To own the Miracle –
Fr1280[B], ca. 1873
Another poem sent to Higginson pulls up at the same terminus: although the heaven we once hoped for may be “Untenable to Logic,” it is still “possibly the one” (Fr1279D). For an evangelical turned romantic, it was difficult not to reaffirm some version of the old faith.
When Higginson came to Amherst on December 3, 1873, to give a lecture, he had his second and last encounter with the poet. Several months later, bestowing on him her most resonant honorific, she wrote, “Twice, you have gone – Master,” then added, “Would you but once come.” This enigmatic wish, so open to clumsy misinterpretation, arose both from the frustration she found in most encounters and the apparent emptiness of this one. Her visitor didn’t mention it in his diary and in time forgot it, while for her part the long and ambitious poem she sent him afterward correctly predicted that this was their last meeting:
Because that you are going
And never coming back . . .
Reaching for the paradox of their relationship, she observed that, although he was “Existence” itself to her, he himself somehow “forgot to live.” *148 But the piece was by and large an unimpressive gathering of previously worked-out conceits, such as the old idea that Heaven would be insufficient “Unless in my Redeemer’s Face/I recognize your own.” The poem ended by looking forward to an eventual reunion with select friends, when God “will refund us finally/Our confiscated Gods” (Fr1314C). This was one of the few works sent to Higginson that struck him as too weak to merit publication in a selected edition. His judgment was sound: compared to her despairing meditation of 1863, “I cannot live with you” (Fr706), the poem seems turgid and unfelt. Perhaps it came down to the fact that she had adjusted to her life’s painful lacks. Higginson wasn’t “Master,” she didn’t need him in that way, and it finally made little sense not to deal with him on the basis of her hard-won literary independence.
On his side, Higginson was tempted to take the view favored by his wife, Mary, and his sisters that the poet was “partially cracked.” A letter to the sisters quotes Dickinson:
She says, “there is always one thing to be grateful for – that one is one’s self & not somebody else” *149 but Mary thinks this is singularly out of place in E.D.’s case. She (E.D.) glided in, in white, bearing a Daphne odora for me, & said under her breath, “How long are you going to stay.” I’m afraid Mary’s other remark “Oh why do the insane so cling to you?” still holds.
Keeping his high opinion of Dickinson’s work, he made an effort to say the right things in his New Year’s message: “certainly I enjoyed being with you. Each time we seem to come together as old & tried friends; and I certainly feel that I have known you long & well.” Is the double “certainly” a tip-off to the reservations he was striving to overcome? Gently inviting her into the open, he ended by recommending the “ruddy hues of life” and speaking of Helen Hunt’s enjoyment of healthy Colorado.
Dickinson’s reply shows that even though she continued to venerate Higginson, she sensed the limits of his usefulness for her. Complimentary and affectionate, she still let him know that his brief visit, his “flitting Coming,” had been succeeded by the solitary “Awe” that constituted her true home. Asking a rather depersonalizing question at the end of her letter—“Was it you that came?”—she answered by appending the second half of one of her most astringent and uncompromising poems. (Her letters often incorporated fragments only of her poems.) Yes, Higginson came and flitted, but another wind came and stayed—
A Wind that woke a lone Delight
Like Separation’s Swell –
Restored in Arctic confidence
To the Invisible.
Fr1216D
So far from introducing the poet to the ruddy hues of life, the visit restored her to a confident delight in her own wintry climate. Invisible, back in the Arctic, and glad to be there, she seems to have realized she could not be Higginson’s kind of writer, and that the social, serious, responsible voice he called up in her was less vital than this cold high “Wind that rose.”
Helen Hunt Jackson
It was thanks to Higginson, however, that Dickinson made useful contact with someone she had known as a girl and who was as unlike her as it was possible to be: Helen Hunt.
