My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  Another and more appealing British novelist, Dinah Craik, got a much fuller response from Emily, who seems to have paid extremely close attention to the character of Rachel Armstrong, a wronged woman in The Head of the Family. Of humble birth, Rachel is drawn to a plausible rogue who reads poems to her, inspires her with a life-changing vision of high culture, marries her in a suspiciously private ceremony, and vanishes after committing her to secrecy. Unaware that she has been in effect seduced and abandoned, she remains tensely, exquisitely, faithful, but with episodes of insanity. Someone asks her if the man who revealed the world of books to her had been her master (meaning teacher). “‘My master?’ The proud woman’s head was raised, then sunk again humbly, even smilingly. ‘Yes, he was my master.’”

  In April 1852, Emily named this novel and Olive, Craik’s pioneering treatment of the life of a woman artist, as books she planned to read. If she read the latter work, as seems likely, what she found (as in Jane Eyre) was a kind of model for her own developing life. The heroine, Olive Rothesay, born with a slightly deformed spine, passes through a Calvinist upbringing (sympathetically presented) and develops “precocious yearnings after the infinite.” When she realizes she is likely to remain unmarried, she “has a thought almost like terror. Though fated to live unloved, she could not keep herself from loving.” Her solution: “Woman as I am, I will dare all things—endure all things. Let me be an artist!” Craik’s distinction was to work out, always within the Victorian framework, the steps by which a gifted but handicapped single woman could make herself “into a self-dependent human soul” and claim “life’s greatnesses” in place of its “sweetnesses.” As we shall see, the novel’s key junctures show an arresting congruence with certain phases of Dickinson’s life in the late 1850s and early 1860s.

  The most immediately inspiring book Dickinson read in her early twenties was Reveries of a Bachelor by Ik. Marvel, pseudonym of Donald Grant Mitchell. Published in fall 1850, this cycle of delicate and wistful essays was one of the winter’s popular and critical successes; by February 22, when Vinnie finished it, Emily had no doubt devoured it. The book presented the ardent memories and daydreams of a cultivated bachelor, whose life is defined by a succession of unconsummated desires. The pattern is set by the opening three-part reverie on marriage—“Smoke,” “Blaze,” and “Ashes.” In “Smoke” the bachelor thinks of all the reasons not to marry. In “Blaze” his imagination takes fire and he longingly pictures the joys of wedded life. In “Ashes” the burning log he is staring at crumbles and he imagines the illness and death of the wife he might have had and tearfully reaffirms his single state.

  The premise of Reveries is that, since nothing is as real as “thought and passion,” our essential human truth is expressed by our fantasies, not our acts. For Dickinson, the book reinforced the lesson of Picciola, transforming the cultivation of sentiment into a very serious business. Austin was so impressed that when he named the books he kept at his side in fall 1851, “Bachelor’s Reveries” headed the list. His copy, now at Yale, has several types of vertical lines penciled in the margin. Those made by Emily remind one of her poetic account of a book given her by a friend “Whose Pencil – here and there –/Had notched the place that pleased Him” (Fr640). “Notch” is perfect for the short, neat, emphatic marks she chiseled next to admired passages: “Noon in the country is very still: the birds do not sing: the workmen are not in the field.” “The great Now, so quick, so broad, so fleeting, is yours;—in an hour it will belong to the Eternity of the Past.” We find the same notch beside a passage contrasting men and women without religion (“A woman without that anchor which they call Faith, is adrift, and a-wreck!”). In February 1852 Dickinson commented on the “exquisite writing” of Marvel’s “great” book. It was the first time she is known to have praised a writer’s style in this way.

  The young woman’s enjoyment of Reveries was closely tied to her new friendship with Susan Gilbert and the “pleasant musings” they enjoyed together. “If you were only here,” wrote Emily, “we would have a ‘Reverie’ after the form of ‘Ik Marvel.’” It would be “just as charming as of that lonely Bachelor, smoking his cigar – and it would be far more profitable as ‘Marvel’ only marvelled, and you and I would try to make a little destiny to have for our own.” The passage shows how consciously she adapted the cigar-puffing bachelor to her own needs. Her, or rather her and Susan’s, reveries would not be solitary, resigned, and issueless but companionable and productive, pointing to a possible future. Yet Marvel was on the right track: unlike Lady Fullerton, who crushed desire, he knew how to “interpret these lives of ours.” Perhaps that was because he took for granted that daydreams, friendship, and writing flowered together, thus anticipating Dickinson’s creative practice of 1859, when poem after poem was sent to Sue. These poems, like her reveries, arose in part from an insistence on making Susan their intimate participant. Yet both were almost certainly hers alone.

