White Heat

by Brenda Wineapple

  And as he continued to read Dickinson, we can watch Higginson overcome his squeamishness. “One poem only I dread a little to print—that wonderful ‘Wild Nights,’—lest the malignant read into it more than that virgin recluse ever dreamed of putting there,” he wrote to Mrs. Todd. “Has Miss Lavinia any shrinking about it? You will understand & pardon my solicitude. Yet what a loss to omit it! Indeed it is not to be omitted.” And it was not.

  Regardless, the editors snipped this, sorted that, with Mabel perpetually inclined to alter Dickinson’s subjunctives. And they also “corrected” grammar, changing, for instance, “Further in Summer than the Birds—” to “Farther in summer,” spoiling the internal rhyme (further / birds) and tampering with the meaning. In “They dropped like Flakes—,” they converted the first five-line stanza into a quatrain and changed the poem’s last two lines to regularize the rhyme. Yet even when tucked under their reductive titles, the poems were not entirely defanged. Take, for instance, the quietly ferocious (and untitled) “It was not Death, for I stood up.” In spite of the editors’ substitution of commas for dashes and their lowering the cases of the nouns, the funereal images—simultaneously concrete and abstract—parse that inchoate feeling that is despair:

  It was not death, for I stood up,

  And all the dead lie down;

  It was not night, for all the bells

  Put out their tongues, for noon.

  It was not frost, for on my flesh

  I felt siroccos crawl,—

  Nor fire, for just my marble feet

  Could keep a chancel cool.

  And yet it tasted like them all;

  The figures I have seen

  Set orderly, for burial,

  Reminded me of mine,

  As if my life were shaven

  And fitted to a frame,

  And could not breathe without a key;

  And ’t was like midnight, some,

  When everything that ticked has stopped,

  And space stares, all around,

  Or grisly frosts, first autumn morns,

  Repeal the beating ground.

  But most like chaos,—stopless, cool,—

  Without a chance or spar,

  Or even a report of land

  To justify despair.

  Bells put out their tongues, siroccos crawl on the flesh, feet are by contrast cold and stiff, and yet “It was not night,” or “frost” or “fire,” and “yet it tasted like them all.” And what is “it”? Not death, but something analogous, something that occurs when “everything that ticked has stopped,” and “grisly frosts…/ Repeal the beating ground”: motion is stilled, the clocks are irrelevant when living earth accedes to immobile winter, and we exist “Without a chance or spar” to help us. There’s no overrefinement or platitude here.

  PERHAPS HIGGINSON ACQUIESCED to Todd’s unwarranted liberties or insisted on his awful titles because he never did quite suppress his ambivalence about some of Dickinson’s poems. At once declaring their genius and then, sometimes, deploring their immature form, he handled them as he treated current affairs, with an odd amalgam of conservatism and radicalism. The man who recommended that abolitionists secede from the Union, the man who bore arms against the South in the name of liberty, the man who loved Thoreau and Margaret Fuller and African spirituals and then peddled moderation, conciliation, and the verse of Helen Jackson knew that no one had ever seen poetry like this. And yet despite dedication, appreciation, and loyalty, he suggested she would have wanted to improve her work had she lived to publish it. School-marmish, he reminded Mrs. Todd that “it might do well for you to suggest in your preface [to the second volume] that we never can tell to what rigorous revision these poems might have been subjected, had the author printed them herself. They are to be regarded in many cases as the mere unfinished sketches or first studies of an artist, preserved for their intrinsic value, not presented as being in final form.”

  In her preface to Poems, Second Series, Todd obligingly apologized for the ragged quality of the poems, though she did say, likely also at Higginson’s prompting, that “all interference not absolutely inevitable has been avoided. The very roughness of her own rendering is part of herself, and not lightly to be touched; for it seems in many cases that she intentionally avoided the smoother and more usual rhymes.” Determined to rebut whatever jibes the first volume had suffered, Todd also squashed rumors about Dickinson as a lovelorn invalid wrapped in seclusion and nursing a broken heart. Austin, for one, would have none of it. “She had tried society and the world, and found them lacking,” Mabel wrote with clenched teeth. “She was not an invalid, and she lived in seclusion from no love-disappointment. Her life was the normal blossoming of a nature introspective to a high degree, whose best thought could not exist in pretence.”

