Geoff Wyss
Amherst
I
I spend June reading Emily Dickinson’s poems, July reading her letters and a biography. In August, I board a plane for my NEH institute, “Emily Dickinson: Person, Poetry, and Place.”
This is my second visit to Amherst. The first was a day trip twenty-three years ago as part of another NEH class, a class I chose because it met in New York. My entrance essay was a rhetorical screen raised to conceal my desire to go somewhere far away and fun as a reward for surviving my first year teaching high school. I needed the class precisely because I did not deserve it. Only an extravagance, dramatic and unmerited, could restore me to myself after my year of incompetence and failure. Probably I had not even taught Dickinson in my sophomore English class. If I had, it was whatever poems the textbook contained—in every textbook, the same poems—deracinated and pressed flat and waiting for a teacher to revive them with air and light. I was not that teacher. My students probably loathed that textbook the way I loathed my own high school English textbooks, those dreary mistreatments of paper designed to deliver their contents with parboiled inoffensiveness. My sophomore English teacher was Mrs. Walker. Mary Margaret Walker, my high school yearbook informs me. Although she must have sometimes stood, written on the board, even smiled, the Mrs. Walker of my memory sits expressionlessly behind her desk, every few moments resetting her glasses with a twitch of nose that saves her the vulnerability of a lifted hand. The only thing I recall from her class was memorizing Mark Antony’s speech from Julius Caesar, rising in my turn to recite lines to a silent classroom. My wish that I could go back in time and thank my teachers for the time they spent on me is of course a displaced wish that my own teaching might not be so thoroughly lost to time. For Mary Walker, I would not rewind time but fold it, deliver my present self to her in 1984, both of us middle aged and thus familiar spirits. Did she ever find herself looking at students with no idea of their names, this year’s faces fading into the general instance? Did her voice sometimes break against its own waves and crash to nonsense as she spoke to her class? Was she unable even to answer the simple question of whether she did good or harm?
The anxiety I suffer at academic conferences because of my social awkwardness and its analogues in too-cold classrooms, too-small desks, is offset by the pleasure of being handed a key to a room that is, for a week, mine alone. At the NEH reception table, the preliminaries of deposit and lanyard and map are so delicious that I prolong them, joking with the Amherst College interns, before climbing to the luxurious third-floor silence of my dorm room. I prefer dorms to hotels because I am never comfortable in the comforts of a hotel room, whereas I identify with the ugly bareness of a dorm room the moment I enter one. Mine here has two rooms, two beds. Onto the nearest I toss keys and wallet and backpack in a mess that neatly represents my inner mess. The mattress is thin and sheathed in a repellent plastic sleeve, the sheets so synthetic they slide to the floor at the slightest provocation. The walls are scarred, the carpet dank. All of this is highly satisfactory. As Binx Bolling would put it, this room is exempt from the malaise. The lights are too dim to read by and thus fantastic for reading. Wishing not to habituate the room to a notion of ease, I place my clothes not in the dresser but on the floor, in stacks of underwear, socks, and t-shirts. I will sleep in the second room, never turning on the lights so as to preserve its appeal as a mystical adjunct. My retreat achieves perfection when afternoon rain sluices down the canted windows, panes raised by a crank of handle to slow the rain and admit its wet smell. I feel protected then even from the houses across the street, their gaze abstracted by the occult air.
