A Loaded Gun by Jerome Charyn Read Free Book Online Page B

ever felt I—
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  The first that I could recollect
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Bereft I was—of what I knew not
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Too young that any should suspect
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  A Mourner walked among the children
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  I notwithstanding went about
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  As one bemoaning a Dominion
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Itself the only Prince cast out —      [Fr1072]
    And it was as “the only Prince cast out” that she lived her life, searching for the “Delinquent Palaces” of her childhood—and her art. We can feel that streak of rebellion when she unconsciously sympathizes with a maverick student at Mount Holyoke. She had only been there a little longer than a month and was still homesick when she wrote to Austin:
    A young lady by the name of Beach, left here for home this morning. She could not get through her examinations & was very wild beside.      [Letter 17, November 2, 1847]
    It was this wildness that frightened and attracted Emily, a wildness that would haunt the dreamscape of her poems. We never learn what happened to Miss Beach, whether she settled down with some “man of noon” or remained a maverick—another “Prince cast out.” But Dickinson had to rebel in a much more secret and convoluted way, as the village Prometheus, who stole whatever she could from her Lexicon and the local gods of Amherst, and manufactured her very own fire.
    Self-born, self-tutored, she had to tear apart all ties to her mother, the one creature who had done the most to shape her sensibility. Emily Dickinson’s own elliptical songs are like a hymn to her mother’s repeated silences and melancholy. But who was Emily Norcross Dickinson and why do we know so little about her?
    2
    P ART OF IT IS E MILY S R .’ S OWN FAULT . She suffered all her life from logophobia, a fear—and distrust—of the written word. Vinnie, the daughter who was closest to her, who could knit and sew and clean the house like a dervish, suffered from a bit of the same fear.
    . . .though I’ve always had a great aversion to writing, I hope, by constant practice, the dislike will wear away, in a degree, at least.
    But Vinnie wasn’t shy, the way her mother was. Vinnie loved to flirt. She was also a mime and a reader of books. And she overcame her word blindness enough to write seventeen poems that still survive.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  The fire-flies hold their lanterns high
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  To guide the falling star,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  But, if by chance the wicks grow short
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  The stars might lose their way.
    Vinnie has almost a kind of fictional glow; we can imagine her fat little fingers, her brown hair and brown eyes, her plump arms, her growing army of cats, her waspish tongue—she assumes mythical proportions and powers in the eyes of her poet sister. Vinnie could be “full of Wrath, and vicious as Saul—” [Letter 520, September 1877]
    And during the presidential campaign of 1880, Emily wrote to Mrs. Holland:
    Vinnie is far more hurried than Presidential Candidates—I trust in more distinguished ways, for they have only the care of the Union, but Vinnie the Universe —      [Letter 667, 1880]
    Emily hurls a lot of her own Promethean fire on Edward, Vinnie, Austin, and Sue. We can recall her father stepping like Cromwell, or wandering in his slippers after a storm, to feed the hungry birds; and Dickinson scholars have examined and reexamined Austin, who would become a sad clown in purple pantaloons and coppery green wig; Sue remains the Dark Lady of Dickinson scholarship—volatile, complex, and ultimately unfathomable; we follow her tracks and can only find more and more mysterious lines. It’s hard to determine what she