White Heat
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I would also like to thank the following collections for the right to reprint material from their collections and to thank the following individuals associated with them: Thomas Knoles and Susan M. Anderson, American Antiquarian Society; Patricia M. Boulos, Boston Athenæum; Earle Havens, acting keeper of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Department of Rare Books & Manuscripts, and Special Collections, Boston Public Library, as well as Sean P. Casey and Barbara Davis; Jessy Randall, curator and archivist, Colorado College Special Collections, Colorado College Special Collections; Patricia Michaelis, director, Library and Archives Division, Kansas State Historical Society; Lia Apodaca, Library of Congress; Natalie Russell, Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Peter Drummey, Massachusetts Historical Society (Annie Adams Fields, diary, 30 January 1868, Annie Field Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society); Itty Mathew, Rights and Reproductions, New-York Historical Society; Thomas Lannon, The New York Public Library (Emily Fowler Ford papers and Genevieve Taggard papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations); William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan; and Edward Gaynor, Papers and forgeries of Emily Dickinson, MSS 7658, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library. I apologize to anyone whose name I may have inadvertently forgotten or never knew, for so very many librarians and archivists made this project possible.
I am grateful to Ellen Fladger, head of Special Collections, Union College, for her ongoing generosity and support; ditto the indefatigable Mary Cahill, head of Interlibrary Loan, at Union College. Speaking of generosity: again Kent Bicknell has proven himself munificent, helpful, and always willing to share the marvelous papers and books in his burgeoning treasure trove of American literature. So too I am grateful to Philip Gura, who was willing to let me use his Dickinson daguerreotype reproduced in these pages.
I have been fortunate enough to work with marvelous students, both in my Dickinson seminar at Union College, and at Columbia University, where my nonfiction colleagues Patty O’Toole, Richard Locke, and Lis Harris graciously selected the novelist Thorn Kief Hillsbery as my Hertog Fellow. At Union, I am also indebted to the fine work of Shaun Kirk, and, at Columbia, of Kate Daloz, Abigail Rabinowitz, and Kim Tingley, who happily took on many painstaking bibliographical and other tasks with real panache. And many thanks to Robert Polito, director of the Writing Program at the New School, who has created a superb working environment for writers. I am also grateful to Stephen Motika of Poets House, as well as Lee Briccetti and Margo Viscusi, who invited me to celebrate the republication of Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson and Emily Dickinson in the twenty-first century.
To friends, I owe much more than thanks. For reading the entire manuscript with typical insight, imagination, and discernment, I am indebted to novelist Christopher Bram; to my former editor, the sensitive author Frances Kiernan; and to the indomitable Byron Dobell; so too am I indebted to the special friendship of novelist Binnie Kirshenbaum, who read several chapters of the manuscript with typical sensitivity and clear-eyed candor. And over the years, I’ve learned from and been sustained by the invaluable companionship, conversation, and charm of David Alexander, Jack Barth, Frederick Brown, Ina Caro, Robert Caro, Jack Diggins, Benita Eisler, Wendy Gimbel, Elizabeth Harlan, Doug Liebhafsky, Richard Lingeman, Molly Haskell, Rochelle Gurstein, Herbert Leibowitz, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Stacy Schiff, the late, lamented Saul A. Silverman, Susan Yankowitz, and Larzer Ziff. And thanks very specially, too, to my beloved friend, the poet and translator, Richard Howard, who reminds me always “only a hidden life is there / to be looked for, not found.”
I am thoroughly indebted to the incomparable Victoria Wilson, my editor, a woman of decisiveness, perspicacity, kindness, and wit. Again, it has been a privilege to work with her, and I thank her more than I can say for shepherding this book from inception to production with typical intelligence and good sense. I am also grateful to her superb colleagues at Knopf: Carmen Johnson, Vicky Wilson’s assistant, whose diligence, meticulousness, and gentle support go beyond the call of duty; Abigail Winograd, who confronted the difficulties of copyediting this manuscript, with all its poems and variants of poems, with courage and smarts; to Caryn Burtt, for her scrupulous attention to permission and legal matters; to Jason Booher and to Victoria Wilson, for the book’s jacket design; and to Iris Weinstein, for the text design. I am also grateful to my agent, Lynn Nesbit, for her bracing honesty, integrity, and humor, and to everyone I’ve had the pleasure of working with at her agency; a special thanks, too, to Tina Simms and the wonderful and encouraging Richard Morris.
For their love and their extraordinary and tenacious courage, I salute my parents, Helen and Irving Wineapple.
