Prose (47 page)

In this collection there is a poem in memory of the critic Peter Monroe Jack, a particularly fine one in memory of Ford Madox Ford, one on a wood-and-coal man, and one on “chas sing,” a laundryman. One can still enjoy Cummings' inexhaustible pleasure in double o's, parentheses and question marks, but when
honi soit qui mal y pense
becomes “honey swo R ky mollypants” one feels that something should be done about it. Yet at his best he remains one of our greatest lyricists.

1950

Love from Emily

Emily Dickinson's Letters to Doctor and Mrs. Josiah Gilbert Holland.
Edited by their granddaughter, Theodora Van Wagenen Ward (Harvard University Press; $4).

In a sense, all of Emily Dickinson's letters are “love-letters.” To her, little besides love, human and divine, was worth writing about, and often the two seemed to fuse. That abundance of detail—descriptions of daily life, clothes, food, travels, etc.—that is found in what are usually considered “good letters” plays very little part in hers. Instead, there is a constant insistence on the strength of her affections, an almost childish daring and repetitiveness about them that must sometimes have been very hard to take. Is it a tribute to her choice of friends, and to the friends themselves, that they
could
take it and frequently appreciate her as a poet as well? Or is it occasionally only a tribute to the bad taste and extreme sentimentality of the times?

At any rate, a letter containing such, to us at present, embarrassing remarks as, “I'd love to be a bird or a bee, that whether hum or sing, still might be near you,” is rescued in the nick of time by a sentence like, “If it wasn't for broad daylight, and cooking-stoves, and roosters, I'm afraid you would have occasion to smile at my letters often, but so sure as ‘this mortal' essays immortality, a crow from a neighboring farmyard dissipates the illusion, and I am here again.” In modern correspondence expressions of feeling have gone underground: but if we are sometimes embarrassed by Emily Dickinson's letters we are spared the contemporary letter-writer's cynicism and “humor.”

*   *   *

This beautifully edited collection of ninety-three letters written to Doctor and Mrs. Holland covers the last thirty-three years of Emily Dickinson's life. Dr. Holland had begun his career as a rather reluctant country doctor, and he went on to become a wealthy citizen, a popular lecturer, the editor of the
Springfield Republican,
and finally the founder and editor of
Scribner's Monthly.

It is curious to think of the Dickinson family reading the
Springfield Republican
as religiously as they must have from the many glancing references to it; but except for generalizations usually turned into metaphors, current events rarely appear in these letters of gratitude and devotion. As in her poetry, Emily Dickinson is interested in Geography (in which “Heaven” seems to be one of the most familiar places) and the Seasons, and in her own combinations of both. “It is also November. The moons are more laconic and the sun-downs sterner, and Gibraltar lights make the village foreign. November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.” “February passed like a skate.… My flowers are near and foreign, and I have but to cross the floor to stand in the Spice Isles.” And in the concluding letters, when Mrs. Holland is visiting in Florida, Emily Dickinson speaks of it as if it were Heaven, with which she is familiar, as well as an earthly state of which she is very ignorant.

The use of homely images, and their solidity, remind one over and over of George Herbert, and as the letters grow more terse and epigrammatic, one is reminded not only of Herbert's poetry but of whole sections of his “Outlandish Proverbs.” And one is grateful for the sketchiness: it is nice for a change to know a poet who never felt the need for apologies and essays, long paragraphs, or even for long sentences. Yet these letters have structure and strength. It is the sketchiness of the water-spider, tenaciously holding to its upstream position by means of the faintest ripples, while making one aware of the current of death and the darkness below.

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

The Riddle of Emily Dickinson

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

What the Young Man Said to the Psalmist

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.

The most entertaining sections of the book are those dealing with his early years of mastering French: Paul Claudel mystifying an audience at the Copley Plaza, his first Parisian
pension,
(“Mangez-vous les haricots à Chicago?”) the scenes with his diction teacher, Mlle. Fayolle-Faylis. He is capable of seeing a joke on himself, as for example in the account of his sedate evening “on the town” in Paris with a more worldly friend. His unnecessary asthma cure, and his life-long passion for the movies are equally real.

It is in these more casual episodes that the charm of the book lies, and in them Mr. Fowlie is more spontaneous than he gives himself credit for. The story of his work on Ernest Psichari, and his interviews with figures of French literature are laborious in contrast. And he has chosen to interpret his various experiences by means of a mystique of clowns and angels, as the spectator and/or actor, that I find hard to follow. But he has attempted to present or suggest some troublesome frames of mind, and being, as I said, a good New Englander, to give the psalmist an honest answer, even in
arrière pensée.

1952

The Manipulation of Mirrors

Selected Writings of Jules Laforgue.
Edited and translated by William Jay Smith (Grove; $4).

In this book, William Jay Smith, poet and translator of Valéry Larbaud, gives us a judicious sampling of almost everything Jules Laforgue wrote in his tragically short life: a generous number of poems, two of the
Moralités légendaires,
travel pieces and letters, and excerpts from hard to find or hitherto unpublished “Landscapes and Impressions” and criticism. At the end there is a biographical sketch of Laforgue and a bibliography. Mr. Smith's introductions to each section are informal but informative; his translations, on the whole, are models of accuracy. The book is obviously a labor of love, and for the reader without French it should make an excellent introduction to Laforgue. The prose reads easily; the poems—but that, of course, is a different matter and perhaps it would be better for both reviewer and the reader new to Laforgue to begin with the prose.