Hunt had grown up in Amherst, a daughter of Professor Nathan Fiske and his consumptive wife, Deborah, whose death in 1844 had been part of the series that disturbed Emily at age thirteen. The two girls had lived some distance apart, attended different schools, and had little to do with one another. Helen, a tomboy remembered as “tough & hardy” and quite disposed to “wrestle or fight,” left Amherst for good after her father’s death and married an engineer in the U.S. Army. When the couple attended a Dickinson reception, probably in 1860, Major Hunt impressed the poet by observing that her dog “understood gravitation.” He was killed in a military accident in 1863, and when his widow’s last surviving child died in 1865, she moved to Newport, Rhode Island, and took lodgings in the same boardinghouse as Higginson. Eager to support herself by her pen, she was encouraged and advised by him, and before long her energetic talents resulted in a steady output of popular work. Insisting on anonymity, she brought out her poems as H.H. and her stories as “Saxe Holm.” A novel, Mercy Philbrick’s Choice, inaugurated the successful No Name Series published by Roberts Brothers of Boston. *150 Crediting Higginson for her success, she called him “my mentor—my teacher—the one man to whom & to whose style, I chiefly owe what little I have done in literature.” Dickinson was by no means the only woman writer who went to him for literary counsel.
As a professional writer, Hunt made deliberate use of what she called her “impudence” and “audacious subjectivity.” In the eyes of Emily Fowler Ford, she was “a woman of genius and quick vivid impressions without convictions on any subject.” When Mercy Philbrick came out, Hunt twisted arms to make sure the Atlantic Monthly would not assign its influential review to the rising young international novelist whose scalpel was always sharpest on New England’s women writers: “If Henry James does it, M.P.C. will be . . . badly handled. . . . I really think Hatty Preston might do it. It wouldn’t take her two hours.” The pressure worked and Preston’s praise of the book’s “beautiful literary workmanship” duly appeared in the Atlantic. Set in a western New England village modeled on Amherst, the narrative concerned a woman poet whose “choice” was not to remarry. Locally, it was rumored that Dickinson had helped write the novel, and also the Saxe Holm stories—early examples of the inflated and unreal tales always being told about her.
Higginson started things off by showing Dickinson’s poems to his fellow boarder (probably allowing her to make copies for a manuscript volume), and then, in 1869, telling the poet there was a lady in Newport who “once knew you but could [not] tell me much.” A correspondence began the next year, when Hunt spent a working summer and fall in Bethlehem, New Hampshire. In August 1873, seeking a healthy place to recuperate, she came to Amherst on the strength of Dickinson’s assurance that a lodging house the Norcrosses favored would not be insalutary. When it proved both damp and “close & stifling,” Hunt experienced a “disastrous” relapse and fled, ending up in Colorado Springs and marrying William S. Jackson, a banker and railroad man. She returned to New England for long autumn sojourns but spent little time in Amherst. Her depiction of Penfield in Mercy Philbrick suggests her view of the girlhood village where her consumptive mother had died—poky, old-fashioned, poorly laid out, dark.
Hunt’s 1875 marriage to Jackson elicited from this dull and backward place an electric congratulatory note, which reads in its entirety:
Have I a word but Joy?
E. Dickinson
Who fleeing from the Spring
The Spring avenging fling
To Dooms of Balm –
In this three-line segment of a poem twice as long (Fr1368B), line one may be construed as the direct object of “fling.” Helen’s history of bereavement,
illness, and travel for health’s sake forms the background. Compelled to run away from spring (life, vitality, happiness), she has been flung back into the thick of it by this second marriage. If she is doomed, as once seemed the case, it is not to suffering but to a soothing and odorous “Balm.” As in other late poems by Dickinson, heaven proves unavoidable.
But “Who” refers to more than Hunt Jackson. Since the word immediately follows “E. Dickinson,” it appears that she too is flung from grief into ecstasy. Do the lines incorporate a memory of the wasting depression that sent her to Boston in spring 1844, when Helen lost her mother? Did the poet see the same rebound to joy in her and her friend’s utterly different lives?
