My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  If Emily depended less on Austin now, she clutched as much as ever her at times unresponsive sister-in-law. In spite of the vigorously pressed claim that this was a close and fully mutual relationship, Dickinson regularly gave voice to a feeling of neglect. Her letter to Geneva opens with a familiar lament about Sue’s silence: “I hav’nt any paper, dear, but faith continues firm.” This typical sentence not only has an iambic regularity but, if broken after “dear,” would form two lines in common meter. It was the poet’s old refrain with silent friends, starting with Harriet Merrill in 1845.

  About the time Sue returned from Geneva, Emily composed a poetic tribute based on the contrast between her two sisterly bonds. Unlike much-loved Vinnie, who

  . . . came the road that I came –

  And wore my last year’s gown –

  Sue entered as a deeply attaching foreigner:

  She did not sing as we did –

  It was a different tune –

  Herself to her a music

  As Bumble bee of June.

  The speaker has no difficulty admitting her continuing dependency on this self-sufficing stranger:

  Today is far from Childhood –

  But up and down the hills

  I held her hand the tighter –

  Which shortened all the miles –

  Now, even though Sue has become one of the Dickinsons, she seems distinct, absorbed by her separate past and interior life:

  And still her hum

  The years among,

  Deceives the Butterfly;

  Still in her Eye

  The Violets lie

  Mouldered this many May.

  Is Austin the butterfly that persistently misreads the alien hum? Do the “mouldered” violets in Sue’s eye refer back to her sister Mary, dying in the springtime of life but still unforgotten? One thing seems clear: the stranger’s self-contained and unchanging nature appeals to the speaker, who has also given up the temporal for the eternal, though in a different fashion:

  I spilt the dew –

  But took the morn;

  I chose this single star

  From out the wide night’s numbers –

  Sue – forevermore! *99

  Fr5A

  This pledge of allegiance is at least as striking for what it doesn’t say as for what it does. Whether Sue is regarded as a bee humming to herself or as a worshipped astral being, she seems beyond understanding. There is no easy or tangible reciprocity; the hand Emily grips does not necessarily grip back. And just as the poem doesn’t clarify Sue’s remote mentality, neither does it explore the speaker’s adhesiveness, which remains unchanging, fixed, beyond psychology. One sister is given, and then a second and very different sister is given, and she too is tightly held. But the two sisterly bonds are not the same, the second being as abstract as it is invigorating.

  Although few of Dickinson’s poems from 1858 to 1860 are explicitly about Sue, the three or four that are, a special group, all take for granted a certain absence or distance. Their theme is not precisely intimacy (however defined) but the desire for intimacy. In the earliest of the group, “I often passed the village,” an unnamed speaker addresses “Dollie” (the Gilberts’ pet name for Sue) from the cemetery. Having reached the village earlier than expected, this speaker—the first of Dickinson’s voices from the grave—assures Dollie of its soothing and restful nature and then extends an invitation:

  Trust the loving promise

  Underneath the mould,

  Cry “it’s I,” “take Dollie,”

  And I will enfold!

  Fr41

  The “I” that will enfold or embrace is not death but a patient and loving human spirit “underneath” decay. Even if we identify this spirit as Mary Gilbert Learned, the lost sister who waits for Sue, we must also leave room for Emily, who in 1852 made the impassioned declaration that “we will lie side by side in the kirkyard.” This yearning forecast, sent to Baltimore, exhibits the same basic elements as the poem: a great distance, a great sorrow, and a tireless love waiting to erase both.

  Another strategy for erasing the gap is seen in a poem from 1859 that stresses the disparities in scale between Sue and Emily, enabling the latter to be the former’s humble client:

  Her breast is fit for pearls,

  But I was not a “Diver” –

  Her brow is fit for thrones

  But I have not a crest.

  Her heart is fit for home –

  I – a Sparrow – build there

  Sweet of twigs and twine

  My perennial nest.

  Fr121A

  This nest-seeking speaker diminishes herself so drastically that anything like reciprocity becomes unimaginable.

