So competent a sight,
And sang for nothing scrutable,
But impudent delight—
Retired, and resumed his transitive estate,
To what delicious accident
does finest glory fit!
One sings for nothing scrutable. Remoteness is the founder of sweet song.
THE UNBELIEVABLE RUMOR of Helen Hunt Jackson’s fatal illness prompted Emily to write Wentworth immediately. “Please say it is not so,” she begged him in the summer of 1885, afraid of what he might answer. The news was bad. Jackson died on August 12. Higginson published a memorial sonnet in The Century, which he sent in manuscript to Dickinson, who replied with her own farewell:
Not knowing when Herself may come
I open every Door,
Or has she Feathers, like a Bird,
or Billows, like a Shore—
Shortly afterward she contacted Wentworth again, enclosing an elegiac poem that quietly lauds him.
Of Glory not a Beam is left
But her Eternal House—
The Asterisk is for the Dead,
The Living, for the Stars—
For years he had been her living friend. And she thanked him.
EMILY RELAPSED IN THE FALL of 1885. Canceling a Boston trip, Austin sat at his sister’s bedside. By December she seemed to improve for a time but soon sank lower. She was breathing with difficulty. There were convulsions. Otis Bigelow, her physician, prescribed olive oil and chloroform. On Thursday, May 13, he stayed by her side all day, but as Austin scribbled in his diary, “Emily seemed to go off into a stark unconscious state toward ten—and at this writing 6 PM has not come out of it.” She never regained consciousness.
Bigelow diagnosed Bright’s disease, a kidney disorder, but it was not necessarily the cause of her death, for the symptoms that began shortly after Gib’s death—those terrible headaches, the vomiting—and the ensuing stretches of good health may be consistent with severe primary hypertension, leading to cardiac failure or stroke. Or with cancer. In 1886 there were no medical interventions that might have saved her.
“IT WAS SETTLED BEFORE MORNING BROKE that Emily would not wake again this side,” Austin noted on Saturday, May 15. “The day was awful. She ceased to breathe that terrible breathing just before the whistles sounded for six…. I was near by.”
“AUDACITY OF BLISS, said Jacob to the Angel ‘I will not let thee go except I bless thee’—Pugilist and Poet, Jacob was correct—,” Dickinson reconceived Genesis at the very end of her life, posting a final note to Wentworth Higginson, some of the last lines she was ever to write, tribute to a subtle friendship.
And though Higginson may have been the angel who saved her life, as she had often reminded him, when she retold the story of Jacob and the angel, it was she, both poet and pugilist—and a monarch of dreams—who would, could, will bless him, and who never let go these many, many years.
SIXTEEN
Rendezvous of Light
Those two sisters living alone, their bond insoluble, their rebuff of conventions rock hard: to Higginson, who stepped inside the Homestead once again—it had been nearly thirteen years—the place was a living House of Usher, updated and New Englandly. The day was lustrous, calm, and gemlike. The morning haze had burned off, leaving the sky blue and hopeful, and the village was dressed for spring in bright green, violet, and wild geranium. But at the Homestead the long shades were drawn, and in the library sat a small white casket.
Inhaling, Higginson peered down at Emily Dickinson’s beautiful unfurrowed brow. He did not hesitate at calling her beautiful now. And as he sadly noticed, she was youthful too, without a gray hair or a wrinkle.
“How large a portion of the people who have interested me have passed away,” he mourned.
Higginson’s unusual friend had died just days before. He had received the sad news, likely by telegram, on the seventeenth. So many deaths: Helen Hunt Jackson not a year earlier, when Dickinson herself, upset, had contacted him to say Jackson had written she could not walk “but not,” Dickinson cried, “that she would die.” Now Emily herself was gone. He knew she had been ill, for earlier that spring she had told him she had been sick since November, “bereft of Book and Thought,” she had said, “by Doctor’s reproof.” But he had not thought, as Emily had said of Jackson, that she would die.
Of course he would go to the funeral. Emily herself had probably requested that her family invite him. She had stipulated everything: the simple service, the men who would carry her casket, perhaps even the soft white flannel robe in which Sue tenderly wrapped her. Vinnie scattered pansies and lilies of the valley on the piano and placed a sprig of violets at Emily’s neck, as she had done with their mother, along with a pink flower called Cypripedium, or lady’s slipper. She also set two heliotropes by her hand “to take to Judge Lord,” Higginson heard her say.
The funeral took place on Wednesday the nineteenth. The Reverend Jonathan Jenkins, who came from Pittsfield to offer a short prayer, and the Reverend Mr. Dickerman, pastor of the First Congregational Church, read from 1 Corinthians 15: “For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.”
Higginson then pulled himself to his feet, announcing he would recite a poem, the one Emily had often read to her sister: Emily Brontë’s “Last Lines.” It was “a favorite with our friend,” he added, “who has now put on that Immortality which she never seemed to have laid off.”
No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven’s glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.
