My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  The cordiality of the Sacrament extremely interested me when a Child, and when the Clergyman invited “all who loved the Lord Jesus Christ, to remain,” I could scarcely refrain from rising and thanking him for the to me unexpected courtesy, though I now think had it been to all who loved Santa Claus, my transports would have been even more untimely.

  In these two retrospective passages, the original experience seems to have been heavily overlaid with later materials, so that it is now seen through various intervening screens. But judging by common elements, the girl’s initial reaction was a pleased surprise. There was an unexpected cordiality in Reverend Bent’s invitation, and she took it seriously enough to want to respond, feeling she was being offered something rare and precious.

  This response is what we might expect from a child with unusual linguistic and intellectual gifts, and who is eager to master the adult religious mysteries. Admitted for the first time into the presence of ultimate power, she gets a glimpse of the rare privilege awaiting her.

  Part Three

  1840-1847

  The house on Amherst’s West Street (today North Pleasant Street) that was Emily Dickinson’s home from 1840 to 1855. The porch in the photograph is of a later date.

  Chapter 7

  First Years on West Street

  The national economy was still depressed but 1840 was a banner year for Emily and her family. In spring they left the Homestead’s east half and moved into a spacious house on what was then called West Street and later became North Pleasant. At the same time, the First Church secured its most effective pastor of the century, the Reverend Aaron Merrick Colton, a major influence on the poet’s formative years. In November, the Democrats took the rap for hard times and the Whigs hoisted old William Henry Harrison into the White House, to the loud cheers of all Dickinsons, Norcrosses, and Sweetsers. And either that fall or the next spring, Emily began attending Amherst Academy.

  It was in January 1840 that an itinerant portrait painter named Otis A. Bullard rented studio space above Pitkin and Kellogg’s store and advertised his services in the Amherst Gazette: he would stay “a few weeks” and be available afternoons “from 1 to 4.” Unlike the old Squire, who died without leaving an image of himself, Edward wanted permanent visual records of the family—“Mold[s],” his uncooperative daughter later called them. Sittings were arranged, and if the resulting portraits seem frustratingly generic as compared to the daguerreotypes about to take America by storm, they do convey a few personal qualities. Looking at Edward, one is struck by the red hair, the tightly set mouth, the direct gaze and premature furrow—the whole impression of taut severity. His wife, Emily, whose eyes do not quite meet our own, presents (in Theodora Ward’s apt description) “a face of gentle propriety with a deprecatory smile.” The children’s faces, much harder to delineate than those of adults, seem stamped by the same template. To individualize them, Bullard resorted to props, showing Lavinia, for instance, with a picture of her favored pet, a cat.

  Of the three, Emily is the most fully characterized, holding a flower above a book opened to a drawing of a flower. Clearly, the nine-year-old is not only interested in plants but wants us to observe a connection she has spotted between the two worlds of print and nature. Unlike her brother and sister, she has her father’s emphatically red hair.

  A Bold New England Voice

  There was no one outside the family whose voice, language, and opinions were drummed into Emily more regularly than were those of the Reverend Aaron Merrick Colton.

  Orthodox in doctrine, Colton was remembered as a gentle, peaceable, unostentatious man, fond of joking, a hater of slavery. One gets an idea of his character from the good habits enumerated in one of his sermons—

  habits of candor, and charity, in judging; habits of self-control, and the soft answer which turneth away wrath; . . . habits of friendliness, courtesy, gentleness toward all men; habit of a pleasant look and word to children, wherever you meet them—a whole mission in itself, and of the best; habits of keeping at home, and improvement of time; habits of observation, of study and reflection . . .

  As a public speaker, Colton didn’t aspire to the sedate polish of the more dignified school of ministers or the emotional heat of the type that “fire[s] up.” Instead, he devised a laconic, not always correct, yet vividly expressive style that seems to have had a major influence on the future poet.

