Disillusioned by the military, by the government, by the intransigence of the South, he justified his withdrawal into art, claiming—incredibly—that “except to secure the ballot for woman, a contest which is thus far advancing very peaceably, there seems nothing left which need be absolutely fought for; no great influence to keep us from a commonplace and perhaps debasing success.” More and more he preferred a different, more creative writing. “My nature seems to be rather that of an artist than that of a thinker,” he had confided in Emerson, wishing it were so.
Restless, he also befriended Hawthorne’s eldest daughter, the lovely and star-crossed Una, who was briefly engaged to his favorite nephew, Storrow. Calling on Hawthorne’s widow and daughters at the Wayside, itself a vestige of former times, Higginson sat in their plain, chilly parlor—perhaps in the very chair where Hawthorne had sat—and thumbed through the great man’s notebooks. This was what he wanted: Hawthorne’s rectitude, his devotion to his art, his single-mindedness. If he had to ignore Hawthorne’s despair or his odd friendship with Franklin Pierce, so be it; all that paled next to the man’s achievement. The only immortality is a book.
If his commitment to social change prevented Higginson’s devoting himself to art, it also protected him from the fear that, without it, he might lose his sense of direction, as he suggested in “A Night in the Water.” But now his mother, recently deceased, was unable to censure him, and the war—and its disappointing aftermath—momentarily scraped his conscience clean, so he rolled up his sleeves and wrote three sketches of “Oldport,” the setting for his novel Malbone, and two short stories, “The Haunted Window” and “An Artist’s Dream.” These tales assuaged his guilt about writing Malbone because, in them, he punishes the protagonists for doing what he himself wished to do.
Flavored with atmospheric Gothic effects, “The Haunted Window” is interesting less for its contrived plot and moral pabulum than for the fact that the apparition’s name is Emilia, a name that Higginson will use again in his novel. Emilia is art, the tempting seductress who drives men mad. And in the other story, pseudo-Hawthorne even to the title (“An Artist’s Dream”), Higginson’s narrator visits a happily married artist and his beautiful wife, Laura—the Petrarchan reference meant to be self-evident—and realizes that while the couple are passionate about each other, they mostly ignore their child. “Is it,” asks Laura, referring to her marriage, “a great consecration, or a great crime.” This answer is conventionally obvious, and when she dies, her bereaved husband discovers that it is their child and not his art that can relieve his awful suffering: “the artist had attained his dream,” Higginson concludes his fable.
The apex of all this was Malbone, the Hawthornean romance he announced to his sisters not long after his second trip to the Wayside, jubilantly reporting that Fields would be printing it serially in The Atlantic during the first six months of 1869. This was the book, published later that year, that Dickinson had planted on the table at the Homestead when he came to call.
Malbone is the story of Higginson’s doppelgänger, the indolent and fickle Philip Malbone, whose good looks turn the heads of both sexes. Higginson admitted that he had modeled Malbone in part on William Hurlburt, but he is also based on Higginson’s nephew Storrow, whose unpardonable sin—a dalliance with another woman?—caused Una Hawthorne suddenly to break their engagement. But Malbone mostly sounds like Higginson himself, recast as the artist who falls in love with his fiancée’s untamed half sister, Emilia, often referred to as Emily.
When he wrote Malbone, Higginson had not yet met Emily Dickinson in person, so he freely imagined her as lovely but intangible, with “a certain wild, entangled look…, as of some untamed outdoor thing, and [with] a kind of pathetic lost sweetness in her voice, which made her at once and forever a heroine of romance.” And it is this Emily/Emilia that is his Laura, his ideal, his symbol of the unadulterated, untrammeled pursuit of art. For, as Malbone says, “Every one must have something to which his dreams can cling, amid the degradations of actual life, and this tie is more real than the degradation; and if he holds to the tie, it will one day save him.”
But, also like Higginson, Malbone cannot attain his dream lover: he cannot lose himself in his pursuit of the ideal, and thus the affair between Malbone and Emilia ends tragically, when late one night, Emilia drowns in a stormy, featureless sea.