  At Higginson’s urging, this time Mabel signed the preface and she placed his name ahead of hers on the flyleaf. In the meantime, he had been busy with his own introductory essay, the delightful “Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” which publicized the second book of poems by gently narrating the course of his relationship with its author, beginning with the day he encountered her query “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”

  Today Higginson’s essay is often denigrated both by Higginson detractors and Dickinson enthusiasts (usually they are of the same party). Yet it’s a trove of firsthand facts and insights about the poet who defied the protocols to which he, as her editor and friend, admitted he often fell prey. “It would seem that at first I tried a little,—a very little—to lead her in the direction of rules and traditions,” he observed, not quite remembering, “but I fear it was only perfunctory, and that she interested me more in her—so to speak—unregenerate condition.”

  Though acquiescing to the charade of preceptor and student, he knew he could teach her little, and humble before her, or so he recollected, “I soon abandoned all attempt to guide in the slightest degree this extraordinary nature, and simply accepted her confidences, giving as much as I could of what might interest her in return.”

  Writing for the public, he does not tell us what Dickinson gave him; perhaps he never knew himself. But he does recall wanting to see more, do more, know more, and be more to her. “Perhaps in time I could have got beyond that somewhat overstrained relation which not my will, but her needs, had forced upon us,” he reminisced as honestly as he could. “Certainly I should have been most glad to bring it down to the level of simple truth and every-day comradeship; but it was not altogether easy.”

  Dictating the terms of their relationship, Dickinson demanded more than ordinary companionship, if indeed she knew what shape that might take. And she admired the outdoors that Higginson represented and his perpetual defiance of social pieties even while he seemed to uphold them. Hers was an inward life; his outward. But he moved her. She saw beyond the mottled air of Boston, its benignities and reverent causes, and would not come to his Radical Club, knowing that radicalism is not clubbable. Neither is art. But she sensed the art in Higginson.

  If his strength lay in action, hers lay in words, which she would never subordinate to rule. Nor did he, though over time he considered compromise necessary for success in a fallen world. And yet he had staked so much of his life on finding the right word to inspire and inflame and liberate, quite literally, those who needed it. So what had happened to him? This blackest of all Black Republicans had become disillusioned. The livid pulpit orator of Worcester witnessed not just the breakdown of racial barriers, long overdue, but the breakdown of linguistic promise. Emancipation when? And for whom? The questions still hung in the air, unanswered and, it seemed, unheard in the scramble for celebrity riches.

  Yet if no longer spouting revolution, Higginson stayed a reformer, and in later years the elegance of his prose well served his charming reminiscences not because it emptied the past of meaning but because it firmly and without apology affirmed his earlier radicalism. He had been a champion of the tough-minded, the far-flung, the sove
reign, and the crack’d, and of Emily Dickinson, whose words were, all in all, a form of action too.

  SWATHED IN WHITE, like its author, Poems, Second Series was released on November 9, 1891. It sold posthaste.

  Again the emblem on the cover was Dickinson’s Indian pipes. Again the editors placed her poems, 166 of them in this volume, into broad categories: “Life,” “Love,” “Nature,” and “Time and Eternity.” But this time the editors included poems about poetry (“Essential oils are wrung”) and passion (“Wild nights! Wild nights!” and “Going to him! Happy letter!”) and doubt (“Their height in heaven comforts not”). Reviewers fidgeted. The more the poetry moved them, it seemed, the more they balked. The New York World haughtily asked if the “admirers” of Dickinson’s “experimental vagaries” do her any service by printing more of her “crudities,” and The Critic groused about “too much of the same thing,” namely, “jerky and disjointed writing, and occasional faults of grammar.” The Literary World dubbed the poems “neuralgic darts of feeling.” And when Thomas Bailey Aldrich read Howells’s review of Dickinson, he cringed. “I honestly think his mind unbalanced,” he said. Aldrich, Howells’s successor at The Atlantic Monthly who ushered it into a period of decline, then trounced Dickinson’s poems as well as Higginson himself. “I fail to detect in her work any of that profound thought which her editor professes to discover in it,” he concluded his review. “The phenomenal insight, I am inclined to believe, exists only in his partiality; for whenever a woman poet is in question Mr. Higginson always puts on his rose-colored spectacles.”

