My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  Next came the turn of Harriet W. Fowler, daughter of Noah Webster, best friend of Mrs. Fiske, wife of another professor, and mother of Webster and Emily Fowler. Harriet had also been dwindling from consumption for many years, doing her best to spare her children and make her home cheerful and hospitable. One winter night, as she lay in bed with no lamps lit, she felt her mouth filling with blood. If she got up to spit, she feared, she would have a paroxysm of coughing and wake her husband and children, so she made herself swallow “two or three mouthsful.” On February 16, 1844, Mrs. Fowler was taken by sleigh to visit Mrs. Fiske, who exclaimed, “Why, how quick you breathe! Perhaps you will follow me next winter, and I shall be the first to welcome you [in heaven].” They knew this was their last sight of each other, and when the visitor tried to leave, she was called back for “another affectionate farewell.” Three days later Mrs. Fiske died. Another six weeks and Mrs. Fowler followed, her suffering reportedly “severe.” “Death is doing his work thoroughly in this place,” observed Jeremiah Taylor, who dismissed the academy early on the afternoon of April 2 so that those who wished could attend the funeral. Chances are, Emily did and thus heard President Humphrey praise Mrs. Fowler’s “sprightly conversation, cultivated manners, and refined sensibility,” and also “the ceaseless overflowing of her maternal love.” The Last Interview of Mrs. Fowler and Mrs. Fiske would be remembered with admiration.

  Ann and Helen Fiske and Emily Fowler were not Emily’s closest friends, but it was a fearful thing to see acquaintances lose a mother. The Fowler girl had to withdraw from school in order to take charge of her father’s household. When another friend, Luthera Norton, lost her mother the following year, Emily reported that “she seems to feel very lonely, now her mother is dead, and thinks were she only alive it would be all she would ask. I pity her much, for she loved her mother devotedly.”

  In April came the devastating death. Sophia Holland was Emily’s second cousin, a granddaughter of the Lucinda Dickinson who moved to Tennessee after lending Samuel Fowler Dickinson too much money. What little we know about the girls’ friendship dates from 1846, two years later, when Emily recalled Sophia as a “friend near my age & with whom my thoughts & her own were the same.” We note the resemblance between this perfect communion and what Emily had enjoyed following her conversion, and also that the cousin was two and a half years older. Her death from typhus on April 29 proved utterly traumatic. Emily was allowed to watch “over her bed,” but when the dying girl grew delirious the young visitor was excluded on doctor’s orders. “It seemed to me I should die too,” Emily recalled, “if I could not be permitted to watch over her or even to look at her face.”

  On the night of April 28, a Sunday, Lucius Boltwood informed a correspondent that “Seneca Holland’s daughter is very sick with a brain fever—& it is thought that she will not live till morning.” It may have been that night or the next day that Emily prevailed on the doctor to allow one last look. She took off her shoes and quietly stepped to the sickroom, stopping in the doorway. There Sophia

  lay mild & beautiful as in health & her pale features lit up with an unearthly – smile. I looked as long as friends would permit & when they told me I must look no longer I let them lead me away.

  The hushed calm, the bystander’s rapt gaze, the uncanny and uninterpretable “smile” (the preceding dash evoking the pause in which the writer scans for the right word): this is fifteen-year-old Emily’s retrospective narration of her first Last Interview. It may lack the mastery of, say, Walt Whitman’s “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest,” where a marching soldier receives a dying soldier’s mysterious “half-smile” from out of absolute hell, but it nicely anticipates a fundamental aspect of Dickinson’s mature writing—the sense that life’s awesome climaxes are all too likely to prove hauntingly elusive. In her poems and letters, rapt participants are forever turning into bystanders, their minds heavy with unfinished business.

  Letting herself be led away before she had finished looking, Emily could neither observe the moment of death nor settle the meaning of that . . . smile. Recalling the disturbing experience two years later, the girl brought into play the therapeutic formulas of her era:

  I shed no tear, for my heart was too full to weep, but after she was laid in her coffin & I felt I could not call her back again I gave way to a fixed melancholy.

