White Heat

by Brenda Wineapple

  His letters arrived Mondays. “Tuesday is a deeply depressed Day—,” she scribbled on a scrap of paper; “it is not far enough from your dear note for the embryo of another to form…but when the Sun begins to turn the corner Thursday night—everything refreshes—the soft uplifting grows till by the time it is Sunday night, all my Life [cheek] is Fever with nearness to your blissful words [rippling words].” He came to visit, and when he left, she mused, “Were Departure Separation there would be neither Nature nor Art, for there would be no world.”

  These tatters of passion reach us through Austin, who may have rescued them from Vinnie’s fire. Years later, when Mabel Loomis Todd was preparing a book of Dickinson’s letters, he presumably handed her an old brown envelope and with typical understatement said the contents were curious. Todd read the letters, stuffed them back into the envelope, and though she decided not to publish them, she did not give them back. Instead, she placed them under lock and key in a camphorwood chest containing other treasured Dickinson papers, and not until her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, published the slim blue-covered Emily Dickinson: A Revelation in 1954, a portrait of Lord as the frontispiece, were the contents of the envelope divulged.

  Among the secrets never divulged are whether Judge Lord read or admired Dickinson’s poetry and whether she even showed it to him. Surely he was aware that her reputation had traveled beyond the Pelham Hills. In the summer of 1878, the Springfield Republican alleged that the undisclosed author of the popular stories by Saxe Holm was not, as supposed, Helen Hunt Jackson but an Amherst recluse with a connection to literature and flowers who, clad in white like Hawthorne’s Hilda, devoted her life to a single idea. Clearly the author of those stories saw into the heart of small spaces, and a subtle writer, which Jackson definitely was not, shunted not the world but its pain. Another paper, the Springfield Union, jumped on the speculating bandwagon and declared that the anonymous author had to be a Dickinson.

  With brusque discourtesy, the Republican then denied its own allegation. “We can only say that we happen to know that no person by the name of Dickinson is in any way responsible for the Saxe Holm stories,” barked the editor, his voice sounding very much like Austin’s.

  THE ELDEST OF FIVE SISTERS, Minnie Thacher was the niece of the first Mrs. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and, as Higginson observed, “an old-fashioned girl.” Shy and modest, she never wore a low-necked dress in her life, nor, thank goodness, had she bored holes in her ears to dangle rings from; rather, she was “exquisitely refined & dainty in all her ways,” Higginson bragged as if he had never cared a fig for women’s rights or their independence.

  His family was speechless. Having assumed that if he remarried, he would naturally choose his bride from the ranks of the woman suffrage movement, they never imagined he might pluck her out of a bouquet of pastel Newport damsels. His friends were flabbergasted. To their uneasy inquiries, Higginson explained that he had no choice: home and family were his “only safety,” he had emphatically said. “I’m adrift in the universe without it.” Coming from the freedom fighter of yore, the admission was peculiar, but the man who feared drowning in a river of his own fancy needed to cling to a raft, pretty and predictable. Brittle are the piers.

  The couple had met two years earlier in Newport, where Minnie had evidently stayed for a few days with the Higginsons, and Higginson courteously admired her prose sketches, Seashore and Prairie, mentioning them in The Woman’s Journal as exhibiting the “clear good-sense and…modest faithfulness” of their author. He divulged little else about the hasty courtship. Instead he circulated the compliments of friends polite enough to congratulate the couple: Celia Thaxter compared Minnie to Pallas Athene, and Louise Moulton said she was mayflowers and moonlight. Higginson shared the metaphors with Dickinson, who responded with a satiric laugh: “I shall pick ‘May flowers’ more furtively,” she said, “and feel new awe of ‘Moonlight.’”

  A small wedding took place on the first of February, 1879, at the home of Minnie’s parents in West Newton. Samuel Longfellow, Higginson’s longtime friend from divinity school, presided, and the Harvard poet himself also joined the small group. Fit and dapper, Higginson stood next to his charming bride as if nothing had happened: not his dismissal from Newburyport almost thirty years earlier, not Thomas Sims or the Anthony Burns debacle, not Kansas, the war, South Carolina, emancipation: none of it.

