These Fevered Days

by Martha Ackmann

  The Poets light but Lamps –

  Themselves – go out –

  The Wicks they stimulate

  If vital Light

  Inhere as do the Suns –

  Each Age a Lens

  Disseminating their

  Circumference – 90

  It was not so much that Emily didn’t believe in publishing. She didn’t want to engage in the advertising that went along with it. Perhaps her poems might become public sometime, but now was not the time. She wanted to hold on to verses, reworking them, mining them for other poems, “Our own Possessions though our own / ’Tis well to hoard anew,” she wrote.91 She had written a hundred or more new poems over the past few years, and many Helen would like: “A little Madness in the Spring,” “The Heart is the Capital of the Mind,” and “There is no Frigate like a Book.” There were scores of fragments, too, jotted down between tending to her mother and helping Margaret prepare supper: phrases written on a note to the dressmaker, a few words on the back of the Massachusetts Agricultural College commencement program, a line or two on Mrs. Kingman’s bill for milk. Once her family had discovered a complete poem written on the flyleaf of Edward Dickinson’s edition of Washington Irving. “The most pathetic thing I do,” the poem began, “Is play I hear from you.”92 But even with so many poems—both old and new—to choose from, Emily believed her verses were not yet ready, and she felt incapable of agreeing to Mrs. Jackson’s request. She told her no, but Helen did not accept the answer. She thought Emily was perfectly able of writing poems and seeing them through to print. She even carried some Dickinson verses in her own valise and knew many by heart. She offered to help Emily choose which poems to include in the Roberts Brothers book. But then Helen started talking too forcefully and fell right back into pushing too hard: she accused Emily of wanting to live in darkness. Sensing Dickinson’s unease, Helen changed course, telling Emily she need not make a decision immediately. Jackson was patient, but she would not give up. As they said goodbye, the two women clasped hands. The day was beautiful. Fall colors were at their peak: sugar maples already orange and oaks turning brown. The hemlocks outside Emily’s front door stood tall like sentinels. The livery driver who had been waiting with the horses assisted Mrs. Jackson into the coach. As the team headed north out of town, Helen could almost still feel Emily’s hand in hers. It felt to her like a wisp.93

  AFTER HELEN’S VISIT, Emily had second thoughts. She worried she had said the wrong thing, and fretted she had handled the conversation poorly. She looked at the No Name circular, folded it, and put it in a letter to Mr. Higginson, asking for advice and an alibi. “I am sorry to flee so often to my safest friend,” she wrote. She hoped he would be willing to write Helen, saying he disapproved of Dickinson publishing her verse. Helen will believe you, she said.94 But Higginson misunderstood the request and thought Mrs. Jackson had asked Emily to submit short stories or a novel for the series. Fiction is not in your line, he told Emily, unaware that Roberts Brothers had also planned a volume of verse.95 Higginson left the decision up to Emily. Meanwhile, Helen spent a few days in Ashfield, a hilltown near Amherst. The weather had turned sharply colder and snow had fallen. “Cold as Greenland,” she wrote in her diary.96 Austin had returned from the expedition and come down with chills and fever. Perhaps Helen had been right: the Philadelphia Centennial was unhealthy. Sue consulted a physician in Springfield, who diagnosed Austin with malaria. Remember he is not of common clay, Sam Bowles wrote Sue.97 Sue handed her husband glasses of quinine and brandy.98

  Faithful to her word, Helen did not give up. She wrote Emily from Ashfield and apologized for being pushy, but then she pushed again. She had spent the morning looking over Emily’s poems—the last batch Dickinson had sent her. She continued to find a few verses inscrutable, but when she read them again and more deeply, she had determined that “the dimness must have been in me.”99 Still, she liked the most direct poems best, the ones whose words did not baffle the way that “dooms” had in the wedding verse Dickinson had sent. Later back home in Colorado, Helen resumed the campaign, telling Emily she herself would contribute to the volume. It would be fun, she added, having the two of them participate in the national guessing game. Could you do it for me as a personal favor? she pleaded.100 Emily wavered. It “almost seems sordid to refuse from myself again,” she wrote Higginson.101 Thomas Niles was busy assembling copy for the book, and had been in touch with Mrs. Jackson. Already he had secured poems from Louisa May Alcott, Bronson Alcott, William Ellery Channing, Annie Fields, Sidney Lanier, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, James Russell Lowell, Christina Rossetti, and Celia Thaxter.102 In her continued appeals to Dickinson, Helen reduced the number of poems she asked her to contribute. First she had requested “some,” then one or two, and then finally only a single verse—a poem she had always loved and had memorized. Emily had written the poem almost two decades before and had published it during the Civil War in the Brooklyn Daily Union. Helen may not have realized the verse represented an idea that had absorbed Dickinson all her life. It was a poem about the reach, the miss, and the poignancy of the almost. No one knew the space between effort and accomplishment better than Dickinson:

