Capital Murder: Emily Dickinson and the Case of the Missing Metonyms

Capital murder? Yes. In two senses. 

I refer to the notorious forgery of an Emily Dickinson poem fabricated by the homicidal fraudster and Mormon iconoclast, Mark Hofmann, whose inspired fakery – conceived to dupe academia – first surfaced in a catalogue of Fine Books and Manuscripts mailed to collectors by a major international auction house in 1997. Reportedly, the manuscript was sold for $21,000.

Left: Emily’s true pencilled script. (Circa her final decade.)

Right: Mark Hofmann’s forgery with line-breaks defined by
width of Emily Dickinson’s folded, lined, fascicle-style paper.
(Facing page, a graphologist belatedly denounces Forgery.) 

Commendable reverse-engineering? 

While commending the ‘reverse-engineered’ invention of a fellow fictionist, I find, however, I am compelled to take issue with at least three shortcomings in Hoffman’s criminal act of poetic personation. Since I am well-known as a fixated completist, I trust you’ll understand why these deficiencies in Hofmann’s attempts to replicate a venerated canonical style continue to rankle with me.

 

But first the verses. Can you spot the howlers?

 

                                        That God cannot be understood

                                        Everyone agrees

                                        We do not know His motives nor

                                        Comprehend his Deeds –

                                        Then why should I seek solace in

                                        What I cannot know?

                                        Better to play in winter’s sun
                                        Than to fear the Snow.

Surely – everyone agrees – a defining characteristic of Dickinson’s verse is the metonymic capitalisation of her motifs . . . they are the signature feature of her rhetorical devices.

So . . .  hang on! 

Blooper 1: Where’s the capitalised ‘H’ for His deeds? ‘Reverential capitalisation’ is a scriptural convention no devout 19th Century versifier would be without.

Blooper 2: As to the familiar capitalised Dickinsonian metonyms, where is the consistency that would balance the figuration of Life and Death as Sun and Snow?

Blooper 3: Conversely, it’s evident to me that Hofmann was naïvely overeager in his assumption that line-breaks in Emily’s manuscripts necessarily indicate capitalisation of the next line . (You can see in the example of her true hand, Left, the constraint of her notepaper width does NOT determine the capitalisation of her verses: Though the great Waters sleep, / That they are still the Deep, / We cannot doubt —) 

I suspect that Emily lived through a period of reappraisal as to personified nouns. I have always considered it curious that the four seasons in our language remain uncapitalised. Surely spring, when personified, takes a capital? And is feminine? (Emily sees Grass as Nature deserving of a feminine possessive determiner and pronoun . . . the Wind is a capitalised male, a metonym for God: The Wind does not require the Grass / To answer—Wherefore when He pass / She cannot keep Her place.)

By the late 19th Century, discriminatory capitalisation was a subject of fickle debate. As a certain flippant connoisseur pronounced in 1896, ‘Many are ready to talk of some crafts under the name of art, which must now be spelt with a capital letter – why it written with the capitalest of letters, I know no more than the artists.’

A criminal act of poetic personation.

With hindsight, it’s glib to claim special insights into this shabby affair of literary forgery BUT I do profoundly believe greater vigilance could have been observed on the purely textual details I’ve identified. 

Yes, the forger’s writing-paper was manufactured in Boston most probably in 1871, when Emily was in her forties. 

Yes, Emily often wrote in pencil (and, fortunately for forgers, pencil lead cannot be forensically dated).

Yes, the forger’s script replicated the hand of a poetess no longer cursive in her febrile latter years whose decline saw each character printed separately like that of a child. Nevertheless, there is a crudity in the hesitant execution that betrays the faker’s ineptitude.  (As an apparent holograph – especially the stumbled signing of her given name – the whole thing seems insincere.)

Yes and Yes, the verse itself  is an inspired enviable pastiche, despite its vague provenance.. 

 

(In fact, may I recommend the brilliant prize-winning short story, Fascicle 41 by Anna McGrail, published in 2016 in The London Magazine, which most ingeniously questions the provenance of Dickinsonian forgeries up to the point of casting doubt on the provenance of the story’s protagonists themselves.                                                          See:https://www.thelondonmagazine.org/article/fascicle-41-by-anna-mcgrail/               May I presume to recommend the reader should memorise Hofmann’s verse then read Fascicle 41, which was maybe Anna’s intention in her artful game. Unlike Hofmann’s skullduggery, her plot line is unbeatable.)

 

Em Dash. Separatrices where she drew breath.

