White Heat

by Brenda Wineapple

  There was no real contest. Though commentators then and later assumed Vinnie had perjured herself by lying about the deed, on April 15, 1898, Judge John Hopkins decided the case in favor of Lavinia and the New England propriety, primogeniture, and real estate she represented. The deed was rendered void, the Todds ordered to pay Vinnie’s legal fees, and when Mabel appealed the decision, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, then presiding over the Massachusetts higher court, upheld the verdict.

  “I shall die standing up,” Mabel fumed. “There will be no weak admission that persecution has keeled me. But I am so tired in my soul!”

  Mabel Loomis Todd locked the trunk in which she kept her collection of Dickinson poems and letters, and for the next fifty years their ownership remained a source of legal contention, Dickinson heirs calling Mrs. Todd a whore and a thief. As an adult her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, worked hard to rehabilitate Mabel’s reputation while ruing the “blight of self-interest and self-glorification [that] had fallen upon her.” Maybe it had. But what we do know for sure is that the feud erased the contribution of Thomas Higginson to Emily Dickinson’s spectacular debut.

  Me—Come! My dazzled face

  In such a shining place!

  Me—hear! My foreign Ear

  The sounds of Welcome—there!

  NINETEEN

  Because I Could Not Stop

  In the pinkish twilight of a September evening in 1904, after nearly twenty-one years abroad, Henry James was back in America, strolling along the brick streets of Cambridge. The university was no longer a small, leafy affair, he noticed. Knots of motley immigrants jostled long-skirted Radcliffe women on the crowded sidewalks, and further on, walking by Craigie House, he mused how the companionable Longfellow’s home was now a watering hole for sightseers. Democracy levels it all: distinction, nuance, individuality.

  This was just the sort of hauteur that exasperated the local Cambridge belletrist, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who considered James a formidable talent deracinated by his refusals—chief among them, his repudiation of America. “American literature is not,” Higginson emphatically declared, “and never can be, merely an outlying portion of the literature of England.” Though he himself admired Jane Austen, whom he reread every year along with his beloved Thoreau, Higginson also believed American literature sprang—should spring—from that rich, self-renewing idiom in which “the mixture of nationalities is constantly coining and exchanging new felicities of dialect”: from the African spirituals he had so scrupulously copied; the twang of Western writers such as Bret Harte and Mark Twain, with whom he’d become friends; the argot of the Italian newcomer and of those who sailed in steerage from beyond the Pale. This was true cosmopolitanism, not the sinuous, self-regarding sentences of Henry James.

  And unlike James, Higginson still hoped to heal the rift between art and public life, or what so long ago he had called, more generally, the dreamer and the worker. This had been the aim, as he saw it, of Thoreau, a writer snubbed by James, to whom Higginson constantly returned, again quoting Thoreau’s definition of style—“the art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle.” Thoreau, John Brown, Lincoln, Grant: these men—not James or Higginson himself, as he knew too well—closed the gap between private and public with the plain, clear speech of eloquent meaning.

  Doubtless some of Higginson’s irritation with James, not unlike the grudge he bore Whitman, had its origins in the war, which James curiously had managed to avoid. Or had he? Higginson cannily wondered. “Mr. James has no doubt placed himself as far as possible beyond the reach of the Civil War by keeping the Atlantic Ocean between him and the scene where it occurred,” Higginson dryly commented. “But when I recall that I myself saw his youngest brother, still almost a boy, lying near to death, as it then seemed, in a hospital at Beaufort, S.C., after the charge on Fort Wagner, I can easily imagine that the Civil War may really have done something for Mr. James’s development, after all.”

  Yet Higginson agreed with James that art was to be evaluated in aesthetic, not moral terms. “Let the picture only be well drawn; and the moral will take care of itself; never fear,” Higginson insisted. His preferred modern poets were Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Heinrich Heine, and he said that “in case I were going to prison and could have but one book, I should think it a calamity to have Tennyson offered me instead of Browning.” These days he gravitated toward Lanier and Poe and Swinburne, whom he praised for their metrical experimentation, as well as the young William Butler Yeats, whom he had met in England.

