The family troubles had long-lasting consequences for the publication and reception of Dickinson’s writing. In 1890, four years after she died, a selection of her poems was published to wide acclaim. More compilations followed, including a two-volume edition of letters. All were edited by Austin’s lover, with Vinnie’s encouragement and Higginson’s strategic assistance; all took editorial liberties with what the poet had written. After Sue’s death in 1913, her daughter, Martha, passionately loyal to her mother, brought out a selection of the poems Emily had sent next door, followed by the first extended biographical account, The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924); eight years later came Emily Dickinson Face to Face (1932). Martha was determined to wipe Mrs. Todd out of the record, reclaim Aunt Emily for the family, take the royalties, and vindicate Sue, the spurned wife and tragic mother who had lost both her sons (Ned having died in 1898 of cardiac troubles). Not surprisingly, these books present a sanitized account of Sue’s marriage and an idealized picture of her relationship with the genius next door. They are also full of incidental “facts” that cannot be relied on.
And yet Bianchi had been positioned as no one else, and much of what she passed on—Dickinson’s absorbed reading of books in the family circle, her “pet gesture of bravado,” her twisting an imaginary key in her door and saying, “It’s just a turn – and freedom, Matty”—seems to grant us an access no one else could have matched. No one conveyed better than this “imperial Girl,” as Emily called her, the poet’s love of games, jokes, fiction, secrecy, rule-breaking, and general roguishness. Looking back as an old woman, Bianchi grasped the fine self-command Dickinson had won by her fifties: “The fret of temporal servitudes did not exist for her. There was an exquisite self-containment about her from her very relinquishment of all part in outward event.” This assessment catches the independence of spirit that distinguished the poet from grim Austin and harried Vinnie.
So complete was Dickinson’s containment that the sense of achievement she expressed in so many poems does not seem to have issued in any open boasts. In general, writers who attain an assured mastery expect a matching public acknowledgment. They leave a collected edition; they make a sly nod at the pantheon to show where their urn might best be placed. Dickinson not only made little or no effort to clean up and organize the poems she continued to write, but failed to take steps to ensure that her work would reach readers at large. Quite the contrary, she exacted promises from Vinnie and Maggie that they would burn her papers, possibly including her manuscript books and ungathered verse. No doubt this was largely owing to her continued aversion to all forms of public exposure. But why do none of her letters comment on her achievement? Is this silence to be explained as humility, carelessness, some kind of disillusionment? Didn’t she know how good she was? That may be what we want to know most of all.
One way to try to find out is to follow her interest in two writers who were in some sense her peers, George Eliot and Emily Brontë. Dickinson idolized both, but underneath she had a keen sense of affiliation and a greedy curiosity about personal history. After seeing the announcement of George Eliot’s death in 1880, she could not get “[t]he look of the words as they lay in the print” out of her mind. Regretting that the novelist lacked the “gift of belief which her greatness denied her,” the poet made a guess at her story: “perhaps having no childhood, she lost her way to the early trust, and no later came.” In 1882 the editor Thomas Niles assured Dickinson that George Eliot’s second husband had “not abandoned” his projected biography of her. The next year, when Mathilde Blind’s George Eliot and Agnes Mary F. Robinson’s Emily Brontë had their American debut, the poet promptly waded in, reacting in ways that hint at her own sense of achievement.
From Blind’s George Eliot, Dickinson got a picture of Marian Evans’s youthful solemnity, awkwardness, and inner solitude; her painful troubles with father and brother; her early rejection of Evangelicalism. The book presented her as coming “into the world fully developed, like a second Minerva,” yet insisted that her “intellectual vigor did not exclude the susceptibilities and weaknesses of a peculiarly feminine organization.” Getting a much richer picture of what she did and didn’t share with the Englishwoman, Dickinson wrote Niles (dropping the male pseudonym): “The Life of Marian Evans had much I never knew – a Doom of Fruit without the Bloom, like the Niger Fig.” This fruitful “Doom” recalls the “Dooms of Balm” (Fr1368B) of Helen Hunt’s marriage. Incorporated in the letter was a poem on the compensatory fecundity that makes something of nothing, an idea that fits Evans’s active life less well than Dickinson’s:
Her Losses make our Gains ashamed.
