In this collection there is a poem in memory of the critic Peter Monroe Jack, a particularly fine one in memory of Ford Madox Ford, one on a wood-and-coal man, and one on “chas sing,” a laundryman. One can still enjoy Cummings’ inexhaustible pleasure in double o’s, parentheses and question marks, but when honi soit qui mal y pense becomes “honey swo R ky mollypants” one feels that something should be done about it. Yet at his best he remains one of our greatest lyricists.
1950
Love from Emily
Emily Dickinson’s Letters to Doctor and Mrs. Josiah Gilbert Holland. Edited by their granddaughter, Theodora Van Wagenen Ward (Harvard University Press; $4).
In a sense, all of Emily Dickinson’s letters are “love-letters.” To her, little besides love, human and divine, was worth writing about, and often the two seemed to fuse. That abundance of detail — descriptions of daily life, clothes, food, travels, etc. — that is found in what are usually considered “good letters” plays very little part in hers. Instead, there is a constant insistence on the strength of her affections, an almost childish daring and repetitiveness about them that must sometimes have been very hard to take. Is it a tribute to her choice of friends, and to the friends themselves, that they could take it and frequently appreciate her as a poet as well? Or is it occasionally only a tribute to the bad taste and extreme sentimentality of the times?
At any rate, a letter containing such, to us at present, embarrassing remarks as, “I’d love to be a bird or a bee, that whether hum or sing, still might be near you,” is rescued in the nick of time by a sentence like, “If it wasn’t for broad daylight, and cooking-stoves, and roosters, I’m afraid you would have occasion to smile at my letters often, but so sure as ‘this mortal’ essays immortality, a crow from a neighboring farmyard dissipates the illusion, and I am here again.” In modern correspondence expressions of feeling have gone underground: but if we are sometimes embarrassed by Emily Dickinson’s letters we are spared the contemporary letter-writer’s cynicism and “humor.”
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This beautifully edited collection of ninety-three letters written to Doctor and Mrs. Holland covers the last thirty-three years of Emily Dickinson’s life. Dr. Holland had begun his career as a rather reluctant country doctor, and he went on to become a wealthy citizen, a popular lecturer, the editor of the Springfield Republican, and finally the founder and editor of Scribner’s Monthly.
It is curious to think of the Dickinson family reading the Springfield Republican as religiously as they must have from the many glancing references to it; but except for generalizations usually turned into metaphors, current events rarely appear in these letters of gratitude and devotion. As in her poetry, Emily Dickinson is interested in Geography (in which “Heaven” seems to be one of the most familiar places) and the Seasons, and in her own combinations of both. “It is also November. The moons are more laconic and the sun-downs sterner, and Gibraltar lights make the village foreign. November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.” “February passed like a skate.… My flowers are near and foreign, and I have but to cross the floor to stand in the Spice Isles.” And in the concluding letters, when Mrs. Holland is visiting in Florida, Emily Dickinson speaks of it as if it were Heaven, with which she is familiar, as well as an earthly state of which she is very ignorant.
The use of homely images, and their solidity, remind one over and over of George Herbert, and as the letters grow more terse and epigrammatic, one is reminded not only of Herbert’s poetry but of whole sections of his “Outlandish Proverbs.” And one is grateful for the sketchiness: it is nice for a change to know a poet who never felt the need for apologies and essays, long paragraphs, or even for long sentences. Yet these letters have structure and strength. It is the sketchiness of the water-spider, tenaciously holding to its upstream position by means of the faintest ripples, while making one aware of the current of death and the darkness below.
The careful study of Emily Dickinson’s changing handwriting, appended to this volume, bears out this image pictorially. Among other illustrations there is a charming photograph of Lavinia Dickinson, laughing, and holding one of her innumerable cats that seem to have been a trial to her adored sister. Twenty-nine of the letters are included in the most recent edition of Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd, with an introduction by Mark Van Doren (World; $3.75). Mrs. Holland died believing that all the others had been lost, but some sixty more have now been found and further ones may yet come to light.
1951
The Riddle of Emily Dickinson
By Rebecca Patterson (434 pp.; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company; $4.50).
Why is is that so many books of literary detective-work, even when they are better authenticated, better written, and more useful in their conclusions than Mrs. Patterson’s, seem finally just unpleasant? And why — but perhaps it is rather exactly because: in order to reach a single reason for anything as singular and yet manifold as literary creation, it is necessary to limit to the point of mutilation the human personality’s capacity for growth and redirection. It could not very well be a pleasant process to observe.
For four hundred pages Mrs. Patterson tracks down the until now unknown person (she believes it to have been a person, not persons) for whom Emily Dickinson is supposed to have cherished a hopeless passion and to whom she is supposed to have written every one of her love poems. This person Mrs. Patterson proves, to her own satisfaction at least, to have been another woman, a Mrs. Kate Anthon (to use her second married name), a school friend of Emily Dickinson’s sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson. She came to visit Susan Dickinson, next door to Emily Dickinson, in Amherst in 1859; she was then a young widow who preferred to go by her maiden name of Kate Scott. The two young women met and fell in love; about a year later Kate Scott broke it off in some way, and Emily Dickinson had been christened and launched on her life of increasing sorrow and seclusion. It was all as simple as that.
That her thesis is partially true might have occurred to any reader of Emily Dickinson’s poetry — occurred on one page to be contradicted on the next, that is — but even so, why is it necessary for us to learn every detail of Kate Scott’s subsequent life for fifty-seven years after she dealt Emily Dickinson this supposedly deadly blow? It is interesting enough to read: she was an attractive, generous woman who travelled a great deal, a devoted wife as well as an effusively affectionate friend — but none of this seems to have much to do with “the riddle of Emily Dickinson.” Perhaps Mrs. Patterson is trying at such length to establish the fact that Mrs. Anthon was capable of the relationship Mrs. Patterson thinks she was — which again doesn’t seem to prove much, considering the lengths of the lives of both women, the enormous emotional vitality both obviously had, and the number and variety of people in Kate Scott’s life, and even, although of course to a much lesser degree, in Emily Dickinson’s.
According to the book-jacket, Mrs. Patterson has long been an admirer of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. In the avidity of her search for “proof,” this fact seems to have been lost sight of, as well as a few more: the possibility of a poet’s writing from other sources than autobiographical ones, the perfectly real enjoyment in living expressed in many of the poems, the satisfaction that Emily Dickinson must have felt in her work, no matter what, and, quite simply, the more demonstrative manners of another period. When the poems are quoted they are used or mis-used merely as bits of “evidence,” and poor Mrs. Anthon’s exuberant underlinings in the books of poetry she carried about with her are subjected to the same treatment.