Stung, Emily began her long reply the day the reprimand arrived: “At my old stand again . . . and happy as a queen to know that while I speak those whom I love are listening.” She loved being Austin’s lifeline home, loved serving up his weekly information and amusement. A passage written when worn out—“you must’nt expect any style. This is truly extempore, Austin – I have no notes in my pocket”—shows how much care she ordinarily took. And her patron was satisfied, mostly, telling Sue that “Emily’s letters are to me just about what Mat’s are to you—She writes me every week—and always something I like to read.”
The great sensation of the day was Jenny Lind, the Swedish soprano. Austin was one of the few not overwhelmed, and when the rest of the family heard her perform her virtuoso repertoire in Northampton—Taubert’s “Bird Song,” the “Echo Song,” “Comin’ thro’ the Rye”—they too were unimpressed. Emily, responding to “herself, and not her music,” fancied a longing for home in the singer’s eyes. The most interesting object was Edward Dickinson, who held the poet’s attention more closely than Lind:
Father sat all the evening looking mad, and silly, and yet so much amused you would have died a laughing – when the performers bowed, he said “Good evening Sir” – and when they retired, “very well – that will do,” it was’nt sarcasm exactly, nor it was’nt disdain, it was infinitely funnier than either of those virtues, as if old Abraham had come to see the show, and thought it was all very well, but a little excess of Monkey!
In Sue’s absence, Emily relied a great deal more on Martha Gilbert’s quiet companionship. In May 1852 they “had a long, sad talk about [Sue, and] *76 Michigan, and Life, and our own future, and Mattie cried and I cried, and we had a solemn time.” “Michigan” was short for Mary Gilbert Learned’s death, observed by Martha, from puerperal fever. “Our own future” meant the young women’s chances for love and marriage, sex and death. The next month the two friends had another talk “on the front door stone . . . about life and love, and whispered our childish fancies about such blissful things.” Empty as the present was, the future seemed freighted with rapture and danger.
The “childish fancies” passage was sent to Sue. Given the poised and decorous tone of her letters to others, one wonders how she answered Emily’s more and more impassioned and confidential manner: “heart-talk blazing on the paper,” Marvel’s bachelor called it. A phrase sent from Baltimore and quoted by Emily—“will you ‘love me more if ever you come home’?”—suggests Sue saw herself as having held back and intended to be more responsive in future. But could anyone be sufficiently responsive to Emily? Even she admitted that “‘eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor can the heart conceive’ my Susie, whom I love”—my Susie being the imagined one to whom all fancies could be whispered. Except when Martha was sick, Emily imparted very little news from Amherst and said nothing about Sue’s life in Baltimore, focusing instead on her own longings and alarms and private symbols. Indeed, she tried to get her correspondent to write “saintlier, and more like Susie Spirit,” showing again that Emily Spirit wasn’t perfectly suited by the southern mail.
Once, anticipating how Martha and Sue would marry and leave her behind, Dickinson confessed the mere “fancy of ever being so lone” almost made her cry. Then her thoughts turned to death and she let herself imagine that one “of our precious band . . . should pass away.” As she worked out the agonizing scenario, it slipped her mind that her correspondent still wore mourning for a dead sister—that for the real Susie, if not for Susie Spirit, the precious band was already shattered. Emily was showing the same commanding self-absorption as her brother, who often proposed to Sue when they were apart that they do the same thing at exactly the same time: eat a chestnut, read the Amherst paper, and so forth. These were prosaic versions of what the poet was also aiming at: sharing, controlling, Sue’s inner life.
