These Fevered Days

by Martha Ackmann

  Friday, February 20, 1852 2 p.m. Thermometer 18.2 degrees. Barometer mean 30.38b. Wind NW 2. Humidity 44. Cloudiness 0. Snow 0. Remarks: Clear and pretty cold. Faint Streamers.

  —Ebenezer Snell, The Meteorological Journal Kept at Amherst College

  The family cat had been missing for a month, and in its absence Emily became the house mouser. She traps one a night, Vinnie boasted.1 Even when it came to rodents, Vinnie was proud of her sister’s accomplishments. Now that Emily had permanently returned from Mount Holyoke, her life revolved around the Dickinsons’ home with all its attendant comforts, duties, and grievances. When Emily informed Abiah she would not be returning to the seminary, she said the decision was her father’s.2 The statement was true, partially. As the presumed head of the household, Edward Dickinson rendered most of the judgments for the family, but Emily was coy about what was or was not her choice. Routinely she suggested that others made decisions for her or actions simply happened or evolved by default. Other times she remained mute about personal accomplishments that others would have bragged about. It became increasingly difficult to discern what she chose to do and what she appeared to have no hand in. She was growing intentionally furtive, indiscernible, and tight-lipped about owning up to her decisions. And she appeared to acquiesce easily to her father’s determinations—perhaps too easily. In truth, nothing about twenty-one-year-old Emily Dickinson was easy or apparent. Implying the Mount Holyoke decision was her father’s alone said as much about Emily’s silence as it did Edward Dickinson’s dominance. It was not that Emily was capricious or believed she was not entitled to her own point of view. Rather, she did not want to be found out. She preferred being imperceptible. It was as though Emily wanted to set the trap, but be nowhere in sight when it snapped.

  The decision not to return to Mount Holyoke was understood. Emily wanted to stay in Amherst, and teaching already had been ruled out. When she looked around, she saw young people her age finding work, leaving town, and establishing their independence. Cousin Emily was teaching in Ohio. Austin had graduated from Amherst College and was teaching in Boston. Her friend Jane Humphrey had accepted a school post in the Midwest. “Why so far,” Emily asked. “Was’nt there room enough for that young ambition, among New England hills?”3 Everyone seemed to be moving, Emily said—implying she was not.4 She was especially sad to see Sue Gilbert leave. She had grown close to Sue and Mattie Gilbert, who lived in Amherst with their sister and brother-in-law, William Cutler. But, worried about being financially dependent on her sister’s husband, Sue had moved to Baltimore. As a teacher, she earned $125 a year—not much—she admitted, but enough to make a home for herself and be on her own. Perhaps it was more than financial concern that made Sue distance herself from him. William Cutler believed women who worked exposed themselves to sickness and even death, and labeled Sue’s decision to leave “foolish.”5 But Sue had enjoyed herself in Maryland—made new friends, took in operas, sampled food she had never tasted before—and so far she had proved Mr. Cutler wrong.6 She was, after all, still alive.

  Many young men were also no longer around: Amherst College students and former law students who had visited the Dickinsons’ home and showed an interest in Emily. One of them, George Gould—a fraternity brother of Austin’s—had gone west to seek work as an engineer. Everyone liked George’s wit and kindness, and said even shaking hands with him made a person feel better.7 Long after George left, Emily kept his invitation to a party—a candy pull.* Two law clerks in her father’s office also had departed Amherst, but not before giving Emily gifts. The young men shared her love of literature: one had given her a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poems and the other Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. While Emily had no serious romantic prospects at the time, she often was amused by those who did. She told Austin about one friend who had two admirers pulling weeds out of her flower bed. “That’s romantic, is’nt it,” she joked.8 In the winter, the same young woman was with a beau sledding down Boltwood’s Hill. “The very last phase of flirtation,” she quipped.9 If teaching were out of the question and marriage not on the horizon—Emily wondered where life would take her. She was ambitious and a clever writer. At least, that’s what her friends and teachers thought. But she didn’t know if others agreed. She would soon find out. Before the day ended, Emily’s first poem would be published. The verse would take a circuitous route passed from friend to acquaintance before finally ending up in the hands of a respected editor. It all started in the most inauspicious way with shenanigans around Valentine’s Day and one of Vinnie’s suitors.

