My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  On Emily’s side, we should note she had no female kin to help with housekeeping and child care, and that the cheap labor supply the huge Irish Catholic influx brought in was still in the future (apparently, New Englanders were not reliable domestic workers). In these circumstances, and given the Dickinsons’ insecurities, the young wife presently made an ill-advised decision. In fall 1828 her husband had been approached by a leading Springfield attorney looking for a “regular family” to board his son and nephew, Richard Bliss and Henry Morris, then entering Amherst College. Since the school furnished no meals, students boarded with those who took an interest in the institution or wished to earn a modest income. In Edward’s case, there was also a professional incentive to meet the request: Richard’s father was a state representative and Henry’s father was about to become a judge. Still, a letter Edward sent from Springfield left the decision “entirely with [Emily] to manage as you think best. The work, you know, comes upon you, and it is wholly immaterial with me, what you conclude.” As usual, Lavinia had strong opinions, urging her sister not to “take boarders next term as it is so uncertain about help and Edward says you can do as you please.” Spring term began in early February and ended in mid-May, and Emily was due in mid-April; the advice was sound. But it was ignored, as we learn from Lavinia’s letter of March 17 asking to be remembered to the boys. Of course, the arrangement couldn’t last, and when summer term opened, Edward explained to Richard “the reasons of our not taking boarders” anymore.

  That Emily took on this extra work shortly before the birth of her first child reveals something about her as a housekeeper—her drivenness, her extreme thrift. It also shows how she adjusted to her and Edward’s unsettled situation: putting her shoulder to the wheel, doing everything possible to promote their prosperity, doing it all perfectly and by herself and without adding to her husband’s burdens or expenses. Even under the best of circumstances, a young married woman in charge of housekeeping had to see to a huge number of domestic operations, especially in storing and preparing food. In Emily’s case, the unexpected financial troubles of her husband’s family exacerbated her self-reliant and perfectionist tendencies.

  The household manual Edward gave Emily about 1830 discloses some of the attitudes and practices the poet grew up with. Written by Lydia Maria Child, The Frugal Housewife was aimed at families of “the middling class” who were struggling to get ahead. “Unlike all other domestic advice books of the period,” writes Child’s biographer, this one does not “take for granted that its readers rely on servants.” One of its ruling maxims is that “patchwork is good economy.” That is, “the true economy of housekeeping is simply the art of gathering up all the fragments, so that nothing be lost. I mean fragments of time, as well as materials.” The book itself is a kind of patchwork quilt, consisting of hundreds of random rules, hints, tricks, recipes. “Never put out the sewing. If it be impossible to do it in your own family, hire some one into the house, and work with them.” Child’s directions on the right way to clean brass, leather, lamp wicks, freestone hearths, you name it, presuppose an endless supply of elbow grease as well as an exalted ideal of household cleanliness. The effect of such a book on a housewife already inclined to take the business too seriously is easily imagined. Emily’s copy of the book, moderately worn, has what looks like a grease spot in the section on “common cakes.” The one dog-eared page is in “How to Endure Poverty.”

  This frugality came to look quite primitive to the children. “Our amiable mother never taught us tayloring,” the poet wrote years later, “and I am amused to remember those clothes, or rather those apologies made up from dry goods with which she covered us in nursery times.” “Tayloring” meant employing a tailor or dressmaker instead of sewing it yourself; the word, identically spelled, shows up in an account of Joel Norcross. Edward’s opinion was that his wife took domestic self-sufficiency too far: “You must not try to do things that expose you, for the sake of being too economical—& getting along, within yourselves.”

  Over time, Mother’s devotion to thrift and order grew so extreme she became a kind of outsider in her own home, subtly detached from its pleasures and standards. In the early 1860s her daughter Emily concluded a letter written late at night by making a fantastic excuse for not transmitting Mrs. Dickinson’s best wishes: “Mother would send her love – but she is in the ‘Eave spout,’ sweeping up a leaf, that blew in, last November.” That the letter was probably written in August, long after the leaf got lodged in the roof gutter’s spout, adds to the grotesqueness of the scene: the housewife out in the dark, tiny, singleminded, going into the spout for that last fallen leaf. Is this chore something the mad sweeper is only dreaming of, or is she imagined as actually in the pipe’s flared opening with her miniature broom? Either way, it is an unforgettable picture of an obsessed New England housekeeper driven from the comforts of home and much too busy to send her love, let alone to write.

  Sister! Why That Burning Tear?

  On April 16, 1829, the Dickinsons’ first child was born, a boy named William Austin. Everyone was inexpressibly relieved, and before long Edward was boasting about his “smart boy.” Just as quickly, Lavinia twitted him on his fatherly pride, predicting the child “will go to College soon if he improves as fast as you mention he has.” The advantages of being the firstborn son soon became evident to the keen eyes of his Aunt Lavinia, who wished that winter that she could see the baby “& govern him a little.” To Edward she sent a warning, “You must not love him too well.” It was a dangerous thing to become too attached to one’s child.

