Various Emilys/Gondals - by Josie/Jocelyn Deane
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We’re getting back into Dungeons and Dragons, ordering Ghost Pan pizza. I’m experimenting with close reading, through the language of dice rolls and spell lists. Emily Dickinson, my character – who may not be an exact representation of Emily Dickinson – is sleeping in the garret she rents in the fictional city of Sigil. We agree there’s nothing much in her room. A bed. A chest of drawers, a mirror and a crucifix, a chair. Emily’s white dress is slumped across its back, caked in dry sewage, from when she first materialised in the Slags, a land-locked Pacific trash vortex of Sigil’s underbelly. She’s asleep, after a full day supervising the Black Rose bookstore/co-op. Her passive perception is 20; nothing escapes her. Her charisma is 18; she easily makes the persuasion rolls to hawk the fantasy equivalent of Kropotkin or Spivak to any borrowers. The Game Master (GM) asks: does she still hope she’ll wake up back in Massachusetts? ‘Hope is a thing with feathers, right?’ they add.
Each of us gives the GM our character sheets: our states, spells, proficiencies. Moreover, our bonds, ideals and flaws. D&D has these listed out, itemised, as per the background we choose for our characters. The GM sits us down privately and asks what our characters cherish, what we can infer from this. The GM builds what they call their ‘knives’: painful details, drawn from our backstory, sprung on us to induce character development.
Emily Dickinson is dreaming. She’s on stage somewhere, like a ventriloquist. She can’t make sense of the crowd. She begins to panic, remembers travelling circuses, Barnum and Bailey. ‘Did Barnum and Bailey exist when Dickinson was alive?’ the GM asks. Emily gets the impression she is being asked to read, but can’t speak. She can only garble fragments from poems she’s written and others she’s admired, like translating a ouija board:
No coward soul –
I see— I’ve known
a— like a tent— its shining—
rip of nail—
to signalise—
God— North America.
Emily Dickinson wakes up, still in Sigil, the city of interdimensional doors.
x
Emily Dickinson died in Amherst, Massachusetts, 1886, in the same house in which she was born. The physician attending her diagnosed Bright’s disease, inflammation of the kidneys with accompanying cardiac problems, as the cause of death. She had instructed her sister, Lavinia, to burn their correspondence.
At her funeral, Thomas Higginson – the critic and radical abolitionist with whom Dickinson had ambivalently shared her poetry – read Emily Brontë’s ‘No Coward Soul Is Mine’.
When Emily Brontë’s sister Charlotte discovered her poetry, she insisted on its publication to support their destitute family. Emily was horrified, but agreed. Emily’s poems appeared with Charlotte’s and Anne’s work under masculine pseudonyms derived from the first letters of their names: Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Only two copies were sold.
Anne and Emily, as children, created a shared imaginary world called Gondal. During their lives, and at different ages, they created several such games/worlds. First, the Glasstown Confederacy, with their older siblings joining in: island nations, like ‘Yorkshire’, derived from a box of tin soldiers gifted to their brother. Others were named after British luminaries like Wellington, the explorer and colonialist William Parry, the Arctic navigator John Ross. The capital of each island was called Glasstown. Charlotte describes:
Mine was the prettiest of the whole & perfect in every part. Emily’s was a Grave looking fellow we called him Gravey. Anne's was a queer little thing very much like herself. [H]e was called Waiting Boy …
This later became ‘Angria’, a world/game in which the Duke of Wellington and his sons, who were giants, were heroes.
Anne and Emily – as the youngest – were given subordinate roles. They staged a rebellion, like the Boston Tea Party, and christened their new world Gondal; just for the two of them. Eventually, their games metastasised into prose, poetry and diary entries. They’ve been called early examples of speculative fiction, coded auto/biography and Real Person fan fics. The prose is lost, but poems from Gondal survive. Apparently – though it’s not certain – Anne and Emily played Gondal to the ends of their lives.
x
You imagine two Gondals meeting each other, post-lockdown; the fictional country, and the real city in India. Maybe at a café in the Block Arcade on Little Collins Street, gold light through the discount Belle Epoque skylights and Art Nouveau filigree. They order earl grey with soy milk. One of them talks about an awe-inspiring, 10-storey Wellington, reforming the land with his stride. The other talks about how the Portuguese sold Bombay to Charles II for ten pounds a year.
