My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  Oh, Signor, Thine, the Amber Hand –

  And mine – the distant Sea –

  Obedient to the least command

  Thine eye impose on me –

  Fr387

  A favorite fantasy is that of an eventual heavenly reunion, as in “Fitter to see him I may be” (Fr834). In some of the poems that develop this thought, she speaks of herself as his waiting betrothed, or even “wife.”

  The relationship this group of erotic poems had to the external events of Dickinson’s life remains an unsolved problem. A few readers have proposed, in spite of the gendered nouns and pronouns, that the lover was a woman. Others, making a hard-and-fast rule of the poet’s statement that her lyric “I” is a “supposed person,” read the marriage poems as essentially fictive. Still others evade the problem by reading them as “texts” existing in no universe but their own. These solutions, deriving from various fixed positions, serve to disinfect her work of its manifest if elusive autobiographical content.

  Another possibility is that Dickinson was out of her mind, unable to draw the line between fantasy and reality. In 1852, in the first of several passages about her “insanity,” she wrote Sue that “in thinking of those I love, my reason is all gone from me, and I do fear sometimes that I must make a hospital for the hopelessly insane.” Ignoring the playful exaggeration of such passages, a few scholars have taken her at her word, most notably John Cody, who sees an incapacitating psychotic episode following Austin and Sue’s marriage: “Emily’s ego was like an opal, rent by fissures and fractures, brittle, never coalescing into a unity, reflecting first this, then that fracture-surface.” One reason to be wary of this (admittedly impressive) image and the accompanying diagnosis is the difficulty of reconciling such fragmentation with the integrative resourcefulness of the poet’s work. Another is that not one document from her many literate and outspoken contemporaries speaks of her as crazy.

  Edward Dickinson, always so quick to raise the specter of “insanity” or “monomania,” becomes a key witness here. As a college student, he had urged that insanity be considered a disease and asylums established for its victims. In the following decades he promoted the Worcester hospital for the insane, and in 1859 he was appointed trustee of the newly established State Lunatic Hospital at Northampton, which he would later praise as a “safe & valuable & desirable retreat.” When Pliny Earle took charge of this institution in 1864, *114 he recognized Edward’s interest and expertness by sending him a book on the Parish will case in New York, which turned on the legal competence of a wealthy victim of apoplexy. By this time, Hampshire County had had its own famous will case, in which the heirs of Oliver Smith of Hatfield challenged his philanthropic bequests by claiming that one of his witnesses had been insane. Heard in Northampton, the appeal pitted Rufus Choate against Daniel Webster; a transcript was published by James W. Boyden, an Amherst attorney. All in all, Emily’s father was extremely well posted on the legal risks in using signatories who were mentally unsound, or could be deemed such. Nevertheless, on six occasions between April 1859 and November 1862 (see Appendix 4), he asked Emily to witness his real estate transactions. The inference is that he assumed she was of sound mind and able to withstand legal scrutiny.

  That the love poems were a response to an actual and painful relationship with a man seems the only plausible way to take them. Yet even as we scour them for news of the poet’s life, we must keep in mind her predilection for fiction, fantasy, secrecy. She may or may not have had a special “Box – /In which his letters grew” (Fr292), but there probably was a correspondence. Several poems, such as “Doubt me! My dim companion!” (Fr332), seem to react to messages received in the present or past, in this instance questioning her constancy. Closely related are those poems, such as “Civilization spurns the leopard!” in which she defends herself against reproach: “This was the Leopard’s nature – Signor –/Need – a keeper – frown?” (Fr276). *115 Again and again, there are hints of tension, disagreement, and struggle, often a pained sense of having offended.

  A few poems seem to recall a face-to-face meeting in which “I groped opon his breast” (Fr349), or a conversation in which

  You said it hurt you – most –

  Mine – was an Acorn’s Breast –

  And could not know how fondness grew

  In Shaggier Vest –

  Coming up with a belated retort, she corrects his arrogance by saying that if he had looked into her heart he would have seen “A Giant – eye to eye with you” (Fr301). The intense reconstructive energies at work in this and other poems show that, while there may indeed have been some sort of talk, embrace, or parting scene, something leaving a sharp-edged trace, biographers must exercise great caution in reading these narratives.

