White Heat

by Brenda Wineapple

  Still, here he was, in 1862, asking Dickinson if she knew of Whitman’s work. Whatever his limitations, and despite his queasiness, Higginson could spot and respond to talent.

  THE DEATH OF FRAZAR STEARNS, Wadsworth’s removal to California, now Samuel Bowles’s departure for Europe and Dickinson’s unresolved relation to a mysterious Master—these were the circumstances of her life in the spring 1862, when she first wrote to Wentworth Higginson. And here, in a sense, narrative begins. Higginson is narrative. His life proceeds by it; he believes in it. For him there are beginnings and middles, and when it comes to slavery, he is focused on ends.

  Yet she wrote to this man of the world not as a bereft lover or plaintive friend, not as a woman besieged by a beast in the woods, not as sister-in-law or sister, not as anything but a poet, sweetly imploring him in her next letter, “Could you tell me how to grow—or is it unconveyed—like Melody—or Witchcraft?”

  Flattered by her queries and evidently floored by her poems, he offered some criticism, then worried he had been a touch too harsh. Not at all, she reassured him. She had wanted the truth: “I had rather wince, than die,” she explained. “Men do not call the surgeon, to commend—the Bone, but to set it, Sir, and fracture within, is more critical.”

  In return, though, she flirtatiously promised him obedience and gratitude, intending no doubt to flatter him further. She then sent him another four poems. She had taken none of his advice. “I thanked you for your justice—,” she would tell him, “but could not drop the Bells whose jingling cooled my Tramp.”

  Still, his response to her had been insightful and tender enough to please her, and in a very early letter to him, she had included the poem “Your Riches, taught me, poverty—”

  Your Riches, taught me, poverty—

  Myself a Millionaire—

  In little wealths—as Girls could boast—

  Till broad as Buenos Ayre—

  You drifted your Dominions—

  A different Peru—

  And I esteemed all poverty—

  For Life’s Estate, with you—

  Of Mines, I little know, myself—

  But just the names—of Gems—

  The Colors of the commonest—

  And scarce of Diadems—

  So much—that did I meet the Queen—

  Her glory—I should know—

  But this—must be a different wealth—

  To miss it, beggars so—

  I’m sure ’tis India—all day—

  To those who look on you—

  Without a stint—without a blame—

  Might I—but be the Jew!

  I’m sure it is Golconda—

  Beyond my power to deem—

  To have a smile for mine, each day—

  How better, than a Gem!

  At least, it solaces to know—

  That there exists—a Gold—

  Although I prove it just in time

  It’s distance—to behold!

  It’s far—far Treasure to surmise—

  And estimate the Pearl—

  That slipped my simple fingers through—

  While just a Girl at school!

  She had already given Sue a version of this poem, which she may have composed in memory of Benjamin Newton; by presenting it to Higginson, she buttressed her request for his friendship: his riches, his worldliness, his fame, his gentility made him exotic, foreign, powerful. And the “Girl at school”? No droopy supplicant, drab and forlorn, she can create her own interlocutor just by imagining him, which she, in part, will do. But he will help.

  She also enclosed “Success—is counted sweetest,” a poem often reproduced today and that, in this context, spoke to Higginson’s dilemma about joining the war effort, for Dickinson knew he was writing essays in Worcester, not shooting at Confederates in Virginia. He need not second-guess his decision not to enlist, she seems to suggest; victory lies in defeat, perhaps even in withdrawal.

  Success—is counted sweetest

  By those who ne’er succeed—

  To Comprehend a Nectar—

  Requires sorest need—

  Not one of all the Purple Host

  Who took the Flag—today—

  Can tell the Definition—so clear—of Victory—

  As He—defeated—dying—

  On whose forbidden ear—

  The distant strains of Triumph

  Burst—agonized—and Clear!

  As for herself, Dickinson was content, or seemed to be, with the paradox of never succeeding. Defeat was specific victory, far better than success.

