My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  In spite of the “great love” the members of this tight and exclusive circle felt for one another, there were striking lapses of sympathy and understanding. When Emily learned from Sue’s one note how happy she was in New Hampshire, she used her reply to glance at “the shadows fast stealing” over her own life, in this way both suggesting her premonitions about herself and asking for something like reciprocity. With Austin, too, she was beginning to see that he meant more to her than she to him. Arguing that the Dickinson siblings’ difference from “most everyone” made them all the more “dependent on each other for delight” (this being an implicit plea), Emily wondered if he thought “of us as often as we all do of you.” The question “troubles me,” she confessed. She was right to be uneasy. After reading her brilliant account of a German concert “the evening of Exhibition day,” he wrote Sue that Emily hadn’t even mentioned the Exhibition; he doubted “she knew there had been one.” This inattention to the writing she lavished on him is as striking as his insistence on the idea of her remoteness.

  And so she overdid her tending of his romance. When Sue finally put away her mourning for Mary Learned (as in Barrett Browning’s sonnet), Emily sent Austin a tempting sketch of her white dress, fawn-colored silk mantilla, and straw hat. And when local gossips got wind of the Revere Hotel assignation, she became so solicitous for his peace of mind she ended up annoying and embarrassing him. On June 9, hoping he wouldn’t be troubled by “any remarks,” she begged him to let her and a trusty servant “help a little.” Four days later she assured Austin “the stories are all still . . . and Susie says she dont care now the least at all for them. They must not trouble you – they are very low – of the earth – they cannot reach our heaven.” This naively collective heaven, based on a rejection of coarse imputations, recalls her “lofty” denial two years earlier that there was anything “wicked in Shakespeare.”

  After Austin scolded his sisters for their interference, Vinnie apologized for both: “We received your notes last evening . . . they made me feel very badly & I hope there will be no more occasion for such ones. I think Emilie & I were in the fault some what. I thought she ought not to say what she did the last morning & tried to prevent it, but she felt you must know it.” Emilie’s next letter opens on a distinctly downcast note: “Do you want to hear from me, Austin? I’m going to write to you altho’ it dont seem much as if you would care to have me. I dont know why exactly, but things look blue, today, and I hardly know what to do, everything looks so strangely.” The episode reveals the twenty-two-year-old’s distress at overstepping—and without knowing “why exactly”—the bounds of maidenly speech.

  The frank erotic passion of Dickinson’s mature poetry need not obscure her naïveté as a young woman, when she could not allow sex, something “low” and “of the earth,” to have anything to do with the love that found fulfillment in “heaven.” Her youthful over-the-top language, surging and transgressing, was the sign of an innocence that was lasting too long.

  Chapter 14

  1853–1855: News of the Ancient School of True Poets

  The Hollands

  On June 9, 1853, the day Edward Dickinson marched the New London visitors around Amherst, his daughter became acquainted with her first full-time writer, Dr. Josiah Gilbert Holland, literary editor of the Springfield Republican and one of the mid-century’s most popular essayists. An unusually direct and engaging man, Holland asked Mrs. Dickinson while calling at West Street whether her daughters could visit him and his family in Springfield. The invitation was taken seriously after he and Elizabeth, his appealing wife, dropped in without warning the next month and had “Champagne for dinner, and a very fine time.” He seemed to be in top form, insisting, as Emily told Austin, that “you would be a Judge – there was no help for it – you must certainly be a Judge!” “Splendid visit,” echoed Vinnie.

  When Abiah Root invited Emily to visit, she was turned down out of hand: “I’m so old fashioned, Darling, that all your friends would stare.” All objections vanished with the Hollands, however, and in September 1853 the sisters spent a night at their Springfield home, on the corner of Bliss and Water Streets—Emily’s only known trip to a new friend who wasn’t a relative. That she and Vinnie returned a year later for a longer stay tells us a major new stimulus had entered the poet’s life, initiating one of her closest, longest-lasting, and least understood friendships.

  Unlike Dickinson, Holland was not only a preacher at heart but had a sure grasp of mass-market tastes. Whether explaining the wisdom of proverbs or exposing the weakness of the female imagination, he knew how to drive home standard views with the charm and certainty readers wanted, often with a gesture of punitive severity at the end. A polished simplifier, he gained a much bigger following in the Midwest than in Boston or New York. His work “had the immense advantage,” summed up a keen obituarist, “of keeping on a plane of thought just above that of a vast multitude of readers.” Although Dickinson praised one of his lyric poems, she had little to say about his widely popular books. Yet she instantly responded to his cordial manner, remembering all her life his way of praying on her first visit, “so simple, so believing”—and so unlike her stentorian sire, who, in conducting household prayers, would rasp “‘I say unto you’ . . . with a militant Accent that would startle one.” Tall, suave, dark-complexioned, and with a “clear tenor voice,” Holland presented the poet with familiar elements in a novel combination.

