My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  There are indications that Abiah now became somewhat preachy in her letters, further eroding the old frolicsomeness. Emily tried to be responsive as well as honest, admitting she was concerned about “the all important subject, to which you have so frequently & so affectionately called my attention in your letters. But . . . I do not feel that I could give up all for Christ.” Following Abby’s conversion in 1850, Emily sent Abiah an account of their friend’s altered appearance, her face seeming “calmer, but full of radiance.” Struck by Abby’s candor in talking about her feelings, Emily remarked on the contrast between this apparent openness and the furtive conduct of “the lingering bad ones,” herself included: “I slink away, and pause, and ponder, and ponder, and pause.” However, such writing was hardly slinking, exemplifying as it did a kind of honesty the regenerate were not prepared to accept. Abiah and Abby’s retreat to the safety of standard beliefs and feelings posed a challenge to the poet’s expressive drive, helping explain both her sentimental returns to the past and her teasing recklessness.

  A sentence Dickinson jotted down in later life reads, “Did we not find (gain) as we lost we should make but a threadbare exhibition after a few years.” It was partly because Abiah was found after Sophia had been lost that Emily adhered with such tenacity as this girlhood friend entered the church, adult life, and marriage, leaving less and less to write about. There is an interesting contrast in these letters between the rich growth of the writer’s mind and style and her insistence on keeping the past in amber. At times, a correspondence that had its origins in a lifesaving friendship very nearly became a disguise for a relationship gone stale. Not until 1854 was Dickinson prepared to recognize that it was all over. By then, she had new gains to cover this latest loss.

  At no time was it harder to deny the obvious than in August 1848, when Abiah unexpectedly showed up at Mount Holyoke’s Commencement, then vanished without a word. That Emily hung on after this brush-off gives the measure of what friendship, memory, writing meant to her: “Why did you not come back that day, and tell me what had sealed your lips toward me? . . . if you dont want to be my friend any longer, say so, & I’ll try once more to blot you from my memory. Tell me very soon, for suspense is intolerable.”

  The work of communicating thought and feeling was as unstoppable as the soul itself. If Dickinson’s fidelity to her select intimates proved a great trial to them and her, that was partly because the responsibilities of consciousness could not be put aside.

  Friendship and Conspiracy at Home

  Of course, there were other friends. On the perimeter of the “five” were Sabra Palmer, Abiah’s cousin in Amherst, and Mary Warner, daughter of a professor of rhetoric at the college. Jane Humphrey, no longer in Amherst, apparently remained in touch, and Eliza Coleman would become one of the poet’s dearest friends. The offspring of professional or mercantile providers, these young women were relatively well educated and refined and without the “rough & uncultivated manners” Emily shied away from. She joined parties and excursions but kept her distance, as her parents preferred, from even the safest of organizations. At fifteen, unlike “most of the girls near my age,” she did not attend the large gatherings of the “Ladys Sewing Circle,” giving as her reason that “Mother thinks it not best for me to go into society so soon.” This was in tacit accord with Father’s conservative views opposing women’s participation in societies.

  The society that perhaps meant more to Emily than any other was the one we know least about, that of her siblings at home. Since letters are obviously occasioned by absence, her ordinary domestic intimacies left few written records. When she was away at Boston or Mount Holyoke Seminary, she was repeatedly assured—it made her very “happy”—that “‘they were so lonely’” without her. Writing Austin, she quoted what he seems to have said in person, that in her absence home felt “like a funeral.” There are a few retrospects from later years, as when she told Higginson that when Austin brought Kavanagh home, he “hid it under the piano cover & made signs to her & they read it: her father at last found it & was displeased.” The retrospect is consistent with everything we know about the family. But what biography wants is contemporary evidence.

