My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  Following the move on September 1, Emily found herself in her second shared living arrangement, separated by hallways and staircases from Edward’s parents and younger siblings. Lavinia had no doubt her sister and brother-in-law would be happy in their new home. The only disadvantage she saw was in living “so far from the city.” She may have been referring to the village business center a quarter mile distant.

  That fall it was learned that Joel planned to remarry—a necessary step now that Emily and Betsey were gone and a firm hand was needed for the children still at home, Lavinia, Alfred, and Joel Warren. The new wife and mother, previously unmarried and in her forties, was startlingly unlike “retiring” Betsey Fay. Coming from an eminent clerical family, Sarah Vaill had been a teacher and was thought to be “quite a superior woman”; as Emily guardedly put it, she was “very well spoken of.” Her shrewd and humorous father, the Reverend Joseph Vaill, pastor for fifty years of a Connecticut church, was to be the subject of a book-length biography in 1839. Sarah’s extant letters, pleasant but a little starchy, are those of someone who made a constant point of being temperate, refined, helpful, good-humored.

  To receive such a bride, the immense Norcross house had to be cleaned as never before. On November 11 the man who painted Monson’s wagons and fences billed Joel for “painting floors at your House.” A week later Lavinia informed her sister that “we are all full of business.” The wedding was set for early January, and as the day approached Lavinia gave voice to a thought others might not have uttered: “what shall I call her? Can I say Mother. O that I could be far away from here—Emily you may depend I want to be with you.” That was on December 6.

  Notwithstanding such anxieties, it was a time of high hopes and fresh starts. The bankruptcy in Amherst had been weathered, and the deaths and other upheavals in Monson were receding into the past. The Dickinsons and the Norcrosses had both succeeded in reconfiguring and restabilizing themselves. A few days after Lavinia doubted she could say “Mother,” Dr. Isaac G. Cutler was summoned to the west side of the Dickinson Homestead. The town’s senior physician, he knew the building well, having gone there to deliver Lucretia’s last babies. Afterward he added a line to his long record of deliveries:

  Edward Dickinson Esq r December 10 G [for Girl]

  Opening his wife’s Bible, Edward made a more detailed entry in the family record:

  Emily Elisabeth, their second child

  was born Dec r. 10. 1830. at 5. o’clock A.M. *14

  From all the signs, the baby was an easy one to care for. Six months after her birth, as the mother wrote a letter to her temporarily absent husband (he had written every day), she conveyed an air of tranquil contentment: “I have retired to my chamber for a little space to converse with you—with my little companion on the bed asleep. . . . I am now counting the days when I hope that you will return into the bosom of your family. . . . I attended the tract society yesterday had quite an interesting meeting. I must leave you my dear to resume my usual employment which you may well suppose.”

  There is a one-word postscript following the signature:

  Excuse

  Was it because she hadn’t written? Was it because she risked the “evening air” in order to attend one of the meetings her husband deprecated as unnecessary for women?

  This was the home that awaited the sleeping baby.

  Part Two

  1830-1840

  After the fire of 1838, David Mack, Jr., built a straw-goods factory in the center of Amherst, the appearance of which has been preserved on company letterhead. In the right foreground stands the commercial building erected by Samuel Fowler Dickinson in the 1820s. Looking east along Main Street, we see in the middle distance the first two homes occupied by Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson: on the right the Jemima Montague place; on the left the Dickinson Homestead, purchased in 1833 by Mack.

  Chapter 5

  1830–1835: A Warm and Anxious Nest

  In 1866, reporting an encounter in which Mrs. Dickinson hoped her grandson “would be a very good Boy,” her daughter took immense pleasure in the five-year-old’s answer: “‘Not very dood’ he said, sweet defiant child!”

