I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality.
Yet never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.
If Samuel Bowles felt the wrath of Emily’s grievance over publication or the bungled lines, he did not mention it. His only comment on the poem was surprise that Emily knew the proper agricultural conditions for growing corn. “How did that girl ever know that a boggy field wasn’t good for corn?” he asked Sue.16 For Emily, the criticism over an intrusive editorial hand was her last word on the subject; it was the last time she voiced an objection to any editorial interference ever. Even when additional poems were published, she never articulated another criticism about line breaks, titles, or other changes to her manuscript text. Either she approved, disapproved and kept opinions to herself, or—as with so many other moments in her life—she simply remained silent.
With Emily home again in Amherst and Thomas Wentworth Higginson more confident his ailing wife was being well cared for in their Newport boardinghouse, the two correspondents renewed their conversation about a visit. Higginson went first and again invited Emily to Boston. He frequently made the short trip from Newport to Boston and thought the location would be a good halfway meeting point. But Emily declined, using Edward Dickinson as her old excuse. In place of Higginson’s suggestion, she extended her own, but they still could not find a time. A few years later, Higginson mentioned the prospect to a botanist friend who taught at Amherst College. “I have always dreamed of coming to Amherst, to see you,” he said, “& my unseen correspondent Emily Dickinson.”17 Yet, Higginson’s schedule again wouldn’t work, and instead he presented another meet-you-halfway invitation to Emily, this time adding Boston literary and social events as enticements. “You must come down to Boston sometimes?” he wrote. “All ladies do.” Would it be possible to lure you to meetings on the third Monday of each month at Mrs. Sargent’s, when somebody reads a paper and others discuss? Mr. Emerson will read next Monday, he said, and there is also a meeting of the Woman’s Club, where I’ll read a paper on the Greek goddesses. When it seemed he still did not have enough attractions to offer, Higginson threw in even more, adding he would be in Cambridge in June for his Harvard reunion, and later for a music festival. If that weren’t enough, he gave one more desperate push. “Don’t you need sea air in summer,” he asked.18 She did not. Nothing Higginson suggested could convince Emily to leave Amherst, but she wanted to see him. After corresponding for almost a decade with the man she now called her friend, she needed to tell him something important. “Could it please your convenience to come so far as Amherst I should be very glad,” she carefully wrote. “Of our greatest acts we are ignorant – You were not aware that you saved my Life.”19
Higginson decided to go. It was not Emily’s startling admission alone that prompted him, but also a tragic turn of events. On August 11, 1870, his older brother Stephen Higginson died of a stroke.20 Perhaps “Wentworth,” as his family called him, could help make arrangements for burial. The very least he could do was to check on them and their home in Deerfield some twenty-five miles away from Amherst.† Sad as his duty was, Higginson realized there would never be a better time to visit Emily. He also wanted to visit his botanist friend, pay a call on Amherst College president William Stearns, and see chunks of meteors and dinosaur tracks in the college’s acclaimed museum. He planned to drop in on the sister of a new friend too—the young widow who recently had moved into the same Newport boardinghouse where he and his wife were living. In spite of her bereavement, Mrs. Helen Hunt was outgoing, good-natured, and full of energy. With his wife unable to join him in most outdoor activities, Higginson enjoyed taking his new friend on picnics and sailing. She was kind to his wife, too, decorating the boardinghouse parlor with flowers and organizing piano evenings she thought Mary might enjoy. One night, with Mary unable to make the steps, Higginson and his new friend climbed to the boardinghouse roof to take in a lunar eclipse. “She is in deep mourning,” Higginson wrote his sisters, but is also “bright & sociable & may prove an accession.”21
Helen was mourning not only the loss of her husband in the tragic naval yard accident but the death of their remaining son as well. Young Warren Horsford Hunt—“Rennie” to his family—died of diphtheria in 1865. He was nine years old. Helen once again traveled to West Point, this time to bury Rennie next to her husband and their firstborn child. At that moment, she realized—more than at any other time in her life—she was alone. Higginson suspected Mrs. Hunt’s sunny disposition masked deeper sorrows, and he was right. After Rennie died, Helen first thought she would never have the concentration to work. But when her sister urged Helen to take steps forward, she uncharacteristically snapped back. “I do not see why you urge me so to take myself in hand,” she wrote. “As if I had not done it!”22 What she meant by “done it” was to immerse herself in their parents’ prescription for any malady: hard work and cheerfulness. She also was writing. While Helen had always wanted to write, she had produced nothing. She needed to feel the full weight of her loss and isolation before she could re-create herself. “I myself never took an upward step, till I left happiness behind me,” she later said.23 She began by publishing poems about grief. The next year she wrote book reviews and essays. She then turned her attention to travel writing and discovered she was good at describing places and people. Every year, when her seasonal allergies fired up, Helen