  Success is counted sweetest

  By those who ne’re succeed.

  To comprehend a Nectar

  Requires the sorest need.

  Not one of all the Purple Host

  Who took the flag to-day,

  Can tell the definition,

  So plain, of Victory,

  As he defeated, dying,

  On whose forbidden ear

  The distant strains of triumph

  Break, agonizing clear.103

  Emily gave Helen permission to submit the poem. She had been worn down by repeated requests, and finally relented to turn the poem over to Thomas Niles. In truth, it would be the third time Emily had directly submitted her own work for publication. The first was Forest Leaves back when she was a schoolgirl at Amherst Academy. The second was more recently, when Mattie had asked her to contribute to a short-lived neighborhood newspaper, The Fortnightly Bumble Bee—the name for the publication suggested by Aunt Emily herself.104 But with “Success is counted sweetest” in the new volume from Roberts Brothers, Emily achieved something she had never accomplished in her life: her first poem published in a book she could hold in her hands.

  The years Helen Jackson spent urging Emily to publish her poems had made Dickinson respect Helen all the more. No one else felt such a mission in trying to convince Emily to share her work with the world. Thomas Niles was ecstatic to include Dickinson’s poem in the 1878 publication of A Masque of Poets, and he gave the verse a prominent place at the end of a section. Helen was pleased, too, and grateful. “I hope you have not regretted giving me that choice bit of verse for it,” she wrote.105 No one guessed Emily Dickinson was the author of “Success is counted sweetest.” The poem had been altered slightly and had a title attached to it, “Success”—but she voiced no concerns. Thomas Niles wrote Emily directly and sent a complimentary copy of the book. The guessing game over “Success” elicited much speculation, he told her. Most people thought Ralph Waldo Emerson had written the poem. In Concord, Mr. Emerson set the record straight. He did not write the poem, Emerson said. He had not submitted a verse to the volume at all. Readers do not like my poetry much, he said.106

  * Daniel Bliss was president of the Syrian Protestant College from 1866 to 1902. The college is now American University in Beirut and enrolls nearly 9,000 students.

  † Some scholars report Bowles called Dickinson “a damned wretch.” By “washing the adjective,” she meant she had deleted the “damned.” [L515.]

  ‡ Most critics believe “Miss P” was novelist, poet, and essayist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, although Dickinson biographer Alfred Habegger suggests she might have been Elizabeth Peabody. [Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Random House, 2001), 545.]

  § Mary Ann Evans also was known by her married name
, Mrs. George Henry Lewes. She wrote under the pseudonym, George Eliot.

  ¶ The opening poem of Emily Fowler Ford’s book of poetry confirmed the assessment of the Springfield Republican reviewer: “I am no poet, and I know it./ But if a wild bloom lingers/ within my loving fingers/ From the woods I joyful bring it;/ In my sweet friend’s lap I fling it./ Can you blame me that I show it.” Years later after refusing a visit from Mrs. Ford and rejecting her offer to visit Brooklyn, Emily acknowledged receipt of her friend’s volume of verse. “The little Book will be subtly cherished,” she told her old friend—as noncommittal a statement as Dickinson ever wrote. [L781.]

  # The nearly five-mile-long Hoosac Tunnel was constructed in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts near the town of North Adams. Until the twentieth century, it was the longest tunnel in North America. The tunnel opened in 1875, and still is used today for freight rail service.

  ** A Boston doctor conjectured Edward’s cause of death was apoplexy—what would now be considered a stroke. Later the family discovered the physician had administered morphine to Mr. Dickinson. That drug was poison to Father, Austin said.

