Lavinia, “perter and more pert day by day.” ED
Some paternal uncles and aunts.
Lucretia Dickinson Bullard
Asa Bullard, editor of the widely distributed Sabbath School Visiter.
William Dickinson: “He always had an opinion . . .”
Samuel Fowler Dickinson, Jr.
Catharine Dickinson Sweetser, Emily’s favorite paternal aunt.
Elizabeth Dickinson Currier, “the only male Dickinson on the female side.” ED
“The Newmans seem very pleasant, but they are not like us . . .” ED
Mary Dickinson Newman, Edward’s favorite sister, married a successful bookseller and lived in Brooklyn. The family portrait dates from shortly before her and her husband’s death from consumption in 1852.
Clara and Anna, the two youngest Newman orphans, lived next door to the poet, in the Evergreens, from 1858 to 1868 or 1869.
Relatives on the maternal, Norcross, side.
The poet’s two maternal uncles who were photographed.
William O. Norcross was on the winning side of a family lawsuit against Loring Norcross, represented by the poet’s father.
Joel W. Norcross, a successful im-porter of “fancy goods,” was sent one of the poet’s most vehement letters.
Joel Norcross, of Monson, the poet’s prosperous maternal grandfather. Age and artist unknown.
The poet’s relations were particularly close with Loring and Lavinia Norcross and their daughters, Louisa and Frances.
callout20
Loring
Lavinia and daughter Louisa
Frances in her mid-teens. Twenty years later, as she acted in a play at Concord, Lidian Emerson, Ralph Waldo’s widow, whispered to her daughter, Ellen, “Isn’t she modest and sweet?”
School; a teacher; a friend made at school.
Amherst Academy. On the third story was a “real nice hall, & arched roof, . . . for the speaking of Wednesday afternoon.” Edward Hitchcock, Jr.
Caroline Dutch Hunt taught both the poet and her mother.
Abiah Root, with whom the poet became close friends in 1844, during a term at school.
Youthful friends.
Joseph B. Lyman looked up German words with Emily.
Henry Vaughan Emmons. “The poets . . . wrestle with the angel of sorrow till he leaves a blessing upon them . . .” Emmons, “Poetry the Voice of Sorrow”
Susan Gilbert.
I have a Bird in spring
Which for myself doth sing – ED (Fr4)
Martha Gilbert. “We had a long, sad talk . . . and Mattie cried and I cried, and we had a solemn time.” ED
Men whose preaching made a powerful impression on Dickinson.
The Reverend Aaron M. Colton, pastor of the First Church in Amherst, 1840-1853.
Professor Edwards A. Park. “He is sometimes tremendous . . .” Henry Boynton Smith
Dickinson is thought to have heard the Reverend Charles Wadsworth in Philadelphia in 1855. “The very appearance of the man in the pulpit shows his abhorrence of claptrap.” George Burrowes
Elizabeth Holland and Samuel Bowles were among the correspondents Dickinson most confided in.
Elizabeth Holland, the poet’s “Little Sister.”
Samuel Bowles. “We shall never settle the woman question so long as we . . . divide them off as the Shakers do in their meetings.” Review of Dr. Holland’s Miss Gilbert’s Career.
Mary Bowles, compared by her husband, Samuel, to a porcupine.
Some of Dickinson’s most vital correspondences were with people she saw little of.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the Brahmin radical who was selected by Dickinson as her “preceptor.”
Maria Whitney taught German and French at Smith College.
How well I knew Her not ED (Fr813A)
Sarah Tuckerman, wife of the Amherst College botanist, received many messages from Dickinson but never saw her.
The Dickinson Compound.
The poet’s home. The two windows on the upper left, her bedroom. On the far right, her conservatory.
The Evergreens, an “Italianate villa” built in 1856 for Austin and Susan Dickinson.
In her last fifteen years, the poet was deeply affected by family events next door, even though she almost never went there.