  One reason Emily turned to Susan was that Abiah Root could no longer be a partner in reveries à deux. “You are growing wiser than I am, and nipping in the bud fancies which I let blossom,” Emily wrote in late 1850. Leaving Abiah to hug the shore, Emily chose “to buffet the sea – I can count the bitter wrecks here in these pleasant waters, and hear the murmuring winds, but Oh I love the danger!” Once, after another of Abiah’s abrupt arrivals and departures, Emily voiced her dissatisfaction with these “brief imperfect meetings.” Her idea had been that they would “sit together and talk of what we were, and what we are and may be – with the shutters closed, dear Abiah and the balmiest little breeze stealing in . . . I love those little fancies.” Perhaps such moments were what grown-up Abiah wished to avoid. In August 1851 and again in January 1852 she repeated her 1848 performance in South Hadley by quietly leaving town, defeating Emily’s plan for a heart-to-heart chat. The evasive act did not go unnoticed. As the Dickinson sisters sat with their sewing, Vinnie would “drop her work, and say in much perplexity ‘I dont know what to make of Abiah.’” What did friendship mean if it didn’t include the sharing of fancies?

  Her Little Whip

  A year or two after Marvel’s follow-up book, Dream Life: A Fable of the Seasons, disappointed his admirers, Emily included, her father unloaded some of his antediluvian literary opinions, in the process giving her

  quite a trimming about “Uncle Tom” and “Charles Dickens” and these “modern Literati” who he says are nothing, compared to past generations, who flourished when he was a boy. Then he said there were “somebody’s rev-e-ries” he did’nt know whose they were, that he thought were very ridiculous, so I’m quite in disgrace at present.

  Instead of contesting these judgments, Emily bethought herself of Austin’s haughtiness—“that ‘pinnacle’ on which you always mount, when anybody insults you.” This proved “a comfort,” especially now that Father had “made up his mind that its pretty much all real life.” “Fathers real life and mine,” she wrote, “sometimes come into collision, but as yet, escape unhurt!” For many reasons, a life of not putting fancy to the test, of dignified evasion in the manner of Picciola and Reveries, was becoming the obvious choice.

  When Edward was in one of his dark moods, the Dickinson home lay under a pall and his daughters went on tiptoe, even in their private remarks. After visitors kept him from a lecture, Vinnie wrote in her diary, “Bowdoin, Thompson took supper here. Father is Wanted to hear Mr [Henry Ward] Beecher.” Other entries read, “A Storm arose in the house” and “Father at home ‘Sick.’” To Austin, Vinnie confided that home had become “a gloomy place” with “very black” clouds. Some of Emily’s letters reinforce the impression, yet the pleasure with which she sketched Edward’s angularities shows how unoppressed she felt. There was a definite margin of freedom and trust: when an eagerly awaited letter from Austin arrived, Father didn’t insist on hearing the parts she preferred not to read aloud. In spite of everything, she was certain home was “a holy thing,” a “bit of Eden,” and that “noth
ing of doubt or distrust can enter its blessed portals.”

  On the whole, Emily was comfortable with her family’s sharp contradictions—the warmth and the frigidity, the freedom and the restrictiveness. This was her native briar patch, and no matter how much Father scorned the life of the imagination, she continued to look up to him as preeminent among men. When a fire broke out on the Common, he and the sheriff “took charge” and saved the town. When the Northern Lights appeared, he got everyone’s attention with “a violent church bell ringing.” When he stepped out with his pantaloons casually tucked in his boots, she didn’t “think ‘neglige’ quite becoming to so mighty a man.”