escaped to Bethlehem, New Hampshire, where she wrote accounts of the charming town and the price it was paying for an influx of visitors. Once, after returning to her Newport boardinghouse from a research trip, Higginson and fellow boarders greeted her with a playful note applauding the “GREAT AMERICAN OVERLAND TRAVELER WOMAN!”24 Helen also set out for Europe and wrote more essays from the continent. But it was her poetry that captured Higginson’s highest praise. He shared her work and called Mrs. Hunt “one of the most gifted poetesses in America.”25 Even Ralph Waldo Emerson was paying attention. After meeting her in Newport, he said Mrs. Hunt’s work deserved recognition. He found it original, elegant, beautifully compressed, and even pasted a newspaper clipping of one of her poems in the front of his journal.26 Helen grew to rely on advice from “the Colonel,” as she called Higginson. She was grateful for his suggestion to take herself more seriously, and asked him to wield his blue pencil over awkward phrases. “If you see a rent in any of the lines, you might perhaps patch it for me, dear Col. as you so often used to,” she wrote.27 Now that Higginson was reading both Emily’s and Helen’s manuscripts, he wanted to make sure the old friends were aware of each other’s endeavors. They had much in common: both fiercely independent, both brilliant writers, both preferring to publish anonymously. Higginson knew Mrs. Hunt was preparing a small volume of poetry for publication—frantically churning out travel pieces to cover the cost of printing. Even her publisher thought she was crazy, working so hard for a book that probably wouldn’t earn a cent. But Mrs. Hunt’s ambition revealed her growing confidence. Self-possession was something else the two women shared. “There is always one thing to be grateful for,” Emily once said, “that one is one’s self & not somebody else.”28 Higginson wondered if Emily might reconsider the question of publication. Perhaps his visit to Amherst could convince her to do what Mrs. Hunt—and all literary ladies did.
Mr. Higginson’s visit would be no ordinary call for Emily—not that she received many guests. Since her beloved dog, Carlo, had died, Emily seemed different.‡ Without her silent companion beside her, she stayed indoors and was more reclusive. The great literary productivity of the Civil War years had tapered off. She also stopped collecting her poems into stitched fascicles, and new poems remained unbound in loose sheets. There continued to be revisions to some of the eleven hundred poems she already had written—there would always be revisions—but urgency no longer propelled her. She had practical reasons for writing fewer poems. Losing the family’s maid, Margaret O’Brien, to marriage in
1865 placed more household demands on all the Dickinson women. When help could not be retained, Austin noted the strain. “No girl at the other house yet,” he had written Sue, who was away visiting relatives. “Consequence—depression.”29 But later, Margaret Maher joined the Dickinson family as a housekeeper and cook. Although she wavered about staying at first, she became an invaluable presence, adding stability to the household and providing more time for Emily to write.30 But other changes were evident besides the number of poems she was writing. She was more patient, less insistent, and more forgiving of perceived slights. Although others around her were busy with their own lives, she did not feel as forsaken as she once had. When Sue gave birth to a daughter—Martha, born in 1866—Emily did not pester her sister-in-law with notes seeking attention. She showed similar acceptance of Austin’s many town involvements. One night in the dark, she accompanied her brother across the street to admire the new First Church building, a construction project that had consumed Austin for years. Even Emily’s aging parents were absorbed in new callings that she noted with pleasure rather than rejection. Emily Norcross Dickinson delighted in her two grandchildren and Edward joined Col. William Clark working to start an agricultural college in Amherst.§ Emily’s sense of self made the difference. She knew who she was. Vinnie once observed that her sister’s primary job was to think. “She was the only one of us who had that to do,” she said.31 Emily no longer was hoping to make her family proud, as she once told Sue. The hundreds of poems in fascicles and sheets hidden away in her room bore witness to what she already had accomplished. One had only to look at her to see the maturity. Her russet hair, once the object of girlhood impulsiveness—first long, then cut short—had settled into permanence: parted in the middle and pulled back in a knot. Then there was her clothing. The fashionable fabrics she had once asked Austin to bring from Boston—the calicos, the colored cloth—had given way to dimity. She now wore one style—white dresses—all year round. They were loose-fitting, down to the ankles with lace trim, pearl buttons, and a pocket large enough for paper or a pencil. Words had shifted for her, too. When she was young, she said, words were cheap and weak: the exuberant valentines, the effusive letters to Abiah. But nothing had grown mightier to her now. Sometimes she would write a word and trace the outline of its curves with her finger. She said the word before her glowed.32 Emily had chosen deeper rather than more abundant sustenance, a life where—as she put it—she would eat evanescence slowly.33 Thomas Wentworth Higginson also noticed a change. In her letters, she no longer signed her name on a card, slipped inside the envelope: a game played as much for effect as reticence. Largely gone, too, were the callow signatures of “Your Gnome” and “Your Scholar.” Now she signed her name with a single word: “Dickinson.” That is who she had become.