For his love, his breadth, his brilliance, and for the depths of his music, inner and outer, I thank my husband, Michael Dellaira, an intimate part of every word in this book and the best part of anything I do. With characteristic open-heartedness and insight, he suggested I dedicate it to the sustaining friend I recently lost—the amazing writer that the world lost—for we shall not see her like again. To Michael and to Sybille, then, forever astonishing.
Notes
ABBREVIATIONS
For frequently cited names, the following abbreviations are used:
DICKINSONS
ED
Emily Dickinson
EdD
Edward Dickinson (father)
END
Emily Norcross Dickinson (mother)
LD
Lavinia Dickinson (sister)
MDB
Martha Dickinson Bianchi (niece)
SGD
Susan Gilbert Dickinson (sister-in-law)
WAD
(William) Austin Dickinson (brother)
HIGGINSONS
AH
Anna Higginson (sister)
LH
Louisa Higginson (sister)
LSH
Louisa Storrow Higginson (mother)
MCH
Mary Channing Higginson
MTH
Mary (Minnie) Thacher Higginson
TWH
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
OTHERS
HHJ
Helen Hunt Jackson
MLT
Mabel Loomis Todd
MTB
Millicent Todd Bingham
For frequently cited books, the following abbreviations are used:
AB
MTB, Ancestors’ Brocades
Austin and Mabel
Longsworth, Austin and Mabel
Dear Preceptor
Wells, Dear Preceptor
Fr
ED, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, variorum ed. or Reading Edition (see note below)
Home
MTB, Emily Dickinson’s Home
Letters
ED, The Letters of Emily Dickinson
LL
Sewall, The Lyman Letters
Poems, First Series
ED, Poems, ed. MLT and TWH, 1890
Poems, Second Series
ED, Poems, ed. TWH and MLT, 1891
Revelation
MTB, Emily Dickinson: A Revelation
Sewall
Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson
Strange Enthusiasm
Edelstein, Strange Enthusiasm
TWH
MTH, Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Werner
Werner, Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios
YH
Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson
For frequently cited writings by TWH, the following abbreviations are used:
Afternoon Landscape
The Afternoon Landscape
Army Life
Army Life in a Black Regiment
Book and Heart
Book and Heart: Essays on Literature and Life
Civil War Journal
The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters
Contemp.
Contemporaries
CY
Cheerful Yesterdays
L&J
Letters and Journals
Magnificent Activist
The Magnificent Activist
Malbone
Malbone: An Oldport Romance
Monarch
The Monarch of Dreams
New World
The New World and the New Book
Part
Part of a Man’s Life
Thalatta
Longfellow and TWH, Thalatta: A Book for the Seaside
Wishes
Woman and Her Wishes
W&M
Women and Men
For frequently cited libraries and manuscript depositories, the following abbreviations are used. (Note that in quoting primary materials, including poems, I have retained the writer’s original spelling and punctuation so that the reader may better hear the author’s voice.)
AAS
American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.
Amherst
Amherst College Archives and Special Collections, Amherst College Library, Amherst, Mass.
BPL
Rare Books and and Manuscript Department and Special Collections, Boston Public Library
Butler
Special Collections, Nicholas Murray Butler Library, Columbia University Libraries, New York
Colorado
Special Collections, Tutt Library, Colorado College, Colorado Springs, Colo.
Houghton
Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
Huntington
Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, Calif.
Kansas
Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka, Kans.
LC
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
MHS
Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston
NYPL
Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library
Smith
Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass.
Stowe Center
Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Conn.
UVA
Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville
Yale
Manuscripts and Archives Department, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University Library, New Haven, Conn.
THE FRANKLIN NUMBERS
Because most of Emily Dickinson’s poems were unpublished in her lifetime, we do not know which version of them, if any, she considered “final,” and prior to 1955, the variants were not available to the public. Rather, most of her editors, like Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Todd, chose—have to choose—which version of the poem they would print and/or how they would print it. But in 1955, Thomas H. Johnson, with the assistance of Theodora Ward, published a three-volume edition of Dickinson’s poems “including variant readings critically compared with all known manuscripts.” This groundbreaking edition of poems also established the numbering system (instead of titles, which Dickinson herself rarely used) commonly employed in Dickinson studies.
Subsequently, the most recent compilation of Dickinson’s work and its variants is the R. W. Franklin three-volume variorum edition, published in 1998. Franklin, who published the Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson in 1981, includes more and recently discovered Dickinson poems and renumbers them. Though not complete—and inevitably contested—the Franklin version is, to date, the best we have. I have used its numbering system, which supersedes Johnson’s, but since few readers have access to the three-volume edition, in quoting from Dickinson’s poetry I drew on the single version of the poem that Franklin chose to include in his one-volume, readily available Reading Edition.
