But the Confederates had fired on Fort Sumter, and all bets were off. Then thirty-seven years old (Dickinson was thirty), he unsuccessfully tried to organize a military expedition headed by a son of John Brown’s, assuming that the mere sound of Brown’s name would wreak havoc in the South. He tried to raise a volunteer regiment in Worcester. That, too, failed. “I have thoroughly made up my mind that my present duty lies at home,” he rationalized.
By his “present duty” he meant his wife, an invalid who in recent years could not so much as clutch a pen in her gnarled fingers. She needed him. “This war, for which I long and for which I have been training for years, is just as absolutely unobtainable for me as a share in the wars of Napoleon,” he confided to his diary. To console himself, he wrote the “Letter to a Young Contributor” in which he declared one need not choose between “a column of newspaper or a column of attack, Wordsworth’s ‘Lines on Immortality’ or Wellington’s Lines of Torres Vedras; each is noble, if nobly done, though posterity seems to remember literature the longest.” No doubt Dickinson agreed. “The General Rose—decay—/ ,” she would write, “But this—in Lady’s Drawer / Make Summer—When the Lady lie / In Ceaseless Rosemary—.”
South Winds jostle them—
Bumblebees come
Hover—Hesitate—Drink—and are gone—
Butterflies pause—on their passage Cashmere—
I, softly plucking,
Present them—Here—
Hover. Hesitate. Drink. Gone: the elusive Dickinson enclosed three more poems in her second letter to Higginson, along with a few pressed flowers. He must have acknowledged the gift quickly, for in early June she wrote him again. “Your letter gave no Drunkenness,” she replied, “because I tasted Rum before—Domingo comes but once—yet I have had few pleasures so deep as your opinion.”
That initial taste of rum had come from an earlier “tutor,” who had said he would like to live long enough to see her a poet but then died young. As for Higginson’s opinion of her poetry, she took it under ironic advisement. “You think my gait ‘spasmodic’—I am in danger—Sir—,” she wrote in June as if with a grin. “You think me ‘uncontrolled’—I have no Tribunal.” To be sure, Higginson could not have been expected to understand all she meant; who could? No matter. She did not enlist him for that, or at least not for that alone. She wanted understanding and friendship, both of which he offered, all-important to her even if his advice proved superfluous. “The ‘hand you stretch me in the Dark,’” she said, “I put mine in.”
Nor would she admit to being put off by his apparent suggestion that she “delay” publishing. She smiled archly. “‘To publish’—,” she shot back, “that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin—.” Yet “if fame belonged to me,” she also observed, “I could not escape her—.” Perhaps he had mentioned The Atlantic Monthly, where he often recommended new talent—particularly women—to Fields. He need only dispatch one of her poems.
He did not.
That he told her to be patient seems paradoxical. This was the man who urged immediate, even violent action in the political sphere. Yet he did not say she should never print her poems. He had said “delay.” He needed to find his bearings. Her poetry shocked him, violating as it did the canonical forms of meter and rhyme, and it stunned him with well-shaped insights that thrust him into the very process of writing itself—the difficult transition from idea to page, the repeated attempts to get it right:
We play at Paste—
Till qualified, for Pearl—
Then, drop the Paste—
And deem ourself a fool—
The Shapes—though—were similar—
And our new Hands
Learned Gem-tactics—
Practising Sands—
Having reminisced about her former tutor, Dickinson concluded her third letter with the suggestion that Higginson replace him. “Would you have time to be the ‘friend’ you should think I need?” she wondered with shy charm. “I have a little shape—it would not crowd your Desk—.” And though she did not enclose any poems in this letter, she concluded with a verse:
As if I asked a common Alms,
And in my wondering hand
A Stranger pressed a Kingdom,
And I, bewildered, stand—
As if I asked the Orient
Had it for me a Morn—
And it should lift it’s purple Dikes,
And shatter Me with Dawn!
“But, will you be my Preceptor, Mr. Higginson?”