  We find a faint trace in a book the Dickinsons owned, John Pendleton Kennedy’s popular Swallow Barn, or a Sojourn in the Old Dominion. Among numerous marginalia is an underlined passage: “Ned pretended to impute all this tediousness to Sunday, which, he remarked, was always the most difficult day in the week to get through.” In the margin, in what appears to be Austin’s handwriting, we read, “that’s a fact.” Someone else—Emily, judging by the handwriting—came upon the comment, added an asterisk, and wrote at the bottom, “unless you have some such book as this to read.” This exchange was conjecturally assigned to 1844 by Jay Leyda. Whatever the date, the comments nicely evoke the conspiratorial feeling that united Austin and Emily against grown-up severities. The tedium of Sundays was to be a leading topic in her letters to him in the early 1850s.

  Our best insights into the children’s associated life at home come from Joseph B. Lyman, who briefly lived with them in his boyhood and became a close friend of the poet. His entrance into the family was a consequence of her father’s insistence on providing a trusty male protector when he was away overnight. This practice went back at least to 1829, when Samuel Fowler Dickinson, facing an unavoidable absence, asked a student to move in “as a guard.” In the late 1830s, when Edward served in the General Court and General Mack occupied the Homestead’s west half, the question didn’t arise, the General being a militia in himself. But after the Dickinsons moved to their own place, the more Edward got involved in politics the more a household guard was required. *46 In 1845 and 1846 he was elected to the Governor’s Council, which was responsible for vetting all pardons, judicial appointments, and treasury warrants. Joining this powerful watchdog group had consequences for Edward’s family, among other things introducing Emily to her first governor, George N. Briggs. (After he came to Amherst College’s commencements of 1846 and 1847, she answered Abiah’s boast of meeting Daniel Webster with the retort, “However you dont know Govr Briggs & I do.”) A more important result was her getting to know young Joseph Lyman.

  The rule at home, as Edward succinctly put it, was that “Austin cannot well be spared, when I am absent.” After the principal of Amherst Academy resigned in March 1846 and the school fell into disarray, the boy wanted to return to Williston Seminary at term’s end, March 31—just when the Council would have its hands full of business and his father had to be in Boston. Edward’s resourceful resolution of this conflict is spelled out in a letter by sixteen-year-old Joseph, who was also planning to transfer to Easthampton. As of March 12 he was eagerly anticipating the move. Then, writing his older brother on April 7, he had surprising news:

  Since I have been here [in Amherst] to school I have formed accuaintance with one Austin Dickinson son of Hon E Dickinson, College Treasurer, he was intending to go to E[asthampton] at the close of the term but the nature of his fathers business demanded that he should remain at home. As was very natural he felt quite disappoined and said he would like very much to have me remain with him and board in his family untill the commencement of the summer term in E. . . . I have taken up with the kind and advantageous offer as I pay no charges for my board. I am prosecuting my studies with my usual dilligence . . . under the instruction of H[enry] Edwards and during vacation shall recite to Proff Tyler which I consider a great privilage. . . . [A]lthough I study with pleasure I have very pleasant recreations such as riding, gardening, “swinging in the grove” &c.

  Council minutes show that Edward was indeed present from March 31 through April 8 and again on April 14–15. And meanwhile his females were safe and his son and son’s friend were getting the best possible tutoring: Henry Edwards was the Latin salutatorian in 1847 and William S. Tyler was professor of Greek.

  The young man who now entered the Dickinson household for some two months before leaving for Williston
was a pleasing, talented, ebullient lad; rather a “scamp,” in the eyes of a Yale professor. Energetic and forward-looking, Joseph relished his introduction into the “very improving society” of families like the Dickinsons. He was attractive to girls, and a romance developed between him and Lavinia, with scenes like the following during the next five years:

  She sat in my lap and pulled the pins from her long soft chestnut hair and tied the long silken mass around my neck and kissed me again & again. She was always at my side clinging to my arm and used to have a little red ottoman that she brought & placed close by my chair and laid her book across my lap when she read. Her skin was very soft. Her arms were fat & white and I was very, very happy with her.

