My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  In one of her finest treatments of this topic, as amusing as it is penetrating, Dickinson imagined the world of nature watching with dismay as the human mind flees from itself:

  To flee from memory

  Had we the Wings

  Many would fly[.]

  Inured to slower things[,]

  Birds with dismay

  Would scan the mighty Van

  Of men escaping

  From the mind of man

  Fr1343

  Consciousness, here, can function only by resorting to the most undignified of evasions.

  Just as Dickinson did not import the literal detail of her experience into her lyrics, so her memory-poems of the earlier 1870s refrain from examining her past. That is their point: not to exorcise the mind’s ghosts but to evoke their haunting presence. The reverse of confessional or confrontational, the poems deal with questions of identity as such—its internal divisions, its continuity over time, its sense of a spectral shadow self, its need for concealment.

  Still, we are free to probe Dickinson’s memory-poems for what they suggest about her. What does it mean that memory is so often a “house,” and that the threatening rooms are associated with storage and rubbish, *143 and that the idea of not entering, or escaping, is always coming up? Does this material have something to do with the strict spatial limits Father seemed to mandate, or with the fact that her memories were divided between two houses? It was seven years after leaving West (now Pleasant) Street, where Emily lived from age nine to twenty-five, that she composed “I years had been from home.” If that is in some sense the house of the poem (and her West Street letters often mention the steps and front door, a favored place), the poem would seem to involve her uneasy feelings about her pre-crisis self. Something about her “‘Little Girl’hood” had become very hard to face.

  The 1852 note in which Emily sprints back home and the front gate opens of itself in welcome makes an arresting contrast with the 1862 poem, in which she fears the door might swing and pull her in. The difference can be interpreted in many ways, but one thing it suggests is that she had lost her intact identity, acquiring in its place a grown-up’s sense of being at large in the world and unsimple in character. The ominous cellars and closets, bulging from the inside with very bad news, were what that eager and friendly gate had turned into—what it had to turn into for Emily to mature. There was a further step, of course, but it would have to wait until Father died and she became accustomed to his absence.

  Meanwhile, a poem of about 1874 that revisits an old question—why don’t they answer?—throws further light on her uneasy sense of who she was:

  Whether they have forgotten

  Or are forgetting now

  Or never remembered –

  Safer not to know –

  Miseries of conjecture

  Are a softer two

  Than a Fact of Iron

  Hardened with I know –

  Fr1334

  Not surprisingly, the occasional reappearance of early friends became one of the torments of the poet’s later years. When Emily Fowler Ford summered in Amherst in 1882 after a long absence, the poet apparently refused to see her. In 1873, when Abby Wood Bliss took a leave from her missionary and educational work in Syria, she found that Emily “had become the village mystery, inaccessible to all but an elect few, who were admitted to the sanctuary with appropriate preliminaries and ceremonies.” Unwilling to treat “her old crony as a Sibyl,” Abby insisted on being “received on the old basis.” The poem that is thought to record the occasion offers a distinctly unsibylline report of a chastening social exchange. Here, ignoring the snow “Flake” in Abby’s hair, the hostess politely lies that she hasn’t changed, whereupon the honest guest says that Emily has aged and advises her to accept time’s “‘pillage/For the progress’ sake’” (Fr1304B). It took a savvy old friend to bring Dickinson down to earth.

  A third visitor, the former Catharine Scott Turner, now Anthon, didn’t know how to do this. It was probably in 1877 that the poet composed a tearful excuse for not seeing her:

  I shall not murmur if at last

  The ones I loved below

  Permission have to understand

  For what I shunned them so –

  Divulging it would rest my Heart

  But it would ravage theirs –

  Why, Katie, Treason has a Voice –

  But mine – dispels – in Tears.

  Fr1429

  Treason is voluble, full of excuses and reassurances, but Emily, still inwardly faithful, dare not speak lest the explanation of her avoidance “ravage” her friends. At the end of time, if all things are made plain and her motives are disclosed, she will not “murmur.” Until then, her voice “dispels – in Tears.”