Before dinner, a reception. I search the room for alcohol and learn there is none, the starkest measure yet of how far I am from New Orleans. Wishing in truth to stand mute against a wall, I violate my nature and become instead the person who thrusts his hand at you and declares his name. I fall into conversation with a person named Carmen when my failure to flick a gobbet of brie off a pair of tongs attracts her sympathy. Her means poem. She is confident and brimming with words. I ask what she teaches, and she leaps past the answer (fourth grade) to tell me that she is a published writer, in fact a poet, conveying this news with a fake dreamy offhand reluctance meant to insulate her from the vanity of conveying it, as if she had resolved to hide this information until I forced it from her. At this moment I split into two persons, one who wants to escape the conversation and another who thrills at having witnessed Carmen’s moment of weakness and is fascinated to see how she will survive it—and perhaps a finer, non-contingent third self who feels an almost religious thankfulness that it wasn’t I who exposed myself so baldly when it was exactly the kind of thing I might have done and who loves Carmen for suffering in my stead. There is a tiny black flaw in Carmen’s deep brown right eye, and I fixate on it to anchor the moment, fixate lovingly, not because of Carmen but because the flaw is in the very location where my cat Penny has a similar black flaw, a pen-tip dot, in her far more beautiful golden left eye, both flaws attesting to the saving fallenness of the world. I continue in this comfortably multiple way—comfortable because I am always divided against myself, it is only a question of how the shards are composed—until Carmen asks how I spend my summers. The intimacy of the question nonpluses me. How do I spend my summers? Am I allowed to ask what drawer she keeps her socks in, how often she phones her parents? I am a poor liar always but especially when I have been hiding in my house for two months and have forgotten that language does not have to signify, so I hear myself saying that I spend my summers writing (a true lie), and then, when she asks what I write, telling her I have published a novel and a book of stories, thus becoming contemptible to myself within the space of two sentences, not only for replicating Carmen’s error but also because I am bullying her by imitating her fake nonchalance to establish that I am better published. I feel despicable until, standing to introduce ourselves minutes later in the dining hall, Carmen proves I have not in the least dented her self-regard by announcing to the room of fifty people that she is a published poet in exactly the tone she had taken with me and which she has, I realize, been practicing until she is powerless against it. The blueberry pie is excellent.
The program director begins the next morning, as she will each morning, by taking the podium and declaring, I’m nobody! Who are you? Without coaching, the room of us responds, I’m nobody too! The air shivers with our pleasure at being ideal students, knowing something and obediently supplying it. My distaste for this ritual and refusal after the first day to participate in it neatly captures how armed against myself I am. I have come to Amherst to learn new ways of engaging my students in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, ways that might include rising in front of my class and offering a decontextualized line of Dickinson’s poetry to evoke a choral response. But I distrust by nature, distrusted as a student and still distrust, anything in a classroom that foregrounds itself as technique, that grinds content into grist for “teaching,” rendering subject matter secondary to the goals of order, entertainment, or product and not rarely emptying the subject matter of meaning, as happens to Emily Dickinson’s poem “I’m Nobody” when a teacher declaims its first line to an audience and the audience misquotes the second line to make it serve as answer. I loved many of my teachers with a love undimmed thirty and forty years later, but the ones I loved never committed the sin of teaching. Rather than shepherding students in compliant flocks, my favorite teachers taught in the second-person singular, like the speaker of Emily Dickinson’s poem “I’m Nobody” offering themselves intimately to my person. And so the problem of public and private, understood as the problem of Emily Dickinson even by those who know little of her poetry, is revealed also as the problem of teaching (at least for me) and more broadly the problem of rhetoric and writing (at least my writing). My discomfort at writers’ conferences and writing workshops, a discomfort so acute it can only be called existential, springs precisely from the way such events confuse public and private, making me feel invisible when I join the group and watched when I leave it. Either because I have made too many errors like the one I made with Carmen, in panic exposing myself to view, or because publication by definition throws public light into the private workspace, my fiction has lately become mortified by self-awareness and refuses to take a step for fear of stumbling. Better to have failed in my attempts to publish, to have been unluckily lucky, like Emily Dickinson. That is a dishonest statement whose honest version goes like this: Better to have been a person with the courage to keep writing after failing to publish like Emily Dickinson, better to have been a different person.
