White Heat

by Brenda Wineapple

  Yet when editing Poems, Third Series, without Higginson, Mabel encumbered the poems with as many titles as she and Higginson together used previously. Both of them, then, were guilty of saddling Dickinson’s complex, subtle, and tricky work with unwieldy headings that read like monosyllabic penny dreadfuls: “Almost!” “The Secret,” “Dawn,” “Real,” “Setting Sail,” “Too Late,” “Why?” and “In Vain.” Regardless, the editors left more than a quarter of the poems untitled, affording the room for interpretation that a Dickinson poem demands: “Presentiment—is that long shadow—on the Lawn—,” “A wounded deer leaps highest,” “The Brain within its groove,” “I’ve seen a Dying Eye,” and “I reason, earth is short.”

  And sometimes they omitted whole stanzas, as is the case with “Because I could not stop for Death—,” where they left out the lines “Or rather—He passed Us—/ The Dews drew quivering and Chill—/ For only Gossamer, my Gown—/ My Tippet—only Tulle—.” Other times they removed punctuation and in so doing cut terror from the heart of a poem. Compare, for instance, these two versions of “Two swimmers wrestled on the spar.” The following is Dickinson’s original:

  Two swimmers wrestled on the spar—

  Until the morning sun—

  When One—turned smiling to the land—

  Oh God! the Other One!

  The stray ships—passing—

  Spied a face—

  Opon the waters borne—

  With eyes in death—still begging raised—

  And hands—beseeching—thrown!

  This is the handiwork of Higginson and Todd:

  Two swimmers wrestled on the spar

  Until the morning sun,

  When one turned smiling to the land.

  O God, the other one!

  The stray ships passing spied a face

  Upon the waters borne,

  With eyes in death still begging raised,

  And hands beseeching thrown.

  In each version the words are the same, but by omitting dashes and smoothing line breaks, the editors blunted the poem’s edge with a quiet if disconsolate picture of prayer.

  Despite the editorial heavy-footedness and in some instances outright butchery, Dickinson’s poems remarkably retain their meaning, their power to reach beyond what can be seen, heard, or felt. Consider the poem ineptly titled “Death and Life.” The dashes have been removed, the punctuation regularized, and yet the images of amputation, beheading, and assassination concoct a world—or a God—cruel in its murderous indifference to life:

  Apparently with no surprise

  To any happy flower,

  The frost beheads it at its play

  In accidental power.

  The blond assassin passes on,

  The sun proceeds unmoved

  To measure off another day

  For an approving God.

  If the strategies of Todd and Higginson differed slightly, the result was the same, and both editors were eventually pilloried for bowdlerizing the poet’s work. But they did not suppress or occlude it; rather, they presented it to an audience like them that, after many years of saccharine poetasting and propaganda, hungrily devoured the fresh, intricate, and dramatically novel verse.

  LAVINIA DID NOT WISH Mabel to receive any credit for the Dickinson book. None. “I dare say you are aware our ‘co-worker’ is to be ‘sub rosa,’” Vinnie wrote to Higginson, “for reasons you may understand.” Not only was he confused, but he was barely able to read Vinnie’s swerving cursive, which he naively asked Mabel to decipher. “I have her letter to Mr. Higginson,” Mabel seethed in her diary, “& I am trying not to be furious.”

  Mabel assumed Vinnie wanted to avoid a fight with Sue, who, as it happened, by having submitted Emily’s poems to magazines, made copyright a problem. Though Lavinia insisted the poems belonged entirely to her—that Emily had left them solely to her—Todd and Higginson now needed permission to use “There came a Day—at Summer’s full” because Sue had sold it to Scribner’s Magazine three months before the book was scheduled to appear. Higginson thought Sue could be enlisted as part of the forthcoming volume; surely her tender obituary of Emily in the Springfield Republican would beautifully introduce the book. Lavinia—and Mabel of course—recoiled. Higginson’s essay would preface the volume, as promised; discussion over.

