These Fevered Days

by Martha Ackmann

  ** Edward Dickinson witnessed an aurora borealis in Amherst the previous autumn. So emotionally moved by the display, he rang the church bell, alerting Amherst residents to the phenomenon. “We were all startled by a violent church bell ringing,” Emily wrote Austin, “and thinking nothing but fire, rushed out in the street to see. The sky was a beautiful red, bordering on a crimson, and rays of a gold pink color were constantly shooting off from a kind of sun in the centre.” [L53.]

  †† The Republican claimed that it was read by people in every state except Mississippi and every territory except Utah. [Stephen G. Weisner, Embattled Editor: The Life of Samuel Bowles, PhD Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1986, 52.]

  ‡‡ Eudocia Converse [Flynt], a first cousin of the poet’s mother, copied “‘Sic transit gloria mundi’” into her 1848–1853 commonplace book, along with the note “Valentine by Miss E Dickinson of Amherst.” Within some circles at least, readers knew the poem was Dickinson’s. [R. W. Franklin, ed, The Poems of Emily Dickinson Variorum Edition (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 49.]

  §§ Around early 1853, Emily enclosed a lock of her hair in a letter to Emily Fowler [Ford]. “I said when the Barber came, I would save you a little ringlet, and fulfilling my promise, I send you one today.” [L99.] Dickinson’s ring of hair is now in Amherst College’s Archives and Special Collections.

  Four

  DECIDED TO BE DISTINGUISHED

  Tuesday, January 4, 1859 7 am Barometer 29.835. Attached Therm. 35.1. Extern. Therm. 17.9. Cloudiness 10. Winds NW 3 mph. Humidity 100%. Remarks Stormy all day

  —Ebenezer Snell, The Meteorological Journal Kept at Amherst College

  The snow began before dawn and by the time Emily finished cleaning up breakfast, she could see several inches collecting outside the window. Quite a fairy morning, she thought, but the day wouldn’t stay enchanting for long.1 Already the storm, which had stretched from Virginia to Canada, halted train service, made mail delivery impossible, and caused people down in New York to nearly come to blows. “What right have the stage proprietors to sprinkle salt the whole length of Broadway in order to remove the snow, and thus spoil sleighing for the use of private citizens?” one resident complained.2 Stage drivers were wise to keep ahead of the storm. By the time the snow ended twenty-four hours later, Boston and Springfield were buried, and towering drifts leaned against houses, barns, and fence posts. The blizzard had Amherst College professors shaking their heads with a mixture of amusement and annoyance. For as long as anyone could remember, the very day students were due back from winter break, a snowstorm roared through New England. Some young men took advantage of the situation and delayed their arrival for one, two, or even three weeks. This snow would give “loiterers”—as they were called—an especially good excuse.3 By nightfall there would be nearly two feet on the ground. Few citizens of Amherst were out and about, but one was Emily’s fearless sister, who had shopping on her mind. In last Friday’s newspaper, Vinnie had seen an advertisement for Mr. Cutler’s store.* “Wool hoods, hosiery, gloves, furs, cuffs,” the notice announced, “For Sale Cheap.”4

  Emily did not join Vinnie on the walk “up-street,” as they called it. Sometimes when bad weather moved in, she wanted nothing more than to be left alone. She loved looking out windows, mesmerized by the images before her. Once she saw a pale storm “stalking through the fields” and “bowing” at the window, she said.5 Other times, she studied how snow turned to rain and then mist. “Soft fogs like vails hang on all the houses,” she wrote, and “the days turn Topaz, like a lady’s pin.”6 On another snowy day with her dog, Carlo, by her side, she placed both hands on the windowpanes and tried to imagine how birds flew. “I talk of all these things with Carlo, and his eyes grow meaning.”7 It was no secret to members of her family that Emily was always thinking and writing in her head—“poetizing,” she said—imagining a phrase from words that churned all around her.8 Yet it wasn’t enough to merely write down what she had imagined, she wanted to share it too. “Do I paint it natural,” she once asked Sue, “so you think how it looks?”9 Townspeople braving the storm that snowy morning would have seen her solitary figure at the Dickinson window. Solitary yes, but not detached. As she watched the snow, Emily was thinking about her prospects. She had just turned twenty-eight, a new year was upon her, and she was at a critical point in her life. Emily wanted to be distinguished.