  HE MUST HAVE ANSWERED right away, for their correspondence begins to sound like a conversation. “You say ‘Beyond your knowledge,’” she gently chided him in the summer of 1862. “You would not jest with me, because I believe you—but Preceptor—you cannot mean it? All men say ‘What’ to me, but I thought it a fashion—.”

  He was unlike all other men. Nor did she believe she was “beyond his knowledge,” or at least not completely. And if she was, then his confusion pleased her, his gallantry in the face of what he did not understand, his respect for it.

  She teased him with coquettish condescending humor. “I think you called me ‘Wayward,’” she reproved him. “Will you help me improve?” She sent him a poem, “Of Tribulation—these are They,” with the note “I spelled ancle wrong” but did not correct the spelling.

  Again she enclosed poems: along with “A Bird, came down the Walk—,” she sent “Before I got my eye put out—,” “I cannot dance opon my Toes—,” and, it seems, a resplendent “Dare you see a Soul at the ‘White Heat’?” Mostly about the act of creation, these poems told Higginson that even if she could not dance upon her toes—“No Man instructed me”—her poems, irreducible, are distinct, self-sufficient, and much more arresting than standard “Ballet knowledge,” however graceful or well executed. The soul burns at the white heat. Dare he look? “Are these more orderly?” she asked, tongue in cheek.

  Dare you see a Soul at the “White Heat”?

  Then crouch within the door—

  Red—is the Fire’s common tint—

  But when the vivid Ore

  Has vanquished Flame’s conditions—

  It quivers from the Forge

  Without a color, but the Light

  Of unannointed Blaze—

  Least Village, boasts it’s Blacksmith—

  Whose Anvil’s even ring

  Stands symbol for the finer Forge

  That soundless tugs—within—

  Refining these impatient Ores

  With Hammer, and with Blaze

  Until the designated Light

  Repudiate the Forge—

  Dickinson had thrown down the glove, daring him to watch her perform. But poetry was more than a performance, however incandescent; it was transcendent, white-hot, volcanic. “When I try to organize—my little Force explodes,” she told him, “and leaves me bare and charred.”

  Higginson wanted to meet her, this small, wrenlike correspondent with the sherry-colored eyes and exploding force. Was he conscious of the sexual innuendo? Was she? In either case he would have to wait; he had left his study to drill troops at Camp Wool, near Worcester, and prepare them for battle. She at first said nothing and then responded, “You told me in one letter, you could not come to see me ‘now,’ and I made no answer, not because I had none, but did not think myself the price that you should come so far—.”

  She was definitely worth the price. About this both of them tacitly agreed, for they had begun the rare epistolary communication that seems, somehow, more real than bodily contact, with its averted eyes and fidgety hands, its blushes and shuffling feet. “A Letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend,” she would tell him. “Indebted in our talk to attitude and accent, there seems a spectral power in thought that walks alone.” They were able to invent each other, at least in part, as well as speak to each other without bo
unds. For their link was words—their letters, her poetry, his essays. Words meant everything to her and a great deal to him.

  The Evergreens.

  “Of our greatest acts we are ignorant—,” she told him at a later date, recollecting then what his attention, his courtesy, his comprehension offered her during their first months of correspondence. “You were not aware that you saved my Life.”

  Perhaps the same was true for him. In any case, he did save almost every letter.

  IT WAS A CLEAN, well-lit bedroom in the southwest corner of the Homestead. To the west it faced the Evergreens, and from a set of windows to the south Dickinson could peer across rolling meadows, their color fading from yellow in fall to the glittering bone white of winter. And there was the light: “There’s a certain Slant of light, / Winter Afternoons—.” Inside, a Franklin stove relieved the chill; her small mahogany sleigh bed was covered with a warm counterpane. Beyond it sat the bureau, in which Lavinia, years later, would find her manuscripts. And slipped into the southwest corner was the small cherry desk (only seventeen and a half inches square) on which she conducted a vast correspondence and composed almost eighteen hundred poems. “Sweet hours have perished here, / This is a timid room—,” she wrote. It was not.

