But it goes deeper than that. Approaching Higginson soon after Wadsworth, Bowles, and her sister-in-law had all proved inadequate, Dickinson wanted a hand in moving from the “zeroes” of her life to “phosphorus,” from depression and desertion to incandescent mastery. Higginson’s job was to help her learn the self-control she needed now that her “‘Little Girl’hood” was at last behind her. Holding no illusions about her preparation at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke, she admitted she “went to school – but in your manner of the phrase – had no education.” In August 1862 she ceased sending earlier poems to concentrate on more recently composed ones: “Are these more orderly?” Perhaps some were written with her new preceptor partly in mind. “I had no Monarch in my life,” she confessed, showing how ambivalent she felt about her singleness and independence, “and cannot rule myself, and when I try to organize – my little Force explodes – and leaves me bare and charred.” And yet she was engaged in a massive “organizing,” recording poems in manuscript books and burning the rough drafts she had accumulated.
In late 1862 Higginson was asked by Brigadier General Rufus Saxton to take charge of the first regiment of ex-slaves. Saxton (the army officer Dickinson met in Washington in 1855) was now military governor of captured southern territory. Accepting a challenge most white officers would have scorned, Higginson soon found himself on a Sea Island off the coast of South Carolina. Writing to him there but saying nothing about his work with black troops (her letters never mention his radical politics), the poet said that war felt like “an oblique place,” that she too had “an ‘Island.’” If you could, “with honor, avoid Death,” she would be much obliged. Mischievously, she signed herself “Your Gnome,” then added a postscript hoping his recent essay, “The Procession of the Flowers,” would not prove a bad omen. It was another example of her gallows humor, “off charnel steps.”
Friendships with Women
The Friendships of Women, a genial volume brought out in 1868 by a Bostonian named William R. Alger, drew on European and American literature and history to characterize the patterns of women’s closest relationships. Alger’s longest chapter was on Platonic love between women and men. His next longest, “Pairs of Female Friends,” was about women’s passionate but Platonic same-sex bonds. The topic was in the air.
On July 10, 1862, Eudocia Converse Flynt, wife of Emily’s mother’s first cousin, came to Amherst for Commencement and the Dickinson reception. Flynt’s diary shows she met Governor John Andrew, the Hollands, and the Lords, and thoroughly enjoyed herself. Back home in Monson, she got an unexpected note:
You and I, did’nt finish talking. Have you room for the sequel, in your Vase?
All the letters I could
write,
Were not fair as this –
Syllables of velvet –
Sentences of Plush –
Depths of Ruby, undrained –
Hid, Lip, for Thee,
Play it were a
Humming Bird
And sipped just
Me –
Emily – *127
Fr380A
As in the poem “My river runs to thee,” sent the previous year to Mary Bowles and concluding, “Say – Sea –/Take Me!” (Fr219C), the writer almost seemed to be offering herself as an erotic treat to a woman who was several years older, not especially close, and married. The poems appear to invite an affectionate union, but in their original context they posed an enigmatic challenge to any conceivable response. They offered no recognizable social categories, only metaphors of union drawn from nature. How does one answer such an intense and unsocialized invitation? Flynt’s diary entry—“Had a letter from Emily Dickinson!!!!”—suggests she was floored by this attempt to “finish talking.” “Finish” was the right word: there could be no reply.
Dickinson showed a more practical affection to cousins Clara and Anna Newman, whose footing in the Evergreens was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. Instead of acting as mother to the orphans, Sue used them as substitutes for the nurses she no longer hired. A surviving letter from sixteen-year-old Anna gives a full report on Ned’s daily activities while Sue was visiting Gertrude Vanderbilt in Flatbush. More often, the boy’s care was assigned to Clara, against her will. Petty insults and punishments were visited on the sisters, as when they were forced to “study an entire evening seated in a lighted bay window with the shades up.”
Clara’s interest in Charles H. Sweetser (or his in her) presented a special problem. Austin was so opposed to this talented but flighty young journalist, who graduated from Amherst College in 1862, that Bowles came to the young man’s defense: “I do not understand what you say about Sweetser. I do not find him out yet.” Still, Bowles agreed the young man should not “have either of your girls. They surely must do better.” Receiving little sympathy or love at home, Clara confided in Emily at a certain “trysting-place” on the Homestead’s back staircase. When the time came for the girl’s rigorous all-day entrance examination at Amherst’s newly established high school, the poet was full of comfort and reassurance.
The poet’s friendship with Kate Turner, Sue’s schoolmate from Cooperstown, was in abeyance when the Republican reported that much of the town had been destroyed by fire. The story ran April 12, 1862, three days after Bowles sailed and three days before the first letter to Higginson. “Katie is doubtless in ashes,” Emily thought, or so she claimed in answering Kate’s letter about the disaster. But the real comfort lay elsewhere, in knowing she hadn’t been dropped: “Thank you Katie, it was relief, you had’nt spoke so long, I got a bad whim.” Once again, a friend’s unresponsive silence had given rise to dark fears. “So tired, Katie,” Emily abruptly wrote at letter’s end. The next year the beautiful widow returned to the Evergreens, but there is no evidence that she and Emily polished their rusty connection. Like so many others, Kate remained Sue’s friend more than Emily’s.