  The most suggestive, “There came a day at summer’s full,” makes the Lord’s Supper (to which the speaker is finally admitted) the metaphor for an intense farewell scene in which nothing is said and everything is changed. At the end, as the speaker and the other person part, she feels they have sealed a compact that can be fulfilled only in heaven:

  And so – when all the time had failed –

  Without external sound –

  Each – bound the other’s Crucifix –

  We gave no other bond –

  Sufficient troth – that we shall rise –

  Deposed – at length – the Grave –

  To that New Marriage –

  Justified – through Calvaries of Love!

  Fr325C

  The date of the earliest known version of this poem, January 1862, would be consistent with a parting during the summer of 1860 or 1861.

  Among the poems that scout the suggestion that the speaker could be unfaithful to her tacit pledge is “Me change! Me alter!” (Fr281), also about 1862. In another, the speaker insists that her “‘Wife’s’ Affection” can change only when her mind and sex are surgically tampered with. She begins in white-hot outrage at what seems to be someone’s advice or prediction:

  Rearrange a “Wife’s” Affection!

  When they dislocate my Brain!

  Amputate my freckled Bosom!

  Make me bearded like a man!

  Blush, my spirit, in thy Fastness –

  Blush, my unacknowledged clay –

  Seven years of troth have taught thee

  More than Wifehood ever may!

  Love that never leaped its socket –

  Trust intrenched in narrow pain –

  Constancy thro’ fire – awarded –

  Anguish – bare of anodyne!

  Burden – borne so far triumphant –

  None suspect me of the crown,

  For I wear the “Thorns” till Sunset –

  Then – my Diadem put on.

  Big my Secret but it’s bandaged –

  It will never get away

  Till the Day its Weary Keeper

  Leads it through the Grave to thee.

  Fr267

  In this remarkable poem, recorded on the same sheet as “What would I give to see his face?” (Fr266) but later destroyed by a family member (though not before being copied by an assistant of Mabel Loomis Todd), Dickinson used an emphatically physical vocabulary to establish her passion. Her freckled breasts and blushing flesh (“clay”) culminate in the daring fifth stanza, where the betrothed speaker, seduced and abandoned, big with her secret, finally leads it as a small child to a heavenly reunion with her lover. The poem dates from the same period as “There came a day at summer’s full”; both offer similar constructions of a relationship that is to involve no more face-to-face meetings. Franklin puts “Rearrange a ‘wife’s’ affection” in late 1861. If we move it to early 1862 and take the seven years literally—two big ifs—the originating event (heavily fantasized) could be assigned to March 1855, when Dickinson was in Philadelphia.

  In this work Dickinson presents herself as figuratively ravished, possessed, owned, with the implication that her tragic victimhood is also her glory—that she has
transformed a shameful private burden into a crown. The trick in “getting” the poem is to sense how it plays with the poet’s reality. We can assume she was too well informed to see herself as literally betrothed or seduced: in 1853 she heard about a breach-of-promise suit from Vinnie; in 1860 her father successfully defended a man in another such case all the way to the Supreme Judicial Court; in August 1861 it was reported in the Amherst paper that the unmarried daughter of a “prominent and respectable citizen” of Greenfield gave birth while her family attended church. A lawyer’s daughter with a gossipy sister heard enough about such events to be able to devise a truth-telling fiction of her own, especially if she had been deeply impressed, as Dickinson was, by Dinah Craik’s Head of the Family. Tricked into becoming a “wife,” Craik’s Rachel Armstrong makes herself into a great actress precisely by remaining painfully faithful to the “master” who has trifled with her. Her story forms a partial but fascinating parallel with Dickinson’s “wife” poems. *116

  In “Many a phrase has the English language,” the poet speaks of one persistent phrase

  Breaking in bright Orthography

  On my simple sleep –

  Thundering its Prospective –

  Till I stir, and weep –

  Abruptly turning to the speaker who has violated her peace, she ends with this plea:

  Not for the Sorrow, done me –

  But the push of Joy –

  Say it again, Saxon!

