My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  Turning to the immediate season, as in the “Master” draft, Dickinson wishes she could communicate what she sees and hears but refrains from making the attempt:

  There is a smiling summer here, which causes birds to sing, and sets the bees in motion.

  Strange blooms arise on many stalks, and trees receive their tenants.

  I would you saw what I can see, and imbibed this music. The day went down, long time ago, and still a simple Choir bear the canto on.

  The reference was to the sound of crickets or cicadas in trees. Dickinson knew that Sweetser, residing at 17 East Twenty-fourth Street in New York, couldn’t hear this “Choir,” which, as the next sentence hints, had become a symbol for her own ability to function in darkness and depression: “I dont know who it is, that sings, nor did I, would I tell!” Her emphatic obscurity marks the affiliation between her act of writing and the night’s dark music.

  Letters that fall to Sue and the Hollands proclaim the same reticence: “I shall never tell!” and “I shall not tell how short time is.” A recently discovered note from Dickinson’s last years shows how deep her identification with crickets went: “I am too rustic to know if reply to your lovely courtesy is authorized, but the Crickets are too unseen to be censured and their sable homage disturbs none.”

  Why did the poet’s message from the night go to Uncle Joseph rather than, say, his wife, Catharine? As a commission merchant who had weathered the recent business panic, he would have known about Loring’s failure and the great railroad trouble and thus how to read her opening words, “Much has occurred.” At the same time, he was her most literary uncle, writing polished anniversary poems to his wife and from 1855 to 1858 funding Amherst College’s first ongoing oratorical and literary prizes. The Sweetser awards in English composition were bestowed on June 29, 1858, and the “Sweetser Prize Declamation” took place on August 9, during Commencement Week. Her letter may anticipate her uncle’s arrival for one of these events.

  Knowing that Sweetser was a devotee of fine writing helps explain Dickinson’s access of self-consciousness at her letter’s end: “I hardly know what I have said – my words put all their feathers on – and fluttered here and there.” She was admitting that her letter was a performance before a keenly judging eye, and also that one could easily say too much in a time of troubles and cover-ups. Hand in hand with her desire to announce herself as a writer went a self-protective secrecy. “I shall never tell!”

  The First Manuscript Book

  In 1858, apparently in summer, Dickinson undertook what R. W. Franklin terms “a major stocktaking, . . . a sifting and winnowing of her entire corpus.” Reviewing the poems she had written in the distant and recent past even as she continued to compose new ones, she set about making clean copies of her work on good stationery. Entering several poems on each sheet, which came folded from the factory, she filled four sheets and bound them into a little booklet with needle and thread, stabbing near the fold. In this, she followed a practice like her father’s years before, when he preserved his (messier) college compositions by sewing their pages together.

  Unlike Edward, who didn’t bother retranscribing, Emily assembled her manuscript books or fascicles with the same neat care as she had her herbarium a dozen years earlier. And just as the schoolgirl endeavor proved exceptionally ambitious, the forty fascicles and ten unthreaded “sets” she created from 1858 through 1865 eventually held some eight hundred poems. One difference was that the girlhood assemblage was open to others’ inspection but the adult one was definitely not: until after her death, no one realized how carefully she had recorded her poems or how many there were. Where the herbarium was designed to exhibit as well as preserve, the manuscript books were a private hoard, or a secret garden of work done, or a thing put through for its own inherent excellence. Or so we guess, not having one explicit statement as to what the massive project meant to her.

  Although Dickinson sent hundreds of poems to friends, she revealed to no one, not Sue, not even Vinnie, the existence of these books, which remained strictly behind the “vail.” Did she foresee their eventual discovery and publication? When Thomas Wentworth Higginson cautioned that her work was not ready to go before the world, she emphatically assured him that publication was “foreign to my thought.” Apparently sharing the conservative view that feminine self-respect was not compatible with public life, *96 she reportedly asked Helen Hunt Jackson how she could bear to “print a piece of your soul.” The question was in accord with Edward Dickinson’s pronouncements on publishing females in his Coelebs essays.

  “On this wondrous sea” (Fr3), a poem Dickinson copied on her first fascicle sheet, had been sent to Sue in 1853. Other poems, particularly those that echo her earlier letters, may also have been several years old. “I had a guinea golden,” complaining of a friend’s silence—

  Grant that repentance solemn

  May seize opon his mind –

  And he no consolation

  Beneath the sun may find

  Fr12

  —reminds us of her 1850 assault on Joel W. Norcross. Of the sixteen poems Franklin believes were transcribed “about summer 1858,” seven seem designed to introduce gifts, mainly flowers. Secretive as Dickinson was in creating her booklets, individual poems remained a vital part of the commerce of friendship.

  Compared to the disturbed letters to Master and Sweetser, the first fascicle seems infinitely more serene, “affirmative,” at least on the surface. As in 1854, when Dickinson’s poem about her troubled relations with Sue, “I have a bird in spring,” showed an equability absent from the letter leading up to it, these poems seem designed to contain or cover up distress, not get it out: not telling remained part of the impetus. A case in point is the “exultant” treatment of one of Dickinson’s pressing subjects, the transition from death to heaven:

  Adrift! A little boat adrift!