  Perhaps, then, it was to lay his past to rest that the newlyweds trekked south to Harpers Ferry for their honeymoon. Supposedly they went to meet Minnie’s relatives, but the real reason, at least for Higginson, was to walk among sites connected to bygone days: the small firehouse in the armory yard from which John Brown had shot at federal troops, the courthouse where he was tried, the jail yard where he was confined: ghostlike, all of it.

  In Cambridge, though, he leaped into life. If rejected as an outsider in Newport, as he had believed, in Cambridge he was the Colonel, a local hero, popular and sought after. “I shall no doubt do something or other to dispel it before a great while,” he joked to a friend. Elected president of the Young Men’s Republican Club and appointed the governor’s chief of staff, he declined to run for mayor of Cambridge but did serve two years in the Massachusetts legislature, where he opposed compulsory Bible reading in public schools and supported abolishing the poll tax qualification to vote. He campaigned for woman suffrage and backed the establishment of Harvard Annex (later Radcliffe) so that young women could receive an education comparable to that of Harvard men. Maybe they’d enter Harvard itself someday. He hoped his daughter would.

  That daughter, named Louisa for his mother and sister, was born in January 1880 and seven weeks later died of cerebral meningitis. The instant she heard, Dickinson contacted the bereaved father.

  The Face in Evanescence lain

  Is more distinct than our’s—

  And our’s surrendered for it’s sake

  As Capsules are for Flower’s—

  Higginson answered her right away, and she wrote again. “Most of our Moments are Moments of Preface,” she instructed this Master with gentle pith. We begin; that is all. Signing her note “Your Scholar,” she did not tease him this time; his description of the infant Louisa had touched a chord, and just a few months later she was telling him about an Indian woman at her kitchen door, carrying baskets and a “dazzling Baby” that reminded her of the little girl she never met. If a gulf had opened between them, Higginson’s daughter temporarily bridged it.

  And when another daughter, Margaret, was born to the Higginsons the following year, Dickinson congratulated the Colonel with unalloyed pleasure. “I know but little of Little Ones, but love them very softly—,” she said, welcoming this little one with a verse:

  “Go traveling with us”!

  Her Travels daily be

  By routes of ecstasy

  To Evening’s Sea—

  And Higginson was ecstatic. Wheeling the baby carriage beneath the wide elms flanking his beloved Cambridge streets, he nabbed passersby to show off his achievement before trundling back home to the Queen Anne–style house, dark brown and all the rage, that he had built on Buckingham Street, between Mount Auburn Cemetery and Harvard College. It was the first house the Colonel ever owned, and as soon as it was finished, he placed an old brass knocker on the front door above the brass plate with “S. Higginson” engraved on it; both items were from the old house on Kirkland Street. But in the front hallway he hung something of his own: the sword decorated in the colors of his regiment that the freedmen of South Carolina had presented to him, with gratitude, before he left Beaufort.

  Higginson home, Buckingham Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1880.

  “It is such inexpressible happiness to have at last a permanent home,” he told his sister, echoing Emily, though in his case it was the return of the native, settled, after all these bleeding and peripatetic years.

  IN AMHERST, DICKINSON herself had settled into a routine of passion and solicitude, sketching out love lett
ers to her judge while tending her mother night and day, tirelessly soothing her, reading to her, fanning her in the heat, and lying to her in all weather about her condition. “The responsibility of Pathos is almost more than the responsibility of Care,” Emily told Elizabeth Holland. One day slid into another. “I hardly have said, ‘Good Morning, Mother,’ when I hear myself saying ‘Mother,—Good Night—.”

  If Dickinson seemed happier, her romance with Lord was the likely reason—that and her having assumed a new authority at the Homestead. Relieved of her father’s stony frown, no matter how she loved it, and Mrs. Dickinson’s moralizing, Emily no longer had to fight for independence; now she just assumed it and wore it well. If she and Austin dared talk about the extension of consciousness after death, a subject their mother considered “very improper,” Dickinson airily quipped that her mother “forgets we are past ‘Correction in Righteousness.’” The children were adults, as if for the first time.