  The worst thing Father did was to give the horse “a ‘basteing’ occasionally.” Writing Austin in 1852, Vinnie paused for the late-breaking news: “Oh! dear! Father is killing the horse . . . whipping him because he did’nt look quite ‘umble’ enough. . . . Emilie is screaming to the top of her voice. She’s so vexed about it.” This, the poet’s angriest known outburst, shows how disturbed she could be by the infliction of pain. Yet she, too, was fond of a certain punitive ritual. Anticipating Susan’s return to Amherst, she described herself as sitting “here with my little whip, cracking the time away, till not an hour is left of it.” The whip was her pen, her quick mind, and what she was hurrying was time itself. Missing Austin, she ordered the days to “flee away – ‘lest with a whip of scorpions I overtake your lingering!’” The dragging weeks, days, hours drove her mad with impatience. “I’ll punish them,” she wrote Jane Humphrey when she was expected; “you know they ought to be whipped.”

  Her Little Gate Flies Open to See Her Coming Home

  Shortly before her twentieth birthday, Dickinson attended an exhibition of the college Eclectic Society. Vinnie, pretty and popular, was escorted by a young man whose oration, “The Past,” appears on that evening’s printed program. Emily, her mind apparently racing, sat with Ebenezer and Sabra Snell, a staid faculty couple.

  As she listened to the young men’s speeches, she jotted on her program the passages that caught her ear. From John E. Sanford’s oration on the most unsavory figure (to date) in American politics, she copied a bold judgment and a neat antithesis: “Aaron Burr was undoubtedly a remarkable man” and “An avowed rather than disguised rascal.” As the evening wore on, it was not ideas as such that she noted but resonant and well-turned passages, some of which touched her private concerns:

  Concentration gives intensity . . .

  The brightest luminaries in the “galaxy of human geniuses – ”

  The majesty of his manhood gone –

  He stands like a tree stripped of the foliage of self esteem & torn by the blast of self reproach –

  Grateful as the distant echoes of evening bells He hears the voice from behind the vail which

  “Pleasant but Mournful to the Soul – ”

  Back home, she wrote a cryptic memorandum that was later erased, though ineffectively: “. . . This night is long to be remembered. New things have happened. ‘The crooked is made straight.’ I am confided in by one – and despised by an other! and another still!” This, Dickinson’s only known diarylike record of an event, seems to mark a stage in the crystallization of her odd position in the tightly organized college town. What is striking is that even though she learns she is “despised,” she neither registers self-pity nor tries to justify herself. Instead, she builds up the drama of her situation.

  A contemporaneous letter confessing she is no longer friends with Abby Wood hints at the identity of one despiser. They took “different views of life,” Emily wrote Abiah, and would probably “disagree” if they saw more of one another. Unlike Abby, a woman now, Emily still loved “to be a child.” Just how far her fondness for this old friend had “drooped” became apparent at the Sweetsers’ annual after-dinner Thanksgiving gathering in 1851, when she left the room as Abby sang.

  The record of Emily’s social activities during the year and a half following the evening of speeches is exceptionally well documented. On New Year’s, 1851, Vinnie was given a diary, and although its minuscule size ruled out much detail (which wouldn’t have suited her anyway), her social notes illuminate her sister’s daily life. Austin’s year in Boston teaching school called forth an all but weekly letter from Emily and many shorter notes from Vinnie. Letters also went to Baltimore, where Susan Gilbert, Emily’s last best friend, was making her own experiment of a year’s schoolteaching. These two absences caused so much ink to flow that the poet’s extant letters from June 1851 through June 1852 make as thick a pile as her first nine years of correspondence. All these (and other) materials permit an assured assessment of the basic direction of her social life, which grew in intensity as it decreased in scope.

  The one organized group she belonged to was a reading club, a select literary circle of young unmarried men and women that met on Tuesday and Friday evenings. Vinnie recorded attending eleven times, from March 21 to July 25, the final meeting. That Emily also went, though probably less regularly, we learn from two of her letters to Austin. Once, after a Tuesday gathering that Vinnie “did not enjoy . . . at all,” Emily Fowler spent a morning at the Dickinson house “reading Shakespeare,” possibly to encourage the sisters’ attendance. Fowler, an organizer, thought of the group as the “Shakespeare Club.” Once, as she recalled decades later, when a young man proposed inking out the bawdy speeches in everyone’s copies, Dickinson “took her departure, saying, ‘There’s nothing wicked in Shakespeare, and if there is I don’t want to know it’”—a speech that represents a decidedly ambiguous attack on censorship. This was probably the session Vinnie didn’t like at all.