She bore Life’s empty Pack
As gallantly as if the East
Were swinging at her Back –
So far the speaker sounds like an abashed admirer who lacks the power to create, but in the second stanza we see that she, too, is a load bearer and honey maker and thus understands Evans’s secret:
Life’s empty Pack is heaviest,
As every Porter knows –
In vain to punish Honey –
It only sweeter grows –
Fr1602B
Clearly, the poet felt some sort of parity with the novelist.
Robinson’s biography, read within a month of publication, confirmed Dickinson’s previous image of “gigantic Emily Brontë, of whom her Charlotte said ‘Full of ruth for others, on herself she had no mercy.’” Intuitive and highly dramatic, the book was rife with details, insights, claims that must have connected: Brontë’s motherlessness, attachment to home, elusiveness with strangers; her powers of self-disciplined labor; her housewifely skills; her indulgence of Branwell; her thorny brilliance; her upright purity but also her bold treatment of passion. There was the large dog she loved, the Calvinism she both abandoned and transformed, the uncanny imaginative power that transmuted “the miriest earth of common life.” “If the butcher’s boy came to the kitchen door she would be off like a bird.” “Kindness and thought for others were part of the nature of this unsocial, rugged woman. . . . She made the bread; and her bread was famous in Haworth.” What was this if not a distorted image of Amherst’s poet? Writing Elizabeth Holland, Dickinson pronounced the book “more electric far than anything since ‘Jane Eyre.’” Calling Brontë the “Napoleon of the Cross!” she grounded the writer’s grandeur in the mastery of pain and insisted Elizabeth read the book, bad eye or not. “It is so strange a Strength, I must have you possess it.”
Nothing Dickinson ever read was recommended with more force than this biography, which effectively validated her idea of power based in weakness. Still, we can only surmise what the book said to her about her own strange strength as poet, a point on which she was silent. The electric new possession was to be shared, not hugged in private. True greatness, as in “Lay this laurel on the one” (Fr1428), made no claims for itself. On itself—and on us readers and biographers—it had no mercy.
Family Life in the Dickinson Compound
At the Mansion, with Father gone and Mother incapacitated by her stroke and broken hip, everything was in the hands of the three Dickinson siblings, the indoor servant Maggie Maher, and the hired men who brought in the hay and cared for the animals, orchard, and lawn. Austin oversaw the outside work and took charge of major projects, such as the installation of running water in 1880. Indoors, following in Emily Norcross Dickinson’s steps, Vinnie tried to see to everything. Her friend and neighbor, Harriet Jameson, had never seen “a daughter so devoted.” In Emily’s words, Mother needed only to “sigh” before being tended by the “brave – faithful – and punctual” Vinnie. One summer night, when half downtown Amherst went up in the worst of the town’s many fires, she came to her sister’s room “soft as a moccasin” and said, “Dont be afraid, Emily, it is only the 4 th.. of July.” Emily’s senses told her that was a lie, but she played along, allowing her sister to shield her from the outside world. When Elizabeth Holland’s coded disclosure of a daughter’s pregnan
cy wasn’t understood, it was Vinnie who “picked the Sub rosas, and handed them” to the poet.
From all sides, and especially her own scribbled, headlong notes, one gets the impression Vinnie was in a constant mad rush—“under terrific headway,” as her sister put it. In the election year of 1880 she was “far more hurried than Presidential Candidates . . . they have only the care of the Union, but Vinnie the Universe.” As for Austin, though he was more self-possessed, he too seemed always busy and burdened. Unable to accept Clara Newman Turner’s invitation to Norwich on account of his many engagements, he asked her to pity him as “a man with an expensive family relying on his daily labor for the delights of life.” When he did find time to visit, she pressed some forceful advice on him: “Don’t take life so hard.”