  By 1859 much had changed in the lives of the Dickinson family. Austin had married and Edward had ventured into politics. Vinnie had ended her schooling. Even Emily found herself in new and surprising surroundings. She never thought she would see the White House or travel to Philadelphia. The changes began when the family packed up their belongings and moved. Deacon Mack, who’d bought the old Dickinson family homestead, had died, and Edward jumped at the chance to buy back the house. Although the move was only around the corner from their beloved home on West Street, Emily felt as though she had been thrown in a covered wagon bound for the prairie. “It is a kind of gone-to-Kansas feeling,” she said.10 She had been happy in the old home with its trellises, large garden, and the big stone step where she and friends exchanged confidences. But the family decision was her father’s and nothing could stop Edward from taking the opportunity to redress his own father’s financial failure and reestablish Dickinson prominence on Main Street. When the time came, Emily made the trek by foot. She noted her “‘effects’” were transported in a bandbox and “ ‘deathless me’” followed.11 Emily knew her siblings sometimes poked fun at her for being ethereal and she often played the part, calling the move back to Main Street a transit of “heavenly bodies.”12 But displeased with the uprooting as she was, she also laughed at her own melodrama, and offered a more earthbound definition of home: “They say that ‘home is where the heart is,’” she said. “I think it is where the house is, and the adjacent buildings.”13

  Austin and Sue soon followed with a move of their own. Since Austin’s time at Harvard Law School, his relationship with Sue Gilbert had deepened. By 1853 they had become secretly engaged, but it would be another three years before they married. After setting a date and then changing it several times, Sue and Austin finally wed on July 1, 1856, in Geneva, New York, with no family present, not even Emily, who was important to them both. Sue did not go in for fanfare, at least not then. “I have no extravagant ideas of life,” she had written her brother. “I expect to forego a great many enjoyments that wealth could procure . . . but I can do it very cheerfully and happily if the man I love well enough to marry, is unable to give them to me.”14 Sue’s brother may have detected some misgiving in the “well enough” phrase. He might also have known Austin had his own doubts. Seems strange, Austin had written about Sue, that two tall, proud, stiff people could love so well or hate so well.15 But Austin, aware of his reserve, vowed to change. Explaining what held him back, he admitted to Sue, “I have always been brought up to the idea that it was not a man’s part to show any one a tenderness unless in sore distress—but as water finds its level, so will our hearts find their true expression as the barriers to it are one by one broken down.”16 Emily—as always—worried about her brother’s well-being. Her credo was: whatever makes Austin happy. “After that,” she said, “I dont care.”17 In starting married life, Austin’s initial impulse had been to get away from Amherst. Emily knew that when her father and brother were together, the two men tangled. “Nothing but “‘fisticuff,’” she said.18 But she also saw their devotion when they were apart. Austin thought opening a law practice out West—Chicago, maybe—would be a good idea, a fresh start. But when Edward purchased the Dickinson Homestead, he made his son a tempting offer: stay in Amherst, join the Dickinson law office, and the house on the lot next door is yours. “It has been something of a sacrifice for Austin’s spirit and rather of a struggle with his pre-conceived ideas,” Sue wrote, but “I feel satisfied that in the end it will be best.” She added, Austin goes into partnership with his father
on even terms.19

  Emily was ecstatic that Sue Gilbert had become her sister-in-law. “My mother and my sister – thy mother and thy sister,” she wrote.20 In the weeks before Sue ended her teaching post in Baltimore, Emily had eagerly anticipated her return to Amherst. One day she let her attention in church wander, pondering what to wear for Sue’s arrival. Would the fawn-colored dress be better, or the blue one? “Just as I had decided by all means to wear the blue, down came the minister’s fist with a terrible rap on the counter,” she said. It took a while to regain her composure, she told Sue, and added, “I am glad I reached a conclusion!”21 As her friends married—Emily Fowler, Abiah Root, Jane Humphrey, Mattie Gilbert—Emily saw her circle shrink. More than any other friend, Sue meant the most to her. “I need you more and more,” she confessed, “and the great world grows wider, and dear ones fewer and fewer, every day.”22 Emily had much in common with her. Sue was smart, direct, opinionated, loved books and art, and the two young women could talk for hours. Sue liked being alone too. It had not escaped Emily’s attention that Sue took Austin’s letters outdoors to read, “to look at the hills and the trees and the blue, blue home.”23 Sue enjoyed being back in New England, where she had room to roam: she’d walk out to the mill or fields fresh with second mowing. Sometimes when she grew weary of housework, she would “saunter”—as she said—until she couldn’t take another step.24 Together, Emily and Sue would tramp for hours by brooks, across meadows, and up to a favorite high, gray rock.25 On a windy day undaunted by the gusts, Emily and Sue had set out for the train depot to retrieve a package for Vinnie, holding on to each other and their bonnets.26 Another time in winter at night, they walked to Plainville to hear a sermon. The length of the journey—six miles—was so common it did not receive a single mention in a letter to Austin.27 A gift Emily had fashioned for Sue’s return to Amherst expressed how close the two women had become. While walking alone one day, Emily had found a tiny snail shell, whitened by the snow. It looked like a “cunning artist had carved it from alabaster,” she said. She picked it up, nestled it against soft moss, and slipped it inside a leaf. Then she bound the tiny parcel with a blade of summer grass.28 The gift was exquisite, tender, and intimate. It suggested Emily believed Sue could appreciate—and maybe even understand—all she could create.