  By any measure, Vinnie’s gentleman callers had been plentiful and some ardent. Vinnie had young men come for the afternoon to hear her sing, stop by for pie, and take her riding in a carriage “drawn by six horses”—or so she effused in her diary.10 One night Emily observed with amusement that a young man took Vinnie to a lecture while she went unescorted and settled for a seat next to Mr. and Mrs. Snell.11 At one point Vinnie had so many callers, she had to stagger them or dodge one while another was coming through the gate. Many narrow escapes, she admitted.12 William Howland was the most persistent. An 1846 Amherst graduate, he later tutored at the college and studied in Edward Dickinson’s law office. William and Vinnie frequently went walking and rode horseback to a nearby glade. Howland called so often, Vinnie noted he was at the family’s home “again & again.”13 His tenacity sometimes annoyed her, or perhaps it was William himself.14 But when she came back from a visit to Boston, Vinnie had been pleased to see Howland waiting for her. By accepting his invitations, she clearly encouraged him, and one afternoon led to trouble. The two had gone riding far enough away so that no one would see them. Then they exchanged rings. Mr. and Mrs. Dickinson disapproved and—most likely—the incident did not help Howland’s prospects at the Dickinson law office. “Did Vinnie tell you that she went with him to Ware, and how it made a hubbub in the domestic circle?” Emily tattled to her brother.15 A month later, Vinnie noted in her diary: “Received offer of marriage”—but no other details followed.16 Emily couldn’t help teasing her father’s law clerks; their earnestness made ribbing them irresistible. When Valentine’s Day came around, she penned a lively poem to William. She assumed he wouldn’t take her words seriously and would enjoy their charm and exaggeration. It was a spoof, after all: merely a way to have fun. Even if her poem was more quick-witted than profound, Emily assured herself that the valentine was for William’s eyes only.

  Emily loved Valentine’s Day. Most everyone did. Local townswomen hosted Valentine’s festivals that served up ice cream while residents penned amusing notes that they slid into a mock post office. For weeks, the Adams brothers’ bookshop in Amherst had filled its shelves with embossed lace and flower valentines.17 Esther Howland, an enterprising young woman who had gone to Mount Holyoke, had been mass producing valentines from her father’s stationery store in Worcester. Initially she’d hoped her brother could rustle up $200 worth of orders, but was astonished when he came home with sales topping $5,000.18 When it came to valentines, Emily considered herself old-fashioned. She wanted to compose the words herself and not rely on someone else’s sentiments. She used the holiday to scribble poems and long prose declarations bursting with exuberance and made-up words. She also loved the verbal sparring that came with the holiday. When someone shot a humorous volley her way, she welcomed the challenge, and countered with banter as sharp as it was erudite. “A little condescending, & sarcastic, your Valentine to me,” she teased a male cousin, “a little like an Eagle, stooping to salute a Wren, & I concluded once, I dared not answer it, for it seemed to me not quite becoming – in a bird so lowly as myself – to claim admittance to an Eyrie, & conversation with it’s King.”19 While Emily enjoyed the personal exchange of valentines, one of her fanciful compositions had earlier ended up in a student publication at Amherst College. It happened that a group of young men—some of whom were Austin’s friends—had been scrambling to fill pages of their magazine, the Indicator. George Gould from the
candy pull was on the Indicator’s editorial board and had received one of Emily’s delightful valentines. When the pages of the magazine had come up short, George offered Emily’s witty prose piece to fill the gap. “Magnum bonum, ‘harrum scarum’, zounds et zounds, et war alarum, man reformam, life perfectum, mundum changum, all things flarum? Sir, I desire an interview,” she began. Come, she implored, “meet me at sunrise, or sunset, or the new moon – the place is immaterial. In gold, or in purple, or sackcloth – I look not upon the raiment. With sword, or with pen, or with plough – the weapons are less than the wielder. . . . Our friendship sir, shall endure till sun and moon shall wane no more. . . . I am Judith the heroine of Apocrypha, and you the orator of Ephesus. That’s what they call a metaphor in our country. Don’t be afraid of it, sir, it won’t bite. If it was my Carlo now! The Dog is the noblest work of Art, sir. . . . But the world is sleeping in ignorance and error, sir, and we must be crowing cocks, and singing larks, and a rising sun to awake her; or else we’ll pull society up to the roots, and plant it in a different place. We’ll build Alms-houses, and transcendental State prisons, and scaffolds – we will blow out the sun, and the moon, and encourage invention. Alpha shall kiss Omega – we will ride up the hill of glory – Hallelujah, all hail!”20

