My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  One of the poet’s memorable encounters occurred when James, the other brother, showed up at the Dickinson mansion: “I could scarcely have believed, the Morning you called with Mr Brownell,” she wrote some two decades later, “that I should eventually speak with you, and you only, with the exception of my Sister, of my dearest earthly friend.” Whatever the purpose of Clark and Brownell’s call, it must have taken place between 1858 and 1863, when the two men conducted a private school in Brooklyn. Even though this seems to have been the poet’s only face-to-face meeting with the teacher, it was to have a crucial sequel: after Wadsworth’s death, a posthumous collection of his sermons was sent to her by James, an act resulting in extended correspondence with both brothers. James evidently knew—from the minister?—how vital this Dickinson connection was. Like Charles H., both knew how to guard the confidentiality of clients, parishoners, and trusting female friends. *118

  As Albert J. Gelpi concluded many years ago, “Wadsworth would seem the unquestionable choice for Master.” That seems truer than ever, yet the evidence remains so circumstantial and conjectural it is wisest to hold back. In principle, there could have been another man, someone for whom we have no surviving documentary evidence, leaving Wadsworth to play the role of pastoral adviser. Still, there are enough clues pointing to the minister that he is the one we will consider as occasion offers.

  I Am So Far from Land

  There was a man, probably a minister; he was married and in other ways out of reach and unsuitable; his feelings for her had little in common with hers for him; she knew little about him and began to project her powerful desires and fantasies on him; their correspondence became increasingly troubling for her; they met, perhaps in 1860, perhaps only once, parting in a way that may have looked quite ordinary to a bystander; and in the poems she wrote afterward she returned again and again to this impossible relationship, developing its latent elements in fantastic ways.

  Whether or not Wadsworth was the man, this romantic crisis was the necessary and climactic phase of Dickinson’s long-delayed maturity and of the huge demands she made on intimates. This was the event that forced her to think about the satisfactions she could reasonably expect in life and the compensatory goals she might plausibly achieve. By 1863, when she wrote in passing of “the Heart I former wore” (Fr757), she had come to regard the crisis as her life’s transforming event.

  What made her trouble all the more painful and defining was that Samuel Bowles and Susan Dickinson were caught up in their own crises in 1861 and couldn’t afford the attention and understanding the poet demanded. Triply abandoned, she had no choice but to work matters out on her own terms, in writing.

  Soon after November 7, 1860, when Mary Bowles was delivered of her third unviable child in a row, she received a strange and moving letter of sympathy:

  Don’t cry, dear Mary. Let us do that for you, because you are too tired now. We don’t know how dark it is, but if you are at sea, perhaps when we say that we are there, you won’t be as afraid.

  The waves are very big, but every one that covers you, covers us, too.

  Emily had gone through nothing resembling Mary’s ordeal, yet the letter spoke with authority, in part because its author was drawing on a new sense of the solidarity of female pain. “Are the children women, and the women thinking it will soon be afternoon?” she had asked Elizabeth Holland in 1859; “We will help each other bear our unique burdens.” Now, helping Mary, she wrote as one who had reason to feel she was in the same deep water as other women.

  The lost-at-sea image had by this time acquired a special resonance. In fall 1859, the poet informed Kate Scott, probably ironically, that she was “pleasantly located in the deep sea.” When Susan D. Phelps, for a time the fiancée of Henry Vaughan Emmons, was in difficulty, Emily sent her a note based on Isaiah 43:2: “When thou goest through the Waters, I will go with thee.” Now, going with Mary, she offered not a life rope but a vivid image of being swamped by waves in darkness, a shared desperation. Was she remembering that Mary’s Aunt Laura Dwight Childe had gone down in 1854 with the Arctic, one of the great transatlantic packets? So dramatic and unforgettable was this shipwreck that it showed up in Henry James’s 1913 memoir, A Small Boy and Others. The Republican ran a graphic series about the launching of spars, the final mad rush for boats, and similar horrors. The casualty figures were brutal: as the captain and sixty-two crew members saved themselves, over two hundred passengers were abandoned and drowned, including every woman and child on board. The Amherst paper drew attention to the death of Mrs. Childe and her daughter. It brought the tragedy even closer to home that Emily’s Aunt Catharine had made a transatlantic crossing on the ship one year earlier. When Emily wrote Mary that every wave “that covers you, covers us, too,” the words were thick with recent history.

  As Dickinson drifted out to sea in the winter of 1860–1861, she suffered her usual seasonal (consumptive?) symptoms—a “cough as big as a thimble,” “a Tomahawk in my side.” Samuel appears to have sent a get-well message early in the year, judging by her somber and enigmatic way of taking issue with his genial optimism:

  You spoke of the “East.” I have thought about it this winter.

  Dont you think you and I should be shrewder, to take the Mountain Road?

  That Bareheaded life – under the grass – worries one like a Wasp.