One of the signal differences between the poet and her siblings was her gift for drawing back in reflective abstraction, reacting from a position of leisure and plenitude and then resting on her playful constructions. Her enjoyment of this internal margin owed a great deal to the family’s assumption of responsibility for her. Still, she not only continued to do various chores in pantry, kitchen, and sink room but also helped look after her bedridden mother. In the hot and humid early September of 1880, when the temperature rose to 100, that meant constant tending: “to read to her – to fan her – to tell her ‘Health would come Tomorrow,’ and make the Counterfeit look real – to explain why ‘the Grasshopper is a Burden’” often used up the entire day (the grasshopper comes from Ecclesiastes). Yet, instead of resenting the demands on her time, Emily felt real tenderness for “Mother’s dear little wants”—this from the daughter who ten years earlier “never had a mother.”
The old blockage between mother and daughter was dissolving. Now that Emily Norcross Dickinson had been compelled to give up her lifelong housekeeping cares, she seemed to become, in the poet’s phrase, “a larger mother” than before. In spite of her serious disabilities, she took a new interest in others, as when, anxious about the Hollands, she said she wished she could “take them both in my Arms and carry them.” The poet was astonished. This was her own self-originating strength—her assumption of imaginative power from the depths of incapacity. There must be common ground after all.
Mrs. Dickinson died November 14, 1882. Five weeks later the poet sent a mellow summing-up to Elizabeth Holland: “We were never intimate . . . while she was our Mother – but Mines in the same Ground meet by tunneling and when she became our Child, the Affection came.” The passage exemplifies the poet’s skill at finding rapprochements outside the usual patterns. Still, her grief was less intense than after Father’s death, and few poems resulted. The one that grazed Mother’s reality most closely says, unremarkably, that the “lowliest career” gets the same funerary pageantry as the most “exalted” (Fr1594C).
The troubles next door were more consequential. Since May 1874, when young Ned had a serious bout of “rheumatism,” there had been much anxiety about his heart. This sharpened to fear on the February night in 1877 when the fifteen-year-old boy had the first of the grand mal epileptic seizures that dogged him from then on. Poorly understood, the attack inspired a doctor to issue a warning about his heart and caused the family to feel “intensely excited,” as a professor’s wife noted. From then on, at irregular intervals, as Austin’s diary records, he would be waked in the night “by a jarring sound, as if the house was shaking,” or, a month later, “by a sound as of some wagon passing—and a feeling that something was wrong—and by some exclamation from Sue,” following which he would rush upstairs and find his son in convulsions, often groaning and breathing with “great effort.” In March 1883, the young man was “sick with rheumatism and most everything else,” Austin noted, and “occupying most of the family in his care and amusement.” Acute rheumatism was synonymous with rheumatic fever, according to a standard medical dictionary of that year, with 50 percent of cases showing cardiac complications. Bianchi never forgot the night (she put it in summer 1883 but her date is suspect) when her brother had “an acute attack of rheumatism, affecting his heart” and she found the poet standing outside a window after midnight: “‘Is he better?—oh, is he better?’ she whispered.”
Bianchi was mistaken in her claim that Dickinson never again crossed the lawn, yet it seems the case that for long periods she had little direct contact with the Evergreens. For all of 1880, her brother’s diary mentions a single visit to the “two sits at other house.” After Christmas 1882—a season when he would be expected to drop by—the poet noted that “Austin seldom calls. . . . He visits rarely as Gabriel.” Bianchi’s first book on her aunt has a photo of a “path just wide enough for two who love” joining the Dickinson houses, with the implication it was worn by Sue and Emily. Some scholars take this seriously, and yet it is obvious the path must have been worn by others, and for various purposes. Face-to-face meetings were so infrequent that when Sue gave Disraeli’s latest novel, Endymion, as a Christmas gift in 1880, she inscribed it, “Emily—Whom not seeing I still love.” Anyone who tackles this panoramic roman à clef, based on an inside knowledge of English politics and society, will wonder why such a gift was chosen, and what it says about the sisters-in-law’s relationship. However well the book suited Sue’s social aspirations, *172 nothing seems less calculated to appeal to Emily.
