My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  *119. Lurking in the shadows of this exchange is an unsigned essay published on the Republican’s editorial page on June 1. Titled “Over the Border,” it concerned the attraction felt by some “conscientious people” to the “border land between virtue and vice.” There is the good woman, for instance, who “explores with curious foot [italics added] every inch of that debateable ground from which her more prudent sisters timidly retreat . . . prepar[ing] her household eggs and coffee in the hot ashes of the smouldering crater.” Bowles admired the essay and informed Austin it was by Fidelia H. Cooke, his new literary editor: “she touches inner life very deeply & shrewdly.” We know from the manuscript of “A feather from the whippowil” that Cooke was authorized to open the poet’s letters during Bowles’s absences, of which there were several in early 1861. One wonders why he called the essay to Austin’s attention, and whether it was prompted in part by Dickinson’s confidences, and (most important) what she herself made of it.

  *120. After an accident with a runaway horse, Samuel wrote Austin that “the feminine element predominated in that animal.” Aware that he and Mary could supply “all the nerves & fidgets necessary” behind the dashboard, he demanded “calmness & good sense in front.”

  *121. The previous summer, the Republican ran a tribute to Barrett Browning that told how she had watched a boat carrying her loved brother go “down in a tranquil sea.” Bowles pronounced the unsigned piece, which Cooke had written, “very good.”

  *122. Two closely related poems—“’Tis true – They shut me in the cold” (Fr658), “They won’t frown always – some sweet day” (Fr923)—have been assigned to 1863 and 1865.

  *123. The letter is scissored through twice, making three horizontal pieces. The idea was to delete the middle piece, everything from “for I Emily bear a sorrow” to “why not we?” leaving the impression that the top and bottom fragments comprised the entire letter. The placement of “for,” however, frustrated this scheme. When the tamperer—Austin?—realized the top and bottom pieces could not be made to fit, he gave up his foolish effort.

  *124. In 1864 Emily asked Sue to “kiss little Ned in the seam in the neck, entirely for Me.”

  *125. A poem sent to Sue in 1863, signed “Springfield,” almost seems to concede Bowles’s failure in life: “Ungained – it may be/By a Life’s low Venture” (Fr724A). His biographer saw him as paying too heavy a price for his will to power: “To command success, to win full expression and achievement for all the powers within him, to conquer disease, to hold Death himself at bay . . . this was his ceaseless effort.”

  *126. In Richard B. Sewall’s biography, Austin’s assessment is accorded a centrality it doesn’t merit. It had first been cited by his lover’s daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, who worked closely with Sewall and gave him access to many valuable materials not previously made public. He ended up absorbing Austin’s perspective on Sue and, more important, on Emily’s “posing,” which became one of Sewall’s leading themes. Few things can be so dangerous for biographical objectivity as the sense of privileged access.

  *127. Dickinson’s manuscript, whose lineation is here reproduced, shows that she gave “Me” its own line even though she had sufficient room between “just” and the edge of the page.

  *128. Autonomy also has the sinister potential of ultimate self-betrayal:

  The Soul unto itself

  Is an imperial friend –

  Or the most agonizing Spy

  An Enemy – could send . . .

  Fr579B

  *129. In Dinah Craik’s Olive, the heroine feels degraded when she realizes that “unwooed, unrequited, she has dared to love” a certain minister. Then she boldly resolves not to disown her feelings: “Though a world lay between us, my spirit shall follow him all his life long. Distance shall be nothing—years nothing! . . . And then, after death, I shall await him in the land of souls.” Keeping the arrow in her heart, the “virgin martyr” makes art “the chief interest and enjoyment of her life,” works hard and achieves success. This was not so far removed from Dickinson’s story.

  *130. In the same manuscript book, for instance, “It is a lonesome glee” has this to say about solitary birdsong:

  Delight without a Cause –

  Arrestless as invisible –

  A Matter of the Skies.

  Fr873

  Here, the motive for lyric expression has nothing to do with pain, release, discipline.

  *131. Curiously, Dickinson often let her friends know she didn’t need their gifts, such as “the little Bat” (alpenstock?) Bowles brought back from Europe.

  *132. Two years earlier Bowles voiced the same idea after seeing Charlotte Cushman play Romeo: “real tragedies are so [illegible] in life that the stage ones, however well done, do not impress my soul.”

