When I was young, and my father got the blues, he would often try to buck himself up by telling me what a good president he would have been. To this bricklayer who was the son of Swedish immigrants, the job of leading the Free World looked like a snap when compared to battling the caprices of nature or contending with the vagaries of the human heart. Whenever a cold wave had driven my father and his crew off the job for a week, or Lefty, his lead bricklayer, had gone on one of his periodic drinking binges, I could expect to hear, “I’d do a better job than that rich guy Kennedy. He doesn’t know what pressure is,” or “What does Johnson know about life? A man with common sense needs to be president.” Having assured himself that only a poor career choice had kept him, and all of America, from fulfillment, my father was then free to resume his labors with good cheer.
In choosing teaching over bricklaying, I left my father’s trade behind but carried his trait with me. As my father did, so do I occasionally try to shake myself out of discouragement by imagining what I might have done.
To be sure, in true academic fashion, I have changed the range of reference for my comparisons. Rather than declaring what a great president I could have been, I make myself proud by thinking that I would have done a better job of writing a particular book or dispatching a complex subject in a 20-page essay.
This temptation–a fantasy of sorts–has been especially strong for me in the case of biographies. Throughout my adult life, I have read for pleasure the lives of noted authors and public figures. And, admittedly, I have come away from more than one biography convinced that its subject would have fared better in my hands. “Had I told the story of Robert Lowell’s life, I would have traced more clearly the pattern beneath the cruel behavior,” I’ve told myself, or, “Walter Jackson Bate is a great writer, but if I had done Samuel Johnson’s life, I would have gotten it right about his Christian faith.” Buoyed by such assurances, I have invariably gone back refreshed to teaching American literature and writing about literary theory.
Then, several years ago, when I agreed to write a biography of Emily Dickinson, everything changed. Convinced that it was a relatively straightforward job, I anticipated finishing the work in a year or two and moving on to other things. But now, four years later, what at first looked like a simple task has turned out to be the most exacting assignment I have ever undertaken. When I finish my revisions of the biography in the next several months, I will return to my other labors having been duly chastened by the experience. My appreciation for biographers will have been deepened and my fantasies forever dispelled.
The 250 or so pages of the Dickinson biography–which will appear in the Eerdmans series, The Library of Religious Biography–will represent close to two years of actual work on the subject. Over the past several years, I have read several hundred books and articles about Emily Dickinson, made four trips to New England for research in libraries with Dickinson manuscripts, and written, discarded, and rewritten close to 200,000 words on the great enigmatic poet from Amherst, Massachusetts.
Yet it is not the volume of work that has made this assignment so challenging. Because of her mystifying brilliance, Emily Dickinson is one of the most intriguing intellectual companions imaginable. She never makes for dull company. Even now, as I comb over poems and letters that I have read countless times in recent years, I find myself stumbling upon a fresh insight or a brilliant gem of wit that I have never seen before. Dickinson once wrote of heaven that “it beckons, and it baffles.” The same is true of her life and poetry. They compel our interest and frustrate many of our efforts to understand them. But they never bore us.
Instead of attributing the rigors of writing this biography to the distinctive difficulties of Dickinson’s work, I have come to believe that they are intrinsic to the art of biography itself. “Biographical prose, which reflects historical truth about persons, is the hardest kind of prose to write,” claims Park Honan, who is, not surprisingly, himself a biographer. It is one thing, for instance, to attempt to analyze Emily Dickinson’s beliefs or poetry; it is another matter to try to “reflect the historical truth about her person.” It is one thing to try to take the measure of an idea or deed and make judgments about it; it is something else entirely to try to follow the flow of a thought or action back to its tributary sources in the murky waters of motives, fears, hopes, and obsessions.
As I have tried in recent months to articulate the challenges of biographical writing, I have been helped in the process by questions that friends have asked me about my work along the way. Each was a simple question. Yet by compelling me to explain my goals and analyze my methods, the questions from my friends have brought Dickinson’s life and my own writing into sharper focus.
