My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

So far, neither spouse showed signs of disenchantment with the other. When Austin gave Sue an ivory hairpin in the shape of a lamb, she had never been “so pleased with a gift.” Surviving letters express the usual attention and affection, as when he offers to fetch whatever “you want” from Boston or calls her “My dear old girl.” Samuel’s one mention of discord in a letter to Sue—“You quarrel with Austin in color & in rhythm”—dates from much later, 1875.

  As the end of Sue’s pregnancy drew near in June 1861, the thirty-year-old wife and her husband came under heavy stress, to judge from Samuel’s many concerned letters. On June 8, a Saturday, going to Greenfield for the weekend, he saw Austin in Northampton, was told of some alarming development with Sue, and took away an impression of dire trouble. Three days later he wrote that “the memory of your face Saturday is ever present with me.” When he belatedly shared Austin’s ominous news, whatever it was, with Mary, she became so “nervous & anxious” she might have gone forthwith to the Evergreens if a reassuring note hadn’t arrived. Meanwhile, Emily heard from Austin “Saturday morning – that [Samuel was] not so well” and did her best to encourage her friend: “Wont you decide soon – to be the strong man we first knew?”

  Incapacitated as he was by his pinched sciatic nerve, Samuel sent a steady stream of letters expressing his anxiety about Sue and guying Austin for trying to learn (in a bad pun) “infantry tactics.” On Monday, June 17, setting off on another desperate restorative trip, the editor made a brief unplanned stop at the Evergreens. Sue was only two days away from giving birth, yet the visitor’s bread-and-butter note suggests she was able to manage some of the duties of hospitality. When news of her successful delivery on June 19 reached him in North Adams, he sent a long letter expressing his relief and assuring the couple that all their worry and agony would be repaid “ten-fold.”

  One of the most troubling aspects of this childbirth was its implication of an obscure female doom among the Gilbert sisters. It was on another June 19 eleven years earlier that Mary Gilbert Learned had given birth to her first child, only to die a few weeks later of puerperal fever. A second bad omen was that on June 14, 1861, five days before Sue’s labor, sister Martha lost her first and (as yet) only child. Even before these uncanny and frightening coincidences, Sue’s sense of Gilbert family unity had been acute. That summer, poor bereft Martha came for a visit but found it “almost broke [her] heart” to see the new mother and her baby in bed. When Samuel drove to Amherst from Denniston’s water cure, Sue was so full of “tearful remi[ni]scences & forebodings” about her stricken sister that Martha promptly showed up in the sympathetic editor’s “morning dreams.” Reports of Sue’s crying are extremely rare. She seems to have feared for her sister’s life, and perhaps her own. To be a Gilbert and a mother was to risk terrifying troubles.

  Provisionally called Jacky, the baby wasn’t given a proper name (Edward, soon shortened to Ned) until he was half a year old. He proved inordinately difficult, not only crying night and day but raising doubts as to his normality and survival. Austin’s “infantry tactics” did not begin to meet the challenge, and by October the stressed father was looking “thin & pale.” For Samuel, the explanation was obvious: “the summer campaign with your new life has evidently borne hard on you both.” This was the battle summer of 1861, when the North was not prevailing and everyone in the poet’s circle seemed to be losing ground.

  Four months after the birth, a nurse playfully hoped Austin had “left the corner far behind,” presumably the corner from illness to recovery. It was a household phrase: “Now we will turn the corner,” the poet wrote in 1871. But the new father’s complaint was as persistent as it was debilitating and depressing, and the following spring Samuel could only hope he was “not so pathetic & sad as when I last saw, & . . .” The rest of the letter is torn away, perhaps because of what came next.