  There were other indications of change, small but subtle: when asked, Dickinson offered to contribute three poems to a charity raising money for indigent children. Again she turned to Higginson. “I have promised three Hymns to a charity, but without your approval could not give them,” she said. This time she was not asking whether she should submit them or if he would reject the appeal on her behalf. She had already agreed to furnish the poems and wanted only to know if he thought them appropriate.

  Happy to read her work and no doubt pleased, he replied quickly. “The thoughtfulness I may not accept is among my Balms—,” she thanked him, “Grateful for the kindness, I enclose those you allow, adding a fourth, lest one of them you might think profane—They are Christ’s Birthday—Cupid’s Sermon—A Humming-Bird—and My Country’s Wardrobe—Reprove them as your own.”

  The most concise and visually fanciful poem of the lot, the hummingbird (“A Route of Evanescence”) proceeds from an absent center, around which Dickinson puts color in motion to mimic the fluttering of the tiny bird:

  A Route of Evanescence

  With a revolving Wheel—

  A Resonance of Emerald,

  A Rush of Cochineal

  “My Country’s Wardrobe,” intended as an amusement, cheekily decks the nation in patriotic garb: “Her triple suit as sweet / As when ’twas cut at Lexington,” but “Christ’s Birthday” (“The Savior must have been”) tilts in a slightly different direction and is likely the poem she thought “profane,” with its conceit that the Savior is a “docile Gentleman” come far on a cold day—his birthday—to save his “little Fellow men.” (This poem was presumably sent to the Evergreens as accompaniment to an iced cake for Christmas.)

  These light, droll, and charming poems differ sharply from “Mine Enemy is growing old” (“Cupid’s Sermon”). The most conspicuously personal of the lot, it mixes regret with advice, acceptance with rue, and neither mentions Cupid nor furnishes a sermon, at least not directly:

  Mine Enemy is growing old—

  I have at last Revenge—

  The Palate of the Hate departs—

  If any would avenge

  Let him be quick—

  the Viand flits—

  It is a faded Meat—

  Anger as soon as fed is dead—

  ’Tis Starving makes it fat—

  Is “growing old” her enemy, or is her enemy growing old? As is often the case, Dickinson avoids a specific context; she will not staple her meaning down. The poem opens wide and burrows deep, touching the quick of our anger while distancing itself from the emotion it names. Its homiletic is an irony, and yet the poem is not ironic. And like much of her verse, it affords us the frisson of emotion before we are sure of what we experience. It speaks intimately, blasphemously, sensually even when we can’t quite parse her grammar.

  As Higginson knew, her poetry is also a seduction: it dances before the reader, enticing the reader before darting away; it is dangerous, daring, dubious; it flaunts its independence from the habits of predictable reading. And it insists on itself—one is always glad one is oneself—with panache, concealing what it creates, creating what it conceals, both at the same time. The experience is explosively nonverbal.

  In her room, on the backs of envelopes or on snippets of brown writing paper—the odds and ends of literary genius—Dickinson composed, a poseur deeply sincere, a consummate flirt, a sorceress, a prestidigitator in words soaring beyond the law. Candor is the only wile. Said the poet Allen Tate, Cotton Mather would have burned her as a witch.

  THIRTEEN

  Things That Never Can Come Back

  Imperturbable among the sturdy trees that Austin had planted—magnolia and ginkgo and of course evergreen—the Evergreens was an eleven-room Victorian poem, ambitious and impersonal but whimsically indifferent, at least on the surface, to the staid Homestead next door. Painted in a serene buttery color, its trim finished in cranberry, its windows festooned with striped green awnings, and all this topped by a large square tower, the place was in its calm way quite self-assured, announcing itself these last twenty-five years as the home of Susan and Austin Dickinson.

