These Fevered Days

by Martha Ackmann

  In Emily’s mind, fame was equated with the public sphere. It was no accident that she found it unlikely to consider a literary career similar to Dr. Holland’s. No doubt Sue, Austin, and Vinnie would have agreed, shaking their heads at the idea of Emily traveling to New York to speak with an influential publisher. Emily could hardly transact business in Amherst without feeling drained. In running errands, Emily admitted, “coming to anchor, is most that I can do.”47 The path to distinction that Dr. Holland followed—while instructive—suited him, not her. Making connections through business associates, presenting a manuscript for publication, addressing public audiences, receiving reviews, traveling on lecture tours—were activities that Emily would have found presumptive and petrifying. In recent years, she was allowing fewer people into her secluded world, although there always were exceptions. Vinnie was quick to point out that Emily continued to look for the “rewarding person”—someone to spar with and ignite her mind.48 With so few intimates, it was surprising that Cousin Loo was one of them. Young as she was, Loo was unlikely to help her older cousin puzzle through the large questions Emily was now facing. After all, what would a schoolgirl have known about the balance between privacy and fame? But what others could not see, Emily frequently could. She recognized a quality in her cousin—loyalty, perhaps—that others failed to notice. Emily knew she wanted Loo in her life. “For you remember, dear,” she wrote her cousin that morning, “you are one of the ones from whom I do not run away!”49

  Someone else who could have offered a receptive ear was Emily’s childhood friend Helen Fiske. The Dickinsons saw Helen from time to time. One day Austin had caught sight of her on a sidewalk in Boston. She had been with someone, he said, a “large, ambling long-faced, ungraceful, brass-buttoned individual of some forty to fifty years. . . . I took [him] to be her Lieutenant.”50 Austin was wrong about the age of Helen’s escort. He had just turned thirty. But he was right about their close relationship. Lt. Edward Bissell Hunt—the military man she had met at the Albany Christmas Ball—had proposed, and Helen had accepted. After they married, the Hunts moved to Washington, DC, where Edward was stationed with the Army Corps of Engineers. In 1853, their son, Murray, was born. After years of loss and transience, Helen’s life had finally achieved stability—but there also were frustrations. The boardinghouse was noisy, her husband’s work demanded nearly all his time, and the new baby needed constant attention. Once, during a conversation with other boarders, a remark about women writers left Helen fuming. One of Edward’s fellow officers had excoriated Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He called Mrs. Stowe “a talented fiend in human shape!!”51 Helen spoke up defending abolition and Stowe’s right to publish. But any thoughts she had about someday becoming a writer herself soon vanished. The Hunts’ infant son died of a brain tumor, and she was emotionally adrift again.

  Helen might have welcomed a visit from Emily and literary talk. As surprising as it was, Emily Dickinson had been in Washington, DC. She and Vinnie were with their father who had won election to the US House of Representatives.† The Dickinson sisters stayed at the Willard Hotel a few blocks from the White House and close to Helen’s boardinghouse. Vinnie and Emily toured Mount Vernon, sailed down the Potomac in a painted boat, and met dignitaries. Emily found herself swept up in the bustle of Washington and not entirely happy about it. “All is jostle, here – scramble and confusion,” she said.52 The meeting between Helen and Emily never happened. Helen was simply not up to seeing anyone. She spent days reading condolence letters, and declining invitations. “Still my conscience troubles me a little,” she admitted, because the Dickinsons “are from dear old Amherst.”53 Before Helen knew it, Emily was gone.