  The baby’s first nurse was a former slave whom the Bowleses and Dickinsons knew as Aunt Abbe, Abba, Abby, or Abbie. Born in 1800, she had been a personal maid in Savannah and at Dungeness, the large Sea Island estate of General Nathanael Greene. During her extensive travels with her mistress, Louisa Greene Shaw, Aboo (as she was then known) had resided for several years in France, where she learned the language and “frequently” saw Lafayette, a friend of Louisa’s father; she picked up other languages as well. When her mistress drafted her will in 1829, she tried to assure her slave’s future by requiring a nephew to provide a “mat house” and quarterly stipend. It didn’t work, and by 1850 the cosmopolitan but illiterate Aboo was living in an industrial section of Springfield known as Indian Orchard and supporting herself as an itinerant lady’s nurse. The Bowleses lined her up for Sue by persuading her to leave another’s employ.

  At first, Sue was charmed with the spectacle of her “gay-turbaned nurse, sauntering over the grounds with baby . . . his long white robe flowing effectively over her [scanter?] draperies.” But as the exotic appeal faded, the employer decided that Aunt Abbie’s “evolution” wasn’t up to the job of tending a crying baby night and day. Caught “sound asleep with the priceless baby in her lap,” the aging nurse was, in Sue’s euphemistic phrase, “gently . . . transferred . . . to her home in S .”

  Abbie’s successor—her name appears to be Cerinthia Inghram in Sue’s difficult script—was a tough, egalitarian Yankee from the vicinity of Amherst. Nothing bothered Inghram, who could rock a baby for hours with one foot while reading the New-York Observer, a national conservative religious weekly. Hardy enough to ignore the constant crying, she also refused to act the part of a servant, demanding “cowcumbers and pie for breakfast,” questioning her employer about the cost of furniture, and urging home remedies like goldthread (Coptis groenlandica). When she quit, she declared “in fierce tones there was something radically wrong with the baby—his head was too large—his crying unnatural she never had seen nothing like him.” Informed of Inghram’s misdemeanors, Samuel wrote in late September that “these long weeks of that nurse must have prepared [Sue] for Heaven, if anything will.” Soon after, on his first visit from the water cure, he was relieved to see her looking “so well after ‘suffering so many things from so many’ nurses.”

  The third nurse, Maggie (Conroy?) of Hartford, apparently arriving in October, was an immediate success. When she left the following spring, a new arrangement was worked out about which we know nothing beyond Samuel’s approving comment: “You are going through a revolution, indeed—losing Maggie, & putting Jacky away in one way to draw him nearer in others. I foreshadowed as much, when I saw you last. It is well, necessary for you.” It sounds as if the baby was being weaned.

  As this complicated domestic ordeal worked itself out at the Evergreens, Emily Dickinson was sinking deeper into her own troubles and intensities and learning how to write her way out of them. She was probably acquainted with the first and third nurses, judging from the polite letters they sent after leaving the Evergreens. Shaw’s dictated letter asked to be remembered “with all respect to Mrs. Dickinson & the ladies—I dont forget their kind remembrances to me, all of them,” and Maggie sent “compliments to . . . Miss Aunt Vinie Miss Aunt emily” and others. Apart from these courteous expressions, we have nothing to connect the poet to the domestic drama next door.

  Nothing, that is, beyond the strange poem of June 19 or soon thereafter expressing great wariness about the newborn baby:

  Is it true, dear Sue?

  Are there two?

  I should’nt like to come

  For fear of joggling Him!

  If you could shut him up

  In a Coffee Cup,

  Or tie him to a pin

  Till I got in –

  Or make him fast

  To “Toby’s” fist –

  Hist! Whist! I’d come!

  Fr189

  The poem is bizarre in so many ways, whether thinking of the mother as dividing into two, or imagining the baby as a minuscule and fearful squirmer, or proposing such cruel uses for coffee cup, pin, and Toby the c
at’s paw. It isn’t clear what, if anything, these features tell us about the writer’s notions of childbirth and babies. Perhaps very little: one could easily go too far in interpreting this little impromptu, which never got into the manuscript books. But one thing seems obvious: the poem is an excuse for not going next door. Although two lines end with “come,” the message is one of distance and disconnection. In an age when it was assumed that maiden sisters and sisters-in-law helped out, the first thing Emily said was that she would not get involved.