Colonel Higginson was excited and nervous about paying calls. As a boy he was shy around women outside his family. To mitigate awkwardness, he would write down conversation topics. If tongue-tied, he would pull the paper from his pocket and select a matter to discuss.34 But Higginson had plenty of questions for Emily, chief among them inquiries about her seclusion. In a letter before his visit, he had asked if Carlo’s death had made her even more detached from society. It was difficult for him to understand how she could live so isolated. He certainly was awestruck by the extraordinary images that flooded her mind, but wondered if she paid a price for brilliance. It “isolates one anywhere to think beyond a certain point or have such luminous flashes as come to you,” he said.35 At times her talent made him reluctant to answer her letters, aware he never could match her artfulness. He was clumsy with words, he told her, and often missed the fine edge of her thought. But he forced himself to put aside timidity and continued to write, knowing what he could not offer in useful criticism he might be able to offer in dependability, friendship, and generosity. Higginson thought she needed someone—a person who admired her, even if he did not always understand what she was saying. “Sometimes I take out your letters & verses, dear friend,” he wrote, “and when I feel their strange power, it is not strange that I find it hard to write & that long month pass. I have the greatest desire to see you, always feeling that perhaps if I could once take you by the hand I might be something to you; but till then you only enshroud yourself in this fiery mist & I cannot reach you, but only rejoice in the rare sparkles of light.”36
Eight years had passed since Emily had first asked Higginson if her verse were alive. That was a long time to wait before meeting each other face-to-face. The night before he was to arrive in Amherst, Emily dreamed all night—not of Higginson—but of his wife, Mary, a woman the poet had only heard of infrequently. Mary Higginson’s spectral appearance puzzled Emily and she was eager to share the dream. But she would have to wait twenty-four hours before telling Mr. Higginson. All day Monday, August 15, 1870, Emily expected him to arrive, but he did not. There had been a mix-up. He thought they had agreed on Tuesday, not Monday. The next day when they both realized the error, Emily sent a kindly note up-street to his Amherst House hotel. “Dear friend,” she wrote, “I will be at Home and glad. I think you said the 15th. The incredible never surprises us because it is incredible.”37 With the day straightened out, Higginson prepared to meet her. To be honest, he was exhausted. He had spent the past year writing two books. The Atlantic Monthly serialized his first novel, Malbone; An Oldport Romance, and then there was an upcoming book based on his Civil War diary. Living in Newport had also lost its allure. He now found society life superficial and draining.38 Perhaps Emily knew better after all how to preserve the energy needed for creativity. As tired as he was, Higginson must have wished he could find a place to exercise in Amherst. If he were home, he would chop wood or swing on parallel bars at the Newport gymnasium. Exercise always invigorated him, he realized, and warded off feeling glum.39 But Higginson found no parallel bars in Amherst and so he made himself comfortable. The hotel Emily had suggested was convenient: four stories tall in the center of town with a dining room and livery stable around the corner. It was not as hot as it had been that summer, but it was dry. Many town wells had dried up, and the Connecticut River was low with brown banks stretching from shore. The town common looked terrible—scraggly and barren. It’s “higglety-pigglety,” one embarrassed citizen said, “with patches of grass, gravel pits . . . old frog holes and snakes.”40 Near the common, a few workers were pouring tar. Amherst was putting in sidewalks, and one would run directly in front of Austin and Edward’s law office.41 The sounds Higginson usually heard—the clatter of Boston omnibuses, ships coming into dock at Newport’s Narragansett Bay—were nowhere to be found. An unspeakably quiet town, he thought.