  After they departed Washington, Emily and Vinnie proceeded to Philadelphia to visit Amherst neighbors who had taken up residence there. The friends introduced the sisters to Rev. Charles Wadsworth, their charismatic minister. The forty-one-year-old Wadsworth was known for his powerful words and poetic sensibility, and had increased his congregation from twelve families to a church bursting with parishioners. He was also rising in national prominence. Mark Twain was among those who recognized the minister’s talents, including his humor. “Dr. Wadsworth,” he said, “never fails to preach an able sermon; but every now and then, with an admirable assumption of not being aware of it, he will get off a firstrate joke and then frown severely at any one who is surprised into smiling at it.” The reverend’s words, Mark Twain said, were like “lightning from a clear sky, when least expected there is a flash and a smash.”54 After Emily returned to Amherst from her travels, a friend sent her a pamphlet of Wadsworth’s most celebrated sermons. Some said Emily even started writing to the celebrated clergyman, although no one could be certain.

  Edward Dickinson had not accompanied his daughters to Philadelphia; he had been closing his office in Washington. After only one term, Edward Dickinson had lost his reelection bid. “Lost” was a generous word for what had happened: he had been trounced. In Amherst, voters turned against him nearly 2 to 1.55 The defeat had been a disappointment, but not a surprise. Edward Dickinson’s Whig Party had become a dying breed.‡ While he abhorred slavery and spoke out against it as early as his student years at Yale, Edward Dickinson believed the federal government should not interfere with states and argued that a federal law to end slavery was unconstitutional. How Congressman Dickinson could oppose the formation of new slave states while upholding the right of Southern states to perpetuate slavery struck voters as absurd. They viewed old-line Whigs as compromised—“fossil politicians” one had called them—and voted them out.56 If Emily disagreed with her father’s stance on slavery, she did not say. Initially Edward’s election to Congress had stunned her into silence. She told Sue that when she heard the news her “mind came to a stand, and has since then been stationary.”57 She was only half joking. Politics to her was loud, rough, unrestrained, even bombastic, and visiting Washington had confirmed that. She often responded to political talk with humor that could be read as disapproving. Once when dining at the Willard Hotel and presented with a flaming dessert, she was heard to remark, “Oh, Sir, may one eat of hell fire with impunity here?”58 Yet as much as that clamorous environment ill suited her, Emily could not escape it. She heard her father and brother discussing “electioneering,” read about Edward’s political triumphs and defeats in the newspaper, and when her father attended a political convention, she quipped to Sue, “Why cant I be a Delegate to the great Whig Convention? – dont I know all about Daniel Webster, and the Tariff, and the Law?”59 She certainly felt like an outsider to her father’s political world, a bit like the drawing she scribbled on a piece of his congressional stationery—a Native American in full headdress strolling past the Capitol dome. Emily knew she would never be allowed inside—neither did she seek entry. What she wanted was quiet and solitude. “I often wish I was a grass, or a toddling daisy, whom all these problems of the dust might not terrify,” she wrote Mrs. Holland. “And should my own machinery get slightly out of gear . . . some one stop the wheel.”60 After his election defeat, Edward Dickinson may have better understood his daughter’s inclination toward seclusion.§ The time for his brand of conservative politics had passed as the fissure between the North and the South widened. Perhaps Mr. Dickinson recognized that the national stage was not for him. He was frequently absent from Congress and his pronouncements from the House floor were to little effect. He left Washington and withdrew to Amherst, where—with his family—he ensconced himself behind a tall hemlock hedge.