He could not say no.
EARLY IN HIS CAREER, Higginson had planned to write a sermon, “the Dreamer & worker—the day & night of the soul.” “The Dreamer shld be worker, & the worker a dreamer,” he jotted in his notebook. In a country that measures success in terms of profit rather than poetry, dreamers are an idle lot, inconsequential and neglected. But inside every worker there’s a dreamer, Higginson hopefully insisted, and by the same token dreamers can turn their fantasies to Yankee account: “do not throw up yr ideas, but realize them. The boy who never built a castle in the air will never build one on earth.”
Fragmentary, incomplete, disconsonant—these terms—dreamer and worker, poet and activist—recur with frequency in his later writing. Back and forth he swerved, between a life devoted to dreams and one committed to practical action. The themes are clear, too, in his “Letter to a Young Contributor,” where he incorporated whole sentences from his “Dreamer and Worker” journal to come to a propitious conclusion: “I fancy that in some other realm of existence we may look back with some kind interest on this scene of our earlier life, and say to one another,—‘Do you remember yonder planet, where once we went to school?’ And whether our elective study here lay chiefly in the fields of action or of thought will matter little to us then, when other schools shall have led us through other disciplines.”
Fields of action, fields of thought; the active life or seclusion—twin chambers of a divided American heart. This was Higginson’s conflict. He who would risk his life to end chattel slavery nonetheless fantasized about a cabin in the woods where, like his idol Thoreau, he might front only the essential facts of life. But Higginson had already run for Congress, and would later serve in the Massachusetts legislature and co-edit The Woman’s Journal for the National American Woman Suffrage Association. And he would command the first regular Union army regiment made up exclusively of freed slaves (mustered far earlier than Robert Gould Shaw’s fabled Massachusetts Fifty-fourth). You could not do this from a cabin in the woods.
Opting for the seclusion he could not sustain, Dickinson had walked away from public life, informing Higginson that she did not “cross her Father’s ground to any House or town,” and for many years, as she told him, her lexicon had been her only companion. “The Soul selects her own Society—/ Then—shuts the Door—.” Yet she did not choose unequivocally. No one can who writes.
Emily Dickinson and Thomas Higginson, seven years apart, had been raised in a climate where old pieties no longer sufficed, the piers of faith were brittle, and God was hard to find. If she sought solace in poetry, a momentary stay against mortality, he found it for a time in activism, and for both friendship was a secular salvation, which, like poetry, reached toward the ineffable. This is why he answered her, pursued her, cultivated her, visited her, and wept at her grave. He was not as bullet-headed as many contemporary critics like to think. Relegated to the dustbin of literary history, a relic of Victoriana cursed with geniality and an elegant prose style, Higginson has been invariably dismissed by critics fundamentally uninterested in his radicalism; after all, not until after Dickinson’s death, when the poet’s family contacted him, did he consent to reread the poems and edit them for publication, presumably to appeal to popular taste. Yet he tried hard to prepare the public for her—“The Truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind—,” as she had written—and in his preface to the 1890 volume frankly compared her to William Blake.
Dickinson r
esponded fully to the man he thought—and she thought—he was: courtly and bold, stuffy and radical, chock-full of contradictions and loving. For not only did she initiate the correspondence, but as far as we know she gave no one except Sue more poems than she sent to him. She trusted him, she liked him, she saw in him what it has become convenient to overlook. And he reciprocated in such a way that she often said he saved her life. “Of our greatest acts,” she would later remind him, “we are ignorant—.”
To neglect this friendship reduces Dickinson to the frail recluse of Amherst, extraordinary but helpless and victimized by a bourgeois literary establishment best represented by Higginson. Gone is the Dickinson whose flinty perceptions we admire and whose shrewd assessment of people and things informed her witty, half-serious choice of him as Preceptor, a choice she did not regret. Gone is the woman loyal to those elect few whom she truly trusted. Gone is the sphere of action in which she performed, choosing her own messengers. Gone, too, is Higginson.