In 1862 Dickinson sent four poems to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, editor of the Atlantic, asking him to judge whether her verse was alive. This person she had chosen as a synecdoche for the public, for publication, performed surgery on her poems and declined to publish them. She sent three more, four again, and learned that her work was spasmodic and uncontrolled and that she should delay to publish. She pretended to have been misunderstood: The idea of publication, she responded, was as alien to her as Firmament to fin. If pretense, it became her truth. Even late in life, when Dickinson was writing little and thus had no creative process to protect, an appeal from Helen Hunt Jackson, a childhood friend and now most prominent female novelist in America, brought a cordial response but no verses for the poetry series Jackson was editing. Perhaps an older Dickinson was thinking of such matters when she rewrote the fourth line of “I’m Nobody,” whose original opening reads:
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—too?
Then there’s a pair of us! Don’t tell!
They’d banish us—you know.
When I received my class copy of The Poems of Emily Dickinson, I was dismayed to see that R.W. Franklin had accepted Dickinson’s later variant, replacing banish us with advertise. Banish us makes a better poem for sophomores, its romanticizing of social difference speaking to a fourteen-year-old’s feelings of oddness (or wish to be odd). But advertise makes a better poem, its threat now the darker opposite threat of being retailed, noticed, known.
A young white man in the tavern where I write this has begun yelling the words to a Jay-Z song. At the song’s first note, he sprinted to the jukebox and reached under its chin to increase a hidden volume control. He knows the woman tending bar and the man on the stool beside him, whose contrasting quiet ease reveals him as the bartender’s boyfriend. We are the only people in this big empty summer drinking room where the barmaid’s indulgence of the still yelling man suggests that she expects no other patrons and properly reads me as standing outside the usual codes of politeness and offense. The man flings gestures at his friends, casting them as antagonists for the lyrics, which are about being misunderstood and the mistake others make in committing this misunderstanding. Just as my interest in his performance stales, so does his own—he falls onto his stool, his friends having ignored him the whole time—and when I can no longer clearly see the words I am writing in this notebook, I walk back to my room at the college Emily Dickinson’s grandfather founded, wishing that someone from my class, anyone, would have appeared to save me from my loneliness.
After my midnight drinking at Stackers (such was the name of the bar), I obey my alarm at 4:00 a.m. because I told Carmen I wake every day at four to write and doing so promises to redeem the stupidity of my boast. By Jane Wald’s mid-morning lecture, “What Happened to Emily Dickinson’s Stuff?”, I am suffering waves of incomprehension, troughs of waking sleep amidst which Wald’s voice mixes with the fragmentary dreams that play each time I close my eyes, each time falling promptly asleep. In one a trapdoor falls open in the ceiling of my dorm room and pours its blackness onto me. In another my hands rip at enormous dinner rolls, the rolls I had seen through a restaurant window made monstrous in imagination. In a third I trim the hedges of the Amherst campus with artful shears. I wake with pencil in hand, my classmates laughing at something, and cannot remember where I am. Kenyon? Sewanee? On our afternoon walking tour with Martha Ackmann, Amherst’s green lawns float through the greens of other conferences and colleges, other histories related and forgotten. Even Emily Dickinson’s house and room, so forcefully present to me in 1995, merely repeats memory the way a photograph repeats life without being alive. Perhaps this failure to feel what I am supposed to feel looking at her desk and pencils and bookshelf is what makes me irritable at the afternoon meeting meant to help us construct a Curriculum Project, my distemper attaching to tacit charge that I should gather a pile of a dead poet’s stuff and put pedagogical brackets around it. According to Jane Wald, most of Dickinson’s stuff is here in Amherst under glass where it can’t escape when we stand over it and stare; and it is probably because I have reduced my own body to a site of gross ruin, but it seems to me (as I make everyone uncomfortable by demanding a definition of “Project”) that Emily Dickinson’s stuff is consubstantial with her body and that our stirring it around is as grotesque as disinterring her bones to knock them together.