  The baby was coddled partly because he was the bright spot among shadows. That spring Edward felt “lifeless,” full of “languor & weakness,” a condition caused in part by an infected tooth he knew he should have removed. The previous year the pain had been so severe he felt an occasional “jump, which actually shakes my head.” The use of ether for extractions being two decades in the future, the young father had not been able to make himself see a dentist. Lavinia’s blunt opinion was that he had “not exercised much patience in his sufferings.”

  In Amherst’s property valuations for May 1, 1829, Edward’s once prominent father is shown for the first time as owning no real estate, and in Monson the Norcrosses were wrestling with the elemental challenges of sickness and death, sin, salvation, and immortality. After giving birth to her first child, Aunt Eliza Norcross (Erasmus’s wife) remained “quite low” for a time (and never had another child), and in February Emily’s brother Hiram died of consumption, leaving an infected widow and two young children. But nothing proved quite so agonizing as Mother’s terminal decline.

  By mid-July Betsey could no longer keep food down and was taking calomel, a mercury-based medicine. At month’s end her poisoned mouth was raw, her vomiting was persistent, she had to be lifted when her bed was made, and Lavinia’s bulletins were sounding desperate:

  You can have no idea how emaciated she is nothing but the skin covers her bones, she cannot yet take any thing to nourish her except a little water-gruel . . . she is very anxious to see you wishes after commencement is over to have your husband fetch you down you must not disappoint her.

  Was it cancer? Feeling that she was in the “dark valley & shadow of death,” Lavinia ended her letter with the plea “Emily do come & see us—I feel as tho’ you must come & sympathise in our distress.” That was on August 18. Commencement was not until the twenty-sixth.

  Remarkably, it was that summer, while Betsey lay dying, that the great revival her Female Praying Circle had been working for the last two years finally got started. For herself, one guesses, the dying woman was not overly concerned; she would reportedly die in peace and with a “full assurance of a happy immortality.” Still, could she die in peace with her daughters outside the ark of safety? That consideration undoubtedly lay behind the dying woman’s insistence that Emily come home. If Emily was to be refreshed with the shower of blessings, she must come now.

  But as of Septembe
r 1, Edward had not yet driven his wife the twenty-two miles to Monson. On that day, writing at Mother’s behest, William O. Norcross virtually required Emily to “come home & stay with her a few days.” Joel had to be away, Mary (the “girl”) was absent for her own health’s sake, and it was obvious that Betsey could not “long remain with us.” The revival was gaining power, and several members of the family including cousin Loring (but not Lavinia) had found the throne of grace. William would be in Amherst by ten A.M. on September 4, a Friday, driving Emily back to Monson that same day.

  Taking her baby, Emily apparently reached home a matter of hours before her mother died early Saturday morning. Later that day William wrote to inform Edward of Betsey’s death and relay instructions where to find his wife’s black bonnet, veil, and collar, and the bandbox to carry them in; prepared ahead of time, perhaps, all were necessary now. And meanwhile the revival continued its crescendo under the direction of the Reverend Asahel Nettleton, who also came to Monson in early September. The following month William and Lavinia both found “relief”—in her words, “a peace of mind different from anything . . . ever before experienced.” There can be no doubt that Betsey’s protracted death and the coincidental revival marked a major and dramatic epoch in Norcross family annals.

  For Lavinia, the drama had an almost suicidal intensity. In 1835, when she wished to transfer to the evangelical Bowdoin Street Church in Boston, the Reverend Alfred Ely drafted a brief account of her desperate 1829 conversion. Ely’s letter, laid before the new church’s Examining Committee and duly summarized in its minutes, stated among other things that Lavinia felt “she was a lost sinner without a hope in Jesus—After some time she shut her self up in her room and was determined to submit before she came out.” This ultimate and solitary struggle, one of the great crises in the life of Emily Dickinson’s closest aunt, took place a month or so after Betsey’s death and funeral. One of the things we would like to know about the poet, given her own habits of seclusion, is what she knew about her aunt’s ordeal.

  Hoping to communicate her new sense of happiness, Lavinia wrote Amherst, “Yes the convert has enjoyment the world knows not of. I enjoy my mind very much.” Sister Emily, on the other hand, dressed in mourning and still unconverted, found no such relief. So far from enjoying her mind, she seems to have been overwhelmed with grief and guilt. By marrying, she had abandoned the home that needed her. She had let Mother die without the comfort of knowing they would meet in heaven. And she had had her sister’s constant reminders that Mother’s anxiety about Emily’s exposure to hard labor was “a great hinderence to the restoration of her health.” The dutiful young wife and mother carried a very heavy load on her conscience.

  These were the circumstances under which Lavinia composed a poem designed to ease her sister’s anguish. She may have written others as well, but this is the only one we have from her hand:

  Sister! why that burning tear

  Stealing slowly down thy cheek

  To my friendly listening ear

  All thy little sorrows speak

  These lines from just before Emily Dickinson’s birth could not be mistaken for hers, yet they exhibit something repeatedly seen in her writing—a consolatory purpose and an animating bond between an articulate sister full of insight and eager sympathy and a silent sister unable to express her choked sorrow. Reading the silent sister’s thoughts, the writing sister tries to divert her imagination from the grave:

  What if that heart once beating warm

  Lies low among the silent dead

  O look not there! but raise thine eye

  To higher climes where angels are

  Where pleasures never bloom to die

  Sister—our mother’s happy there.