  The condescension of Aldrich was nothing compared with the consternation of the British press, which denounced Dickinson’s crude American infraction of poetic form. That amused Alice James, the sister of William and Henry. “It is reassuring to hear the English pronouncement that Emily Dickinson is fifth-rate, they have such a capacity for missing quality; the robust evades them equally with the subtle,” she snickered. But the book sold, and Mabel, delirious with yet another victory over Sue, busied herself with more Dickinson projects: a yearbook of Dickinson’s epigrams and poetic fragments and a set of new lectures throughout New England that would attract as many as two hundred expectant listeners in auditoriums, drawing rooms, churches, and town halls. She had a mission.

  Lavinia Dickinson, 1880s.

  And it has proved invaluable. Because she had been systematically collecting and copying Dickinson’s letters since 1892, we owe the discovery and preservation of many of them largely to her Herculean effort. But the Dickinson family was hard as ever to navigate, and Higginson, at first part of the letter project, sniffed trouble when Vinnie wrote to ask how it was going. He bowed out. “I had expected to leave the letters entirely to you & at any rate the work of them & the profit,” he told Mrs. Todd. “I do not now wish to do any of the editing or to read the proofs, but if you should think that my name would help the book or that Miss L. should be indulged, I would do whatever you think about it.”

  Mabel later explained that Lavinia, upset, had gone to Higginson behind her back because she, Mabel, was also working on a book about eclipses for Roberts Brothers—Mabel knew how to take advantage of an opportunity—and Lavinia thought this other project interfered with Mabel’s commitment to Emily. That may have been true. But Lavinia also begrudged Mabel’s limelight-grabbing—and lucrative—appropriation of her sister. Sternly she explained to Higginson in an eight-page letter (now lost) that Mrs. Todd should not share in royalties and, moreover, that nothing would ever induce her to “give the copyright of Emily’s mind to anyone.”

  Higginson wisely stepped aside, and half-sorry to hear Mabel had almost finished her collection of Dickinson’s letters, he ruefully noted in the summer of 1893 that it “will be the last, I suppose, & will not only yield the final news of E. D. but take from me a living companionship I shall miss.”

  His affection for Dickinson had splashed onto Mrs. Todd. Over the years he and she remained in touch, the Colonel careful always not to offend Sue when he occasionally went to Amherst, where he stayed at a hotel so as not to show preference. And after Austin’s death, Higginson tried to console Mabel. “I wish as I always do, that Massachusetts were not so unreasonably long a state, that you might not live so far from me,” he said. It sounds as if he were writing to Emily, with whom Mabel was so closely linked. But it was the ethereal, wonderful poet whom he loved, that “mystic and bizarre Emily,” he called her, “born at once between two pages, as Thoreau says summer passes to autumn in an instant.”

  THE PANIC OF 1893 delayed publication of the letters, and the book would not appear anyway until Vinnie and Mabel, then squabbling, settled their argument over royalties. Vinnie, who kept the copyright, wanted to dole out royalties to Mrs. Todd rather than have the publisher divide the proceeds. “I think she can trust my honor,” huffed Vinnie. Austin had by then intervened on Mabel’s side, arguing for a legal contract, and Vinnie finally consented to splitting earnings, although, as it turned out, there were none. Wounded, Mabel avenged herself in the preface by not acknowledging Vinnie’s role in collecting the letters and, for that matter, by not even mentioning Vinnie’s name.

  MABEL WAS ALSO EDITING a third series of Dickinson poems, this time without Colonel Higginson, and on her own at last she did not have to follow Higginson’s injunction to alter as little as possible. Consequently, of the three volumes, Poems, Third Series (1896), is the most expurgated. Higginson flinched, albeit with diplomacy. “It is noticeable, also, that in a few of the poems,” he noted, “there is an unexampled regularity of form, beyond anything to be found in the earlier volumes.”

