White Heat

by Brenda Wineapple

  Attraction to his fellow boarder was not the only reason Higginson served as Hunt’s literary cicerone. He consistently boosted women writers, offering editorial advice as well as entrée into the literary world. In addition to Hunt and Harriet Prescott Spofford, there were Celia Thaxter, Rose Terry Cooke, Kate Field, Lucy Larcom, and Emma Lazarus, to name just a few of the authors whose craft he praised, whose work he edited, whose essays and verse he forwarded to editors like Fields, Theodore Tilton, and, later, Richard Watson Gilder. Quality knew no gender, he insisted, just hard work, commitment, sacrifice. His eulogy of Charlotte Hawes, a friend from his Worcester days, contained his mantra about achieving “perfection in every sentence”—rewriting, if need be, until each word glimmered.

  After the war he redoubled his commitment to equal pay for women, equal education, and equal rights under the law, as well as his commitment to their receiving from an early age the kind of material, economic, and emotional support generally denied them. “In almost any town in New England the obstacle in the studious girl is not want of time,” he declared, “but want of teaching and encouragement.” He wrote hundreds of articles on the subject, the cause of women replacing abolition as his social passion. But war had siphoned off most of the energy of the women’s movement, and the movement itself suffered an internal rupture when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony campaigned against the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Everyone walks through the door or no one does, insisted Stanton and Anthony, who opposed any amendment giving the vote only to men. More moderate feminists and former abolitionists disagreed, arguing this was the “Negro’s hour.” The ladies’ turn would come. Higginson sided with the moderates. The enfranchisement of black men is what he had fought for, and much as he supported women’s rights, he could not support any demand that threatened to protract his thirty-year battle against slavery.

  In 1869, Stanton and Anthony founded the all-female National Woman Suffrage Association. (Frederick Douglass had called Stanton and Anthony racist for putting woman suffrage ahead of the gubernatorial candidacy of a black man.) That same year Higginson, along with Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and Julia Ward Howe, formed the American Woman Suffrage Association: “Without deprecating the value of Associations already existing, it is yet deemed…an organization at once more comprehensive and more widely representative.” They were reformers, not revolutionaries.

  The man who had run guns to Kansas, a bowie knife stuck in his boot, had not renounced radicalism as much as he had toned it down, subordinating it to a pragmatism born of experience and disappointment: John Brown had been hanged; and the war waged to free the slaves had lasted four miserable years, cost over six hundred thousand lives, and left in its wake a racist infrastructure in the South and “colorphobia” in the North. “There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power,” Epictetus had written; change the things we can change.

  He tried to explain his position to Stanton, who patiently shook her head. “No! my dear friend we are right in our present position,” she replied. “We demand suffrage for all the citizens of the republic in Reconstruction. I might not talk of negroes or women, but citizens.” Higginson reverted to the hopeful notion he had once rejected: through suasion, law, and justice, women would gain the vote and the rights they deserved. No longer could he believe, as he once had, in disunion. “The world has always more respect for those who are unwisely zealous than for those who are fastidiously inactive,” he admitted to Harriet Beecher Stowe. These days, though, he occupied a middle ground, which he considered the better side of wisdom.

  One of his biographers quipped of Higginson that “before the war he never missed a good fight; after it he never joined one.” This is not quite fair. Distancing himself without acrimony from Stanton and Anthony’s all-or-nothing position on woman suffrage, Higginson did not entirely disagree with it. “If the conservatives think that because it [our organization] is called the Woman Suffrage Association it has no further object, they are greatly mistaken,” he declared. “Its purpose and aim are to equalize the sexes in all the relations of life; to reduce the inequities that now exist in matters of education, in social life and in the professions—to make them equal in all respects before the law, society, and the world.”

