My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  In her one letter to Higginson from Cambridge, Dickinson presented herself as living amid ultimates:

  The only News I know

  Is Bulletins all day

  From Immortality.

  Fr820B

  Throughout, her emphasis was on compensatory powers. The doctor has “taken away my Pen,” she writes in pencil. He won’t let her go home, “yet I work in my Prison, and make Guests for myself.” She could bring neither the mountains nor Carlo, who “would die, in Jail, . . . so I brought but the Gods.” With her extraordinary retention (never sending the same poem twice to the same person), she obviously remembered informing Higginson two years earlier that her companions were a dog, the hills, and the sundown. The last of these, the subject of so many poems, was no doubt one of her portable gods. Even in Cambridge, even with photophobic eyes, one could look at the sundown.

  As for those guests Dickinson made for herself, one reason for thinking she continued composing in Cambridge and then brought her rough drafts home at the end of her treatment is that a huge number of perfect copies in ink—her unstitched “sets”—have been assigned to early and late 1865. It says something about her basic impetus that few of these poems involve her current ordeal. The only one that speaks of her uprooting in the present tense, “Away from home are they and I” (Fr807A, from 1864), links her exile to that of the recently orphaned and relocated Norcross sisters. They and she, emigrants in “a Metropolis of Homes,” are all trying to acquire “The Habit of a Foreign Sky.” Conspicuous by its rarity, the poem reminds us how rarely she made her verse a vehicle for comment on passing troubles.

  Another answer to how she got through all that dead time lies in Louisa and Frances Norcross’s love of drama. Several years earlier, when Fanny Kemble gave public readings of twelve of Shakespeare’s plays in Boston, Louisa was there for at least part of the series, and in the 1880s, when she and her sister lived in Concord, they took part in the Frolic Club’s all-female theatricals. Once, as Frances joined a chorus of “sorrowing Israelites” from the Book of Ruth, Emerson’s widow whispered, “Isn’t she modest and sweet?” On another evening Louisa was so delicious in a comic role that Emerson’s daughter Ellen named her as one of the evening’s two “great actors.”

  Certain at age twenty that Shakespeare could write nothing “wicked,” Dickinson had to do a great deal of growing up before he could become an invigorating presence for her. As late as 1863, in her only poem mentioning him, she insisted that “Drama’s Vitallest Expression” is found in the human heart and ordinary events, not in formal tragedies, which “Perish in the Recitation” (Fr776). *132 Now, apparently listening to Louisa and Frances’s own recitations, she seems to have had her ears opened, and to have left Cambridge with a voracious desire to read for herself. As she confided to Joseph Lyman, “going home I flew to the shelves and devoured the luscious passages. I thought I should tear the leaves out as I turned them. Then I settled down to a willingness for all the rest to go but William Shakespeare.” Writing Louisa, she described an oral performance in a location where she would not be overheard or interrupted: “I read a few words since I came home – John Talbot’s parting with his son, and Margaret’s with Suffolk. I read them in the garret, and the rafters wept.” This interest in 1 Henry VI, suggests that the Austin Street readings had gone well beyond the standard plays. The matter seems clinched by two later remarks. To Higginson: “When I lost the use of my Eyes it was a comfort to think there were so few real books that I could easily find some one to read me all of them.” To Louisa Norcross: “This little sheet of paper has lain for several years in my Shakespeare, and though it is blotted and antiquated is endeared by its resting-place.”

  Among the plays Louisa may have heard Fanny Kemble read was Antony and Cleopatra, on December 16, 1859. We lack the connecting links, but it is clear that by the time the poet returned to Amherst in fall 1864 she was well prepared:

  How my blood bounded! Shakespeare was the first; Antony & Cleopatra where Enobarbus laments the amorous lapse of his master. Here is the ring of it – “heart that in the scuffles of great fights hath burst the buckle on his breast”

  Then I thought why touch clasp any hand but this, give me ever to drink of this wine.

  No play meant more to Dickinson or was quoted more often. As Judith Farr has shown, she saw aspects of herself in the great-hearted voluptuary who renounces the world for what his heart says is better than it. Associating Cleopatra with her sister-in-law, the poet neatly marked two speeches in Sue’s expensive edition of Shakespeare: “Age cannot wither her” and “Egypt, thou knew’st too well,/My heart was to thy rudder tied.” In a note sent next door in the 1880s, Emily restated her near-but-distant relation to Sue by taking the part of the captivated Roman: “Susan’s Calls are like Antony’s Supper – ‘And pays his Heart for what his Eyes eat, only.’” Her identification with the buckle-bursting soldier went very deep, incorporating her sense of herself as fighter and lover, boldly daring to forfeit everything.

  Was it during her second summer in Cambridge, living by her ears and not her eyes, that she composed the elegiac meditation “Further in summer than the birds”? Written originally in seven stanzas, the poem was reconceived by early 1866, when the last five stanzas, discursive and unfocused, were replaced with two infinitely tauter ones. Dickinson had always been fascinated by detached sounds—an ax ringing in the woods, wind swishing through foliage, crickets stridulating everywhere. By August, when songbirds have fallen silent, cricket song has become the ubiquitous but scarcely noticed background. Now that the poet was in her mid-thirties, it was time to reach for the meaning of this quiet, constant sound:

  Further in Summer than the Birds

  Pathetic from the Grass

  A minor Nation celebrates

  Its unobtrusive Mass.