  Not as square a critic as a subsequent generation of modernists would characterize him—neither as moralistic nor as mediocre—in 1890 Higginson co-edited a collection of American Sonnets, noting that “in attempting to enforce…[fixed] laws, it is easy to become as pedantic and wearisome as the later Greek grammarians.” Regardless, his taste was often inhibited by a finicky reticence, as it was in the case of Whitman, who still rankled him, although a mellower Higginson in old age acknowledged the poet’s gifts and said he’d like Whitman’s “Joy, Shipmate, Joy!” carved on his tombstone. But in 1870, just a few months before he went to Amherst for the first time, he declared that the “American poet of passion is yet to come.” Had he failed to see the genius under his nose? For a while, perhaps. But he eventually understood enough to let others—us—have her.

  And though he initially hesitated about publishing Dickinson’s verse, once Poems appeared and he looked at it, as if for the first time, he never changed his mind about her brilliance. In 1895 he said she possessed an ability to touch depths other poets may only dream of. The next year, when Mabel Todd brought out the third and last volume of Dickinson poems, he recurred again to Thoreau’s aggressive metaphor: “She is to be tested,” Higginson declared, “not by her attitude, by her shot. Does she hit the mark? As a rule she does.” In 1903, when Higginson turned eighty and it seemed Dickinson’s star had set, he was unfazed. “We take for granted the somewhat exaggerated estimates of Margaret Fuller, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Emily Dickinson,” griped one critic riled by Higginson’s feminism. Higginson shrugged. Poems such as “Vanished” (his title) would never be forgotten, he claimed, and while this isn’t one of her best poems, it does reveal his awe in her presence—and his nagging sense of what he had lost and still missed:

  She died,—this was the way she died;

  And when her breath was done,

  Took up her simple wardrobe

  And started for the sun.

  Her little figure at the gate

  The angels must have spied,

  Since I could never find her

  Upon the mortal side.

  Unable to find her on the mortal side, Higginson invented her: “a strange, solitary, morbidly sensitive, and pitifully childlike poetic genius who could afford, in all simplicity, to fall back upon her own companionship, and the companionship of animals, without caring to grow in wisdom,” he wrote with cloying sentimentality. A concoction of his and Mabel Todd’s, this image of Dickinson as reclusive-savant served both of them well: Mabel desperately wanted to enlarge her role in Dickinson affairs as the cicerone of a retiring genius, and Wentworth, who likely distrusted his own fondness toward Emily, wanted to keep her at bay. For though he may have been smitten with the crack’d and solitary singer who drained his nerve power, he would never have admitted to or acted on his feelings.

  In the end, though, it was Emily who had closed the door, a door never opened to Mabel but unbolted, in part, for him. Their relationship was long-standing, deep, affectionate, real, and her poetry, whether he fully grasped all of it or not—he did grasp a great deal—said what he wished to say but more keenly, directly, daringly, and with more brio. He knew it. Eccentric and unmistakable and naming those uncharted places, her poetry “stands at the opposite remove from the verse of Longfellow,” Higginson noted in 1903—and Longfellow’s popularity, he hastened to add, was “the last fate” Dickinson would have “wished for.” There was nothing
really strange about her vaunted seclusion; she merely shunned what she called “an admiring Bog.”

  In fact, he envied the strength it took to withstand the world, since he, an obliging son of Puritans, could never brook isolation for long; his conscience hurled him, over and over, into the field of action. But the writers he most admired—Hawthorne, Thoreau, even the abolitionist Whittier—were recluses of a sort, as Higginson observed in an essay on the thorny subject of solitude. Even Shakespeare, a writer on the public stage, so skillfully concealed his private life that many doubted he wrote his own plays. “It would be easy to make up a long list of authors of eminence who have deprecated instead of encouraging all personal information,” Higginson declared, “and who would have been eminently unfitted to live in an age or land of interviewers.”