  †† Higginson appears to have accepted the book of George Eliot poems, informing Emily he already owned the Parker biography.

  ‡‡ William Howland moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, where he worked as a lawyer for the rest of his life. He died in 1880. After his romance with Lavinia in 1854, Joseph Lyman married, had children, and became a New York journalist. He died in 1872.

  §§ Dickinson scholar Jay Leyda later found the poem among Helen Hunt Jackson’s papers, years after her death. [Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 580.]

  ¶¶ For the next twenty-six years, Sabra Snell would continue recording weather data in the journal started by her father.

  ## Emily Dickinson made the trek to the top of Mount Holyoke along with Vinnie and several friends on October 9, 1849. Her name still appears in the Prospect House registry. [Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 158–59.]

  *** In 1877 the No Name series issued Louisa May Alcott’s A Modern Mephistopheles, a dark thriller based on Goethe’s Faust. In her journal, Alcott wrote that she enjoyed writing the novel, “being tired of providing moral pap for the young.” [Louisa May Alcott, Little Women: An Annotated Edition, ed. Daniel Shealy (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 2.]

  ††† Helen Hunt Jackson wrote Mercy Philbrick’s Choice, and some characters in the novel bear a striking resemblance to Dickinson. “One cannot walk through the streets of a New England village,” the book began, “without being impressed by a sense of the futile semblance of barrier, this touching effort of withdrawal and reticence.” The main character is a shy woman with poetic sensibilities—a woman who led a secluded life, and whose personality was marked by “the loneliness of intense individuals.” Some local readers thought Dickinson may have been the novel’s author. [Karen Dandurand, “Dickinson and the Public,” in Martin Orzbeck and Robert Weisbuch eds., Dickinson and Audience (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 272–73; Leyda, vol. 2, 257.] The No Name series ran between 1876 and 1886 and published a total of thirty-seven volumes. Each book was bound in green cloth with symbols of good luck on the cover: a four-leaf clover and a horseshoe.

  ‡‡‡ Emily cared about the way she looked and once apologized to Sue, who had dropped by for a quick visit. “I would have liked to be beautiful and tidy when you came,” she wrote her sister-in-law. “You will excuse me, wont you. . . . How it would please me if you would come once more, when I was palatable.” [L383.]

  §§§ When the Springfield Republican revealed Helen Hunt had written a series of anonymous short stories, she was furious with Samuel Bowles and wrote him directly. “I will not be found out,” she later wrote a friend, “not even to sell 10 000 of the book in one week!” [Leyda, Vol. 2, 216.] To another friend she said, “I intend to deny it, till I die. Then I wish it to be known.” [Kate Phillips, Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 198.]

  Ten

  CALLED BACK

  Saturday, May 15, 1886 9 p.m. Thermometer 55.2. Rain/Snow 0. Clouds 0. Winds 0. Thermometer Attached to Barometer 72.1. Dry Bulb 55.3. Wet Bulb 54.5. Force of Vapor .411. Humidity 93.

  —Sabra Snell, The Meteorological Journal Kept at Amherst College

  Alone at her desk at night, Emily looked up and stared into the darkness. Even as she approached fifty, Emily continued to write at night. Sometimes the sound of the wind woke her, or her invalid mother called out from another room or a thought intruded on her sleep and wouldn’t let go. Once roused, Emily would walk ten steps to her desk, light a lamp, and get to work. The only sound interrupting her solitude was the scratch of mice going after candy Vinnie kept on the top kitchen shelf.1 “Time, why Time was all I wanted!” Emily was fond of saying, even if the hours she snatched were in the middle of the night.* After her father’s death, Emily told Higginson that nothing had changed—at least externally.2 She still had her mother and Vinnie. Austin, Sue, and their three children remained next door at the Evergreens. But there were internal changes—profound ones. Everything now seemed more tenuous, as if the world Emily had once known could disappear in a flash or at least not be the same as it was. In the days following Edward Dickinson’s death, Emily said she did not—at first—feel “danger.” She didn’t feel much of anything, wandering around in a daze and all but unconscious. But the sense of threat came later in what she called the after, slower days.3 Emily fixed her gaze out the western window and tried to discern what was before her. In the dark, the pupils in her brown eyes grew large, trying to absorb light. She could barely see the ghostly line of hemlocks, the tall oak tree, and the edge of the veranda where Sue liked to be alone with her thoughts.4 At night the glass in Emily’s window turned into a mirror, reflecting her face as much as it did the shadows before her. She did not turn away as others might have, those who claimed there was nothing to see. For Emily, there was always something to see, even in the dark—especially in the dark. Years earlier she had imagined groping her way across a pitch-black landscape without the benefit of light or moon or good eyes. “We grow accustomed to the Dark – ” the poem began.