  And there was, too, the issue of Mrs. Todd’s name on the book’s title page. “Your name should appear somewhere”: Higginson ignored Vinnie’s objection, suggesting that the title page contain both their names, if that did not seem too awkward for so small a book. When Mabel expressed delight, he placed hers prominently: “It is proper that yr name shld come first as you did the hardest part of the work.”

  By then he had finished a long essay on Dickinson, introducing her and her strange verse to the public. Published in the Christian Union in September 1890—slated for the Century, it would appear there too late—the essay is the longer, more relaxed form of what would become Higginson’s preface to the poems. Far less defensive than the brief preface, the essay begins in Higginson’s conversational style:

  Emerson said, many years since, in the “Dial,” that the most interesting department of poetry would hereafter be found in what might be called “The Poetry of the Portfolio,” the work, that is, of persons who wrote for the relief of their own minds, and without thought of publication. Such poetry, when accumulated for years, will have at least the merit of perfect freedom; accompanied, of course, by whatever drawback follows from the habitual absence of criticism. Thought will have its full strength and uplifting, but without the proper control and chastening of literary expression; there will be wonderful strokes and felicities, and yet an incomplete and unsatisfactory whole. If we believe, with Ruskin, that “no beauty of execution can outweigh one grain or fragment of thought,” then we may often gain by the seclusion of the portfolio, which rests content with a first stroke and does not over-refine and prune away afterwards.

  With the metaphor of “Poetry of the Portfolio,” Higginson intended to nip in the bud any criticism of Dickinson’s unusual form, for the Higginson who had been Dickinson’s ally—sometime muse, sometime guardian, sometime epistolary inamorato—had always insisted that form serves thought, and Dickinson’s poems wonderfully “delineate, by a few touches, the very crises of physical or mental struggle.”

  He went on to praise enthusiastically such poems as “Glee—The great storm is over,” “I never saw a moor,” and “Soul, wilt thou toss again?”:

  Soul, wilt thou toss again?

  By just such a hazard

  Hundreds have lost, indeed,

  But tens have won an all.

  Angels’ breathless ballot

  Lingers to record thee;

  Imps in eager caucus

  Raffle for my soul!

  “Was ever the concentrated contest of a lifetime, the very issue between good and evil, put into few words?” he marveled. And when reproducing “I died for beauty,” he compared it for weirdness—a good quality—with the work of William Blake, and no one, he cagily added, would dare criticize Blake for defects in draftsmanship. “When a thought takes one’s breath away, who cares to count the syllables?” With a courage that shrank from nothing, Dickinson looked straight into the heart of darkness, he concluded, again recalling the unforgettable stanzas of “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—” sent him so many years ago, those daringly condensed lines that, he said, struck a note much too fine to be lost or excised:

  Grand go the years in the crescent above them;

  Worlds scoop their arcs, and firmaments row,

  Diadems drop and Doges surrender,

  Soundless as dots on a disk of snow.

  THE BOOK WAS DONE. Bound in white, framed in gold and stamped in the same color, it was slim, handsome, understated. On the front was a picture of silver Indian pipes. Its title was simply Poems.

  “I am astounded,” Higginson cried, holding the book in his hands. “How could we ever have do
ubted about these?”

  How could he have doubted anything? He suddenly realized, in dismay, that Dickinson’s letters to him had contained poems as good as the ones just printed: “No Brigadier throughout the Year,” for instance, and “A Route of Evanescence” and “Dare you see a Soul at the ‘White Heat’?” and “The nearest Dream recedes—unrealized—” and “When I hoped I feared—” and “Before I got my eye put out—” and “It sifts from Leaden Sieves” and “A Bird, came down the Walk”—so many of the poems she had sent to him over the years.

  Your riches taught me poverty.

  “This shows we must have another volume by and by,” he cried, “& this must include prose from her letters, often quite as marvellous as her poetry.”