Still, there are exceptions. If a poem Dickinson sent to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, for instance, is not the version included in the Reading Edition, I quoted from the version of the poem printed in the variorum edition. It is identified by number and with the alphabetical designation (A, B, C, or D) employed by Franklin. And, in several cases, I quoted from the variorum edition and used its alphabetical designation when referring to a particular version of a poem sent to a particular recipient.
CHAPTER ONE: THE LETTER
“This is my letter to the World”: Fr 519.
“Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”: ED to TWH, April 15, 1862, Letters, 2:403.
after reading from a statement: See Lucy Stone, “Protest against the Laws of Marriage,” Protest Read at Wedding Ceremony, May 1, 1855, reprinted in Dorothy Emerson, Standing Before Us, p. 57.
“I enjoy danger”: TWH, Kansas notebook, Houghton.
“Could I make you and Austin—proud—”: ED to SGD, [summer 1861. Many of Johnson’s dates are speculative, and so unless I can be sure of the date or an approximation of it, I have put it in brackets.], Letters, 2:380.
“Should you think it breathed—”: ED to TWH, April 15, 1862, Letters, 2:403.
“the most curious thing about the letter was the total absence of a signature”: TWH, “Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” p. 444.
“I’ll tell you how the Sun rose—”: Fr 204.
“The nearest Dream recedes—unrealized—”: Fr 304.
“the impression of a wholly new and original poetic genius”: TWH, “Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” p. 445.
“I read your Chapters”: ED to TWH, April 25, 1862, Letters, 2:405.
“Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—”: Fr 124.
“There may be years”…“Charge your style with life”: TWH, “Letter to a Young Contributor,” pp. 403, 404.
“I foresee that ‘Young Contributors’ will send me worse things”: TWH to James T. Fields, Houghton, quoted in YH, 2:55.
“Two such specimens”: TWH to James T. Fields, April 17, 1862, Huntington.
“Since that Letter to a Young Contributor”: TWH to LSH, April 18, 1862, Houghton.
“I tried a little”: TWH, “Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” p. 448.
“surgery” “It was not so painful as I supposed”: ED to TWH, April 25, 1862, Letters, 2:404.
“with a naive skill”: TWH, “Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” p. 445.
“but in your manner of the phrase” “they are better than Beings”: ED to TWH, April 25, 1862, Letters, 2:404–405.
“In a Life that stopped guessing”: ED to SGD, [1878], Letters, 2:632.
“does not care for thought” “begs me not to read them” “except me—” “I sing”: ED to TWH, April 25, 1862, Letters, 2:404.
“When far afterward—”: ED to TWH, June 7, 1862, Letters, 2:408.
who “came to my Father’s House”: ED to TWH, April 25, 1862, Letters, 2:405.
“I cannot think of a bliss as great”: TWH, Field Book, September 20, 1861, Houghton.
he unsuccessfully tried to organize a military expedition: See TWH to Sydney Howard Gay, May 5, 1861, Butler.
“I have thoroughly made up my mind” “This war, for which I long”: TWH, journal, August 25, 1861, Houghton.
“a column of newspaper or a column of attack”: TWH, “Letter to a Young Contributor,” p. 409.
“The General Rose—decay—”: Fr 772.
“South Winds jostle them—”: Fr 98E.
“Your letter gave no Drunkenness”: ED to TWH, June 7, 1862, Letters, 2:408.
“You think my gait ‘spasmodic’—” “The ‘hand you stretch me in the Dark’”: ED to TWH, June 7, 1862, Letters, 2:409.
“‘To publish’—” “if fame belonged to me”: ED to TWH, June 7, 1862, Letters, 2:408.
“We play at Paste—”: Fr 282A. She was also slyly alluding, it seems, to his “Gymnastics” essay: “Practise…thoroughly and patiently, and you will in time attain evolutions more complicated, and, if you wish, more perilous.” See TWH, “Gymnastics,” p. 292.
“Would you hav
e time to be the ‘friend’”: ED to TWH, June 7, 1862, Letters, 2:409.
“As if I asked a common Alms”: Fr 14.
“But, will you be my Preceptor”: ED to TWH, June 7, 1862, Letters, 2:409.
“the Dreamer & worker—”: TWH, “Dreamer and Worker” notebook, Houghton.
“I fancy that in some other realm”: TWH, “Letter to a Young Contributor,” pp. 410–411.