  No Ordinance be seen

  So gradual the Grace

  A pensive Custom it becomes

  Enlarging Loneliness.

  Antiquest *133 felt at Noon

  When August burning low

  Arise this spectral Canticle

  Repose to typify

  Remit as yet no Grace

  No Furrow on the Glow

  Yet a Druidic Difference

  Enhances Nature now

  Fr895D

  The poem is as unemphatic as the crickets, with nothing dramatic or painful happening, no distracting scratch, no “Furrow on the Glow.” As the summer noon blazes, the pacified listener sinks into the pensive background drone. Some songs propose to release us from loneliness; this song merely enlarges it. This is all there is, this is all there is: that is what the crickets say. It is the chant of acceptance, not Christian but Druid, leaving behind a keener sense of nature and solitude, a recognition that everything is different from what one thought and hoped, and that one has already begun to live with that.

  The war was over. The time had come for repose.

  Part Seven

  1866-1886

  About 1873. Fr1299, stanza 2.

  Chapter 19

  1866–1870: Repose

  When the large dog that had been Dickinson’s companion for sixteen years expired in the winter of 1865–1866, Thomas Wentworth Higginson received a death notice pared to the minimum:

  Carlo died –

  E. Dickinson

  Would you instruct me now?

  She was not asking for consolation but for a critique of the enclosed “Further in summer than the birds,” which seems to have perplexed the recipient: the manuscript still has his penciled “Insect-Sounds?” His letter of reply must have said something about the elusiveness of poem and author alike, as her following communication opened with a flat denial: “Whom my Dog understood could not elude others.” Still, the next time she sent the poem out, seventeen years later, she condescended to give the reader a helping hand by calling it “My Cricket.”

  Carlo’s death marked the end of something for Dickinson, who in summer 1866 admitted to Higginso
n, “I explore but little since my mute Confederate [died].” Immortality was still “the Flood subject” for her, but for the time being she was content to stay on shore, which she had been told “was the safest place for a Finless Mind.” In another letter from 1866, she spoke of her “slowness,” asked her preceptor to be patient with her, and transcribed lines composed three years earlier:

  Except the smaller size

  No lives are round –

  These – hurry to a sphere

  And show and end –

  The larger – slower grow

  And later hang –

  The Summers of Hesperides

  Are long.

  Fr606C

  Consonant with Higginson’s advice to young writers to be less precipitous in publishing, the poem was also a statement about Dickinson’s creative production. She evidently knew she was not one of “the smaller size,” an early-summer fruit that ripens and drops, but a late-summer apple, a keeper, one of the golden pomes guarded by the daughters of Hesperus. For the first time in her writing life, she signed herself, simply, “Dickinson.”

  Beginning in 1858, the poet’s heroic production had been driven in part by the working-out of inner matters. Eighteen sixty-five, the last year she kept up her blistering pace, resulted in more than two hundred poems recorded on the unsewn sheafs termed sets. During the next five years, no longer assembling these, she composed only about seventy poems—less than in any one of the previous five years. There were fewer letters as well. This abruptly reduced activity has been read, reasonably enough, as a sign of dormancy or even exhaustion. Also, as Aífe Murray has pointed out, the four-year period in which the Dickinsons were without steady domestic help neatly coincides with the poet’s lessened productivity. But that is not to say the slowdown wasn’t deliberate—a version of the dignified seasonal repose of “Except the smaller size” and “Further in summer than the birds.”

  Remarkably, of the seven poems written in the first person singular from 1866 through 1869, only one has a speaker engaged in reviewing the past: “I noticed People disappeared/When but a little child – ” (Fr1154). And as the full text makes clear, the “I” of this poem is not so much a version of the writer as a generalized observer reflecting on how death is disguised. For four years, in other words, Dickinson does not seem to have produced a single first-person poem recapitulating or reflecting on her past. The writer who had lavished herself on acts of memory, exploring her history, her singularity, her starved triumphs, her hard-won mastery, had for the time being stopped trying to tell her story.

  Of course, there are poems without an “I” that evidently concern the writer’s identity and history. From 1867, one of her most slenderly documented years, we have a composition reminiscent of the tough boasts of 1864 and 1865: “There is a strength in proving that it can be borne.” The concluding lines, which combine Jesus’ walking on water with the need to “fight,” hint at Dickinson’s sense of embattled achievement:

  The ship might be of satin had it not to fight –

  To walk on seas requires cedar Feet

  Fr1133

  Another poem touches on the satisfactions of autonomy and victory over circumstance:

  There is another Loneliness

  That many die without – [;]

  Not want of friend occasions it

  Or circumstance of Lot

  But nature, sometimes, sometimes thought [;]

  And whoso it befall

  Be richer than could be revealed

  By mortal numeral –

  Fr1138A

  That is, there exists a rare and rich type of loneliness, one that does not stem from social or other deprivations but rather from native endowment or personal “thought.” Perhaps, in her case, the poet considered “thought” the right explanation. That, at any rate, was the view taken by Vinnie, who had begun to take a signal pride in her sister. Once, specifying the distinct contribution of each family member, she wrote that Emily “had to think—she was the only one of us who had that to do.”