  The floodgates were open. Higginson turned in relief to the cunning and unsinkable Mrs. Todd, “the only person who can feel as I do about this extraordinary thing we have done in recording this rare genius.”

  “I feel,” he burst out, “as if we had climbed to a cloud, pulled it away, and revealed a new star behind it.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Me—Come! My Dazzled Face

  The first edition of Poems by Emily Dickinson sold out, the second edition was snapped up by Christmas, and Niles released a third and then a fourth in January. In all, the book would go through eleven printings in 1891 and sell almost eleven thousand copies. Higginson was astounded.

  The poems humbled critics, even those who carped about faulty rhymes or poor poetic technique (vide Arlo Bates), and it delighted readers. Fed for years on Tennyson, Patmore, and Longfellow or, more recently, on the folksy verse of James Whitcomb Riley and the jingles of Rudyard Kipling, to say nothing of the verse of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, they were evidently tired of the didacticism and overrefinement of poetry without heat. Edmund Clarence Stedman, no radical, suggested as much in the introduction to his popular Poets of America, published the year before Dickinson died. “A poet, most of all, should not believe in limitations,” he wrote, “and so, if poetry has lost its hold, it is in some degree because no brilliant leader compels attention to it, devoting himself to the hazard of arduous and bravely ventured song.” Fifteen years later, when he published his American Anthology, Stedman included twenty-one selections by Emily Dickinson.

  Looking backward, we can say that 1890 ushered in a new period of Newness, to rephrase Higginson. Telephone lines would soon link New York and Chicago; Thomas Edison was about to patent his motion picture camera, the Kinetoscope; and William K. Vanderbilt had already erected a birthday present for his wife at Newport in the form of a marble palace that cost eleven million dollars. In New York Harbor a former munitions dump on Ellis Island would serve as a processing center for as many as eight thousand immigrants a day; in Chicago Jane Addams opened Hull House. The Populist party was about to be formed, and armed Pinkerton guards would soon fire on the striking Homestead steelworkers. More than two hundred Lakota Sioux were massacred at Wounded Knee, and in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court would uphold the “separate but equal” doctrine that legitimized Jim Crow. Only Justice Harlan dissented, declaring the Constitution color-blind.

  In literature, Jacob Riis exposed the squalid conditions of urban life in How the Other Half Lives. William Dean Howells published his novel A Hazard of New Fortunes, whose subjects were capitalism, social conscience, and socialism, and George Washington Cable brought out a collection of essays, The Negro Question, rejecting the myth of African American inferiority. William James’s long-awaited Principles of Psychology, soon a standard college text, refreshed the vernacular with phrases like “stream of consciousness” and “bitch-goddess success.” But the bitch-goddess continued to possess the soul of a conspicuously consuming America. This and American indifference to art had long been Henry James’s theme and was, in part, dominant in the work of a young Edith Wharton, who in 1891 published her first story, “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” about an elderly woman whose garden view will be blocked by a new high-rise next door. (In 1905, Higginson ranked her novel The House of Mirth “at the head of all American fiction, save Hawthorne alone.”)

  To Higginson—as to James and, later, to Wharton—the scramble for cash, splash, and speed in postwar America had elbowed out any concern for art or style. “Nobody reads Thoreau; only an insignificant fraction read Emerson, or even Hawthorne,” he had complained in his diary. But when incorporating this passage into his novel Malbone, he then remonstrated with himself by taking up the position of the reformer, not the aesthete: “If you begin with high art, you begin at the wrong end,” he admonished. “The first essential for any nation is to put the mass of the people above the reach of want.”