Emilia gone, Higginson thus restores the order of things, as convention prescribes. But convention had nothing to say about the nooks and crannies of an unusual friendship.
THE LONG-ANTICIPATED MEETING: in the Homestead parlor after eight years of correspondence and tantalizing bafflement, Emily Dickinson and Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson stood together in the same room. “Forgive me if I am frightened,” she apologized. “I never see strangers & hardly know what I say—.” Nervous, she talked without stopping. Occasionally she paused to ask him to speak and then started all over again. “Manner between Angie Tilton & Mr. Alcott,” he noted, referring to the two gabbiest people he knew, “but thoroughly ingenuous & simple which they are not & saying many things which you would have thought foolish & I wise.”
He listed a few of her pungent observations:
“I find ecstasy in living—the mere sense of living is joy enough.”
“How do most people live without any thoughts.”
“Is it oblivion or absorption when things pass from our minds?”
“Truth is such a rare thing it is delightful to tell it.”
She told him more about her family. Her father read only on Sunday, “lonely & rigorous books,” she added for emphasis. She made bread for her father because he liked only hers, Higginson noted, “& says, ‘people must have puddings’ this very dreamily, as if they were comets—so she makes them.” Doubtless she was ironic. And hyperbolic. She claimed she had not known how to read a clock until she was fifteen. “My father thought he had taught me but I did not understand & I was afraid to say I did not & afraid to ask any one else lest he should know.” Her mother was weak. “I never had a mother,” she said. “I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.” Dickinson endured alone.
They discussed literature. She said that she and her brother had hidden Longfellow’s novel Kavanagh under the piano cover to outfox their strict father, who forbade it. A friend concealed other books in a bush by the door. To read was to defy with pleasure.
They discussed poetry. Suggestively. Here was another form of transgression and transformation, erotic and inflammatory. “If I read a book,” she declared, “[and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way.”
Poetry, again, as explosive force: he must have felt the pull, the energy, her sexuality. He left exhausted but in the evening walked back to the house. Afterward, hinting at the sexual tension—and release—of the whole experience, he admitted he had never met anyone “who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me.”
“I am glad not to live near her,” he concluded.
The remarkable encounter, far exceeding his expectations, was too much for him.
He had flirted with the writer Helen Hunt, he had flirted with others, but he had always chosen the straight and narrow. Emily Dickinson demanded nothing short of a full commitment. Irreducibly herself, without compromise, she took everything, drained the cup, was irresistible. And to Higginson, far too dangerous.
WHEN HE TOOK HIS HAT for the last time that day, he promised the poet he would come again sometime. “Say in a long time,” she mischievously answered, “that will be nearer. Some time is nothing.”
As usual she was right.
TEN
Her Deathless Syllable
Something indescribable had passed between them, something encapsulated in his remark that she “drew” from him and in her similar observation, sent to him a
fter the visit, that “the Vein cannot thank the Artery.” But on the surface, Higginson’s coming to Amherst had changed nothing. After he left, he saw his family in Brattleboro before riding back to Newport, which he liked less and less, and to Mary, who suffered more and more. He attended meetings of the Radical Club, delivered his speeches, wrote his journalism, chugged along the railroad to Boston and New York. And he composed an essay defending Sappho, “the most eminent poetess in the world,” against prurient hecklers made anxious, he believed, precisely because she was a woman.
Did he recognize the similarities between Dickinson and the Mytilene poet? It seems not; yet while he ranked Sappho “unapproached among women, even to the present day,” the timing of the essay suggests Dickinson tugged at the back of his mind, her lapidary lyric reminding him of what he admired in the ancient author. And so, though she had drained him, Higginson could not, would not close the door. He understood now she would never come to Boston to sit in the high-toned drawing rooms of the ladies. He would have to go to her.
Impossible. Instead, both of them savored the safe, satisfying distance of their subtle intimacy.