  I told no one the cause of my grief, though it was gnawing at my very heart strings. I was not well & I went to Boston & stayed a month & my health improved so that my spirits were better.

  In spite of the clichés (“fixed melancholy,” “gnawing at my very heart strings”), this brief account shows how attentive the young writer already was to the life of feeling. The stiff dignity of her response to trauma seems particularly impressive. Unlike the popular literature of the time, she insists on no resolution, no final healing tears. She had not been able to achieve a saving conversion, and now she does not claim a satisfying termination of her paralyzing grief. Instead, she simply leaves home for a month and experiences a gradual lift in “health” and “spirits,” so that in time the inherently uncompletable experience (“I could not call her back again”) can at least be looked at and narrated. Her helpless veracity, quite unlike President Humphrey’s funeral sermons for Mrs. Fiske and Mrs. Fowler, shows what it means to be injured “Where the Meanings, are” (Fr320).

  But there was one more death to be absorbed in 1844, the most horrifying yet. The letters sent to Emily in Boston, running from May 19 to June 4, imply she was back in Amherst at the end of June, when Martha Dwight Strong, the sixty-two-year-old wife of Hezekiah Wright Strong, a prominent man who had often figured in the Dickinson family’s annals, killed herself. According to the Hampshire Gazette, Mrs. Strong had been both incoherent and depressed of late, frequently declaring “she should soon give up the Ghost.” On Sunday, the thirtieth, apparently “quite cheerful,” she was left at home while her husband went to church. Unable to find her on his return, he “at last discovered her in a well in the yard,” into which she had apparently “thrown herself headlong.” The official death notice gives the cause of death as “Suicide. Drowned in a state of mental derangement.”

  In general, suicides were not considered eligible for heaven. But was Mrs. Strong’s death a suicide if she wasn’t in her right mind? And who is to say the all-powerful God of John Calvin cannot raise up such a person if He so elects?

  In a letter Dickinson is thought to have written in June 1877, on the third anniversary of her father’s death, she dredged up the memory of a long-ago funeral in this fashion:

  Since my Father’s dying, everything sacred enlarged so – it was dim to own – When a few years old – I was taken to a Funeral which I now know was of peculiar distress, and the Clergyman asked “Is the Arm of the Lord shortened that it cannot save?”

  He italicized the “cannot.” I mistook the accent for a doubt of Immortality and not daring to ask, it besets me still.

  After age thirty, Dickinson tended to exaggerate her earlier youthfulness and innocence, sometimes representing her “Little Girl’hood” as having extended into her late twenties. We should not be misled by her “few years old.” The clergyman’s question fits Mrs. Strong’s funeral better than any other of the time. Since she and her husband were members of Amherst’s East Church, whose pastor was the Reverend Pomeroy Belden, the funeral would have been an easy ride for the Dickinsons. It may have been this event that the poet was recalling—the fourth death in a row to touch her, all of the dead female and all dying in her fourteenth year. Only after Father’s death, when “sacred” things enlarged and “dim” things were recovered, was Dickinson ready to bring this memory up from the Strongs’ fearsome well. *41

  That Dickinson now knew the funeral had a “peculiar” pain suggests she was not given the full story at the time. Yet she evidently registered the effort made by the officiating minister to be generous as well as just. It is an index of her early preoccupations that she mistook the question as one o
f strength. What the young listener surmised was that God might be weaker than he was thought to be and that heaven could be a fable—two more burdensome issues not to be carried to Mother or Father and thus necessitating a further increase in her own powers. As she would one day write,

  I can wade Grief –

  Whole Pools of it –

  I’m used to that . . .

  Fr312

  So Independent She Don’t Say a Word

  All that is known of Emily’s recuperative month-long visit to Lavinia and Loring Norcross in Boston, and also to the William Dickinsons in Worcester, is found in her parents’ affectionate messages to her. Saying nothing about her illness and depression, these letters seem determinedly cheerful. Mother mentions David Mack’s marriage to Harriet Washburn (“pleasant indeed”), assures her daughter her plants “look finely,” and mentions more than once that Emily’s friends have been asking after her. In separate letters she twice writes the identical words, “we are lonely without you,” thus communicating both her love and her meager epistolary resources. Vinnie having also been sick, Mrs. Dickinson reports that she is “now able to assist me considerable.” Her statement that Vinnie “gets along better without you” than had been expected gives us our first glimpse of the sisters’ closeness.