  The split that opened in summer 1861 between Emily and Sue resembles what often happens to first-time parents and their childless adult friends. In this case, however, the wedge was driven with great force from each side. With all her troubles, the inexperienced mother was as little inclined to humor Emily as Emily was to help with Jacky. The poet loved and identified with children, but babies were another story. As she said years later, “I know but little of Little Ones, but love them very softly.” Very softly indeed: her congratulatory note following Mary Bowles’s safe delivery at the Brevoort begins: “Can you leave your flower long enough – just to look at mine? Which is the prettiest?” If this suggests she saw her friends’ babies as rivals, the next letter offers amusing confirmation: “Could you leave ‘Charlie’ – long enough? Have you time for me? . . . Dont love him so well – you know – as to forget us – We shall wish he was’nt there – if you do.” Remembering Mary’s three preceding stillbirths, we can sense why the woman, apparently quite judgmental, wouldn’t answer this needy and extremely cheeky voice.

  Dickinson’s poems from the early sixties often express a keen sense of exclusion. One from late 1861 begins:

  Why – do they shut me out of Heaven?

  Did I sing – too loud?

  As in the Master draft that offers to be his “best little girl,” the poem’s small, insistent voice promises to be perfectly quiet, if only they will open to “the little Hand”:

  Would’nt the Angels try me –

  Just – once – more –

  Just – see – if I troubled them –

  But dont – shut the door!

  Fr268

  Another poem along these lines was sent to Sue in 1861 *122:

  Could I – then – shut the door –

  Lest my beseeching face – at last –

  Rejected – be – of Her?

  Fr188

  A serious breach in friendship, it lasted into the fall. Emily couldn’t appreciate the pressure Sue was under, and Sue had no time for Emily or anyone else: the narrative she wrote decades later about her search for a nurse dwells on her own fatigue and worry and ignores husband, in-laws, friends. For the poet, it was a repeat of how she had been treated by Master. With the baby crying, and Austin in a funk, and Sue contending with him and Jacky and Cerinthia Inghram, and Samuel making one trip after another to escape his terrible sciatica, Dickinson came to understand her position in the world as never before.

  The following April, in her second letter to Higginson, the poet said she “had a terror – since September – I could tell to none – and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground – because I am afraid.” The enigmatic statement has been explained chiefly in two ways: that she had early symptoms of her eye trouble of 1864 and 1865 and feared she was going blind, and that she felt deserted when she learned that Wadsworth would accept the pastorate at San Francisco’s Calvary Presbyterian Church. Under scrutiny, neither explanation holds up. There is no real evidence of eye trouble in 1861, and no reason to think this would be a problem she could “tell to none.” As for the minister, it is true that Calvary’s previous pastor resigned on September 23, after his refusal to back the Union precipitated a riot, yet it was not till December 9 that the congregation voted to call Wadsworth, and even then his acceptance was delayed for months. News of his imminent move to California may have deepened but cannot have precipitated her crisis. There was no discrete event: Dickinson felt deserted by everyone who was dearest and could understand her, and on whom she most depended.

  The terror since September, a profound and systemic and ongoing state lasting through the winter, was the thing Dickinson had been booked to fall into. It may have begun with a moment when “the meaning goes out of things,” as she put it in one of her jottings, but its essence was a recognition of something permanent: the disconnection between her heart’s absolutism and the realities of life. Painful and transforming, it brought a final sense of isolation, abandonment, rejection. Her troubles with Master had helped her understand her “unique burden” as a woman, and now there was Sue’s apparent uninterest. To be forgotten by her selected ones—“‘They have not chosen me,’ he said,/‘But I have chosen them’” (Fr87A)—had always been the great and primary fear.

