Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Part One: 1636–1830
Chapter 1 Amherst and the Fathers
Chapter 2 Emily Norcross of Monson
Chapter 3 1826–1828: Winning Emily Norcross
Chapter 4 1828-1830: Shifting Foundations
Part Two: 1830–1840
Chapter 5 1830–1835: A Warm and Anxious Nest
Chapter 6 1836–1840: The Fire-Stealer’s Girlhood
Part Three: 1840–1847
Chapter 7 First Years on West Street
Chapter 8 Amherst Academy
Chapter 9 Death and Friendship
Part Four: 1847–1852
Chapter 10 1847–1848: Mount Holyoke Female Seminary
Chapter 11 1848–1850: First Drunkenness
Chapter 12 1850–1852: Somebody’s Rev-e-ries
Part Five: 1852-1858
Chapter 13 1852–1854: A Sheltered Life
Chapter 14 1853–1855: News of the Ancient School of True Poets
Chapter 15 1855–1858: Troubles and Riddles
Part Six: 1858–1865
Chapter 16 1858–1860: Nothing’s Small!
Portraits of the Dickinson family
Chapter 17 1860–1862: Carrying and Singing the Heart’s Heavy Freight
Chapter 18 1862–1865: The Fighting Years
Part Seven: 1866–1886
Chapter 19 1866–1870: Repose
Chapter 20 1870–1878: Wisdom That Won’t Go Stale
Chapter 21 1878–1884: Late Adventures in Friendship and Love
Chapter 22 1880–1886: Exquisite Containment
Appendix 1 A Second Photograph of Emily Dickinson?
Appendix 2 Standing Buildings Associated with Emily Dickinson
Appendix 3 Deaths from Consumption (Tuberculosis)
Appendix 4 Emily Dickinson’s Legal Signatures
Appendix 5 Summary of Corrected Dates of Letters
Abbreviations
Endnotes
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Alfred Habegger
Copyright Page
For Nellie
My Wars
Are Laid Away
in Books
Introduction
Any great writer who stands aloof from customs seen as fundamental is certain to be mythologized by posterity. For no one is this truer than Emily Dickinson, whose reclusiveness, originality of mind, and unwillingness to print her work left just the sort of informational gaps that legend thrives on. And yet there is no need to settle for the simplifying icons of her that pass for truth, including the icon of ineluctable mystery. In spite of the gaps, there are enough materials for a solidly documented narrative of her life covering the conditions that shaped her to the inner dynamics of her art and thought.
The present volume began with the feeling that it was time someone assess recent findings and claims relating to this poet, undertake a comprehensive review of the known sources on her, and conduct a determined search for new ones. Among the reflections that set me in motion (this was 1994) was the realization that it was two decades since the huge Dickinson midden had been sifted by Richard B. Sewall, still the best of the poet’s surprisingly few biographers. Since then, the feminist revolution had brought a number of rich new insights, conjectures, and perspectives to bear on her, some wonderfully illuminating. R. W. Franklin was about to complete his new edition of her poems, and certain “theoretical” approaches and isolated finds had opened fresh avenues into her life and work. But the more I read and taught her and considered competing claims, the more I felt that the story of her struggle and her genius was not being told.
Among the many ways readers have made sense of Dickinson, two approaches stand out. The older of them regards her as a pioneer, working in isolation and developing fifty years ahead of time the fractured thought and language that were to be characteristic of high modernism. The modernist Dickinson was not someone who could be patronized as “eccentric,” or explained as a product of New England Puritanism; it was her writing and not her person that merited attention. The other and more recent approach sees her as a woman of her time, an American Victorian intimately involved in female networks and responsive to female writers. This view builds on the groundbreaking 1975 article by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual,” and a great deal of specialized historical excavation, and rightly emphasizes that Dickinson had friends to whom she regularly sent letters and poems.
Each of these two approaches gets a great many things right. But aside from the obvious fact that they are fundamentally opposed and irreconcilable, both distort her historical reality. Their inadequacies will appear as this book unfolds. What must be noted here is the dubiousness of construing this profoundly one-of-a-kind writer by first enrolling her in any group at all, no matter whether it is the contemporary group of close female friends or the future group of detached modernists.
It seems wiser to begin and perhaps end with a recognition of the things that make Dickinson stand out—her genius, her extremely tenacious affection, her avoidance of public life, her reluctance to publish. Whatever her final intentions for the nearly eighteen hundred poems she left behind, the fact that a great many were not communicated to friends warns us that we cannot assume, as we of course do with most writers, that she meant to be read and understood. What George Steiner has said of a poem by Paul Celan applies even more exactly to a large proportion of Dickinson’s work: “At certain levels, we are not meant to understand at all, and our interpretation, indeed our reading itself, is an intrusion.”
