It’s tempting to pick this one
apart on gendered political grounds, especially that first stanza, but B. is daring
such a thing anyway and chuckling while he does it. So I think we let that
slide for a moment and remember that absurd fantasy is a healthy aspect of our
interior mental lives. Who hasn’t fantasized about spooning with Emily
Dickinson? Um, wait a sec…now that I think about it, I’ve never done that. Never
occurred to me. A good friend told me last week, when Thoreau came up, that
Thoreau would never have invited her into his little cabin and talked, because
she was a woman. This thought gets in the way of any kind of Thoreau fandom and
makes her sad. It’s likely true, although I’m not entirely convinced. He was an
uptight Puritan all right, but he would have been gracious and polite, and he
would have known how to mind his manners. On the other hand, Emily Dickinson
would most certainly not have spoken a word to me. We know from her poems and
her letters that there was more heat to her than popularly imagined—she wasn’t
just some withdrawn, chilly spinster cowering in her attic frantically
scratching little poems in a notebook meant only for herself, sneaking out in
the morning to glimpse snakes and bees and flies in the garden, then hiding for
the rest of the day when the world awoke. Obsessed with death. We know she
loved a man passionately, though the restrictive mores of her time and place
and social station mainly put the kibosh on her expressing it directly. But a
tall stranger like me—she would have hidden from me, like a nervous cat, under
her bed if need be. This is a completely meaningless imagining but it still
feels awkward and hurts to know it would have most certainly been so. So here’s
how a Berryman deals with that: Imagine secretly passionate Emily hissing you
up to her attic. Lying guiltily together on her noisy mattress filled with corn
husks supported by a weave of rope. The hand-stitched quilts, the breeze
through the gauzy curtains fluttering her calico dress thrown over the back of
the chair…
Hah! That, right there, is the
most ridiculous thing I’ve ever written. B. couldn’t have possibly cared less
about doing the same thing, though he stops short of fantasizing about
Elizabeth Bishop, who is just too untouchably noble. There are lines it’s not
healthy to cross even in a fantasy.
And then there’s Sylvia Plath,
about whom it would be easy to fantasize—she was beautiful, and man, was she
ever an artist. This is especially
true if your tastes run to the secretly dark and weird. Her poems dredged some genuine
dark and weird out of the depths of her rather Poe-ish nether-psyche. The
problem is that her life story is so sad, with such a tragic ending, that the
only appropriate response in whatever fantasy one dares make public is to
grieve for her mental torment and mourn the loss of all of her that was lost. In
the end, thank you for those amazing poems. They matter to many of us. But her life was tough. Read The Bell Jar if you don’t believe it.
Fantasize about her all you want if you must, but real life with her was
complicated and difficult, and the tragedy of her life became the tragedy of
her husband’s and children’s as well.
B.’s life is tough enough too,
and he turns from flirting with fantasies of tormented poets to joining their
number. He’s justified in doing so. Tolstoy is another exhibit underscoring his
point. Count Leo Tolstoy led a great aristocratic life, but he rejected privilege
and comfort toward the end, and he eventually rejected his bourgeois family.
His wife, loyal assistant, happy to live the luxurious life of the wife of the
rich and famous novelist, didn’t quite get his messianic conversion, which by
the way pulled the support from under her and her children, understandably causing
her no end of anguish. He ran off at the end, but grew ill on the frigid train
he was riding. The stationmaster of the town where he was put off the train—he had
been recognized as the famed Tolstoy—put him up in his own house, where Tolstoy
eventually died. He had tried to run away, but he wound up the sensational focus
of intense worldwide publicity. His wife was summoned, but he wouldn’t let her
near him, and she was kept away until he finally fell into unconsciousness just
before he died. It was a messy, public death for someone who had tried to slip
away and become a peasant. B.’s point is that these poet/artist types don’t fit
so well into the social boxes most of us are so often consigned to. Marry one,
and look out. There may come much of anguish, embarrassment and trouble ahead.
Their heads aren’t normal. Wonderful things come out sometimes, which can be
caught, refined and distilled into precious little bottles of art. But every
gorgeous bottle of amber cognac also produced waste mounds of slimy, fermenting
grape skins. The public sips the fine, aromatic cognac. The wives and widowers
shovel the mounds of stinking leftovers.
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