Emily Dickinson Face to Face

Anyone who teaches Emily Dickinson should read Martha Dickinson Bianchi’s Emily Dickinson: Face to Face, a slim volume recently published by the lovely McNally Editions. Originally from 1932 (McNally add the essay ‘A Hedge Away’ from 1924), it gathers the recollections of the poet’s niece about growing up in the house beside Emily. Bianchi was in her 60s when she wrote Face to Face and by then an experienced author, but her writing is still full of brilliantly fresh memories. Of course, by the 1930s the poet was famous, and one has to treat such memories with some caution, but they feel genuine.  (You can skip the poorly-written Foreword).

Dickinson comes to us as comfortably herself in her own spaces (the smallness of her house, the vastness of her poetic imagination) and infinitely affectionate for her niece and nephews (Aunt Emily stood for indulgence). They would await the exciting gifts brought by the handyman (perhaps three tiny frosted, heart-shaped cakes, or some of her chocolate enamels) accompanied by sparkling notes and poems for their mother Sue. The line between note and poem is impossible to see at times, and there were so many: one cannot but imagine her WhatsApping constantly in the twenty-first century. Bianchi brings across the famous aversion to publication, the wearing of white (the only person who never thought of it as a mystery was Emily herself, as she moved about her father’s house and garden), the texture of everyday life that kept Emily busy, always busy.

The piece is full of vivid things:

Like the Shepherdess on Keats’s ‘Grecian Urn’, the more she eluded, the more she was pursued.

It is this element of drollery in her, the elfin, mischievous strain, that is hardest for those who never knew her to reconcile with her solemn side.

We were those hemmed in. Aunt Emily was free to her chosen horizon. 

The little mental trapeze acts she performed for herself kept her spirits agile.

Every door of her father’s house flung wide signified to her a welcome home not a setting forth.

Short though it is, Face to Face gives us an extremely rich portrait of a real woman, not a ‘mere’ literary legend embalmed in cliché.