About the time Bowles reached Paris, his friend Maria Whitney made that first “call on Mrs [Susan] Dickinson that I have been wanting to pay, so long,” in the process bringing a new element into the Dickinson compound. Born the same year as the poet and growing up in a well-to-do Northampton family, Whitney was a robust, well-traveled, cultivated woman, with an interest in foreign languages and social progress. She had many strong family ties and a lively sense of order and duty, and as she passed through her thirties her skilled help was requisitioned for others’ illnesses and childbirths. Twice she moved in with the Bowleses to assist in medical or household emergencies, in all giving about a year to the family; her feelings for Samuel were warm and worshipful. At intervals she was depressed by a sense of unattached homelessness—“my otherwise empty life,” as she put it, with “its great wants & deficiencies.” Not long before her visit to Sue, she spent a year in New York teaching impoverished German girls. Now, having returned for the time being to her banker-father’s Northampton home, she looked forward to “occasional walks to Amherst” as fall came on.
When Whitney reported on her new social resource to Samuel, the favorable verdict was relayed back to the Evergreens: “She writes enthusiastically of you all, & of your pleasant home. Her enthusiasm about Austin fairly makes me jealous. . . . He is a ‘sly dog,’ isn’t he? Yet everybody thinks he is such an open, frank fellow!” The letter omitted all mention of Emily, who probably didn’t make contact with the new recruit. For the rest of the decade, in fact, no extant letter by either woman so much as alludes to the other. It appears the connection didn’t take hold until Samuel’s death in 1878, when Emily, knowing Maria loved him, had the necessary basis for some of her best letters.
From early on, however, Maria was sent poems written expressly for her. The first has been assigned to fall 1862, when she was making her seven-mile treks (each way) to Amherst. Probably sent next door to the Evergreens during one of these visits, the poem presents a typical excuse:
A Charm invests a face
Imperfectly beheld –
The Lady dare
not lift her Vail –
For fear it be dispelled –
But peers beyond her mesh –
And wishes – and denies –
Lest interview – annul a want –
That Image – satisfies –
Fr430A
Demonstrating how much anxious thought was being given to the visitor, the poem contrived to satisfy the requirements of politeness without lifting the “Vail.” The same was true of the second lyric, “But little carmine hath her face” (Fr566A), from 1863, which accompanied a flower intended to “exhibit” the poet’s love; this may also have been sent next door. Both works drew their force from their creator’s invisibility.
The third poem, “How well I knew her not,” has been obscured by the claim that it was occasioned by the death of Maria’s sister, Sarah Learned, in July 1864. This is highly improbable: Maria was in California on that date, Emily was in Cambridgeport, she isn’t known to have sent her work across the continent, and the fourth line mentions a grief “Next door.” The actual train of events began in summer 1863, when the Whitneys were extremely anxious about Maria’s sister living in San Francisco, Elizabeth Putnam, pregnant, in poor health, and with six children to bring up. Maria was preparing to travel west to offer assistance when a telegram arrived saying her sister had “died June 23d. Maria not needed.” “Almost overcome,” Maria felt depleted and purposeless after her “busy days . . . made full of delight by the thought of going to be with Lizzie after so many years of cruel separation”; she doubted she would ever “have another such friend.” That winter, changing her mind, she resolved to go to California after all and look after the Putnam children for two or three years. When Austin went to Northampton to say good-bye shortly before her February 13 sailing, he thought it felt like “the next thing to a funeral.”
With him, perhaps, went Emily’s poem, which said good-bye in a strange, oblique, yet honest fashion:
How well I knew Her not
Whom not to know – has been
A Bounty in prospective – now
Next door to mine, the pain –
Fr813A
A hesitant bystander, Emily had been looking forward to the day she would get to know Maria, the “Bounty in prospective.” Now, she confronts the likelihood that this undeveloped friendship that has been occupying her (“How well I knew Her not”) will not materialize. Maria’s painful bereavement is “Next door” in two senses: it is in nearby Northampton, and it is a far more tragic version of Emily’s loss of a potential intimate. A decade later the poet would express the idea more lucidly to Sue: “To lose what we never owned might seem an eccentric Bereavement but Presumption has its Affliction as actually as Claim.” The idea (not so very far-fetched if you live in anticipation) was eventually molded into a nice paradox: “the parting of those that never met.”
The three Whitney poems’ sense of next-doorness shows up in other lyrics prompted by events that touched Dickinson through the Evergreens. In March 1864 Sue’s Flatbush friend, Gertrude Vanderbilt, was shot in the intestines while trying to protect a servant from a stalker; she wasn’t expected to survive. Bowles immediately forwarded the Brooklyn Eagle’s account of the brutality along with his own stunned reaction: “It is all horrible, & tears, & tortures, & sets all fundamental ideas afloat.” When the victim astonished everyone by living, Henry Ward Beecher apparently called her the “visible evidence of the spiritual life.” “A sort of ‘Second Coming,’ eh?” wrote Bowles. But Dickinson wasn’t surprised, having “believed” all along in Vanderbilt’s survival. The resulting poem, “To this world she returned,” picking up Bowles’s idea, articulated the wounded woman’s—and the poet’s—odd position in the world, both in and out:
. . . hesitating, half of Dust –
And half of Day, the Bride.
