White Heat

by Brenda Wineapple

  As for Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a Vigilance Committee in Worcester rallied round him, should he be seized by the government. But civil disobedience implied an acceptance of consequences, and he was ready for them. Even eager. “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly,” Thoreau had written, “the true place for a just man is also in a prison.”

  Higginson did not run. He did not burn incriminating evidence. Instead he organized an attempt (unsuccessful) to spring Aaron Stevens and Albert Hazlett, two members of Brown’s party, from the Charles Town, Virginia, jail. Aided by the former Kansas guerrilla James Montgomery, Higginson was to lead the attack, but he called it off when Montgomery learned that soldiers were swarming over Charles Town. Stevens and Hazlett were hung. Higginson stood fast. “John Brown is now beyond our reach,” he declared, “but the oppressed for whom he died still live.”

  When the Senate investigated Harpers Ferry, summoning Howe and the others, Higginson was ready, proud to tell all he knew. But the government likely second-guessed his motives once again and decided that of all people, Higginson, capable of making his testimony a cause célèbre, was worth avoiding. He was never called.

  Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1857. “He prided himself not a little on his good looks,” said Angelina Grimké Weld.

  THE MINISTERIAL CLOTH was never a comfortable fit, and Higginson had left the church without regret. For though he redeemed himself in his own eyes, he had wondered if there wasn’t something unmanly about his calling. “What satirists upon religion are those parents who say of their pallid, puny, sedentary, lifeless, joyless little offspring, ‘He is born for a minister’?”

  His reference to himself as the sickly, half-dead child he once had been partly accounts for his commitment to forcible political action. It also accounts for his devotion to exercise, bodybuilding, and the nonministerial physical values he touted in such early essays for The Atlantic Monthly as “Saints and Their Bodies,” “Physical Courage,” “Letter to a Dyspeptic,” “Barbarism and Civilization,” and “Gymnastics.” Behind each article lurked Higginson’s need to prove himself as strong, fit, virile.

  He also admired in fugitive slaves the quality he most desired in himself—physical valor—not because he romanticized them in a typically benighted way, though he was capable of that, but because he genuinely admired their staggering bravery. As he wrote in “Physical Courage,” one of his earliest Atlantic Monthly essays: “These men and women, who have tested their courage in the lonely swamp against the alligator and the bloodhound, who have starved on prairies, hidden in holds, clung to locomotives, ridden hundreds of miles cramped in boxes, head downward, equally near to death if discovered or deserted,—and who have then, after enduring all this, gone voluntarily back to risk it over again, for the sake of wife or child,—what are we pale faces, that we should claim a rival capacity with theirs for heroic deeds?”

  The outlet for Higginson’s self-confident, radical prose had become The Atlantic Monthly. Initially conceived as an antislavery magazine in 1853, it wasn’t truly launched until 1857, when its inaugural editor, James Russell Lowell, put a drawing of Shakespeare on the frontispiece and called The Atlantic a magazine of literature, art, and politics; literature would trump current events. Lowell canvassed the historian John Lothrop Motley as well as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, Mrs. Gaskell, and Higginson as early contributors, and Oliver Wendell Holmes (who named the magazine) appeared in the first issue, along with Emerson, Whittier, Lowell himself, and Charles Eliot Norton. Higginson published his first article, “Saints and Their Bodies,” about the weakness of civilized (white) men, in its fifth issue.

  It was Lowell who reluctantly published Higginson’s “Physical Courage” in 1858 and in 1859 his satiric tour de force “Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?” Higginson tried to push Lowell deeper into politics. “Would you like an article on the Maroons of Jamaica and Surinam, suggested by the last Virginia affair,” he queried Lowell in 1859, a week after Harpers Ferry. More hospitable to the antislavery movement than to female suffrage, Lowell acquiesced, and in all, under either Lowell or the next editor of The Atlantic, James Fields, Higginson published four essays on slave uprisings, including the tragic tale of Denmark Vesey’s failed revolt in Charleston, South Carolina, which warned readers that slaves could and would rebel, and the story of the insurrectionary slave Nat Turner, whom Higginson compared with John Brown: ordained by Providence, devoted to freedom, baptized in blood.