  And night is coming down!

  Will no one guide a little boat

  Unto the nearest town?

  So sailors say – on yesterday –

  Just as the dusk was brown

  One little boat gave up its strife

  And gurgled down and down.

  So angels say – on yesterday –

  Just as the dawn was red

  One little boat – o’erspent with gales –

  Retrimmed its masts – redecked its sails –

  And shot – exultant on!

  Fr6

  The basic metrical pattern, often called ballad meter or (in hymnals) common meter, alternates between four- and three-stress lines. In the last stanza, lines four and five break free of the pattern, thus imitating the boat’s shooting on—the release from mortal limits. In this way as in others, Dickinson directs attention to the moment of transition from mortal life to immortality. But the poem “gives up its strife” a little too easily: the anguish and tragedy that set it in motion are so neatly reversed we might not guess the author was struggling to devise a nonorthodox “hope” of her own. Like many other lyrics in the first manuscript book, this one is a clever performance that neatly wraps up matters still at issue for the writer. It gives too knowing and willful an answer to her riddle.

  Since Dickinson destroyed preliminary drafts after making her final copies, the compositional and biographical origins of this and most other works remain obscure. For all the poems in her forty fascicles, there is only one mysteriously surviving rough draft, from summer 1858. Happily, it is a riddling poem rather less obvious than its companions:

  If those I loved were lost,

  the crier’s voice would tell me –

  If those I loved were found,

  the bells of Ghent would ring,

  Did those I loved repose,

  the Daisy would impel me –

  Philip when bewildered –

  bore his riddle in –

  Fr20A

  As Johnson pointed out, the enigmatic last couplet has to do with the tragically ignominious death of Philip van Artev
elde, the title character in a verse drama owned by Austin. Unlike the speaker, whose questions about life and death receive an easy public answer, Philip keeps his riddle and meditates on it.

  This unique rough draft, penciled onto a tiny folded paper, fills the free space without spilling over and thus makes visible the poet’s fantastic “regard for boundaries,” as Franklin calls it. The draft suggests that from the beginning she had the poem well in mind except for the last couplet, which originally read: “Philip questioned eager/I, my riddle bring.” In this version, with its confusing second “I,” the final line may be read as if in quotation marks. That is, eagerly questioned, Philip merely says he brings his riddle with him and that it must be let stand. The poem is contrapuntal, the conclusion implying that the big questions are less easily disposed of than the first part—and Dickinson’s other early poems—would have it.

  It is not that we have a “breakthrough” (a tiresome notion) in this early and happily preserved draft, but rather that, as we follow the poet’s swift act of writing, we see her stumble and hesitate precisely at the critical point. When Austin faced the imperative to choose now, he chose conversion, then stood up in church and “blat[t]ed” out his new, consoling, and convenient truths. Emily went on to choose, not affirmation, as in “Adrift! A little boat adrift!” but mystery. “If those I loved were lost” predicts what lies ahead for her as she, like Philip, learns how to bear her riddle in, and in, and in.

  Part Six

  1858-1865

  About 1863. Fr627, stanza 6.

  Chapter 16

  1858–1860: Nothing’s Small!

  As if the Boston Norcrosses did not have their share of trouble, Aunt Lavinia began to die in the winter of 1858–1859, her state such that Vinnie had to leave home and help get her through her “invalid winter,” as Emily called it. Vinnie was gone for months, from before Christmas to the middle of spring, and, as Emily’s letters make clear, was badly missed, not just for sewing and housekeeping but as companion, informant, arbiter.

  The older sister had become highly dependent on the knowing and somewhat bossy younger one. But the relationship eludes easy categorizing, if only because Emily’s comments on it date mainly from Vinnie’s absences, when the writer was apt to stress her sisterly need. She herself was amazed the lack of intellectual sympathy didn’t count for more. As she said in a brilliant passage to Joseph Lyman, “It is so weird and so vastly mysterious, [Vinnie] sleeps by my side . . . and the tie is quite vital; yet if we had come up for the first time from two wells where we had hitherto been bred her astonishment would not be greater at some things I say.” This intimate alienation persuaded the poet “that space & time are things of the body & have little or nothing to do with our Selves. My Country is Truth. Vinnie lives much of the time in the State of Regret. I like Truth—it sets free is a free Democracy.” The passage catches the paradox of the poet’s familial basis: a dependency that sets free.

  Emily’s sister-in-law served to mobilize her powers in a very different way. If Vinnie lived in the State of Regret, Sue ruled a wide empire of Literature, Religion, the Best Society, with a heavily contested border with Truth. As Mrs. Dickinson’s slow recovery released her daughters from domestic servitude, Sue and Austin’s next-door home became a focus of Emily’s social and literary life, introducing her to new people, books, and ideas and drawing poem after poem from her. From 1858 to 1861 this enriched social scene was a powerful stimulus, both qualifying and reinforcing the isolation of her well. It was the old story, more tormenting than ever: a tantalizing combination of nearness and distance; a quick responsiveness that cannot find reciprocity. And so we get a creative outburst of unprecedented brilliance and intensity.