  There was none of this kittenish love play with the older daughter. Instead, Emily “read German Plays with me and sat close beside me so as to look out words from the same Dictionary.” The friendship grew during the young man’s years at Yale, 1846–1850, when (unlike Abiah Root) he regularly dropped in on the family, which he thought of as “that charming second home of mine.” Occasionally, he boasted of receiving “letters very pleasant from the Dick. girls in Amh. and fr Austin.” A decade later, residing in New Orleans, he and “Em” were still in touch. Although their correspondence was interrupted by marriage and the Civil War (Joseph fought for the Confederacy), they made renewed contact after he returned north. He died of smallpox in 1872.

  Unlike Abiah, Joseph was changed by friendship with Emily, acquiring a more challenging ideal of what conversation and letter-writing could be. In 1849, when he and his older brother exchanged youthful pronouncements on women’s conversational powers, “You are right about ladies’ talk,” Joseph wrote; “they dont know how.” But as he cited the older girls he “flirted a little with last summer,” he thought of an exception: “Em. Dickinson is a year younger it is true but older . . . in mind & heart.” Even in her teens and well before she was a poet, she stood out for this young man as exceptional.

  Proud of his conquests, Joseph wrote about the Dickinson girls with greater frankness to certain male friends and to his fiancée, Laura Baker. A boy who knew the Dickinsons only through Joseph’s letters liked to picture him in Amherst “playing—what? ‘spooney,’ I suppose—with Vinnie, or sitting up late of night to talk with Emily, when less spiritual beings, such as watchful parents, are fast asleep.” Distant as it is, this glimpse reinforces one’s impressions from elsewhere: that Father and Mother thoroughly indulged their daughters at home, that plump-armed Lavinia was pretty much available, and that “spiritual” Emily was on the whole more fascinating.

  After the Civil War Joseph transcribed several excerpts from Emily’s letters, apparently revising as he wrote. Most of these date from their maturer acquaintance, but there is one that may go back to the late 1840s. It offers a vivid glimpse of the playful ingenuity with which Austin and Emily whiled away a Sunday at home:

  We had merry talk about them [bumblebees] the other day. Austin wanted me to say what is their music. So he went buzzed like one and I mocked the wee hum they make down in the cayl calix of a holly hock. I’m sure I don’t know much about bumble bees tho’ I have seen them a hundred times go thump down onto on a clover buttercup head & never dig come out. But Father came out from the sanctity of his sunday nap and said he was glad to see the little people enjoy themselves.

  That Father still saw them as “little” reinforces the suspicion the letter is a product of the late 1840s. It provides a fascinating glimpse of sister and brother at home, enduring another boring Sunday by improvising a humming bumblebee duet. Emily’s mimicry of “the wee hum they make down in the calix” says something about what she noticed and thus about her. The passage may mark the earliest appearance of the erotic flower-seeking bees that wander through her letters and poems, most famously in “Come slowly – Eden!” where “the fainting Bee,”

  Reaching late his flower,

  Round her chamber hums –

  Counts his nectars –

  Enters – and is lost in Balms.

  Fr205

  That Emily first imitated this bee’s “wee hum” in company with Austin shows how much the (probably) unconscious eroticism of her language and imagery pervaded her ordinary talk. At home with her brother or in school with her girlfriends or in letters to her chosen intimates, young Emily Dickinson expressed her affectionate ardor in what was even then an unusually innocent, unguarded, and unworldly fashion. She was like her sister, who knotted her tresses around sexy young Joseph in order to kiss and keep him, except that Emily made knots with words. Even more than Vinnie, the poet-to-be was unbelievably well guarded and unbelievably exposed.