  *133. Dickinson’s first version of line 9 had another unusual superlative: “’Tis Audiblest, at Dusk.” The next version used a comparative, “Antiquer felt at Noon,” which was then amended with an st written over the r. She evidently wanted the superlative of “antique,” perhaps to convey the classic and the age-old, two qualities she had long associated with cricket song. In August 1854, writing John L. Graves after Commencement was over and Amherst had quieted, she compared a merry woman friend to a honeybee “among more antique insects.”

  *134. However, following these words came a complaint suppressed in the 1894 and all later editions of her letters: “Father didn’t go to Northampton, the omnibus meeting was postponed, so I have to roast meat and vegetables much against my will.”

  *135. Another way to save and simplify was to move to Italy, as Charlotte Sewall Eastman did for twelve years; from there she wrote Emily and Vinnie in 1872: “I hear so much of the trouble of living and the extravagance of it and of the horrors of servants. . . . Crowds come abroad to be rid of those evils.”

  *136. In 1881 a series of fires elicited this flash of wit: “The fire-bells are oftener now, almost, than the church-bells. Thoreau would wonder which did the most harm.”

  *137. Announcing Wadsworth’s departure at the head of its “Religious Intelligence,” the indiscreet San Francisco Daily Morning Call disclosed that he was “suffering from nervous debility.” This is the only known public comment on the psychic fractures one senses in the man.

  *138. The allusion is to I Timothy 3:16, which says that “God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels . . .”

  *139. Before Bram Stoker, vampirism was linked to women at least as much as to men and had another kind of sexual valence. In Rebecca Harding Davis’s preachy “The Wife’s Story,” published in the Atlantic Monthly of July 1864, a dissatisfied wife has a dream in which the attempted fulfillment of her operatic ambitions results in the death of her husband, seen with a drop of blood on his neck. The man’s first wife, an opium addict, had been a “foul vampire” who “sucked his youth away.”

  *140. Alternative: guess.

  *141. Other instances of the type that are not discussed here:

  “This slow day moved along” Fr1198 1871

  “My triumph lasted till the drums” Fr1212 "

  “Frigid and sweet her parting face” Fr1231 "

  “The stars are old that stood for me” Fr1242 1872

  “Had I not seen the sun” Fr1249 "

  “Through what transports of patience” Fr1265 "

  “I thought that nature was enough” Fr1269 "

  “While I was fearing it – it came” Fr1317 1874

  “My heart ran so to thee” Fr1331 "

  “Let me not mar that perfect dream” Fr1361 1875

  “I sued the news yet feared the news” Fr1391 1876

  “Of their peculiar light” Fr1396 "

  *142.Poems on memory not discussed here include:

  “Its hour with itself” Fr1211 1871

  “The past is such a curious creature” Fr1273 1872

  “When memory is full” Fr1301 1873

  “September’s baccalaureate” F
r1313 "

  “That sacred closet when you sweep” Fr1385 1875

  *143. Years later, MacGregor Jenkins, son of the nearby minister, recalled how his neighbors got rid of their trash: “each spring there was dug on the Edward Dickinson place a huge hole, and into it the winter’s accumulation of rubbish was dumped.”

  *144. Dickinson also liked to listen from another room to skilled pianists, such as Fred Bliss (Abby’s son), and Mrs. Adelaide Dole.

  *145. There is no evidence “The most pathetic thing I do/Is play I hear from you” (Fr1345) was sent to Sue or that she was “Goliah,” as one critic proposes. The poem was written about 1874, the year Edward died and two years before the earliest attested date for the resumption of Dickinson’s correspondence with Wadsworth, who, like Goliath, was seen “as ‘a strong man.’”

  *146. From Churchill Dudley’s “Midsummer Night” (1878):

  . . . Rock is fluent; ice is wine; Mighty nerve-lines, telegraphic, Pour your heart-beat into mine . . .

  *147. In a letter to brother Ned, nine-year-old Mattie named some other games she enjoyed: “hide and seek was the first game Wolf Battle of Bunker hill and theif followed till Horace [Church, the handyman] forbade the apples flying any longer.”

