Emily Dickinson: A Literary Life by Linda Wagner-Martin (review)

Alfred Habegger
The Emily Dickinson Journal, Volume 23, Number 1, 2014, pp. 120-123
(Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/edj.2014.0002
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The Emily Dickinson Journal, Vol. XXIII, No. 1
120
Book Reviews
ALFRED HABEGGER
Wagner-Martin, Linda. Emily Dickinson: A Literary Life. Basingstoke, England:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. $85.
Not forgeting Roger Lundins able atempt of 1998, Emily Dickinson and
the Art of Belief, there is a need for a short biography that provides a trustworthy
account of Dickinsons writing life: its stages and milestones; how family, friends,
and correspondents played into the development and expression of her art; and
what can be gathered from recent claims, insights, discoveriesa book, in short,
that one can confdently recommend to readers at all levels. Linda Wagner-
Martins brief biography is part of a series, Literary Lives, which, avoiding the
spirit of traditional biography, as the general editor puts it, aims to trace the
professional, publishing and social contexts that shape an oeuvre (i). The author,
as the back cover tells us, has won numerous awards and produced ffty-three
books. Is Emily Dickinson: A Literary Life the compact treatment we have been
waiting for?
Fitingly enough, the book follows others in emphasizing the importance
of Aunt Lavinia Norcross and her daughters in the poets life; the infuence of
the Dickinsons domestic help, Margaret OBrien and Margaret Maher, on her
productivity; the impress of the Civil War; and the roles played by Thomas
Wentworth Higginson and Otis Phillips Lord. In handling conundrums like the
Master leters and the terrorsince September, the author shows a commendable
respect for indeterminacy. I rather like the treatment of grimness in the poems of
1866 and 1867, and I admire the diligence with which the scholarly record has been
sifted (though Domhnall Mitchells Measures of Possibility is overlooked). But none
of these praiseworthy achievements can disguise the fact that this is a distinctly
unsatisfactory biography, one that goes of the rails so consistently that informed
readers will fnd their patience severely tried.
2014 The Johns Hopkins University Press
Book Reviews
121
On page one we read that if [the Edward Dickinson family] went abroad,
which was unlikely, they traveled to England, France, and perhaps Italy (my
italics). On page six, in connection with Dickinsons early interest in science, we
meet the conjecture that as a girl or young woman she saw some opportunities
for employment in the feld. On page nine, it appears that her early teasing poem,
Oh the Earth was made for lovers, for damsel, and hopeless swain (Fr1), was not
sent to Elbridge G. Bowdoin, as the record shows, but to Benjamin Newtonan
impossible supposition. The author interprets I have a Bird in spring (Fr4) as a
troubled response to news of the engagement of Susan Gilbert, only to assert a few
paragraphs later that by the time Emily wrote the poem she was reconciled to
Sues plans. Indeed, the poem is a kind of negligent dismissal (16)this about
a lyric that puts the speakers tenacious atachment front and center. Of all the
Sounds despatched abroad (Fr334) is said to be a poem in memoriam for lost
friends (58). We learn that certain poems appeared in what Dickinson labeled
Fascicle I (34), only to be advised at a later point that, as R. W. Franklin makes
clear, Dickinson never used the term fascicle herself (78). Further on, however,
we fnd that a poem was placed in what by this time Dickinson is calling Set 6c
(105).
As these quotations suggest, the book appears to be in a half-conscious fugue-
like state. Each new topic and statement is so detached from previous points that
the texture becomes chaotic and even incoherent. The author does not so much
rehearse what is known about Dickinsons life and work as run a line of hearsay,
fantasy, and improbable guesswork around and above the facts. I never hear
the word Escape / Without a quicker blood (Fr144) inspires the refection that
the poet might have welcomed the chance to leave her sorrowing home (55)a
conjecture as otiose and literal as it is remote from the poets known preferences.