This yearning for the annihilation of everything that must die is the dark side of my dread of death, and a proper night’s sleep restores its lighter face, no less irrational but cheerier, of wishing to preserve under glass forever everything that can be preserved. One need not see Amherst as a mausoleum, I tell myself as I walk the morning hallway to class, then I look to the right and see bones. On previous mornings, my eyes held left on the cases of rocks and minerals lining the long wall, rocks that belong to the Beneski Museum of Natural History, housed directly across from our classroom behind doors whose glass frames the rearing two-story remains of a dinosaur. I push through toward its skeleton, set into a far wall with jaws hinged open in rage or extremity or the urgency of declaring itself from the past. The pride of the Beneski is its collection of dinosaur footprints, the largest in the world, assembled by Amherst College Professor Edward Hitchcock in the first decades of the 19th century. As a student of Amherst Academy, schoolgirl Emily Dickinson attended lectures in which Hitchcock explained such phenomena as volcanoes, earthquakes, and photosynthesis. Hitchcock gathered his queerly marked stones from around the Connecticut Valley, where word of his interest summoned him to homes and farms and, often, public works sheds where the stones were stacked in readiness to be installed print-side down as sidewalk pavers. Because these stones began as mud, mud deposed in layers, a knife tapped in at the seams releases them into leaves that hold the impress of a foot sunk in muck and lifted out. Bound with hinges into “track books,” these leaves can be read for what they say, and the much more they do not say, about life on Pangaea 190 million years ago. For me the track books are terrifying. They are too, too old, symbols with no referent capable of comprehension. Yet they have awful power precisely because they are not dead, because each track still speaks its life. I have referred herein to the first day, second day, and so forth, but in fact the compressed intensity of the eight days of my NEH class—and the days that have passed since, as I rewrite this—melded the days into one Day laid down in layers. So it is that the eight mornings I entered class are individually lost but in their aggregate laminae strongly preserved: signing the roster taped to the blackboard (green), ascending to my seat (third chair, third row), setting out my books (the letters, the poems) on the long common desktop, clicking the mechanical pencil I favored that summer (a purple Pentel SmartErase with 0.5 lead). Rising each morning to write with my coffee and cat—it was once a different cat—has likewise compressed twenty-five years of mornings into Morning. From a vantage, all the breaths of life are one long Breath.
We visit the Robert Frost Library Archives. I lean a second time, after twenty-three years, over the lock of Emily Dickinson’s hair, this last bit of her body. I have tried many times to describe my first experience of seeing the lock, always with embarrassing results, understanding finally that some things cannot be spoken. That first low lean over the four-fold antiquarian envelope with its whorl of chestnut hair bursting upon my vision—a strong, fresh red one could hardly suspect from the famous image nor even from the oil portrait of the Dickinson children, in which Emily has the redsilk flyaway hair that so often resolves after childhood (like my own childhood red hair) to a more or less colorless brown—that memory, I say, fills undiminished the space this second experience would fill. Even the force of the fascicles on the next table, prodigious enough, has been shared out to their excellent likenesses online. (But: a thought of the word evanescence spanning its page from margin to margin causes me to momentarily lower my pen.) Rather, it is the daguerreotype taken before Dickinson left for Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary that stops me as my classmates continue to the next table. Surely this image in its thin gold frame has nothing left to say after all the time I have spent considering it on my computer screen, where it is reproduced with perfect photographic fidelity. But the daguerreotype does have more to say, contains information lost to its digital copies—physical, not mystical, information, though it must seem as if I am attempting to convey a mystical property when I say that the daguerreotype contains the quality of the air of the room where it was produced, air freighted with the consciousness of the sitter. That living air is the true subject of the image, the animate space connecting the camera with what it saw, connecting Emily Dickinson with me as I bend to the image and let it fill my sight.
