After his wounding, Thomas Wentworth’s Higginson’s health improved, but not by much. Doctors finally diagnosed his weakness as malaria and he rested in camp presiding over courts-martial, and walking once or twice a day to the river. Many days Higginson sat with Charlotte Forten and edited her manuscript on life in the Sea Islands. Editor James T. Fields at the Atlantic Monthly might enjoy it, he thought.¶¶¶ Higginson seemed constitutionally unable to turn aside a serious woman who asked for literary help. It was not merely courtesy that propelled him. He believed in women’s rights, and his impulse was political as much as literary. Colonel Higginson suspected he would not stay in the military any longer. He loved his men and the soldier’s life, but with his health impaired, he no longer felt useful. “I can understand a gradual sliding into slippers & dressing gown,” he admitted, perhaps with a touch of guilt—the old tug between a life of the mind and a life of action continuing to trouble him.34 He thought of returning to Cambridge, Massachusetts, his hometown. He had no idea Emily Dickinson had moved there herself. By the spring of 1864, Higginson resigned his post. His wife, Mary, had grown tired of Worcester and proposed moving to a boardinghouse in Newport, Rhode Island: the rent was affordable and the city was filled with artists and writers. Higginson wrapped up his military business and set sail for New England. He did not know what awaited him. “I have no restless ambition, never have had,” he wrote Mary.35 In June the Springfield Republican reported, “Col. T. W. Higginson is now at Newport, R.I., in poor health.”36
Emily was in Cambridge when she heard the news. “Are you in danger – I did not know that you were hurt,” she wrote. “Will you tell me more?”37 Months as an invalid had made Emily more considerate of Higginson. “A nearness to Tremendousness – / An Agony procures,” she had written in a poem.38 Her previous letters always had focused on her needs, but this time she asked about him. “I wish to see you more than before I failed,” she said.39 The news of Higginson’s health left Emily distressed, and she worried his letters might not find her at the boardinghouse. Her handwriting was larger and more disjoint, and she didn’t trust her eyes to legibly write her new address.### She scissored the details from another letter: “Miss Dickinson 86, Austin Street, Cambridge, Mass.”40 She described her new surroundings unfavorably. “I work in my Prison,” she told him. “Carlo did not come, because he would die, in Jail, and the Mountains, I could not hold now, so I brought but the Gods.”41 Was Higginson to understand “the Gods” were her verses? With Emily’s figurative turns, he could not be sure. She reported the barest of details about her health, telling him only that she had moved in April and did not expect to leave anytime soon. Her doctor, she said, “does not let me go.” Emily acknowledged she was at a low point in her life and that word of Higginson’s recovery “would excel my own.” Yet she did not tell him what was exactly wrong with her. “Can you render my Pencil?” was all she said.42
Emily’s eye problem, it appeared, was iritis. Her primary symptoms—dim vision, pain, and red eyes that ached in light—were consistent with that diagnosis. There would be treatments in Dr. Williams’s Boston office and instructions for protecting her eyes during the day: proscriptions that included rest and limiting her exposure to light.**** She could need bandages to block the sun.43 Williams used several protocols, medication, eye drops, and a new instrument for the treatments.44 An ophthalmoscope illuminated the interior of her eye and enabled him to examine muscles controlling her pupil, blood vessels, and the surrounding nerves. If pressure within her eyes did not improve, he might puncture her eyes’ anterior chambers. Mercury could be administered. Cocaine, too, for pain. If all treatments failed, a portion of the iris might be removed, although that was considered a step no one wanted to take. To make her more comfortable, a darkened room and dry flannel wrapped around a jug of hot water would help. She could hold the jug against her