  After the first visit, Dickinson wrote to say how much she had been thinking of the couple: “If it wasn’t for broad daylight, and cooking-stoves, and roosters, I’m afraid you would have occasion to smile at my letters often, but so sure as ‘this mortal’ essays immortality, a crow from a neighboring farm-yard dissipates the illusion.” She was adapting the statement in I Corinthians 15:53 that “this corruptible [flesh] must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.” An odd use of a familiar text, her passage shows a complicated self-consciousness about her obsession with heaven, a dominant concern in the correspondences she initiated in the 1850s.

  In her letters to the Hollands, Dickinson liked to bring out her desire for a heavenly reunion with them (“if God is willing, we are neighbors then”) even as she brandished her irreverence (“Wonder if God is just – presume he is, however, and t’was only a blunder of Matthew’s”). What did the editor think about this baffling young woman, always anticipating heaven in spite of being technically “without hope”? And why did she snuggle up to his authority, as when, “scared” by an 1854 sermon on “death and judgment” and lapsing into a child’s voice, she told the Hollands she “longed to come to you, and tell you all about it, and learn how to be better.” Both questions are partly answered if we note how much the doctor made of the distinction between religious fervor and doctrinal correctness. “Christianity, in the form of abstract statement, and in the shape of a creed, has not for me any particular meaning,” he would say; “I have to test things through my heart and best feelings.” It was this opinion, which sometimes got him into trouble, that made a temporary basis between the crowd-pleasing moralist and the individually questing poet. What she took from him was authorization to go on trusting her feelings. It is an interesting connection, a writer who was merely successful giving courage to one who was primal.

  Much shorter than Josiah, Elizabeth seems to have been a classic helpmeet, “a typical womanly woman,” pleasing in looks and manner and bent on smoothing the way for her husband. His biographer, looking back from the 1890s, saw their domestic relationship as “‘sweet’” in an old-fashioned way. The same source claimed “he never printed any important book without first reading it to her.” The spectacle of “the dark man with the doll-wife,” or “the Angel Wife,” as Dickinson variously typed them years later, appealed to her on a very deep level. In several poems of the early 1860s, she seems to picture herself in just such a relationship:

  Forever at His side to walk –

  The smaller of the two! . .
.

  Fr264

  But her attention was fixed less on the doctor, who never became a romantic figure for her, than on his wife seen in relation to him. Then he receded and she became the point of attachment.

  A Theology of the Feelings

  One of the biggest mistakes we make with Dickinson is to detach her from the religious currents of the 1850s, without which she could not have become herself. Of these, the single most important was the growing tendency within orthodoxy to question the primacy, even the necessity, of a rationally articulated faith. Was it so vital, after all, to have correct abstract doctrines? Wasn’t there also a true religion of the heart that would do just as well, and which could be expressed “aesthetically” rather than abstractly? Such questions, particularly as worked out by Horace Bushnell and Edwards A. Park, New England’s boldest Protestant thinkers, helped make feasible Dickinson’s work as poet.

  The fundamental text is Bushnell’s 1849 God in Christ, which challenged the need for dogma by examining the nature of human speech. Impressed by its inexactness and inherent inadequacies, Bushnell argued that language is always approximate, figurative, and paradoxical in handling religious matters. Words are at best “hints, or images”; ultimate truth must be approached through repeated poetic attempts; only the prophet or poet speaks with truly religious accents. Indeed, for Bushnell, the basic Christian idea—the descent of the ineffable into human forms, the incarnation of God in Christ—almost seemed replicated “in every writer, distinguished by mental life.” It is the work of writing to “receive a new inbreathing of life and power,” and it is “the right of every author, who deserves attention at all, to claim a certain liberty.” Bushnell also dared to say that the force of revivalism was “spent” and that a new kind of spiritual life addressed to our aesthetic powers was being born. His views invite comparison with other theories of language and writing that show an antirational impetus: Coleridge, écriture féminine, deconstruction.

  The year after Bushnell’s book appeared, Dickinson applied the idea of an incarnate divine “life” to her own letter writing and quest for perfect friendship: “as these few imperfect words to the full communion of spirits, so this small giddy life to the better, the life eternal, and that we may live this life, and be filled with this true communion, I shall not cease to pray.” By the end of the decade, she could be quite forceful in declaring she did “not respect ‘doctrines.’” Her poems sometimes express a kind of Bushnellian relief at the abandonment of propositional analysis, the “easing” turn from theology to art:

  The Definition of Beauty is

  That Definition is none –

  Of Heaven, easing Analysis,

  Since Heaven and He are One.

  Fr797B

  No contemporary thinker came closer than the liberal Trinitarian Bushnell to formulating the linguistic rationale for Dickinson’s poetic vocation. *86 Although we can’t be certain she read him, he stood out as New England’s most eminent theological mind, and his influence was pervasive among the bright young future ministers Dickinson knew in Alpha Delta Phi, including George H. Gould, whose ornate “music of words” drew criticism.

  But the most important person in Dickinson’s orbit to voice Bushnell’s aesthetic vision was his ally in theological warfare, Edwards A. Park, who taught at Andover Theological Seminary and had extremely close ties with Amherst College. Although Park did not go as far as Bushnell in discarding systematic theology, his 1850 essay, “The Theology of the Intellect and That of the Feelings,” vigorously argued that abstract propositions could not capture the truths of religion, which can be approximated only by symbol and hyperbole. If the exposition of doctrine gives the impression “the divine government is harsh” or leaves “the sensibilities torpid,” then “somewhere it must be wrong.” Creating a separate space for aesthetic truth, Park insisted on the necessity of “rendering unto poetry the things that are designed for poetry, and unto prose what belongs to prose.” An 1857 essay urges the importance of “condensing a world of import” so as to intimate “what ‘eye hath not seen, nor ear heard.’”