  Despite the obscurities, it is evident she was troubled by the thought of death. Samuel was always talking up a warm and fuzzy and very Victorian faith that everything would be better, even his own deteriorating back, stomach, head. His letters to Austin and Sue were full of exhorting and reaffirming mantras: “We are full of Faith & Hope,” “wait in Patience & Faith,” “Faith I find grows larger & richer with me as I myself grow more powerless.” The well-known poem that opens Emily’s wasp-note was surely a riposte to this tireless uplift:

  “Faith” is a fine invention

  When Gentlemen can see –

  But Microscopes are prudent

  In an Emergency.

  Fr202A

  What Dickinson wanted from Bowles was the kind of sympathy that took her and her extremity seriously. In early 1861, in her strongest plea yet, she sent him a dramatic narrative poem that combined the lost-at-sea image with a life-and-death struggle between two survivors of a shipwreck. It is a repetition of the Arctic, with the man (it seems) abandoning the woman:

  Two swimmers wrestled on the spar

  Until the morning sun –

  When One turned, smiling, to the land –

  Oh God! the other One!

  The stray ships – passing, spied a face

  Opon the waters borne,

  With eyes, in death, still begging – raised,

  And hands – beseeching – thrown!

  Fr227A

  Dickinson’s statement introducing this powerful poem—“I cant explain it, Mr Bowles”—suggests it concerned a matter she dared not otherwise elucidate. It has been applied to her life in many ways, but the obvious connection is with her worsening relations with Master, who, the poem hints, has abandoned her at sea. Since it was out of the question to expose the details to Samuel, she sent an image of pleading desolation, hoping, perhaps, to stimulate the sympathy she had offered Mary.

  The closest she came to telling him her secret was in the ecstatic poem also (apparently) dating from spring 1861:

  Title divine – is mine!

  The Wife – without the Sign!

  Acute Degree – conferred on me –

  Empress of Calvary! . . .

  Fr194A

  The poem intimates that though she is not truly wedded and has thus not known the highly mystified “swoon/God sends us Women,” she has accomplished her unique and painful destiny and can now perform an ironic imitation of true wives, who have the right to say “‘My husband.’” At the end she went out of her way to emphasize the confidentiality of her disclosures: “Heres – what I had to ‘tell you’ – You will tell no other? Honor – is its
own pawn.”

  If Dickinson wanted Bowles to somehow appreciate her “unique burden”—her painful sense of being lastingly, transformingly, bound to a man not her husband—her message fell far short of explicitness. He may have taken her obscure confession in the way that most people would, drawing the wrong inference about her “purity.” Certainly, her tone in correcting him could not have been more lofty:

  If you doubted my Snow – for a moment – you never will – again – I know –

  Because I could not say it – I fixed it in the Verse – for you to read – when your thought wavers, for such a foot as mine – *119

  The poem she attached, opposing fixedness to wavering, compared the faith of martyrs, their “everlasting troth,” to the magnetic needle that always points north (Fr187B).

  Responsive as Bowles was, he was not the ideal receiver for Dickinson’s impassioned but cloudy self-disclosures. In fall 1861, meeting William and Henry James’s newly married cousin, Catharine James Prince, he left a vivid record of his impression of the unstable woman: “The wife is fascinating, or can be, most assuredly. She quite impressed me with evidences of genius; but there is a wild unsettled look about her that would frighten most men.” He had heard that Rebecca Harding Davis’s novel Margret Howth was “powerful, weird, but ‘unhealthy.’” Samuel wanted women to be steady, reliable, and up-to-date, and not to rear up with nerves and vagaries. *120 Absorbed in his paper, the political scene, and the suddenly explosive Civil War, which he described in April as this “new world of action & thoughts, that the rest of us are talking about daily,” the man simply couldn’t afford the time and patience Emily required.

  About the time she realized that Samuel could not be the strong and sympathetic male friend she needed, he was laid low by a physical collapse that completely altered their basis with each other. Terribly afraid for him, she wondered if another of her cherished friends was going to be “snatched.” Yet she also drew strength from his trouble, and just when she needed it.

  His crisis began in February 1861 as he drove by sleigh from Amherst to Springfield during a heavy snow. He had to get out from time to time, and the result was “a violent attack of sciatica” and a series of forced absences from his paper’s editorial office, regardless of wartime pressures. In early June, as a Northampton paper reported, he spent several days recuperating “in town and vicinity”—mainly Greenfield, it seems. Later that month he toured the Berkshire Hills and in July the White Mountains. In September, back from a health trip to Saratoga, his back “doubled up on me with a vengeance” and he “fairly cried with pain & disappointment,” though still managing a joke about “boils & bowels & sciatica.” Finally, on October 16, with his wife nearing the fearsome end of yet another pregnancy, he had no choice but to try Dr. Denniston’s Northampton water cure for a month or two. Once there, even though his “bent back & crippled leg tether[ed him] as closely as a young calf,” Samuel gallantly managed a ride to the Evergreens, apologizing afterward for having been so “stooped.”