  A Poet and the Life Next Door

  Austin seemed in no doubt his and Sue’s union had a rare perfection. On their second Christmas, he gave her The Angel in the House: The Betrothal, Coventry Patmore’s smarmy narrative poem about an idealized Victorian courtship. In his presentation inscription, he drew a parallel between the male protagonist’s wooing of Honoria, the youngest of three daughters, and their own courtship: “Some one has been watching us, Sue.” His wife, the youngest of four, read the book attentively and marked admired passages with her usual lines and X’s. When she reached the statement that woman can redeem man only by initially withholding her sexual favors, she made her first double lines, suggesting emphatic agreement:

  Knowing he cannot choose but pay,

  How has she cheapen’d paradise;

  How given for nought her priceless gift,

  How spoil’d the bread and spill’d the wine,

  Which, spent with due, respective thrift,

  Had made brutes men and men divine.

  Thirty years later, writing Emily’s obituary and wishing to emphasize her exquisite domesticity, Sue quoted the last three words of Patmore’s description of the refined home shared by Honoria and her sisters:

  A tent pitched in a world not right

  It seem’d, whose inmates, every one,

  On tranquil faces bore the light

  Of duties beautifully done.

  At the time the obituarist’s own tent had been irreparably torn.

  Keenly aware of the risks of childbearing, Sue also seems to have held a censorious view of sexuality. *97 Since she and Austin were married five years before their first child was born, the question arises whether their union was a chaste one for a time, as Austin had promised. A letter sent him by his friend Samuel Bowles after the latter’s wife gave birth to a stillborn infant suggests an ongoing conversation about sex and offspring: “I do not pray your exemption from such risks: they are fearful, but . . . they have their uses. Greener grows the grass where the fire has burned.” Another early letter from the same friend touches on the question of fertility with mixed jocularity and delicacy. Hoping for “blessings on both your houses” (Evergreens and Homestead), Bowles added, “I’d liked to have written another word with a b, as the prattle of my babies reaches my ears,—but prudence & propriety came in time to stay the impulse.” Again, the censored “b” word, which must be baby, hints at the issues the two men canvassed.

  By now, Austin’s feelings about babies were fairly snarled by accommodations and rationalizations, or so one surmises from a defensive outburst Jane Hitchcock reported in a December 1860 letter to brother Ned in Europe:

  I told [Austin] you missed the children, & he exclaimed that if he had three children he believed it would cause him to start for Europe immediately & stay as long as he could. I ventured to suggest that he was not capable of judging of the feelings of a Father, & he intimated that he considered himself fortunate in being so.

  Sue would have been three or four months pregnant at the time of this conversation. Evidently, her husband had not been informed that he was about to experience “the feelings of a Father.”

  A further irony is that he already had children. In fall 1858 the Newman orphanage had been broken up and Mrs. Fay sent packing, the older daughters leaving Amherst and the two younger ones, Clara and Anna, fourteen and twelve, moving into the Evergreens. Since Edward continued to be the girls’ legal guardian, the new arrangement was not a true adoption. Still, it endured for nine years in spite of real friction between wards and caretakers. As for the one Newman boy, a document filed in Brooklyn places him in Philadelphia, married to a woman named Mary who couldn’t sign her name and had to make .

  What evidence there is of Austin and Emily’s relations in 1858–1860 suggests a kind of closing down. One of her letters speaks of “calling upon him” Sunday afternoon—an oddly formal phrase. When Sue went to Geneva to visit Martha (married since 1857 to a thriving dry-goods retailer), the letter that came from Emily assumed a classic Yankee dryness in reporting that “Austin supped with us. ‘Appears well.’” This laconic distance seems just the opposite of her eager participation in the courtship.

  A month later, Austin was not at all well, having contracted typhoid fever at a time whe
n Frazar Stearns, son of the college president, was “very sick” with the disease and the town was ravaged by an epidemic of scarlet fever. The fatalities included eight-year-old Harriet Matthews, daughter of the Dickinsons’ handyman. Presently Emily sent a wildly ebullient letter to the Hollands dramatizing her own giddy readiness to die:

  Good-night! I can’t stay any longer in a world of death. Austin is ill of fever. I buried my garden last week – our man, Dick, lost a little girl through the scarlet fever. I thought perhaps that you were dead, and not knowing the sexton’s address, interrogate the daisies. Ah! dainty – dainty Death! Ah! democratic Death! Grasping the proudest zinnia from my purple garden, – then deep to his bosom calling the serf’s child!

  Readers are shocked by Dickinson’s equating “the serf’s child” with her frost-killed flowers. *98 In thinking about this apparent heartlessness, we shouldn’t forget how often epidemics have inspired a strained and humorous dance of death, with all sense of scale abandoned. Was it because so many were dying that she gave such hurried treatment to Austin’s life-threatening fever, or did her lack of concern reflect a doctor’s opinion that he was “better”? Whatever the explanation, she failed to convey the gravity of his illness, which lingered into January “as a neuralgic presence.”