The tacit recognition that our reading of Dickinson is an intrusion has all along contributed to her appeal. One of the reasons readers at all levels respond to her with passionate enthusiasm is that, knowing something of her life and character, they approach her work with these in mind. Again and again, readers feel that, remote and difficult as she is, they are on the track of knowing her. They feel a heartbeat; they receive the words as primal and immediate, as coming straight from life. Sadly, this way of reading is generally a mistake, especially if we succumb to the illusion that we can zoom into her life and penetrate her secret being. One of Dickinson’s paradoxes is that she both invites and deflects such intimacy. “Not telling” was one of the things she did to perfection. How that came to be is part of the story this book attempts to follow.
Coming to this project after having written about the James family, I was struck by an assumption pervading a great deal of the critical analysis of Emily Dickinson. With almost anyone else—Charles Dickens or George Eliot or Henry James or James Joyce or T. S. Eliot—it is taken for granted that the life has some sort of shape or curve, however complicated, and that if we know where on that curve a particular work is situated we will probably come to a better understanding of it. There is development over time, in other words, and this directional trend becomes a map by which readers steer. With Dickinson, however, it is often assumed there is no map, direction, or development—that her art was static or airless and that we don’t need to know about her stages, sequences, contexts in order to catch on. Her critical expositors habitually move back and forth between her writings of the early 1860s and those of the 1870s and 1880s, as if to rule out in advance that a given work had much to do with the point she had reached when she wrote it, and that the points connected. It is as if this writer were freakishly unable to learn from experience, and wrote without traction all her life. This approach was made explicit some years ago by David Porter, an influential Dickinson critic, who based his analysis of her as modernist on such premises
as these: that “a chronology of composition has so far been impossible to establish” and that “her art did not change over more than two decades of composition.”
It is true and indeed notorious that Dickinson wrote in the same few verse forms all her life, and that she always sounds like Dickinson, and that readers are easily lulled. But her stitched manuscript books, loose copies and drafts, and poems sent to others have been dated with varying degrees of exactness, and thus we can follow her tracks in a very rough chronological sequence. The feeling that she somehow failed to grow arises less from the oeuvre as such than from the problems we encounter in trying to read it. Aside from the inherent obscurity of some of her work, we meet two sets of practical problems: editorial and biographical. Since she did not date her verse or write for the press, choosing instead to trust a fraction of her output to close friends while keeping most of it to herself, we don’t know how to organize it, frame it, or even set it up in type. The biographical problems are equally daunting: many of her letters are not dated; those to key correspondents have been destroyed or tampered with; and those she received are almost entirely gone, making it next to impossible to understand some of her replies and assess some relationships. And then there is the dearth of recorded incident that resulted from her reclusiveness. Any honest attempt to narrate her life, especially certain phases, ought to begin by acknowledging such difficulties.
But that there were phases is certain. A premise of this biography is that chronology is vital to comprehending Emily Dickinson—that she not only developed over time but that her work often reflected the stages of her life. Her poetry shows a striking and dramatic evolution. The question of development is fundamental: again and again, in reading her, we need to think about her recent history and how it shaped her immediate future. While the poems are obviously not a diary, a great many bear the impress of current experience. Even when they stand at a certain remove from it, as almost all of them do, their meaning may elude us if we miss the connection.
To get a handle on Dickinson’s relationships, especially with those to whom she sent her poems, biography has to carry out two different tasks. The first is to conduct a broad archival investigation in order to discern her friends’ historical reality apart from her. The second (for which her girlhood letters offer an indispensable fund of suggestion) is to try to see what she apparently expected from friendship as such. Only by taking both steps is it possible to sense the distances between her and others, and how she tried to bridge them with her letters and poems, and thus how she came to craft that unique writing voice that speaks so directly and seductively to us. And only if we follow her step-by-step from the beginning, or rather from her parents’ and their parents’ beginnings, can we see the successive stages of her struggle and achievement.
By now, the tradition of parceling Dickinson out among her friends is well established. When Mabel Loomis Todd brought out her pioneering collection of the poet’s letters in 1894, she organized it by recipient, devoting each chapter or segment of a chapter to a particular correspondence. Although Todd arranged matters so that the earlier correspondences preceded the later ones, her book did not finally present a coherent picture of the poet’s life in letters. Eighty years later, when Sewall composed his two-volume life of Dickinson (for which he enjoyed access to restricted materials owned by Millicent Todd Bingham, Todd’s daughter), he observed the same principle of organization, devoting each chapter to a particular family member or friend. One of the strengths of Sewall’s two volumes, which for twenty-five years have set the standard, is the judiciousness with which they examine a number of legends and riddles. But because they present the poet’s life as an amalgam of separate relationships and correspondences, the basic story of her life and work is not laid out. A recent and selective edition of her messages to Susan Gilbert Dickinson, her sister-in-law and close friend—Open Me Carefully, by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith—follows a similar procedure, trying to see Dickinson through a single lens. A great deal of other work in print and electronic media is organized in the same way.
