The day of the funeral, November 16, 1882, Mabel Todd sat quietly with the mourners. Vinnie had placed a small bouquet of violets in her mother’s hand, but Emily, as was to be expected, did not leave her room. A cousin recalled that when she said good-bye, Emily opened the door a crack and, pale and worn, thanked her for coming so far.
Afterward the Homestead was strangely empty for the first time. Besides the two servants they continued to employ, it was just Vinnie and Emily—and, queerly, Austin. “My Brother is with us so often each Day, we almost forget that he ever passed to a wedded Home,” Dickinson noted, doubtless with a raised eyebrow.
“BLOW HAS FOLLOWED BLOW, till the wondering terror of the Mind clutches what is left, helpless of an accent.” It had been a season of loss. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s death the previous April had marked the end of an era. Colonel Higginson was one of the hundreds of mourners who boarded a special funeral train bound for Concord, where throngs of fans walked up and down the streets before crowding into the church to hear the service that Higginson dismissed as lacking the “coals of fire” only Emerson could supply.
Though Emily was saddened by Emerson’s death, the passing of her friend Charles Wadsworth cut more closely. She and the Reverend Wadsworth had stayed in touch—“a intimacy of many years,” she called it—and having returned to Philadelphia from the Pacific coast, he had visited her just two years before. “He rang one summer evening to my glad surprise—,” she told a friend of his. “‘Why did you not tell me you were coming, so I could have it to hope for,’ I said—‘Because I did not know it myself. I stepped from my Pulpit to the Train,’ was his quiet reply. He once remarked in talking ‘I am liable at any time to die,’” she added, “but I thought it no omen.”
Gilbert (Gib) Dickinson .
For comfort this time there was Otis Lord, not Wentworth Higginson. “Your Sorrow was in Winter—,” she wrote the Judge, referring to his wife’s death, “one of our’s in June and the other, November, and my Clergyman passed from earth in spring, but sorrow brings it’s own chill. Seasons do not warm it.”
Nor would sorrow cease, even during the warm months that Austin and his sisters loved. August was Austin’s favorite, when he could listen to the crickets—subject of Emily’s poem “Further in Summer than the Birds”—and the month when Gib was born. And Gib, who warmed all seasons, turned eight that summer of 1883. His little friends celebrated with cocked hats and banging drums, and when they marched over to the Homestead and around Emily’s garden, she stood by and smiled.
Just a month later, in late September, he was taken ill after playing with a friend in a nearby mudhole. It was typhoid fever. He died the afternoon of October 5.
The night before had been terrible. Emily had noiselessly gone over to the Evergreens—certain neighbors gossiped that she had not been inside the place for fifteen years—and, according to Vinnie, received a nervous shock when she saw Gib’s flaming cheeks. It was the odor from the disinfectants, neighbors speculated, that caused her to blanch and faint. It may have been the boy’s heart-piercing delirium. “‘Open the Door, open the Door, they are waiting for me,’” Emily recorded the boy’s deathbed words.
“Emily was devoted to Gilbert,” Vinnie sighed.
During the funeral, Emily lay in bed. Sue, too, missed the service—she could not bear to go—and for months saw no one. When she finally emerged from the Evergreens, she was wrapped in the black crepe of bereavement she wore forever after. Bereft and abandoned by her husband, she was never the same, and neither was Emily, who would herself die just three years later.
But she reached out to Sue, offering comfort where there was none. “I see him in the Star, and meet his sweet velocity in everything that flies—,” she told the sister beyond the hedge. “His Life was like the Bugle, which winds itself always, his Elegy an echo—his Requiem ecstasy.” Whatever she knew about her brother, whatever she felt about Mabel, she would not fail Sue.
And Austin? “Gilbert was his idol and the only thing in his house which truly loved him, or in which he took any pleasure,” Mabel lamented.
Within two months of Gib’s death, she and Austin were lovers at last. “I kept him alive through the dreadful period of Gilbert’s sickness and death,” Mabel justified herself. “He could not bear the atmosphere of his own house, & used to go to his sisters’, & then he or Lavinia would send for me—& it was on those oases from the prevailing gloom in life that he caught his breath & gathered strength to go on.”
They met as often as possible: Austin bundled Mabel into his carriage for long rides through the tall pines, or they rendezvoused mornings or afternoons, or both, at the Homestead. In the evening, Austin would stop by the Todds’, especially when David worked late at the college. Austin kept up appearances at the Evergreens, and for many years Mabel continued to have a physical relationship with her husband, who remains a cipher. When Mabel confessed everything to him, he seems not to have offered any objections. Perhaps he feared losing her, or maybe he feared Austin, a powerhouse in this small town and the éminence grise of the college who raised David’s salary when or if he saw fit. Years later his daughter herself wondered how “he, the youthful serious young scientist—how could he have accepted the situation—an old aristocrat twice his age, who looked down upon him as a plebeian, and preempted his wife as by the divine right of his august preference?” But likely David had affairs of his own. “I do not think David is what might be called a monogamous animal,” Mabel would later confide to her journal. “While I know that he loves me to the full of his nature, he is not at all incapable of falling immensely in love with somebody else, & having a very piquant time of it.”