  He addressed the first convention of the American Woman Suffrage Association in November 1869—before he visited Amherst—and he planned to write an “Intellectual History of Women”—“my magnum opus, if I can really ever get to it.” He praised women’s colleges, women’s athletics, and a woman’s right to choose not to marry or bear children. He nominated women for membership in various bastions of male privilege, such as the National Institute of Arts, Science and Letters, which admitted Julia Ward Howe as a result. By 1873, he was president of the American Woman Suffrage Association, and in his weekly editorials to The Woman’s Journal, its organ, he wrote sleek essays putting forward its case: “If there is only one woman in the nation who claims the right to vote, she ought to have it.” Wondering how and why so many women seemed to oppose suffrage, he continued, “I do not see how any woman can help a thrill of indignation, when she first opens her eyes to the fact that it is really contempt, not reverence, that has so long kept her sex from an equal share of legal, political, and educational rights.”

  Literary rights, too: “The yearning for a literary career is just now greater among women than among men,” he observed. “Perhaps it is because of some literary successes lately achieved by women. Perhaps it is because they have fewer outlets for their energies.” Both were true. Women writers had entered the exclusive precincts of the literary marketplace, which, though restricted, was more welcoming than other professional venues. Higginson said he liked ambitious women who strove to achieve something against all odds, and he remarked that their letters to him—Dickinson’s included?—“reveal such intellectual ardor and imagination, such modesty, and such patience under difficulties, as to do good to the reader, whatever they may do to the writer.” Paternalistic, he nonetheless told them to heed their internal compass and, as if echoing Dickinson, to determine—as he must—how they define success. Success is counted sweetest, she had said, by those who never succeed.

  And Higginson, who yearned for literary fame and likewise condemned it, could understand the conflict in others: to publish or not to publish, to advance oneself or not. Though driven, he who castigated his own need for recognition could easily identify with women reluctant to assert themselves. Nudging open literary doors for Helen Hunt, he could have done the same for Emily Dickinson. One suspects he would have, were she tractable, which she was not. Her own ambivalence about publishing her work, her own tensile strength, and her choice of an alternative route of publication—circulating her poems among friends, nurturing her reputation by piquing curiosity—rendered moot what Higginson could offer in the way of conventional channels. And Dickinson would know she did not write for—nor would be appreciated by—humdrum editors and standard readers.

  Accused by the cadres of scholars who wish she had contacted a more prescient correspondent, like one of them, Higginson was a vigorous, liberal advocate of women writing, women voting, women educated and free, self-respecting and strong. Of this Dickinson had been amply aware for a very long time. She took what she needed and discarded the rest.

  IN THE SPRING OF 1872, Higginson went to Europe, which he had long wanted to do. Depressed by Mary’s deteriorated condition, frightened by the sudden death of his brother Francis, disgusted by Newport’s empty sparkle, flummoxed by Susan B. Anthony’s arrest, and annoyed by the editorial change at The Atlantic, where a callow William Dean Howells had replaced Fields as editor, Higginson accepted an offer to sail with his brother Waldo to England for a two-month visit. His sister Anna stayed with Mary; Mrs. Hunt went to California: time, all around, for a change of air.

  “I am happy you have the Travel you so long desire,” Emily coolly noted on his return, “and chastened—that my
Master met neither accident nor Death.” Most of all, though, she wanted him to travel to her. “Could you come again that would be far better—,” she observed, “though the finest wish is the futile one.”

  Resuming her role as Scholar, she again sent him poems. “To disappear enhances—The Man that runs away / Is tinctured for an instant with Immortality,” one of them begins, her use of “runs away” rather than “goes away” suggesting that she knew how much she had drained his nerve power. She also included the pointed “He preached opon ‘Breadth’ till it argued him narrow—,” about the churchly self-righteous, sure to please him. And then there were the riddles of “The Sea said ‘Come’ to the Brook.”

  The Sea said “Come” to the Brook—

  The Brook said “Let me grow”—

  The Sea said “then you will be a Sea—

  I want a Brook—Come now”!