  *148. Helen Hunt was critical of Higginson’s deferentiality: “He steps too softly—knocks like a baby at the door, & then opens it only a quarter of the way & comes in edgewise!”

  *149. Higginson probably missed her point, which, judging from her poems, may have involved her autonomy, powers of resistance, or special isolation (as in “There is another loneliness,” Fr1138).

  *150. Many of the volumes in this teasingly anonymous series were by women. The most popular was the novel Kismet, by Julia Constance Fletcher.

  *151. A sampling of other personals from January 25: “Pokie and Ida—Have returned, will meet you at same place Tuesday evening next, same time.” “Neapolitaine—Live forever, O Queen! Have I found favor in thy sight? Shylock.” “Mary—Waited an hour. You won’t fool me again. ‘T.’”

  *152. In 1876, in one of her rare allusions to family finances, the poet warned her fifteen-year-old nephew she would have to retrench on that year’s Christmas gifts: “Santa Claus’ Bridge blew off, obliging him to be frugal.” Edward had owned about $3,000 in Sunderland Bridge shares. When the bridge was wrecked on December 9, 1876, by gale winds, Austin undoubtedly realized he must expect assessments instead of dividends, and passed the word next door.

  *153. Bianchi would later claim that she and her brother had appreciated their aunt’s poetry—had “shared the certainty” and “importance of what she was doing upstairs.” Her own verse sometimes looks like a meretricious version of Dickinson’s: “The spurnèd bough reveals the path/Her bird has flown; as unaware/A gentle sense of aftermath,—/Renunciation fills the air” (“Indian Summer,” 1897).

  *154. Two years after Professor Root’s death, Helen Jameson, a neighbor of the Dickinsons, learned that Martha Cushing, Sarah Tuckerman’s unmarried sister, had not been seen for some time and was thought to have “shut herself up as Emily Dickinson has.” Jameson’s regret that there should be “two lovelorn damsels in the same town, shunning the world & devoting themselves to their grief,” shows how the town understood Dickinson’s seclusion.

  *155. Questions remain about the poem’s private significance. Was Dickinson recalling paternal acts that weren’t publicized and remain unknown? Is this the place to factor in James W. Boyden and the enormous and unexplained financial losses he caused Edward in the early 1860s? Was the poet saying that something accruing to Father’s honor would always have to remain secret?

  *156. The gentle preciosity of a note from Montague (preserved because of a poem drafted on the back) evokes the cocoon in which Dickinson lived: “Cousin Emily will please forgive me.— I have made a blemish . . . on two of her Envelopes, & have substituted two of mine. . . . If they will do, I shall be glad.”

  *157. Franklin’s edition does not make clear that after Dickinson drafted her original version of the first stanza, she jotted down an alternative for lines 3–4 (used above) before entering the rest of the poem.

  *158. George F. Whicher’s amusing report of an interview with the last surviving and very dignified child, Dr. William S. Wadsworth, appeared in The Nation in 1949. At the end of the conversation, expressing himself much less guardedly than at first, the doctor assured Whicher his father would not have been “unduly impressed by a hysterical young woman’s ravings.” The outburst may or may not reflect the minister’s feelings about Dickinson in the early 1860s, but it speaks volumes about the family’s resentment of the way the relationship had been construed.

  *159. All editions of Dickinson’s letters beginning with that of 1894 omit the middle paragraph of this letter: “To every heart adjoining his, Springfield must be first, and sweetest of unappeased hope is his convalescence.”

  *160. Whitney lived in California in 1864–1866, taught in Cambridge 1868–1869, resided in Germany 1869–1871 (both studying and chaperoning Sally Bowles), conducted a private class for Northampton girls 1872–1874, studied French in Paris 1875–1876 and then returned for five months in 1877. During her intervals in Northampton, she clipped excerpts for the Republican, saw to the remodeling of the family home, helped care for a sister who had typhoid fever in 1873–1874, and did much more besides. She should not be seen as “a supervisory companion and housekeeper for the Bowleses during Mary’s pregnancies and depressions in the sixties and early seventies.”