  A poem sent to Sue about the same time hints at the impact of her social and intellectual command. Here, as a typically “low” speaker works at a problem in mathematics (Sue’s forte), she finds her powers abruptly baffled:

  Low at my problem bending –

  Another problem comes –

  Larger than mine – Serener –

  Involving statelier sums –

  I check my busy pencil –

  My Ciphers steal away –

  Wherefore my baffled fingers

  Thine extremity?

  Fr99A

  In one sense, however, the “statelier” presence next door did not inhibit the writer’s busy pencil, which in 1859 recorded at least thirteen additional poems concerned with low, meek, or humble states of being. *100

  Although some have postulated a nonhierarchical equality between the sisters-in-law, the poems dealing with this relationship are marked on one side by desire, on the other by distance, highness, aloofness. The asymmetry helped stimulate Dickinson’s growing productivity, with poem after poem going next door to the Evergreens—by Franklin’s count, nine or ten in 1858, twenty-one in 1859, twenty in 1860. Poems were given to other friends in these years, but Sue remained the primary recipient. We cannot know whether Emily would have been as copious a writer without her sister-in-law, but it seems beyond question that Sue’s elusive presence proved endlessly stimulating.

  It is also clear that Sue admired Emily’s poetry and that this appreciation meant a great deal. Did the sister-in-law offer useful criticism? Her 1861 critique of “Safe in their alabaster chambers” spurred the poet to draft alternative versions of a stanza that failed to please, and then to enter them in a manuscript book. Inferring that what Sue did once she must have done many times, Martha Nell Smith has elevated her into a full literary collaborator in a “poetry workshop.” The theory has won adherents but has also met widespread skepticism, if only because induction requires more than one example. In the next chapter we will look at the exchange over the “alabaster” poem. For now, it is enough to say that Sue seems to have been a constantly available audience—alert, intelligent, tasteful, nodding approval, often silent. Not even her daughter, Martha, who treasured the documentary record and made a great point of her mother and aunt’s closeness (there were private motives for stressing this), could provide more than the one instance of criticism offered. As creator, Emily was basically on her own.

  Fittingly, a poem sent next door in 1860 expresses a strong sense of discipline and privation:

  A little bread, a crust – a crumb,

  A little trust, a Demijohn –

  Can keep the soul alive –

  Not portly – mind!

  But breathing – warm –

  Conscious . . .

  Likening her position to that of soldiers under fire or Napoleon on the eve of crowning himself Emperor, Dickinson seems to regard her life as one whose terms require a high degree of courage, commitment, discipline, honor:

  A brief campaign of sting and sweet,

  Is plenty! is enough! . . .

  Fr135A

  Her military language, conspicuous in her poetry even before the Civil War, reminds us of what she had in common with Major Edward Dickinson. For her, however, the military stood le
ss for male combativeness than for a resolute attitude in private life. It was linked to a sense of deprivation, northernness, apartness.

  What made Sue’s distant nearness so powerful a stimulant was that it fit a basic rule of life for Dickinson: always seeking intimacy and finding it withheld. The pattern shows up not only in her friendships but in her orientation to nature and religion. The naive fixation on heaven that was so central in Protestant America, and which she had recklessly taken to heart without experiencing a conversion, had generated a pressing quest for the absolute within the mundane. This perennially expected rush is one of the things that gives her poems on bees, sunsets, and the seasons their Dickinsonian cachet:

  A something in a summer’s Day

  As slow her flambeaux burn away

  Which solemnizes me.

  A something in a summer’s noon –

  A depth – an Azure – a perfume –

  Transcending extasy.

  The last line was not hyperbole. Ecstasy comes with fulfillment, but what moved Dickinson was expectation: not rowing in Eden, but the thought of rowing in Eden. A later stanza of this poem describes the action of nature’s fingers on the responsive heart:

  The wizard fingers never rest –

  The purple brook within the breast

  Still chafes its narrow bed –

  Fr104

  Sexual, yes, but so much more than sexual, this constant chafing that results in a poetry of increasing power, daring, mastery. The poetry of arousal, it is the product of the single heart lying in its narrow bed and dreaming of a final escape from itself.