  The pleasure grew with age. At fifty the poet sent this subversive encouragement to a group of neighborhood children: “Please never grow up, which is ‘far better’ – Please never ‘improve’ – you are perfect now.” Among other things, she was making an irreverent allusion to St. Paul’s yearning for heaven in Philippians 1:23 (“For I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better”). Another letter toying with Holy Writ, in this case Jesus’ saying “Except ye . . . become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3), advised a devout friend: “Unless we become as Rogues, we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” For the poet, our inborn disobedience had become wholly benign. It qualified us for paradise rather than causing our expulsion from it.

  These charming provocations remind us that Dickinson was a nineteenth-century Romantic who found some of her best material in the idea of childhood purity. They exhibit her insouciant defiance of a huge range of conventions and disciplines. They warn us not to see her as the product of a “blighted childhood” (Sewall’s good phrase for the legend he effectively opposed) or to forget how she was always harking back to her beginnings and finding a perennial richness there. And they hint that as she looked back at her early years from the vantage of middle age, what she saw was someone who had probably been too good.

  In narrating a subject’s early years, a biographer tries to assemble the scattered and fragmentary evidence into a truthful portrait of a mind in process of formation. Among other things, that means not letting the occasional drama or sensation obscure the mundanity of life. With Dickinson, whose later retrospects were apt to be pungent, extreme, and free of context, not so much reporting as transforming the original facts, the work becomes doubly treacherous. We must not ignore the documented grimnesses and certain shocking claims (“I never had a mother”), yet we have to keep the fundamentals steadily in view: the parents’ devotion to their firstborn daughter and that daughter’s attachment, adhesion, to them. When she was fourteen and a friend was left motherless, her response was to “pity her very much she must be so lonely without her mother.” Young Emily was an affectionate and spirited child, and the home she grew up in had a close, regular, anxious feel. Her parents believed in simplicity, systematic planning, steady discipline, and hard work, but the work fell on their own shoulders rather than the children’s and the punishments were less frequent than the rewards. It is clear that Emily experienced major trauma as a girl, but probably not before 1844.

  Which is not to say there were no shadows from the outset: tight living quarters, financial insecurity, insistent parental anxieties, threats of sickness, fears of death and the afterlife, and an extreme imbalance of power between father and mother.

  The occasionally sinister conditions and the basically unblightable vitality: the challenge before us is not only to keep both of these in sight but to trace the explosive generative force of their union.

  The Dangerous Evening Air

  Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson were surrounded by parents bereft of their children. Up the street lived Irene Dickinson Montague, Edward’s aunt, who had lost three of her first four. In Monson there was Hannah Porter of the Female Praying Circle who had to bury all four of hers, the last one surviving to age thirteen, and in Easthampton there was Samuel Williston, the rich button manufacturer whose four children, girls, all died by the age of six, the first two in 1831 from “inflammation upon the lungs” and “Canker Rash.” The latter disease was scarlet fever. Once, after young Emily woke up with a rash, her father vigorously conjured her mother not to let it develop *15 into “the Canker-rash.” Among her aunts, Lucretia Dickinson Bullard lost her first child and Mary Newman her first three. Edward was in the vicinity of Andover, the Newmans’ home, when the third one “died at 1
. o’clock this morning!” as he informed his wife. He was glad to be able to show his sympathy for the desolated parents by attending the funeral. “I really feel for them much,” he wrote.

  Little Emily was two years old when Aunt Lavinia advised the Dickinsons that a two-year-old in Monson had been scalded to death “in a pail of hot water.” “I mention this,” she added, “that you may be careful about your children.” The warning was superfluous: Edward was already in a constant state of alertness for illness, accidents, and criminal assault. This vigilance stemmed both from his sense of female vulnerability and from his own medical history, including what a sister once referred to as “your old complaint, the palpitation in the heart.” In 1823, taking the stage to New Haven for his commencement, he had been in an accident that left his roommate George Ashmun with a broken leg. In 1826 he had been greatly impressed when an Amherst sophomore caught cold, “neglected to apply for medical advice,” and died. As a bachelor law student, he assembled a file of emergency remedies: for dysentery, take blackberry root; if you swallow prussic acid, take ammonia; if you’re struck unconscious by lightning, let’s hope someone douses you with cold water. By his mid-thirties he had known “the distress of rheumatism in my hyp & back.” All his life Edward prescribed, doctored, ordered to bed, and warned against drafts, so that his home remedies became both an accepted ordeal and a standing family joke. Twelve years after he died, the poet heard of a case in which someone was thought to have been poisoned in her home, and the old joke instantly revived: “Dont you think Fumigation ceased when Father died?” She wrote that a month before her death.

