On an ordinary morning in spring 2019 I was on my way to the kitchen when my eye caught a salmon-colored book cover on the dining table, a book that would reset the course of my life for the next five years. Neither my wife nor I remember how the book got there, but there it was, Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, edited by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith. That morning my journey with Emily Dickinson began.
I sat down with my coffee and began reading. In their introduction, Hart and Smith describe Emily’s passionate writings to Susan as “romantic and erotic expressions.” At their invitation to let the work of Dickinson speak for itself, I began my study. I found, as Hart and Smith promised, that Emily’s letters to Susan were standing proof of a romantic passion that had been overlooked for more than 100 years. The Dickinson that emerged from them was far different than the Dickinson I had been taught. The recluse pining away her years in a corner bedroom for a failed heterosexual love faded into folklore.
In spring of 1852, Emily wrote to Susan, who was away teaching math in Baltimore at the time:
“I hope for you so much, and feel so eager for you, feel that I cannot wait, feel that I must have you – that the expectation to see your face again, makes me feel hot and feverish, and my heart beats so fast.” (OMC 11)
In another letter that same spring, Emily writes to Susan, twisting to the third person pronoun as if turning to God:
“Tis only a few days, Susie, it will soon go away, yet I say, go now, this very moment, for I need her – I must have her, Oh give her to me.” (OMC 6)
These two letters were just the beginning. Several of Emily’s 250+ letters to Susan were as blatantly homoerotic.
In December 2019, after the holidays, I prepared for my annual trip to the east coast from California, as I did each year to have a few weeks of writing and to get our old cape through yet another Maine winter. I packed the suitcase with my books by Dickinson and about her with the idea that I would hunker down amidst the blizzards and power outages and immerse myself—a perfect solo retreat for my continued Dickinson study. Little did I know a pandemic was taking hold. What began as a two-month winter retreat expanded to two years including geographical separation from my spouse, each of us quarantined on separate coasts. Zoom emerged as the primary method for celebrating our 32nd anniversary, having regular check-ins, doing date nights by attending online events, and touching a two-dimensional image of my spouse on a screen delivered by satellite across a continent.
My daily study of Dickinson during the pandemic became my survival, more akin to a companionship. My research notes grew less tabular and began to appear as first-person entries, journal-like, conversational, and imagistic. I found myself communing with Emily as if she was sitting across the room. And I won’t deny that I felt a tap on the shoulder once or twice. Persona poems organically evolved, a poetic form I had rarely used. I began writing in the persona of a reimagined Dickinson discovering and giving voice to the suppressed Dickinson, the Dickinson whose original work posthumously revealed erasures and alterations done by others, with Susan’s name and other words, and phrases removed by scissors, seemingly to hetero-sexualize Dickinson’s work. I admit my horror and anguish here. Given my subjectivity, I had no plan to publish my writings. They simply represented my private journey, a personal quest.
Over the course of the pandemic, I read and reread Dickinson’s 1789 poems including restored redactions as well as her 1049 (now 1304) letters, including her three Master letters. When I completed my reading of Dickinson’s work, I started all over again. I interspersed my study with research of 19th century Amherst and queried when the first train arrived in town, what kind of oil was used in lamps, what garden implements were used, what industries were within ear- and eyeshot of the Dickinson’s Homestead, and so on. Each day revealed something new. Each read yielded new associations, encodement, and cross-references, like something submerged was bubbling to the surface from the bottom of a pond. I found the gender fluidity in Dickinson’s poems just as astounding as the homoeroticism in her letters to Susan. Dickinson’s I-voice in her poems speaks as an Earl, a prince, bridegroom, fellowman, boy, or stag. In poem J474, Dickinson changed pronouns in two versions of the same poem, and in poem J1737, Dickinson’s female I-speaker demands transfiguration, exclaiming “Amputate my freckled bosom! / Make me bearded like a man!”
I became more and more aware of the person underlying the icon—her immense and troubled passion, a homoerotic passion that had been silenced, denied, ignored, and hushed, an unrequited passion that Dickinson transmuted from pain into a strange beauty. Dickinson writes: “Most — I love the Cause that slew Me.” (J925) As a queer New Englander having grown up within similar rigid socioreligious strictures and judgment in a small Maine fishing village, I recognized the pain and complexity of an unrequited, unacceptable homoerotic love that she lived beside. Emily and Susan were separated only by a hedge. Susan lived next door within her marriage to Austin, Emily’s brother, a union that began as platonic by agreement but which gave way to their eventual family that included three children, a circumstance that exacerbated difficulties for Dickinson.
After three years, my Dickinson study had generated more than 80 pages of poems, each poem epigraphically evoked, which I shared with my longtime poet friend, Stephen Haven. In early 2022 and at the urging of Stephen, I sent out a small set of poems for consideration. The editor accepted my poem “Dear Sir, (No. 7)” for publication, which also placed for the Pablo Neruda Prize. That acknowledgment gave me the nod I needed from the publishing world to proceed with my Dickinson manuscript of persona poems. Six months later, in November 2022, Called Back, a book title utilizing the last two words Dickinson wrote, was awarded publication by Tupelo Press.
I am not the first to write in the persona of an imagined or reimagined Dickinson. So did Lucie Brock-Broido in her poetic and brilliant work, The Master Letters, which was first printed in 1995 with later editions in 1997 and 2018. Dickinson, herself, used the persona poem form and referred to her I-speaker as “a supposed person” as she clarified to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in her letter to him in July 1862 (L 268).
In spring of 1886, only weeks before Emily died, she wrote a letter to Susan in which she asked, “Do you remember what whispered to ‘Horatio’?” (OMC 253). Emily was referring to what Shakespeare’s Hamlet from his deathbed whispered to Horatio:
“If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.” (V.ii.346-349)
Following Hamlet, Emily asked Susan to tell her story. After Emily’s death, Susan became more and more estranged from the Dickinson family and lived in the shadows of Austin’s very public affair with Mabel Loomis Todd. Susan was not only literally scissored from Dickinson’s work, but also demonized and hardly in a position to tell Emily’s story.
The aesthetic purpose of Called Back is to give voice to the erased and to discover Emily’s story and tell it. That is the purpose that fueled my journey with Emily Dickinson that began that spring morning in 2019, continued during the pandemic years in solo retreat, and which culminated in my work, Called Back, a book of poems written in dramatic monologue, that documents my five-year odyssey with Emily Dickinson.
–
Work Cited:
The following abbreviations are used to refer to the writings of Emily Dickinson:
OMC Hart, Ellen Louise and Martha Nell Smith (eds.). Open Me Carefully: Emily
Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson. Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 2019. Citation by letter number.
J Johnson, Thomas H. (ed.). The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. New York: Back
Bay Books, Little, Brown and Company, 1976. Citation by poem number.
L Johnson, Thomas H. (ed.) and Theodora Ward (assoc. ed). The Letters of Emily
Dickinson. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1958, 1986. Citation by letter number.
*