That my immersion in Dickinsonian speculations began many, many years ago is manifest in my writing of A Room to the End of Fall (composed in my late 20s and finally published in A Bad Case, 2014, by Salt). I quote an extract to demonstrate how period diction – as Hofmann’s pastiche exemplifies – can add colour and tone to sustain a momentary verisimilitude . . . momentary, that is, until the Deconstructionists start tearing it apart.

Here is an extract from the fictional Theresa Ollivante’s fictional novel, An Auroral Stain. . . 

An Auroral Stain was conceived as a postbellum detective story and built on the fictitious premise of a private investigation by a housebound Emily Dickinson intent to solve the mystery of a serving-woman’s suspicious death, ably assisted by Maggie, her faithful Irish maid; my central conceit has the young colleen and her phobic mistress sleuthing as a sort of composite Massachusite Nancy Drew.
          In those early months, I wrote most of the core passages of An Auroral Stain.
          Was it the muffled chiming of the bells from those Irishtown churches on each street corner or the sheer drudgery of my austere day-to-day routines that I found conducive to the mapping of the febrile psyche of the Belle of Amherst and the quaint notions of her resourceful Irish maid?
          Sometimes I would hear the faint strains of a fiddle diddlydeeing and it was as if the once-hidden roots of a deep-set tree were exposed raw above ground.
          Anyhow, the brogue of those Irishtown denizens must have still been ringing in my ears when I wrote:

“A sneeze as long as Nebuchadnezzar!” Maggie scolded as she took her mistress’s wet cape and hat.                                                                                        The maid had been kneeling on the homestead veranda, whitewashing a garden bench in a curious atavistic ritual, as if to welcome a long-lost relation to a hooley.                                                                                                      She took Emily by the elbow and led her, half-fainting, to her room.            That night she attended her mistress in her delirium, hearing her call out strange imprecations: “Refuse the mediciners, damn you! Why are our people backslidden!”                                                                                              So wild and convulsed was her expression she was raving a jeremiad.         “There is no medicine against death!” she gasped. “Take heed, girl, of the promise of a man, for it will run like a crab!”                                                   “By the cross,” Maggie exclaimed, “there is fey blood i’ ye’re head! The poor darlin’s brain’s on fire and full of proclamations!”

         In my notes to my novel I encoded “Emily” as “Em Dash,” both on account of her mercurial nature and of her all-pervasive typographical separatrices that signal the places where you should catch your breath before resuming her spare end-stopped verses.

See also:  

Miss Emily Dickinson Communes with the Great Dictator Mr John Milton . . . http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/10/miss-emily-dickinson-communes-with.html

•

Hanged by a comma. 

See also: Oscar Wilde, apostrophiser of boys but not punctuation . . .  https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2011/10/wilde-apostrophiser-of-boys-but-not.html

David’s Lyre Music
for Jonathan
 
The greatest beauty is unenjoyed.
On fruit ungarnered from the stem
falls dew from dawns as unalloyed
as lips unkissed whose savage charm
is stainlessly uncharactered
by the corruptibility of self regard.

Notes: Visual/tactile evidence. Printed letterhead (Cobalt Blue): Cadogan
Hotel, Sloane Street. (Twice folded from size 22cm width x 17.6cm height.)
Holograph letter superscribed above left margin with: Saturday April 6/
For Charles Matthews/Ah! Lest I speak it’s [sic] name! [Presumed date: April 1895.]
Verse: David’s Lyre Music for Jonathan. Signature: Truly yours/Oscar
Wilde. [Note: Charles Mathews, with one ‘t’, was the third member of
Wilde’s defence counsel.] The two minor errors are plausible failings of a
cavalier orthographer. The type of urgent, flying cursive handwriting of
Wilde’s letters at the time of his trials, beseeching loans from friends, is
absent in the Cadogan Hotel Letter, suggesting that at the time of his
arrest (April 6 1895), Wilde had composed himself in contemplation of his fate.

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2014)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

 
. . .        

 

The grievous worries of Gissingites . . . ‘You have to promise me to suppress your redundant auxiliary verbs . . . ’ (To Have and Have Not, Part 2.)

I fear the following reflections rehash a Case of Unfinished Business inasmuch as a little while ago I challenged  those assumptions that accept there is a classical economy expressed by Lewis (Lutwidge) Carroll’s prose, a feature many would expect of an Oxford logician. I have no doubt that his near namesake, the Cambridge logician Ludwig Wittgenstein, would have had a view on it.  http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2012/04/to-have-and-have-not.html

I questioned the words of Alice, ‘Oh dear! I’d nearly forgotten that I’ve got to grow up again!’  I maintained that the sort of double-verbing Carroll employs with his irritating auxiliary+verb clusters lacks the crystal clarity one would have expected from an Euclidean geometrist and syllogistic rationalist. 