If biography is a narrative that integrates everything, no matter how complex, into a single life’s forward-moving braid, it would seem that the biography of Emily Dickinson has yet to be attempted. My purpose has been to tell the story that seems implicit in the documentary record that is available to us, and at the same time to let the reader behind the scenes by showing just where that record has been fractured. I have aimed at something serviceable for the general cultivated reader and the specialist alike—not an encyclopedic survey of every facet, acquaintance, and poem, but a comprehensive account of essential matters. Of course, I also pay attention to recent insights and contentions, and also to important unknown or untapped sources, such as the printer’s copy for the 1894 edition of Dickinson’s letters. *1 My chief regret is that constraints of space have kept me from going into several poems about which I have much to say.
Four years after I began working full-time on this biography and just as my narrative had reached the year 1850, the date of Dickinson’s earliest known poems, R. W. Franklin brought out his three-volume variorum edition of her poems. No book could have been more timely. Even though it fails to provide evidence or argument for most of its assigned dates (and, inevitably, makes mistakes), the edition is based on an exceptionally careful examination of original manuscripts and early transcriptions. Building on the editorial work of Thomas H. Johnson and others, Franklin goes well beyond it in establishing a plausible chronology and identifying the poems’ recipients. The correction of certain key errors dramatically simplified my work, if for no other reason than that a good deal of distracting peripheral noise abruptly ceased.
But the person to whom I am chiefly in debt is my wife, Nellie Habegger, without whose eager, energetic, and shrewd assistance this biography could not have been completed. Helping me carry out the dusty research at library after library, where “the Habeggers” returned each spring or fall like Dickinson’s birds or crickets, and then providing much-needed criticism, suggestion, and ridicule after reading at our kerosene-lit table my clumsy attempts to get it all down on paper, she is the silent but indispensable presence in this volume.
Textual Note
Although Dickinson’s private copies of her poems sometimes list alternative words or phrases, as if she hadn’t made up her mind, she always made a final choice when sending her poems to friends. I have generally done the same, assuming that that is how she wanted her verse presented to others. If she recorded a preference for a certain alternative (by underlining, say), that will be the one I select. In a few instances, the physical arrangement of alternative lines strongly suggests a preference. If there seems to be no authorial guidance whatever, I rely on my own taste and judgment. Following custom, I quote verbatim and retain idiosyncrasies of capitalization and punctuation. I have, however, silently dropped the apostrophes that Dickinson regularly inserted in possessive pronouns and occasionally in plural nouns, on the ground that such errors are as unrelated to her meaning as they are annoying. Like Franklin, I represent her “dashes,” no matter how long, short, raised, lowered, or angled, with an en dash enclosed by spaces ( – ).
In referring to letters, I adopt Johnson’s numbering, preceded by an “L,” in The Letters of Emily Dickinson (abbreviated Let in the Notes section). For readers accustomed to Johnson’s numbering of the poems, a first-line index to poems discussed provides his as well as Franklin’s numbers. “Fr” stands for Franklin, whose classification system and sequence I follow.
Part One
1636-1830
The arrangement of the stage as shown in the Reunion of the Dickinson Family, at Amherst, Mass., August 8th and 9th, 1883.
Chapter 1
Amherstand the Fathers
Sometime between 1636 and 1638, Emily Dickinson’s earliest American progenitors in the paternal line, Nathaniel and Ann Gull Dickinson, left the parish of Billingborough in Lincolnshire, England, for the ra
w British outpost of Wethersfield, Connecticut. One motive for their drastic move was a determination to practice without interference the militant late-Reformation faith known as Puritanism. The times were hot with rebellion against the Church of England.
In 1659 Nathaniel, Ann, and their children moved north into Massachusetts with a number of other families and established a town along the fertile Connecticut Valley deep in Norwottuck country. They called it Hadley, and Nathaniel played a leading role in organizing and regulating its municipal, educational, religious, and military affairs. When savage warfare broke out in 1675 between the indigenous peoples and the English, three of his nine sons were slain. When England’s Puritan rule ended and those who had condemned Charles I to the headsman’s block fled for their lives, they ended up in this frontier town, founded on righteousness and violence. And when a new town was carved out of Hadley’s eastern parts a century later, in 1759, it was named for the man who would recommend using smallpox-infected blankets to “extirpate” the Indians: Lord Jeffrey Amherst.
By 1830, the year Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, the area was thick with light-skinned farmers bearing her last name, and the ancestral zealotry had moderated into a quirky hardheaded stubbornness known locally as Dickinson grit. A Dickinson reunion held there in 1883 was attended by a huge number of Nathaniel’s descendants, who listened to a minister declaim a versified panegyric composed by Elizabeth Dickinson Currier, one of Emily’s aunts. The poem termed the clan’s patriarchs “men of muscle, as of mind” and denounced any falling away from their evangelical zeal. What the ancestral legacy meant to the event’s organizers is suggested by a photograph of the stage, which shows a slender gun standing on the floor next to portraits of Dickinson judges, generals, governors, and ministers. The weapon was said to have been “used in killing Indians and wolves.”
Although Emily Dickinson would not have attended this pious family gathering, she was very much a member of the tribe—savvy, tough, resolute, heaven-obsessed, independent, unusual. In one of her most eye-catching poems, “My life had stood a loaded gun,” she, or at least the speaker, almost seems to be the deadly Dickinson musket come to life:
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