So,” asked a colleague over coffee the morning after I had gotten news of the fellowship that was to initiate my work on the Dickinson biography, “are you going to discover that Emily Dickinson really did have a secret lover?” My friend asked this question in jest, but in doing so he made a serious point about our urge to find a single, sensational explanation for a complex, mystifying life. He had no special interest in Dickinson, but his curiosity about her had been piqued over the years by the myths and legends that–like so many fun-house mirrors–have twisted almost beyond recognition the picture of Dickinson that has come down from the past.
The myths had already begun to develop during Dickinson’s own lifetime. In 1881, Mabel Loomis Todd, who would eventually become the first editor of Dickinson’s poetry, arrived in Amherst, Massachusetts. After having surveyed the town’s social scene for several weeks, Todd wrote to her parents in Washington, D.C., to tell them “about the character of Amherst. It is a lady whom the people call the Myth. She is a sister of Mr. Dickinson, & seems to be the climax of all the family oddity. She has not been outside of her own house in fifteen years. . . . She dresses wholly in white, & her mind is said to be perfectly wonderful. She writes finely, but no one ever sees her.” Such behavior demanded an explanation, Mabel Loomis Todd concluded, and during Emily’s own lifetime, a number of people had already labored to provide one. “No one knows the cause of her isolation, but of course there are dozens of reasons assigned,” Todd informed her parents.
Some biographers have fared little better than Dickinson’s neighbors in trying to divine the “cause of her isolation.” Here was a vibrant, attractive, and brilliant woman who grew into adulthood in a New England village a decade before the Civil War. Why did she renounce marriage, vocation, and membership in the church and retreat by the age of 30 to the seclusion of her parents’ home? Why did she write close to 1,800 poems over 30 years and yet never seek to have them published? Did Emily Dickinson have any idea that the body of work she left behind would establish her as one of the great lyric poets of the English language?
In the decades after Dickinson’s death, a failure at love was offered as the standard answer to such questions. Accounts of the poet’s life claimed that her seclusion had been prompted by a lover’s rejection or by her own rejection of offers of love. The search for a secret lover became a quest for the hermeneutical key to unlock the mysteries of her life and art. One early account, written by Dickinson’s own niece, had Emily heroically resisting the advances of a married man, the Reverend Charles Wadsworth. “Fated” to love Wadsworth, Emily nonetheless rebuffed him and thus averted “the inevitable destruction of another woman’s life.” In rejecting Wadsworth, Dickinson chose the high and holy calling of a cloistered life: “Without stopping to look back, she fled to her own home for refuge–as a wild thing running from whatever it may be that pursues.” Another version, offered in a competing biography, claims that Emily rejected the proposal of an Amherst College graduate. When George Gould begged her to marry him, this account has it, she refused and “told him she would dress in white, fall, winter, spring, and summer, and never again would go outside the gate, but live the life of a recluse–for his sake.”
In academic circles over the past few decades, notions of romantic heterosexual love have fallen into disfavor, only to be replaced by an intense interest in homosexual experience. In Dickinson studies, this has meant that, as an explanatory key, unrequited love has been exchanged for unremitting lust. Over the past 20 years or so, a number of critical and biographical studies of Dickinson have claimed to have divined the mysteries of her lesbian libido. Here, we are told, in the covert reaches of Dickinson’s homosexual passion, lies the secret to her beckoning life and her baffling art.
In the end, however, homosexual desire is no more satisfactory than heterosexual ardor as a master key to unlock the meaning of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and life. To be certain, Dickinson’s complex relationships with women and men provide vital clues to the mysteries of her life. They are simply clues, however, to part of her experience and not keys to the whole of her life. As created by God and the agency of human freedom, the story of any individual life is far more complex than the tales of unrequited love or insatiable lust would lead us to believe.