The poem seems a valediction to each of the mourners gathered there in the Homestead parlor:
Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes cease to be,
And Thou were left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.
THE HONORARY PALLBEARERS, including the president of Amherst College, bore the small coffin from the library into the hall and then out the back door, but per Emily’s express instructions, the men who worked for the Dickinsons over the years—Stephen Sullivan, Pat Ward, Tom Kelley, Dennis Scannell, Dennis Cashman, Dan Moynihan—conveyed the casket, high on its wooden bier, through the Dickinson meadow to the cemetery. It was the path through the meadow, thick with daisies and buttercups, that Miss Emily herself must often have taken to visit her parents’ graves.
Convulsed in grief and draped in black, a hollow-eyed Mabel Todd accompanied the small group to the cemetery, walking behind the family cortege. The air was iridescent, the white sun streaming on the mourners, who gathered around the open grave, which Sue had lined with a spate of flowers and green branches. “It was a never to be forgotten burial,” commented a family friend, “and seemed singularly fitting to the departed one.”
As the casket was lowered down and farther down, Mabel Todd took one last look. Emily Dickinson, she said, had gone back “into a little deeper mystery than that she has always lived in.”
SUE DICKINSON COMPOSED AN OBITUARY for the Springfield Republican. Printed on May 18, the day before the funeral, it addressed all the rumors flying around her sister-in-law; the rumors had flown around her sister-in-law for years. There was a great deal public about this private person, and Sue wanted to set the record straight. “Not disappointed with the world,” she wrote, “not an invalid until within the past two years, not from any lack of sympathy, not because she was insufficient for any mental work or social career—her endowments being so exceptional—, but the ‘mesh of her soul,’ as Browning calls the body, was too rare, and the sacred quiet of her own home proved the fit atmosphere for her worth and work.”
Emily’s writing and conversation were incomparable, she went on to say. “Like a magician she caught the shadowy apparitions of her brain and tossed them in startlingly picturesqueness to her friends, who, charmed with their simplicity and homeliness as well as profundity,
fretted that she had so easily made palpable the tantalizing fancies forever eluding their bungling, fettered grasp.”
And in the end Emily eluded everyone. “Now and then some enthusiastic literary friend would turn love into larceny, and cause a few verses surreptitiously obtained to be printed,” Sue admitted. “Thus, and through other natural ways, many saw and admired her verses, and in consequence frequently notable persons paid her visits, hoping to overcome the protest of her own nature and gain a promise of occasional contributions, at least, to various magazines.”
One such was Wentworth Higginson.
THEIR FRIENDSHIP HAD BEEN BASED on absence, geographic distance, and the written word. They had exchanged letters in which they invented themselves and each other, performing for each other in the words that filled, maintained, and created the space between them. “What a Hazard a Letter is!” Emily had exclaimed to him. “When I think of the Hearts it has scuttled and sunk, I almost fear to lift my Hand to so much as a Superscription.” Yet she hazarded them for a lifetime and to Wentworth for almost twenty-five years.
He knew what she meant, albeit in his own way. “It is true of all of us that the letter represents the man, odd or even,” he observed. “It is, indeed, more absolutely the man, in one sense, than he himself is, for the man himself is inevitably changing, beyond his own control, from moment to moment, from birth to death.” What a hazard a letter is: quicksilver and irrevocable and frequently misunderstood. Yet somehow these two people, who lived in the intimacies and distances and secrets of words—somehow these two people created out of words a nearness we today do not entirely grasp.
Dickinson’s letters, all of them, blaze with a passion for sight and smell and sound and the enduring pleasure, whatever its cost, of friendship. The soul has bandaged moments, true, difficult to express, but there are points of contact, vehement, aflame, effulgent beyond words, that compel our entire being. That was her gamble. These are my letters to the World, she so famously said.
“Through the solitary prowess / Of a Silent Life—.”
And Higginson? For her he represented the dappled world. And he gave it what he had, glad to give and still shy of what he might have found had he dwelled, as she did, uncompromisingly inward. But there was much he had understood.
“Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” she had once asked this kindhearted man. “Should you think it breathed—and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude—.”
Two weeks before she died, still trusting that he, with his gift of sympathy, would understand, she in effect returned to the same question.
“Deity—does He live now?” she asked him. “My friend—does he breathe?”
Part Three
Beyond the Dip of Bell
SEVENTEEN
Poetry of the Portfolio
The wheels of Austin Dickinson’s gleaming carriage screeched to a halt in front of the main gate of the Evergreens, and hearing the racket, Harriet Jameson bounded from her desk to the window. “I have no doubt he had a delightful drive with charming company,” she caustically remarked, settling herself back down and continuing her letter. “The gossips say the intimacy existing between him and Mrs. Todd is as great as ever.” To think that Mrs. Todd, utterly unrelated to the poet, had stood at poor Emily’s grave shedding copious tears. “Many people are leaving Mrs. T ‘alone’—,” Mrs. Jameson delivered the town’s verdict with smug satisfaction. For this was unimpeachable New England, where emotional displays were insupportable and, if ventured by an outsider, outrageous.