  Hush – Only to me!

  Fr333

  Just what the phrase is that must be spoken to her alone, in a whisper, the poem does not say, of course. No one else is to know it. “None suspect me of the crown.”

  In the manuscript books “Saxon” is marked with a + for an alternative word or words, presumably consisting of two syllables, with the accent on the first. But no word or phrase appears. It is as if something stopped her from entering it.

  One thinks of another poem, also thought to be from early 1862, beginning:

  I got so I could hear his name –

  Without – Tremendous gain –

  That Stop-sensation – on my Soul . . .

  Fr292

  Master

  The links between Dickinson’s love poems and her second and third drafts to “Master” are as problematic as they are obvious. These drafts have been assigned by Franklin to 1861, on the basis of paper and handwriting. The one that is in pencil, an excruciating letter of apology, begins “Oh! did I offend it – Did’nt it want me to tell it the truth, Daisy – Daisy – offend it.” The other, in ink and not so rough a draft, might have been mailed if Dickinson hadn’t introduced revisions after she began, thus necessitating another copy. This letter also begins by reacting to something the unknown correspondent has written. Evidently, the poet has been blindsided:

  Master.

  If you saw a bullet hit a Bird – and he told you he was’nt shot – you might weep at his courtesy, but you would certainly doubt his word –

  One drop more from the gash that stains your Daisy’s bosom – then would you believe?

  Even apart from the wounded and bleeding bird, or the writer’s agonized perception that Master cannot accept her as she is, or her insistence on her truth and fidelity, the drafts echo the poems in countless ways. The desire is frank and fully voiced: “I want to see you more – Sir – than all I wish for in this world – and the wish – altered a little – will be my only one – for the skies.” She tells him that when she asked him for “Redemption,” he gave her “something else” that caused her to forget the request. “I did’nt tell you for a long time,” she added in a passage later canceled, “but I knew you had altered me.” Recalling his farewell in the draft Franklin dates early 1861, she says she “never flinched thro’ that awful parting – but held her life so tight he should not see the wound.”

  Readers are shocked by the openness and direness of her need. If you could “come to New England,” the writer cajoles, “would you come to Amherst – Would you like to come – Master?” Presenting herself as begging at his knee, she implores him to make a special place for her in his life:

  Master – open your life wide, and take me in forever, I will never be tired – I will never be noisy when you want to be still – I will be glad as the your best little girl – nobody else will see me, but you – but that is enough.

  What she seeks is not marriage (clearly out of reach) but some sort of private, nonphysical union, which no one else need ever know about and in which she will always be the best little girl anyone could possibly wish for.

  Paradoxically, Dickinson makes this infantile proposition with an energetic fullness of expression that is nothing less than . . . masterly. And even as she revels in her humble “‘Little Girl’hood,” she flouts the usual feminine rule by making her desire fully visible. She is wooer and seducer here, putting out a line of talk designed to overcome the other’s reluctance. At one point, imagining their sexes reversed—“if I had the Beard on my cheek – like you *117 – and you – had Daisy’s petals – and you cared so for me – what would become of you?”—she conjures up the erotic charge between his scratchy beard and her smooth petals precisely by reversing them: as if becoming a vehicle for what is. In spite of such displacements, the drafts attain a kind of ultimate in the direct expression of desire and agony.

  Although the writer calls herself “Daisy,” as a sign of her commonness and lowness, she knows very well she is also a volcano. Replying to her correspondent’s complaint that she has not told him everything, she writes, “Vesuvius dont talk – Etna – dont – one of them – said a syllable – a thousand years ago, and Pompeii heard it, and hid forever.” Taking for granted that much must remain unsaid, she still dares, like Vesuvius, a “syllable.”

