Childhood – some forms of Hope – the Dead –
Though Joys – like Men – may sometimes make a Journey –
And still abide – 16
In April 1882, it was Charles Wadsworth, Emily’s mysterious minister from Philadelphia. A few years earlier, he had appeared unannounced on the Homestead steps and rang the bell, asking Margaret if he could see Miss Dickinson. Vinnie had heard him enter the front hall and rushed to alert her sister, who was in her garden conservatory. “The Gentleman with the deep voice wants to see you, Emily,” she said.17 Dickinson was surprised, even startled, to find him in Amherst, let alone in her own home. She asked why he had not told her he was coming, and he replied that he hardly knew himself. “I stepped from my Pulpit . . . to the Train,” he said.18 Earlier, Wadsworth had remarked that he was liable to die at any time, but Emily had not taken him literally: he had always been opaque. But now that he was dead of pneumonia at age sixty-seven, she wanted to know more about his life and sought out others who knew him. She located a mutual acquaintance in Brooklyn and asked him questions: Did Wadsworth have brothers and sisters, what did he say on his deathbed, do either of his sons have his remarkable face, does his daughter regret her “flight from her loved Father”?19 For a man she considered “my closest earthly friend,” Emily knew strikingly little about him.20 She shared her skepticism about heaven with his New York friend. “Are you certain there is another life?” she asked. “When overwhelmed to know, I fear that few are sure.”21
Seven months later, Emily’s mother died. Emily Norcross Dickinson’s death on November 14, 1882, was not a surprise. A larger mother had died before, Emily said, thinking of the neuralgia, the depression, the stroke, and the broken hip that had plagued the seventy-eight-year-old woman and limited her life.22 In many ways her passing was a blessing—both for the suffering Mrs. Dickinson and the steadfast daughters who cared for her. Emily admitted she and her mother had not always been close. “But Mines in the same Ground meet by tunneling,” she wrote, “and when she became our Child, the Affection came.”23 The day before Mrs. Dickinson died, she had seemed better, and Emily fed her mother beef tea, custard, and lemonade.24 The next morning, after being lifted from bed to chair, Mrs. Dickinson admired a cluster of grapes a friend had sent, called out for Vinnie not to leave her, then gasped and died. Her funeral was a simple one. Amherst shops did not close as they had for her husband. There were no Boston dignitaries present. To the few who saw Emily the day of her mother’s service, the poet looked pale and worn.25 “There was no earthly parting,” Emily wrote her Norcross cousins. “She slipped from our fingers like a flake gathered by the wind, and is now part of the drift called ‘the infinite.’ We don’t know where she is, though so many tell us. I believe we shall in some manner be cherished by our Maker – that the One who gave us this remarkable earth has the power still farther to surprise that which He has caused. Beyond that all is silence.”26 When she looked back over the many years her mother had been ill, Emily had one regret: She wished her mother had been better friends with the sky. Nature had always been Emily’s preferred companion. “That is ‘sociability,’” she wrote, “that is fine and deathless.”27 Even while expected, her mother’s death left Emily chilled. It was always that way with her: when grief or terror struck, Emily turned to ice. “Her dying feels to me like many kinds of Cold,” she wrote, “at times electric, at times benumbing – then a trackless waste.”28 The poet was right, though, in suspecting that life might still surprise. In the months after her mother’s death, Emily Dickinson fell in love.
Otis Phillips Lord was a justice on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. An Amherst College graduate, former politician, and staunch old-school Whig, he was recognized for being forceful, high-minded, and at times stiff. He had known Emily since she was a girl and—as one of Edward Dickinson’s closest friends—he had often visited the family. Once at the Dickinsons’ dinner table, he had spontaneously launched into the somber hymn “My Thoughts on Awful Subjects Rolls.” Sue and Vinnie could barely contain their amusement, and Vinnie diffused the awkward moment with her own rendition of a more uplifting psalm. Judge Lord might not have minded their giggles. In private moments he exhibited a warm sense of humor, and he and Emily had fun swapping droll newspaper stories.
NOTICE!
My wife Sophia Pickles having left my bed and board without just cause or provocation, I shall not be responsible for bills of her contracting.
SOLOMON PICKLES
NOTICE!
I take this means of saying that Solomon Pickles has had no bed or board for me to leave for the last two months.