II
The surface of things is shimmering, the layers underneath catching light, when Marta Werner, editor of The Gorgeous Nothings, delivers her essay about Sabra Snell, Emily Dickinson’s contemporary and daughter of Ebenezer Snell, Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Amherst College. For forty-one years, Professor Snell recorded daily observations of temperature, pressure, and other matters of sky in the ruled columns of his meteorological journal. Snell’s close-ranked numbers would be inert for me were it not for the box at the end of each line where Snell, and later his daughter Sabra, appended a phrase or two to sum up the salient qualities of weather as seen from his private meteorological station 276 feet above sea level: Air quite pure. Splendid frost-work on trees. The futility of these phrases as data—each a fistful of words tossed into the infinity of the Connecticut Valley—transform them into poetry. A half mile from the Snell home, Emily Dickinson had begun practicing her own discipline of Circumference. In 1841, Professor Snell’s oldest daughter Rebecca died at age twelve; Emily Dickinson was eleven and beginning at Amherst Academy. No images of Rebecca survive, no daguerreotype charged with living air. Rebecca’s burial site—her burial—was visible from the back window of Emily’s house on Pleasant Street, which adjoined West Cemetery. Emily’s earliest surviving letter, written to her brother Austin in her twelfth year, notes, we have very pleasant weather now. I do my documentary duty by reporting that Amherst on this day is clouded gray, the trees stilled in readiness for rain. I have uploaded my Curriculum Project into the cloud. The cloud is where my Project will live unseen by my NEH classmates or anyone ever, residing in an archive infinite and therefore unworthy of the name, where no Marta Werner will search it out nor should she because it is a zombie document written for the living death awaiting it, knew from its conception that it was not a gorgeous something.
I walk to escape thought. I walk to think. The page Werner projected from Snell’s weather journal was so banal and so terrifying, so sensibly insane, that I believed for a moment she had mistakenly projected one of Robert Walser’s microscripts. My sighting of Walser was surely a mere glitch of mind; but W.G. Sebald’s remark that reading Walser taught him to grasp how everything is connected across space and time returns to me when a handbill in the door of Amherst Books announces a meeting of the Robert Walser Society of Western Massachusetts. Walser’s microscripts scurry in close hatches across the backs of bus schedules, between the giant letters in ads for theaters and furniture stores. The results, held however close to the eye, look like the footprints of the tiniest bird walking across the page. After Walser’s death, study of the 526 paper fragments he had stacked in a drawer revealed their apparent nonsense to be a cache of essays and stories—in one case a novel on the back of twenty-four art prints—written in miniaturized German Kurrent, a script designed to save space by removing serifs. Walser had published four novels and hundreds of shorter works—all strange enough to begin with—before going slowly and gently mad and spending the last twenty-three years of his life in an asylum. Walser’s difficulties as a writer, what compelled him to his secret tiny unpublishing, began not with his admission to the Waldau Sanitarium in Bern in 1929—he continued writing there—but years earlier, with a sudden violent spasm of his writing hand that left him unable to hold an ink pen and produce the beautiful script he had always been proud of. No physiological cause could be found for his disability. Or, as Walser wrote to an editor, A swoon, a cramp, a stupor—these are always both physical and mental. The writer of these lines, he continued, experienced a time when he hideously, frightfully hated his pen. The cramp struck in conjunction with Walser’s inability, after early success, to find a publisher for the increasingly difficult work he produced during the last two decades of what might be called his freedom. The silence from editors and publishers caused a killing self-consciousness, and his hand refused to produce any more of the finely turned, glib, and nearly opaque fiction that gave one the feeling of staring at model pastries under glass, objects delicious but inedible. (As Walter Benjamin puts it, The only point of every sentence is to make the reader forget the previous one.) So Walser switched to pencil and learned again, like a little boy, to write.