face. Doctors reported they could detect changes iritis brought to a patient’s eyes. The iris lost its brilliance, they said. A once shining, clear appearance became muddy-looking. In severe cases, the iris could take on another shape, sometimes looking like the ace of clubs. Physicians also knew that the emotional effects of the disease were just as pronounced. One medical text stated, “Cases of iritis, especially those occurring in men accustomed to an active independent life, often produce a very irritable condition of mind, followed by great depression, the result of the pain, partial blindness, and resultant dependence on others.”45 No one knew how Emily had contracted the disease. Medical professionals later theorized iritis stemmed from a bacterial infection such as consumption. Cousin Sophia Holland and Aunt Lavinia both had succumbed to consumption. Emily herself had a bad cough for weeks as a young girl. It was possible her early respiratory problems later triggered iritis. If his treatment did not work, Dr. Williams knew inflammation within Emily’s eye could form clots and lead to permanent blindness. Even if his procedures were successful, the condition might reoccur. He wrote to Edward Dickinson, saying—while satisfied with progress—recovery would be gradual. Emily was not so sure. “I suppose I had been discouraged so long,” she said.”46
Not being able to read was the worst complication of her illness. Dr. Williams had forbidden it, or at least told Emily to drastically limit her time with books. She later said not being able to read was the only restriction in her life “that ever made me tremble.” It felt to her like “shutting out . . . the strongest friends of the soul.” Emily never looked upon books as her “tormentors,” but that’s exactly what they had become. Dr. Williams “might as well have said, ‘Eyes be blind,’ ‘heart be still,’” she lamented. She mostly conformed to her doctor’s dictates. She did read letters from Vinnie and Sue and kept up with news as she could: she noted Nathaniel Hawthorne had died. But what she had first called her prison, she said, now felt to her like “Siberia.”47 Then there was her writing, of course. Dr. Williams “is not willing I should write,” she wrote Vinnie.48 Perhaps Emily saw abandoning books as the more severe blow, because she continued to write. She wrote letters from Cambridge, telling first Vinnie then Sue that she missed them the most.49 She corresponded with Higginson. She wrote her nephew Ned on his third birthday, trying to amuse him with a description of a bumblebee: “Emily knows a Man who drives a Coach like a Thimble, and turns the Wheel all day with his Heel.”50 And she wrote poems, perhaps as many as one hundred during the time of her distress.†††† She realized using her eyes to write might subvert Dr. Williams’s treatment plan and perhaps prolong or further endanger her eyes, but she was willing to take the risk. Writing must have felt to her like stolen time, a precious transgression that might exact a devastating price.
From Blank to Blank –
A Threadless Way
I pushed Mechanic feet –
To stop – or perish – or advance –
Alike indifferent –
If end I gained
It ends beyond
Indefinite disclosed –
I shut my eyes – and groped as well
’Twas lighter – to be Blind – 51
While Emily’s verse always drew from more than the literal details of her life, impaired vision made her rely on her imagination even more. If she could not see distinctly or at all, she would have to tap into her metaphorical reserve. She may have found that imagination gave her a richer sense of perception than what she could discern with her eyes.52 She also may have discovered that her other senses—touch, taste, smell, sound—had grown keener or were able to instruct her in ways she had not fully explored.‡‡‡‡ Emily’s eyesight reduced what she saw, but not what she could understand. Years later an appreciation for a more penetrating power than her eyes could produce may have been on her mind. She told Sue, “Cherish Power – dear – Remember that stands in the Bible between the Kingdom and the Glory, because it is wilder than either of them.”53 She could still imagine, and she might still stitch more poems into fascicles.