And she wanted more. When he mentioned the possibility of coming back to lecture at the college, she asked, almost wistfully, “Could you not come without the Lecture if the project failed?” She sent more verse. “When I hoped I feared—/ Since I hoped I dared,” she wrote, obliquely confiding how much she had anticipated his visit, and in “Remembrance has a Rear and Front” she alluded to her feelings when it was over:
Remembrance has a Rear and Front.
’Tis something like a House—
It has a Garret also
For Refuse and the Mouse—
Besides the deepest Cellar
That ever Mason laid—
Look to it by it’s Fathoms
Ourselves be not pursued—
She remembered him; she would long remember him. (Does her image of “Rear and Front” refer to the military?) But in the poem’s perplexing last lines, Dickinson suggested that in remembrance lay unspeakable, haunting loneliness.
“I remember your coming as serious sweetness placed now with the Unreal—,” she commented in September, adding two lines of poetry to the body of her letter, as was her custom:
Trust adjusts her “Peradventure”—
Phantoms entered “and not you.”
She then barraged him with questions: Where could she find the poems of Maria White Lowell he mentioned? “You told me Mrs Lowell was Mr Lowell’s ‘inspiration’ What is inspiration?” she cagily asked. As for an article of Wentworth’s in The Woman’s Journal, “perhaps the only one you wrote that I never knew,” would he send it? She apologized for the request with dramatic flourish, “Shortness to live has made me bold” no wonder her brother, Austin, accused her of being theatrical and years later, after her death, said she had posed in her letters to Higginson. But doubtless she posed to Austin, too, concealing from him the turbulence of her feelings and frequently speaking in parables he likely did not comprehend.
She penciled yet another poem for Higginson. This one also may refer to their meeting:
The Riddle that we guess
We speedily despise—
Not anything is stale so long
As Yesterday’s Surprise.
Had she been a disappointment? Did she fear she was a riddle gone stale? “You ask great questions accidentally,” she remarked. “To answer them would be events.”
She drafted more poems to him, evidently unsent. “Too happy Time dissolves itself / And leaves no remnant by—/ ’Tis Anguish not a Feather hath / Or too much weight to fly—.” Perhaps she did not want him to know, though, how fleeting—how happy—their time together had been. “I was refreshed by your strong Letter,” she thanked him in another note, also apparently unmailed. She jotted out her replies to him in rough drafts, making certain that she put herself forward with much the same vigilant care that she lavished on her verse, which, it seems, he now considered extraordinary. “Thank you for Greatness—I will have deserved it in a longer time!” she exclaimed, the future perfect tense wittily revealing her intentions.
She wrote to Higginson as if he grasped her meaning, though he was, as he admitted, often befuddled. But he understood enough to please her, that was clear. And she coached him, coaxed him, comprehended him. “You place the truth in opposite—,” she reminded him after his visit, “because the fear is mine, dear friend, and the power your’s—.” He did not know his own strength; her backbone made of steel, she pretended fragility. Here, in a poem ostensibly describing a grave, she asks Higginson to “Step lightly on this narrow Spot—”:
Step lightly on this narrow Spot—
The Broadest Land that grows
Is not so ample as the Breast
These Emerald Seams enclose—
Step lofty for this name be told
As far as cannon dwell,
Or Flag subsist, or Fame export
Her deathless Syllable
Eight years earlier, she had told him that she could not escape fame if it belonged to her, but since it did not, and probably would not, “My Barefoot-Rank is better.” Though real, diffidence was part of her performance. She rejected, fancied, courted, renounced, and intended to collar fame on her own terms, as the last four lines of the poem suggest. A book is the only immortality, Higginson had said. She stood ready, a loaded gun.
Perhaps that is why she sewed her poems together in packets with thread, making them open and close like a folio. Perhaps those packets were intended as books that might sit, with their kinsmen, on a shelf. (“I thank these Kinsmen of the Shelf—,” she wrote in “Unto my Books—so good to turn—.”) And perhaps she surmised her subtle poems, bestowed on only a few, would disappear in the common light of conventional day—but would persist, as indeed they did, if she chose her readers wisely.