  That Higginson respected these leaders without reservation is consistent with his increasing militancy and his conviction that slavery brutally injured the enslaved. And these pieces also demonstrate Higginson’s conviction that despite all, neither the essential humanity of the slaves nor their craving for freedom had been destroyed. Many northerners doubted that the black man would fight for freedom; their stereotype was Stowe’s reassuringly gentle Uncle Tom. Higginson laughed. “If it be the normal tendency of bondage to produce saints like Uncle Tom,” he sarcastically noted, “let us all offer ourselves at auction immediately.”

  In 1860, after his unsuccessful attempt to spring two of Brown’s cohorts from jail, Higginson started keeping a small journal he called his “Field Book” and on the flyleaf scribbled “Recalled to Life” (from Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities). “I began this book on returning from an abortive expedition to Pa. in hopes of rescuing Hazlett & Stevens,” he later explained; “I had thought it likely that my life might be sacrificed.” The truth was more complicated. Documenting Higginson’s return to and love of nature in the face of recent failure, the book served as his refuge. “In these unsettled days it is perilous for a writer to commit his self to a course of systematic thought,” Higginson had commented as early as 1849, “& better to fall back upon nature.”

  Inspired by Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, a book he reread every year, Higginson had called on Thoreau in 1850, boarding the Concord train and arriving unannounced at the family pencil factory. There Thoreau sat, a bronzed, spare man, working. “On other days he surveys land,” Higginson reported to his mother, “both mathematically & meditatively; lays out houselots in Haverhill & in the moon.” If the man was a little dry, his scrupulous love of the natural world and of beauty, his self-containment, even his egotism, redeemed him. “He talks sententiously & originally; his manner is the most unvarying facsimile of Mr. Emerson’s, but his thoughts are quite his own,” said Higginson. “I find nobody who enjoys his book as I do (this I did not tell him).”

  He subsequently followed in Thoreau’s footsteps, tentatively publishing his own nature essays in Putnam’s Monthly in 1853 and 1856. Higginson’s “Going to Mount Katahdin” was literally inspired by Thoreau’s Maine climb, although in his account Higginson pretended he was a woman, perhaps to conceal his unmanly love of things natural. No longer—Kansas had changed all that.

  Just before the publication of Walden, in 1854, Thoreau presented Higginson with a copy of the book, along with his “Slavery in Massachusetts,” the lecture on the Burns affair that Higginson had admired. But Higginson had already read Walden. Fields had given him the proofs, so eager was he for Thoreau’s latest. “Thoreau camps down by Walden Pond and shows us that absolutely nothing in Nature has ever yet been described—,” Higginson unstintingly declared, “not a bird nor a berry of the woods, nor a drop of water, nor a spicula of ice, nor summer, nor winter, nor sun, nor star.”

  Nothing in nature had yet been described, and yet this was the task Higginson now set himself, Thoreau as his guide. Weary and demoralized with the ways of men, he fully indulged his love of nature, swearing he would at last earn his living in the way he had long dreamed. Down the back of the activist was a large reclusive streak.

  SINCE CHILDHOOD, Higginson had roamed the outdoors, attentively observing flowers and trees and the varieties of birds. And since college, when he studied natural history and entomology and recorded whatever specimens he found dur
ing botanical expeditions (today housed at Harvard’s Gray Herbarium), Higginson liked to bathe at dawn in the cold lake water near his home, or skim its surface in a small boat, or search for birds’ nests while hiking through the thick woods on long, hot summer afternoons. Animals and plants, he said, were more human than most people, more kind. “The birds are as real and absorbing to me as human beings,” he wrote in his journal. “I will trust this butterfly against all the dyspeptic theologians or atheists of the world.” He almost sounds like Dickinson.

  “I need ask for nothing else when I find myself coming round again into all that old happiness in nature,” he confided to his diary, “wh my years of hard labor seemed to have stilled.” Writing about nature for The Atlantic, he burst with pride when Thoreau praised his essay “Snow.” “He was the only critic I should regard as formidable on such a subject.” But fan letters about his essays were collecting at the post office. “I had more [mail] about ‘April Days’ than about anything I have written,” he told Harriet Prescott late in 1861. “I am sure I have never come so near to Nature as during the last year,” he continued, “and therefore never so truly and deeply lived; and sometimes I feel so Exalted in this nearness that it seems as if I never could sorrow any more.”