Ned Dickinson, age thirteen.
Mattie Dickinson. “That’s the Little Girl I always meant to be, but wasn’t . . .” ED
Susan Dickinson holding Gib, her third child.
Gib died of typhoid fever in October 1883.
Austin Dickinson
Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd, half Austin’s age, became his mistress in December 1883.
Susan Dickinson in old age.
In her last years Dickinson became romantically attached to Judge Otis Phillips Lord.
“He was strong in his intellect, strong in his emotions, strong in his friendships, strong in his dislikes and prejudices, strong in thought, and strong in language.” Marcus Morton, Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts
It may have been a stroke that prompted Lord’s retirement from the Supreme Judicial Court in December 1882.
Chapter 17
1860–1862: Carrying and Singing the Heart’s Heavy Freight
Lavinia Norcross was known to be “failing very rapidly,” but Emily was still caught off guard when she died of consumption in April 1860, aged forty-eight. Vinnie had gone to help, and the sister who stayed home couldn’t believe it when letters arrived reporting “what Aunt Lavinia said ‘just before she died.’” There had been no nearer death in the family, and Emily would “sob and cry till I can hardly see my way ’round the house.”
The effort to absorb this event brought the poet even closer to her aunt’s daughters, Louisa and Frances: *109 “I know you both better than I did,” she wrote that September. A consolatory poem sent to them, “‘Mama’ never forgets her birds,” affirmed the dead mother’s (and Emily’s) ongoing care of the sisters:
If either of her “sparrows fall”,
She “notices” above.
Fr130
The allusion was to Jesus’ comforting statement, “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.” Her substitution of “mama” as the providential agent reveals a growing inclination to replace paternalistic authority with a specifically feminine sensibility. There was a new and tougher tenderness, a feeling that the heart that loves had better be dogged, self-reliant, armed for trouble.
Two years later, when Aunt Lamira, the wife of Joel W. Norcross, died in a New York hotel at age twenty-nine, also of consumption and also leaving two children, the poet sent her husband a strong, finely calibrated letter of consolation. In the past, she and Vinnie had been put off by Joel’s egotism and emotional remoteness. Now, taking a firm line, she reminded him of his parental responsibilities and pointedly hoped “we shall be more mindful of each other, for just her sake – learning a quicker tenderness.” It was not religion but the dead woman’s spirit that mandated this duty. Indeed, rather than extend the usual consolatory pieties, Dickinson wondered if the songbirds “know Heaven better than me – down here – so far away.” To her, it looked as if Lamira had been “snatched.”
The sinister word also shows up in a fragment about an unbroken family or couple: “They’re so happy you know. That makes it doubtful. Heaven hunts round for those that find itself below [i.e., find heaven below], and then it snatches.” This was sent to Frances and Louisa, who had begun to receive the poet’s darkest thoughts: “Seeing pain one can’t relieve makes a demon of one. . . . Heaven is so cold!” Thinking of Myra’s “young face in the dark” made Emily wish she could explain “the anguish in the world. I wish one could be sure the suffering had a loving side.” Was there no final and absolute comfort after all? That such doubts were imparted to a motherless twenty-year-old shows the degree of candor and equality the relationship assumed.
When Lori
ng died in January 1863, leaving Louisa and Frances fully orphaned, the poet began the first of two warm letters with a declaration of support and solidarity: “What shall I tell these darlings except that my father and mother are half their father and mother, and my home half theirs, whenever and for as long as they will.” Leaving many things implicit—the guttering failure of Loring’s life, the burdens his daughters would have to shoulder—Emily spoke of how “tired” (depressed?) he had been since Lavinia’s death and how happy the reunited couple must be. Her basic move was to offer the comforts of sympathy: she let her cousins know how their various friends in Amherst grieved for them, and “because I cannot pray” proceeded to “sing,” likening the dead to birds that fly south and the bereaved to “birds that stay/The shiverers round farmers’ doors” (Fr528[A]). Written in mid-winter, the poem tried to lift Louisa and fifteen-year-old Frances out of the particulars of their situation, yet not deny their grief. “Be sure you don’t doubt about the sparrow,” she wrote, *110 but it was human love, not faith in divine providence, that prompted the thought.