Walser’s microscripts were mistaken by his literary executor for indecipherable code and lay forgotten among Walser’s papers for twenty-five years. The scholar who recognized what they were and undertook the long work of translating them had become aware of Walser only by accident, after purchasing the wrong book when sent by his aunt to the bookstore. The thin bottleneck of time Walser’s microscripts crawled through inevitably recalls the slow, precarious crawling to light of Emily Dickinson’s work from the drawers and boxes where she placed it before she was called back, her literary remains commending themselves first into her sister Lavinia’s hands, then into her sister-in law’s, then into her brother’s mistress’s—so many opportunities for the bound fascicles and loose sheets and fragments to be mislaid or misunderstood or simply neglected, even destroyed when Lavinia burned Emily’s received correspondence by Emily’s request, or simply ignored in their first small published edition so that no second was produced and the poems never traveled beyond Amherst. The poems themselves slip through narrow rhetorical passages to the reader, adits of archness or assumed authority, petulance, intimacy, flinted intellect. Emily Dickinson’s poems brought this track book of a town into existence for me, the street outside the bar where I sit, Pleasant Street, still adding lines to its accretive verse of human endeavor in the form of cars queuing wetly to its lights. A pedestrian presses the crossing control. Signals hold for the lone walker. I yearn momentarily for the flouted crosswalks and heedless drivers of my home, then climb the asphalt toward Emily Dickinson’s house on an evening cool enough that I have donned long pants for the first time this week.
I spend the walk thinking of Sabra Snell in 1876 when her father died and left fifty years of meteorological records without a successor. Sabra’s sister Rebecca had been meant to take over the work. Rebecca, who from childhood accompanied her father on his daily observations and who in her final illness desired the gage and the rod be brought to her, according to her father, because she did not think another would take the measurements correctly. Autopsy revealed an enlarged heart. Rebecca: like Emily Dickinson, an oldest daughter. Marta Werner, like Sabra Snell, a youngest daughter, on whom, she writes, the parents’ full attention can once again fall. Werner’s father told her from childhood that she would become a professor, and she is a professor. Of the Dickinson children, only Emily in her immovable way stood outside her father’s power to define the lives around him; father and I come into conflict but so far no one has been injured. Of Rebecca’s death we know only what her father wrote to his own parents, that the stroke fell like a thunder-bolt in the clear noon day. By asking for her father’s instruments on her deathbed, Rebecca affirmed his calling, hallowed it, as it were, with her ghostly stamp. Her death is marked by two days of missing data in the weather journal. The ledger lines for these days are joined with braces to mark the lacuna, inside which Professor Snell provides the following explanation, as restrained as his epigrams on the weather and thus more terrible: This blank was occasioned by the short sickness and death of Prof. Snell’s eldest daughter, Rebecca, in whose care he left the journal, while away from home. The journal resumes without interruption for thirty-six years. Three Snell daughters pass into adulthood and out of our ken before Sabra, the last, begins helping her aging father up the foggy hill. Maybe she liked weather too. We don’t know. But when Ebenezer Snell passed back into the great design of things, Sabra’s entries commenced in perfect fidelity to his method, emulating even the compressed poesis of his commentary: Rainy day. Clouds and sprinkles. As the years passed, she wrote less, finally only numbers, practicing an even purer form of her father’s discipline; purer than Emily Dickinson’s, whose poems retreated to scraps and torn envelopes, grew fewer and shorter but never disappeared; purer than Walser’s, which hid itself but kept muttering in the strokes of an archaic alphabet. Sabra kept her journal until 1902, by then made long obsolete by the building in 1891 of Hatch Experimental Station at the Massachusetts Agricultural College. For its last eleven years, Snell’s work enjoyed the freedom of perfect uselessness.