Ten years later, when Sue had a home, a husband, and a child, and Emily apparently realized she would always be single, she sent her sister-in-law a retrospective letter-poem on their opposite fates, “Your riches taught me poverty” (Fr418A). By that time she had left her “‘Little Girl’hood” behind and was engaged in a complex and powerful exploration of the tragic life of desire. In the early 1850s, by contrast, many things conspiring, she let herself dream of a perfect sharing of the life of fancy with a capable, independent, and imaginative girl. Sue’s year-long absence gave the poet-in-the-making the space to indulge this dream as she had not done with Abiah Root or Jane Humphrey or Emily Fowler. When she was supposed to be doing housework, she confessed how she loved to “hide away from them all; here in dear Susie’s bosom.” When others sang a hymn at church, she “made up words and kept singing how I loved you, and you had gone.” When Sue wrote about what she had “‘lost and loved’” (parents? sister?), Emily replied, “You wont cry any more, will you, Susie, for my father will be your father, and my home will be your home, and where you go, I will go, and we will lie side by side in the kirkyard.” But did it meet Sue’s needs to be told to put away her grief and entertain this intense and rather morbid prospect?
When her friend’s return was a few weeks away, Emily could no longer put off the question that had been surfacing. Taking a big risk, she proposed that when they were together they have an intimate talk about “those unions . . . by which two lives are one.” Did Susie have a “dear fancy, illumining all [her] life”? How did she feel about the act of surrender, from which “we shall not run away . . . but lie still and be happy!” Comparing man to “the mighty sun” and woman to a dependent flower, Emily was bringing out her fear of male sexual dominance and her own potential abjectness. Granted, a bride might be happy for a time, but what if “the man of noon” loses interest in her, and what if she feels she belongs to him forever? Aren’t such women doomed to a self-destroying desire?
They will cry for sunlight, and pine for the burning noon, tho’ it scorches them. . . . Oh, Susie, it is dangerous, and it is all too dear, these simple trusting spirits, and the spirits mightier, which we cannot resist! It does so rend me, Susie, the thought of it when it comes, that I tremble lest at sometime I, too, am yielded up.
Emily’s terror of being “yielded up,” going very deep, was rooted in the extreme power differential between her father and mother, her inner struggle during the revivals that asked her to “give up” everything to the Savior, and her tearful talks with Martha about “Michigan” and what that boded. The fear had been given form by Dinah Craik’s The Head of the Family, which Emily had mentioned to Sue two months earlier. Drawing impressively on Ovid’s story of Clytie’s worshipful adoration of the sun god Apollo and her metamorphosis into a flower always turning in his direction, this novel brought Emily’s predicament to life in the richly imagined Rachel Armstrong, whose self-transforming love of her deceiver is
as wild, as daring, as hopeless as Clytie’s for the Sun. Until at last the Sun, looking down from his sphere, saw the flower which his beams had wakened into life—saw it, loved it, lifted it up into his heart. And the poor flower would have been content, even if his brightness had scorched it to death, knowing it had lived one hour there.
The flower scorched; the woman abandoned and transformed: the poet had stumbled onto part of her elemental material and was developing it in breathless disclosures to a distant confidante. *77
Yet the confidante she had been trying to conjure up, Susie Spirit, was not the same as Susie Flesh, a real human being struggling with difficult conditions. Susie Flesh had to hide the secret courtship from Emily—had to be, not a helpless adoring flower, but a skilled operator looking out for herself. She planned to return to Amherst in July 1852. As the moment of truth approached, Dickinson felt a searing doubt about the reality of her captivating dreams: “will you indeed come home next Saturday, and be my own again, and kiss me as you used to . . . or am I fancying so, and dreaming blessed dreams from which the day will wake me? I . . . feel that now I must have you – that the expectation . . . makes me
feel hot and feverish, and my heart beats so fast.” Was it desire that scorched her, or was it the fear of waking up from a seductive reverie? Not knowing, she felt “so funnily” she almost wished “the precious day would’nt come quite so soon, till I could know how to feel, and get my thoughts ready for it.” “Why, Susie,” she said, “it seems to me as if my absent Lover was coming”—the one desired and feared.
Part Five
1852-1858
March 12, 1853. Emily Dickinson to Susan Gilbert.