As for other poets, she did not read Joaquin Miller, as she told Higginson, who’d inquired, and she complimented the poems of Helen Hunt, which he’d recently reviewed in The Atlantic: “Stronger than any written by Women since Mrs—Browning, with the exception of Mrs. Lewes.” Emily duplicated Wentworth’s language before pausing and then adding, equivocally, “—but truth like Ancestor’s Brocades can stand alone.”
It was Higginson’s writing she complimented most often, and he in turn wanted to know what she thought of it. When she failed to comment on his Atlantic piece “A Shadow,” he prodded her, or so we can gather from her somewhat noncommittal reply: “I thought I spoke to you of the shadow—It affects me.” Yet his new collection, Atlantic Essays, which included “A Letter to a Young Contributor,” prompted Emily to ask him again to guide her. Even if he could offer her nothing but encouragement and, those few grammatical touch-ups certain only to tickle her, she desired his opinion, perhaps more than ever.
That opinion was far higher than his critics have guessed. Frequently he praised her poems to friends in Newport, and when he happened on the volume published by another Amherst native, Emily Fowler Ford, he cried, “Amherst must be a nest of poetesses.” As one friend reported, he boasted that he had “letters from Emily Dickinson containing the loveliest little delicate bits of poetry imaginable—he said they always reminded him of skeleton leaves so pretty,” but when asked why they weren’t widely available, he answered, “They were too delicate—not strong enough to publish.” Perhaps he believed this, but perhaps he was protecting Dickinson, who was ambivalent about publishing—at least then. Perhaps both are true.
Higginson did promote the poems of another Amherst native, Helen Hunt, who remembered the Dickinsons from childhood: the pompous father, the invalid wife, the fat and rusticated sister. But Hunt had hated Amherst. “I do think Amherst girls turn out (excuse me—) horridly!” she once declared. That was a lifetime ago. In 1852 she had married Edward Bissell Hunt, an army engineer whom Emily herself remembered as once saying, after a visit, that he’d come back in a year; “if I say a shorter time it
will be longer,” he’d added. (The memory inspired an early Dickinson sleuth to propose Major Hunt as Dickinson’s Master, although the evidence is pretty thin.) But Emily doubtless shared the anecdote with Higginson to tease him about his own vague promise of return.
Inventor of a one-person submarine, Major Hunt was killed when his vessel accidentally exploded, and in 1866, after the Hunts’ only surviving son had died of diphtheria, Helen Hunt resettled in Newport, where she and her husband had briefly lived. There the resilient widow met Colonel Higginson, with whom, or so several scholars have speculated, she fell in love.
Maybe so. Hunt did find support in this overburdened husband, and Higginson responded warmly to her, entranced by her zeal for poetry and people. “Her friendships with men had the frankness and openness that most women show only to one another,” Higginson later noted, “and her friendships with women had the romance and ideal atmosphere that her sex usually reserves for men.” But loyal to Mary and propriety, he checked himself. And to judge by her novel Mercy Philbrick’s Choice, he disappointed her, for there the Higginson-like character is pitifully harnessed to an invalid relative, “the one great duty of his life.” To a friend, Hunt was more explicit: he steps too softly, Hunt said of Higginson, “knocks like a baby at the door, & then opens it a quarter of the way & comes in edgewise!”
Yet he launched her career, advising her to establish herself by writing reviews and then urging her poems, which he considered intensely passionate, on a reluctant Fields, who published them, as it happened, to wide success. Higginson read almost everything she wrote, editing much of her work with his blue pencil. “I shall never write a sentence, so long as I live,” Hunt would thank him, “without studying it from the standpoint of whether you would think it could be bettered.” He praised her novels, like Ramona, which called attention to the plight of Mission Indians and which he otherwise would have considered didactic, but since she never wholly lost her sense of form, far more important to him than any moral mission, he placed Hunt’s work above that of any American woman—except, as he later admitted, Emily Dickinson.
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