These Fevered Days

by Martha Ackmann

  The Soul selects her own Society –

  Then – shuts the Door –

  To her divine Majority –

  Present no more – 7

  Thomas Wentworth Higginson was a person Emily never refused. On a winter day in 1873, he paid a second call at the Homestead. His schedule was tight, his visit brief, and he took few notes. But he wrote his sisters the little he could remember. Emily only sees a few others, he told them, and never goes outside her father’s ground. This time she had greeted him with a pale pink flower from her conservatory—a Daphne odora—and once more she dressed in white. Higginson promised his sisters the next time they came to Newport, he would read some of Dickinson’s verse. He had long ago given up critiquing her poems, and the letters between the two had taken on a different tone. Now when they wrote, they shared personal news. We come together as old and tired friends, Higginson told her. “I hope you will not cease to trust me and turn to me; and I will try to speak the truth to you, and with love.”8 Earlier she remembered the season of his first visit. It was “Mighty Summer,” she wrote. “Now the Grass is Glass and the Meadow Stucco.”9 Perhaps some instinct had put her in a somber mood and she hinted that she thought the second visit could be their last.

  The thought of visiting Emily had grown stronger for Helen Hunt. From the many poems Colonel Higginson had been sharing, Helen had created a volume of her friend’s verse. She wanted to talk about Dickinson’s poems, especially the confounding ones, and she wanted to discuss a writer’s responsibility to the world. Once another writer had tried to tell Emily what she owed society and received a stinging reply. A “Miss P” had written, asking for poems to support a worthy cause.‡ Emily declined the request and burned the letter. It did not seem to bother her that Miss P might be offended. She’s probably off “extricating humanity from some hopeless ditch,” Emily scoffed.10 But Helen was undeterred by Emily’s resistance, and, she had another reason for wanting to speak with her. When it came to poetry, Helen now spoke from experience. The volume of verses she had worked so hard to write and pay for had met with critical acclaim—and rightly so. The book, published under her pen name “H. H.” was so popular that publishers issued an expanded edition almost immediately. Verses, one critic said, places “H. H.” not only above all American poetesses, but all English poetesses as well. Only Elizabeth Barrett Browning shows a greater range of imagination, he added. Other reviewers compared her intellect to Hawthorne, her lyricism to Wordsworth, and her nature poetry to Andrew Marvell and Emerson. With her travel essays, the short stories she was writing and now a book of poetry, Helen Hunt had become a respected and celebrated American writer. Higginson was thrilled and eager to hear what Emily thought of Helen’s verse. Dickinson said she liked the poems immensely and pronounced them stronger than any women’s poetry since Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mrs. Lewes.§ “Truth like Ancestor’s Brocades,” she said, “can stand alone.”11 Around the time Helen’s verse was published, another girlhood friend produced a volume of poetry. Emily Fowler Ford—Noah Webster’s granddaughter, who helped edit the Amherst Academy student publication, Forest Leaves—had been publishing for years in newspapers and the Atlantic. But the reviews for Mrs. Ford’s book did not equal those for Mrs. Hunt’s. The Springfield Republican observed Emily Ford writes too many poems, and “damages the effect of what she has said by what she keeps on saying.”¶12 Regardless of the local opinion of Mrs. Ford, Higginson marveled at the three women writers who were born and raised in Amherst, Massachusetts: Helen Fiske Hunt, Emily Fowler Ford, and Emily Dickinson. What was it, he wondered, about that small college town that had produced so many literary women? “Amherst must be a nest of poetesses,” he told a friend.13