Chapter 13
1852–1854: A Sheltered Life
It is twelve years since the Dickinsons moved into the large frame house on West Street, and their daily and seasonal routines have thickened into a solid root-mass. Summer and fall, there are peaches, grapes, prizewinning apples, and even figs to be gathered and brought inside. At mealtime, “Graham” bread, made of whole wheat flour and still “smoking” (Emily’s word), is carried straight from oven to table. The table itself is moved from the dining room to the warmer sitting room in early November, and soon it is time for New England’s annual festival of plenty and careful provisioning and ancestral piety.
Fall is Austin’s season. A student at Harvard Law School for three terms, he spends so much time in Amherst he is awarded a degree only after his professors petition on his behalf. When his clothes need washing and mending, he sends them home in a valise, an arrangement insisted on by his mother and sisters, who tuck their finest apples, polished and wrapped, into the clean linen they return. Emily dispatches letter after letter to him, writing with a pencil instead of a pen and always insisting how much she misses him and how she and Father enjoy his uproarious letters. For all that, Father’s expression grows so severe his daughters become anxious. One evening, Vinnie tries to amuse him by reading the “spicey” bits from Fanny Fern, the popular madcap columnist who is alternately caustic and demure; Vinnie probably has Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio in her hands, the author’s first best-seller. Father relaxes, but advises his rushing daughter to pronounce each word fully.
Sometimes Emily is the first one out of bed and downstairs, where she builds and lights the fires and prepares breakfast for the others. In winter these chores would have been performed with little light. If we had been there in the shadows, hearing the clang of cast iron as she threw in the wood and regulated the draft and raised the oven temperature, we would never again think of her as helpless.
Father’s Responsibilities
In December 1852 Emily’s Brooklyn cousins, the Newmans, lost their father to tuberculosis, their mother having died earlier that year of the disease. The boy named William Dickinson of Worcester as his guardian, but the girls became wards of Edward, the older ones by their own act, the younger ones (Clara and Anna) by order of probate court. In April 1853 he brought all four girls to Amherst with their Irish maid and their father’s widowed sister, Hannah Newman Fay. Mrs. Merrill’s boardinghouse refused entry to the maid, who had to stay with the Dickinsons till the orphans’ new home was ready—the house on the Common that Edward had bought thirteen years earlier from Cousin Nathan.
The Dickinson children did not exactly welcome their pious city cousins. Emily sarcastically remarked that their arrival, along with that of the Sweetser cousins, would “please” Austin, and Vinnie was afraid “the relations will keep close to us as long as we live!” It bothered her to see the orphans “sitting down perfectly passive, waiting Fathers next direction”; it was a “bad thing for him to have that care.” Emily’s take on the situation was more speculative and self-reflexive, though no less exclusive: “The Newmans seem very pleasant, but they are not like us. What makes a few of us so different from others? It’s a question I often ask myself.”
Inevitably, Mrs. Fay detected the cool, insular temperature and complained about it to Abby Sweetser, who told Harriet Cutler, who told Sue, who carried the ungrateful murmur back to Vinnie. Swelling with outrage, she told Austin she was going to march up to Mrs. Sweetser’s and “bring up all past grievances & set them in order before her & see what she’ll say for herself . . . her bonnet has bobbed long enough.” The manner in which her brother reined in this ferocity speaks volumes about the Dickinson children’s sense of entitlement:
Let the woman talk if it makes her any happier. . . . And that miserable, fretful, old maidish widow [Mrs. Fay], let her alone too. . . . [I]f she barks too loud, & troubles your sleep, tell father & have him inform her her services are no longer needed, and hire some more servicable girl to take charge of those children. We can turn her out of the house any day and she cant say one word.
