These Fevered Days

by Martha Ackmann

  Following goodbyes, Higginson walked down the granite steps and headed toward town. He needed to clear his head and let settle what had just happened. Perhaps he could drop by President Stearns’s office over at the college, he thought, or look up Mrs. Hunt’s sister. Maybe stare at fossils. When he reached the college, the natural history museum was closed, so he made his way to Mrs. Banfield’s home. He found Helen Hunt’s sister engaging and lively; the two women even looked alike. Higginson and Ann Banfield wished that Helen could have joined them, but she was in New Hampshire working—she was always working. With only months left before her book of poems would go to press, Helen was writing essays nonstop in order to pay for the poetry collection’s printing. “I am working away at my trade,” she had written her sister, “send off $45 worth of Ms. tomorrow. . . . I must earn every cent I spend till Jan.”49 Higginson returned to the college after his social call and met with President Stearns. William Stearns knew Emily, of course, and mentioned how proud Vinnie was of her sister. Everyone knew the Dickinsons were proud people, but Vinnie—Stearns emphasized—was especially loyal to her older sister. Stearns noted he would be on the same train as Higginson the next morning. They could talk more then about the Dickinsons.

  Before returning to the hotel for the night, Higginson called once more on Emily. On the parlor table, he caught a glimpse of his nature book, Out-Door Papers, as well as his new novel. Emily had read everything he had ever written, even if she was not subtle about acknowledging it. She must have felt more relaxed than earlier in the day, and entered the parlor informally. Her mind was still on her family and she still wanted to talk. “I never had a mother,” she said. “I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.” She spoke of her father, too, and shared a story Higginson could hardly believe, a tale about not knowing how to tell time. “I never knew how to tell time by the clock till I was 15,” she said. “My father thought he had taught me but I did not understand & I was afraid to say I did not & afraid to ask any one else lest he should know.” They talked of Helen Hunt and Emily recalled the afternoon that Helen and her husband sat at her tea table and Major Hunt fed Carlo scraps from the table. She thought Mr. Hunt was the most interesting man she had ever met. It struck Higginson that the time he spent with Emily that day had been an act of self-definition for her: her torrent of words was like a personal and literary manifesto. She reminded him of Bronson Alcott, Louisa May’s father—although Emily was not pompous or overbearing. Higginson hoped he could remember everything. Before he rose to leave, Emily placed a photograph in his hand. It was an image of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s grave, a memento Josiah Holland had brought back from Europe and presented to her a few days before. He accepted the gift reluctantly, knowing it probably meant more to her than it would to him. Like the daylilies from earlier, he knew the photograph was Emily’s way of saying thank you. “Gratitude is the only secret that cannot reveal itself,” she told him. Higginson said he hoped to see her again sometime, and she abruptly interrupted him. “Say in a long time,” she corrected, “that will be nearer. Some time is nothing.” With a hundred thoughts whirling in his head, Higginson retraced his steps back to the hotel, past the Chinese laundry and the oysters and the livery stables. He needed to go to bed. But before turning in, he compiled notes, trying to recall it all. He pulled out another sheet and wrote a letter to his wife. “I shan’t sit up tonight to write you all about E.D. dearest but if you had read Mrs. Stoddard’s novels you could understand a house where each member runs his or her own selves.¶ Yet I only saw her.”50 Miss Dickinson said many things, he told her, some remarks you would have found foolish and some I thought wise, he wrote. Higginson made one final note before retiring, a quick entry in his diary. Meeting Emily Dickinson quite equaled my expectation, he wrote.51 It had been a momentous day: one he would never forget. As he turned down the lamp, he hoped he would be able to calm his mind and get to sleep. He wanted to wake up early and see the fossils.

  Most people in Amherst were unaware of Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s visit with Emily Dickinson. They had been preoccupied with the excitement at Mr. and Mrs. Gray’s house. Roxalina Gray had a way with plants—and the week before, her rare night-blooming cereus unfolded just as evening fell and then closed forever right before dawn. Mrs. Gray opened her doors the night the flower bloomed and neighbors filed in to witness the phenomenon. The petals were enormous—as big as dinner plates—and smelled like honey.52 For Emily, Mr. Higginson’s visit had been just as miraculous. It felt unreal to her as if a phantom had entered the family parlor and transformed it. “Contained in this short Life / Are magical extents,” she wrote.53 Emily felt elated, emboldened, and slightly off-kilter. Hearing herself talk so much, she said, made her feel as though the words rushing out were not sentences at all, but events.54 After the call, Emily reached again for the family Shakespeare and turned to Macbeth. “Now a wood / Comes toward Dunsinane,” she read, reliving how mystical her friend’s visit had been.55 Yet as exhilarated as she felt, it was gratitude that lingered. When she thought about all Higginson had done for her—answering that first letter, writing her from the battlefront when he was wounded, continuing to write even when he felt his life had lost its purpose, urging her to take time to perfect her art—she felt nearly speechless. Higginson’s generosity “disables my Lips,” she said and magic, “as it electrifies, also makes decrepit.”56 It was not only that he had read her poems—although she was thankful for that. It was that he had been constant. When she sought words to thank him, she reached not for metaphors from nature or images of planets and dreams that she had been working with. She went deeper. She chose anatomy. “The Vein cannot thank the Artery,” she told him, “but her solemn indebtedness to him, even the stolidest admit.”57 That’s what Emily meant by saying Higginson had saved her life: her connection to him was vital and sustaining. Emily gave poetry to herself, but Higginson had affirmed her choice, and that to her was salvation. Over the next months, the thought of seeing him again played on her mind with eerie repetition. It “opens and shuts,” she said “like the eye of the Wax Doll.”58 She hoped he would return to Amherst someday or in “a long time”—perhaps that would be nearer.