  But it was Emily Dickinson who had the most important poems to offer, Helen believed. She did not belittle her own work, but—when it came to poetry—Hunt recognized Dickinson’s verse was of a wholly different order. Not only did she want to talk with Emily about literature in general, but she also wanted to talk about publishing. Unlike Higginson, who no longer broached certain subjects, or Abby Wood, who approached her old friend with gentle nudging, or even Samuel Bowles who playfully cursed, Helen simply barreled in. She wanted a serious, face-to-face conversation. But another one of Helen’s wanderings delayed the visit even longer. The attack of diphtheria that had shortened Helen’s visit to Amherst had also canceled a long-awaited journey to Colorado. She had wanted to see the Rocky Mountains in 1873 with May Alcott, Louisa’s sister—but May could not go.14 She then persuaded a Boston friend, but the two women had to turn back when Helen became ill. That’s when she had ended up in the damp Amherst boardinghouse. But now that she was feeling better, Helen wanted to set out again for Colorado. She had heard the mountains offered the perfect climate for people with respiratory disease. Not taking any chances on a second attempt across the plains, she convinced the Amherst homeopathic doctor to accompany her, along with a nurse. Once they’d reached Colorado’s eastern slope, Helen’s first sight of the mountains was dispiriting. “There stretched before me, to the east, a bleak, bare, unrelieved, desolate plain. There rose behind me, to the west, a dark range of mountains, snow-topped, rocky-walled, stern, cruel, relentless.” It was not what she’d hoped for. “One might die of such a place alone,” she wrote.15 Yet as she always did, Helen made the best of it. The doctor and nurse returned to Massachusetts, and Helen found a room in a Colorado Springs boardinghouse on a street known locally as Dead Man’s Row. Helen appreciated the dark humor; she was not the only person with lung problems who had moved to Colorado. Besides, she kept herself busy: writing more short stories, getting into a fight with William Dean Howells over grammar, and fuming over a review in the Nation that declared her poems lacked womanly grace. In 1872, Roberts Brothers of Boston—a new publisher for her—released Helen’s book of essays, Bits of Talk about Home Matters, an ironic title, considering Helen had never owned a home. Over time Colorado had become more appealing to her. “Mrs. Helen Hunt’s health is greatly improved by the ‘marvelous sunshine’ of Colorado Springs,” the Springfield Republican reported. “She says ‘it is enough, almost, to raise the dead.’”16 As much as she was growing to love the west, Helen still thought about a trip back east—and Emily Dickinson. But that was before Samuel Bowles introduced her to William Sharpless Jackson, a Colorado banker and executive with the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. At first Mr. Jackson did not seem the kind of man Helen would find engaging. He was literal-minded, devoted to his financial books, and not prone to the kind of enthusiasm Helen always displayed. But he was taken with her independence and vitality, and she found his stability a comfort. Helen called him Will and, for some inexplicable reason, he called her Peggy. They spent nearly every Sunday outdoors in the mountains, and once when Helen wanted a perfect view of the sun coming up over Pikes Peak, the two camped on the floor in an empty Manitou Springs tollbooth, waiting for sunrise.17

  It was just as well that Helen Hunt did not return to Amherst anytime soon. Emily had other concerns, and was especially worried about her father. As early as 1871, Edward had begun having health problems. When an unspecified illness made him take to his bed, Emily feared he would die. “Now in a piercing place,” she had written Fanny and Loo Norcross.18 Her father’s strong sense of duty and determination to erase the failures of his own father had exacted a price. College officials hailed Edward as perfectly “perpendicular,” but that was the problem.19 He never played, Emily said, and seldom gave in to an easy moment. One of his rare displays of exuberance was the purple ink he used to write letters home. But the letters themselves were filled with the driest of details and often trailed off with empty phrases, such as “nothing new,” “no more to say,” or “I can think of nothing particular.”20 Even the “straightest engine has its leaning hour,” Emily wrote her cousins.21 Edward eventually recovered from that illness, and when the Panic of 1873 threw most of the nation’s railroads into receivership, he once again ran for political office. Rail
roads were everything to him. Arguably the proudest moment of his life came when the Amherst, Belchertown Palmer Line named a locomotive after him: the Edward Dickinson.22 Against every vow he’d made about leaving politics forever, he placed his name on the ballot in 1873 for the Massachusetts House of Representatives. He won—and the next year, the seventy-one-year-old legislator trudged between Amherst and Boston as a freshman representative. His absence was hard on the family. Austin and Sue’s adolescent son, Ned, recently had an attack of inflammatory rheumatism and worried the family. As much as Edward was concerned about his grandson, he was also committed to using his political clout to complete the Hoosac Tunnel, linking rail service between Boston and Albany. The project had been mired in problems for years: financial debacles, engineering mistakes, and blasting disasters.# During a legislative recess, Edward had made a trip home and—before leaving Boston—he’d stopped at a bookstore to select two volumes he thought Emily might enjoy: a biography of Theodore Parker and new book of poems by Mrs. Lewes. But even while home, he worked demanding hours in his Amherst law office. A local judge noticed the light burning in Edward’s legal chambers long after most residents had retired for the night.23 On June 16, 1874, Representative Dickinson was back in Boston, and rose to make a speech on the statehouse floor on behalf of the railroad. It had been a miserably hot day with lowering thunder-clouds.24 As he spoke, Edward felt faint and sat down. Alarmed, a colleague asked if he could walk the stricken Mr. Dickinson back to his hotel on Tremont Street. Edward said yes. He knew something was wrong and wanted to return to Amherst immediately.25 That evening Emily was eating supper with her mother and Vinnie when Austin burst through the Homestead door, a telegram in his hand. She instantly knew by the look on his face that something terrible had happened. Father is ill, her brother said, and he and Vinnie must go to Boston at once. Everyone jumped and rushed to retrieve valises and hats. It was six o’clock. The train had already gone through. Vinnie and Austin would have to take the carriage. From the barn came the clatter of harnesses and straps as a stablehand dressed the horses. Then another dispatch arrived. It was too late. Edward Dickinson was dead.** 26