  No more than five feet tall, she covered her small shoulders with a paisley wool shawl of auburn and orange. Her housedress contained several pockets; supposedly she kept pencil and paper in one of them. In coming years, though, she dressed only in shades of alabaster.

  It was the raw November of 1862, and the war dragged on, but the Springfield Republican trumpeted Higginson’s essay, published in the December Atlantic, “an article upon wildflowers as only T. W. Higginson can write, since no other like him explores the sylvan haunts with the foot of a child, the eye of an artist and the heart of a woman.”

  The Republican was referring to Higginson’s “Procession of the Flowers,” another of his languid nature essays, which concludes, as his essays often do, with a tribute to the art he himself could not produce:

  If, in the simple process of writing, one could physically impart to this page the fragrance of this spray of azalea beside me, what a wonder would it seem!—and yet one ought to be able, by the mere use of language, to supply to every reader the total of that white, honeyed, trailing sweetness, which summer insects haunt and the Spirit of the Universe loves. The defect is not in language, but in men. There is no conceivable beauty of blossom so beautiful as words,—none so graceful, none so perfumed. It is possible to dream of combinations of syllables so delicious that all the dawning and decay of summer cannot rival their perfection, nor winter’s stainless white and azure match their purity and their charm. To write them, were it possible, would be to take rank with Nature; nor is there any other method, even by music, for human art to reach so high.

  Dickinson would agree with him in that trenchant, pithy way of hers: “Nature is a Haunted House—,” she informed him, “but Art—a House that tries to be haunted.”

  BY THE TIME “Procession of the Flowers” appeared in The Atlantic, Higginson had already polished his rifle, packed his duffle, and dispatched a trunk to South Carolina, prompting Dickinson to remark dryly, “I trust the ‘Procession of Flowers’ was not a premonition—.”

  SEVEN

  Intensely Human

  Like many others, Higginson had not expected a long war, but unlike them he was convinced that its outcome, whoever won, “must put the slavery question in a wholly new aspect.” This was the theme of his article “The Ordeal by Battle,” published in the July 1861 Atlantic. “I have never written any political article there before, because there never has been a time when I could write freely without being too radical,” he informed his mother with a certain pride, “so I thought I would use the present opportunity.”

  Higginson insisted that the war be understood as a conflict between competing principles—slavery versus freedom. “Slavery is the root of the rebellion,” he declared, “and so War is proving itself an Abolitionist, whoever else is.” For slavery was a hateful institution, pure and simple. In his chilling essay “Nat Turner’s Insurrection,” he recounted not the insurrection as much as “the far greater horrors of its suppression,” and documenting the hysteria that followed the rebellion—the maiming, the burning, the killing of the black population—Higginson chronicled the brutalities without heat, noting, nonetheless, that those summarily executed were not even identified by name. So where he could, he learned their names, recording them with telltale understatement, as in the case of one woman, called Lucy, about whom we know nothing except that “she was a woman, she was a slave, and she died.” The sentence, clean and unassuming, clearly influenced Ralph Ellison’s elegy for his character Tod Clifton in Invisible Man, published almost a century later. And according to the poet Susan Howe, one of Dickinson’s most intuitive readers, Higginson’s Nat Turner essay may well have inspired the poet’s unforgettable “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—.”

  Strangely encouraged by the Union’s rout at the First Battle of Bull Run, Higginson calculated that “but for this reverse we never should have the law of Congress emancipating slaves used in rebellion.” He referred to the Confiscation Act, passed that summer; the Union’s lawful seizure of property used for insurrection, including slaves, had effectively freed them. But this bolder antislavery policy, as Higginson called it, meant he could no longer stay at home writing essays. “No prominent anti-slavery man has yet taken a marked share in the war,” he observed in the fall, “and…there are a great many in this and other States who would like to go if I do. I have made up my mind to take part in the affair, hoping to aid in settling it the quicker.”