  Although these essays on nature distracted him from the public failures of Free-Soil, Thomas Sims, Anthony Burns, and Harpers Ferry, those were disappointments he still felt compelled to reverse. Yet after Fort Sumter was fired on, he turned down an offer to lead the Fourth Battalion of Infantry, partly for Mary’s sake and partly because he was skeptical of Lincoln’s commitment to antislavery. Changing his mind in the fall of 1861, he received permission from Governor Andrew to raise a division of troops—the news reached Dickinson’s Amherst by means of the Springfield Republican—but when the War Department subsequently decided not to authorize another Massachusetts regiment, he figured he was destined to be the chronicler of nature after all. And with the prestigious Atlantic beckoning, the tall ex-preacher pitched himself headlong into literature at last.

  He entertained few illusions. “I do not find that my facility grows so fast as my fastidiousness,” he admitted. And yet he was determined to remake his life, to retire from the fray, to become the writer in repose he had long wanted, or thought he wanted, to be. “The more bent any man is upon action, the more profoundly he needs the calm lessons of Nature to preserve his equilibrium,” he said, speaking of himself in the lovely essay “My Out-Door Study.” “The radical himself needs nothing so much as fresh air. The world is called conservative; but it is far easier to impress a plausible thought on the complaisance of others than to retain an unfaltering faith in it for ourselves.” So he kept a place for himself in the woods, regrets suppressed, notebook in hand, and wrote his lyrical paeans to nature—and art—in “Water-Lilies,” “April Days,” “My Out-Door Study,” “Snow,” “The Life of Birds.”

  We talk of literature as if it were a mere matter of rule and measurement, a series of processes long since brought to mechanical perfection: but it would be less incorrect to say that it all lies in the future; tried by the outdoor standard, there is as yet no literature, but only glimpses and guideboards; no writer has yet succeeded in sustaining, through more than some single occasional sentence, that fresh and perfect charm. If by the training of a lifetime one could succeed in producing one continuous page of perfect cadence, it would be a life well spent, and such a literary artist would fall short of Nature’s standard in quantity only, not in quality.

  Perfecting that cadence and polishing the surface of his prose, eventually he would deplete its strength with prolixity and pedantry. But that was much later, after the war. And even then he was capable of a rousing call to arms or the hushed mellow resonance that stirred his reader in Amherst, for whom literature, too, was not a matter of rule and measurement but of April days and snow and perhaps even insurrection, physical courage, rebellion.

  His quiet eloquence heeded by the coruscating poet of inner life—his quiet eloquence touching her—she reached out.

  “My size felt small—to me—,” Emily Dickinson now told him; “I read your Chapters in the Atlantic—and experienced honor for you.” She knew who this man was.

  Part Two

  During

  SIX

  Nature Is a Haunted House

  I enclose my name—asking you, if you please, Sir—to tell me what is true?

  Emily Dickinson stops my narrative. For as the woman in white, savante and reclusive, shorn of context, place, and reference, she seems to exist outside of time, untouched by it. And that’s unnerving. No wonder we make up stories about her: about her lovers, if any, or how many or why she turned her back on ordinary life and when she knew of the enormity of her own gift (of course she knew) and how she combined words in ways we never imagined and wished we could.

  And when we turn to her poems, we find that they, too, like her life, stop the narrative. Lyric outbursts, they tell no tales about who did what to whom in the habitable world. Rather, they whisper their wisdom from deep, very deep, within ourselves. And perhaps these poems plunge down so far—perhaps they unsettle us so—because Dickinson writes of experiences that we, who live in time, can barely name.

  For like Hawthorne, whom she greatly admired, Dickinson spurned the overtly topical; he sneered at what he called the “damned mob of scribbling women” who wrote of social issues, not timeless truths of the human heart, and Dickinson, who shared his sense of literature’s incomparable and universal mission, took literature even further from recognizable person, place, or event. “Is it Intellect that the Patriot means when he speaks of his ‘Native Land’?” she would inquire of Higginson.