  That was all well and good, but Higginson also knew the reading public to be recalcitrant and stodgy, far stodgier than he was, even in his most conservative, Whitman-assailing moments. And since he still believed in a democratic art—an art of open arms—Higginson welcomed Dickinson to the public stage; she could touch anyone, as he explained in The Nation in 1890, because her thrilling poems, with their “irresistible needle-touch,” pierce directly into the heart of things. Each fragment encompasses an emotional whole, self-contained and complete, and its exterior austerity is no harsher than the New England landscape she represents and celebrates. To Higginson, Dickinson pushed back against America’s crass materialism, a point William Dean Howells also made, with Higginson’s approval, when he reviewed her book of poems in Harper’s: if “nothing else had come out of our life but this strange poetry we should feel that in the work of Emily Dickinson, America, or New England rather, had made a distinctive addition to the literature of the world, and could not be left out of any record of it.”

  Austin Dickinson, 61 years old, 1890.

  Yet the book’s wild success had not altered Mabel’s personal situation, for Austin had not broken with Sue. “I have hoped and hoped and expected, and I have nothing more to say,” she declared, not meaning what she said. Apprised of some internecine warfare—it’s not clear if he knew the cause—Higginson grumbled that it was hard to steer among Dickinsons. Sue had not replied to his letter asking how she liked the volume and, worried that he had unwittingly offended her, he confided his concern to Mabel, who swore Sue had no reason to be angry. But Higginson suspected otherwise. As for Lavinia, even though Sue and Mattie refused to talk to her, she cared only about the success of her sister’s poems—and she wanted another volume of them published as soon as possible.

  Mabel was by now Dickinson obsessed. She kept a scrapbook of reviews, she composed an article on Dickinson’s poetry (rejected by several magazines), she peddled her father’s essay on Dickinson (also rejected), she wrote an encyclopedia entry on Dickinson, and in Springfield she lectured on the poet’s life and work, which she would continue to do at various literary events, charging ten dollars per talk, plus expenses. She virtually performed Emily, effortlessly assuming center stage as the poet’s shepherd and spokesperson. And to her great satisfaction, she was much more successful than Sue at selling Emily’s poems to magazines and newspapers; The Independent bought three in the first month of 1891.

  Higginson, too, participated in the Dickinson boomlet, which he helped to create by inviting Boston literati—Howells, Samuel Longfellow, the historian William Roscoe Thayer, and a young Harvard philosophy instructor, George Santayana, who could not attend—to his comfortable parlor. Just a few feet away from the regimental sword hanging in a hallway crowded with family portraits, Higginson recited a selection of his Dickinson letters. “I think there is in literary history no more interesting self-revelation,” he afterward told the drama critic Brander Matthews. Higginson then called Dickinson a genius—a word he used sparingly—when lecturing to New York’s Nineteenth Century Club, and to explain her unusual style, he fell back on his beloved Thoreau, who had said in “The Last Days of John Brown” that “the art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle.” Dickinson seldom missed the mark.

  The
audience having been adequately prepared, Higginson believed Dickinson could now appear as herself—without editorial mangling—but Mabel continued to rework the Poems for the new editions, tweaking rhymes and adjusting grammar. Higginson protested. Such changes must stop. “Let us alter as little as possible, now that the public’s ear is opened,” he would tell her as they began selecting poems for the second volume. He meant it. Mabel did not listen.

  In their cordial way, the editors had grown apart. Giddy with success and convinced of her own wisdom, Todd still wished to regularize Dickinson—“put so in order to have the rhyme perfect,” as she told Higginson, so when, for example, she mailed “Whose are the little beds—I asked” to St. Nicholas magazine, she took the following lines—

  Her busy foot she plied—

  Humming the quaintest lullaby

  That ever rocked a child.

  and replaced them with the nursery-rhymish

  She rocked and gently smiled

  Humming the quaintest lullaby

  That ever soothed a child.

  Vehemently objecting, Higginson restored the lines when working on the second volume of poems. Similarly, when Todd wanted to replace the last lines of “Dare you see a Soul at the ‘White Heat’?,” Higginson put his foot down. Let us alter as little as possible.