With these scruples – not to say overscrupulosity – in mind, I was prompted to ask Pierre Coustillas, the world’s foremost authority on George Gissing – a master of plain English prose perfected by the acutest discrimination – as to whether ‘a Frenchman of equal discernment had ever noted in Gissing the use of the redundant auxiliary verb of “got” (as in “I have got” instead of “I have”).’ I added: ‘In your estimation, having read and reread Gissing, do you regard Gissing as a purist in English usage?’

For a contemporary usage, I noted that Wilde, in his Ideal Husband of 1893, has the character, Mrs. Cheveley, say: ‘You have got to promise me to suppress your report.’

‘You have got to promise me . . ’

 

 

Linguistic oddities?

Professor Coustillas kindly replied: ‘As you seem to have guessed linguistic problems and Gissing’s use of English have been to me (and to my wife) a fascinating subject. Very rarely do we happen to notice oddities. An example which will not surprise you is his (in my opinion) faulty  use – off and on – of “like” for “as”. Clara Collet* once told him about this and (surprisingly!) he declared himself surprised. But this being said, he was, I think, an excellent stylist. He was a purist. His correspondence with Kitton about their respective editorial labours for the Rochester Edition of Dickens’s works (Methuen) is interesting in this respect.

 ‘He certainly never uses the form used by Mrs. Cheveley! Indeed he never uses “do” with “have”. I think that looking for “I do not have” in his works and correspondence would be a waste of time.

‘Although I do not wish either you or myself to spend too much time on such problems, I am tempted to ask you whether you have noticed that very few English people ever use the word “whom” these days. The mistake which consists in using “who” for “whom” is common even among English academics. As a foreigner, such things worry me grievously.’

* Noted statistician and confidante of George Gissing and Eleanor Marx.

 

Evanescent conjectures . . . alleged solecism.

In the event, since this correspondence was conducted in November 2009, we never returned to these rather evanescent conjectures and, nine years later, this venerated scholar sadly was taken from us (Pierre Coustillas, literary scholar, born 11 July 1930; died 11 August 2018).

Only lately have I reconsidered the alleged solecism of ‘like’ for ‘as’.

It did not take me long to find in Demos an example of how the ‘as = like’ misconception of Gissing’s ‘impure English’ might have arisen.

In Demos, the protagonist Richard Mutimer is lower-class.  On two occasions the alleged solecism can be read:

‘She never takes things like you do,’ Richard remarked.

‘You’re not going to say, like mother did, that it was the worst piece of news she’d ever heard?’

In my view, in each case the lower class colloquialisms are in character, so hardly the error Clara Collet supposedly identified.

So for loyal Gissingites the writings of our hero remain an unpolluted stream of both demotic and unadorned English in cadences regulated by a classicist, in exemplars of English prose at its neatest and nimblest because even when, without sentiment, it reaches down to explore below the Lower Depths it still issues from a source that flows faultlessly from the Heights of Parnassus.    

 

See also . . . Escape Chute: An Unexpected Loophole to Enfranchisement (re. Gissing’s feminism). http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2013/03/escape-chute-unexpected-loophole-to.html

See also . . . A Girl Alone: Scenario of a Screenplay in Homage to George Gissing. http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/04/a-girl-alone-scenario-of-screenplay-in.html

See also . . . Respectable Log-Rolling.                              https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2012/02/?m=0

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2014)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

 

Socialist Realism. . . a Brief History. . .

 A peasant named Prosper 

was shot for stealing a turnip 

so he did not live to see 

the farmer rebury the turnip. 

Prosper received no such ceremony. 

Turnip R.I.P.

We dispersed on the road in various directions, and began to collect dry grass and anything that could possibly make a fire. Every time we chanced to bend down towards the ground a passionate desire seized upon our whole body to lie down upon the earth—lie there immovably and eat the dense black loam—eat a lot of it, eat till we could eat no more, and then fall asleep. Only to eat!—if we slept for evermore afterwards—to chew and chew and feel the thick warm pulp flow gradually from our mouths along our dried-up gullet and food passages into our famished, extended stomachs, burning with the desire to suck up some sort of nourishment.

In the Steppe by Maxim Gorky (1897)

 

See also An Insurrection 1897: 

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2018/10/an-insurrection-metoo-1897.html 

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2014)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

 

Pseudo-Borges . . . the Academy of Silence and their Oracular Urn

There existed in ancient Greece a curious association called the Academy of Silence. It was composed of 100 members, each one pledged to do away with all unnecessary sound as far as possible. 