  Emily had no idea the valentine would be published. Nor did she tell anyone after it had, even though the headnote written by one of the student editors was flattering. “I wish I knew who the author is,” the editor declared. “I think she must have some spell, by which she quickens the imagination, and causes the high blood ‘run frolic through the veins.’ Yes, the author, of such a gew gaw—such a frenzy built edifice—I should like to know and talk with, for I don’t believe her mouth has any corners, perhaps ‘like a rose leaf torn!’ But I’ll not keep you in the door way longer, but enter the temple, and decipher the thoughts engraved there.”21 Discovering her prose had been published made Emily realize that others were interested in her writing, even if they were only Austin’s friends. She must have been relieved to see her name not attached to the work. It made her invisible. Only the curious letter C stood where her name would have been. The initial may have been a reference to Carlo.

  For several years now, Emily’s big dog, Carlo, had been her protector and what she called her shaggy ally.22 Edward Dickinson bought the dog—a Newfoundland most people thought—to keep his daughter company. Carlo followed her everywhere and, like most sights and sounds around Emily, he became the object of metaphor—even in a valentine. Emily could hardly get up in the morning without metaphors and images flooding her mind. Often her letters to Austin took on the appearance of a composition exercise, as if she were trying to freeze a moment in words and capture not only the look, but also the feel of an instant. “We have just got home from meeting,” she had written her brother one winter, “it is very windy and cold – the hills from our kitchen window are just crusted with snow, which with their blue mantillas makes them seem so beautiful. . . . Father and mother sit in state in the sitting room perusing such papers only, as they are well assured have nothing carnal in them. Vinnie is eating an apple which makes me think of gold, and accompanying it with her favorite [New York] Observer, which if you recollect, deprives us many a time of her sisterly society. Pussy has’nt returned from the afternoon assembly, so you have us all just as we are at present.”23 When she wrote to others mentioning, for example, that she had a cold, she could not merely say she was ill. Instead she drafted entire scenes featuring a wild creature that spread disease by pouncing on her shawl, throwing his arms around her neck and kissing her wildly. She even used dialogue. “‘Marm, will [you] tell me the name of this country,” she imagined the beast saying, ‘it’s Asia Minor, is’nt it?”24 Emily also spent considerable time writing in her head and marked passages in books about the role of art in expressing the ineffable.25 When she came across a fine sentence, she shared it with others, and studied how the listeners reacted.26 She reused phrases she had created, sending them to different correspondents for different effect. Some of the words in George Gould’s prose valentine came from an earlier letter to someone else.27 The natural world also fueled her imagination—birds, rivers, daisies, sunrises, mice. Like one of Mary Lyon’s science students, she would study the object before her, registering light, movement, shape, and color, but then slip out of the world of scientific observation and into figurative language. Take snakes, for instance: “I love those little green ones,” Emily had written Abiah, “that slide around by your shoes in the grass – and make it rustle with their elbows.”28 Unlike Vinnie, who kept a diary, or Sue Gilbert, who wrote in a journal, or her old girlhood friend Helen Fiske, who wanted to start a “character book” for recording observations—Emily said she was not the type to formally organize her thoughts.29 Perhaps she didn’t keep a diary or a journal because she didn’t need to. Images never left her. Once she stood in the Amherst rain watching Austin return to Boston. It was not so much the sight of Austin himself that lingered in her mind, but rather the place where he was not. “I watched the stage coach yesterday until it went away,” she had written, “and I hoped you would turn around, so to be sure and see me. . . . I thought you saw me once, the way I told was this. You know your cap was black, and where it had been black, it all at once grew white, and I fancied that was you.”30