Lavinia had placed the large estate she had from her father in trust for her daughters, but she let Loring manage it as he saw fit. Thanks to his chronic bad judgment, her decision in this matter proved a costly one for Louisa and Frances. Three months before his death, acting as trustee, he invested $17,500 in a house and double lot on Boston’s recently developed Chester Square. About the same time, the opening of the Back Bay caused a stampede out of the South End, leaving his daughters to dispose of the property the following June for $12,000. At his death, Loring owed his wife’s estate $11,200, of which no more than $2,400 could be found (his debts were five times his assets). Still, mama’s providential arrangements enabled her sparrows to live comfortably on some modest real-estate investments in Lynn.
The truly fearful question, not mentioned in extant letters, was “the evils” of first-cousin marriages such as Loring and Lavinia’s. From the early 1850s, the public was advised in newspapers read by the poet that half the offspring of first-cousin marriage “will be deaf, dumb, blind or imbecile.” It isn’t known how Emily reacted to such brutal forecasts, or whether they had any impact on the Norcross sisters’ decision not to marry. But it seems likely the suspicious regard cast on the children of first cousins only enhanced Frances and Louisa’s appeal to Emily, who, a Druid in 1859, had become “the only Kangaroo among the Beauty” by 1862, the year she called Fan and Loulie her “little brothers.” It was surely a comfort to be a little freakish, a little outside the pale, with them. That she seemed more “natural and spontaneous” with them than with others was noted in the 1894 edition of her letters.
Of all the Homestead’s guests, the “dearest to us, as children,” recalled Martha, the Evergreens’ second child, were the Norcross sisters. Frances, “a great favorite with both houses,” was “bright and charming, ready to play with us, and full of fun.” Lou, equally playful, had a quieter and quainter appeal. Small, dainty, fanciful, impractical, she told the children she would come up some spring as a daffodil. She was “a spell-binder,” with a “serious softness contradicted by the fun dancing in her eyes.” She had ideas about the private lives of birds—“the probability” of a hummingbird “at home like other fathers.” In the eyes of this young observer, “Cousin Lou was more like Aunt Emily than anybody.”
Yet the orphaned cousins, products of a shattered home, had a worldly competence not possible for Emily, with her protective father and retiring habits. After Lamira’s death, Louisa went to Lynn to tend Joel’s children and run the household. The next summer, Vinnie being away, Emily begged her cousins to help “cut the cake . . . and chirp to those trustees.” She was thinking of her great annual ordeal, the treasurer’s reception during Commencement week. “If you should fail me,” she wrote, “my little life would fail of itself.” Another pleading letter compared Commencement to “some vast anthropopic bear, ordained to eat me up.” Still, as was the case with the poet’s other friendships, the dependencies were mutual, complex, and not easily summed up. She often referred to her cousins as her “children” and “little girls,” lavishing a kind of mothering on them that seems to have been gratifying for all concerned.
That all three were readers greatly enriched the friendship. When Emily needed books, Fanny found them for her in Lafayette Burnham’s selection of “antique and modern books” on Boylston Street. Heading the other direction were poems, seventy-one at a minimum, in which Emily “sang” to her cousins. There were also oral performances, as Louisa recalled in 1904 in a letter to the Woman’s Journal, a suffragist magazine. Defending the dignity of domestic labor, she remembered how Emily Dickinson wrote most emphatic things in the pantry, so cool and quiet, while she skimmed the milk; because I sat on the footstool behind the door, in delight, as she read them to me. The blinds were closed, but through the green slats she saw all those fascinating ups and downs going on outside that she wrote about.” It adds to the value of this firsthand testimony to know that our witness not only heard Fanny Kemble but acted in private theatricals (see Chapter 18). Since neither Sue nor her daughter ever described such readings, it appears Aunt Lavinia’s girls knew Emily in ways no one else did.