  Before leaving town, Higginson took in the fossils. The dinosaur footprints looked like the scratches of ancient birds, he thought, or a bit like Emily Dickinson’s handwriting. On the train he sat for a while with President Stearns and they talked more about Emily and her family. It was an all-day ride through Vermont and into New Hampshire and Higginson could not stop thinking about Dickinson. He kept recalling her remark about puddings, her light step, and the imposing weight of her ancestral home. Higginson wrote additional notes and placed them in his valise for safekeeping. While he always tried to record his thoughts, he was especially concerned about capturing every particular about meeting the poet—“his” poet. It was as if he had some momentary glimpse into the future and could imagine generations of readers who wanted to know more. He wrote his wife again and told her about running into Edward Dickinson before leaving town. “Thin dry, & speechless,” he said, adding, “I saw what her life has been.”59 Jostling along on the tracks, miles from Amherst, he said Emily Dickinson had dazzled him, but had also made him uncomfortable. She was not capable of casual conversation, he told Mary, or of everyday friendship. It took every ounce of his being to meet her level of intellectual intensity. “I never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much,” he admitted. “Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her.”60

  When Higginson’s train crossed into Vermont, he stared out the window and could barely see the Connecticut River. Rocks and sandbars emerged where there once was rushing current. There had been little rain. Every moment of his life Thomas Wentworth Higginson had studied the natural world. Rivers, hills, and pastures were a source of inspiration, a canvas on which to project his thoughts and search for answers. “Nature’ is what We know - / But have no Art to say,” Emily once
wrote.61 Passing through Brattleboro, he surveyed the fields. They were as brown as those in Amherst. Grapes had begun to shrivel and farmers were already feeding hay to their cows. In a sign of early autumn, yellow leaves fell to the ground. Yet as dry as everything was, fruit was in abundance.62 It seemed a wonder. Recently Emily had bitten into a pear that had “hips like hams, and the flesh of bonbons,” she said.63 Years earlier when he’d been a young man, Higginson had spent time at Brook Farm near Boston. That great experiment in communal living had intrigued him, and he had made several trips to examine the dairy and farming operations. Before he became a writer, he had considered becoming a farmer. Growing peaches interested him.64 He liked the idea of being closely connected to the seasons and imagined planting a tree, watching it grow, picking its fruit, and transforming slices into pies and thick preserves. Down in Amherst, an editor prepared his copy for next week’s edition of the newspaper. This season there will be a good crop of apples, he wrote.65 The New England Seven—as they were called—had names that were poetry themselves: Baldwins, Delicious, Wealthies, Gravensteins, Rhode Island Greenings, Northern Spies, Macintosh.66 Higginson never got around to asking Emily if she was interested in preparing a book of poetry like Helen Hunt was doing. Perhaps he couldn’t find the nerve, feeling that if he pressed too hard, Emily would withdraw, vanishing like those sparkles of light he always associated with her. But the man who never became a peach farmer knew there was a time to sow and a time to reap. For Emily Dickinson, the harvest was yet to come.

  * The question mark the Republican inserted in line 3 stayed on Emily’s mind for years. Ralph Franklin notes that in 1872, Dickinson sent another version of the poem to Sue and placed a question mark in the middle of line three: “You may have met him? Did you not/ His notice instant is – ” [R. W. Franklin, ed., The Poems of Emily Dickinson Variorum Edition. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 954.] Franklin states that Dickinson probably sent Higginson a copy of the poem in 1865 before it appeared in the newspaper, hence her anxiety about him seeing the verse in print. [Variorum Edition, 952.] The poet continued to rework “A narrow fellow in the grass” over several years—changing lowercase letters to capitals, inserting alternate words, taking out punctuation and putting it in again—demonstrating her lifelong commitment to revision.

  † Stephen Higginson II was a merchant in business with his older brother George. In 1853, he purchased a home on Main Street in Deerfield, where the family spent most of their time. According to the 1870 census, Stephen Higginson died in Deerfield, but Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s diary lists his brother’s death as occurring in Boston. Stephen Higginson II was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. [Margaret Dakin, email to the author, August 7, 2017; Cynthia Harbeson, email to the author, August 8, 2017; Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s 1870 diary, Houghton Library, Harvard University.]

  ‡ Carlo died around January 1866 at approximately age seventeen. Dickinson never had another dog. One is reminded of the words Dickinson wrote about Carlo in her 1850 valentine published in the Amherst College Indicator: “His mistress’s rights he doth defend – although it bring him to his end.” [L34.] Habegger notes Carlo’s death marked the “end of something” for Dickinson. [Alfred Hebegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Random House, 2001), 497.]