  In her last years the poet wrote Charles H. Clark that “your Bond to your Brother reminds me of mine to my Sister – early – earnest – indissoluble.” The indissolubility of this bond is nicely expressed by one of Edward’s letters to Emily in Boston: “[Vinnie] takes hold very smartly—She is so independent, that she don’t say a word about you. She means to brave it out. I hope you will get home safely.” Whether or not Lavinia really felt the stoic resolve her father attributed to her, his letter surely reveals his own anxious, intense, but undemonstrative love. Being independent, not saying a word, braving it out: in his mind these were the strategies for overcoming loneliness and separation. They were among Emily’s strategies also, though by no means her only ones.

  Protective as ever, Edward gave his daughter the type of advice he often pressed on absent family members: “When you come home—be careful, & get out of the cars at Palmer—don’t fall, Keep hold of something all the time, till you are safely off—lest they should start, & throw you down & run over you.” The passage clearly brings out his worried sense of his daughter’s vulnerability when traveling by herself. To some, the flatness with which he envisioned a catastrophic possibility may seem ham-handed, especially as sent to a child oppressed by death. But it is also a sign of the clearsightedness he wished to foster.

  Another of Father’s recommendations—“I want to have you see the Lunatic Hospital, & other interesting places in Worcester”—also catches our eye. Nine years earlier, when her mother went to Boston and Worcester to recover her health, he gave the same advice. Did he hope his overwrought females would regain their balance if they inspected the behavior and treatment of the insane? Or did he want wife and daughter to share his interest in enlightened amelioration—the sort of thing animating an essay he wrote in college, “The importance of providing an Asylum for the insane”?

  Remarkable Fancies and the “Five”

  But it was time and friendship and her own imaginative resources that did the most to bring thirteen-year-old Emily out of her sickness unto death—not stoicism or religion or visits to the Lunatic Hospital in Worcester.

  She returned home on a Wednesday in June, arriving in time for the afternoon “Speaking” at Amherst Academy. Revisiting the scene of former triumphs, she climbed to the school’s third floor along with the regularly enrolled students. Ascending behind her was someone new, an attractive and sedate girl wearing dandelions in her hair. “I shall never forget that scene,” Emily told her eight years later, “nor the very remarkable fancies it gave me then of you.” *42 Young Emily herself was remembered as having been “exquisitely neat and careful in her dress,” and always with “flowers about her.” But the reason the dandelion girl made a lasting impression went deeper than that, given the background of sickness and death: who was this if not the May Queen, rising with all her natural vitality on display and ready to help Emily make a new start?

  The girl was Abiah Palmer Root, as Emily learned after “unceremoniously” introducing herself. She came from a hamlet near Springfield called Feeding Hills, where her father was a merchant and Congregational deacon and the family was well regarded. Judging from Abiah’s flowery curls and the “romance” she began writing in Amherst, she seems to have been a lively and original child. Not only was it decidedly ambitious for a girl to attempt a novel, but in the Dickinson home, where Edward’s views of current fiction grew more and more censorious, such an undertaking would have been quite transgressive. Emily’s first letter to this friend pleads for a look at the great romance: “I am in a fever to read it. I expect it will be against my Whig feelings.” The advice that followed her friend’s transfer to a girls’ school in Springfield—“dont let your free spirit be chained” by the “starched up young ladys there”—says a great deal about both girls. But the advice may have been forgotten: the little that is known of Abiah’s later history does not bear out her early and unconventional promise.