For aspiring Dickinson biographers, the existing commentary represents a
huge challenge and a precious gift. They must try to distinguish what is useful
and cogent from what is journeymans work, or special pleading, or fanciful
and unsound, and then they must incorporate the best of it into an overarching
vision and coherent narrative. Wagner-Martins way of meeting this challenge is
to quote one critic after another and basically leave it at that. At times her primary
task appears to be a neutral review of scholarship. After giving us James Olneys
observation that the poets traditional meters allowed for a very large
element of play, she reproduces George Frisbie Whichers claim that Dickinson
accepted [the hymn form] as unquestioningly as she accepted the alphabet
(98-99), and then moves on, leaving the implicit disagreement unresolved. When
The Emily Dickinson Journal, Vol. XXIII, No. 1
122
she does comment, she often distorts. Citing My Wars Are Laid Away in Books,
she transforms the statement that in early 1862 Sue tried to acquire [Thomas
Wentworth Higginsons] photograph into the claim that early in 1862, Susan
herself writes to Higginson . . . (Habegger 451-2) (55). Naturally, I am pleased to
see my work made use of, but I am dismayed to see a factoid created and laid at
my door.
It is equally dismaying to see how many previously existing factoids have
been trustingly gathered for exhibition. Apropos the obsessive housecleaning of
Dickinsons mother, the author tells us that Polly Longsworth speculates that
she inherited her fearful, anxious temperament from her own mother, Betsey
Fay Norcross (4)a dubious guess in view of the leters from Monson relaying
Betseys wish that young Mrs. Dickinson would stop driving herself so hard.
From the same atractive cofee-table book, the author reproduces Christopher
Benfeys careless and easily disproved claim that the poet sent pictures of Barret
Browning to several of her friends (11).
The most glaring instance of the uncritical recycling of unfounded speculation
is the adoption of Lyndall Gordons thesis that Dickinson was epileptic and that
this afiction may be the key to her mysterious life-choices. Because of the pressure
this sensational claim from a respected biographer places on our understanding of
the poet, biographers are now obliged to master the medical and pharmaceutical
literature as well as pertinent family leters. Gordon did not do this, neither has
Wagner-Martin, and neither, one suspects, will careless scholars in time to come.
Yet this is one of the few Dickinson controversies that can be permanently retired.
A 2013 article in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine by Norbert Hirschhorn and
Polly Longsworth setles the question. The theory that Dickinson sufered from
epilepsy no longer has standing.
A striking feature of Emily Dickinson: A Literary Life is its great distance from
primary sources and manuscript traces (this in spite of the respectful treatment
of critics focused on manuscripts). I have never read a biographer who shows so
litle interest in geting as close to the subject as possible. In quoting Dickinsons
leters, Wagner-Martin frequently cites the secondary sources where she found her
quotations instead of going to Thomas H. Johnsons edition. Particularly bizarre is
the way she repeatedly gives Aife Murrays stimulating Maid as Muse the credit for
R. W. Franklins tally of poems by year (50, 103, 155). Evidently, she never found
her way to the variorum editions second appendix, Distribution by Year.
Do Wagner-Martins insights into Dickinsons poems compensate for
the biographical missteps? Here is a garden of verses, reader, with banalities
Book Reviews
123
appended. Ill tell you how the Sun rose - (Fr204) is an example of the young
poet persona observing the natural life that surrounds her (57). A throe opon
the features is a clear reference to physical debility (34). She laid her docile
Crescent down (Fr1453) invokes sorrow for the person who has died (156).
No less disconcerting is the tendency of Wagner-Martins Dickinson to be forever
using, as when she uses separation of words . . . to slow the poem (68), or
use[s] the sentence So I loop my apron (69) for another purpose. According to
the author, in the later 1860s Dickinson did keep her literary and quasi-literary
actions active (125). Has our language-loving poet ever been weighed down by
more leaden prose?
This sad simulacrum of a biography by a recipient of the Hubbell Medal
prompts some hard questions about the abuses of academic publishing in the
humanities. But this is not the place to go into that, and I will content myself with
two questions that are more immediate. Is not this the time for libraries struggling
with reduced budgets to review their standing orders with Palgrave Macmillan,
particularly the lucrative Literary Lives series, which runs to sixty volumes with
this latest contribution? And would it not be a high service if the author of Lives
Like Loaded Guns could publicly revisit the epilepsy idea and free future readers
from what has become a distraction and a curse?
JAMES R. GUTHRIE
Walsh, John Evangelist. Emily Dickinson in Love: The Case for Otis Lord. New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012. $25.
As has all too often been the case for members of the poets inner circle,
biographers have tended to veer toward making hyperbolic, totalizing, and
often self-interested arguments concerning one or another of Emily Dickinsons
friends or potential lovers. This book is no exception. Sensationalistic, unrealistic,
and heavily sentimentalized, Walshs volume contributes litle to understanding
any more clearly how the poet really felt about Judge Lord. One of the more