In Rough Country: Essays and Reviews

by Joyce Carol Oates

  My life had stood—a Loaded Gun—

  In Corners—till a Day

  The Owner passed—identified—

  And carried me away—

  And now We roam in Sovereign Woods—

  And now We hunt the Doe—

  And every time I speak for Him

  The Mountains straight reply—

  Though I than He—may longer live

  He longer must—than I—

  For I have but the power to kill,

  Without—the power to die—

  (754, c. 1863)

  Benfey suggests that Dickinson’s “Master” poems are addressed to three prominent men in the poet’s life, with whom she corresponded in terse, playful, enigmatic letters very like her verse—the “handsome and worldly editor of the Springfield Daily Republican” Samuel Bowles; the “brooding…Byronic” Protestant preacher Reverend Charles Wadsworth of whom it was thrillingly said that his “dark eyes, hair and complexion (had) a decidedly Jewish cast” and Colonel Higginson, the prominent Boston literary man to whom Dickinson sent her verse in the pose of a school-girl eagerly seeking advice from a distinguished elder, though Dickinson was thirty at the time and had already written—and published, in Samuel Bowles’s newspaper—a poem as assured as the one beginning “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers…” (21, c. 1862) (The romantic relationship with elderly Judge Lord came later in Dickinson’s life.) Here is Dickinson’s now-famous letter of appeal, dated April 15, 1862:

  Mr Higginson,

  Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?

  The mind is so near itself—it cannot see, distinctly—and I have none to ask—

  Should you think it breathed—and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude—

  If I make the mistake—that you dared tell me—would give me sincerer honor—toward you—

  I enclose my name—asking you, if you please—Sir—to tell me what is true?

  That you will not betray me—it is needless to ask—since Honor is its own pawn—

  We can surmise that Higginson replied with encouragement and a predictable sort of advice, to which Dickinson responded with enigmatic dignity:

  You think my gait “spasmodic”—I am in danger—Sir—

  You think me “uncontrolled”—I have no Tribunal.

  As Benfey notes, Dickinson didn’t change a thing in her poems, and assures Higginson that she has no wish to be published: “I smile when you suggest that I delay ‘to publish’—that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin.”

  Both Benfey and Wineapple are very good at presenting the ways in which Dickinson and Higginson “invented themselves and each other” in their epistolary friendship; in both their books, though at greater length in Wineapple’s, Colonel Higginson unexpectedly emerges not as the contemptibly pompous figure who dared to “correct” the most original poet of the nineteenth century as if he were indeed her schoolmaster, which is our usual sense of Higginson, but as a person of considerable courage, imagination, generosity, and achievement. Unlike his distinguished New England literary mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, Higginson managed to combine the intellectual life with the life of a vigorous activist: as a young man he was a Protestant minister who lost his church as a consequence of fervent Abolitionist beliefs; a radical in New England reformist circles, he was a staunch supporter of John Brown; in the Civil War he was a colonel who led a contingent of nine hundred ex-slaves in the occupation of the city of Jacksonville, Florida. (Higginson later wrote movingly of this experience in Army Life in a Black Regiment, 1869: “a minor masterpiece” in Brenda Wineapple’s estimation.)

  With astonishing zeal and steadfastness Higginson was an early advocate of women’s suffrage as he was a vociferous advocate of civil rights for Negroes during Reconstruction; he was a quasi-mystical nature-writer, in the mode of his model Henry David Thoreau; his Young Folks’ History of the United States (1875) became a best-seller. Higginson’s first love had been poetry, in which he may have been slightly discouraged by a rejection letter from Emerson at The Dial that in its devastating brevity deserves enshrinement like the pithier aphorisms of Oscar Wilde:

  [Your verses] have truth and earnestness and a happier hour may add that external perfection which can neither be commanded nor described.