  Desiring the solitude he could not sustain, Higginson thrived in that age of interviewers; Dickinson, not at all. They respected each other the more for it.

  “Perhaps the more we are destined to have in common,” Higginson concluded, “the more we shall take refuge in what we can preserve of ‘retiracy.’” The modern age erased individuals: Higginson agreed with Henry James more than he let on.

  “FEW OF US NOW REMAIN who were baptized into the light & hope of the ‘Transcendental’ movement,” Higginson had remarked just days after his seventieth birthday. “To that & to the Anti Slavery movement I always feel that I owe most of what makes life worth living.”

  Bearing the scar on his chin that he had earned while storming the Boston courthouse, Higginson still framed the war as a contest between freedom and enslavement, with freedom victorious; the simplification, though considered radical in 1893, papered over the inequities and indignities that black Americans, legally free, now endured. In retrospect, then, Higginson sometimes seems a man of denial: the war was over, slavery abolished. Garrison had closed The Liberator in 1865, and all was presumably well.

  Higginson himself is partly to blame for this perception. The ongoing series of reminiscences he published in his later years had a sedative effect on his readers, distancing them from the derring-do of his more militant and feminist past. In 1896, for instance, his gastric ailment bedeviling him, he sat up in bed, propped with pillows, to write a memoir called “The Recollections of a Radical”—that is, before he jettisoned the title as too combative and unliterary. Borrowing instead from Wordsworth’s Excursion (“A man he seems of cheerful yesterdays / And confident tomorrows”) he renamed his book Cheerful Yesterdays.

  Though the title sounds a bit smug, Cheerful Yesterdays is nonetheless the recollection of a public-spirited, self-proclaimed reformer who refuses to recant the radicalism that, by 1898, seemed quaint—or, worse yet, was dismissed as the very fanaticism that caused the war and after it divided the nation. Higginson took umbrage. A commitment to basic human rights is not fanaticism, and as for Reconstruction, if it ended poorly, as he wrote in The Nation in 1899, it was because southerners kept blacks in a condition “just as near slavery as possible; to limit their right of contract, their right of locomotion, and their range of labor.” Former slaveholders had driven out northerners come to invest energy, time, and cash; “the typical carpet-bagger,” he said, “was simply the man who was left behind to do mischief.”

  But overall Cheerful Yesterdays said little about racial inequality, Jim Crow, or the recent disenfranchisement of black voters in the South. Instead, Higginson devised a narrative of his life in terms of progressive reform conceived in the ravishing innocence of radicalism and matured into hope for the coming century: “To those who were living when the American nation lifted and threw off from its shoulders the vast incubus of human slavery,” he asked, “what other task can seem too great to be accomplished?”

  YET THE SUBJECT OF PREJUDICE was on his mind. Higginson joined the Anti-Imperialist League, formed in 1898 to protest American foreign policy and especially the brutal effort to annex the Philippines. With William James, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Andrew Carnegie, and Samuel Gompers, Higginson thoroughly rejected the so-called White Man’s Burden (Kipling would coin the phrase in ’99) and condemned jingoistic American politicians, his disgust the inevitable result of a lifelong commitment to justice and liberty. “Freedom is freedom,” he cried, “and it is not for a nation born and reared on this theory to ignore it in judging the affairs of others.”

  That meant he had to reconsider the present condition of American blacks. “These people have a right to the freedom of civilization, the freedom of political rights, the freedom not merely to escape being held as slaves, but to have a position as free men that is worth having,” he wrote in the Boston Evening Transcript, his oratorical style again strong. In the presidential election of 1900, Higginson threw his support to the anti-imperialist William Jennings Bryan and, aware the black voter would be leery of a Democratic candidate, joined with Garrison’s son and George Boutwell, head of the Anti-Imperialist League, to write the “Address to the Colored People of the United States.” The black population, Higginson said, “must cut adrift from every organization which wars on darker races, as such, and begins to talk again of ‘the natural supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon.’ We fought through a four years’ war to get rid of that doctrine, and enlisted nearly 200,000 black soldiers for the purpose.”