  *161. Todd’s 1894 edition of Dickinson’s letters gave Johnson his text for most of the Whitney correspondence. After he went to print, the manuscripts of eight of these letters came to light, four of which—letters 537, 539, 591, 948—have passages on Bowles excised in accordance with Whitney’s wishes. Todd printed the last of these, on Bowles’s light-giving glance, as a detached and unidentified fragment. The same year, “The Lightbearer,” a stained-glass window dedicated to Samuel and Mary Bowles, was installed in Springfield’s Church of the Unity. Designed by Edward Emerson Simmons and fabricated in the Tiffany Studios, it is on permanent exhibit at the George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum in Springfield.

  *162. In the winter of 1882–1883, declining to see a young professor of rhetoric, she said she had “no grace to talk, and my own Words so chill and burn me, that the temperature of Other Minds is too new an Awe.”

  *163. The question follows an appealing anecdote about Dickinson’s seven-year-old nephew that is missing from all editions of the letters: “Austin’s little Gilbert burst in today, ‘Oh Aunt Emily, I want something.’ ‘What shall it be?’ I said with a kiss. ‘Oh, everything,’ he answered.”

  *164. Vinnie topped this with a comic rendition of another hymn by Watts:

  Broad is the road that leads to death,

  And thousands walk together there:

  But wisdom shows a narrow path,

  With here and there a traveller . . .

  *165. Her friend Sophia Holland died in April 1844, and it was in April 1862 that she learned Wadsworth and Bowles would sail.

  *166. Two poems possibly associated with Lord—“I thought the train would never come” (Fr1473) and “Oh, honey of an hour” (Fr1477)—are assigned to 1878 without explanation by Franklin. The first of these seems linked to a later, regretful poem that speaks of a train’s departure—“The summer that we did not prize” (Fr1622)—and was composed on the back of a letter draft to Lord.

  *167. Whoever preserved the manuscript containing these important words wanted them and nothing else: the paper has been scissored top and bottom. If Austin made the cuts before turning this and other Lord manuscripts over to Todd, a motive is deducible from something his daughter remembered—his “morbid horror of his sister Emily being thought to have been ‘disappointed’ in love.”

  *168. In the fair copy of April 30, 1882, Dickinson mentioned having recently “been in your Bosom.” This, like her reference to Lord’s “Arms,” calls to
mind Sue’s statement, reported by Todd, that the Dickinson sisters “have not, either of them, any idea of morality. . . . I went in there one day, and in the drawing room I found Emily reclining in the arms of a man.” Leyda plausibly dated this speech September 1882. But Todd’s failure to report it till 1931, fifty years later, calls its accuracy into question.

  Dickinson’s earlier “Wild nights – Wild nights!” (Fr269), ends with the wish “Might I but moor – Tonight –/In thee!” Though some readers take this as an image of penetration, it probably signified enclosure in an embrace, a powerful Victorian image. In Dinah Craik’s Head of the Family, the hero “longed to take her and hide her in his bosom”—and he finally does.

  *169. This is the poet’s only known dream in which the dreamer chooses and acts. For her other accounts of dreams, all very brief, see letters 16, 60, 62, 175, 304, 320. She often mentioned dreaming “about” someone, as in letters 32, 342a, 471, 585, 907. A letter to Whitney, quoted above, mentions a dream about Bowles.

  *170. The ungainly “an one” was correct usage, appearing in one of Dickinson’s letters, Henry Shipley’s introduction to her prose valentine in The Indicator, and Dinah Craik’s Olive (“Is such an one as I likely to marry?”).

  *171. This draft, which Johnson mistakenly spliced to one from April 30 and May 1, 1882, can be dated by the statement that “Mrs Dr Stearns called to know if we didnt think it very shocking for Butler to ‘liken himself to his Redeemer.’” On November 7, 1882, Benjamin F. Butler, an outspoken maverick running as a Democrat, was elected governor of Massachusetts after six unsuccessful tries. His victory speech, based on an Old Testament passage Christians apply to Jesus, began, “Fellow citizens—To quote a few words from the Scriptures, the stone that the builders rejected, the same has become the head of the column. (Great laughter and applause.)” Both the Springfield Republican and the Amherst Record noted these words. Butler’s support of women’s suffrage and agrarian issues had already made him anathema to conservative Republicans. Dickinson’s opinion of him isn’t known, but she obviously didn’t share Stearns’s outrage at the speech. Her uncle, William Dickinson, was a fervent Butlerite.