  Yet Emily Dickinson seems to have virtually idolized Higginson, having committed to memory much of his published writing in The Atlantic and elsewhere and constantly deferring, or seeming to defer, to his “superior” judgment. As Benfey notes, “she told him, twice, that he had saved her life.” Their famous first meeting in August 1870, at the Dickinson family home in Amherst, Massachusetts, is preserved solely in Higginson’s prose, in a letter to his wife Mary:

  A step like a pattering child’s in entry & in glided a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair & a face…with no good features—in a very plain & exquisitely clean white pique & a blue worsted shawl. She came to me with two day lilies which she put in a sort of childlike way into my hand & said “These are my introduction” in a soft frightened breathless voice—& added under her breath, Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers & hardly know what I say—but she talked soon & thenceforward continuously—& deferentially—sometimes stopping to ask me to talk instead—but readily recommencing. [A Summer of Hummingbirds]

  And, later, somewhat defensively:

  I never was with anyone who drained my nerve power so much…Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her. She often thought me tired.

  Though convinced of Dickinson’s originality and of the possibility of her genius, yet Higginson persists in seeing in her something frankly repugnant; he suspects “an excess of tension…something abnormal” in her.

  Within the loosely constructed space of A Summer of Hummingbirds, the epistolary friendship/romance of the self-styled “scholar” Emily Dickinson and her “master” Higginson is but one thread in an entanglement of erotic yearnings, while in the aptly titled White Heat the primary focus is a tenderly voyeuristic evocation of the literary couple’s relationship, as in these Jamesian elocutions of Wineapple’s:

  Totemic assumptions about Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson do not for a moment let us suppose that she, proffering flowers and poems, and he, the courtly feminist, very much married, were testing the waters of romance. But about their correspondence is its faint hint or, if not of that, then of a flirtation buoyed by compassion, consideration, and affection…. (Each) of (Dickinson’s) notes bursts with innuendo, attachment, warmth, flattery…. She admired his gravitas. “Your thought is so serious and captivating, that it leaves one stronger and weaker too, the Fine of Delight.” She admired his probity. “That it is true, Master…is the Power of all you write.”

  How crushed Dickinson must have been by Higginson’s remarriage, and by his obvious reluctance to visit her, yet, admirably, as so admirably Dickinson weathered any number of personal blows, in some fusion of female stoicism and pragmatism she seems to have re-channeled her attention upon the elderly widower Judge Otis Lord, a resident of Salem, Massachusetts, to whom she wrote letters of unfettered longing:

  My lovely Salem smiles at me. I seek his Face so often—but I have done with guises.

  I confess that I love him—I rejoice that I love him—I thank the maker of Heaven and Earth—that gave him me to love—the exultation floods me. I cannot find my channel—the Creek turns Sea—at the thought of thee—

  At the same time, Dickinson continued to write to her “Master” Higginson in elevated, occasionally elegiac terms, as in this final poem sent to Higginson shortly before her death in 1886:

  Of glory not a Beam is left

  But her Eternal House—

  The Asterisk is for the Dead,

  The Living, for the Stars—

  (1647)

  The concluding chapters of Wineapple’s White Heat are a detailed scrutiny of Dickinson’s posthumous career—“post
humous” being the only career possible for one of such startlingly original gifts, as if, in the midst of the revered Hudson Valley landscape painting of the nineteenth century there might have appeared the unsettling canvases of Cézanne. How does one see what is so radically new, still more how does one draw meaning from it? Leaving 1775 poems of varying degrees of legibility and completion, often in teasingly variant forms, Emily Dickinson presented a considerable puzzle for scholars of her work through the decades, and particularly for her first, at times overwhelmed editors Higginson and the indefatigable Mabel Todd, who could not resist correcting Dickinson’s punctuation and other seeming flaws in her verse. It may even be—this would constitute another radical strangeness in Dickinson, amid the staid formality of her era—that “her poems were always in progress, meant to be revised, reevaluated, and reconceived, especially when dispatched to different readers.” As Richard Howard suggests, finishing poems may not have interested Dickinson: “her true Flaubert was Penelope, to invert a famous allusion, forever unraveling what she had figured on the loom the day before.” It seems like a simple query, why a poem must be singular and not rather plural, as musical compositions in the mode of John Cage are not fixed and finite but ever-improvised. Perhaps it’s only a convention, that the gravitas of print seems to insist upon permanence, and it’s the “route of evanescence” so magically embodied by Dickinson’s poems that is the truest nature of poetry.