And David was himself half in love with the hapless, arrogant Austin. Austin told Mabel that he and David confided in each other “beyond anything I have known among men.” After the two men built a Queen Anne–style cottage for the Todds in the Dickinson meadow, Mabel and Austin seem to have occasionally made love with a “witness”—David?—in the room. By the turn of the century, David Peck Todd was said to be acting strangely; in 1917 he retired from Amherst College, and in 1922, declared insane, he was permanently institutionalized. Adultery, he told his daughter in 1933, had ruined his life.
Not surprisingly, Mabel’s outraged parents were far less forgiving when they learned of Mabel’s affair. More baffling is the fact that Mabel’s reputation was unblemished for a fairly long time. She figured the reason was that Austin could consort with whatever ladies he liked because the town considered him beyond reproach. Besides, as she convinced herself somewhat contradictorily, “every one knows that he has been wretchedly disappointed in his domestic life, and all universally pity & respect him.” (Mabel thought nothing, years later, of circulating rumors about Sue: that her father’s alcoholism had killed him, for instance, and that a dalliance with Samuel Bowles had destroyed the Dickinson marriage.) As for herself, she refused to submit to base convention, with its primitive view of divorce—and, anyway, “the law of God is to me far higher than calf skin & parchment,” she declared, improvising on the transcendentalism of an earlier day.
Many awestruck undergraduates jostled one another to sign Mabel’s dance card at their various balls, and years later the story of her amorous adventure charmed the scholarly raconteur of Victorian sexual culture Peter Gay, who discovered that the thoroughly modern Mabel meticulously documented the frequency of her sexual intercourse and her orgasms with a set of symbols in her diary far easier to interpret than many of Emily Dickinson’s poems.
Mabel and Austin’s romance lasted for the remaining twelve years of Austin’s life. The couple tried to stay impervious to Sue and Mabel’s disapproving families and the cloaked gaze of their Amherst neighbors. This was easier for Austin than Mabel. “Our life together is as white and unspotted as the fresh driven snow,” Austin would reassure her. “This we know—whatever vulgar minded people, who see nothing beyond the body—may think—or suspect…. We were born for each other—and we
will stay with each other.”
But the inhabitants of the Evergreens felt, as Ned later said, that they’d been sliced with a sword. And yet after his father’s death, Ned snuck Mabel into the Evergreens so she could view Austin’s body one last time. The family sat in the dining room while Mabel leaned over Austin’s casket and kissed his cheek. “The whole town weeps for him,” she grieved. “Yet I am the only mourner.”
FOURTEEN
Monarch of Dreams
Francis Ayrault is himself in mourning, for whom we don’t know, and now alone in the world except for a five-year-old stepsister, he retires to an old family farmhouse, off the beaten track, where he will lose himself, literally, to his dreams.
Completed the summer after Emily Dickinson died, The Monarch of Dreams is a throwback to the kind of romance Higginson had not written in twenty years. It is also his tribute to the intrepid woman who committed her life to her art, who insisted on writing her own way, on publishing as she saw fit when and only when she chose to do so, who remained faithful to her vision of the elasticity, luxuriance, and magic of language, who questioned everything and did not for a moment alter her path for anyone. In a sense she was the poet, the monarch of dreams, he could never be. And in the end, to justify his own failure, he had to condemn what he valued most and believed he could not have.
This is the story: In the spring of 1861, just after the firing on Fort Sumter, the careworn Ayrault, descended “from a race of day-dreamers with a taste for ideal and metaphysical pursuits,” decides to experiment in controlling his own dreams.
The bedroom door locked, the farmhouse quiet, Frank, as his sister calls him, falls asleep, his dreams soon blotting out everything, all his daylight interests and every person he knows, including his sister. Night after night silent hordes mill about him, unfeeling, resembling himself, siphoning off his individuality and his will. “‘Does all dreaming without action,’ he wonders, ‘thus leave a man lost within the crowd of himself?’” He does not control his dreams; they control him.
War inches nearer, regiments are recruited, and men rally to the cause, rousing Frank from his torpor. He enlists and “felt himself a changed being,” writes Higginson, reverting to his pet metaphor for his own army days: “he was as if floating in air and ready to take wing for some new planet.” But though Higginson in 1862 may have been moved to action, his pale alter ego stays pinioned to his dreams. The night before his regiment is scheduled to head to the front, Frank falls asleep and dreams that a colossal mob of figures—all himself—pins his arms and blocks his path while from afar he hears drums beating and the crackle of fireworks. A whistle shrieks, and the local train, jam-packed with flesh-and-blood soldiers, chugs out of the station, carrying “the lost opportunity of his life away—away—away.”