  It seemed fitting that a locomotive should bring Edward Dickinson’s body home. An undertaker met the train at the depot and escorted the coffin up the hill to the Homestead. When he finished his work and left the house, Austin stared down at his father’s face as if for the first time. Then he leaned over and kissed him. “There, father, I never dared do that while you were living,” he said.27 Over the next three days, the town of Amherst came to a standstill. First Church canceled its strawberry festival, the college suspended classes, and out of respect for Amherst’s leading citizen, the bank, the marble works, and even tonsorial artist James A. Williams closed their doors. The only businesses still busy were the hotel and the livery stables: so many lawmakers, judges, mayors, and college trustees had arrived for the funeral, extra hands were needed. On July 19, 1874, workers carried College Hall settees over to the Homestead for crowds gathering on the lawn. Not everyone could fit into the Dickinsons’ parlors or library. Vinnie was everywhere, consoling friends, tending to details of the service, and making sure neighbors had a place to sit. Her strength did not escape Austin’s notice; he’d marveled at his sister’s composure, and his mother’s too. Austin, however, was another matter. His sorrow was so overwhelming it blurred his thinking. He could not remember to whom he had talked or what anyone said. His grief frightened his seven-year-old daughter, Mattie, who tried to do whatever she could to make things better. She scurried around the house setting out vases of lilacs and daisies. Although no one had seen Emily, Mattie knew where she was. Aunt Emily was upstairs alone in her chamber with the door opened a crack. She had caught her niece’s attention and whispered a caution in her ear: don’t cut all the blossoms from the garden, she told her.28 Emily never came downstairs. The only friend she spoke to that day was Samuel Bowles. Perhaps she knew he would never leave without seeing her. After a brief service in the family library, a line of eighteen pallbearers carried Edward’s coffin through the back fields behind the Homestead to the cemetery. Emily stayed behind in her room as the coffin was lowered into the ground next to the graves of Edward’s mother and father. Later someone said Edward Dickinson’s death reversed all the laws of nature for his eldest daughter. “I thought I was strongly built,” Emily wrote weeks later, “but this stronger has undermined me.”29 She did not visit her father’s grave the day he was buried. She did not visit his grave the rest of her life.30

  In one of the last letters Edward wrote home, he had been worrying about pears. It seemed such a mundane concern: were the pear trees in the family orchard producing the best fruit? But Edward had the future on his mind. He wanted to clear away dead limbs and splice new shoots onto the trees so they would bear fruit for years and years to come.31 What he needed, he had thought, was a graft to produce descendants—a single worthy scion. Emily kept thinking of the sound of her father’s voice. There was the militant way he thundered out morning prayers, in a voice that startled her: “‘I say unto you!’”32 But she also recalled a voice that came in fugitive moments, she said, when he forgot the lawyer and became the man. Then he sounded lonely and adrift: a foreigner, she observed.33 Edward once told Emily that he felt his entire life had been passed in a wilderness or on an island. She knew what he meant. She could hear the way his voice often sounded faraway and removed—a “sea tone,” she called it.34 The last afternoon they were together, she heard that voice again. It had been during the legislative recess, when Edward was working so late in his law office. “The last Afternoon that my Father lived,” she later wrote, “though with no premonition – I preferred to be with him, and invented an absence for Mother, Vinnie being asleep. He seemed peculiarly pleased as I oftenest stayed with myself, and remarked as the Afternoon withdrew, he ‘would like it not to end.’ His pleasure almost embarrassed me,” she continued, “and my Brother coming – I suggested they walk. Next morning I woke him for the train – and saw him no more.” Edward’s vulnerability in their last moments together was too much for Emily to bear. “His Heart was pure and terrible,” she said, “and I think no other like it exists.”35