  Though critical responses were inevitably mixed, with British critics the most roused to contempt, the first edition of Dickinson’s Poems sold out rapidly through eleven printings in 1891 and the second, “swathed in white, like its author,” was another best seller later in the same year. Tireless Mabel Todd, thrilled by her new mission of bringing a New England poetess of genius to the attention of the public, set on the road as a sort of precursor of Julie Harris in The Belle of Amherst, giving lectures and readings throughout New En gland.

  Benfey concludes A Summer of Hummingbirds with a lyric epilogue titled “Toward the Blue Peninsula” in which, as in a cinematic flash-forward, he breaks the nineteenth-century frame of his gossamer narrative to bring us to Joseph Cornell who, in the mid-1950s, so brilliantly incorporated images from Dickinson’s poetry—birds and flowers and jewels and planets—in his box-sculptures “with a ghostly majesty and strangeness.” Appropriately, Benfey’s ending isn’t a critical summing-up or a statement of fact but an evocative poetry: “The window is open. The perch is empty. The bird has flown.”

  CAST A COLD EYE: JEAN STAFFORD

  “This is the day when no man living may ’scape away.”

  Whenever she tried out a new typewriter, Jean Stafford typed this oracular remark from Everyman, the medieval morality play in which, as an undergraduate at the University of Colorado in the early 1930s, she’d played the role of Good Deeds. Recalling the experience decades later, in the preface to the 1971 reprint of her novel The Mountain Lion, Stafford notes with characteristic irony: “I spoke [Good Deeds’] lines because I had (and have) the voice of an undertaker.”

  Of the distinguished short story writers of her era—one that includes Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor, John Cheever, Katherine Anne Porter, and Flannery O’Connor—Jean Stafford (1915–1979) is perhaps the most versatile. Her writerly voice is very aptly described as an “undertaker” voice, never oracular or self-conscious but quite often jarringly jocular in its Doomsday revelations. A virtuoso of that demanding sub-genre the “well-crafted short story,” Stafford is yet the author of several novels of which one, The Mountain Lion, remains a brilliant achievement, an exploration of adolescence to set beside Carson McCullers’s masterwork The Member of the Wedding. Unlike Welty, Taylor, Cheever, and O’Connor, whose fiction is essentially regional in its settings, Stafford has written fiction set as convincingly in Europe (“Innocents Abroad”) as in New England (“The Bostonians, and Other Manifestations of the American Scene”); in New York City and environs (“Manhattan Island”) as in the semi-fictitious town of Adams, Colorado (“Cowboys and Indians, and Magic Mountains”), that is an amalgam of Covina, California, where Stafford was born, and Boulder, Colorado, where she grew up and attended the University of Colorado. Impatient with all pieties, not least the piety of familial/cultural heritage, Stafford remarks in her preface to these Collected Stories that she could not wait to escape her “tamed-down” native grounds: “As soon as I could, I hot-footed it across the Rocky Mountains and across the Atlantic Ocean.” Though, into middle age and beyond, Stafford lived in the New York/Long Island area, the evidence of her fiction suggests an essential restlessness, or restiveness: “Most of the people in these stories are away from home, too, and while they are probably homesick, they won’t go back.”

  Stafford’s versatility is perhaps most in evidence in the range of tone in her fiction: from the gently melancholic to the savagely comic, from a delicately nuanced mimicry of the waywardness of interior speech to sudden outbursts of shocked clarity (“But the fact is that there has been nothing in my life,” as the narrator of “I Love Someone” confides) and concise images that take us beyond mere speech (“The weather overhead was fair and bland, but the water was a mass of little wrathful whitecaps,” at the conclusion of “Beatrice Trueblood’s Story”). There are numerous animals in Stafford’s fiction, always individually noted no matter the smallness of their roles: the fat, comatose tabby cats of “A Country Love Story” who mimic their mistress’s gradual descent into emotional torpor over the course of a long New England winter; the pet capuchin monkeys of “In the Zoo” observed as unnervingly humanized, “so small and sad and sweet, and so religious-looking with their tonsured heads that it was impossible not to think their gibberish was really an ordered language with a grammar that some day some philologist would understand” and the foundling German shepherd Laddy, also of “In the Zoo,” who plays a principal, tragic role in the story:

  He grew like a weed; he lost his spherical softness, and his coat, which had been sooty fluff, came in stiff and rusty black; his nose grew aristocratically long, and his clever, pointed ears stood at attention. He was all bronzy, lustrous black except for an Elizabethan ruff of white and a tip of white at the end of his perky tail…He escorted Daisy and me to school in the morning, laughing interiorly out of the enormous pleasure of his life.