  Either the Darkness alters –

  Or something in the sight

  Adjusts itself to Midnight – .5

  As much as Emily refused to turn away, she could not see what was coming, including her own death. Before that spring day in 1886, there would be unimaginable loss, a surprising kindling of romantic love, and—up until the end—more poems.

  On too many nights as Emily stared out the window, lamps suddenly blazed inside the Evergreens, and her reflection would vanish. When the space between the two houses flooded with light, Emily knew it was happening again. Ned, her older nephew, was ill. Austin would awaken to a violent shaking, as if heavy wagons were passing on the road and sending reverberations throughout the house. He’d run into Ned’s room to find his fifteen-year-old son moaning and gasping for breath. Nothing could make the seizures stop as Austin tried to hold his son and keep Ned from biting his tongue. The boy cried out, foamed at the mouth, and his whole body contorted with spasms.6 After the first seizure in 1877, Austin and Sue stood watch over their son the entire night, and sent for the doctor first thing in the morning. The physician examined the young man and believed the convulsions were related to a heart condition, possibly triggered by Ned’s earlier bout with rheumatism. He did not expect the seizures to reoccur and Austin and Sue eased, thinking the previous night’s scare was the end of it. But then the convulsions returned. In his diary, Austin kept track of each episode, and noted the way his son’s eyes darkened hours before an attack. Epilepsy, the doctor said. Austin was devastated, saying Ned is “sick with rheumatism and most everything else.”7 Neighbors found Sue distracted, nervous, and exhausted—“unstrung,” a fr
iend said.8 One night, when Emily once again saw the Evergreens’ lamps burning in the middle of the night, she darted over to the house. Her niece, Mattie, caught a glimpse of her out a window by the rosebushes. “’Is he better?’” Emily whispered. Startled to see her aunt alone at that hour, Mattie could only nod. But before Mattie could get to the door to let her in, Emily had disappeared.9 Later she made pies, wrote poems to Ned, and sent over the season’s first batch of maple sugar.10 She may have thought that the sense of danger she had been living with was a premonition of Ned’s epilepsy. But the fright over her nephew was only the beginning.

  Tragedy struck Samuel Bowles next. “Dear Mr Bowles found out too late,” Emily wrote, “that Vitality costs itself.”11 Years of hard work, travel, and late hours editing the Springfield Republican had sapped his energy and taxed his body. Everyone—even Bowles himself—suspected it. Once, after visiting Emily, Bowles sent her a note: “I hope I may oftener come face to face with you. I have little spare strength or time for writing.”12 He died January 16, 1878, of apoplexy at age fifty-one. When she thought of him, Emily could still see the sparkle of his eyes—“those isolated comets”—and thought his countenance the “most triumphant Face out of Paradise.”13 Bowles loved purple hues, and in the afternoon, when Emily looked east to the Pelham Hills, she thought—there’s Sam’s color.14 After Bowles, death took his friend and coeditor, Josiah Holland. Holland and Bowles had been Emily’s earliest literary champions, publishing her valentine and asking for more work from the promising young writer. A heart attack ended Holland’s life on October 12, 1881, and his family notified Emily by telegram. During one of her restive nights, Emily pulled open a drawer, where she kept a memorial edition Scribner’s had published as a tribute to Dr. Holland. “It shall always remain there – nearest us,” she wrote his wife. She recalled one brilliantly clear morning when, after a visit, Holland placed one hand on Vinnie’s head and another on Emily’s, and said he would always remember the sunshine around them.15 “The Things that never can come back, are several,” Emily wrote Elizabeth Holland