  The poem was neatly copied on an elegant and expensive sheet of boardlike paper with an embossed lacy border and scallops pressed in the corners.

  We don’t know for sure that Dickinson saw it, but it seems obvious that it was from such love-drenched sheets that her own profound explorations of desire and grief began.

  Fresh Beginnings

  Unlike Edward’s father, cousin Nathan Dickinson, the new co-owner of the Montague place and the Dickinson Homestead, was on the rising half of the seesaw: in 1827 his taxable money at interest was put at $400; one year later, at $2,600. Emily happened to be in Monson when Nathan got married in June 1829, leaving Edward to put on record his contemptuous view of Nathan’s method of bringing home his bride—“in an old shackling waggon, without cushion or Buffalo-skin—so much saved—‘out of their hydes’ which is all ‘clear gain.’” “How would you like that way?” Edward asked his wife, clearly implying that Nathan’s way of getting ahead was not going to be their way.

  Nathan did extremely well in Michigan land and timber in the coming years, but for now it was necessary to economize what he could out of his and others’ “hydes.” Early in 1830 he let it be known he could not fulfill his part of the revised agreement concerning the Jemima Montague place. For the second time, in other words, Edward and Emily were threatened with the loss of their home and the money that had gone into refurbishing it.

  As before, Edward turned to his father-in-law for advice, presenting a straightforward account of his situation and the various options. He was satisfied where he was, the old Montague house being pleasant and comfortable and “convenient, at all times, to my business.” But he was reluctant to meet Leland’s demand for “several hundred dollars more than I agreed to pay.” The alternative was to buy from Leland a certain lot west of the Dickinson Homestead—“the best building lot for sale in our neighborhood”—and build a small house. Edward emphasized that he wanted advice only, not money, and also that he was acting in accord with his wife’s wishes. He said nothing about having discussed the matter with his father.

  Answering at once, Emily’s father pointed out the drawbacks of Edward’s two main options: the Montague place was exposed to fire, and building a house would probably be more expensive than anticipated (not to mention “loss of time and anxiety of mind”—two of Squire Dickinson’s plagues). Joel’s suggestion was that Edward rent for a couple of years rather than rush into a deal. But he pointedly left the question to his son-in-law: “After all I think you better able to judge what would be best for you and your little Family.” A young provider could have wished for nothing better than this mix of sound Yankee advice and kindly diplomacy.

  In the end Edward made a choice that had not been on the table when he wrote Joel. Probably acting in concert with his father, he bought the west half of the Dickinson Homestead from Leland and cousin Nathan for $1,500, a deal he was able to swing by signing a mortgage for $1,100. For a young attorney who still had his way to make, this was a heavy commitment. But there were strong favoring considerations: the property was Edward’s boyhood home, the house was the grandest one in town, and it was not much of a walk to his office on the Common’s northeast corner. Nathan and Leland retained possession of the east half of the house, but the west half was Edward’s (with occupancy to begin in six months). Now, surely, his “little Family” would be safe from the threat of a sudden eviction.

  Joel’s letter of advice is postmarked March 9. The deed was signed March 30. At some point in the intervening three weeks, Edward reached an understanding with the Homestead’s owners. Nine months later, on December 10, Emily Dickinson was born. Assuming she was conceived in March—the “Month of Expectation” one of her poems calls it (Fr1422)—a cheeky question arises here. Was she conceived by a couple celebrating the purchase and acquisition of their first home? Could she have been joined to the brick house that came to be her world even more closely than has been thought?

  In May Edward took his first business trip to New York City. Three years earlier, when his fiancée went there, he had indulged some dire fantasies of urban filth and decay—the bad habits of “the lower classes,” “the seducing arts of base men,” the hordes of ruined women. Now, delighted with everything he saw, he walked s
o much he rubbed his heels raw and had to exchange his boots for shoes, “one of them slipshod . . . but never mind—they are not so particular here as they are in little villages.” In the evening he went to the Park Theatre and saw what was billed as a “new opera,” Rokeby. Writing home late that night, he pronounced everything in the city “grand & magnificent.—and just what I like.” Then, his protective anxieties coming to the fore, he warned his wife against the risks of infection: “I trust you will be prudent, and not expose yourself to cold, or the evening air—take the medicine which I prescribed. . . .”

  That summer, when Emily was four or five months pregnant, her sister hoped that she would “not be so much troubled with your help as you have been.” Not only was that old problem still there, but once again she decided to take boarders, to Lavinia’s surprise. As for Edward, he was “so much engaged in business this summer” that a letter carrier was advised not to “call on him at present as he was in a confusion state.” It must have been an extremely busy time for a couple anticipating a change of residence. If Mary Dickinson Newman’s experience when moving into a house is any guide, there would have been a great deal of “painting, papering, scouring” to be got through. There was also the bustle of Commencement in late August, with a house full of guests for Emily to look after.