  After hearing the news, Mr. Higginson wrote Emily gently. Are you working yet? Are you able to read? Yes, she replied. She was able to dip into books, but grief had overpowered her ability to concentrate.36 Emily wanted Higginson to come again to Amherst. She always did. It would be priceless, she told him, precious.37 But his schedule would not permit it and so she spent months shuffling around in what she called “Little – wayfaring acts.”38 She visited with her father’s old friend Judge Otis Lord, who was in Amherst for a week, gathered up fruit for neighbors, and sent orders to Cutler’s stores for family provisions: 10 cents’ worth of brown sugar, 1 can of corn, 1 cup prunes, 35 bars of soap, and 2 corsets—one later returned.39 She also made out her will. Oddly, Edward Dickinson had not prepared a document, leaving Austin to sort out everything. Now more keenly aware of the problems such a situation could produce, Emily wrote her final wishes, bequeathing to Vinnie “all my estate, real and personal, to have and to hold the same to her and her heirs, and assigns forever.” Judge Lord’s wife, Elizabeth, served as one of the witness to her signature. Neighbor Luke Sweetser and Margaret Maher, the Dickinsons’ faithful maid, were the others.40 Grief continued to weigh on her. “Affection . . . helps me up the Stairs at Night,” she wrote.41 The books her father had selected in Boston before his last trip home—the Theodore Parker and Mrs. Lewes—lay unread in the family library. She did not have the strength to open, let alone read, them.42 Emily wanted Higginson to have the books—a gesture linking the two most important men in her life. He demurred at first, a bit embarrassed, as he had been when Emily offered the postcard of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s grave that Josiah Holland had given her. Why she always was quick to give away personal gifts, he must have wondered.†† Before Emily could restore herself emotionally, another famil
y tragedy hit. Almost a year to the day her husband died, Emily Norcross Dickinson suffered a stroke. Her memory was impaired, she wandered around the house looking for Edward, and paralysis weakened her hand and foot. Her “Will followed my Father,” Emily said, “and only an idle Heart is left, listless for his sake.”43 Once again, shades at the Homestead were drawn, and the rooms were saturated with the smell of camphor and roses.44 Higginson wrote with his concern and inquired again if she had the concentration to write. This time Emily was definitive. “You asked me if I wrote now,” she said. “I have no other Playmate.”45

  The losses altered everyone in the family. Austin “set a face of flint to the world,” some said.46 He was worried about Ned’s health, made constant visits across the path to check on his mother and sisters, sometimes eating his breakfast there instead of at home. He also took on more work. Amherst College Trustees appointed him treasurer of the college, succeeding his father and grandfather. The new position meant additional income, but it came with headaches. Austin discovered the college books were not in the best order, and he found it exasperating to manage the college’s money in the first place. “It is the most almighty queer thing that I should be picked out to spend my life handling dirty money,” he said. “I don’t care a thing about it!”47 One day at the Amherst train station, he lost his temper completely. As Austin waited to board, a friend got off. Neighbors greeted the man cheerfully and asked about a recent fishing trip. Austin stood by, envious and fuming. In a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, he berated his friend for having fun, declaring he had little time for recreation. Townspeople stood with their mouths agape at Austin’s anger.48 Nothing, however, pointed more to the aggrieved state of his mind than the way he drove his horse and carriage home every night. Mattie remembered her father would fly down the street at breakneck speed, heedless of who or what might be in his way. The horse’s nostrils flared, dust flew, and cats and the family’s favorite turkey scattered for cover. As he reached the house, Austin would turn the corner on one wheel and violently yank the horse to a stop at the carriage shed.49 His actions were reckless, dangerous even. Perhaps he intended them to be.