For Edward, the real problem was Mark Haskell Newman’s ill-advised will, with its large and complicated bequests to foreign and domestic missions. More concerned with evangelical soul-saving than with his offspring’s worldly interests, Newman left only $25,000, a third of his net worth, to his five orphaned children. Although he provided a second and equal sum for their maintenance and education, they were to get the interest only, the principal reverting to the American Home Missionary Society along with the remainder of his estate. These provisions not only went against Edward’s inclination to put one’s children first, they saddled him with the conflicting responsibilities of guardian, executor, and trustee. He also had to maintain Newman’s partnership agreement for the time being and dispose of his valuable Brooklyn residence, whose large lot, two hundred feet square, ran street to street from Clinton to Vanderbilt Avenue. The estate was more complex than his own, and as an out-of-state attorney he failed to realize that some of the powers granted him by the will were invalid in New York. Quickly selling the Newman house in spring 1853 for $22,000, he learned five years later that he had not provided clear title. To protect himself and the heirs, he had to turn to the Kings County—that is, Brooklyn—Supreme Court (Brooklyn’s trial-level court, not an appellate court) to reconstruct the will. In the end, a descendant recalled, the orphans received “a larger allowance for their education” than their father had provided.
A very different set of problems arose in August 1852, when the Reverend Aaron Colton announced his wish to step down from the First Church pulpit. A letter in the papers of the Reverend Samuel C. Bartlett reveals that the poet’s father was a key actor in the delicate work of finding the right successor. Bartlett had just returned to New England from Ohio’s Western Reserve and was known for his piety, taste, and intelligence; he later became president of Dartmouth College. In September Edward informed him of the opening in Amherst and invited him to pass “a Sabbath with me, at some day not far distant, & preach in our pulpit. You can reply with perfect freedom, & confidence.” Treading with care, the attorney added, “I do not feel at liberty to say more, now.” Within the family, this cautious formula was already an old story. The previous year, in one of her inimitable mimicries, Emily wrote Austin: “Our church grows interesting, Zion lifts her head – I overhear remarks signifying Jerusalem, I do not feel at liberty to say any more today!”
Meanwhile, the performances of two interim preachers hired by the Supplying Committee caused Edward to erupt in fury. The Reverend Phinehas Cooke, six feet six and over seventy years old, had held pastorates in New Hampshire and was now living in retirement in North Amherst. He was remembered as a commanding presence, friendly, candid, straight-talking, and rigorously orthodox. Once, taking I Corinthians 1:13 as his text (“Is Christ divided?”), he argued that the Bible made the doctrines of depravity and divine election so clear and distinct that no one could possibly question them. Another sermon, preached to a congregation that had just dismissed him, ended with this body blow: “Sinners, while I give you my farewell message, let me tell you, if I find you at the judgment, what you now are, however agonizing your doom, I must say to it, AMEN.” The First Church hired Cooke to preach for the first three months of 1853, a duty he performed till March 27, when he became ill; a month later he was dead of influenza. Curiously, this man who had all the right ancestral stuff proved wholly indigestible to Edward,
who, Vinnie noted, became “so outraged towards parson Cooke *78 that he would not let Emilie or me go to church all day last Sunday.” That Sunday, March 20, happened to be the last day the preacher was physically able to deliver a sermon. Father “prefered” that Mother, too, stay home, but she went anyway and caught the old stalwart’s last performance.
Another supply preacher that year provoked a memorable display of derision in the Dickinson home. The Reverend John Henry Martin Leland, son of the previous Amherst College treasurer, was apparently a very poor sermonizer. According to seminary alumni records, his career consisted of brief pastorates in out-of-the-way towns followed by early retirement and “Fire Insurance.” In May 1853, dismissed by a congregation in Maine, he returned to Amherst. On the first Sunday in June, Emily informed her brother:
The rest have gone to meeting, to hear Rev Martin Leland. I listened to him this forenoon in a state of mind very near frenzy. . . . The morning exercises were perfectly ridiculous, and we spent the intermission in mimicking the Preacher. . . . I never heard father so funny. . . . [At church] he didn’t dare look at Sue – he said he saw her bonnet coming round our way, and he looked “straight ahead.” . . . He says if anyone asks him [what he thinks of the preaching], he shall put his hand to his mouth, and his mouth in the dust, and cry, Unclean – Unclean!!
My Wars Are Laid Away in Books Page 30