  These lines, apparently unsent, do not explain Dickinson’s avoidance so much as they defend it, in this respect resembling her treatments of memory. Another poem on the same sheet of paper—“We shun because we prize her face” (Fr1430)—seems even less forthcoming. The closest thing we have to an explanation is an undatable poem that seems to justify the refusal to see Kate (the lines survive only in Sue’s later copy):

  That she forgot me was the least[;]

  I felt it second pain[.]

  That I was worthy to forget

  Was most I thought upon[.]

  Faithful was all that I could boast

  But Constancy became

  To her, by her innominate

  A something like a shame

  Fr1716

  The poet’s constant love, arousing a kind of shame in the other woman, made Emily feel quite “worthy to forget”—which could mean either worthy to be forgotten or inapt to remember. It was the old feeling, summed up in a note sent to Sue in 1873 asking whether anything had as much pathos as “that simple statement ‘Not that we loved him but that he loved us’?”

  Among all the rubbish thrown into the pit that memory dared not peer into was love unreturned and a life unlived . . . not to mention what lay at the bottom of the Strongs’ well.

  Village Life on Her Terms

  In one of the soundest insights into Dickinson’s remote yet far from inactive social life in the 1870s, Theodora Ward wrote, “It was a return after twenty years to a fuller participation in the life of the village, but on terms that she could control.” More imperious than ever, the poet turned most visitors away, saw a few by appointment, and always prescribed certain rituals that abolished both the casualness and the stupid conventionalities of ordinary social encounters. Within these limits, she was remembered as indescribably direct, fresh, fascinating, her terms being as generous as they were nonnegotiable.

  In 1930 Austin Baxter Keep recalled an encounter involving his aunts Mary Taylor Dickinson and Harriet Austin Dickinson while they were summering in Amherst in 1876. One day they decided to call on their old friend Vinnie. “As they reached the eastern gate of the garden they espied Emily, all in white, among her flowers. At first, like everyone else, Aunt Mary whispered, ‘Oh, there’s Emily; now we can get a good look at her’; but almost at once realizing such unfairness she banged the gate, and—presto! she was gone.” Soon after, the poet sent the pair an “exquisite note,” implying, Keep believed, that she was “‘on’ to the situation.”

  At church the following February, a young woman who went on to a musical career sang a setting of Psalm 23 that made a solemn impression on Vinnie. Emily must have wanted to hear for herself, for on a warm June evening several months later Nora Green and her sister Clara and a brother came to the Dickinson drawing room for a private performance. Although no one was in sight, the Greens guessed they were meant to go ahead and sing, which they did. *144 Afterward, “a light clapping of hands . . . floated down the staircase, and Miss Lavinia came to tell us that Emily would see us—my sister and myself—in the library.” When they entered the dimly lit room, “a tiny figure in white darted to greet us, grasped our hands and told us of her pleasure in hearing us.” She said she knew their
voices and laughs, also their brother’s whistle, and that she used to play the piano; she herself spoke with “the breathless voice of a child.” Did she also (her niece alone described this habit) catch “her breath that quickest way of hers”? As she stood and talked, Clara was “chiefly aware of a pair of great, dark eyes set in a small, pale, delicately chiseled face, and a little body, quaint, simple as a child and wholly unaffected.” That was the only time that Clara, then twenty-one or twenty-two years old, saw the poet.

  In 1882 or 1883, William T. Mather, a college freshman from directly across Main Street, came to the Dickinsons’ back door with a message for Vinnie. After he knocked, he “heard someone very quietly turning the key in the lock.” Seeing Vinnie approach from the garden, he delivered his message, then “teased her a bit about being taken for a burglar. Evidently Miss Emily was listening for she appeared at the door with many apologies and we had a brief but very pleasant chat. All in white with her reddish hair with its net and tassels she made an unusual picture.” Millicent Todd Bingham, six years old when Dickinson died, also remembered “a brown silk net in which her auburn hair was held, with a brown silk tassel behind each ear.”