  To date, there is only one candidate who matches what we infer about the unknown correspondent. The Reverend Charles Wadsworth didn’t reside in New England, occasionally traveled there, offered “Redemption” as a minister of the Gospel, and, as shown by the derisive treatment of poetry in his sermons, would have been seriously at odds with Dickinson. We know they exchanged letters before spring 1862 and that she took a special interest in him. Also, like Master in the following passage, Wadsworth was married, a Presbyterian, and (in her phrase from twenty years later) a “Man of sorrow”:

  [I]f I can never forget that I am not with you – and that sorrow and frost are nearer than I – if I wish with a might I cannot repress – that mine were the Queen’s place – the love of the – Plantagenet is my only apology[.] – To come nearer than Presbyteries – and nearer than the new coat – that the Tailor made – the prank of the Heart at play on the Heart – in holy Holiday – is forbidden me.

  “The Queen’s place” is the wife’s place; “the Plantagenet,” an elegant substitution for king, Lord, or Master. Confessing her wish that she could have married him, Dickinson embeds it in a long “if” clause, tacitly conceding satisfaction is out of reach. That Wadsworth was happily married by no means rules him out, since the poet takes for granted her love is not returned, and that all she can possibly get are the meager pleasures she puts in for—walking with him in the Dickinson meadow for an hour, being his secret best little girl for the rest of life.

  The Master drafts quote a sentence from one of his letters, “‘Tell you [that is, him] of the want.’” (It was standard practice to adjust pronouns for correct reference.) The sentence recalls Wadsworth’s solicitous concern in his one surviving note to her: “I am very, very anxious to learn more definitely of your trial. . . . I beg you to write me, though it be but a word.”

  Following Wadsworth’s death in 1882, the letters Dickinson sent his friend James Dickson Clark twice brought up an early visit the minister had paid her. In one of these passages, she remembered noticing the mourning on his hat: “‘Some one has died’ I said. ‘Yes’ – he said, ‘his Mother.’ ‘Did you love her,’ I asked. He replied with his deep ‘Yes.’” Mary Ann Wadsworth Hannahs died Septem
ber 29 or October 1, 1859, age sixty-four. Very likely her son would still be wearing black the following summer, though possibly not in 1861.

  In the other recollection, Dickinson said Wadsworth had spoken of “calling upon you, or perhaps remaining a brief time at your Home in Northampton.” James Clark belonged to an extremely close Connecticut Valley family that had shifted to Brooklyn without cutting local roots. Never marrying, James and his one sibling, Charles H. (in some ways they resembled the Dickinson sisters), resided for years at a stretch with their father, an early, prominent, and successful member of the New York Stock Exchange. One or both brothers liked to summer at the old family place in Northampton, where, by a happy chance, the 1860 town directory has a listing for Charles H. on Elm Street, site of the five-acre Clark homestead. Sold to Smith College in 1889, Clark House still stands, though much remodeled. If Wadsworth put up here, as Dickinson understood, it would have been an easy hour’s ride to his remarkable and as yet unseen Amherst correspondent.

  Like Wadsworth, with his background in western Connecticut and upstate New York, his honorary doctorate from New York University, and his transcontinental jump in 1862, the Clarks operated in far-reaching and cosmopolitan networks. The father, also called Charles, had started out in business in Philadelphia and Charleston before arriving on Wall Street. At the same time (again like the minister and indeed the poet), the Clarks were members in good standing of a very private Protestant patriciate, living in comfort, performing their duties no matter what, and accustomed to the discreet exercise of weighty responsibilities. Charles Clark was an elder in Brooklyn’s Second Presbyterian Church (Old School—Wadsworth’s affiliation) and actively supported its programs, “looking after the wanderers” and “visiting the sick and indigent.” He was also remembered for showing up at his office on Wall Street in the blizzard of 1888, at age eighty-three. When the family’s last survivor, Charles H., a bookkeeper, died in a New York hotel in 1915, also in his eighties, he bequeathed everything to the longtime family housekeeper, Jessie Ferguson, with the request that she be buried in the Clarks’ plot in Northampton. Since she was dead by that time, the entire estate went to an orphanage, a home for needy women, and similar charities. The New York Times ran a story on this unusual will that failed to note the deceased’s link to Dickinson, then at the low point of her posthumous reputation.