  Their elder son, Ned, had grown into a stylish man of twenty years, intense, romantic, and devoted to the distinguished Dickinson name. On Sundays one could glimpse him, cane in hand, his mouth severe and brooding, his head held high, as he walked to church and took his place in the Dickinson pew, proudly wearing his shiny beaver coat. At night, though, grand mal seizures tore through his dreams. Hearing him scream, Austin would sit up in bed and then leap over the footboard to run upstairs and lie atop the convulsing boy. Next morning Ned remembered nothing, and his family, with Dickinson reticence, told him as little as possible about why his tongue was sore where he had bitten it.

  Yet Ned had to have known he would not walk in his father’s or his grandfather’s shoes. Partly because of his epilepsy, he took classes at Amherst College in 1880 as a special student who neither received grades nor matriculated. But measuring success with her iconoclastic stick, his aunt Emily could not have cared less. “‘Aunt Emily, speaking of someone who was a good scholar but not interesting,’” Ned carefully remembered her words, “‘ “She has the facts but not the phosphorescence of learning.” ’” He talked to her about Dickens and George Eliot and the news of politics and foreign affairs that she liked—he supplied her with illustrated reviews when her eyes were bothering her—and he entertained her with his satiric impersonations. He also reminded her of Austin, Ned’s sister later recalled, as if Austin “had gone back and become a young brother again.”

  Edward (Ned) Dickinson, 20 years old, 1881.

  Martha (Mattie) Dickinson.

  Ned’s sister, Martha, or Mattie, as she was commonly called, turned fifteen in 1881. Like her brother, she was strong willed and feisty, and she, too, worshipped her eccentric aunt. If her brother and Aunt Lavinia, wrapped in warm woolen blankets, were sleigh riding on a cold afternoon, Mattie was just as happy to run over to the Homestead and Aunt Emily’s room, where little pots of hyacinth bulbs lined the four windowsills, waiting for spring. They talked about Mattie’s future, her beaux, books. It was a privilege almost as good as those gingery treats Aunt Emily slipped into her niece’s pockets when Mattie was a girl.

  Ned and Mattie’s younger brother, a flaxen-haired boy named after Sue’s father, was born relatively late in the Dickinson marriage. Adored by his family and fussed over by the entire village, Gib, as he was known, pedaled about town on his iron velocipede with a huge, golden smile. “He gathered Hearts,” noted Emily, “not Flowers.” She petted and teased him. “Your Urchin is more antique in wiles than the Egyptian Sphinx,” Emily said in recounting one of his clever retorts to Gib’s mother: “‘Were’nt you chasing Pussy,’ said Vinnie to Gilbert? ‘No—she was chasing herself.’”

  Gib also happened to be one of the few joys in his father’s pinched life. Having matured into a difficult man, Austin Dickinson never suffered fools, and to him most people were foolish. Frequently cold and acerbic, particularly
in social situations, which bored him, he kept largely to himself, though he did like to be noticed. He raced his buggy down Main Street, and arriving at the Evergreens, swerved the vehicle hard onto one wheel before skidding to a stop in front of his carriage house. A yellow wide-brimmed planter’s hat atop his coppery hair, he spurned drab clothes, and while he often wore a light driving ulster in the carriage, at town meetings he reputedly donned lavender pants and a Prince Albert coat. His kid shoes had a strange, square cut, and he seldom smiled. He also loved art. He bought painting after painting, indistinguishable, stiff genre landscapes of the latter-day Hudson River school and notable English, French, and Dutch artists of high academic style. Foraging through picture galleries, his tired, hungry children in tow, he bid for pictures with a recklessness that pushed him way beyond his means. It was another form of fast driving.

  A model citizen, respected and wealthy and in command of significant local projects, like the new building for the First Congregational Church, Austin hankered for the destiny he peevishly regarded as his due, for he believed himself underappreciated, just as his father and grandfather each had felt. But he wanted to ditch all of it, his patrimony, Amherst, those binding expectations, and yet he stayed near the college his grandfather had founded, took on his father’s practice, and lived in the house his father built, never free of its obligations. In this, he was unlike Emily, who, bending family expectations to her will, became more of who she was.