  Putting such ideas into practice, Park became New England’s most mesmerizing preacher and lecturer, stunning his listeners with the drama and brilliance of his sermons, his “weird abstraction” in the pulpit, his huge lantern jaw. His students felt “shivers along our whole system of nerves” and wondered if they were hearing “trumpets of angels.” “Truly a great preacher,” a professor at Amherst College noted; “he is sometimes tremendous, in thought and manner.”

  On November 20, 1853, preaching in Amherst’s First Church, Professor Park delivered his famous sermon on Judas. The next morning Dickinson tried to let her brother know what he had missed: “I never heard anything like it, and dont expect to again, till we stand at the great white throne. . . . And when it was all over, and that wonderful man sat down, people stared at each other, and looked as wan and wild, as if they had seen a spirit.” Decades later she called this “the loveliest sermon I ever heard.”

  Given this enthusiasm, she probably attended Park’s formal address two days later at the dedication of the new college library. His leading idea was that art and religion were not opposed, as many thought, but intimately affiliated. “Reverence, veneration, awe,” he said, should be “complete mental states in which religion and taste meet.” He also suggested that Amherst’s lovely setting be regarded as the nursery of great poetry and art: “In surveying this rich valley—this amphitheatre of villages, and streams, and noble woods . . . I have often thought that the [residents] . . . were blessed with means of aesthetic culture for which poets and painters have longed.” He ended with a prophecy: that “some poet now unborn” would emerge from this landscape and become “known through the world.”

  You May Think My Desire Strange, Sir

  Dickinson’s early 1854 letter requesting information about Benjamin Newton’s last hours shows another facet of her combined religious-poetic quest. Sent to a leading Unitarian minister, the Reverend Edward Everett Hale, this letter hints at her struggle to devise a nonorthodox “hope” of her own.

  When Newton left Edward’s law office four years earlier, he moved to Worcester, completed his studies, and became district attorney. Dickinson’s two references to him suggest she had not been able to keep in close touch. In summer 1851, having finished a letter to Austin, she added in a larger hand, “BFN – is married.” That she was writing eighteen days after the event tells us she had not been given timely notice of it. Almost two years later, she again added a few last words to a sisterly letter, this time inside the envelope flap: “Love from us all. Monday noon. Oh Austin, Newton is dead. The first of my own friends. Pace.” The date was March 28, 1853, five days after Austin and Sue’s rendezvous in Boston, when exclusive friendship was much on the poet’s mind. In singling Newton out as the first of her own friends, she probably meant her first adult friend not shared with Vinnie or Austin.

  After reflecting on Ben’s death for the better part of a year, Dickinson dispatched a strange letter to the pastor of his church, Reverend Hale:

  Pardon the liberty Sir, which a stranger takes in addressing you, but I think you may be familiar with the last hours of a Friend. . . . I often have hoped to know if his last hours were cheerful, and if he was willing to die. . . . You may think my desire strange, Sir, but the Dead was dear to me, and I would love to know that he sleeps peacefully. . . . He often talked of God, but I do not know certainly if he was his Father in Heaven – Please Sir, to tell me if he was willing to die, and if you think him at Home, I should love so much to know certainly, that he was today in Heaven.

  What prompted this shockingly ingenuous query (Did Newton go to Heaven, Sir, please?) is that he had been a Unitarian, outside the evangelical system. Did he die as he lived, in peace and trust, or did his soul agonize with the foretaste of future torment? Significantly, at the time the poet sent this question, January 13, 1854, her father was in Washington, Austin in Cambridge
, and Vinnie in Boston. Sue may have been gone as well. It was two days later that Emily, alone with her fears and fancies, quaked at “the Phantom” when going to meeting by herself. Her letter has been explained in terms of the general interest in deathbed scenes, but this benign cultural explanation misses the point: her fixation on questions of death and immortality, her desperate search for men who knew.

  What Dickinson didn’t realize was that she had the wrong minister. Worcester had two Unitarian societies, and though Newton did in fact belong to Hale’s church, it was the pastor of the other one, the Reverend Alonzo Hill, who attended his deathbed. A specialist in dying and a meticulous record keeper, Reverend Hill was gradually assembling a curious collection of personal obituaries, in which (as in Danilo Kis’s great story “The Encyclopedia of the Dead”), he tried to sum up the life of each person he helped die. His entry for March 24, 1853, reads:

  Benjamin F. Newton Esq Aet 33 [in fact, 32] Consumption He was a member of the Church of the Unity, but desired my attendance during the last days of his sickness. He was District Attorney & tho enfeebled by disease performed the duties of his office with ability & success. He rode out the day before his death. He had secured an insurance of $1500 on his life which would have expired on the first of May. Buried from the Ch of the Unity.