Dont put up my Thread & Needle –
I’
ll begin to Sow
When the Birds begin to whistle –
Better stitches – so –
These were bent – my sight got crooked –
When my mind – is plain
I’ll do seams – a Queen’s endeavor
Would not blush to own –
Hems – too fine for Lady’s tracing
To the sightless knot –
Tucks – of dainty interspersion –
Like a dotted Dot –
Leave my Needle in the furrow –
Where I put it down –
I can make the zigzag stitches –
Straight – when I am strong –
Till then – dreaming I am sowing
Fetch the seam I missed –
Closer – so I – at my sleeping –
Still surmise I stitch – 54
Although Emily initially felt her lodgings had been a “prison,” she tempered her view as time went on. She later confessed that she had found friends in the “Wilderness.”55 Her rooms were in Mrs. Bangs’s Boarding House, a mile from Harvard College, and a block from Cambridge’s main thoroughfare with its bustling shops, livery terminal, and banks.§§§§ The greatest adjustment in her new residence was lack of privacy. Most lodgers had a private chamber and sitting area but encountered one another over meals. Emily’s adaptation to so public an environment must have been a wonder to Austin, Sue, and Vinnie. Yet, within a month of arriving, she yearned to come home. She was impatient with her progress, reported “calls at the Doctor’s are painful,” and that she wasn’t allowed to walk alone.56 Cambridge simply was not Amherst, Emily said, even though Fanny and Loo took good care of her.57 She missed the sound of the whippoorwill in the family orchard, wondered if apples were ripe, whether the wild geese had already crossed, and how Austin’s tobacco crop had fared.58 She was worried about her mother’s cough and yet another of Vinnie’s cats that had gone missing.59 She wrote lonely letters to Sue, saying she felt at the “Centre of the Sea” as if she were submerged, and later told her “I live in the Sea always and know the Road.”60 She admitted that she “flew” most of the time, hiding from others as much as she could.61 But she couldn’t avoid eating and had to gather with the other boarders for dinner and polite conversation. Everyone around the dining table seemed in transition—on the verge of something better or something worse. Emily could not determine which prospect awaited her. All seemed to her a “Foreigner,” she told Vinnie.62
By November 1864 Emily Dickinson prepared to return home. She was relieved to be leaving Cambridge, but felt hopeless about her eyes. Her problems were “sometimes easy, sometimes sad,” she said.63 Emily asked Vinnie to meet her train alone, and cautioned her sister. “Emily may not be able as she was,” she told her, “but all she can, she will.” She had taken on an odd habit of using the third person in talking about herself, as if the healthy Emily were as distant to her as a stranger. But she wanted to be clear with Vinnie so her sister would not be shocked by her altered appearance. “I have been sick so long I do not know the Sun,” she wrote, “now the World is dead.”64
Thomas Wentworth Higginson was feeling spiritless himself. “This turning of the leaf is a trying epoch,” he wrote.65 What he considered the most important chapter in his life—his days in the military—was over. All that remained to him were words, and he had begun to doubt if they mattered as much as he once thought. He hoped he might be able to transform his war experience into essays. “Grind it into paint,” he had said, but the work did not come easy: his mind was clouded, his wife was suffering from rheumatism, and his beloved mother was near death.66 He was grateful for distractions. A clever new boarder had moved into Mrs. Dame’s Newport boardinghouse. She was a young widow with an eight-year-old son—a Mrs. Helen Hunt, originally from Amherst. He continued writing Emily and hoped to meet her someday. While he knew better than to assign autobiographical details to her poems—there was always that “supposed person” speaking in her verse—one poem appeared to address the medical crisis she now endured.67 She had sent the poem to him earlier. The verse struck the tension between what she could imagine and what her eyes could no longer see. She suggested that seeing with her eyes—taking in as much as she could and owning the visible world—was lethal. Perhaps, the poem implied, she wanted to see too much.