SOPHIA PICKLES29
When their relationship began around 1882, Judge Lord was seventy years old, a widower with no children, a resident of Salem, and eighteen years Emily’s senior. She called him “my Church,” and letters to him were filled with affection.30 Judge Lord’s legal work brought him to nearby Northampton twice a year, and he often stayed in Amherst accompanied by nieces who kept house for him. Perhaps Emily felt a newfound sense of freedom after so many years focused on her mother’s care. Perhaps she finally was ready to open herself to the vulnerabilities of love. While Emily and Otis did not see each other often, they exchanged weekly letters—missives that Emily took care in drafting and kept copies of in her room. Whether she mailed all the letters she drafted was unclear. What was certain, however, was her passion. “My lovely Salem smiles at me,” she wrote. “I seek his Face so often . . . I confess that I love him – I rejoice that I love him – I thank the maker of Heaven and Earth that gave him me to love – the exultation floods me – I cannot find my channel – The Creek turns to Sea – at thought of thee.”31 When the time was right, she said she would lift the bars and lay him in the moss.32 Yet as much as Emily poured out her love, she also held back. “Dont you know you are happiest while I withhold and not confer,” she wrote. “Dont you know that ‘No’ is the wildest word we consign to Language?”33 Soon after Emily pledged her love, Judge Lord asked her to marry him—or seemed to.† “You said with loved timidity in asking me to your dear Home, you would ‘try not to make it unpleasant.’ So delicate a diffidence,” she wrote.34 She played with writing her name as if they were married, first joking about his reference to her slight frame. “Emily ‘Jumbo’! Sweetest name, but I know a sweeter – Emily Jumbo Lord.”35
But Judge Lord’s health was precarious. Shortly after his relationship with Emily began, Vinnie and Austin read in the newspaper that he had collapsed. Vinnie asked Emily if she had seen the paper and when she said no, her sister broke the news. Again Emily felt the cold grip of panic take hold and her sight blurred. When Tom Kelley, a family workman, appeared at the door, Emily ran to his blue jacket.36 Miraculously, Otis Lord recovered and he and Emily returned to their correspondence. “The love I feel for you, I mean, your own for me [is] a treasure I still keep,” she wrote in rare stumbling formality.37 There never would be a marriage or anything as official as an engagement. The thought of uprooting Emily Dickinson to Salem was unrealistic. Amherst ran too deep in her veins. She may also have thought that marriage came at too high a price, as if it would distract from her poetry or impede words. “Sleeplessness makes my Pencil stumble,” she wrote Judge Lord one night. “Affection clogs it – too.”38 She preferred to live in a familiar place—as fearsome and eruptive as it was. In a poem she shared with no one, she described living on a precipice.
Volcanoes be in Sicily
And South America
I judge from my Geography
Volcanoes nearer here
A Lava step at any time
Am I inclined to climb
A Crater I may contemplate
Vesuvius at Home39
Around 1882, Austin also fell in love. But unlike Emily’s relationship with Judge Lord, Austin’s love affair was clandestine and eventually tore the family apart. Mabel Loomis Todd had moved with her husband, David, to Amherst in the autumn of 1881. David Todd was the new p
rofessor of astronomy at Amherst College and his twenty-five-year-old wife became the toast of the town—or so Mabel would be the first to tell anyone. She was a beautiful young woman, lively and talented. Upon her arrival in Amherst, she became a close friend of Susan’s. Mrs. Austin Dickinson is the “real society person here,” Mabel gushed, and said Sue’s presence filled every room with grace and elegance.40 Mabel started spending time in Austin and Sue’s drawing room, playing the piano and singing. Ned, only five years younger than Mabel, was smitten. Austin’s fascination went deeper. Austin and Mabel took walks alone and she found him dignified, if also a little odd.41 Vinnie and Emily were impressed with the newcomer, although the poet declined to see her as she did most everyone else. When Mabel played the piano for the Dickinson sisters at the Homestead, Emily would listen from the top of the stairs and send down a glass of wine or a poem. Mabel found Austin’s mysterious sister captivating. “I must tell you about the character of Amherst,” she wrote her parents. “It is a lady whom the people call the