Perhaps one reason some of the poet’s later notes to her sister-in-law pose an extreme challenge to interpretation is that the relationship had become one of words, not acts. About 1878 she wrote, “Susan knows she is a Siren – and that at a word from her, Emily would forfeit Righteousness.” This would have the ring of passion if it weren’t for the hyperbolic wit and the accompanying apology: “Please excuse the grossness of this morning – I was for a moment disarmed.” We don’t know what happened, yet it looks as if the statement of devotion was partly compensatory, making up for an act of avoidance. “Remember, Dear,” Emily wrote in January 1884, “an unfaltering Yes is my only reply to your utmost question.” Again, the statement was occasioned by an inability to satisfy a request, at a time when Sue was in mourning and Emily incapacitated by illness. Sue’s part was to “know,” to “remember.” Emily’s part was to reaffirm a union based on commitment, not contact: an essential love. Instead of reflecting a relationship that existed in daily life, her messages would seem to be the constitutive agency creating it. As the poet put it, “The tie between us is very fine, but a Hair never dissolves.” In 1883–1884, when Sue was in the depths and Emily exerted herself to encourage her, one message wished she “had something vital for Susan, but Susan feeds herself.” A poem accompanying this says that, whereas “Declaiming” waters impress no one, still waters (meaning Sue)
Are so for that most fatal cause
In Nature – they are full –
Fr1638B
The implication is that Sue wasn’t answering Emily’s bracing messages because she was too full of trouble to do so.
By this time the air next door was lethal. As Mattie and Ned grew increasingly alienated by their father’s grim moods, he went to his diary to complain about the parties staged by them and Sue—“an evening carouse” at the Orient Hotel, “a riot in the house till 10 1/2.” On Ned’s twenty-first birthday, the “wild tear and revel” lasted till one A.M., with “one dancer jamming right through a register.” The diarist’s usual tone in noting such events was one of sardonic detachment. He wished he had a quiet room in New York to “drown all thought of Amherst.” In October 1882, when a Gilbert family wedding emptied the house of Sue and Mattie for three weeks, he wrote a gushing rhapsody on peace and quiet—the “utterly utter sweetness and smoothness of Life . . . since Tuesday” (Tuesday being the day his women departed). Then he mailed it to Michigan so they could see for themselves how relieved he was to be rid of them.
By a happy chance, one of Dickinson’s drafts to Lord not only notes Austin’s dismay when his wife and daughter returned on November 10 but puts on record her own lack of involvement: “The Wanderers ca
me [home] last Night – Austin says they are brown as Berries and as noisy as Chipmunks, *173 and feels his solitude much invaded, as far as I can learn. These dislocations of privacy among the Privateers amuse me very much.” Evidently, the poet was not inclined to enter into Austin’s situation. Yet she felt enough sympathy to add, “but ‘the Heart knoweth its own’ Whim.” Her attitude, one of tolerant and exculpatory amusement, seems to forestall any harsh judgments of her surly brother, except as her toying with “privacy” calls up a word meaning “pirate.” This way of judging, based on spectatorship and wordplay, hints at an anarchic frame of mind not much concerned with social or moral ramifications. As Higginson guessed, the Dickinsons did go their separate ways. Which is precisely what the draft justifies: her brother’s freedom to follow his “whim”; hers not to take sides.
But sides were what had formed next door. In late summer 1881, a lively young woman, Mabel Loomis Todd, wife of the newly appointed astronomy teacher at Amherst College, moved to town. Born the year Sue and Austin were married, Todd was a trained singer, pianist, and painter of flowers. She was habituated to city life, handled parasol and fan to charming effect, liked distinguished older men, loved being the center of attraction, and had a shapely figure, lovely hair, very large eyes. One of her diary entries reads, “Every moment was lovely of this perfect day—& David [her husband] loves me so—& everybody else likes & loves & admires me.” Doing as she had done with Sarah Jenkins, Sue recruited this promising addition to Amherst society by asking her to the Evergreens. “Wore my thinnest white dress,” says Mabel’s diary; “I like her so much.” The newcomer was asked to play and sing at musicales, had long confidential talks and rides with Sue (who “understands me completely”), and was charmed to learn of “the Myth” next door, the reclusive genius whose “strange poems” Sue read to her. Her first assessment—“They are full of power”—probably reflects Sue’s own admiration. One evening, as the new faculty wife sang next door at the Mansion, “the rare, mysterious Emily listened in the quiet darkness.”
My Wars Are Laid Away in Books Page 63