Higginson’s sister thought he must be having a breakdown. “It is a warning not a glorification,” he wearily replied. But she was more perceptive than he knew. For what he intended as admonishment was at the same time a celebration: the romantic artist dwells in realms of possibility, and though punished, Frank conducted the very experiment that had long tempted Higginson, attracted since boyhood to poetry, literature, even the fantasy of a perfect woman, his Laura, whoever she might be. But he had never been able to lose himself in his fantasies, throwing caution and duty to the wind.
For though he might aspire to the lofty realm of beauty, Higginson owed allegiance to the world of action, and because his intellectual precocity was channeled early into both scholarship and civic duty, he could not therefore break free, as John Brown or Dickinson had, and light out for a territory of one. “To live and die only to transfuse external nature into human words, like Thoreau; to chase dreams for a lifetime, like Hawthorne; to labor tranquilly and see a nation imbued with one’s thoughts, like Emerson,—this it is to pursue literature as an art”: this is what he wanted, what he most admired, and what he had to censure in himself.
Fortunately, though, in his early years the salutary influence of Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, and Emerson more or less bridged the gap between public service and private longing. Build your own world, Emerson had said. That was not so easy; better to build your own character, which linked one to the world. Higginson copied a sentence from Emerson’s essay “Man the Reformer” onto the flyleaf of one of his journals, remarking that no other sentence had ever influenced him more: “Better that the book should not be quite so good, & the bookmaker abler & better, & not himself often a ludicrous contrast to all that he has written.” Then he added, this “has made me willing to vary my life & work for personal development, rather than to concentrate it & sacrifice myself to a specific result.”
This was partly true. “The trouble with me is too great a range of tastes and interests,” Higginson once acknowledged. “I love to do everything, to study everything, to contemplate and to write. I never was happier than when in the army entirely absorbed in action duties; yet I love literature next, indeed almost better.” He could not choose. He thus never completely surrendered himself to poetry or to action, whether in politics, in the army, or after the war, in an unerring commitment to one of his causes.
And after the war it just wasn’t possible for him to be both an imaginative writer and a public citizen. So he shuttled back and forth, unlike Dickinson, who, replying to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Vision of Poets, brought beauty and truth together in poetry.
I died for Beauty—but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining Room—
He questioned softly “Why I failed”?
“For Beauty”, I replied—
“And I—for Truth—Themself are One—
We Brethren are”, He said—
And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night—
We talked between the Rooms—
Until the Moss had reached our lips—
And covered up—Our names—
Beauty and truth are “Kinsmen,” united in words, not deeds, and even though death covers up “names,” achieved no doubt in the pursuit of beauty and truth, the poet speaks after death, keeping beauty and truth linked and alive.
Years later Higginson singled out “I died for Beauty—” as one of the poems that took his breath away, and doubtless he saw in it the reconciliation, through poetry, of a conflict he never quite resolved. But there was another, unspoken issue for Higginson. The dilemma of Frank Ayrault, isolated by his self-absorption and yielding to his dreams “as a swimmer yields his body to a strong current,” suggests Higginson worried that, alas, at bottom he had nothing, neither beauty nor truth, to dream about. This anxiety also lies at the heart of “A Night in the Water,” when, as Higginson submerges himself in the river, the world as he knows it dissolves: “I began to doubt everything, to distrust the stars, the line of low bushes for which I was wearily striving, the very land on which they grew, if such visionary things could be rooted anywhere,” Higginson wrote. “I had no well-defined anxiety, felt no fear, was moved to no prayer, did not give a thought to home and friends.” But without the shore he was nowhere, he was nothing. And yet if he was unable to dive into the dark waters of his own imagination or fully into the world of action, here, in this tour de force, he swam out much farther than he had planned.
Then he stepped back. Unlike Dickinson, he always stepped back. Most of his short stories are set pieces wagging fingers at moony young men for their addiction to art or beauty. More successful than these efforts are his polemical writings and some of his nature essays. (Few of his accomplishments—and none of his disappointments—ever meant more to him than Thoreau’s admiration of “Snow.”) When he joined the ranks of the literary professional, he wrote with restraint, wit, and unpretentious ease, but when no longer an impassioned advocate, he did not produce documents quite as powerful as his essays about slave uprisings and women’s rights—and about army life in the South with the black
troops he adored.
It would be interesting to know if he mailed Dickinson an early version of Monarch of Dreams and, if he had, how she responded. He had started the story in 1877, just after Mary’s death. But he could not complete it. He didn’t know how it should end. And then when he decided to remarry, he put the tale away. Marriage supplied the regularity he needed; as he had told his friends, “I’m adrift in the universe without it.” He, too, hugged the shore.
In 1886, right after Dickinson died—her death likely motivating him to finish it at last—he picked up the story again. For he was now justifying the road he, not she, had taken: safe and solid and wide awake. Pleased with the result even though The Atlantic rejected it, he published Monarch of Dreams at his own expense when no other editor stepped into the breach. “My favorite child,” he called the slim, leather-covered book. And yet he really didn’t accept the story’s pat lesson: that a life of reverie concentrates the self too much, making solipsists of us all. After all, Higginson was himself a dreamer. His active pursuit of abolition and social justice had itself come by way of the dream of a better world.
White Heat Page 27