 

All the meetings were carried on in silence, ideas being conveyed by signs. One day a stranger appeared at their council, signifying that he wished to join the society. The one in charge, in order to indicate to the would-be member that there was no vacancy in the Academy, showed him an urn so filled with water that not a drop could be added without causing the contents to overflow. The applicant, understanding what was meant, bowed low and started to withdraw, then hesitated and returned. The assembled members were curious to know the meaning of his action but it was made clear to them when the applicant, picking up a rose-leaf, deposited it so lightly and deftly upon the water in the urn that not a drop was displaced. His acuity of thought was rewarded. The Academy of Silence was at once enlarged to include an extra member.

----

“Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.” ― Jorge Luis Borges

----

The rather Borgesian double urn is suggestive of the onion-skin unlayering of meaning in the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, while the Parable of the Silent Ballot is to be found in the Catholic Digest, New York, 1938. (Image: Watercolour by Giovanni Battista Lusieri, A Greek Double Urn, circa 1804, National Gallery of Scotland. The urn was excavated from a burial mound outside Athens. The outer vase was made of white marble and had been damaged by the weight of the tomb. The bronze inner vase contained some burnt bones and a sprig of myrtle* made of gold.)  

*Myrtle, a symbol of love, was a plant sacred to the goddess Aphrodite.

See also more Borgesian fables: I Have a Rendezvous with Dread at Destination Echoville.

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2013/07/i-have-rendezvous-with-dread-at.html

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2014)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

 

Riffrains of a Jazz-Loving Poet . . . Winter Crossings by Alexis Lykiard.

Admirers of Alexis Lykiard’s signature wit and brio will be rewarded by his new collection, Winter Crossings, whose tonality, they will pleasurably discover, is as likely to be rendered in an elegiac autumnal mood as enlivened by – what we might define as – a jazz-loving poet’s vers libre riffrains.

Lyre/Liar Paradox
‘A thought once uttered is untrue . . .
Don’t say a word.’ With this paradox
Fyodor Tyutchev warns poets who,
like Ragenueau in his rhymes, make
‘lyre’ a homophone for ‘liar’. Thus
Alexis Lykiard in his new collection
admits similar doubts but reshapes
them in defiance of ‘voluble minds’
into new phenomena to reflect his
preference, too, for an ‘art drowned
in a silence incorruptibly sea-green.’
(See Colour Charts.)

Detail: Baker-poet Ragenueau’s pâtissière
with metonym in Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac.

Though his characteristic broadsides and satiric counterblasts continue to vie for our engagement as zeitgeisty reminders of a vented spleen, completists of the Lykiard canon will be pleased to recognise new additions to his metrical pioneering of unexpected iconoclastic forms.

In particular, there is a bracing stimulus for students of outré harmonies to be found in a number of fractured syllogistic sonnets in which time-flipping jump-cuts recall freeform jazz motifs, peculiarised by such temporal paradoxes of phrasing and rhyme as when a hinted synthesis makes an appearance before its antithesis is known; cp. Colour Charts and Incubus  . . . the latter, perhaps, should have properly found its place in Lykiard’s earlier, nakedly autobiographical, Skeleton Keys http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2014/04/a-prisoner-of-my-fathers-name-alexis.html

(Doubters of these hesitant interpretations should take note of Alexis’s own view of such speculative jazz-inspired methodologies: ‘I attempted this first consciously in Living Jazz in the late 1980s, seeking a system of musical echoes which seemed specially appropriate there . . . of course one cannot please everyone: a great hero/exemplar Ben Jonson thought ‘Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging.’ I do, though, adhere to a metrical/syllabic count for the most part, which I hope tightens the structure providing regularity of beat although that's flexible. I caution against too much analytical thinking, being wary of what I dub the Sonny Rollins syndrome! When a music critic dissected a lengthy solo – I think from the Saxophone Colossus album – bar by bar and note for note, Rollins felt so disconcerted (flattered, too, of course), when his own intentions, choice of phrases, etc were explained to him, he almost seized up, and went away, didn’t play in public or record for several years . . .’)

Thankfully, judging by this latest collection, the fate of Sonny Rollins is not likely to befall Alexis Lykiard.

Agreed, Charon waits for all . . . but one feels a poet shouldn’t rub it in.

And, what's more, if the meaning of the elegiac poet’s latest title, Winter Crossings, is intended as a grim metaphor for his current mood, then surely the Ferryman should be told to jolly well cool his heels by the Styx for a while longer and advise this poet that, rather than contemplating seasickness, he should breathe deeply into one of the baker-poet Ragueneau's paper bags and continue, without delay, to write more of his provocatively discursive and diverting verses for his demanding followers.

See also Alexis’s Schooled for Life http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/01/satirical-and-satyrical-extramural-and.html