What kind of oral rendition did the poet give of her work? A little-known 1895 essay drawing on Vinnie’s authority suggests an answer:
Emily was herself a most charming reader. It was done with great simplicity and naturalness, with an earnest desire to express the exact conception of the author, without any thought of herself, or the impression her reading was sure to make.
This account goes against two influential interpretations of Dickinson’s art: that it lacked an oral dimension, and that it was high camp performance.
A common past can be a powerful bond for those who live into changing times. One of Emily’s letters to Frances and Louisa smiles at Reverend Joseph Vaill (Grandma Norcross’s brother) and his down-home pronunciation of “Lorin’ and Laviny.” Following the death of Barrett Browning in June 1861 and the publication of an article on George Sand in November, Dickinson wrote: “Your letters are real, just the tangled road children walked before you. . . . That Mrs. Browning fainted, we need not read Aurora Leigh to know, when she lived with her English aunt; and ‘George Sand’ ‘must make no noise in her grandmother’s bed-room.’ Poor children! Women, now, queens, now!” Although we don’t know what the cousins had complained of, the poet evidently intended a soothing parallel between their troubles and the hard early years of Barrett Browning and George Sand. Emily, of course, had had an unusually quiet, confined, rule-bound girlhood. Did the three cousins explore their pasts together? Emily would come out against all forms of childhood discipline, and when a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was organized in Concord in the 1880s, Louisa was a charter member.
As for religion, Louisa and Frances were also trudging the long road out of Calvinism. Both had grown up in Boston’s militantly evangelical Bowdoin Street Church, *111 but Louisa’s conversion at age seventeen took a very different form from her mother’s tormented self-confinement. The committee that questioned her about her spiritual experience noted she did “not remember any particular time when she gave herself to Christ,” and her confession of faith said nothing about a sense of sin. Moving to Cambridge after Loring’s death, she and Frances joined the evangelical Prospect Street Church *112 in January 1865. The affiliation didn’t hold, and when the sisters settled in Concord in the 1870s, they became active in the extremely liberal First Parish, whose most famous member was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Their withdrawal from orthodoxy surely added to the common ground already shared with Dickinson.
Those who believe the Civil War had no impact on the poet haven’t read her Norcross correspondence. When President Stearns’s admired son, Frazar, was killed in March 1862, she sent her cousins a vivid report of the local anguish. Several weeks later, condoling with Uncle Joel on his wife’s death, she wrote, “So many brave – have died, this year
– it dont seem lonely – as it did – before Battle begun.” At year’s end, extending this line of thought, she let her cousins know how the terrible conflict was entering her life:
Sorrow seems more general than it did, and not the estate of a few persons, since the war began; and if the anguish of others helped one with one’s own, now would be many medicines. . . . I noticed that Robert Browning had made another poem, and was astonished – till I remembered that I, myself, in my smaller way, sang off charnel steps. Every day life feels mightier, and what we have the power to be, more stupendous. *113
This important passage reveals the intricate linkage between the poet’s creative ordeal and the spectacle of wartime anguish and heroism. Bereavement had always been a defining experience for her, most recently with the deaths of aunts Lavinia and Lamira. The war multiplied and generalized her sense of mortal risk and large issues and a nearness to ultimates. Now, as she accomplished the greatness she and Louisa had anticipated in October 1859, she saw that her new powers had something to do with the national ordeal. It was as if her own fundamentals had been endorsed.
Sequestered though she was, Dickinson was very much a part of the society of her time. To detach her from the war is to miss seeing how her poetry of the early 1860s, a great and classic descent into a personal inferno, was made possible by the staggering disaster in the distance.
My Wars Are Laid Away in Books Page 42
