Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

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

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.

These four hundred pages are still many sizes too small for Emily Dickinson’s work. Whether one likes her poetry or not, whether it wrings one’s heart or sets one’s teeth on edge, nevertheless it exists, and in a world far removed from the defenseless people and events described in this infuriating book. Or, as a poetic friend of mine better summarized it:

“Kate Scott!

Great Scot!”

1951

Pantomime, A Journal of Rehearsals. By Wallace Fowlie (Henry Regnery; $3.50).

Mr. Fowlie is an unabashed New Englander, and, to him, “things are not what they seem.” “Art is long,” though, at least French literature is, and there is something very disarming about the picture of a serious little Boston, or Brookline, boy becoming so infatuated with a foreign language and culture that when he read Baudelaire’s Le Balcon it “flooded me with the desire to come to these poems with more experience than I had.”

Chapter III of his autobiographical book, Pantomime, begins with these sentences: “I must have been about fifteen years old when I rode on a swan boat for the first time. That ride marked my initial distinct awareness of Boston as a city.” He then describes a swan boat ride: the boats themselves, that “originated from Boston’s early enthusiasm for Lohengrin, ” and the city, revolving about him “in a cyclical panorama.” These few pages give an almost too neat sample of the quality of Mr. Fowlie’s book. He says of himself: “Any happiness I have ever had … has been learned and rehearsed studiously, prepared and meditated on … a performance of a part fairly well insured against failure.” It is as if he had waited until the fairly advanced age of fifteen, waited until he had formed the association with Wagner and grown familiar with Boston’s buildings and statues, before he was ready to embark.

Tremont Temple and its Baptist sermons, Symphony Hall, the Harvard Glee Club, the Museum of Fine Arts — all these were part of my own childhood background, and as I read his book I could not help making comparisons between Mr. Fowlie’s early impressions and my own. My own first ride on a swan boat occurred at the age of three and is chiefly memorable for the fact that one of the live swans paddling around us bit my mother’s finger when she offered it a peanut. I remember the hole in the black kid glove and a drop of blood. I do not want to set myself up as a model of facing the sterner realities of swan boat rides in order to discredit Mr. Fowlie’s idealization, — but there is remarkably little of blood, sweat, or tears in Mr. Fowlie’s book.

It would be unfair to infer any lack of conflict in Mr. Fowlie himself; he is human and it must be there. However it is fair to criticize that lack as the chief literary fault of the book. These twelve episodic, carefully edited chapters from the life of a scholar and teacher are interesting and often amusing, but one wants more of the facts. The curious thing about it is that the one fact responsible for the lack of conflict is at the same time the most interesting fact of all.

Most children are fascinated by a foreign language; many make up a shared or solitary gibberish, or even pig-latin will serve to give them a sense of privacy and power. But Mr. Fowlie, as later for the swan boat ride, waited patiently for his own language to appear, and he was amply rewarded. In the seventh grade he began studying French, and immediately he became an enchanted boy. The accent, the grammar, the literature — everything about the French language was magical to him, and like Aladdin’s lamp, or the string that leads the hero through the maze, it solved his problems. It provided him with constant interest and, later on, work, and as a highly formalized exercise it offered him the “mask” he had been seeking without knowing it to put him at his ease in the world. Apparently it got him safely through the rigours of adolescence as well, although he presents these in all their solemnity.