Myth.” According to town gossip, she said, Emily had not been out of the house in fifteen years and never saw anyone. She allowed children to visit once in a while or would lower treats to them from her window. She dressed totally in white, had a brilliant mind, and wrote beautifully. “Isn’t that like a book?” she said.”42 Sue shared some of Emily’s poems with Mabel, and Mrs. Todd wrote them down to study at home. She was seriously interested and called the poems “full of power.”43 David Todd often was away from Amherst on astronomical expeditions, and was rumored to have romantic affairs of his own.44 On a picnic to nearby Sunderland one day, Austin told Mabel he wanted to be buried where crickets would forever chirp around him. She was transported. He is “a true, if silent, poet,” she confided in her diary, and declared fifty-three-year-old Austin Dickinson was “almost in every particular my ideal man.”45 By 1883, after Mabel returned from an out-of-town trip, Sue’s cordiality turned to hostility. She’d learned that Austin and Mabel had become lovers, with at least the tacit acknowledgment of his sisters, and perhaps others in town. Vinnie sided with Austin and barely spoke to Sue. She urged Mabel to rise above her sister-in-law’s icy behavior.46 Ned was furious with his father, started smoking, and told Mattie that all he wanted was one day to have a house of his own where his mother could live in peace. “No fame, no brains, no family, no scholarship, No Anything.”47 Sue let her unhappiness spill over and told her daughter that the time might come when she would not be there for her children. Hope “lies far behind me,” she said.48 Emily tried to stay above the rancor and not choose sides. She continued to send notes to Sue and stirred berries over a kettle to send over to the Evergreens.49 But she rarely saw Sue: the berries would be delivered to the house by someone else, and a family stableman let Emily know if Mrs. Dickinson seemed weary. Emily did not check on Susan herself, and—too worn by the ruin around her—Sue apparently did the same. “Whom not seeing I still love,” Sue wrote in a book inscribed to Emily, and sent across the path between the houses.50
Constancy for Emily was her poems. She continued to work, and started corresponding with the new champion of her verses, Thomas Niles. Mr. Niles was the Roberts Brothers publisher and Helen Hunt Jackson’s great friend. After the publication of A Masque of Poets, Niles had expressed admiration for Dickinson’s work. Emily knew Helen had been praising her poems and had urged the publisher to consider publishing a Dickinson volume. “The kind but incredible opinion of ‘H. H.’ and yourself I would like to deserve,” Emily wrote the Boston publisher.51 But she then played her usual trick with people who sought to bring her work to the public: she didn’t say yes and she didn’t say no. She did, however, send Niles more poems, a clear indication that she wanted to keep the door open. Just as she had twenty years before with her first letter to Mr. Higginson, Emily sorted through the many poems in her room—forty fascicles and hundreds of loose poems now, some old verses that she loved and some new ones she had been working on. She selected a few. While the quantity of her poems had been reduced over the years, she still produced around thirty or so new poems a year—and the quality of the work had not diminished. Her methods never altered; there were always drafts, alternate phrasings, and endless revisions. And even as she aged, her subject matter remained the same: poems about love, immortality, death and—always—nature. There were some wonderful new poems she wanted to share with Mr. Niles—verses as good as any she had ever written. She chose one to send, and off it went to Boston—a poem about a hummingbird.
A Route of Evanescence,
With a revolving Wheel –
A Resonance of Emerald
A Rush of Cochineal –
And every Blossom on the Bush
Adjusts it’s tumbled Head –
The Mail from Tunis – probably,
An easy Morning’s Ride – 52
When Emily received Niles’s reply, she was pleased with his reaction—happy that the poem with its burst of color and whirl of motion had captured the essence of the bird. Earlier he had admired a poem she had sent about a blue jay, remarking that the verse seemed true to him.53 Commending one of her poems for being true was the highest praise anyone could offer Emily. Encouraged, she sent him another. It was one of her older poems, a verse she had shared with Higginson seventeen years earlier. She had reworked the stanzas many times and looked over the elegy again.