  On that snowy day when Vinnie ventured out, Emily could discern the outlines of her sister-in-law’s home, but remained indoors. When winter bore down, Emily savored “going into the pod,” she said.29 Over the years, Sue and Austin had enlarged the small house Edward presented as a wedding gift, and the Evergreens—as they now called it—had become a fashionable residence with a formal parlor, porches, and a piazza. Only 150 steps separated the two homes, but with snow mounting—Emily knew better than to brave the path between them. As much as she did not like tending to chores, it was warm inside the Homestead, and Emily occupied herself with a basket of sewing. The house was quiet and her mother was resting. Emily recognized that the move to Main Street had been hard on her mother. More often than not, Mrs. Dickinson could be found reclining on a lounger or sitting quietly in a chair. Something was wrong with her, but no one knew exactly what, and the uncertainty of her illness weighed heavily on everyone. For Vinnie and Emily, it also made for more housekeeping—a burden Emily was always quick to point out. But she was sympathetic to her mother. Perhaps Mrs. Dickinson missed the old home with the rooms she knew so well: a domain she proudly governed as her own. Emily stared into the snow and tried to conjure up a phrase from the images. Then she pulled out a sheet of paper. She wanted company—at least, the kind of visit she often preferred—one on paper. “Since it snows this morning, dear Loo, too fast for interruption,” she began in a letter, “put your brown curls in a basket, and come sit with me.”30

  Loo was Emily’s cousin, the sixteen-year-old daughter of her beloved Aunt Lavinia and Uncle Loring Norcross. Loo and her younger sister Fanny had become Emily’s closest relatives now that Cousin Emily Norcross was gone. While teaching in Ohio, Emily’s Mount Holyoke roommate had become ill with consumption. A few months after she returned to Massachusetts, she died at age twenty-four. The same independence and ambition that Emily had appreciated in Cousin Emily, she found in Loo. “I am sewing for Vinnie, and Vinnie is flying through the flakes to buy herself a little hood,” she continued in her letter. “I often lay down my needle . . . which seriously impedes the sewing project. What if I pause a little longer, and write a note to you! Who will be the wiser?”31 Emily’s aim that day was not simply to write Loo about the snow or Vinnie’s shopping expedition. She wanted to return to a previous conversation she could not get out of her mind. “I have known little of you,” she continued, “since the October morning when our families went out driving, and you and I in the dining-room decided to be distinguished. It’s a great thing to be ‘great,’ Loo, and you and I might tug for a life, and never accomplish it, but no one can stop our looking on, and you know some cannot sing, but the orchard is full of birds, and we all can listen. What if we learn, ourselves some day!”32 For months, Emily had thought about their conversation and—as much as she already knew she was a poet—she understood that it would take effort to become a great one. She wanted to learn. She wanted to be brilliant. She wanted fame. The only question was how to achieve it.