Whatever the answer, the lines mystified Helen, who rashly sent them back for an explanation: “I do wish I knew just what ‘dooms’ you meant, though!” No answer was forthcoming, and in March 1876 she wrote again, insisting with her usual bluntness that the poem was “mine—not yours—and be honest.” Just as bluntly, she came out with the declaration that “You are a great poet—and it is a wrong to the day you live in, that you will not sing aloud. When you are what men call dead, you will be sorry you were so stingy.”
Others had said this, beginning with the two “Editors of Journals” (Samuel Bowles? Fidelia H. Cooke?) who sought the poet’s work in the winter of 1861–1862 and, rebuffed, called her “penurious.” But it is unlikely that anyone, even Higginson, who also unleashed the word “great,” had been quite so categorical. In 1875 he gave a talk on Dickinson and another woman writer (“Two Unknown Poetesses”) at the influential New England Woman’s Club, reading some lyrics and finding that their “strange power excited much interest.” But he was also reported to have said that her work “reminded him of skeleton leaves so pretty but too delicate,—not strong enough to publish.” Emily Fowler Ford took the same view, and so did Josiah Holland, who called the poems “too ethereal” (the kiss of death) for the mass-market Scribner’s Magazine he now edited. It took pushy Helen Jackson to hammer out their great vigor.
And Helen would not back off. In August 1876, sending Emily a circular on Roberts Brothers’s projected No Name volume of contemporary verse, she offered to make submissions in her hand: “Surely, in the shelter of such double anonymousness . . . you need not shrink. I want to see some of your verses in print. Unless you forbid me, I will send some that I have. May I?” Two months later, passing through Amherst, she renewed her plea face to face. She also had the temerity to tell the poet she looked unwell and to scold her for “living away from the sunlight.” It was what Higginson thought but hardly dared say.
Unable to field Jackson’s importunities, Dickinson asked the useful Higginson for a note saying he “thought me unfit.” But he seemed to miss the point, leaving the poet to deal on her own with her aggressive friend, who presently sent a clever follow-up. First, she apologized for her roughness and directness: “Your [hand] felt [l]ike such a wisp in mine that you frigh[tened] me. I felt [li]ke a [gr]eat ox [tal]king to a wh[ite] moth, and beg[ging] it to come and [eat] grass with me [to] see if it could not turn itself into beef! How stupid.” But then she returned to the charge, expressing a preference for the “simplest” [translation: earliest] poems and arguing on the basis of enjoyment and reciprocity: “You say you find great pleasure in reading my verses. Let somebody somewhere whom you do not know have the same pleasure in reading yours.” The appeal had an effect, though not the one Jackson intended: writing to Higginson soon after, Dickinson delicately upbraided him for withholding his writing even though it was “sought by others.”
As the 1878 publication date approached, Jackson kept up the pressure, reducing her requests from “some” to “one or two” poems and finally to one in particular, which she promised to submit in her own hand to ensure anonymity. Making it impossible to say no—“I ask it as a personal favor”—she finally extracted the poem she wanted, probably with the author’s reluctant consent.
When A Masque of Poets was issued in late 1878, Dickinson’s “Success is counted sweetest,” written nineteen years earlier, occupied a conspicuous place at the end of the volume’s shorter poems. The editor-in-chief, Thomas Niles, a promoter of women’s writing, thanked her for the contribution, “which for want of a known sponsor Mr Emerson has generally had to father.” No doubt she was gratified by the high estimate of her work, but did it rankle to have the credit go to another?
Perhaps not. When Sue recognized the published lines and mentioned them to Dickinson, thus unveiling her, she went “so white” her sister-in-law regretted having spoken. This strong and instantaneous reaction suggests there was more to her refusal to publish than a fastidious objection to the regularities of print or to the sprucings up of editors, as is often asserted.
Death Away from Home
In March 1871 Samuel Bowles discovered that Edward Dickinson had been “quite feeble all winter, a sort of breaking-down with dyspepsia” and was now “hardly to be recognized in his old character.” For Emily, who had to live with “his lonesome face all day” while assuming he would die, the winter’s “terror . . . made a little creature of me, who thought myself so bold.” That fall, the Amherst paper paid proper honors in a long story on Edward that stressed his civic contributions. Typed as “a gentleman of the elder school,” he was also said to be (was there a question?) “by no means a fogy.”