Ignorant of the village scuttlebutt, Wentworth Higginson returned to Amherst a few months after Dickinson’s funeral as the guest of Sue and Austin. Austin ushered the Colonel about town: two men of the world, or so Austin liked to believe, riding through the bucolic scenery in which Austin took almost boyish pride. Wicker baskets on back porches were filled with ripe apples, and the nearby hills decked in crimson and gold. Chatting away, Austin likely did not speak of Mabel except in a most general way, and one assumes that instead of town tattle the men talked of Emily’s poetry, which Lavinia was determined to see published.
Lavinia: alone in the now cavernous Homestead, surrounded by her cats, she was fretful and thin, the flesh having dropped from her bones in those last agonizing months before Emily died. And why had she been robbed of her one companion on earth, she indignantly wondered, until, that is, she discovered her sister’s poetry. She had known, of course, that her sister wrote poetry, but she was unprepared for the hundreds and hundreds of poems in Emily’s room, in the small bureau, some sewn together in booklets, others scribbled on the backs of envelopes, and she decided there and then that these poems would be published, preserved, respected. She would have her sister back.
It would not be an easy job. Vinnie knew that. Not only had Emily often written in a crabbed hand—as Higginson reminisced, it seemed she took her “first lessons by studying the famous fossil bird-tracks in the museum of that college town”—but the poems themselves looked to be in a state of confusion. Though Emily had collected some of them in small packets (Mrs. Todd called them fascicles, and the technical term has stuck) and grouped others in sets, many poems seemed incomplete. But literature was improvisation, much like Emily’s concoctions at the piano, remembered by all who heard them, and her poems were always in progress, meant to be revised, reevaluated, and reconceived, especially when dispatched to different readers, as her editors would soon discover. (As the poet Richard Howard has pointed out, finishing poems may not have interested her: “her true Flaubert was Penelope, to invert a famous allusion, forever unraveling what she had figured on the loom the day before.”) She kept variants and appears not to have chosen among them, sometimes toying with as many as eight possibilities for words, line arrangement, rhyme, enjambment; nor did she choose among alternative endings. And frequently she composed on scraps of paper—newspaper clippings, brown paper sacks—or around the edges of thin sheets, the writing almost illegible. Or she incorporated parts of poems into the letters, which themselves were acts of poetry.
Nor had she left instructions about how she might want her poems to appear in print, or whether they should appear in print at all. Nor did she tell us if the physical and visual properties of her manuscripts were as semantically important to her as contemporary critics contend.
From an editorial point of view, the situation was a mess.
Sue would have been the person most capable of sorting through Emily’s manuscripts, readying them for publication, but Vinnie mistrusted her. (“I was to have compiled the poems—,” Sue stretched the truth a bit, writing to the editor of The Independent in 1891, “but as I moved slowly, dreading publicity for us all, she [Vinnie] was angry and a year ago took them from me.”) Months passed, and though Sue had a boxful, she did nothing with them, or so Vinnie decided even though Sue had mailed a few poems, much as she had in the past, to men well situated in the literary world. To The Century’s editor, Richard Watson Gilder, she mailed, perhaps at Higginson’s request, a poem she titled “Wind” (“The Wind begun to rock the Grass”), noting that “Col. Higginson, Dr. Holland, ‘H.H.’ and many other of her literary friends have long urged her [Emily] to allow her poems to be printed, but she was never willing to face the world.” Gilder turned her down flat. The result from other magazines was equally discouraging.
Mabel Todd knew all of this. Austin told her everything: of Sue’s failures—a source of pleasure for Mabel—and of Vinnie’s manic determination. And Mabel had already decided that she alone was Emily’s special companion—though one the poet had refused to see—for even if no one else did, Mabel believed in the sincerity of her own feelings. And gripped by Emily’s spectral reputation, she identified with this wisp of a woman, who, though an Amherst insider by birthright, had quietly rejected its mores and earned admiration from the well-known likes, as Sue put it, of Josiah Holland, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Colonel Higginson. There was a lesson here.
Mabel Loomis Todd in 1885, at 29, Austin Dickinson’s lover and soon to be Emily Dickinson’s champion and co-editor, with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, of the first three volumes of Dickinson’s poetry.
Emboldened by success, she wanted to publish her and Austin’s love letters, anonymously of course, their names discreetly omitted. Doubtless Austin scuttled the project. Yet he remained her secular religion, their love sacred, its grandeur her moral shield against guilt or infamy—or Sue, whom she transformed into a monster of cruelty and sloth. Mabel would rise above them all, she knew, as the advocate of the sublime, and if she could not articulate the sublime in a book of her lover’s letters, then why not in a book of poetry? By associating herself with the mythic Emily, Mabel could infuriate Sue and trump the entire town.
White Heat Page 29