Further in Summer than the Birds –
Pathetic from the Grass
A minor Nation celebrates
It’s unobtrusive Mass –
No Ordinance be seen –
So gradual the Grace
A gentle Custom it becomes –
Enlarging Loneliness –
Antiquest felt at Noon
When August burning low
Arise this Spectral Canticle
Repose to typify –
Remit as yet to Grace –
No furrow on the Glow –
But a Druidic Difference
Enhances Nature now – 54
For the woman who more than once had called herself a pagan, the poem celebrated the natural world—beginning low in the grass with chirping crickets and ending in the ancient realm of the Druids. It captured the haunting sounds of autumn and moved with the same majestic sweep she had achieved in “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers.” She knew the cricket’s lonely August chant made one sense a difference that could be felt, but not named. Conjuring up the ineffable was, after all, her territory. “My Cricket,” Emily announced in presenting the poem to Mr. Niles.55 Niles wrote back enthusiastically, saying he had read and reread the poems she was sending. Could Roberts Brothers publish a collection of her verse, he boldly asked. “That is, if you want to give them to the world through the medium of a publisher.”56 Mrs. Jackson had already acquainted Mr. Niles with Dickinson’s reluctance.
After their many conversations over A Masque of Poets, Emily and Helen had forged a close relationship. Dickinson had also sent her friend the hummingbird poem and a bluebird one, which Helen had committed to memory. “That is more than I do of any of my own verses,” Jackson said.57 They also enjoyed sparring over poems, and when Helen all but dared Emily to write a poem about an oriole, Emily fired one back in her next letter. “One of the ones that Midas touched,” it began.58 While still spending her days writing, Helen had all but left poetry behind. Another occupation had overtaken her. On a recent trip out west, she had been appalled by the living conditions of Ponca Indians and was attending political meetings to protest their poor treatment by the US government. The work consumed her, and she wrote to a friend that someday she would be found dead with “Indians” engraved on her brain.59 She vowed to write a serious political treatise pointing out the government’s injustice. The title for the book came to her suddenly, she said, “as if someone spoke them aloud in the room.”60 In 1881 she published A Century of Dishonor, and gave copies at her own expense to every senator and congressman in Washington.61 Two years later President Chester Arthur appoin
ted her a special agent of the department in charge of surveying the needs of Mission Indians in Southern California. Not only was Helen absorbed with her government report, she also had a flickering idea for a novel. She already had a name for the book—Ramona—and told her old friend Colonel Higginson, “If I could write a story that would do for the Indian a thousandth part of what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for the Negro, I would be thankful the rest of my life.” 62 Helen was so focused on her work that she let her correspondence with Emily slip, and Dickinson nudged her with a note and a photograph of her young nephew Gib. The young boy had captured Emily’s heart and that of everyone else around him. He had the unusual ability to bring out the best in people, even his warring parents. Once, on his birthday, he marched around the Dickinson grounds with a band of friends, beating drums and waving party hats. His aunt leaned out the window and applauded.63 Emily hoped Helen would love the little boy as much as she did and told her to keep the photograph.
The last half of 1883 proved to be ruthless. Austin and Sue argued to the point of oblivion and Austin promised Mabel he would straighten things out or “smash the machine.”64 In late September Gib had been outdoors, riding his velocipede around town and splashing in puddles with friends. Within two days he became mysteriously ill—seriously so. Sue and Austin hovered over their eight-year-old child as the little boy’s fever soared. Mabel waited for Austin to come round with news. She wrote in her diary that doctors suspected typhoid or malarial fever.65 In the early morning hours of October 5, Emily crept over to the Evergreens to see what she could do. She had not been in the house in years. By the time she saw him, Gib was hallucinating, sweating, and thrashing in bed. The stringent smell of disinfectant sitting in buckets around the house made Emily’s stomach churn. While she wanted to stay, her physical distress would not allow it. Her head throbbed and she vomited. Emily had to get out of the house, and she rushed back home across the dark path. As the night wore on, Gib’s condition worsened. “Open the Door, open the Door,” he cried in delirium. “They are waiting for me.”66 By five o’clock the next evening, he was dead. A neighbor observed that the Dickinson family—once the symbol of Amherst’s vitality and strength—seemed to collapse overnight.67 Sue shut the door and saw no one. A doctor treated Vinnie for exhaustion. Austin was nearly dead, Mabel wrote in her diary. “Gilbert was his idol, and the only thing in his house which truly loved him.”68 Emily lay in her bed unable to move. “Who were waiting for him,” she asked herself, “all we possess we would give to know.”69
These Fevered Days Page 23