  Another poem sent to Sue conveys the poet’s energetic readiness:

  I never hear the word ‘Escape’

  Without a quicker blood!

  A sudden expectation!

  A flying attitude!

  I never hear of prisons broad

  By soldiers battered down –

  But I tug, childish, at my bars –

  Only to fail again!

  Fr144A

  How did someone apparently writing from her own quick blood avoid the narrow egotism so blatant in Austin or Vinnie? Dickinson’s success in this regard may be related to her “childish” female voice. Issuing from a position assumed to be powerless, this voice does not command or moralize in the fashion of so many Victorian voices, even Whitman’s. It is a noncitizen’s voice, disenfranchised and always aware of its lack of standing in debate or the arts of persuasion. All it can do is resort to the personal, the perceptual, the divine, often in the first person and with an implicit acknowledgment of its disabilities and “lowness.”

  Yet Dickinson was rarely as direct or confessional as she seemed. Among all the distances in her poetry, one of the most crucial was the distance from herself. Growing up in a culture that saw nature and human experience as hieroglyphs of heaven, she early acquired the art of rendering exemplary her own life—turning it into story or drama. Such transformations were more imperious yet less egotistical than Austin’s attempt to see his marriage as a version of Kavanagh or The Angel in the House.

  One of the poems that illustrates all these distances, “Our lives are Swiss,” speaks not of “me” but “us.” Sent to Sue in late 1859, this splendid work reminds us of the writer’s captive spectatorship in winter, her bedroom looking south to the Mount Holyoke Range and west to the curtained windows of the Italianate villa next door. Yet to limit the poem to these perspectives would be to kill it, a brilliant transformative power having already operated on the writer’s perceptual experience:

  Our lives are Swiss –

  So still – so cool –

  Till some odd afternoon

  The Alps neglect their curtains

  And we look further on.

  Italy stands the other side.

  While like a guard between –

  The solemn Alps –

  The siren Alps

  Forever intervene –

  Fr129A

  This is work of a very high order, bringing together an intense lyric brio with an expansive cartographic abstraction. The poem spoke to Sue, and at the same time it placed its maker on a stage not limited by place or time.

  As of 1860, Dickinson was not yet ready to really explore the finality of that “forever intervene.” Only in a few poems—most of them sent to Sue—did she draw out the tragic potential of her material. In one of these, we see her fusing her basic concerns—pleasure and denial, struggle and defeat, distance and comprehension—then bringing them down to a single heartbreaking point:

  Success is counted sweetest

  By those who ne’er succeed.

  To comprehend a nectar

  Requires sorest need –

  Not one of all the purple Host

  Who took the flag today

  Can tell the definition so Clear of Victory –

  As he defeated – dying –

  On whose forbidden Ear

  The distant strains of triumph

  Burst agonized and Clear –

  Fr112A

  This rightly famous poem, distilled with such mastery from its maker’s experience, doesn’t have the first-person speaker that became so essential in her tragic poetry of the early 1860s. That was what would come next: putting a female “I” back in that clear and agonizing perspective.

  Condor Kate

  The reverse of Emily Norcross Dickinson, Sue relished being a hostess and opening the Evergreens to a succession of prominent literary and political visitors. Those she entertained over the years included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bret Harte, Wendell Phillips, and Anna Dickinson, the pioneering woman orator during and after the Civil War. After failing to snag a visiting English lion, Charles Kingsley, in 1874, she felt a lifelong regret. Although her home was not a true literary salon, it almost functioned as one for the poet next door, in the process offering useful stimulation. *101 If Sue had not been there to mediate the social and literary world for Emily, introducing her to a few people, providing a setting for lively talk, lending issues of the Atlantic Monthly, the poetry would almost certainly be less interesting.