  The Sea said “Go” to the Sea—

  The Sea said “I am he

  You cherished”—“Learned Waters—

  Wisdom is stale—to Me”—

  Is Dickinson the Brook, telling Higginson she wants to grow into a sea by herself? But the Sea wants to keep the Brook as she is, for in the second stanza, once she has swelled to a sea, the Sea turns away, disappointed: “‘Learned Waters—/ Wisdom is stale—to Me’—.” It was an impasse.

  Yet Dickinson coquettishly continued to ask for the advice he proffered, as was their ritual, and she continued to show him what she was writing. “Thank you for the ‘Lesson,’” she customarily responded, probably in late 1872. “I will study it though hitherto.” And when she mailed him poems or wrote to him, if he did not answer soon, she plaintively tried again. “Could you teach me now?” or “Will you instruct me then no more?”

  Likely he recognized how little she needed from him, even technically. Her imagination was voracious, her images disquieting, her vision idiosyncratic, her language alive and gleaming. Yet she wanted to keep him close by and involved. “Longing is like the Seed / ,” she wrote him in another poem, “That wrestles in the Ground, / Believing if it intercede / It shall at length be found.”

  Around this same time she also enclosed a leaf or a flower along with the poem “Dominion lasts until obtained—.” It was a gift, an offering, mystical, seductive, brazen: “These are the Brides of permanence—/ Supplanting me and you.” She also sent one of her most accessible poems, “The Wind begun to rock the Grass,” its description keen, about the coming of a summer squall. As usual, she had revised the poem—an earlier version uses the verb “knead” instead of “rock” in the first line (“The Wind begun to knead the Grass—/ As Women do a Dough—”)—but here is the copy she wanted Higginson to have:

  The Wind begun to rock the Grass

  With threatening tunes and low—

  He flung a Menace at the Earth—

  A Menace at the Sky—

  The Leaves unhooked themselves from trees

  And started all abroad,

  The Dust did scoop itself like Hands

  And throw away the Road.

  The Wagons quickened on the Streets—

  The Thunder hurried slow—

  The Lightning showed a Yellow Beak,

  And then a livid Claw—

  The Birds put up the Bars to Nests

  The Cattle fled to Barns—

  Then came one Drop of Giant Rain

  And then as if the Hands

  That held the Dams had parted hold

  The Water Wrecked the Sky

  But overlooked my Father’s House,

  Just quartering a tree.

  Strong, unpredictable verbs—wind rocking the grass, leaves unhooking themselves, dust scooping itself “like Hands”—combine to create the steady, inescapable onset of the storm—there is nothing we can do to forestall or prevent it—until the last stanza, when the “Water Wrecked the Sky”: relief; then in an instant, horror.

  She had asked if he could teach her now. “Your poem about the storm is fine,” Higginson answered. “It gives the sudden transitions.”

  The sudden transitions: one can assume she was satisfied.

  MOST OF ALL SHE WISHED he would come back to Amherst.

  And he did.

  He arrived in the sleepy town on December 3, 1873. Though wintry, the air was mild and melting, the village calm, the trees bare, the sky starched, the undergraduates polite and numerous and, as Higginson noticed, obliged to exercise (unlike Harvard boys) and to listen to him lecture on woman suffrage, for which he was paid one hundred dollars.

  He also inspected their gymnasium, fidgeted through a rhetoric class, chatted with President Stearns, and managed, as he had promised, to call on Miss Dickinson. Unfortunately for us, there is no transcript. If Higginson scribbled out his impressions for Mary, neither his notes nor the letters survive. Or, sensitive to the fact that Mary envied his freedom and distrusted his penchant for female companionship, particularly for women whose poetry he savored, he may have simply not recorded the visit.

  Mary was ill disposed to his taste—she deplored Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh—and surveyed his female friends with misgiving. “I don’t dare die and leave the Colonel,” she once snapped; “there are so many women waiting for him!” Nor was she particularly fond of Miss Dickinson, who had intrigued her husband with that aside of hers—“there is always one thing to be grateful for—that one is one’s self & not somebody else”—which Mary thought “particularly absurd in E. D.’s case.”