  Father’s basic remedy was to require anyone with symptoms, including himself, to stay or return home and take to bed. In 1842, looking forward to visiting Austin in nearby Easthampton, he “was taken suddenly ill—& consequently has been an invalid to-day.” Between him and his sister-in-law Lavinia there was a vigorous contest of wills over proper treatment: he would prescribe certain remedies and she would insist “he need not pride himself that he has cured me—for it is not so.” Once, when she came to Amherst in the dead of winter, troubled and depressed, Edward gave advice that she refused, their standoff growing so bitter it was still unsettled by the time she left for home. She was “grieved to the heart” by the quarrel, and when her travel escort stopped for an hour’s rest in Belchertown, she got off a hasty note to her brother-in-law hoping he would “have me in affectionate remembrance” after all. She reminded him he did not understand “all the bad feelings I have.”

  Like his father before him, Edward “watched” with the sick, sitting up all night at their bedside. Certain duties belonged to women, of course, but it was incumbent on the man of the house to be the vigilant protector. If there was serious illness in his absence, he must abandon all engagements and return home. If prevented from doing so, he must keep strict surveillance from a distance. Edward’s early letters home always contained a regulation dose of health-related advice. When he left for Boston in 1837 to lobby for troubled Amherst College, he was prepared to leave his post “if any of you are sick. . . . I must see to my family, before any & all other business.” In 1874, when his son was absorbed in consulting with Frederick Law Olmsted about the landscaping of Amherst’s common, Edward was so anxious about his grandson’s “Rheumatism” he instructed the forty-five-year-old Austin on his primary duty in the case: “I would not neglect Ned for Mr Olmsted, even.”

  One reason Edward wanted his wife to stay at home was to avoid accidents, exposure to illness, damp drafts, the dew—the “evening air” he mentioned in his 1830 letter from New York. But in 1835, when she made an extended visit to Lavinia in Boston and he remained at home, he sent a very different prescription. Assuring her the children were happy with their temporary caretaker (his cousin Thankful Smith), he urged Emily to have “no anxiety about home, but try to enjoy yourself.” She was to see as many of the “public institutions” as she could, including Bunker Hill, the hospital for the insane, even the Tremont Theatre, and wherever she went she should take a carriage regardless of expense: “forget all your cares.” A few days later someone in Boston informed a correspondent that “Mrs. E Dickinson called in the Evening.” The letter-writer was glad to have the visit but noted it was made rather late, after “Mother & Ann had retired.” Mrs. E. Dickinson was making full use of that hard-to-get license to enjoy the evening air.

  In Amherst, having received an upbeat bulletin, Edward was delighted “to hear that you was enjoying yourself so well.” During his wife’s absence, he attended court in Greenfield, the Franklin County seat, returning home late at night and leaving at five the next morning, but in spite of this grueling schedule he wanted her to “spend as much time & go as far as you desire to, now you have got started.” The next year, when she made some sort of family visit to Springfield, he again pressed her to be carefree and self-indulgent and enjoy the urban spectacle.

