Book review: Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds, Lyndall Gordon (2010)

By diligently suspending disbelief in the stupidity of the book's main topic - the affair between the poet's brother and a woman from Washington D.C. - I managed to get to about page 25 before the enterprise ended up seeming totally worthless. Gordon contrives both to adopt the values of the most doltish of those alive when the poet lived, and to take as her own the laborious prose style of the late 19th century, with the result that you feel truly to be wading through treacle with every sub clause and qualifying phrase. It's bad enough that the book is so trying to read, but to assume that the poet really cared about who her brother took to his bed is to either miss the complexity of the poetry or to devalue the originality of the poet's vision, a vision that has not yet - as far as I can tell - been adequately understood even today.

Gordon's tabloid obsessions are murky and squalid compared to the undeniably gnomic utterances of the poet. If we measure America's appreciation of Dickinson by this production we must assume that the case is still entirely unsolved. Imagine Austin falling for the blandishments of that interloper! Poor man. No doubt he found the society of Amherst as oppressive as a time traveler would, if a time traveler was to arrive from the 21st century into that small town with its religious curiosities and weird social stratifications. Unfortunately, when Gordon decided to go there she forgot to shrink wrap her 21st century intellect, and whatever remained of it after scouring the archives has been comprehensively wiped clean, leaving her with an archaic view of the world that even Dickinson would have laughed at.

As for the struggle of those who lived after Dickinson died, surrounding her legacy and its presentation to the world, I give not a fig. The idiots can scramble for reflected glory with as much passion as they like, I don't need to get involved. The poetry is enough for me.