  There is, though, a brief account of his visit in a letter to his sisters: “I saw my eccentric poetess Miss Emily Dickinson who never goes outside her father’s ground & sees only me & a few others,” he reported. Promising to read Dickinson’s poetry to them when they came to Newport, he told how she had greeted him, holding a flower, this time a Daphne odora. Again she had clad her diminutive frame in fresh white. But as if distancing himself, for the sake of his sisters or because, once again, Emily had exhausted him, he concluded, “I’m afraid Mary’s other remark, ‘Oh why do the insane so cling to you?’ still holds.”

  “How long are you going to stay,” Dickinson had immediately asked, her voice barely audible. He couldn’t stay long but did provide other assurances, promising he would not forget her, and four weeks later he sent New Year’s greetings to tell her that he well remembered his recent trip to Amherst “& especially the time spent with you. It seemed to give you some happiness, and I hope it did;—certainly I enjoyed being with you.”

  These are not the words of the condescending cavalier come to gape at the “eccentric poetess.” “Each time we seem to come together as old & tried friends,” he reminded her, “and I certainly feel that I have known you long & well, through the beautiful thoughts and words you have sent me. I hope you will not cease to trust me and turn to me; and I will try to speak the truth to you, and with love.”

  “THANK YOU, DEAR FRIEND, for my ‘New Year’ but did you not confer it?” Emily wrote Wentworth in early 1874, just a few weeks after he left. “Had your scholar permission to fashion your’s, it were perhaps too fair. I always ran Home to Awe when a child, if anything befell me.

  “He was an awful Mother,” she continued, making the mother, “Awe,” masculine, “but I liked him better than none. There remained this shelter after you left me the other Day.”

  Grateful for his recent visit, she continued, “Of your flitting Coming it is fair to think. Like the Bee’s Coupe—vanishing in Music. Would you with the Bee return, what a firm of Noon!”

  She was delighted to receive his recent letter, in which she still “heard him.” “We hear after we see.”

  She then told him a story that reads like an allegory. “Meeting a Bird this Morning,” she said, “I begun to flee. He saw it and sung.” Did the Bird symbolize Wentworth, who, appreciating her shyness, sang to her—wrote to her—and offered his reassurance?

  Both she and Higginson considered writing another form of nature, a second nature, as Emerson had said of
art, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree; but less pastoral than the transcendentalist guru, they saw nature as also a haunted house, as Dickinson had said, art a house that tries to be haunted. “When the paths that we have personally traversed are exhausted,” Higginson noted in one of the essays Dickinson liked best, “memory holds almost as clearly those which the poets have trodden for us, those innumerable by-ways of Shakespeare, each more real than any high-road in England; or Chaucer’s ‘Little path I found / Of mintes full and fennell greene.’”

  Writing as memory—indeed, memory itself—had become his implicit subject, and seasoning his essays with a characteristic pinch of nostalgia—recall “all the best description is in memoriam” from “Water-Lilies”—Higginson sidestepped the sudden transitions. “I have fineness,” he said, evaluating himself candidly, “but some want of copiousness and fertility…. I wish I could, without sacrificing polish, write with that exuberance and hearty zeal.” Grace and decency were his forte. “My gentility is chronic,” he observed a little sadly shortly after his visit to Emily, recommending to her—to himself—cultivation of what he called the “ruddy hues of life.”

  “I wish you could see some field lilies, yellow & scarlet, painted in water colors that are just sent to us for Christmas,” Wentworth wistfully wrote to her, knowing what she liked and what she didn’t. “These are not your favorite colors, & perhaps I love the azure & gold myself.” Then he added an afterthought directed at himself as well as her: “But perhaps we should learn to love & cultivate these ruddy hues.”