astonishment. Drawn from their nests by the disaster, drunk on light, the birds were singing full-throated. Vinnie ran in and immediately reassured her sister. “Don’t be afraid, Emily, it’s only the fourth of July!” She took her by the hand and led her to their mother’s bedroom. The din had not awoken her. She was one of those souls who were so unhappy that nothing could trouble them; such indifference is not unlike wisdom. The two daughters let her sleep. Maggie, the housekeeper, was sitting by her side. She in turn reassured Emily: it was only a barn burning, nothing more. Emily acted as if she believed their lies. On Amherst’s main street the witches in the fire combed their long red hair, biting ravenously into the wood. Outside it was so light that one could make out a caterpillar’s velvet accordion on the leaf of a plum tree at the end of the garden. “Vinnie’s ‘it’s only the fourth of July’ I shall always remember. I think she will tell us so when we die, to keep us from being afraid.”
There were four windows in Emily’s room—and a fifth one, the Bible, a picture window through which the soul discovered a paradise, terribly near. Emily’s Bible, in fine-grained green morocco leather, was printed in such tiny characters that she had to hold it very close to her face to read it. In one of the stories, three children were thrown into the flames. They were found sitting around the fire, laughing and singing praises. No doubt they had an invisible Vinnie by their side to help them pass through the flames of abandonment, with a peace in their soul that nothing could wrest from them.
“My country is Truth,” said Emily, and referring to her sister’s lingering migraines, “Vinnie lives much of the time in the State of Regret.” She who was so gifted at bringing tranquility to her loved ones was powerless against this nostalgia for a stolen kiss by the flaming rosebush.
Jealous serpents glided across the floor of the room where the three little Dickinsons walked barefoot: by day they lurked in the shadows of the children’s games, by night they rippled among the tall grasses of a dream. Thirty years later they were still there. There were times when Austin rebelled against his sister’s invisible consecration. He claimed that she was “posing” when she received guests—dressed in a cloud of white, speaking to them in a little girl’s voice. But if anyone tried to make him admit to his sister’s strangeness he clenched his jaw; she went so rarely into the streets of Amherst that people called her “The Myth.” There is nothing odd about my sister’s behavior, he would affirm, rebuffing strangers who were unaware that the Dickinson clan was a law unto itself. Vinnie said as much, haughtily, “Each of us in this family is the king of his or her own realm.”
Edward had gagged his soul to such a degree that—like a revenge of the invisible—the children he had fathered were daydreamers, devourers of books. Austin had become a jurist, yet he showed Emily a few poems of his own devising. She read them and remarked, with an iron humor: “Now Brother Pegasus, I’ll tell you what it is—I’ve been in the habit myself of writing some few things, and it rather appears to me that you’re getting away my patent, so you’d better be somewhat careful, or I’ll call the police!” Brother Pegasus would abandon his writing, at least with ink. At his own expense, he redesigned the grounds of the college, planting bushes with red berries to warm the winter, and trees that retained their green confidence all through the gray months. This goodness that seeks no reward for itself, this restlessness for the faraway are marks of deepest poetry.
In the gloom of the little school, Emily discovered the power of books to resurrect. In high school she fell in love with a young teacher, Leonard Humphrey. He died in 1851. The Lord burning behind a beloved face gives it his brilliance. If he comes too close, the face turns waxy white, then melts and disappears. “I do not care for the body—I love the timid soul, the blushing, shrinking soul.”
The pupil of Amherst, too well-behaved, watched as God made up the world with each passing instant. She compiled a secret list of what she loved: poets, the sun, summer, paradise. That was all. The list was full, she wrote, and the word “poets” would suffice in itself: poets give birth to a sun more pure than the sun itself, their summer never fades, and heaven can only be a place of beauty if a poet has painted it.
Fierce, silent, prone to fits of laughter, Emily belonged to a small group at her high school, each of whom had a nickname. Hers was “Socrates”—for the thinker who exasperated the people of Athens with his stubborn pursuit of the truth. The girls addressed impatient letters to each other and several times a day hid behind their fans of pealing laughter. They knew that the more serious days of harvest time lay ahead: husband, children, respectability. Emily sipped delicately at the wine of youth, at the ephemeral grace where sorrows and fervor can be shared. Disappointment arrives from on high. The time would come for them to leave, but for whom, and why?
Something is given at birth to each newborn child. This thing is nothing; it has neither shape nor name nor prestige. It is our only asset. We glimpse it in flashes. “I find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.” Saints share this white flower of nothingness that blooms from time to time in a red heart. It never fades. To be a saint is to be alive. To be alive is to be oneself, one of a kind. Abiah Palmer Root—sensual, radiant, upright—climbed the stairs with the solemn slowness of a queen to where Emily was waiting, astonished. Abiah was a vision: in her hair, and dangling like trophies from her ears, were flaming dandelion flowers. Her peasant grace and her triumphant calm fractured Emily’s heart. Until 1854 Emily would address her in writing as the Mother Superior of the Order of Dandelions.
Abiah did not know that she was a vision. She did not always reply, at the risk of ending up in the “box of Phantoms,” where Emily put those who disappointed her. As she learned the weaknesses of the world, Emily discovered in return the force of writing. That girl who had once made earrings from the tousled sunlight of dandelions moved on, elsewhere, into a life that was dimmed and comfortable. The glory of dandelions has remained: even in the torment of lashing autumn rains, or grazed by cows hobbled to a monotonous hunger, these flowers radiate the language that knows how to express them and love them. The word is an imperishable sun.
From: The Lady in White by Christian Bobin
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