When Edward tried to resign as treasurer of Amherst College in July 1872, the surprised trustees persuaded him to stay on until a successor could be chosen. The search was complicated by the presence of a candidate whose dynastic qualifications outweighed his personal achievements, and by a trustee who pulled every available string for his friend’s sake—Austin Dickinson and Samuel Bowles. Once, after two rivals had been eliminated, Samuel sent Austin the inside information and advised a tactical pause: “This is confidential. I guess we can let the pullets set for a little while now.” In December 1873, the new treasurer was finally selected at a long and divisive trustees’ meeting in a Springfield hotel, after which, at two A.M., Bowles once again violated confidentiality by dashing off a play-by-play report for the successful applicant: “a dramatic performance—long & somewhat doubtful—but we pulled through . . .” Taking over, Austin found the records in such chaos a bookkeeper had to be hired. Overall, however, the son proved less effective than his father in building and maintaining high-level contacts. Once, yielding too much to the heirs of David Sears (a bigtime Boston contributor), he overstepped his limited authority in a way that had to be corrected decades later by the Supreme Judicial Court.
Ironically, as Edward stepped down from the treasurership, he was persuaded to take on a more arduous job. For twenty years, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had been underwriting the expensive Hoosac Tunnel, designed to give Boston a direct rail link to Albany and points west. Also weighing on local voters was the completion of the Massachusetts Central Railroad, which was to pass through Amherst; the town had pledged $100,000 for the project. When this investment was threatened by the Panic of 1873, Amherst’s political operatives felt they had to send “our very best man” to the General Court to protect their interests. That May, Edward had given himself to God. Now, giving himself once again to his community and its economic development, he accepted the nomination. Easily elected to the state’s lower house, he was ballyhooed by the conservative Boston Journal as one of the Connecticut Valley’s long lineage of “River Gods.”
Although the Panic seems to have been on Emily’s mind, her only surviving comment on her father’s election, sent to the Norcrosses, was distant and noncommittal: “I see by the paper that father spends the winter with you.” But she clearly felt sorry for him, seventy-one years old and so reluctant to leave home he asked Austin (not her) to write every day. In January he was duly appointed to the ten-member joint committee on the Hoosac Tunnel. His rooms were in the nearby Tremont House.
It was in the middle of that month, on Saturday, January 17, that Emily’s New York uncle, Jose
ph A. Sweetser, slipped on the ice while entering the Brooklyn ferry and hurt his right temple badly enough that by the following Tuesday the resulting headache was “very severe.” In his mid-sixties, Sweetser lived with his wife, Catharine, in the Madison Square Hotel. On Wednesday night, as was “his invariable habit,” he stepped out to attend regular services at the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, of which he was “a most consistent and useful member.” After he failed to return, the family placed a description in the New York Herald’s widely read personals: “5 feet 11 inches . . . right eye discolored by a recent fall.” *151 It was feared his head injury had affected his mind and he had “done himself violence.”
Although a Mulberry Street detective was hired and a $250 reward offered, nothing was ever heard of the old man. But a spot-on poem came from Amherst saying that death was not the most painful of blows:
There marauds a sorer Robber –
Silence . . .
Fr1315
That the head of one’s family should leave home and not be seen or heard from again: what greater terror was there?
From time to time Father returned from Boston. Once, Emily reported him “ill at home.” On April 29, the ground being covered with fresh snow, he went to the barn in his slippers to get some grain for birds huddling by the kitchen door. During a June legislative recess, a light was seen in his office at night. His last afternoon at home, a Sunday apparently, was spent in his daughter’s company: “He seemed peculiarly pleased as I oftenest stayed with myself, and remarked as the Afternoon withdrew, he ‘would like it to not end.’” “Almost embarrassed” by this indirect expression of love, she proposed he take a walk with Austin. On Monday, June 15, she woke him for the early train.
My Wars Are Laid Away in Books Page 58