  How to explain the difference between these letters of 1835–1836 and that of June 1829, when Edward grudged Emily’s time with her dying mother in Monson (“but this visit is to last till sleighing”)? Though he still regarded himself as his wife’s health monitor, he had gained a better understanding of her “nervous” qualities and requirements. He now knew that she suffered from what was not yet termed premenstrual syndrome, a topic the couple discussed with gingerly euphemism. *16 She had also undergone some poorly documented but threatening bouts of illness, one of them consequent on her third pregnancy, and of course she continued to drive herself to exhaustion. What Edward had figured out was that his wife’s well-being mandated a periodic vacation from home.

  One of the fundamental things young Emily grew up taking for granted was that Mother had a great deal of work, was often worn out, and must be spared as much trouble as possible. “Be kind to your good mother,” Edward frequently reminded his children; “she has to work very hard to take care of you.” That they must “not disturb Mother” or “make her any trouble” or always be running to her for help became a kind of refrain, a basic duty shaping both the mother-daughter relationship and the future poet’s sense of the relative powers of men and women. Again and again the keen-eyed girl (regarded as frail herself) was asked to leave her dear mother alone—and thus to reflect on the disadvantages of growing up to be a woman and a wife.

  Upheavals

  On July 3, 1831, when little Emily was half a year old, her mother became a member of Amherst’s First Church by profession of faith. What that means is that Emily Norcross Dickinson had experienced a satisfactory conversion and could now expect to be reunited with Betsey Fay Norcross in heaven. It appears the poet’s first year was a time of peace and fulfillment for her mother.

  Mrs. Dickinson entered the church as part of a wave of fresh converts. On the hill that year a total of twenty-six young men joined the Amherst College church, and elsewhere in New England and New York hundreds of communities were shaken by one of the most intense and widespread revivals on record. There is a fitting symbolism in the fact that, as the older Emily was caught up by the tides of the time, the one thing we know about the younger one is that at eleven months “little E. is as well as ever, and stands alone, a great deal.”

  As for Edward, although he had long since accepted the truth of the orthodox system, he had not yet tasted the inner surrender that would mark him as “saved.” During courtship, his solemn admission that he was “not a christian” had prompted some gloomy reflections on death and eternity, and a hope that he and Emily could together undergo a change of heart, but now that she was safe and he wasn’t, a new fear entered his letters: separation for eternity. Would he be the one left behind? One by one his siblings were being gathered in: Lucretia had proclaimed her faith at twelve, Mary joined Andover’s South Church in 1831, Catharine entered Amherst’s First Church soon after Emily, Frederick became a member of the college church, and Samuel Junior was redeemed in Georgia. When Edward was sent the news about brother Samuel, he couldn’t help making a di
scouraged remark about “that happy future state of existence, for which we all ought to be ever in readiness, but which I am sensible I have always neglected—and fear I always shall.”

  Meanwhile, Edward became more active than ever in the First Parish. Congregational societies consisted of two overlapping entities, church and parish. Professed members constituted the church, the inner group, but the less selective parish was in charge of finances. Not infrequently, the influential men were unsure of their salvation and thus outside the church proper. After Emily’s conversion, the structure of authority in the Dickinson family mirrored what was often seen in Congregational societies: the husband had the secular power but no religious voice; the wife, vice versa. For the next nineteen years Emily Norcross Dickinson had the unenviable position of being both the subordinate wife and the solitary Christian in the family. Here, she was alone, it being her task to carry husband and children to the throne of grace without having been granted abundant means.

  One ironic result of the 1831 revival and the spread of benevolence—the “general moral reformation,” Edward termed it—was a drastic reduction in his volume of business. In February 1832, going to Joel Norcross once again for advice, he confessed that lawyering had become so unprofitable it did “not at present afford me a support.” He wasn’t “pressed or embarrassed,” but if he could raise $500 by April 1 he would feel much less anxious. Worried about the mortgage he had signed on March 30 two years earlier, he recalled in his next sentence that at the time he took this plunge his “prospects were very fair, and soon after . . . the change of times took place.” Now there was so little work he was thinking of abandoning Amherst and the profession and looking for a responsible position in a bank or factory.