  Once, when a daughter of Elizabeth Holland appeared at the Commencement reception, Dickinson asked her to return the next morning. The visitor, perhaps fourteen years old, was received in a dark utility hallway in the rear of the house and was asked whether she would prefer a rose or a glass of wine. Over sixty years later, Annie Holland Howe remembered her hostess as being “very unusual.” “Her voice, her looks, and her whole personality, made an impression on me that is still very vivid.”

  This dark hallway, known in the family as the Northwest Passage, was a nondescript space between the public front rooms and those where food was stored and prepared. Because it had five doorways, one of which opened to an unlit staircase, it offered multiple possibilities for “access or escape,” as Martha Bianchi cannily put it. According to her, when Emily spotted Sue on her way from the Evergreens, she often sought a hurried meeting in this passageway. Martha conveys the impression these get-togethers tended to be interrupted by other family members, who naturally invited Sue into the more presentable front rooms.

  To judge from Emily’s follow-up letters (“Our parting was somewhat interspersed”), her farewells to intimates often failed to go as planned. Once, after Elizabeth Holland left, she wrote, “The Parting I tried to smuggle resulted in quite a Mob at last! The Fence is the only Sanctuary. That no one invades because no one suspects it.” Like the Northwest Passage, the “Fence” must have been another private trysting place, one of the shared secrets Dickinson was fond of evoking, as in this coy (and metrical) passage to Holland about night and darkness:

  The Sun came out when you were gone.

  I chid him for delay –

  He said we had not needed him. Oh prying Sun!

  Was she referring to the endearments preceding her friend’s early-morning departure? If so, instead of simply recalling the tender moment, she created a curtained scene of intimacy. In this seductive game, the prying sun played as vital a role as the outsiders always breaking in on her staged partings.

  Few of the locals who exchanged messages with her during her last fifteen years ever laid eyes on her. Among these unseeing correspondents was Adelaide Hills, who lived in New York and summered in the spacious house east of the Dickinsons’, and whose husband ran the mercantile side of the family’s palm-leaf hat factory. Others included Olive Stearns, wife of the college president; Abigail Cooper, whose son became Austin’s law-partner; and cultivated Sarah Tuckerman, who lived in Amherst’s first stone house. The Coopers were “inveterate readers,” and Tuckerman’s husband, the college botanist, was an expert in lichens. The pleasant college town was attracting a variety of literate and specialized people, making it that much easier for the poet to stay in touch through the written word. Judging from extant notes, she felt a special affinity for Sarah Tuckerman, accomplished, attractive, well-off, whose parties Sue remembered for their “remoteness from Life’s ordinary Method.”

  This phrase aptly describes the scores of polished and ingenious notes the poet sent these women, whether to convey thanks, or condole with, or congratulate, or to accompany flowers or fruit. A note to Tuckerman says, in its entirety: “I fear my congratulation, like repentance according to Calvin, is too late to be plausible, but might there not be an exception, were the delight or the penitence found to be durable?” Read individually or in the mass, these messages imply a rarefied sense of social accountability. They present themselves as tender and original expressions of affectionate consideration, but they may also be read as compensatory substitutes for a denied presence, outdoing all competitors in the field of refined feminine interchange. After Vinnie relayed a message from Adelaide Hills, then in New York, Emily pulled all the stops: “To be remembered is next to being loved, and to be loved is Heaven, and is this quite Earth?” Yet she had little in common with Hills, who didn’t mix with the college crowd and whose letters bespeak an ordinary mind: “it seemed real nice to see a little of your handwriting again—& so like you are the words.” The reason this wasn’t destroyed with other letters is that a charming plain-language poem, “Dear March – Come in” (Fr1320), was scribbled on the back.

  That two-thirds of Dickinson’s surviving notes and letters date from her last sixteen years tells us how active her social and expressive impulses were within her well-regulated seclusion. These numbers tell us something else as well—that her messages were seen as worth preserving. Their lapidary brilliance was recognized and appreciated, and all the more if they eluded comprehension and had to be scrutinized, deciphered, discussed, before being stored away. A legend was building.