  “How happy we all were together that term we went to Miss Adams,” Emily recalled in spring 1845; “I wish it might be so again, but I never expect it” [italics added]. The striking thing about the girls’ friendship is that, although it produced a correspondence lasting into their early twenties, nearly ten years, they were originally in close daily contact for well under two school terms. *43 This rapid crystallization suggests how much Emily’s hunger for love was stimulated by her private mourning. But it also reveals a lifelong pattern of response—a quickness in attaching herself to others and a fixity in holding on. “She loved with all her might,” Emily Fowler recalled, immediately adding, “there was never a touch of the worldling about her.” That was the consensual view: impulsive, loyal, generous to the point of improvidence, perhaps naive. Lavinia put it well in saying that, rather than being “withdrawn or exclusive,” the poet was “always watching for the rewarding person to come.”

  In his 1849 novel, Kavanagh, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow gave this account of two schoolgirls’ close friendship: they “sat together in school; they walked together after school; they told each other their manifold secrets; they wrote long and impassioned letters to each other in the evening; in a word, they were in love with each other.” In the Dickinson family copy, the passage is marked twice, once by Emily. She, too, would (repeatedly) “Choose One,” as she put it in “The soul selects her own society” (Fr409), yet Longfellow’s description does not quite match her friendship with Abiah. The two were less an exclusive pair than members of a congenial group, “the ‘five,’” which coalesced in fall 1844 under the preceptress Elizabeth C. Adams. The other three were Abby Wood (met in a previous chapter), Harriet Merrill, and Sarah S. Tracy. Once, touching off their distinctive traits, Emily noted that Abby was studious, Harriet was “making fun,” and Sarah was “as consistent and calm and lovely as ever”—adjectives partly suggesting why the latter was tagged as “alias Virgil.” It was the coming together of this tight yet disparate group following a series of deaths that gave the fall term a special, never-to-be-forgotten flavor for Emily. *44

  The letters in which she tried to perpetuate this short-lived circle have led unwary scholars to suppose it endured for years. In fact, soon after Abiah transferred elsewhere, Harriet and then Sarah also left. The poet’s letters to them, mentioned to Abiah, have not been found, yet there is no question but that Emily was by far the most persistent in keeping the connection alive. Unwilling to accept Harriet’s obvious lack of interest, she urged Abiah to besiege her with letters—“heap coals of fire opon her head by writing to her constantly until you get an answer.” As late as 1847 she was still writing Harriet, harping on “old & I fear, forgotten friends.” Why were there no remembrances in Harriet’s notes to her grandmother in Amh
erst? Was there a “mystery” in this silence? Having heard nothing from her “this age,” or Sarah either, Emily felt a perplexed pain. *45

  Also painful was the impact of her friends’ conversions on girlhood intimacies. As long as Abiah was still unsaved, Emily could be free and easy with her vagrant fancies. “I have lately come to the conclusion that I am Eve,” she wrote soon after her fifteenth birthday. “You know there is no account of her death in the Bible, and why am not I Eve? If you find any statements which you think likely to prove the truth of the case I wish you would send them to me without delay.” Although the sprightly tone of this arresting passage is an implicit plea not to pick it to shreds, one can’t help wondering what the writer understood as the point of identity. Was it that she felt archetypal and original, or more naturally wayward than others, or essentially parentless? However we interpret this appealing provocation, Abiah was in no mood to play along. Overwhelmed by a revival, she drafted and sent a somber report on her “unsettled” state of mind. Following suit, Emily composed a solemn lament on her former and false conversion, excoriating herself in the best evangelical fashion for her stubborn refusal to submit.

  Since Abiah was not yet among the regenerate, Emily was free to bring out her gloomy reflection that, fearful as it was to die, living forever almost seemed worse. “Does not Eternity appear dreadful to you. I often get thinking of it and it seems so dark to me that I almost wish there was no Eternity. To think that we must forever live and never cease to be.” Here, we seem to have the dark side of the teasing fantasy about being Eve and living on and on. Had the girl caught a glimpse of something that would occupy her as poet—the undischargeable burdens of vision, consciousness, integrity?

  By the time Emily wrote her next letter, in March 1846, she had received the momentous news of Abiah’s conversion and carried it to Abby Wood, the two friends doing their best to digest it. Since by now Sarah Tracy had also been saved, Emily and Abby saw themselves, inevitably, as “left.” Torn between joy and sorrow, they hoped the revival then under way at the college would result in their own conversions.