  About 1871, when Dickinson was reengaged in her vocation after her five-year quiescence, she wrote a poem that looks like an indirect summation of her desperate struggle in the early 1860s. The opening line may refer to Henry Thoreau, whom she had come to admire.

  ’Twas fighting for his Life he was –

  That sort accomplish well –

  The Ordnance of Vitality

  Is frugal of its Ball.

  It aims once – kills once – conquers once –

  There is no second War

  In that Campaign inscrutable

  Of the Interior.

  Fr1230

  These lines suggest how Dickinson looked back on her beset years, when she was driven in self-defense to perfect her “aim” and accomplish something once and for all. They form an intriguing contrast to the more famous “My life had stood a loaded gun,” from 1863, in which the speaker also kills as often as she shoots:

  None stir the second time –

  On whom I lay a Yellow Eye –

  Dickinson was the gun in the earlier work—a hint of the extent to which her existence had been subsumed in “fight.” In the later and freer work, by contrast, she is able to consider another’s effort and to generalize about the nature of the battle. Before, she was caught up in the idea of living for and serving a master. Now she understands the basic issue as fighting for one’s own life. In 1863 the story lacked a resolution (and in fact many readers have been dissatisfied with the way the poem ends):

  For I have but the power to kill,

  Without – the power to die –

  Fr764

  In 1871 the result was more definitive: “That sort accomplish well.” These contrasts attest to what Dickinson had achieved in the intervening years: a relaxed sense of security, a mature and detached perspective on herself.

  That seems to be the basic story of 1865–1870, a period in which Dickinson slowly circled back on herself from higher ground. It was a process of reaching out and enlargement in which a number of people figured in complex ways.

  Servants

  A few months before Carlo’s death, the Dickinsons lost the household servant, Margaret O’Bryan, the same age as Austin, on whom they had depended for some nine years. On October 18, 1865, she got married in working-class Holyoke’s Catholic church. Two weeks later, when the poet’s brother returned from a visit to the Smiths in Geneva, where Sue and Ned were staying on, he let his “dear Spouse” know how the hunt for Margaret’s replacement had gone: “No girl at the other house yet—consequence—depression.”

  Chances are, the complaints he heard came from Vinnie, Mother, or Father, not Emily, who pointedly made light of minor troubles. Once, when Margaret was still present and objected to furnace heat in early October, Emily agreed to “dwell in my bonnet and suffer comfortably.” *134 It had been her job to dry the dishes as Margaret washed. Doing the washing herself now, she “winced at her loss” but quickly accepted the new domestic order: “to all except anguish, the mind soon adjusts.” Apparently, Margaret was a very large woman. The first time Samuel Bowles called after her departure, according to Vinnie, the front door was opened (“strange as that may seem”) by Emily. “Where is your Colossus?” asked the visitor. “She has rode,” said the poet, not missing a beat.

  It was not until 1869 that the Dickinsons finally reeled in a permanent successor for Margaret. In the interim the laundry was probably done by washerwomen and some of the sewing by seamstresses, but the Dickinson women had to shoulder more of the basic housekeeping work than they had been accustomed to. In the new division of labor, baking and dessert making seem to have fallen to the poet, so that, deeply sequestered as she already was, she now gave even more of her time to the family. Just as in 1856–1858, when Mother’s invalidism furnished another reason not to leave home, the new work detail in kitchen, pantry, and sink room reduced social contacts and writing alike.

  “The art of making perfect bread,�
�� in the opinion of Emily’s old friend Joseph Lyman and his wife, Laura, who together brought out a comprehensive domestic manual in 1867, The Philosophy of House-Keeping, “outweighs every other domestic merit.” Dickinson became so expert at this art, in Clara Newman’s memory, that her father “prefered” (translation: demanded) bread from her hands alone. Even after Margaret’s successor had settled in, the poet still made “all the bread,” as Higginson noted in 1870, “for her father only likes hers.”

  The longest chapter in The Philosophy of House-Keeping was on “Cakes, Desserts, and Delicacies”—all Dickinson specialties. Her gingerbread was so successful both Sue and Elizabeth Holland secured the recipe: 4 cups flour, 1⁄2 cup butter, 1⁄2 cup cream, a tablespoon of ginger, a teaspoon of soda, and salt, with molasses for sweetening. At a time when a proper cake was understood to be “winy and spicy and fruity,” hers were no exception. Her famous recipe for black cake, which included cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, and five pounds of raisins, was probably designed for her father’s annual Commencement reception. When she told Higginson, “& people must have puddings,” he noted that she spoke “very dreamily, as if they were comets.” It was a hot August day, and her visitor may not have known how much stirring at a cast-iron stove a pudding involved.