  Perhaps inflating his own importance, Higginson never betrayed his position of the past several years: abolition or nothing. But until the summer of 1862, nothing happened: emancipation was not forthcoming; recruiting offices were temporarily closed. Then, with casualties mounting, the government called for fresh reserves, and Higginson obtained Governor Andrew’s permission to assemble a regiment. As its captain he would finally play a part in the revolution he had called for, fought for, hoped for. All the currents of his life, he hastily scribbled in his journal, had converged. (“Each Life converges to some Centre—,” as Dickinson would write.) He put down his pen. “What I could write I have written and should I never write anything more, no matter.”

  Settling Mary into a parlor and a bedroom in a boardinghouse nearby—he was stationed at Camp John E. Wool, just outside Worcester—he asked Margaret Channing, their niece, to stay with her the days he was gone, Tuesday to Saturday. On Sunday he came home, and on Monday he rejoined his regiment, the Fifty-first Massachusetts, at the barracks. He could not wait to get there and in future years remembered those first heady days “as if one had learned to swim in air, and were striking out for some new planet.” The scratchy uniforms, the mindless drills, the marching, the rules—he relished all of it. A military novice, he read handbooks about formation, maneuvers, and the rules of conduct, but what counted most to him were the men; it was as if he was their father. At night he loved to hear them sing in the dark or watch when, bunks moved aside, as they square-danced, their long arms looping in huge arcs, half the men marking themselves as women by tying a handkerchief to their arm. “In each set,” he told his mother “there are mingled grim & war-worn faces, looking as old as Waterloo, with merely childish faces from school, & there is such an absorption, such a passionate delight that one would say dancing must be a reminiscence of the felicity of Adam before Eve appeared, never to be seen in its full zest while a woman mingled in it.”

  Higginson so thoroughly reveled in the maleness of army life that today scholars consider him a “man of somewhat fluid gender identifications,” especially since in later years he freely admitted to loving his friend from his seminary days, the charming William H. Hurlburt of Charleston, South Carolina, a true southerner, as Higginson had excitedly told his mother, “slender & graceful, dark with r
aven eyes & hair,” a man charismatic and capacious, who translated South American and West Indian poets and was writing a book on Cuba. Hurlburt eventually moved to New York, where he wrote theater criticism for The World; during the Civil War, he was imprisoned as a spy by the Confederacy when he traveled south; and in later years he lived in London, where he was a lesser light in Wilde’s circle. “All that my natural fastidiousness and cautious reserve kept from others I poured on him,” Higginson would reminisce years later; “to say that I would have died for him was nothing.”

  Though they drifted apart, he had loved Hurlburt without shame. And he loved male flesh, muscular and lean, whether in the gymnasium or in the barracks, also without shame. Convention allowed him this physical appreciation of men—part erotic, part aesthetic—while at the same time forbidding as salacious the mere glimpse of a woman’s ankle. And Higginson was a man of delicacy, which also means, particularly in his case, a repressed blue-blood reared to endure privation without complaint no matter how the limits of his sexual life—with whatever gender—saddened him.

  Allowing himself the unself-conscious joy—part sensual, part paternal—of male company, he permitted himself the luxury of looking, watching, savoring, patronizing, and fantasizing, but he remained a spectator. As for women, he discussed them only in cerebral or political terms, though several of his female acquaintances whispered that the handsome Higginson had an eye for the ladies. He definitely liked their attention. Physically fit and slightly vain, he was no longer the gangling boy clutching a pocketful of topics for conversation.

  He was, in other words, noticed. People knew of Wentworth Higginson. They recognized him (he was quite tall); they went to hear his speeches. They read his essays. They saw a limerick about him in the local papers: