OK
– late 70s, Great Performances on PBS. My b&w portable TV (a
graduation gift) sitting on some second-hand furniture. I think that was
the scene, anyway. Could have been early 70s, living room b&w
(living color was downstairs – a split-level thing, readers). She was
beautiful, sweet, nice, and had haunting eyes that drooped at just the
right curve to elicit melancholic sympathy from the audience. I wish I
could remember her name right now.
She
had many powerful roles on stage, film and screen. She was the lead in
“I Am a Camera” – the play before the movie before the musical that was
by then called “Cabaret.” She did a lot of other stuff that was great.
She didn’t have this “I am a stage actor doing this for money” air –
rare back then. Just everything she did had this quiet edge to it. This
was her biggest role: Emily Dickenson* in “The Belle of Amherst.” She was
magnificent in that play.
Which was completely wrong.
I don’t know who’s reading this, so just to keep it PG, I used the word “wrong.” I meant to write something else.
She
had red hair. By some accounts, it was curly. After she was 24 (I
think), she only wore white. She was not a recluse, not a hermit, not
agoraphobic. She was the town’s unofficial florist. Everybody in town
knew Emily had this incredible “green thumb.” Contemporary descriptions
run to ecstasy over her floral exhibitions. She did stay close to home.
Unmarried women of her era pretty much had to.
That
the picture we all have of Emily Dickenson in our heads comes from that
photo of her we all know – or maybe a drawing based on that picture
from a book jacket. She was a teenager when it was taken. Like the one
of Rimbaud taken in a later era, it is striking. As if there is some
latent grandeur held closely inside that diminutive body.
But,
look closely at an archival quality repro of Emily’s photo. Her lips
and eyebrows are very light-colored, but her hair – straight, pulled
back – is the color of India ink. A form of heavy shoe polish called
“bootblack” would have done the trick. I think she is wearing a dress
from her mother’s – maybe even her grandmother’s – era.
You
see, her father was a big-shot lawyer in town. Their house was the
first brick home ever built in Amherst. And he was a strict Puritan: to
them, red hair was a bad sign. But his brilliant daughter Emily’s scalp
was abloom with it. Having your photograph made back then was expensive,
a very big deal. You couldn’t very well put her in a maidenly dress
with all that red hair sticking out, could you? What would the neighbors
think when they come to call and see the devil’s daughter grinning back
from inside a flowery dress right there above the mantel? Egad!
Years
later, Emily wanted to marry a certain guy she’d known for years. He
wasn’t good enough for Daddy Dickenson, though. And this guy’s health
got worse when he found that out. Emily’s would-have-been beau died a
year or two later, and that’s when Miss Em put on a white dress. The
only color she would ever wear again.
She
apparently confined herself afterward to the Amherst home and its
grounds, growing flowers in the back yard (I guess) in season, and
later, growing exotic plants in a “conservatory” – a kind of 19th
Century hothouse the family had built for her to use as such.
She
wrote thousands of poems – yes, thousands – all in draft form with
little notes and alternate words to the side. She was a careful writer
who broke all the rules of 19th Century poetics. Nobody wrote in common
meter – “Harrumph! That’s for hymnals!” Nobody bent language or invented
words (all usable linguistically) – “Humph! We only use the Queen’s
English here!” And nobody, but nobody, wrote without punctuating
anything. “Ho! What would the British say if they read this? We’d be a
laughingstock!”
Even
critics writing nearly a hundred years after Emily died thought of her
as some spinster Grandma Moses who wrote verse as a hobby, like knitting
sweaters. It was really good, they said, in spite of all the
“primitive” irregularities.
They
weren’t “primitive” – they were innovative. They weren’t a hobby – they
were a serious endeavor intellectually. They weren’t an accident – they
were spiritual meditations on ultimate questions. This tiny redhead in
white nobody took seriously had the heart of a lion. And it roared, very
quietly, in verse. The quiet was not from timidity; it was from control
(as in “self-control”).
Even
her sister, who had (with an editor friend) to collect her writings
after Emily’s death and put them in a publishable form (for that era),
called her sister a “scintillating spirit.” The introduction to that
edition (available on gutenberg.org) also denies that Emily was a
recluse.
All
three editions Emily’s sister brought out do not contain all of her
sister’s poems. They were originally stitch-bound in a certain order
(Emily died of kidney failure and was unable to communicate toward the
end of her time). That order has since been published as a scholar has
reconstructed it. And the poems appear (according to at least one
researcher) to imply some kind of story – a strange facet that scholars
are still debating.
They
did not understand this scintillating spirit. And we don’t, either. We
just thought we did. She was not the “belle” of Amherst. She was its
sage.
___
*Emily Dickinson's last name is left misspelled, as in the original, though other typos have been fixed. “They” in the last paragraph refers to her
contemporaries. The actress's name was Julie Harris.
LJ orig.: 09/08/07
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