My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

But if Edward’s time in Boston proved a wash, the correspondence it stimulated constitutes an invaluable record of family relationships and the poet’s early development. Every few days he penned a long message home, generally filling the sheet. His wife, Emily, wrote once or twice a week, leaving less blank space than formerly. The letters they produced in the first four months of 1838, more abundant and detailed than for any other period in their lives, permit some assured conclusions about the young poet’s domestic situation and early formation.

  For all its problems, the marriage seems to have become a happy and successful one. There are no more lofty disquisitions from Edward or opaque, tangled excuses from Emily. The two speak the same language now, answering one another frankly and promptly and with an evident feeling of comfort and security. In every letter they say how much they hate to be apart. They offer fond but dignified expressions of attachment. They are quick to show sympathy for one another’s troubles. They often “reperuse” the other’s letters. In a word, they work hard at the business of mutual accommodation, hold similar views of a husband’s and wife’s very different “duties,” and take pleasure in performing them to each other’s satisfaction. When someone showed signs of thinking their love had cooled now that they had been married so long, Emily “imagine[d] I could tell him a different story.”

  Quite telling is the way the Dickinsons handled the awkward fact that she was “saved” and he wasn’t. To keep this difference from becoming a hidden sore point, or, worse, a constant source of edged allusion, the couple followed a certain daily ritual that indirectly reaffirmed their desire to be as one.

  Several months before Edward’s election, the Reverend Josiah Bent had been installed as the First Church’s pastor, thus ending a troubled four-year period without an acceptable minister. A new fervency had become felt, rising to a climax on January 1, the day Edward left for Boston. It was a day of “Fasting & prayer,” as Reverend Bent noted in the church record book, “a precious season, and promising to the cause of religion”; in the margin he drew a pointing hand. One result of this fresh spirit was that the Dickinson couple agreed to pray twice daily for Edward’s conversion. “My Dear,” he reminded her, “we will remember each other, morning & evening—tho’ I am not what I should be—& what I hope your good example & influence will enable me to become.” These reminders of his spouse’s “promise” gave her a deep gratification in seeing him “thus disposed.” “My promise is not forgotten to my dear husband,” Emily would reply, with typically formal affection; “may you be what you so much desire to be is my earnest prayer.” In this way, even though Edward was doubly apart—unsaved as well as in a distant city—the pair daily reenacted their eagerness to be united.

  What particularly weighed on him was the knowledge that he wasn’t ready for heaven:

  If, as you believe, and I can’t doubt, this life is a mere preparatory state for another period of existence, how important to act with reference to such a state—& yet how little we really do seem to consider it. I need not tell you that no day passes without my having some reflections on this subject, in connection with you, & our dear little children. The idea that we must be, at some time, separated, is too much for me to harbor—and the reflection that we might not meet again in a future state, is too much.

  Years later his daughter expressed a similar idea with greater compression and generality: “Were Departure Separation, there would be neither Nature nor Art, for there would be no World.”

  That Edward was agonized by the prospect of separation and not the threat of hell says something about his personal investment in his family. It also prompts some questions about the nature of his anxious fear, which he may not have fully understood. Was he feeling the wage earner’s regret at having to be away from his family each day and slowly losing touch? Was he intuiting the terminal remoteness he eventually fell into? Years later, as his daughter noted, he spoke of his life as having been “passed in a wilderness or on an island. . . . And so it is, for in the morning I hear his voice and methinks it . . . has a sea tone . . . a suggestion of remoteness as far [as] the isle of Juan Fernandez.”

  Given the good working relations the couple established in the 1830s, their union’s permanent tensions stand out all the more clearly. The most salient of these concerned Emily Norcross Dickinson’s health, “nervous” as well as physical. Putting the conflict at its simplest, Edward believed she exposed herself to needless risk, while she believed he worried about her too much. Over and over, with varying tones, they restated these basic positions. A snowstorm drew this from Edward:

  Do not overdo—nor exert yourself too much—don’t go out evenings, on any account—nor too much, in the afternoon. It is better for you, in cold weather to stay at home, pretty much. If you will ride to meeting [i.e., church], send Austin to ask Mr. Frink . . . to carry you.

  Emily’s reply that others were looking after her carried the muffled implication that her husband needn’t worry about her so much or issue so many orders:

  My dear you are very kind to say to me to call upon Mr Frink when I wish, but when I tell you, that he has offered to do it, without my presenting my requests . . . we may well suppose that we have some friends.

  Sometimes, however, she stated her position with simple dignity, and a steady recognition of his nervous states:

  You must not be to anxious for us You must try to sleep quietly nights as you say to me Last night I rested finely and I have enjoyed the comfortable affects during the day. which I presume you will be glad to learn.