Before I got my eye put out
I liked as well to see –
As other Creatures, that have Eyes
And know no other way –
But were it told to me – today –
That I might have the sky
For mine – I tell you that my Heart
Would split, for size of me –
The meadows – mine –
The Mountains – mine –
All Forests – Stintless Stars –
As much of Noon as I could take
Between my finite eyes –
The Motions of The Dipping Birds –
The Morning’s Amber Road –
For mine – to look at when I liked –
The News – would strike me dead –
So safer Guess –
With just my soul opon the Window pane –
Where other Creatures put their eyes –
Incautious – of the Sun – 68
That November of 1864, voters went to the polls to cast their ballots for President Abraham Lincoln or Gen. George McClellan. Near Emily’s boardinghouse, crowds gathered at City Hall, where men carried a wounded Union captain up the steps. The officer tipped his cap and told the gathering he was casting the first vote of his life. Onlookers roared and offered three cheers.69 The next day, when news of Lincoln’s victory reached Cambridge, supporters paraded through the streets, shouting and cheering. Two days later—on Friday, November 11—marchers were at it again. The evening was so bright with moonlight it almost seemed like noon. As she listened to the parade, Emily thought about what was ahead of her. She knew her health was far from certain. Her eyes might recover or they might become worse. Permanent blindness was not out of the question. But what she could not see, she could hear. “The Drums keep on for the still Man,” she wrote Vinnie. The beats for Lincoln were like a meter, counting out her prospects.70 When the noisy parade reached Harvard College a mile down the road, marchers wondered if Robert Todd Lincoln would come out to greet them. The president’s son was a law student at the college, although he had chafed under his studies and wanted to join Ulysses S. Grant in action. In the White House, Abraham Lincoln read a telegram from General Grant extending congratulations on his reelection. The greeting offered the president respite from lists of the dead—those awful bulletins as they were known—that crowded his mind. Lincoln realized there was much to do—unfinished work—he had called it in his address at the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg.¶¶¶¶ For Emily, the coming days felt like an uncertain pause between the life she once knew and life she could not yet see. “The only News I know,” she wrote Higginson, “Is Bulletins all day / From Immortality.”71
An old friend would never forget the look of Emily’s wounded eyes. Once bright hazel, they had become “melted & fused,” he said, like “two dreamy, wondering wells of expression.”72 In two weeks, Emily would return home to Amherst, where her mother would cook the fricassee beans she liked so much, her father would read her news of Sherman’s March to the Sea, and Vinnie would treat her older sister like a delicate teacup, fragile and liable to crack. Once again she would be surrounded by all her poems with their images of bandages, stitches, and finite eyes.#### 73 “War feels to me an oblique place,” Emily said.74 Few could tell if she were talking about General Sherman or the growing darkness around her.
* Unfortunately, Higginson’s letters to Dickinson have not survived. Some of his questions to Dickinson can be construed by her responses. Dickinson frequently reiterates Higginson’s question or places his query in quotation marks. The letters upon which this chapter is based had previously been misdated. This letter most likely was w
ritten on November 11, 1864, when the Lincoln Clubs of Cambridge held a torchlight procession. Contemporaneous newspaper accounts attest to the re-dating. On November 13, the date Johnson and Leyda assign to the letter, a powerful storm swept through New England. Parades could not have taken place in such bad weather. [Beverly Gill, email to the author, April 28, 2017, Boston Public Library Archives; George E. Clark, email to the author, April 28, 2017, Houghton Library, Harvard University.]
† Dickinson loved the Brownings and mentioned them often in her letters. She wrote of Keats only twice in her life, and after her letter to Higginson, she never mentioned Ruskin again. She might have been currying favor with Higginson when it came to Ruskin and Sir Thomas Browne, writers he cited in his essay “Letter to a Young Contributor.” [Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Theodora Ward, associate ed., The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), 405.]
‡ Higginson may have been thinking about Whitman, whom he had bumped into in Boston. Whitman, perched on a counter at his publisher’s office, was reading proofs of the third edition of Leaves of Grass. He did not impress Higginson. The “personal impression made on me by the poet was not so much of manliness as of Boweriness,” he wrote. Higginson admitted he may have been prejudiced against Whitman’s poetry because he had read it while seasick—“a fact which doubtless increased for me the intrinsic unsavoriness of certain passages.” [Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 113.]
§ One editor had to be Bowles or Holland representing the Springfield Republican. Karen Dandurand suggests the second editor was Richard Salters Storrs. An Amherst College graduate, Storrs was a friend of Samuel Bowles and frequent commencement guest of Sue and Austin. [Karen Dandurand, “New Dickinson Civil War Publications,” American Literature 56, no. 1, March 1984, 17–27.]
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