Oh so much to say. Dickinson did go through a grand crisis in middle age, culminating in the “Master Letters”, an excerpt from one of which is in the background of panel four – a series of drafts abjectly begging some unknown person to let her worship him/her from afar. There is a good deal of fighting over what these letters actually are. Those who want her to be a secret lesbian make the case that they could be to a female, and in her life she did scare away virtually every female friend that she had with the emotional outpourings in her beautiful letters to them. Some, who can’t bear that she should feel anything as common as the need for love, try to pass them off as literary exercises, not to anybody at all.
Interesting ideas, but yeah, it’s Charles Wadsworth. Matching the letters with the poems from the same period, Habegger has shown how the figure described in those poems, a figure who could only be loved from afar, is shown going through exactly what Wadsworth happened to be doing at that time. When he left the East Coast for a position in San Francisco, Emily’s poems suddenly talk about the imminent departure of an object of intense devotion to a faraway land, taking the same sea route he took, using the same pitch of desperation we see in the Master Letters. She also got her friends to forward her letters to Wadsworth for her so that they would not have the postmark from the city she lived in, which is something she didn’t do for others, but would make sense, as Wadsworth was way married. There’s no smoking gun – much of the correspondence has been destroyed by Wadsworth’s family, but it fits together pretty nicely, and lets her be herself, however disappointing that may be for some. And really, it shouldn’t be. It was one period of intense impossible devotion from which boiled forth some spectacular poetry and which, once gotten over, allowed her to feel more confident within the space of her own head than ever before. Her last romance, with Judge Otis, was much more level headed, and the poetry that reflected back on that time gives us some breath-taking insight into the nature of emotional pain and the healing process.
– Count Dolby von Luckner
First of all, Alterna Comics, a great independent comics publishing company, is facing bankruptcy. They are having an emergency fundraising drive, so stop on over and support the cause of independent comics!
Second of all, I added some new books to the Good Reads section – a Pierce, Dickinson, and Marx biography (rather, one of each, not a combined bio – though that would be pretty rad).
Third of all – Lincoln and Pierce. Pierce was in favor of letting the South secede if they so wanted, of fighting a purely defensive war, and so blamed Lincoln as the aggressor in an unnecessary conflict. That was Pierce’s view of the abolition movement in general – he saw it as an unconstitutional attempt to use federal power to dictate something that was a purely state matter, and one that was likely to lead to bloodshed. Which sounds reasonable, except that we’re talking about SLAVERY here, not legalized weed. As somebody who played by the book even as it choked the lifeblood out of his presidency, Pierce couldn’t countenance Lincoln’s expanded sense of the executive’s powers, his limited suspension of habeas corpus, and the like. The classic breakdown is that Pierce – Lincoln (leaving out Buchanan, who entirely deserves his awful reputation) breaks down to legal vs. moral, the law of the nation vs. the laws of humanity, and so forth. And that’s tricky – merely national laws have reigned in the excesses of people who thought they were answering to a higher law, and for the better, and that fact guided Pierce. But there are also times when the laws can no longer contain the humanity that is trying to live within them, and Lincoln was guided by that insight.
– Count Dolby von Luckner