  But there was an unmistakable doubleness in the role Emily played in Amherst’s social commerce. On one hand, she was so expert in conveying refined affection that her refusal to join in person could not be chalked up to unconcern. But she also took a caustic private view of the saccharine rituals the whole business depended on. Once, as she and her niece listened from the upstairs hall to Vinnie’s “lady-callers” say good-bye, she stage-whispered, “Hear them kiss! – the traitors!” A letter to Maria Whitney mentioning a similar scene juxtaposes the poet’s opposing attitudes without reconciling them: “How precious to hear you ring at the door and Vinnie ushering you to those melodious moments of which friends are composed – This also is fiction.” The last word dryly undoes the preceding sentence without so much as a warning “but,” yet the first sentence still gushes (though sounding rather wicked now), “How precious.”

  Although Dickinson showed no inclination to leave her upstairs listening post when celebrities appeared, she sometimes made contact in her own way. In May 1880, Frances Hodgson Burnett, a recent success with a novel about the Lancashire coal mines, made a brief stop at Austin and Sue’s. At lunch, as she remembered years later, “a strange wonderful little poem lying on a bed of exquisite heartsease in a box” was brought to her.

  Heading the list of the new people in Dickinson’s life were Sarah Jenkins and her husband, the Reverend Jonathan Jenkins, whose appointment Austin had engineered in 1867. Jonathan lived well and attracted influential backers, impressing a general as having a “distinctly aristocratic personality” and being “one of the most congenial companions that ever graced a table.” His wife was remembered for her “beautiful intonation and a scrupulous precision of language.” The new parsonage was just across Main Street from the Evergreens, and for a time Sarah and Sue became (in the words of a female parishioner not in the inner circle) quite “inseperable [sic], much to the disgust of various parties.” A memoir by a Jenkins son describes his parents as always dropping in on Austin and Sue and raising loud gales of laughter, with Emily pictured somewhat vaguely as hovering on the foursome’s “perimeter.” When Sue visited her sister in Geneva in 1869, Emily “humbly tr[ied] to fill your place at the Minister’s, so faint a competition, it only makes them smile.�
�� What this may mean is that she was writing to them more frequently. It isn’t likely that she crossed the street to the parsonage.

  It was perhaps under the new minister’s guidance that Edward did some serious reading in theology, becoming so engaged that in 1870 his daughter said he “only reads on Sunday – he reads lonely & rigorous books.” The one revival during Jenkins’ ten-year pastorate came in 1873, helped on by a visiting evangelist. Observing the daily prayer meetings from her second-story lookout, Dickinson enjoyed watching a pious, rotund, and fancifully dressed neighbor, Abby Sweetser, “roll out in crape every morning” on her shortcut through the Dickinson compound. The poet’s seventy-year-old father, reacting more solemnly, drafted and signed a sacred pledge: “I hereby give myself to God. Edward Dickinson May 1. 1873.” Uneasy about his scoffing daughter, he asked Jenkins to have a pastoral interview with her. In an awkward spot, the minister must have deployed all his suavity in approaching his dauntingly independent parishioner, and then assuring the anxious parent afterward his daughter was “sound.” What did she make of the episode? Her statement three years later that she talked “with Father’s Clergyman once” (italics added) suggests she was aware of the backstage prompting. It also shows how little she saw of the minister.

  Sue’s daughter had a vivid memory of the snowy evenings when the hired man would bring a pail of milk from the Mansion and a small box with an edible treat and a note or poem from Aunt Emily. Chances are, some of these, such as “Had this one day not been” (Fr1281) or “Birthday of but a single pang” (Fr1541), were occasioned by Sue’s December 19 birthdays, which were made much of. In 1875, when Sue gave birth at age forty-four to her third child, Gilbert, the poet’s message was much more self-assured and helpful than in 1861: “Emily and all that she has are at Sue’s service, if of any comfort to Baby – Will send Maggie, if you will accept her.”