  Lately Emily was pondering an abstract idea some may have found bizarre. She used one of her wildly imaginative letters to sort out what she was thinking. Surely Uncle Joel Norcross would have realized his niece was writing one of her overblown reprimands for not responding quickly enough to her letters; he had received many of them. But in the final paragraphs, Emily’s prose took a startling turn, moving from the humorously absurd to the violent with talk of stones and daggers and guns. She was trying to get at a belief that was important to her, but it was difficult to understand what she meant. “Harm is one of those things that I always mean to keep clear of,” she had written, “but somehow my intentions and me dont chime as they ought – and people will get hit with stones that I throw at my neighbor’s dogs – not only hit – that is the least of the whole – but they insist upon blaming me instead of the stones – and tell me their heads ache – why it is the greatest piece of folly on record. It would do to go with a story I read – one man pointed a loaded gun at a man – and it shot him so that he died – and the people threw the owner of the gun into prison – and afterwards hung him for murder. Only another victim to the misunderstanding of society . . . Now when I walk into your room and pluck your heart out that you die – I kill you – hang me if you like – but if I stab you while sleeping the dagger’s to blame – it’s no business of mine.”31 On the surface, she was making a preposterous claim about accountability: the dagger’s to blame, the loaded gun is at fault, stones hit the neighbor’s dog. But beneath the surface, Emily was trying to understand if writers were responsible for the feelings they prompted in others: if hurling a word had the same effect as throwing a stone. Was imagination—like a loaded gun—the one pulling the trigger?† Emily seemed to say she wanted the freedom to hurl her words without consequences. She did not want to pay a price for daring images or be muzzled into saying only what was acceptable. Invisibility seemed the key for keeping her imagination sovereign. Years later she would remember sitting with her friend Jane in a favorite spot—the big stone step outside the Dickinsons’ front door. She recalled hearing the faraway sound of an ax being brought down long after a farmer had swung it.32 What stayed with her was not the action or the farmer. What remained was the lingering sound. Emily wanted to be like that: heard but not seen.

  Austin could not always understand what Emily was saying, and it exasperated him. Austin and Emily’s friend Sue Gilbert had become close, and in one letter, he complained to Sue about Emily’s confounding prose. “I have a sort of land of Canaan letter from Emily yesterday,” he had written, “but she was too high up to give me any of the monuments of earth.”33 Vinnie also found her sister abst
ruse and difficult to comprehend. She “has fed you on air so long,” Vinnie told Austin, “that I think a little ‘sound common sense’ perhaps wouldnt come amiss Plain english you know such as Father likes.”34 Writing joint family letters to Austin sometimes prompted sharp contrasts. “Vinnie tells me she has detailed the news,” Emily wrote. “She reserved the deaths for me, thinking I might fall short of my usual letter somewhere.”35 But when Emily heard that her brother and sister were complaining about her writing, she fired back to Austin with humor and hyperbole. “You say you dont comprehend me, you want a simpler style. Gratitude indeed for all my fine philosophy! I strove to be exalted thinking I might reach you and while I pant and struggle and climb the nearest cloud, you walk out very leisurely in your slippers from Empyrean, and without the slightest notice request me to get down!”36

  With Valentine’s Day over, the Adams brothers cleared their shelves of Esther Howland’s red and white cards and made way for new books to occupy the shop racks. Vinnie had been reading a book with a personal connection to the family: a biography of Mary Lyon. Amherst College president Edward Hitchcock spent the last two years writing the book in order to pay tribute to the woman he admired. He hoped his words would inspire readers to emulate Miss Lyon’s ambition.37 In 1849—the year after Emily left the seminary—Mary Lyon had become seriously ill. Already ground down by years of work, she had insisted on caring for a student who was battling a serious infection. When the infection spread to Miss Lyon, the erysipelas that had long plagued her returned. A beloved nephew’s suicide may have weakened her physical condition even more. On March 5, 1849, Lyon died at age fifty-two. In accordance with her directions, Mount Holyoke resumed activity a few days later, and as he so often did, Professor Snell came over to help with lectures.38 Behind the sprawling seminary building, trustees worked on a gravestone monument for Mount Holyoke’s founder. Teachers and students had watched as trustees dug postholes for an iron fence surrounding the grave. When shovels proved inadequate, the men dug the dirt with their hands. Receiving the news in Persia, Fidelia Fiske vowed to collect memories of Mary Lyon from former students. “I have nothing that I wanted to do here, except to finish that writing,” she said.39 She recalled the words to a song Miss Lyon once sang at the spinning wheel. “It’s not in the wheel, it’s not in the band,—It’s in the girl who takes it in hand.” ‡40