At some point in 2018, a group of people are holding a séance at Hares & Hyenas, in Fitzroy, Naarm. The event is called ‘Dramatis Personae’, possibly after Robert Browning. There are still photos on Facebook; if you type it in, you’ll find them. You can’t remember how long it went for: you left before it was done. In one photo, everyone who took part is posing, to channel the ghosts of canonical poets. Everyone selected to channel knows each other here, much as you would expect their spirits to in heaven. Everyone portrays the dead as close to their popular image as possible. Cis-men portray men, except for one – who wears a fedora and speaks waspishly – as Dorothy Parker.
There’s someone dressed as Edgar Allan Poe: pencilled-on moustache, black cravat, eyeshadow, a deep red scarf, tearing up ‘The Raven’, almost screaming the last stanza. Their partner is Lord Byron as he died in the Greek War of Independence; he is standing beside Hugo Ball, in a metal bird costume, performing Dadaist soundscapes during World War 1: a tube of whipped cream wearing a Superman cape. One of them bookends their set, saying: ‘No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of...’ before the mic cuts.
In your D&D game, a demi-monde is a sentient being. Just as the city is full of trans-dimensional portals a rose, an out-of-order toilet, a phrase uttered walking down a side-street – certain streets are the mouths of demi-mondes, depositing you at the Slags, the Cathedral Wards, the Financial Sectors, like Jonah and the Whale. A demi-monde could spit you up in Massachusetts, the fictional country Gondal or the real city Gondal.
The old man impersonating Arthur Rimbaud on the right of the frame, performing his poems in a Hercule Poirot accent, emphasises, ‘We don’t know – after he stopped writing in his early twenties – if in fact Rimbaud went into the slave trade. There’s no reliable biography from that time.’ In the centre of the picture, in a handstitched gown, pre-Victorian tresses, Emily Brontë is sitting.
One Gondal tells the other about its geography: the residential girls schools, modelled off the institutions both Emilys passed through. The other makes a comment about how the words of the dead are modified, passing through the guts of the living. ‘Pankaj Udhas was born in me, the first replies. A ghazal singer. He had a lot of hits in the ’80s.’ They watch each other. The block is closing. It spits them back into the light.
Unlike everyone else, who channel their poets unproblematically, Emily Brontë is aware of her death. She chats amiably on stage about cohabiting with the other canonical poets: she and her sisters have had Christopher Marlowe and William Burroughs – who are dating – over for tea (this is said in exasperation; William Burroughs has just removed the bright orange codpiece he wore for his set; he spent the majority of time poring over the details of the accidental murder of his wife). She reminisces about the tuberculosis that killed her, fondly. How she and Anne had kept up their games in their imaginary world, how – quoting one of her biographers – they remain ‘in the very closest sympathy which never had any interruption’.
As Emily Dickinson is sleeping in her garret in Sigil, in the demiplane of air, another person named Emily Dickinson is working as a dock-hand. Like Sigil-Emily, this person shares Emily Dickinson’s memories, but if you pointed at them and said ‘Emily Dickinson!’ someone might raise their eyebrows. Imagine the transporter from Star Trek, with which philosophers of personal identity are obsessed; two or more Emilys emerging from it. Elsewhere, another Emily Dickinson wakes up in Massachusetts and breathes the frost through the window.
We run a support group for other poets who died from tuberculosis, she says: John Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Novalis, who is also performing here. Part of the therapy – she laughs – is figuring out from what time someone has become unstuck. To conclude her set, she reads ‘No Coward Soul Is Mine’, a poem she says that her biographer argued was ‘probably as an answer to the violation of her privacy and her own transformation into a published writer’.
She continues quoting: ‘Despite what my sister Charlotte may have said, it was not my last poem.’ Emily smiles. ‘I’ll have to speak to Charlotte one of these days about that.’ Everyone titters.
The lights come up for the break; the photo is taken. It reminds you of Victorian ghost photography: spirits and/or a person transparently edited into the frame, hovering at your shoulder. Everyone talks like understudies, commiserating. ▼
The image at the start of this article is a kaleidoscopic composite of Emile Bronte (left, from group portrait by her brother Branwell) and Emily Dickenson (right, from daguerreotype taken at Mount Holyoke, Dec 1846 or early 1847).
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