  Reviewers were less tactful. “Her vogue has passed,” declared one critic. “Now such reputation as she has among minor lyricists is imperiled by the indiscretion of her executors.” The poems did not sell.

  But a seventy-two-year-old Higginson rode to the rescue. For the next ten years most of his poetry columns in The Nation included a mention of Emily Dickinson, whether he was praising the verse of Celia Thaxter or Stephen Crane (whom he called an amplified Dickinson) or Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Captain Craig Poems, suggesting that Robinson’s poetry was “often like that of Emily Dickinson when she piques your curiosity through half a dozen readings and suddenly makes all clear.” He compared Hamlin Garland’s verse unfavorably to Dickinson’s, he heard the poetry of Dickinson in the English lyricist Winifred Lucas, and it was he who prodded Stedman to represent Dickinson amply in his American Anthology. When Brander Matthews composed a list of significant American authors, Higginson chided him for excluding someone as unique and talented as she.

  AUSTIN DICKINSON HAD DIED in the summer of 1895 from what his doctor diagnosed as a tired heart. Plagued by Mabel’s persistent unhappiness, Vinnie’s moods, and the cold misery of his own disconsolate family, Austin had been complaining of shortness of breath, exhaustion, and poor appetite for almost a year. The families warred on, and he wore out.

  Six months later, on February 7, 1896, Mabel and a lawyer, Timothy Spaulding of Northampton, marched over to the Homestead to put a deed of sale under Vinnie’s nose that would transfer to the Todds an additional strip of Dickinson land, fifty-three feet wide, running east of the property that Austin had already given them. Mabel claimed that Austin had promised her this land—worth two thousand dollars—as remuneration for her work on Emily’s poems. But Austin’s promises were mostly hollow. He had failed to include Mabel in his will—it was “best for now,” he lamely consoled her—and instead, to circumvent Sue, bequeathed to Vinnie his share of his father’s estate with the verbal proviso that Vinnie pass it on to Mabel. He must have known Vinnie would never convey Dickinson property to anyone, least of all Mabel.

  Mabel said she assumed that Vinnie would immediately comply with Austin’s wish, a mighty naive assumption for a woman not particularly naive.

  Yet Vinnie did sign the deed that cold February night. At Mabel’s request it was not filed right away; Mabel wanted to conceal the ar
rangement from Sue and so planned to be out of the country, in Japan, accompanying her husband on another astronomical junket, when the deed became public knowledge.

  The Todds came home to Amherst in the fall of 1896, just after Poems, Third Series, appeared, to find Vinnie suing them for fraud. Alleging that Mrs. Todd had duped her into signing the deed, Vinnie said she thought she was merely putting her name to a friendly agreement forbidding construction on the contested site. Aghast, Mabel immediately countersued for slander. That suit was scheduled to be heard first, and when Mabel did not turn up in court (no one knows why)—her attorney may have suspected what her biographer calls “moral quicksand”—the judge, denying a continuance, proceeded with Vinnie’s suit.

  That trial commenced in March 1898.

  It was a tawdry business, since what was really on trial was Mabel Todd’s affair with the poet’s brother. Naturally this was not directly stated, and fortunately for Mabel the deposition of Vinnie’s servant, Maggie Maher, never became public; nor was Maggie called to the stand, where she would have testified that she knew of Mabel and Austin’s adultery. But in a significant tactical error, Mabel put the poems at the center of her defense. The land in question, she argued, was her reward for poems that took her the better part of ten years to copy, edit, and arrange for publication. Evidently Mrs. Todd had forgotten that she was considered an opportunistic interloper: how dare she profit financially, legally, or personally from Emily Dickinson’s poems?

  Amherst buzzed with the scandal, but Sue Dickinson stayed aloof, ensconced at the Evergreens, her absence from the courtroom noticeable and in its silent way eloquent. Yet day after day, Ned and Mattie listened to their aunt and their father’s lover trade ugly accusations, each adversary playing her part to the hilt. Head held high, Mabel strode into the courtroom in a modish black and white hat. And in blue flannel dress, long crepe veil, and yellow shoes, Vinnie costumed herself as the self-reliant Yankee spinster, eccentric and familiar, shrewd and helpless, Hepzibah Pyncheon with vinegar.