  Of course, the Evergreens was not the poet’s only door on society. In September 1858 she was the first to call on a bride new to Amherst, Mrs. Mary Allen, and she continued to play a marginal part in the social round, once making a visit to the Aaron Warners that so exhausted her she begged off a planned musical evening next door. Yet avoidance was by now so well established that in the winter of 1859–1860 she pointedly reminded cousin Louisa she was one of the few “from whom I do not run away!” It isn’t known whether she saw Emerson when he put up at Sue and Austin’s in December 1857 (and if she didn’t whether she excluded herself or wasn’t invited). She was probably in Cambridge when he came a second time in 1865.

  One of the few guests she met and made friends with was Catharine Scott Turner, young, beautiful, and, like Sue from 1850 to 1853, dressed in mourning. Raised in Cooperstown, New York, Kate had attended Utica Female Seminary with Sue, both signing the same copy of Kames’s Elements of Criticism. In 1855 she married a doctor whose tuberculosis was so advanced a local diarist thought he looked “dreadfully” and felt “so sorry for him and also poor Kate.” A year and a half later the man was dead, aged twenty-six.

  In January 1859 the young widow came to the Evergreens for a visit that lasted till February 18; she would return for two more extended stays in October 1861 and January 1863. Decades later she reminisced about her nights at the Evergreens as if they were the best she had known: “Those celestial evenings in the Library—the blazing wood fire—Emily—Austin,—the music—the rampant fun—the inextinguishable laughter, the uproarious spirits of our chosen—our most congenial circle.” She vividly remembered “Emily with her dog, & Lantern! often at the piano playing weird & beautiful melodies, all from her own inspiration, oh! she was a choice spirit.” The first exclamation point marks Kate’s recollection of the time the revels lasted so far into the night Emily’s father suddenly appeared
with a lantern to take his reckless daughter home. The next morning, her high spirits undiminished, she took her revenge by snipping from his modern reprint of The New England Primer a woodcut of a youth fleeing a demon. She sent this next door, explaining that the youth stood for her and the pursuing “Reptile” for her “more immediate friends, and connections”—meaning of course her overprotective father.

  Far more humiliating was the night she and Kate made fools of themselves in front of Reuben A. Chapman, a dignified family friend about to step up to Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court. Remembered as having “great respect for existing institutions,” Chapman was a conservative on abolition, and as a good Calvinist felt a “special dislike” for “alterations of old and familiar hymns.” At home, he was always “serene and unruffled,” and fond of reading serious theology. As Emily later explained to Elizabeth Holland, she was spending the evening with Sue and Kate (“as I often do”) when “some one rang the bell and I ran, as is my custom.” Kate ran with her, and as they stood behind a door “clinging fast like culprit mice,” they heard the Judge’s voice. “Since the dead might have heard us scamper,” Emily proposed they return, but before they could act they were exposed to view. Although she “gasped a brief apology,” the sense of disgrace did not subside, especially after she was reproached by Austin. Drafting a full apology, she sent it to Elizabeth for her to approve and then forward. “Mr. Chapman is my friend,” Emily explained: he “talks of my books with me.”

  After Kate was back in Cooperstown, Emily sent her a note recalling the pleasures of their congenial group. Until now, the only “girls” she had missed had been named Sue, Eliza, and Martha. Now, a new candidate knocking at her door, she pretends to speak for the other women in the coterie: “Go Home! We don’t take Katies here!” Then, abruptly changing her mind but continuing the game (“Stay! My heart votes for you”), she grills the applicant on her qualifications for the exclusive sisterhood: “Dare you dwell in the East where we dwell? Are you afraid of the sun? When you hear the new violet sucking her way among the sods, shall you be resolute? All we are strangers . . . And Pilgrims! . . . and Soldiers.” The letter offers another take on Dickinson’s sense of a special calling, as sensuous and playful as it is austere and spiritual. Enclosing a single rose, meant to be “worn upon the breast,” she concluded with a statement of attachment: “So I rise, wearing her – so I sleep, holding, – Sleep at last with her fast in my hand and wake bearing my flower.’”