  Emily claimed the second-floor bedchamber of the new house. She spent hours at her desk at a window that overlooked the town, the college, and Austin and Sue’s home. She was writing more, and her writing had changed. For one thing, the valentines were gone. The last one anyone could remember Emily sending was years before, and on commercially produced valentine paper from Mr. Adams’s store.61 With the shift away from composing her own valentines, she also shed her youthful need to exaggerate, flaunt
her wit, and trot out erudition. She still sent poems to mark an event or nudge someone to write, but her poems became less about what happened and more about what she was thinking. Poems sent in letters to Sue, Loo, and the Hollands rose above daily concerns to larger contemplations on nature, faith, and loss. Images of boats, sailors, and the view from shore appeared frequently. “Adrift! A little boat adrift!” began one verse—three stanzas that ended with the image of a small boat buffeted by gales that managed to shoot “exultant on!”62 Another had someone staring out to sea in search of a boat’s “mystic mooring.”63 In a letter to the Hollands, Emily offered a different turn on the subject that was cryptic and confounding. “Goodnight! My ships are in!,” she had written. “My window overlooks the wharf! One yacht, and a man-o-war; two brigs and a schooner! ‘Down with the topmast! Lay her a’ hold, a’ hold!’”64 Absent from the passage was any attempt to clarify exactly she meant. The “what I mean is” explanation that Emily had included in earlier letters had vanished. It appeared Emily had decided that if her writing were difficult to understand, then her readers would have to make an effort to reach her rather than the other way around. She already had given up on Austin, vowing never again to send him anything lofty, only trifles and “crickets upon the hearth,” she said.65

  By the time Emily told Loo she wanted to be distinguished, she already had written nearly fifty poems.¶ They were full of edits, alterations, changes in order, and changes of mind. She waffled over opening lines, sent different versions of the same poem to different correspondents, wrote one poem and then recomposed it as prose. There were verses with lines so fiercely crossed out they were nearly impossible to read.

  One Sister have I in the house –

  And one a hedge away.

  Emily wrote. Then, as if frustrated, she drew thick loops over every word and started over.66 Sometimes Emily would carefully write a poem and fold the sheet as if for mailing, but never send it. She dated practically nothing and almost never included titles. One poem was as short as two lines and others extended to five or six stanzas. There were countless images from nature—robins, gentians, owls, snowflakes—and verses that echoed the religious cadences of her youth:

  In the name of the Bee –

  And of the Butterfly –

  And of the Breeze – Amen!67

  Several poems described an aching void that she refused to identify. The mass of poems surrounding her must have looked like a disorganized workshop or the scattered production of an amateur. But nothing was further from the truth. Emily was making a plan, carving out her own route to distinction even if she would not say so directly. Emily was even more indirect about describing the kind of poetry she wanted to write. A clue appeared in a letter to Emily Fowler Ford with congratulations on her wedding. “You stood before us all and made those promises, and when we kissed you,” she had written, “it seemed to me translation, not any earthly thing, and if a little after you’d ridden on the wind, it would not have surprised me.”68 Emily could have been talking about her verse. She wanted her poems to translate all she saw and heard and felt, and not be any earthly thing. What she aimed for was evanescence like the brilliance of lightning, the flash of truth, or a transport so swift it felt like flight.

  Among the jumble of papers on Emily’s desk was also a curious letter—a missive so private and inscrutable it seemed almost an invasion to read. She was writing to a man, but she did not identify him. He could have been a fancy of her imagination, and it was unclear if the letter had been sent or remained as a draft. In spite of all that was not said, it was clear Emily felt urgency. She feared her correspondent had been ill or perhaps had died. Although time and distance had passed between them, Emily wanted to please him. “Dear Master I am ill,” she wrote, “but grieving more that you are ill, I make my stronger hand work long eno’ to tell you. I thought perhaps you were in Heaven, and when you spoke again, it seemed quite sweet, and wonderful, and surprised me so . . . I wish that I were great, like Mr. Michael Angelo, and could paint for you. . . . Listen again, Master. I did not tell you that today had been the Sabbath Day. Each Sabbath on the Sea, makes me count the Sabbaths, till we meet on shore – and (will the) whether the hills will look as blue as the sailors say.# I cannot talk any more (stay any longer) tonight (now), for this pain denies me. How strong when weak to recollect, and easy, quite, to love. Will you tell me, please to tell me, soon as you are well.”69 The letter was extraordinary in its vulnerability. And as difficult as it often was to understand Emily—this letter was even more enigmatic than the rest. She would not—at least for now—make her reasons for writing clear.