One of the most challenging tasks the biographer faces, then, is that of responding with nimble wisdom to the contrapuntal complexity of human life. To understand any story, whether it is lived or imagined, an interpreter must consider the full array of forces and intentions that have gone into its making. For biography, this means that in addition to taking the measure of the sexual, psychological, and economic forces that come into play in a person’s life, the biographer must also attempt a nuanced interpretation of the ethical ideals that inspired that person’s actions and the sacred dimension that impinged upon the subject’s life. In tracing the outline of an individual life, then, the biographer must abandon the search for a single thread and seek instead to unravel a tangled skein of motives and goals.
When I told another friend I was about to tackle a biography of Dickinson, he looked at me unenvyingly and said, “Hasn’t she already been picked over enough? Is there anything new to say?” This question resembled the one about the “secret lover” in its assumption that something like a single meaning might exist for Dickinson’s life and poetry. In this case, however, the questioner was not interested in the search for that meaning, because he assumed it had already been completed. What he wondered was why anyone would linger over a life that had been exhaustively described and dissected.
This friend’s question became especially interesting to me as I began to see its relationship to widely shared evangelical beliefs about hermeneutics in general and biblical interpretation in particular. The writing of this biography, I realized, had brought me into the heart of current struggles over questions of truth, intention, and authority in interpretation.
My friend’s question–“Is there anything left to say?”–betrayed its origins in widely held evangelical beliefs about intention and meaning. Lacking a robust doctrine of the church and a clear understanding of the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in history and tradition, modern evangelicals have been prone to view meaning as a fixed entity that can be traced to a specific source. In the main, evangelicals have argued that every text has a univocal, or single, meaning. That meaning is determined by the intention of the author behind the text. We read to discover what that intention is, and when we have uncovered that intention, the work of interpretation is over. All that remains to be done is to apply the changeless meaning we have found to our ever-changing lives.
When looked at this way, interpretation becomes the art of offering definitive accounts, and a model of this kind indeed held sway over the theory of interpretation earlier in this century. Only decades ago, it was common for authors, reviewers, or publishers to claim that a particular work had said the final word about its subject. Such overweening confidence was bound to provoke sharp reactions–exemplified by Roland Barthes’s notorious celebration of textual interpretation as a kind of free play “unimpoverished by any constraint.”
In Dickinson studies, interpretive freedom of this type has produced some provocative and insightful readings, but it has also led to a number of far-fetched interpretations in which the critic’s preoccupations are projected anachronistically onto the poet and her life. Thus in one version Dickinson becomes a proto-radical whose “comic vision destabilizes, subverts, and reimagines cultural situations.” According to another reading, Dickinson was a thoroughgoing feminist decades before her time; she knew that “we [women] have to create ourselves, because, as we know, the patriarchy is only too willing to do it for us, as it always has, to our disadvantage at the very least, or suppression and oppression at the most.” Or Emily surfaces as the lesbian who offers in her poetry “a submerged identification between the blunt rounded shape of the western Massachusetts mountains and a woman’s breasts, [and] presents nature, embodied in these mountains, as the ‘strong Madonna,’ from whom she sucks support.”
So, for better or worse, one can hardly say that Emily Dickinson’s life has been picked over to such an extent that there is nothing new to say about it. Indeed, the history of biographical interpretations of Dickinson would seem to confirm that what Joel Weinsheimer (“Philosophical Hermeneutics and Literary Theory,” 1991) says about interpretation in general is true of the writing of biography in particular: “An interpretation as such is different from and yet also the same as what it interprets. Unless it is both, it is not an interpretation.” If an interpretation is not in some sense the same as what it interprets, then it is not an interpretation but an entirely new text; and some biographical treatments of Dickinson do appear to be creative texts that bear little relationship to the poet’s actual life. Yet, at the same time, if an interpretation is not in some sense different from its object, then it “is not an interpretation of the text but a copy of it.” And to be sure, some biographical accounts of Dickinson are so dully unimaginative that they add nothing to our understanding of her life or art.