Calling card in hard, Higginson set out walking toward the Homestead in long, loping strides. Outside the hotel, new farm machinery was on display. Men listened to a salesman touting a thresher’s efficiency: with a boy to turn and a man to feed, it could produce 100 bushels of oats a day.42 Across the street, the Amherst Record newspaper office posted its current edition: a “peotry” column featured a verse by Bret Harte and there was a lengthy article on growing corn. The best way to cultivate corn in New England, an expert reported, was to plow in the autumn and spread green manure in the spring. It was all about chemistry.43 A few steps further on, at Frank Wood’s Dining Rooms waiters served stewed oysters, a favorite of the local citizenry. Higginson passed a Chinese laundry, a harness shop, and Mr. Marsh’s cabinet- and coffin-making establishment. A dry-goods store was draped in mourning. One of the store’s proprietors, William Cutler, had died suddenly the same day as Higginson’s brother. He didn’t make the connection, of course, that Cutler was Susan Dickinson’s brother-in-law—the man who feared she might die if she left Amherst to teach in Baltimore. Higginson followed the road down a gentle slope until it leveled off near a copse of trees and the start of a wooden fence. The fence marked the beginning of the Dickinson property. First the Evergreens, Susan and Austin’s stately home, then the Homestead, Edward Dickinson’s manse. The walkwa
y rose again as it approached the front steps—a not-so-inconsequential reminder of the family’s prominence. Higginson took in the sight so he could tell Mary everything. A large house. Like a country lawyer’s. Brick. Flower and vegetable gardens to the east and an apple orchard. Pears too.44 From where he stood, he could see the train depot and the distant line of the Pelham hills. Mrs. Hunt used to laugh at how timidly Colonel Higginson would knock at her room in the boarding house. He knocks like a baby, she said, and then slides in edgewise.45 Higginson made no such hesitant entrance at the Dickinsons. He knocked, presented his card, and was ushered into a dark parlor on the left. Then he waited.
First he heard her. From upstairs on the second floor came the sound of quick, light steps—footsteps that sounded like a child’s. Then she entered. A plain woman with two bands of reddish hair, not particularly good-looking, wearing a white pique dress. The white stunned him. It was exquisite. A blue worsted shawl covered her shoulders. She seemed fearful to him, breathless at first, and extended her hand, not to shake—but to offer something. “These are my introduction,” she said, handing him two day-lilies. “Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers & hardly know what I say.”46 Then Emily looked at him. A tall man in his mid-forties with joyful face, she thought.47 Dark-haired, whiskered, graceful, he looked kind. Higginson did not reach into his pocket to fish out a topic for conversation. He did not need to. Once they sat, Emily began talking and she did not stop. “When I lost the use of my Eyes,” she told him “it was a comfort to me to think there were so few real books that I could easily find some one to read me all of them.”48 She wondered how people got through their days without thinking. “How do most people live without any thoughts,” she said. “There are many people in the world (you must have noticed them in the street) How do they live. How do they get strength to put on their clothes in the morning.” She was full of aphorisms, sentences that seemed to have been crafted earlier in her mind and that she wanted to share. “Women talk: men are silent: that is why I dread women; Truth is such a rare thing it is delightful to tell it; Is it oblivion or absorption when things pass from our minds?” At times Emily seemed self-conscious and asked Higginson to jump in. But every time he tried, she was off again, and words tumbled out, almost uncontrollably. He tried to recall every phrase, every thought, even her tone, humor, and asides. “My father only reads on Sunday – he reads lonely & rigorous books,” she said. Once, she recalled, her brother brought home a novel that they knew their father would not condone. Austin hid it under the piano cover for Emily to find. When she was young, she said, and read her first real book, she was in ecstasy. “This then is a book!” she had exclaimed. “And are there more of them!” She boasted about her cooking and said she made all the bread for the family. Puddings, too. “People must have puddings,” she said. The way she said “puddings”—so dreamy and abstracted—sounded to Higginson as though she were talking about comets. Emily said her life had not been constrained or dreary in any way. “I find ecstasy in living,” she explained. The “mere sense of living is joy enough.” When at last the opportunity arose, Higginson posed the question he most wanted to ask: Did you ever want a job, have a desire to travel or see people. The question unleashed a forceful reply. “I never thought of conceiving that I could ever have the slightest approach to such a want in all future time.” Then she loaded on more. “I feel I have not expressed myself strongly enough.” Emily reserved her most striking statement for what poetry meant to her, or rather how it made her feel. “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry,” she said. “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way.” Emily was remarkable. Brilliant. Candid. Deliberate. Mystifying. After years of waiting, he was finally sitting across from Emily Dickinson of Amherst, and all he wanted to do was listen.
These Fevered Days Page 18