  Many times during her Mount Holyoke Female Seminary days Emily heard Mary Lyon’s advice: try to be systematic; develop effective habits; don’t waste time. Mount Holyoke’s founder had urged her charges to avoid succumbing to disorganization and squandered effort. When Emily surveyed the sea of papers around her, she knew she needed a better system for preserving her poems. She needed to contain the disorder, maintain a record of what she had accomplished, separate good poems from false starts, polish poems in draft form, produce final copies without edits or alternate words, and prepare a compendium in case she wanted to do something with them—something other than sending them to her private public.** There was another reason too. She wanted to place her words on the page exactly as she envisioned them, complete with unconventional capital letters, dashes instead or commas or periods, and her own unique line divisions and stanza breaks. Her published works in the Amherst College Indicator and Springfield Republican followed the conventions of print, but those choices had been an editor’s not hers. What would her poems look like if she created a book of her own? Emily decided that if she wanted to be distinguished, she would have to do so on her own terms. The route Dr. Holland pursued was appropriate for a man, but—like Helen Hunt—she knew a woman faced different obstacles. Emily reached for a piece of cream-colored stationery—fine paper with a formal finish appropriate for something important and lasting. The page already had been folded in half by the manufacturer so she could write on all four sides. She paged through her pile of poems and selected one. “The Gentian weaves her fringes.” Emily placed the worksheet draft in front of her and copied the poem onto the elegant writing paper. She made sure the G of “Gentian” was capitalized and the M in “Maple” in the next line as well. Dashes, commas, placement on the page were all exactly as she wanted. She looked through the stack, selected another poem, turned the page, and began copying again.

  Frequently the woods are pink –

  Frequently, are brown.

  Frequently the hills undress

  Behind my native town –

  At the end of the twelve-line poem, she drew a short horizontal line indicating the poem was finished and then filled out the page with a third verse. She turned the page and selected another gentian one, beginning

  Distrustful of the Gentian –

  And just to turn away,

  The fluttering of her fringes

  Chid my perfidy – 70

  When Emily finished with the piece of stationery, she took another sheet and filled its pages with four more poems, then another sheet with five more, and another with seven. The boat poems went in; the valentines did not. When she finished copying each poem, she destroyed the worksheet.

  With four folded sheets in front of her, Emily looked over the pages. Twenty-two poems in all. It was enough, she thought. Enough for now. But she wasn’t finished. She needed to make the collection permanent. She wanted to bind the sheets so that she could hold them in her hand like one of Mr. Emerson’s books. Emily picked up the four sheets, stacked one on top of the other and looked around for something to attach them. She found a piece of string, cream-colored like the stationery. It was too thick to be threaded through a needle, but if she poked holes through the side of the stacked pages, she would be able to push the string through and hold everything together. She reached into her sewing basket and found a needl
e. It looked large enough to make an opening. She held the stack of pages in her hand, punched a hole on the side and moved the needle back and forth to make a hole big enough for the string. She poked another hole farther down and wobbled the needle. Then she joined the string in front with a knot. It worked. Years earlier, when she was a schoolgirl at Amherst Academy, she’d made a herbarium and filled it with species of leaves and plants and flowers. She had been proud of the collection: her first book, one might say. But like valentines, the herbarium was the project of an ambitious young woman. She was older now—almost thirty. Emily looked up-street to see if Vinnie was returning from Mr. Cutler’s store. I “build a castle in the air,” she wrote Loo.71 Her cousin would know what she meant. Emily was writing. She always was—poetizing, reciting lines in her head or sitting at her desk behind the hedge with worksheet in hand. Before long, whatever verse she had composed would join the stack of papers nearby. If she thought it was distinguished, she would pull out another sheet of cream stationery and search for needle and string. “Fascicles” someone would later call her hand-sewn booklets. Emily gave no name for what she had produced. All she knew was that when she opened the volume, the words were her own—and the pinhole in the page before her looked like wings.