  § Edward Dickinson was one of the founders of Massachusetts Agricultural College, now the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The college was chartered in 1863 and offered its first classes in 1867.

  ¶ Elizabeth Drew Stoddard (1823–1902) is best known for her novel The Morgesons (1862), which features a female protagonist struggling between societal norms and her own desire for independence.

  Nine

  SUCCESS IS COUNTED SWEETEST

  Tuesday, October 10, 1876 2 p.m. Temperature 63.4 degrees. Clouds 2 str. Wind SW 3. Barometer 29.431. Humidity 51 Remarks none.

  —Sabra Snell, The Meteorological Journal Kept at Amherst College

  Helen Hunt’s first mistake was asking Emily Dickinson for travel advice. Her second was taking it. After Thomas Wentworth Higginson urged the two childhood friends to reconnect, Helen made plans to see Emily again. She stopped by Amherst in August 1873 on her way to New Hampshire, where her sister now lived. After so much travel across the country and in Europe, Helen had taken to viewing her hometown as a backwater. She still had affection for the landscape and memories of her girlhood, but she also was quick to find fault. People didn’t dress well. The streets were dusty. Old-timers told the same tiresome stories. And certain preachers bellowed their way through sermons just as they always had. When she checked into the local boardinghouse Emily had recommended, she was not in the best mood. The room was awful: damp and stifling. A recent bout of diphtheria complicated matters and made Helen’s persistent problems with her lungs flare up again. She worried things would get worse, and blamed her health—blamed everything—on Amherst. There “was a positive miasm about the house,” she complained to her sister. “I was prostrated in twelve hours! . . . Me! Of all people! If there had not been a remarkably intelligent & skilled homeopathic Dr. there, I think I should never have got away alive! . . . [He] checked the dysentery—& orders me to fly at once.”1 Helen obeyed the doctor’s orders and made her way to Worcester, securing lodgings where she previously had boarded. Even though she had to share the room with a young woman who had been in bed for five days with cholera, she found the conditions an improvement. In retrospect, consulting a woman as reclusive as Emily Dickinson for travel advice was misguided at best. And as for her new roommate’s cholera, Helen had her suspicions. “Brought from Amherst no doubt,” she huffed.2 Helen’s visit with Emily would have to be postponed, but she would not abandon plans to see her. Helen never gave up. It was one of her best and—some would say—worst qualities. For decades, the two old friends had tried to find the right time to meet and talk about literature. Helen already had an agenda in mind: she believed Emily should publish and share her work with the world. While other writers and editors agreed that the poet’s verse should see the light of day, no one—including Thomas Wentworth Higginson—ever dared to speak so forcefully to Dickinson. But Helen was not like other people. She was passionate, pragmatic, persuasive, and impossible to turn away. Dickinson and Helen Hunt would find their moment to talk soon and—when it came—their conversation would have consequences for generations to come.

  From time to time, other girlhood friends wanted to visit Emily, but she demurred. The letters she once sent friends all but begging them to visit had tailed off. Nearly all her schoolmates had married, were raising children, or had moved, and she felt little in common with them. Abby Wood from Emily’s Amherst Academy days had come to visit recently, and was startled to discover Emily had become the town enigma: darting upstairs when a visitor knocked or fleeing the garden when a carriage drove up. “Quick as a trout,” someone said.3 Children especially had stories about the secluded Miss Emily. One boy remembered stumbling upon her when he cut through the Dickinson property in search of playmates. There she was, standing on a rug near the barn, potting plants. The boy almost froze. But Emily motioned for him to join her and soon they were talking about favorite flowers. Before he dashed off, Emily snipped blossoms and handed them to the boy for his mother. He raced home, clutching the bouquet as if it were golden treasure.4 But Abby Wood thought surely that she would not have to rely on cutting through the Dickinson property to see her friend again. After all, she had traveled so far. Since marrying Rev. Daniel Bliss two decades ago, Abby and her husband had settled in Beirut, where they were rearing four children, and where Reverend Bliss had founded the Syrian Protestant College.* Over the years, Abby had sent Emily plant specimens from the Mediterranean and when Austin’s First Church building project was near completion, the Blisses had shipped cedarwood from the Holy Land for the new pulpit.5 Yet even with the kindness Abby had shown her, Emily offered her usual response to a req
uest for a visit: she said no. Abby was astonished, and tried persuading Emily with some good-natured teasing. The second attempt worked, and Emily invited Abby in. Other friends, such as Samuel Bowles, received similar rejection. Once when he’d stopped by, Emily refused to leave her upstairs chamber. He stood at the bottom of the stairs and bellowed for her to come down. He even swore—mildly—calling her a “damned rascal.” She relented finally. Later in a note, she thanked Bowles for the visit and signed the letter, “Your Rascal,” playfully adding, “I washed the Adjective.”† The family had a name for Emily’s refusals and darting out of a room. “Elfing it,” they said.6 There was no question she delighted in occasional mischief, but Emily was serious about her privacy and required it to accomplish her work. She had articulated her point of view in a poem years earlier.