  In early 1840, Colton was in his second year of graduate study at Andover Theological Seminary. What must have been a student essay, “Boldness in the Preacher,” had already seen print. “There is power in boldness,” it declared; “we bow to a decisive spirit. We do it instinctive homage.” The ministerial student was not quite ready, however, to seek the homage of a large and prominent congregation.

  Then, the Reverend Josiah Bent having died, the young man got an invitation from Amherst’s First Church to “supply” the first two Sundays of March 1840. “Supplying” meant preaching for a stated fee without assuming other pastoral duties. Fifty years later, speaking at the church’s anniversary celebration, Colton gave a sharply etched account of what happened next: how he arrived by coach on muddy roads, called as directed “on Edward Dickinson, Esq., then occupying the east part of Gen. Mack’s house,” and had tea there. On Sunday morning, contrary to agreement, the theological student found he was on the footing of an applicant for the empty pastorate. The next day, in Edward’s law office, there was a two-hour confrontation with the church and parish committees, during which the young man was prevailed on to declare himself a candidate and be introduced to all the parish households by committee members. After the high-pressure recruiting operation ended, the poet’s father offered a strategic and well-turned commendation of the victim: “That Colton is a marvel of a man—to visit two hundred families in one week, and tire out seven committee-men, and pat every woman’s baby.”

  Edward probably made this statement at the April 1 parish meeting, which voted to “unite with the Church” in extending a call to young Colton. The vote was unanimous—a signal achievement given the bitter conflicts that had riven the society in the years since Samuel Fowler Dickinson pressed formal charges against the Reverend Daniel A. Clark. In the parish minutes Edward’s name heads the three-man committee appointed to enact the resolution. There can be no doubt he was a key player in the devious campaign to restore congregational unity and snag a bold, first-rate preacher.

  Before a candidate could be ordained, he had to prove his orthodoxy in a public grilling by a council of ministers. Colton’s account of this ordeal nicely illustrates his elliptical manner. Here, in sentences that mostly do without subject or predicate, he produces the effect of rough private notes:

  Tuesday, June 9th [1840] . . . Documents presented and approved. Then the march to the church—moderator and candidate arm in arm, and followed by a large company, representatives of the churches. Something of form if not of comeliness in the times of old. Large gathering in the church. Stood nearly two hours for examination. . . . Coming out of the church after that ordeal, I was met at the door by a Mr. Clark Green, asking me to come to his house on the evening of the next day (Ordination day), and marry his daughter. Well, well; didn’t this mean business and binding?

  Colton may have wanted his hearers to have the same initial misunderstanding of “marry his daughter” that we do. A practiced writer and speaker, he knew how an ambiguity hanging in the air can operate on listeners, keeping them alert and thinking. There was attitude in his packed sentences, a running implication of trenchant opinions not spelled out. For a poet who was to ignore many rules and carry the art of economy to unprecedented lengths, listening to this voice was excellent training.

  As impressive as Colton’s spare humor was his emotional candor. After his ordination and his officiation at the wedding, he returned to his room in the Amherst House, on the corner of West and Amity Streets. Too tense to sleep, he pushed the curtains open in the middle of the night and looked down at the dark crossroads. W
as he up to this work he had been inveigled into accepting? Suddenly, he felt a mad impulse, “a more than half purpose,” to escape while he could. At the same time, the humorist inside voiced the town’s response: “‘Strange freak; man called and settled, and ran away the first night.’”

  This was the man whose preaching Emily Dickinson heard from childhood to early adulthood. At age sixteen, she thought his Thanksgiving sermon “excellent.” But then came the momentous 1850 revival, following which her letters show signs of irritation at “his earnest look and gesture, his calls of now today.” In August 1852, seriously ill, he announced his resignation. The young woman was probably willing for him to go. But by then the gift he had brought was part of her—not the gospel as delivered to the saints, preached week after week for thirteen years, but the sustained exhibition of a man expressing himself in the kind of plain, honest, uncalloused English that grazed your funny bone. Colton’s abrupt and pithy understatement exemplified the New England tone at its best—sly, pungent, comfortable with the vernacular, intelligent without ceremony, anything but bland.