Sabra Snell never married or had children. Nor did Emily Dickinson. Nor did Robert Walser. My own childlessness leaves me unsure what to do with my unpublished writing, the drafts filling my desk and collecting in piles atop it. I am no Emily Dickinson or Robert Walser, and no one will come seeking the drafts, but the value of the drafts does not change the value of the problem. Perhaps it would be best, the most fitting accession to the final fate of everything, to destroy the drafts myself now so that my wife won’t have to contend with them when I’m gone. Self-annihilation has beckoned before. Two years ago, in a mood of great grim calm, I shredded fourteen drafts of a novel, each page of every draft filled with the next draft’s handwritten revisions in the eminently legible mechanical pencil print I have always been vain about, the shape of the signifiers as important as what they signify. The earliest draft, like all my fiction, was written out on the backs of school memos and printed emails and other pieces of wastepaper rescued from the school recycling bin. Plucking from oblivion and repurposing sheets of paper whose first existence served a different textual purpose satisfies the sense of secrecy I require to make fiction, opens a quiet room whose door is known only to me. Despite the lack of ruled lines, my lettered rows come out perfectly straight. The size of the letters and the space between lines are mechanically regular. The effect of a finished page, all that orderly gray within which wonders hide, is intensely pleasurable. It takes four or five mornings, perhaps eight hours, to fill one sheet of 8 x 11 paper with my tiny artisinal script. Five or six such sheets make a story that is perhaps twenty drafts and two years away from publication. But sometimes, when I lose faith in the meaning of publication and the handwritten sheets themselves come to seem the point and endpoint of my labor, I return to the first page and undertake a second-order art with the strikethroughs and insertions of a revision, an overwriting of brackets, carats, arrows swooped to the margin, interline writing in text so small it is a physical challenge to execute (requiring me to hold the pencil tip to my eye to find its most chiseled facet), and ghost text ushered past the power of sight by my eraser. The appeal of first-draft pages is their sameness, their many-paneled interchangeability; the appeal of an overwritten page is its singularity, shaped by a thousand doubts whose resolutions brought the page to a final form I could not anticipate or even see forming until it was finished, since I write with my glasses off and the page held so close to my face that where I see only a few words at a time.
But I have recently found myself where Walser did, hating my hand because it is mine and testifies to my presence in the general failure of my writing, and perhaps that is why when I discovered the box chocked with fourteen drafts of my never-to-be-published novel, some four thousand pages of my work stumbled upon, as it were, like a stack of grotesque self-portraits, I decided to shred them. I wished most of all to obliterate the date marking the earliest draft, which revealed that I had spent ten years on a novel that I let myself believe had taken two or three. The box was too heavy to lift. Or too heavy to lift from the bottom of the closet where I had hidden it, carry to my car, and carry again from my car to the second-floor shredder at work. I set the drafts out onto the floor of my home office in cross-stacked paper bricks. Each day as I left, I removed the top brick and, before class, fed it to the shredder. Halfway through the stack, I had a misgiving, but the decision was made. The thought that I was saving my wife from having to dig through the box—a thought I used to cover the more terrible thought of her finding the box and judging me insane as a result of its contents, and the yet more terrible thought that she might not look through the box at all before discarding it—was the virtue I congratulated myself on as I gave each day’s draft to the shredder’s teeth, the longest of them four hundred and forty pages of closely edited work.
The notion of Emily Dickinson as uncanny genius is created in part by the editorial dating of her poems, 227 of which Franklin assigns to the year 1862, another 295 to 1863, encouraging the illusion that, at her height, Dickinson produced a masterpiece almost daily. In fact the dates indicate the year of the poems’ fair copying, with untold drafts stretching back from each, drafts Dickinson disposed of. But one ought not need ten years to not-finish a novel. Perhaps a teacher who wants to write should, like Sabra Snell—a teacher for twenty years at Miss Stearns’ School for Girls—write not novels but a weather journal. A weather journal can’t be finished. It cannot succeed but also can never fail. There is only an eternal rough draft, and thus no danger of discovering a decade of dead ends and coming to hate the way one’s words look marching along to their own mumble—a discovery that cramped my own hand (for me figuratively) and has me scrawling this document in nearly illegible ink. And has rendered me unable any longer to write fiction.