Weinsheimer argues that there is in interpretation “a pole of correctness,” which affirms that truthful interpretations “are necessarily of the text” and life; at the same time, there is a “pole of creativity,” which confirms that a text or a life “can sustain interpretations that are not just duplicates of it but genuinely other.” What makes the interpretation of any text a bracing and rewarding enterprise is the fact that “both poles are definitive of interpretation. If the text had but one right interpretation and many wrong ones, or many right interpretations and no wrong one, there would not be a problem.” It requires wisdom to “understand how there can be but one text and yet . . . many right interpretations.” Weinsheimer’s claim is as true of the interpretation of lives as it is of texts.
There is no danger, then, that we will ever exhaust the store of significant things that might be said about the life of Emily Dickinson, any more than we could utter the final word as to the meaning of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” or Saint Paul’s “Letter to the Romans.” In interpreting a text or telling the life of another person, one strives to honor the object of one’s study through a devoted attention to its character and a creative understanding of its present importance. Attention without creative understanding makes for a lifeless recitation of facts; creative understanding without attention to facts produces mere fantasy.
Dickinson herself captured something of the paradoxical nature of biography in a poem about the lives of poets and the “afterlife” of their poetry:
The Poets light but Lamps–
Themselves–go out–
The Wicks they stimulate–
If vital Light
Inhere as do the Suns–
Each Age a Lens
Disseminating their
Circumference–[#883]
“The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement,” Leon Edel, the distinguished biographer of Henry James, once observed. “A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn’t discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip.” In “The Poets light but Lamps–” Dickinson notes this vital link in her depiction of the poet as one whose experience “stimulates” the wick that continues to burn long after the poet’s life, like a match, has “gone out.” If inspired, the poem becomes a “vital Light” with the power of a Sun. And “Each Age [is] a Lens” that refracts and disperses the light from the poet’s lamp.
The longer I have thought about the productive difficulties of writing a biography, the more I have appreciated what the task has in common with all our efforts “to hand on what we in turn have received,” as the apostle Paul puts it. This common bond was made especially clear to me when yet another friend asked the simplest question possible about my work. All he said was, “How has writing a biography been hard?” This friend is a distinguished New Testament scholar, and I answered him by referring to his own work. The challenges I have faced, I told him, are inherent in any effort to write creatively and fairly about events of importance in the past for which there are scanty records and about which there is a history of disputed interpretation.
That is not to confuse the life of Emily Dickinson with the Gospel of Matthew. But as I spoke with my friend, I realized how obstacles very much like those facing a biographer loom before anyone who strives to tell the truth about the past. There is so little to go on, but so much to be said. “It’s just incredible. It just does not explain,” argues Quentin Compson’s father in William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” as he tries to piece together events from only decades before. “We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature. . . . They are there, yet something is missing.”
That something missing, as Quentin’s father comes to understand, is a sympathetic openness to the full range of human motivation. Although he is an inveterate cynic, Mr. Compson admits that he must expand his own range of reference before he can understand the life of another: “Have you noticed,” he asks his son at one point in the novel, “when we try to reconstruct the causes which lead up to the actions of men and women, how with a sort of astonishment we find ourselves now and then reduced to the belief, the only possible belief, that they stemmed from some of the old virtues? the thief who steals not for greed but for love, the murderer who kills not out of lust but pity?”
I come to the end of my work on Dickinson, then, having been chastened by the challenges of the task. I have learned almost as much from the difficulties of writing about Dickinson as I have from the extraordinary body of poetry and letters that she left behind. In attempting to account for the mystery of her life, I have come up against the perpetual temptation to dispense with nuance or conflict in favor of sensational explanation. At the same time, as I have selected works and incidents representative of the whole of Dickinson’s life, I have had to consider the tension between the pole of correctness and the pole of creativity.
While evangelical hermeneutics has tethered meaning to the pole of correctness, some postmodern theories have tied it to the pole of creativity alone. As I have worked with the rich materials and pondered the eerie silences that Emily Dickinson left behind at death, my respect has been deepened for all interpreters who have sought to negotiate the narrow straits between absolute certainty and interpretive license. Whether they have written biographies, histories, commentaries, or the like, the ones who have charted those waters continue to assist us in our difficult passage to the truth.
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE
July/August 1996, Vol. 2, No. 4, Page 11
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