  The short quotations Dickinson was always introducing into her letters show how alert she was to the striking sentence or phrase, memorized on the instant (but often modified later). Judging from the many Bible verses she remembered hearing at church, the habit must have developed in childhood. Once, she evidently caught a minister intoning, “‘Oh thou who sittest upon the Apex of the Cherubim, look down upon this, thine unworthy Terrapin.’” Whoever “fired up” with that pious nonsense, producing a spasm of hilarity in at least one listener, it can’t have been Colton.

  Along with style, the young poet derived something else of incalculable value from her minister: a sense of the power of language. The leading idea in Colton’s essay on boldness is that, however mild the preacher may be in private life, as vicar of Christ he speaks with sovereign authority and stands with founders and conquerors. Convinced that ministerial power must be articulated by the voice in well-thought-out “modulations and cadences,” Colton took to heart his father’s “criticisms, on one occasion, upon my own manner of closing the Lord’s Prayer.” In Matthew 6:13, this prayer concludes, “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.” These words, uttered again and again with attention to shades of meaning, took on a profound private significance for the poet-in-the-making. “When a little Girl,” she wrote in her thirties, “I remember hearing that remarkable passage and preferring the ‘Power,’ not knowing at the time that ‘Kingdom’ and ‘Glory’ were included.” Although we don’t know exactly how Colton’s musical delivery gave rise to this striking act of appropriation (mine is the power), the idea never left her. In her forties she urged her sister-in-law to “Cherish Power,” which “stands in the Bible between the Kingdom and the Glory, because it is wilder than either of them.” Here, too, supreme power is snatchable by mortals, though now its lawless energy is such that it must be hedged between—indeed, syntactically enclosed by—the two other entities.

  Such were the lessons the quiet, red-haired girl sitting in the Dickinson pew was learning from bold (though not that bold) Reverend Colton.

  A Grand Old House All Their Own

  In spring 1839, as the depression persisted and the General Court declined to make an appropriation for Amherst College, Edward made his first substantial investment in local real estate since 1830. For $3,000, he bought a large frame dwelling place on West Street with over two acres of grounds. It was “a grand old house,” as a later occupant recalled, with a traditional central chimney, wide plank floors, and “beams . . . of such hard wood the carpenters dreaded cutting into them.” The long irregular yard made a dogleg south and east, running along the southern boundary of Amherst’s burial ground. In the 1920s the house was razed to make way for a Socony Mobilgas filling station. At present, another station occupies the site.

  In making this purchase, Edward gave the seller a $1,500 mortgage. He must not have felt stretched, however, for in March 1840, after Colton’s first visit, he invested $3,000 in a second house—cousin Nathan Dickinson’s former dwelling. The reason Edward could swing these deals in hard times was that he had his father-in-law’s backing: Joel not only cosigned on a loan but made a $2,000 “advancement” on his daughter’s future inheritance. Paying half this amount to his cousin, Edward covered the rest with a $2,000 mortgage. The risk was minimal: Nathan’s three-acre place had a good location on the Common’s east side, and it brought a steady income until 1856, when Edward sold it to the Newman estate for $6,000, to be a home for his orphaned nieces.

  Judging from a remark of Loring Norcross to Edward—“we hope you will be pleased with your new residence when you get into it”—the Dickinsons moved from Main to West Street about April 1, 1840. Although the new home was less imposing than the former one, it was their own, it didn’t have to be shared, and there was plenty of room for garden, orchard, and grapevines, and even for a small grove of pine trees planted by Austin. For the first time, the family knew what it was to have abundant space to themselves. However, the second-floor rear windows looked down on Amherst’s burial ground, described by a local minister as treeless, “forbidding,” and “repulsive.” The place entered Emily’s imaginative life in many ways, some playful, as when she found a buried homophone and “called the Cemetery Tarrytown” [italics added].