  But Mrs. Dickinson’s times of calm well-being were few and short-lived. Once, when the man Edward hired to dispatch his routine business called on her, he found her “looking very well, but complaining of being very nervous.” Her fears about the many things that might go wrong in her husband’s absence were not unfounded. Robberies and assaults were always being reported, and one night, when Lavinia was attacked with the croup, her mother had to get up, “obtain” a light, and give the child “wine drops” to make her vomit (it worked). When Emily was “covered with the rash” and “complained of being tired,” a doctor was called in, “a little course of medicine” was administered, and the girl was soon on her feet. If the wind rose in Boston, Edward feared it was driving against his wife’s “chamber window” in Amherst and disturbing her rest. Often two-edged, his messages surely stressed her as much as they soothed. “Keep your doors all safely locked, nights,” he ordered, adding hollowly, “tho’ nothing is going to hurt you.”

  Since the First Church did not yet have a vestry, weekday events were held in the meetinghouse basement, later recalled as “a most uninviting room, low-ceiled and dark and half-subterranean.” That was where the prayer meetings took place during the Reverend Bent’s revival. On April 1, Edward laid down the law:

  One thing I forgot to charge you about [before returning to Boston]—that is going out, evenings, to attend meetings—as much as you may be inclined to go, my positive injunction is that you do not go into the vestry, on any occasion, for any purpose, in my absence. Now don’t disregard this. I shall find it out, if you do. It is a most dangerous place—& I wonder that any body will venture into it.

  There is no doubt Edward himself was part bear. Once, he sent the threat that if any of the children should die, “& you did not let me know that it was sick, before hand, I should never forget it.” One would like to know whether his wife retained the memory of this terrible anticipatory vindictiveness.

  What we should not forget is that the protective rage was in proportion to the anxious and tender love. Father’s affection and ferocity, twisted to form an unbreakable strand, stretched around his children, his daughters especially, the older one most of all, forming her high-tension electrified perimeter.

  The Best Little Girl in Amherst

  Being the oldest child and a male and thus presumed to be hardier than his sisters, Austin was singled out again and again for special duties and privileges. As a designated water-ca
rrier and general-purpose errand runner, he was entitled to brave the elements when females were compelled to stay indoors. Once, when Mother was at a wedding, she waited till it was nearly over and then sent Austin racing to the post office to see if she had a letter from Edward. Over time, the distinction grew more invidious, especially after Austin entered Edward’s profession. From then on, Father would write to him about politics and business, and to his daughters about . . . little of importance. Judging from the record (incomplete, we remind ourselves), his relations with them steadily contracted.

  But in 1838 it looks as if his connection with Emily was warm and rich, and well integrated into her growing sense of herself and the world. Indeed, the voluminous correspondence of that year suggests that Father distinguished his older daughter in subtle but immensely significant ways. On January 5 he sent brief messages to each of his children. That to Austin seems the most generic: “You must be a nice boy—go to school. . . . Get in your wood . . . be good, at the table, & help Mother all you can. I shall want to hear all about it.” That to Lavinia shows she was seen as needing correction: “You must not deceive Mother—if you do, I shall know all about it.” But that to Emily takes for granted an advanced moral and emotional development and has no threat of surveillance: “Be pleasant to your little [italics added] brother & sister, & help all get along as pleasantly as you can. I want to have you one of the best little girls in town.” What one senses between the lines here—that Emily was the most responsive of the three, in rapport and eager to please—finds confirmation elsewhere, as when Edward warns Austin and Lavinia but not Emily against playing outside in the wind. The impatient and inconsiderate juvenile egotism that Aunt Elizabeth noted in Lavinia (“stands at my elbow, tearing me to stop”) was nowhere recorded for the older sister.

  The same picture emerges from the letters of Mrs. Dickinson, who also distinguished Emily as the advanced and thoughtful child, moving faster than her siblings toward responsible participation in the world of adult concerns. It is she who sent the bundle to the Bullard cousins and asked for “a little Emery” to scour her needles with—a request that tells us she was not only assembling her domestic toolbox but acquiring the ethic of frugality and self-help. (What Austin wanted was a penknife.) Though Mother often said the children missed their father, she transmitted no individualized messages to that effect from Austin or Lavinia. From Emily, however, we have two, each suggesting how competently the girl assimilated her parents’ tone and at the same time how skillfully she worked out what she wanted to say:

  [The children] are very desirous I should say to their Father they have been good children. Emily says she wishes I would write to you that she should be glad to see you but she hope *26 it is all for the best that you are away.

  [Emily] speaks of her Father with much affection. She says she is tired of living without a Father.

  These statements show how conscious the girl was of her family’s entire dependence on Edward, powerful and all-sustaining and much-loved and frequently, necessarily, absent.

  In her maturity, Dickinson often intimated she had been anything but a model child. As we have seen, she had a vivid memory of being reproved by Mother after wading in the mud. Although we must be on guard against literal readings of her first-person poems, the importance of being “still” in “They shut me up in prose” does evoke the Dickinsons’ tight half-house, with the Macks beyond the partition walls from 1834 to 1840. “We’re nettles, some of us,” says Marian Erle in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, “And give offence by the act of springing up.” The passage is marked in Dickinson’s copy.

  What to do with this contradiction between the parents’ picture of the best little girl in Amherst and her mature sense of having been a mud-loving nettle? It is obvious the spirited child must have broken many rules, and also that her frequently absent father didn’t have to contend with her or wasn’t always apprised of her misdemeanors. But there is a deeper answer, one that has to do with the girl’s contrasting relations with her father and mother.