  The Early Daguerreotype

  It used to be assumed on no very convincing evidence that Dickinson’s early daguerreotype was taken in fall 1847, when she was attending Mount Holyoke and nearly eighteen years old. In fact, as Elizabeth Bernhard argued in 1999, the image probably dates from the previous winter. Beginning December 10, 1846, and running to March 25, 1847, a “Daguerrian Artist” named William C. North advertised his services in Amherst’s Hampshire and Franklin Express. His arrival made Mrs. Dickinson “very anxious” to secure a copy of a portrait of her father, Joel, who had died the previous May. It now seems likely that she and Emily had their own images recorded at this time, with the same props and pose, though not the same expression.

  Knowing that we are looking at the poet during the three and a half months after her sixteenth birthday opens our eyes a little. Her dress, gathered at waist and bodice to accommodate her growth, already seems too tight at neck and wrists. There’s a trace of the gawky adolescent, recently stretched out but not yet fully formed, and then we remember she has recently recovered from a long and threatening pulmonary episode, perhaps accounting for her thin cheeks. Chances are (and we have Vinnie’s statement to support this), the mature Dickinson did not look like this. We note as well that her naturally curly hair must have been straightened before her session with the “Daguerrian Artist.” Small wonder she came to object to the conventions of studio portraits, remarking in July 1862 how “the Quick wore off those things, *47 in a few days.”

  Having resumed her studies at Amherst Academy, the young woman has the face of someone who is back in the world and ready to take it on again. It can’t be said she’s pretty, but there is absolutely no flinching—not a trace of deprecation or obliquity or abjectness in that straight and steady gaze. Whatever her thoughts and feelings may be, there is no attempt to make a display of them. That will be the work of the full lips and the long and graceful fingers, nearly ready for plucking.

  Part Four

  1847-1852

  Drawing of the Mount Holyoke Seminary building, May 2, 1844.

  Chapter 10

  1847–1848: Mount Holyoke Female Seminary

  In 1875 a financially secure friend of Susan and Austin Dickinson, Maria Whitney, was offered a teaching position at Vassar College. At the time, Whitney was living in Northampton, in her late father’s comfortable home. The main reason she turned the offer down was her unwillingness “after this independent family life to be shut up in such a big institution with such an army of girls.”

  This statement helps explain why Emily Dickinson’s year at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, only nine miles south of Amherst, proved such a trial for her. Away from the comforts of home, she slept, studied, recited, attended religious meetings, and ate her meals in a large, four-story brick building; she was one of 235 students and 12 teachers. Her classes were more systematic than at Amherst Academy, and she was obliged to follow a tight daily regimen, with each half-hour accounted for. Everyone rose at six, teachers were friendly but strict, the rules forbade the occasional trip home over Sunday, and there was little privacy. There was also an unrelenting emphasis on conversion. Back home, given Father’s views on women and meetings and on the musty church basement, it was easy not to attend prayer sessions during a revival. Here, there was no such margin.

&nbs
p; Mount Holyoke toughened Dickinson, who worked hard and did well and at one point became “much interested” in chemistry and physiology. But we should remember that women’s higher education was then in its shaky beginnings: her teachers lacked advanced training, did little or no research, did not produce or translate standard texts, and could not assume they were helping to create the subjects they taught. Still in its pioneering phase, female education was badly undermined by the denial of equal access to the professions. Since women were not supposed to lecture, preach to, or in other ways publicly guide the adult world, rhetorical and even literary study lost part of its rationale. Mount Holyoke had nothing like the debating societies that flourished at Yale, where Edward Dickinson’s student essays on public policy questions took for granted that positions of leadership were open to him. Since women could not even vote, the focus inevitably shifted from analysis of issues to attention to detail. When Emily studied Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, the lessons proved, disappointingly, to be “merely transposition.” *48 Aware that something was missing, she complained to her brother (rather airily) that “I dont know anything more about affairs in the world, than if I was in a trance. . . . Has the Mexican war terminated yet & how? Are we beat?” A teacher who shared this uneasiness regretted that “we know little of the political world, in our little community.”