  As befitted a rising county attorney with many public responsibilities, there was a continual flow of visitors for the women of the household to feed and clean up after. There were also occasional long-term guests, mainly relatives or student boarders. Ann Elizabeth Vaill Selby, a niece of Stepgrandmother Norcross, spent the summer of 1845. Edward’s youngest sister, Elizabeth, lived there in April and May of 1842, and in 1844 was invited to return for “a 6 months visit.” Jane Humphrey, one of five well-educated daughters of a doctor in Southwick, moved in while attending the academy. All of these seem to have been on an easy footing in the household. Mrs. Selby became an honorary “Aunt” and gave Emily piano lessons, and one morning Elizabeth rose at 5:30 “and got breakfast before any of the rest were up.” Since the eighteen-year-old was “afraid to sleep alone,” or so Emily claimed, Vinnie—Lavinia—had to share her bed. *27 That left Emily with the slightly older Humphrey girl as a sleeping companion, an arrangement she may have preferred, judging from the affectionate reminder she sent Jane afterward: “what good times we used to have jumping into bed when you slept with me. I do wish you would come to Amherst and make me a great long visit.”

  “Jumping” was how a lively pair of girls went to bed in an unheated room in winter, followed perhaps by a bit of snuggling. Lucy Fowler, who grew up in Westfield and shared Emily’s social, economic, and religious coordinates, recorded years later that “our house was always full and no one ever aspired to a room or even a bed alone,” and also that “the sleeping rooms were cold.” Recalling early bedmates, this memoirist noted that she and a girl cousin “often slept together and a more sweet and capable and loving friend never lived.” Once, on the spur of the moment, Lucy spent a night in nearby Feeding Hills with Abiah Root, one of Emily’s special friends. “How grand I felt to be robed in one of Abiah’s nightgowns and how we chattered after we were in bed.”

  Emily Dickinson also remembered such moments—remembered as she alone remembered. Writing her last known letter to Jane in the mid-1850s, she yearned for the domestic closeness they had known in 1841–1842: “How I wish you were mine, as you once were, when I had you in the morning, and when the sun went down, and was sure I should never go to sleep without a moment from you.” This statement, quite intense even for the time, suggests one of the reasons why friends sometimes drew back from her.

  Living on West Street for fifteen years, Emily completed her schooling, had a series of intense friendships, wrote a great many letters and a few poems, and reached her mid-twenties. The place became filled with vital memories, good and bad, so that when the day finally arrived when she and the rest
of the family moved back to the Dickinson Homestead, newly remodeled and grander than ever, neither she nor her mother appears to have welcomed the change. West Street was home.

  But it never quite became home for Father, whose eye remained cocked on the Homestead and the small property he had bought just west of it. In 1843 he enlarged this toehold by purchasing two adjoining tracts from Luke Sweetser. Edward had long-range plans for the neighborhood he had left. Slowly, piece upon piece, he was putting something together.

  I Sent You There to Improve

  Emily’s first extant letters, spurred by her brother’s and a girlfriend’s unwelcome absence, were written when she was eleven. The basic pattern was already present: as she took up her pen she was flooded by memories of severed intimacy.

  In fall 1841, with Amherst College continuing to decline, it was decided that Edward would have to return to the State House and try yet again to secure legislative support. Running for the Senate this time, he won by an impressive margin, 3,175 votes out of 5,184, showing how respected he was in Hampshire County and how well the Whigs were doing. He took his seat on January 5, 1842.

  The other senator from Hampshire County, Samuel Williston of Easthampton, was the wealthy founder of the first endowed academy in western Massachusetts, Williston Seminary, which had opened its doors the previous month and was known to be aiming at a very high standard. The two senatorial colleagues undoubtedly talked about the school, particularly since Edward was dissatisfied with his son’s performance in Amherst. On March 3 the legislature adjourned for six months and Father came home, freeing Austin from male guard duty. Amherst Academy’s sixteen-week winter term ended March 22, after which (and a couple of weeks’ freedom), the boy left for the last month or so of Williston’s spring session. The paternal message that followed him—“I sent you there to improve”—suggests that a comprehensive shaping-up was expected.