After his forced admission to the asylum in Herisau in 1933, Robert Walser either gave up writing or didn’t—no writing survives from the last twenty-three years of his life. (I am not here to write, he told a visitor, but to be mad.) We know only that Walser pursued his long discipline of walking, laying daily tracks in the Swiss snow until, on Christmas Day 1956, he collapsed during his hike and died on the roadside. Emily Dickinson bound no fascicles after 1865. Dear to me now, as an older writer, are the loose sheets of long-finished poems that middle-aged Emily pulled from her drawer to trouble with variants. “Two butterflies went out at noon,” from 1863, is transformed by Dickinson’s revisiting in 1878 (the year Dickinson herself gave up pen for pencil) into a dozen poems or, more correctly, since no final version is resolved from the variants, into none, the original poem replaced by the possibilities mapped over it. I like to think of this reworking not as failure or disintegration but as a recognition that there is no best poem—that there is no such thing as the poem “Two butterflies went out at noon.” Dickinson’s first terse +, the mark she uses to signal a variant, appears in line three. Should espied be overtook? Should caught a ride be took a boat? From there the pluses multiply so quickly, the reader’s eye darting so often to the substitutions, that the overwritten poem seems to be about nothing so much as itself, the folded stationery deciding and undeciding like the butterflies in the poem, like the younger Dickinson and her later self whirling each other off course in their waltz. The next lines, Then lost themselves / And found themselves, are rewritten twice, each new version interlineated with variants as Dickinson attempts to wring more force from the verbs: They chased and caught themselves, flung themselves, spurned themselves. The eddies of the sun become Frenzy, written twice and capitalized. Wrecked deepens to drowned. Till Gravitation missed them becomes Until a Zephyr pushed and then chased and then scourged them, And they were hurled from noon. I recognize the later poet’s desire to make language say more than it can, a desire that, indulged, only reveals its inability to say anything. Dickinson’s choice in this case not to cancel any variants, which she commonly did, suggests that certainty, knowing one’s direction and destination, is an illusion of youth. I think again of Walser, who claimed as a young writer never to revise a word he wrote but who retreated in middle age to the microscripts, which, because they offer a different solution to each pass of the magnifying glass, refuse to yield a final reading. Dickinson was forty-eight in 1878, when she unwrote her poem. Walser was born that year. She died at fifty-five, my own age as I write this and the age at which Walser was transferred to Herisau.
On the last morning of class, we share our curriculum projects and walk through the rain to West Cemetery. I have a hangover, again or still, and have vomited in my dorm garbage can. Placed atop the bedside table, its lip came conveniently to my lips and saved me the indignity of kneeling, though it also gave me a closer view of my body’s discards coating the discards of my week, making the garbage doubly mine, a metaphor for me. It is a good morning for a walk to a cemetery, the sky a gray that intensifies all colors. Up Main Street, Emily’s street, then Pleasant Street, the route that even in death she judged too public, requesting that her family’s Irish workmen carry her coffin out the back door of the house and across the fields to the family plot. The Pleasant Street house, where Emily lived from age ten to twenty-five, is gone, in its place a filling station whose asphalt gives way to the grass of the cemetery.
My sentiment won’t heed a summons—it turns its back when faced by Life in formal dress—so I was taken by surprise when we reached Emily Dickinson’s grave marker and my eyes filled with tears. (I here dispense with present tense.) It should not have surprised me. I had spent the summer with Emily Dickinson, had been closer to her during those months than to any living person, and now she was passing away from me. My classmates were too busy taking pictures to notice my quiet extremity. I wiped it from my face with shaking hand and settled back into my hangover. I was sick and fragile and alive. With others crowding the iron fence separating us from the stone, I was denied the graveside communion I might have wished for, the kinship with Emily’s bones, but no matter; it doesn’t pay to make too big a fuss in cemeteries, as if there is really much difference between Us and Them. We formed a circle of quicker shades and recited poems. I squinted at my Franklin and read “Heaven has different signs to me” but must have read poorly because when I finished, it seemed no one had heard. Carmen read one of her own poems with a desperate earnest faith that trusted we would see she could not have prevented herself. Goodbyes, shuttles, airports, a day of travel disappearing into other such days. And now I sit with my clipboard and coffee, my cats. Tomorrow I will go to school to prepare for the new year. Summer is over.