  Dickinson would not be ready for Shakespeare till the mid-1860s, when she found the treatment of passion in Antony and Cleopatra and Othello of compelling interest. Prior to that, there is little or no evidence of enthusiasm. Two days after the morning reading with Fowler, she complained that the club “seems lonely – perhaps it weeps for you.” The next week she told him that after they finished reading, Fowler’s brother put in an appearance “and we broke up with a dance,” following which the tutors escorted the women home. “We enjoy that!” she added—her most emphatic expression of interest. “Pleasant time,” says her sister’s diary.

  A kind of daily telegraph from the mid-nineteenth century to our time, this diary taps out Amherst’s mundane social rhythms for us. The chief activity, “calling,” absorbed so much of Vinnie’s time her parents repeatedly tried to rein her in. Becoming, in Emily’s words, “perter and more pert day by day,” she once made an unapproved day trip to Ware with her main beau for the year, William Howland. But Vinnie didn’t need to leave Amherst to keep busy and stimulated. In the first eight months of the year, her diary records a total of thirty-five social interactions with Susan Gilbert. Many of these probably involved Emily, particularly when Susan and her sister Martha came calling. For the year as a whole, Vinnie recorded a single quarrel with her sister: “offended Emily [over?] dress.”

  Omitting a trip to Boston, we know of thirteen times the Dickinson sisters jointly “called,” “walked,” “went out,” “rode,” or “rode horseback” (sidesaddle?), or together attended a concert or “Freshman levee” or group excursion to Montague or Holyoke. In only four diary entries do we see Emily stepping out without her sister: on March 5 “Emilie & Austin were from home,” on the twenty-fourth “Joseph [Lyman] & Emilie went to walk,” on September 8 “Emily rode with Mr Leavitt,” *65 and on the evening of December 16 she visited the Kelloggs, neighbors to the south. Of course, it wasn’t Vinnie’s intention to track her sister’s movements. After the sugaring expedition to Montague on March 25, she did not bother noting that her friend Joseph Lyman was “with Emily a good deal,” as a letter of his reveals. Still, Emily’s own letters add surprisingly few outings to the list—the prize speeches by the graduating Seniors, the commencement address on imagination by Henry Ward Beecher, a call one June evening on Susan Gilbert and Emily Fowler. The tally doesn’t
come to much for a twenty-year-old residing in a socially active village.

  The pressure to stay home came from both without and within. After making her summer evening call on Gilbert and Fowler, Emily returned at nine o’clock to find “Father in great agitation at my protracted stay – and mother and Vinnie in tears, for fear that he would kill me.” In spite of her comic exaggeration, she found Father’s anxieties as infectious as they were insistent. Writing to Jane Humphrey the next year, Emily said that “when some pleasant friend invites me to pass a week with her, I look at my father and mother and Vinnie, and all my friends, and I say no – no, cant leave them, what if they die when I’m gone.” Again, notwithstanding the humor, we shouldn’t underestimate or dismiss her fear: the paternal worries about eternal separation and what might happen when the women left home had taken effect.

  Staying home from group events had in fact become an open preference. For unexplained reasons, she skipped a pleasant excursion to nearby Pelham Springs and a couple of exhibitions. She wrote letter after letter on Sunday mornings or afternoons when her mother, father, and sister were hearing Reverend Colton’s sermons, a tiresome ordeal now for her and Austin. “They will all go but me, to the usual meetinghouse, to hear the usual sermon; the inclemency of the storm so kindly detaining me; and as I sit here Susie, alone with the winds and you, I have the old king feeling.” Thanks to her “slender constitution,” she was excused from attending in bad weather. One beautiful spring day she “bought the privilege” of skipping afternoon meeting by staying in church to Communion.