Sometimes we see better through a single window after all: this book is not a biography of Emily Dickinson, of whom biography gets us nowhere, even though her poems seem to cry out for one. Nor is it a biography of Colonel Higginson. It is not conventional literary criticism. Rather, here Dickinson’s poetry speaks largely for itself, as it did to Higginson. And by providing a context for particular poems, this book attempts to throw a small, considered beam onto the lifework of these two unusual, seemingly incompatible friends. It also suggests, however lightly, how this recluse and this activist bear a fraught, collaborative, unbalanced and impossible relation to each other, a relation as symbolic and real in our culture as it was special to them. After all, who they were—the issues they grappled with—shapes the rhetoric of our art and our politics: a country alone, exceptional, at least in its own romantic mythology—even warned by its first president to steer clear of permanent alliances—that regularly intervenes on behalf, or at the expense, of others. The fantasy of isolation, the fantasy of intervention: they create recluses and activists, sometimes both, in us all. “The Soul selects its own Society” is a beloved poem; so, too, the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Though Higginson preserved a large number of Dickinson’s letters to him, most of his to her have mysteriously vanished. Before she died, in 1886, Emily instructed her sister, Lavinia, to burn her papers, a task Lavinia dutifully performed until, about a week after the funeral, she happened upon a boxful of poems (about eight hundred of them) in a bureau drawer. (It seems Dickinson had not instructed Lavinia to burn these.) Lavinia, who wanted these poems published, suddenly realized the literary significance of her sister’s correspondence, but by then she had unthinkingly tossed much of it—Higginson’s letters included—into the blaze. That’s the standard tale. Yet when Higginson, along with Mabel Loomis Todd, Austin’s mistress, was preparing the first edition of Dickinson’s poems, Todd noted in her diary that Lavinia had stumbled across Higginson’s letters to the poet. “Thank Heaven!” she sighed.
At a later date, however, Todd jotted in the margins of her diary: “Never gave them to me.” Today no one knows what became of them: whether Higginson asked that they be destroyed—he seems to have purged as much as he saved—or whether for some inexplicable reason Lavinia intentionally lost them.
Because these letters are missing, one has to infer a good deal: his dependence on her, his infatuation, his downright awe of her strange mind. But not that she sought his friendship.
Yes, she sought him. And the two of them, unlikely pair, drew near to each other with affection as fresh as her poems, as real and as rare.
Part One
Before
TWO
Thomas Wentworth Higginson: Without a Little Crack Somewhere
Don’t you think it rather a pity that all the really interesting Americans seem to be dead?” an Englishwoman once asked the aging Colonel Higginson, who, slightly startled by the insult, sadly agreed.
There was a belated quality about Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Born in 1823, almost two decades after Emerson and Garrison and Theodore Parker, he was of a generation fated to admire and emulate but never outshine them. For they were the giants of what Higginson called the sunny side of the transcendental period, spawned by a German philosophical idealism in which the love of nature and humanity routed out the bogey of Puritan gloom, substituting idealism for depravity and sin.
Yet Thomas Wentworth Higginson, their beneficiary, had been at the banquet, unbelievable as that might be to future chroniclers. “It would seem as strange to another generation for me to have sat at the same table with Longfellow or Emerson,” Higginson admitted with characteristic modesty, “as it now seems that men shld hv. sat at the table with Wordsworth or with Milton.”
Perhaps; but perhaps not.
DESCENDED FROM SEVEN GENERATIONS of Higginsons in America, Thomas Wentworth bore the mixed blessing of a long New England lineage. His ancestor the Reverend Francis Higginson had sailed to the New World from England in the spring of 1629 along with six goats, about two hundred other passengers (not including servants), his eight children (one of whom died during the voyage), and his wife, Higginson’s fare on the Talbot paid by the Massachusetts Bay Colony. For one hundred acres of land and thirty pounds per annum, Reverend Francis had been commissioned to save souls in Naumkeag, and he would perform so conscientiously—changing the name of the village to Salem and establishing its first church—that Cotton Mather would dub him the Noah of New England.