Fr815A
When Vanderbilt came to Amherst in the last half of June, Dickinson was in Cambridge and thus couldn’t have seen her. Nevertheless, this and three other poems were eventually sent to her—more instances of verse standing in for contact.
On March 18, 1865, Harriet Gilbert Cutler died, only forty-four and with children at home—“in the midst of her usefulness,” as the obituary put it. In a year when Amherst’s sixty-one other deaths were all assigned a standard cause in the town’s vital records, Harriet’s entry says only, “Unknown, 24 days.” The effect of this unexplained death on Sue, who had now lost two of her three sisters, was a protracted illness or breakdown. Assuming she would soon recover, the Bowleses were “surprised & shocked” to learn six weeks later that her life had been in question. “It touches the realities of existence,” Samuel wrote Austin, “to have those close to us so prostrated, so tentative as to going or staying.” In mid-May the editor was still hoping her “long days of sickness & trial” would terminate in a “speedy convalescence.”
That spring Emily sent her sister-in-law a consolatory stanza asserting an unshakable faith in her survival as well as in Harriet’s immortality:
Unable are the Loved – to die –
For Love is immortality –
Nay – it is Deity –
Fr951A
More impressive is the impassioned note in which the poet insisted she be allowed to die, or give way to despair, before Sue:
You must let me go first, Sue, because I live in the Sea always and know the Road.
I would have drowned twice to save you sinking, dear, If I could only have covered your Eyes so you would’nt have seen the Water.
Forced to leave home for eye treatment about two weeks after Harriet’s death, Emily must have been terribly anxious for her sister-in-law. The bland get-well message sent through Vinnie some weeks later—“Is Sue still improving? Give her love from us all, and how much we talk of her”—tells us the crisis had passed.
Another tragic Gilbert family death took place November 3, when Martha Gilbert Smith once again lost her only child, this time a two-year-old named Susan. “The redoubtable God!” exclaimed Emily to Elizabeth Holland; “I notice where Death has been introduced, he frequently calls, making it desirable to forestall his advances.” A poem describes the huge grief the girl left behind as the “Andes – in the Bosoms where/She had begun to lie” (Fr897C). Another 1865 poem, telling how two yearly cycles end in death during the season of fullness, may commemorate this child:
Two full Autumns for the Squirrel
Bounteous prepared –
Nature, Had’st thou not a Berry
For thy wandering Bird?
Fr950
These poems exhibit the tenderness that Dickinson distilled with such mastery, but they scarcely hint at the power of two others that dramatize the grieved laying out of a female corpse. The earlier of the two, from summer 1861, contemplates a worn-out housewife whose death permits the bystander to at last
Stroke the cool forehead – hot so often –
Lift – if you care – the listless hair –
Handle the adamantine fingers
Never a thimble – more – shall wear –
Fr238
In the later poem, from 1863, which seems to involve a young girl, we are commanded to close her eyes, stroke her cheeks, steal one last kiss, and adjust (and drop tears on) her feet, all in an incantatory Victorian ritual of helpless physical love:
These – saw Visions –
Latch them softly –
These – held Dimples –
Smooth them slow –
This – addressed departing accents –
Quick – Sweet Mouth – to miss thee so – . . .
These – adjust – that ran to meet Us –
Pearl – for stocking – Pearl for Shoe – . . .
Fr769
Ironically, these supremely tactile and moving funerary poems cannot be linked to real—touchable—people. It looks as if all that wonderful stroking was not a product of experience.
Poems to Sue
Sue, who received a total of seventy-three poems from 1863
through 1865 (Franklin’s count), continued to hear from Emily more than anyone else. With a few exceptions, chiefly the tender “For largest woman’s heart I knew” (Fr542A) and “I could not drink it, Sue” (Fr816A), these poems do not chronicle a relationship marked by episodes, changing feelings, and so forth. Instead, the few lyrics that comment on the friendship, such as “To love thee year by year” (Fr618[A]), mostly restate the poet’s unchanging affection and devotion. Often, there is an implication of distance, as in “An hour is a sea” (Fr898) and “So set its sun in thee” (Fr940A). One intricate poem, which also went to Higginson and the Norcross cousins, imagines the pleasure of merely looking forward to a single glance at the recipient. The work probably dates from Dickinson’s stay in Cambridge for eye treatments:
The luxury to apprehend
The luxury ’twould be
To look at thee a single time . . .
Fr819B
It would be naive to take these many lyric messages as signs of daily intimacy.
The most substantial of the group addresses a majestically aloof peak that spurns sunsets and the speaker alike:
Ah, Teneriffe!
Retreating Mountain! . . .
My Wars Are Laid Away in Books Page 49