  That the African American had no real advocate in government soon became abundantly clear to Higginson, who read with mounting fury Bryan’s newspaper, The Commoner, in which Bryan stated over and over that he believed black Americans inferior to Anglo-Saxons. Higginson angrily wrote Bryan; the letter is worth quoting at length:

  I have yours of Nov. 23rd, and it perhaps justifies me in writing to you with a frankness which I might not otherwise have regarded as proper. You ask me to assist in finding efficient agents for “The Commoner.” Excuse me if I reply that, although I headed your electoral ticket in this state during the last presidential election, I never could have done it had you taken the position assumed in “The Commoner” of Nov. 1st, in regard to what you call the “social equality” question. In this number of the paper you take a position which appears to me utterly retrograde and mediaeval; & wholly inconsistent with your general attitude.

  You also show in your way of arguing either ignorance or indifference in respect to American history when you say that no man or party has advocated social equality between the white man and the black man. The simple fact is that no man concerned in the great anti-slavery movement in its early days ever advocated anything else. In my own case from the first time I had a house of my own in 1847, a fugitive slave always had a refuge there, and was treated as a social equal; and when, in the year 1857, I raised emigrant parties and accompanied them into your state and Kansas, it was always under the same fiat. It is humiliating to me to think that a newspaper, calling itself Democratic in a region thus made free, should take such an attitude as you now assume.

  It is in my opinion an essential part of Democracy that social distinctions should be merely individual, not racial. Character is character; and education is education. What social gradations exist should be based on these, and these alone; and even these should be effaced as rapidly as possible. What are you or what am I that we should undertake to advocate any social law that shall place us above men like Frederick Douglass or Booker Washington? No point which “The Commoner” advocates seems to me so important as this, and whatever its other merits, it here seems to me so utterly in the wrong, that I have no wish to subscribe for it myself or to have it sent me and can only wish, if it holds to this attitude, that it may be discontinued.

  Similarly, in 1904 Higginson wanted to know what so-called freedoms African Americans actually enjoyed: “a freedom tempered by chain-gangs, lynching, and the lash” he angrily wondered. Loathing the deep vein of racism that underlay violence perpetrated on black Americans, he snapped with antebellum fury, “Was any white man ever lynched, either before or since for insulting the modesty of a colored girl?” As for the fear, northern and south
ern, of miscegenation, he would have none of it. “As the memories of the slave period fade way, the mere fetich [sic] of colorphobia will cease to control our society,” he imagined, “and marriage may come to be founded, not on the color of skin, but upon the common courtesies of life, and upon genuine sympathies of heart and mind.”

  In 1905 he wrote an introduction to The Aftermath of Slavery by Dr. William Sinclair, an ex-slave, in which Sinclair cogently argued that southern whites, wishing to reenslave black Americans, murdered thousands of them while denying them the vote. Though Higginson took the long view—“I am a man old enough to recall a time when there existed all around us at the North instances of the same kinds of injustice of which we now properly complain when we see it in the South”—he rebuked individuals like the white supremacist Thomas Nelson Page, whose novels Higginson had already censured. The next year he reproached Brander Matthews for not paying much attention to “the fact of colorphobia, still so dangerous & inhuman a feature of our civilization.”

  While he largely agreed with the Great Accommodator, Booker T. Washington, that education—for Washington, vocational education—was for African Americans the royal road to economic independence, he reminded his readers that “it is important for this race to produce its own physicians, lawyers, preachers, and above all, teachers.” And he chided Harvard graduates in a poem published the same year that Henry James rambled the streets of Cambridge:

  They saved you; charged Fort Wagner; they held out,

  Held the road wide that Sherman might pass through.

  You built Shaw’s statue; can you calmly doubt

  That those who marched with him should vote, like you?