  In a letter he remembered receiving in the summer of 1862, she explained warily what she was after: even if “you smile at me, I could not stop for that—,” she told him. “My Business is Circumference.” To Dickinson, circumference evidently meant both limits and the transgression of them: the soul selects its own society; the brain is wider than the sky. “St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose center was everywhere and its circumference nowhere,” Emerson wrote in his 1841 essay “Circles.” “There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us.”

  And thus Dickinson braved the unknown:

  I saw no Way—The Heavens were stitched—

  I felt the Columns close—

  The Earth reversed her Hemispheres—

  I touched the Universe—

  And back it slid—and I alone—

  A speck opon a Ball—

  Went out opon Circumference—

  Beyond the Dip of Bell—

  The poetic “I” is alone in the universe, intrepid though a speck upon a ball. Yet she does see a way (poetry) that extends beyond time (the “Dip of Bell”). For nothing is categorical in Dickinson, whether delight or despair or even time and death. If contentment is ragged, loneliness intolerable, her task was “To learn the Transport by the Pain—.”

  More down-to-earth when writing her friends Elizabeth and Josiah Holland, she offered them, too, an explanation of her ambitions similar to the one she gave Higginson. “Perhaps you laugh at me! Perhaps the whole United States are laughing at me too!” she cried. “I can’t stop for that! My business is to love. I found a bird, this morning, down—down—on a little bush at the foot of the garden, and wherefore sing, I said, since nobody hears? One sob in the throat, one flutter of bosom—‘My business is to sing—and away she rose!’”

  My business is circumference; my business is to love, my business is to sing beyond the dip of bell. By 1862 she had chosen her domain: “I dwell in Possibility—/ A fairer House than Prose—.” That year she wrote more than ever: approximately 227 poems, including some of her most frequently anthologized, such as “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers—,” “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” and “I like to see it lap the Miles—.” The sheer quantity of her output far exceeded that of the previous year, when she composed about 8
8, and a year later, in 1863, she produced even more, at least 295.

  Her business had thus become poetry. “Each Life converges to some Centre—,” as she wrote circa 1863,

  Expressed—or still—

  Exists in every Human Nature

  A Goal—

  Embodied scarcely to itself—it may be—

  Too fair

  For Credibility’s presumption

  To mar—

  Adored with caution—as a Brittle Heaven—

  To reach

  Were hopeless, as the Rainbow’s Raiment

  To touch—

  Yet persevered toward—surer—for the Distance—

  How high—

  Unto the Saints’ slow diligence—

  The Sky—

  Ungained—it may be—by Life’s low Venture—

  But then—

  Eternity enable the endeavoring

  Again.

  When published posthumously, this poem was titled “The Goal,” but Dickinson did not use titles; a title, as she obviously sensed, would deprive her first lines of their startling force. Take these: “He put the Belt around my life—,” “The Soul has Bandaged moments—,” “The Zeros taught Us—Phosphorus—,” “Nature—sometimes sears a Sapling—” “Remorse—is Memory—awake—,” “Doom is the House without the Door—,” “I had been hungry, all the Years—,” “One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—,” and “Crisis is a Hair.” One could go on and on.

  And there was also, by this time, a range of tone and subject. There are poems of playful doubt—but doubt nonetheless—as in “I reason, Earth is short—.” There is the verse of pure elation: “Inebriate of air—am I—/ And Debauchee of Dew—/ Reeling—thro’ endless summer days—/ From inns of molten Blue—.” Other poems describe the numbly indescribable, as in “After great pain, a formal feeling comes—,” “There’s a certain Slant of light,” “It was not Death, for I stood up.” (Often for Dickinson, death is the mother of beauty.) Still other poems possess a lyrical certainty, lovely and austere, even pietistic after a crooked fashion, as in “God is a distant—stately Lover—.” And “The Soul selects her own Society—” would become an equivocal anthem of independence: “I’ve known her—from an ample nation—/ Choose One—/ Then—close the Valves of her attention—/ Like Stone—.”