  One answer already had revealed itself to her. Recently Emily had become acquainted with a literary man—Dr. Josiah Holland, coeditor of the Springfield Republican. The newspaper had printed Emily’s comic valentine poem in 1852, praising her verse and inviting her to submit more. Over years of reporting on Amherst for the newspaper, Dr. Holland had become friendly with the entire Dickinson family. Emily and Vinnie had paid a visit to Holland and his wife, Elizabeth, and the sojourn had opened Emily’s eyes to a larger world. Emily noted, for example, that when Dr. Holland offered family prayers, he spoke of God as a friend. “That was a different God,” she said—a warmer, more intimate deity than the one invoked in the Dickinsons’ prayers.33 Holland had no use for orthodoxy and doctrines, and he trusted his own heart above a preacher’s decrees. “Christianity, in the form of abstract statement, and in the shape of a creed,” he had said, “has not for me any particular meaning. I have to test things through my heart and best feelings.”34 Dr. Holland’s approach to religion aligned more with Emily’s own. She wanted to think through the question of faith herself, and she held fast to the belief that heaven on Earth would always outweigh heaven above. “My only sketch, profile, of Heaven,” she once wrote, “is a large, blue sky, bluer and larger than the biggest I have seen in June. . . . no need of other Heaven.”35

  Emily enjoyed writing letters to Josiah and Elizabeth Holland, and they became two of her favorite correspondents. When she wrote to them, the style and tone of her letters shifted slightly, as if she were trying to impress the couple. Emily was aware that her own words occasionally missed the mark: that her meaning could be lost in abstraction and wordiness. With the Hollands, she sometimes had to double back and clarify what she meant. “If it wasn’t for broad daylight, and cooking-stoves, and roosters,” she wrote Mr. and Mrs. Holland, “I’m afraid you would have occasion to smile at my letters often, but so sure as ‘this mortal’ essays immortality, a crow from a neighboring farm-yard dissipates the illusion, and I am here again. And what I mean is this – that I thought of you all last week.”36 As much as she tried to be “sensible”—as she called it—such practicality in her writing didn’t last long. There always was metaphor and abstraction in her words. “My letter,” she told them, almost apologetically, “as a bee, goes laden.”37

  Emily had reason to respect Dr. Holland: he was a prolific and successful writer. Besides editing the Republican, he wrote fiction, essays, history, columns, and poems. He also knew publishers in New York, and word had it that when he had read one of his manuscripts to Charles Scribner, the powerful publisher had halted him midsentence and said: “Stop there. I’ll take the book.”38 That wintry morning as Emily thoug
ht about greatness, she knew the path to literary fame that Dr. Holland pursued would be difficult for her to follow: it was too public. In recent years, Emily’s solitude had grown more pronounced. Her family assumed she would rarely consent to trips away from home and sometimes even visits with friends in Amherst. They didn’t push. Her strategies for avoiding people were many. She waited to arrive in church until everyone was seated so she could avoid conversation.39 She played the piano for guests, but only if they stayed in another room with a door cracked open.40 When delivering a letter to a friend in town, she rang the bell and ran.41 Forced to come downstairs to entertain a guest, she did so with an admittedly “sorry grace”—irritable, reluctant, and defiant.42 She even confessed to fleeing to avoid chores. “I do love to run fast,” she said, “and hide away from them all.”43 Her reasons for seclusion were also numerous: she disdained social chatter; she was old-fashioned; she disliked some people or found them not worth her time; socializing left her depleted; people stared; retreat was invigorating.44 Emily had a word for her retreats—“flying.”45 On one of her “flying days” she told Sue about trying to slip into church unnoticed. The scene she painted was comical in parts, but it also revealed her distress and panic:

  I’m just from meeting, Susie, and as I sorely feared, my “life” was made a “victim.” I walked – I ran – I turned precarious corners – One moment I was not – then soared aloft like Phoenix, soon as the foe was by – and then anticipating an enemy again, my soiled and drooping plumage might have been seen emerging from just behind a fence, vainly endeavoring to fly once more . . . I smiled to think of me, and my geometry, during the journey there – It would have puzzled Euclid . . . How big and broad the aisle seemed, full huge enough before, as I quaked slowly up – and reached my usual seat! . . . There I sat, and sighed, and wondered I was scared so, for surely in the whole world was nothing I need to fear – Yet there the Phantom was, and though I kept resolving to be as brave as Turks, and bold as Polar Bears, it did’nt help me any. After the opening prayer I ventured to turn around. Mr. Carter immediately looked at me – Mr. Sweetser attempted to do so, but I discovered nothing, up in the sky somewhere, and gazed intently at it, for quite half an hour. During the exercises, I became more calm, and got out of church quite comfortably. Several roared around, and, sought to devour me. . . . until our gate was reached, I need’nt tell you, Susie, just how I clutched the latch, and whirled the merry key, and fairly danced for joy, to find myself at home!46