  Before Emily’s adolescence, we do not have one report or memory of Edward’s having reproved or punished her. Instead, whenever the source of early parental chastising is specified, it proves to be Mrs. Dickinson. “Mother told me when I was a Boy,” she told a nephew in the 1870s, “that I must ‘turn over a new Leaf’ – I call that the Foliage Admonition.” The passage not only tells us the girl impressed her mother as often misbehaving, but that the daughter’s disdain for maternal platitudes became a point of tension. Another memory, recorded on two scraps of paper pinned together, seems to rebel against Mother’s pinched outlook, and also the doctrine of Original Sin: “We said she said [the?] Lord Jesus – receive my Spirit – We were put in separate rooms to expiate our temerity and thought how hateful Jesus must be to get us into trouble when we had done nothing but crucify him and that before we were born.” It isn’t known who the other child was or what this was all about, but it looks as if an innocent game was misread as blasphemy.

  The point is not that Mother liked to punish (she didn’t), but that there was real tension between her narrow mind-set and the daughter’s wilder, exploratory impulses. “I always ran Home to Awe when a child, if anything befell me,” the poet wrote Thomas Wentworth Higginson in the 1870s; “He was an awful Mother, but I liked him better than none.” For the mature Dickinson, “awe” meant something like sublime terror. The girl realized she could not carry this burden to Mother, so she kept it to herself, pondering it, letting it become a kind of second home.

  Simultaneously, the girl was giving some concentrated thought to certain patriarchal figures in the Bible—their power, love of dependents, private anguish. The story of the tragic conflict beween David and his loved son Absalom “haunted me when a little girl.” She was especially troubled by the punishment meted out to Moses, who was not permitted to enter the Promised Land after leading the Children of Israel to its borders:

  It always felt to me – a wrong

  To that Old Moses – done –

  To let him see – the Canaan –

  Without the entering –

  The poem ends with Moses gazing at the distant, forbidden place:

  Old Man on Nebo! Late as this –

  My justice bleeds – for Thee!

  Fr521

  The same scene appears in two other poems, Fr179 and Fr1271. The girl was lastingly impressed by it.

  Emily’s rapt pity hints at the vigor and complexity of her juvenile feelings about the paternal order that mandated her own disabling exclusion as a female. On the one hand, her sympathetic interest in patriarchal leaders suggests how much she identified with Father in thought and fantasy. We may take this interest as a sign she was incorporating into her own psychic horizons his powerful determination, self-reliance, aloofness.

  Yet, along with the sympathy for suffering patriarchs, went more than a touch of suspicion and defiance: to pity Moses, after all, was to question sovereign justice. According to the First Church’s Articles of Faith, the Scriptures had been written by “Holy Men . . . moved by the Holy Ghost.” On this point the girl had her secret reserves, or so she declared in the 1880s: “The Fiction of ‘Santa Claus’ always reminds me of the reply to my early question of ‘Who made the Bible’ – ‘Holy Men moved by the Holy Ghost,’ and though I have now ceased my investigations, the Solution is insufficient.”

  Above everything was the central mystery of “the Father,” whom everyone was always addressing in public prayer. One of the hymns in Watts and Select, her church’s hymnal in the 1830s, had a riddling and disturbingly exclusive quatrain:

  “There’s none can know the Father right,

  But those who learn it from the Son;

  Nor can the Son be well received,

  But where the Father makes him known.”

  What made these words, spoken by Jesus, even more impressive was that they were sung to the tune of “Old Hundred” (composed by John Dowland, incidentall
y). A gifted and alert girl might easily wonder what this hieratic male wisdom was all about, and why there was no provision for the Mother and the Daughter in the divine circuit of knowledge. Dickinson’s possible response, composed in the 1870s, begins:

  Who were “the Father and the Son”

  I pondered when a child –

  And what had they to do with me . . .

  Fr1280A

  There is one early memory that can be precisely dated: the poet’s first Lord’s Supper. This rite was celebrated every two or three months, following the regular Sunday morning meeting. Edward and his children and other nonmembers would stand up and leave and the pastor would then invite professed Christians to partake, so that Mrs. Dickinson would be the only one in the family pew who drank the wine and ate the bread. Young Emily may well have been curious about the unseen rite and her powerful father’s mysterious exclusion (like Moses’?).

  On January 7, 1838, when Edward was in Boston as Amherst’s newly elected representative, his wife wrote him that at church that morning “Austin and Emily . . . staid with me during the communion season.” The event hardly seems noteworthy, yet it made a lasting impression on the precocious seven-year-old, who felt she had been offered a rare invitation. Four decades later she recalled the occasion in a letter to Maria Whitney:

  Detained once at a sacrament, because too small to retire [by herself, that is], the Clergyman asked all to remain “who loved the Lord Jesus Christ” –

  Though the Lord Jesus Christ was a stranger to me, the invitation was noble.

  In another letter recalling the same event, “rising” persists as an odd aspect of the moment: