SALEM — They say the truth will out.
Generations of literary sleuths thought they knew all there was to know about Emily Dickinson, one of America's greatest poets, a woman of the Victorian Age, pictured in white, secluded from the rough-and-tumble world in her family's comfortable Amherst home.
Hers was a passion of the mind even as she remained a spinster, alone, a virgin until her death at age 55 in 1886. In lieu of romance, she satisfied herself with harmless flirting via letters.
Or did she?
"She did say," Susan Snively said, "'I dwell in possibilities.'" So. "It's possible she is a virgin. It's possible she is not."
What's more, Snively, 66, believes she has evidence to cast doubt on the conventional wisdom. She speaks and writes of a woman whose desires ran off the printed page.
Snively is a poet, a filmmaker, a guide at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst and a retired teacher — at Smith, Mount Holyoke and Amherst colleges. Currently, she is on the trail of what may be the long-hidden Dickinson love affair.
It's a trail that leads right here to Salem and this city's own Judge Otis Phillips Lord, at one time a member of the state's Supreme Judicial Court.
She called him "Little Phil," Snively said. He called her "Jumbo," a playful name for a remarkably petite woman.
Tomorrow, Snively will discuss her study of Dickinson in a talk at The Salem Athenaeum titled "My lovely Salem smiles at me," a phrase from one of the poet's letters.
If it could be proved that Dickinson, one of the most studied American writers, had known physical love, it might change the way we see her, the way some read her.
More to the point, Snively said, "It might make some of us a littler happier to know that she had a mutual love that gave her pleasure."
Midlife romance
Judge Lord was himself a remarkable man, "a tiger in court," Snively said. He was her father's contemporary and best friend. It's likely Lord knew Emily first as a 4-year-old.
"He watched her grow up," Snively said.
After his wife died childless, "he and Emily got involved." She was 47. "He visited a lot. The evidence of letters she wrote to him indicate they were very close." His letters to her somehow vanished.
They shared similar ideas about life and literature. Letters also refer to her "lying in his arms."
At one point, the pair are interrupted in an embrace by Dickinson's unhappy sister-in-law. "A little hussy," is how she describes Dickinson at one point.
The disparity in age of nearly 20 years is one reason some dismiss the possibility of a full, physical relationship. Lord's portrait at the court is off-putting, Snively said.
"He was not a babe magnet. ... He looks as if he's staring into the mouth of hell," she said.
Yet, Dickinson wrote provocatively, "while others go to Church, I go to mine, for are you not my Church, and have we not a Hymn that no one knows but us?"
Snively cites not only Dickinson's words but, more intriguingly, the absence of those words. At the museum, she has gone over the torn pages, fragments of sentences that comprise some of Dickinson's papers, correspondence and musings ravaged by someone and kept from public inspection until 1954.
When they were finally released, Snively said, "they revealed an Emily Dickinson the world hadn't known about."
The condition of those papers smacks of someone with something to hide. And Snively believes she knows who — Dickinson's brother Austin, who was involved in an illicit affair himself.
Clues from the poet
Born in New Orleans, Snively grew up in Louisville, Ky., but has lived mostly in New England. She is currently working on a novel centered on the Dickinson-Lord relationship. She's even imagined a love scene, though she cautions, "It's not pornography. I couldn't do that. I have to sleep at night."
She concedes Dickinson might not appreciate this prying into her most intimate secrets. But the researcher suggests it's Dickinson herself, in everything she writes, trying to get the truth out. "All I really want to do is listen to her voice," Snively said.
Nobody really knows what happened between the couple, Snively said. She's not making authoritative pronouncements. But she points to clues: the passion in Dickinson's writing and particularly her passion as she writes about "Phil."
"My lovely Salem smiles at me. I seek his Face so often — but I have done with guises. I confess that I love him — I rejoice that I love him — I thank the maker of Heaven and Earth — that gave him me to love — the exultation floods me. I cannot find my channel — the Creek turns Sea — at thought of thee —"
EMILY DICKINSON & JUDGE OTIS Phillips LORD
What: A lecture by Susan Snively
When: Tomorrow, 7 p.m.
Where: Salem Athenaeum, 337 Essex St., Salem
Admission: $15, $10 members, students free
More information and reservations: www.salem athenaeum.net
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