  In “An Influx of Poets,” Cora Savage observes her pet cat Pretty Baby, whose blissful pride in motherhood is an ironic, in time bitterly ironic expression of the vulnerability of Cora’s emotional state:

  [The kittens] were still blind and [Pretty Baby] was still proud, cosseting them with her milk and her bright, abrasive tongue and the constant purr into which, now and then, she interjected a little yelp of self-esteem. When she nestled down, relaxed among her produce, I knelt and strongly ran the knuckle of my thumb down the black stripes that began just above her nose and terminated in the wider, blacker bands around her neck, and then I left her to her rapturous business of grooming her kittens, nursing in their blindness and their sleep.

  A gambling casino in Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium, a grubby downscale version of Monte Carlo, nonetheless exerts an almost preternatural spell on a young woman named Abby in “The Children’s Game” who succumbs to the hypnotic frenzy of roulette:

  She was still ahead when the wheel was spun for the last time; and when everything was finished she was giddy as she struggled out of her cocoon-like trance. The croupiers’ fatigue humanized them; they rubbed their eyes and stretched their legs and their agile hands went damp. Abby was a little dashed and melancholy, let down and drained; she was, even though she had won, inconsolable because now the table, stripped of its seduction, was only a table. And the croupiers were only exhausted workingmen going to bed.

  So appalled is Abby by the “monstrous” Belgian town, her appalled fascination inspires Stafford to a tour de force of description as charged with kinetic energy as Dickens’s most animated city scenes:

  [Knokke-le-Zoute] possessed houses that looked like bus
es threatening to run them down and houses that looked like faces with bulbous noses and brutish eyes…The principal building material seemed to be cobblestones, but they discovered a number of houses that appeared to be made of cast iron. In gardens there were topiary trees in the shape of Morris chairs and some that seemed to represent washing machines. The hotels along the sea were bedizened with every whimsy on earth, with derby-shaped domes and kidney-shaped balconies, with crenellations that looked like vertebrae and machicolations that looked like teeth, with turrets, bow-windows, dormers and gables, with fenestrations hemstitched in brick or bordered with granite point lace. Some of the chimneys were like church steeples and some were like Happy Hooligan’s hat. The cabanas, in the hot, dark haze, appeared to be public telephone booths. Even the flowers dissembled and the hydrangeas, looked like utensils that belonged in the kitchen…The plazas were treeless plains of concrete where big babies sunned…. There was an enormous smell of fish.

  And Stafford’s characters are a wonderfully motley lot, out-sized and garrulous as cartoon bullies, meekly repressed and virginal as the hapless observers in Henry James; adolescent girls and women who struggle to define themselves against their adversaries, and deeply conflicted, self-lacerating women who seem to have succumbed to sexist stereotypes despite their high intelligence. Here, as intelligent as any of Stafford’s characters, yet utterly miserable, is Ramona Dunn of “The Echo and the Nemesis,” an American graduate student who has come to post-war Heidelberg to study philology:

  Ramona Dunn was fat to the point of parody. Her obesity fitted her badly, like extra clothing put on in the wintertime, for her embedded bones were very small and she was very short, and she had a foolish gait, which, however, was swift, as if she were a mechanical doll whose engine raced. Her face was rather pretty, but its features were so small that it was all but lost in its billowing surroundings, and it was covered by a thin, fair skin that was subject to disfiguring afflictions, now hives, now eczema, now impetigo, and the whole was framed by fine, pale hair that was abused once a week by a Friseur who baked it with an iron into dozens of horrid little snails.