  Emily’s many letters touching on this affliction are hard to date, inconsistent, and charged with intense feeling. In one she tells Samuel she prays “to ‘Alla’” for his health; in another, she both reminds him she hasn’t learned to pray and assures him she often carries her friends’ pains to the Virgin Mary. Fearing the worst for him, she nevertheless kept her distance during one of his visits because “something troubled me – and I knew you needed light – and air.” Both explanations ring true, even the second, however fantastical: she knew how exhausting she could be. When Thomas Wentworth Higginson called on her in 1870, he was struck that she “often thought me tired.”

  One of many reasons Samuel can’t be Master is that Emily’s messages repeatedly press others’ claims on him. With Master she pleaded her own case, but with Bowles she positioned herself within an anxious and admiring group, showing little possessiveness. Once, telling him how she, Sue, and Vinnie had talked about him, she mimicked a recording secretary’s report: “We voted to remember you.” When she again refused to see him in late 1862, her stated reason was: “I gave my part that [Vinnie and Austin] might have the more.” This, too, rings true, showing that she (rightly) assumed she did not come first with this choice family friend.

  All the same, Dickinson wanted Bowles to see her as his special and devoted well-wisher, and to realize that her sympathy was boundless and entirely at his disposal. Associating him with Mr. Swiveller in The Old Curiosity Shop, she cast herself as the tiny scullery maid who works and eats in a miserable basement kitchen. After Swiveller teaches this servant to play cribbage, renames her the Marchioness, and in other ways shows an interest, she runs away from her tyrannical mistress to nurse him through a three-week illness. “It grieves me till I cannot speak, that you are suffering,” Emily told Samuel in a letter offering dainty remedies and signed “‘Marchioness.’” It “grieve[d]” her a second time when he left the nearby water cure for New York’s Brevoort Hotel, where he could scarcely walk the two blocks to Broadway. She was grieved most of all by his 1861 Christmas gifts, which included a photo of himself that made him look, in Sue’s words, “paler, and thinner, than when you were here.” Emily’s thank-you note was choked with emotion: “You are thoughtful so many times, you grieve me always – now. The old words are numb – and there a’nt any new ones.” She said she would explain her reaction to the picture on his next visit to Amherst, though she wasn’t sure she could:

  But the Heart with the heaviest freight on –

  Does’nt – always – move –

  Fr193A

  A letter written about the same time to the Reverend Edward S. Dwight, whose wife had recently died, helps clarify these intensities of grief and sympathy: “I do not ask if you are ‘better’ – because split lives – never ‘get well’ – but the love of friends – sometimes helps the Staggering – when the Heart has on its great freight.” This somber insight into personal loss was contemporaneous with “There came a day at summer’s full,” about a final parting of her own. She was writing from personal and painful experience, staggering like Bowles and Dwight under a heavy weight she couldn’t risk explaining, no matter how close she felt to these male friends.

  What she was reaching for was a way to make her “unique burden” serve great and generous ends. One reason Bowles’s photo grieved her was that it seemed to reveal how he had been consuming himself for his friends. Like the spectacle of wartime sorrow, the photo further stimulated her drive to make herself larger than she was—“more stupendous,” more primal. The more the editor suffered, the more determined she was to live up to what she perceived as his level.

  There is a recurring image in her letters to Bowles—the brimming cup, the lashes holding their tear—that suggests her incommunicable emotional surplus. Her feelings were so far in excess of any conceivable relationship or social context that they could not possibly be discharged; but they had to be. One of the ways she resolved this torment was to make her private agony the point of departure for a generalized treatment of human desire as such. Another was to simply seize the power she didn’t have, as when, in her most muscular treatment of the lost-at-sea material, she assured her suffering friend:

  Should you but fail at – Sea –

  In sight of me – *121

  Or doomed lie –

  Next Sun – to die –

  Or rap – at Paradise – unheard –

  I’d harass God –

  Until He let you in!

  Fr275

  Some may wish to dismiss this poem, surely not one of Dickinson’s best, as pointlessly hypothetical and vaunting. It would be wiser to take it as exercise, practice, by which the tiny “Marchioness” lifted herself into power, boldness, creativity. If she could save Mr. Bowles, she would appropriate not only his range and command but God’s as well. Dickinson belonged to that select group who find their way to supreme mastery by being as generous as they are daring and egotistical.

  A Bi
rth

  As Bowles brought all this to the surface, Sue brought something else by a very different route.

  By now the Evergreens’ interior life had become a world in itself. Unlike the Homestead, where space was defined by stately dimensions and heavy Empire furniture, Sue and Austin’s smaller rooms aimed at an up-to-date jewel-box effect—an exhibition of privacy and comfort organized around high-definition kitsch, including a statuette of Cupid and Psyche in rapturous embrace. Like Samuel, Austin had become an habitué of New York’s leading galleries, yearning for pieces he couldn’t afford yet feeling (in Sue’s words) “he must have them.” This itch became so well known that Mary Clemmer Ames slyly glanced at it in one of her New York letters to the Republican: “There are at least two pairs of eyes in Amherst . . . which would gaze delighted on Ginoux’s latest and greatest picture, ‘Indian Summer.’” Régis Gignoux, a landscapist specializing in snow scenes, was a great favorite at the Evergreens.