  The one extant note from Sue to Emily relating mainly to personal matters seems to have been written at the end of summer 1861, in September or October:

  I have intended to write you Emily to-day but the quiet has not been mine—I send you this, lest I should seem to have turned away from a kiss—

  If you have suffered this past Summer—I am sorry—[for] I Emily bear a sorrow that I never uncover—If a nightingale sings with her breast against a thorn, why not we? *123 When I can, I shall write—

  Sue

  An apology for ignoring Emily, the note confirms that her summer had been a painful one, and that Sue had been too distracted to answer her notes and poems. Perhaps the reason she did not disclose her special sorrow to her unmarried sister-in-law was that it involved marriage, sexuality, and motherhood. Going into labor on the birthday of a dead sister’s child, five days after the death of another sister’s child, Sue had cause to see herself as entering the common doom of maternal anguish. Her tearful conversation with Bowles that fall—their first since June 17—shows how distraught she was.

  Although Sue did not spell out her trouble or invite Emily to be more confidential about her own suffering, she still defined a common ground: shared female lyricism growing out of private female pain. Her emphatic solidarity—“why not we?”—undoubtedly meant a great deal to the poet and may explain why this one note was preserved: it affirmed a connection at a time of loneliness and despair. The following April, when the poet said she sang because of the terror she “could tell to none,” she was virtually echoing her sister-in-law’s “sorrow that I never uncover.”

  We hear other echoes in a slightly later poem written for Sue:

  For largest Woman’s Heart I knew –

  ’Tis little I can do –

  And yet the largest Woman’s Heart

  Could hold an Arrow – too –

  And so, instructed by my own,

  I tenderer, turn me to.

  Fr542A

  This looks like a chastened affirmation of the ground shared by these two very different women. Just because each heart held its own arrow, there was a place for tender gestures, however “little.” It was a restatement of what Sue had said.

  A major consequence of this “turn” toward each other was the well-known exchange over “Safe in their alabaster chambers.” First composed about 1859, this poem presents the buried dead as sleeping in hermetic isolation till the moment of resurrection:

  Safe in their Alabaster Chambers –

  Untouched by morning

  And untouched by noon –

  Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection –

  Rafter of satin,

  And Roof of stone.

  Light laughs the breeze

  In her Castle above them –

  Babbles the Bee in a stolid Ear,

  Pipe the sweet Birds in ignorant cadence –

  Ah, what sagacity perished here!

  Fr124B

  The range of interpretation this has spurred matches the differing ideas about the sleep of the dead in Dickinson’s time. The 1844 funeral sermon for Deborah Fiske gives the orthodox view: “We would not disturb her repose, for we believe she sleeps in Jesus, and that in the morning
of the resurrection, he will awake her.” Preferring an active immortality, in early 1859 Higginson scoffed at a popular hymn about “the pious dead” and “soft their sleeping bed.” Dickinson herself, uniting the passive and the active, imagined the dead Adams boy riding the wind “back to the village burying-ground where he never dreamed of sleeping: Ah! the dreamless sleep!” That was on December 31, 1861.

  When Sue expressed her dissatisfaction with stanza 2, which contrasts the activity of high summer to the immaculately sealed dead, Emily drafted a replacement and sent it next door: “Perhaps this verse would please you better.”

  Grand go the Years – in the Crescent – above them –

  Worlds scoop their Arcs –

  And Firmaments – row –

  Diadems – drop – and Doges – surrender –

  Soundless as dots – on a Disc of snow –

  Fr124C

  Dropping her too frequent bees and birds, the poet introduced a sublime perspective that utterly changed the scale. In the first version the dead are sealed away from nature’s pleasing bustle and music, but in the second they lie still while time itself cycles above them, grand and irrelevant. What does the spinning zodiac or the fall of kingdoms and republics—the passing universe, in other words—mean to those waiting for the resurrection? The last line, with its sudden plunge into their perspective, gives the answer: it is all as hushed and insubstantial as dots dropping “on a Disc of snow.”

  But the splendid new stanza was not to Sue’s taste:

  I am not suited dear Emily with the second verse—It is remarkable as the chain lightening that blinds us hot nights in the Southern sky but it does not go with the ghostly shimmer of the first verse as well as the other one. . . . You never made a peer for that verse, and I guess you[r] kingdom does’nt hold one—I always go to the fire and get warm after thinking of it, but I never can again.