When the Reverend Higginson died, just a year after setting foot on Massachusetts soil, his son John took up his mantle by promptly banishing Quakers and then signing a nefarious share of arrest warrants during the witchcraft hysteria of 1692. But John’s rather lackluster commitment to killing witches compromised his own daughter, who was soon accused of the dark art. Not surprisingly, in later years he apologized in public for the terrible delusion he had helped incite and, always one to admit a mistake, at age ninety backed Judge Samuel Sewall’s efforts to abolish slavery and the slave trade, the foundation of much of Salem’s wealth. The local historian Charles Upham, who approved of very few, called Higginson a man of sterling character.
Conscience was a Higginson inheritance, or at least the legacy insisted on by its nineteenth-century descendant Thomas Wentworth. Of course the family had by then distinguished itself in commerce. Higginson’s paternal grandfather, Stephen, shipowner, merchant, and soldier, was the Massachusetts delegate to the Continental Congress in 1783 and the reputed author of The Writings of Laco, published in 1789, which, arguing for freedom of the press, scathingly denounced John Hancock. A member of what was called the Essex Junto, a group of well-to-do Federalist merchants who, despising Jefferson, considered seceding from the United States to protect their interests, he opposed the Embargo Act of 1807, which choked off trade in the port of Salem, but he managed to turn a profit during the War of 1812. No wonder his grandson Wentworth (as Thomas was called) long remembered this imposing specter, attired in black, as wielding a gold-headed cane.
Wentworth Higginson would write laudatory biographies of his ancestor Francis and his grandfather but kept largely silent on the subject of his own father. An improvident investor and lavish spender, Stephen Higginson Jr. had to liquidate most of his colossal library after the War of 1812 and move his family from Boston’s fashionable Mount Vernon Street to a sheep farm in Bolton, where they remained until well-placed friends landed him a job as steward of Harvard College. He immediately built a house on Kirkland Street, then a sandy plain, but doubtless the good-hearted profligate was not the best man to guard the Harvard treasury.
By then his family was quite large. After his first wife died, leaving him five children, Stephen wed his daughters’ governess, Louisa Storrow, a New England Jane Eyre with a pedigree eminently respectable (Appletons, Wentworths, and Storrows) as well as swashbuckling (she was also descended from an English officer who had been imprisoned in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, during the Revolution). S
tephen Higginson’s ward since her eleventh year and his wife at nineteen, she bore ten children, six of whom lived to adulthood. Named for her forebears, Thomas Wentworth Storrow Higginson was her last, “the star that gilds the evening of my days—and he must shine bright and clear,” she ominously continued, “or my path will be darkened.” Later in life, Higginson identified his mother as the woman who influenced him most, particularly since he had been a feeble, sickly infant “half dead,” as she had liked to remind him.
Higginson’s childhood was comfortable, privileged, and difficult. A charitable man who helped organize the Harvard Divinity School, his father had not mended his ways. “I think sometimes he will offer his wife and children to somebody who has not got any,” Mrs. Higginson grumbled, and Wentworth would comment, with some aspersion, that “his hospitality was inconveniently unbounded.” When the Republicans in the state legislature (along with Emily Dickinson’s grandfather) chartered the Congregationalist Amherst College in protest against Harvard’s balmy Unitarianism, Harvard lost its annual appropriation, and Stephen Higginson Jr. faced a crisis he could not contain. (The families of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Higginson were thus linked, and though they sat on different sides of the theological fence, each was intimately connected to the way in which that fence had been built.) The deficit mounted, salaries were cut, students were charged for the wine they drank in chapel, and the college sloop was sold. He resigned his post in disgrace, and the Harvard Corporation held him personally responsible for the bills.
White Heat Page 2
