Emily Dickinson in Love: The Case for Otis Lord by John Evangelist Walsh (review)

As has all too often been the case for members of the poet’s inner circle, biographers have tended to veer toward making hyperbolic, totalizing, and often self-interested arguments concerning one or another of Emily Dickinson’s friends or potential lovers. This book is no exception. Sensationalistic, unrealistic, and heavily sentimentalized, Walsh’s volume contributes little to understanding any more clearly how the poet really felt about Judge Lord. One of the more controversial figures in Dickinson studies, Otis Lord has suffered more than most at the hands of partisans and detractors alike. It would be welcome news that a seasoned Dickinson scholar had taken on the important work of clearing up some of the many misconceptions that have accumulated around Lord, but Emily Dickinson in Love only buries him more deeply under the detritus of wishful thinking posing as scholarship.

Despite a fairly extensive bibliography and several endnotes, Walsh’s book has more in common with journalistic exposes than it does with bonafide scholarship. In the front matter, Walsh provides a list of the many books clothed as literary mysteries he has already written, and the tenor of his prose style is suggested by their titles—Plumes in the Dust: The Love Affair of Edgar Allan Poe and Fanny Osgood, for example. Walsh tries several times to present Emily Dickinson in Love as being scholarly, even while dismissing the importance of offering tangible proof. “[T]he truth in such veiled and volatile matters,” Walsh writes, “is [not] always recoverable through rational inquiry and the picking over of ‘evidence’” (80). He also writes, “It is not unlikely that in my drawing out of the latent content of the documents, some readers may feel that at times I exceed what is permissible or probable,” and, elsewhere, “in my explication of certain of her poems—those carrying, as I see it, biographical significance — I do not bother with larger meanings or with aesthetic considerations” (158, 4). Drawing, perhaps, upon an earlier career as editor at Reader’s Digest, Walsh’s writing style relies frequently upon hackneyed journalistic phrases and clichés, as when he describes the poet as “[a]pproaching Lord in a fever of love” (39). Walsh also often adopts a blustering tone evidently intended to distract his readers from examining shoddy evidence and leaky logic any more closely. Phrases like “of course,” “no doubt,” “surely,” and “certainly” are used to buttress points that are not at all certain. His frequent exclamation marks seemed to this reader to shout, while also betraying a lack of confidence in the persuasiveness of his prose.

In Emily Dickinson in Love, Walsh rehashes an argument he made in The Hidden Life of Emily Dickinson (1971) that Judge Lord was the intended recipient of the Master Letters. Yet his new book suffers from the same problems that his previous book did. With virtually no plausible textual or documentary evidence, Walsh now theorizes that, while convalescing in Boston during optical treatments, Dickinson carried on a series of cross-town adulterous trysts with the Judge. And Walsh helpfully provides a lithograph of the kinds of horse-drawn trams that “would have taken her conveniently to any part of the city for her rendezvous with Otis Lord.” Despite having written about Dickinson in the past, Walsh also sometimes displays an unaccountable lack of familiarity with some of the basic facts concerning her life. For example, on a page showing the famous daguerreotype of the poet, Walsh says that the picture was taken “while Emily was attending college in Northampton,” apparently mistaking the yet-to-be-established Smith College for Mount Holyoke, a few miles distant. Toward the end of Emily Dickinson in Love, Walsh suggests that Dickinson so deeply loved the Judge that after he died, she took her own life by swallowing a cocktail of poisons gathered by hoarding prescription medicines.

It all gets to be too much, and I cannot recommend this...