My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  Emilie Led Off in Triumph

  The remarkable thing is that she understood home was captivity and not the sum of her wishes. That insight became acute after a friend from Amherst, probably Abby Wood or Mary Warner, spent a week with her at school and then spilled the secret Emily had been keeping from her family—her bad cough. It could have been serious: she had had several pulmonary episodes as a girl, the Norcrosses suffered from consumption (not then known to be infectious), and in four years her roommate would die of the disease. Without warning, Austin appeared March 25, 1848, “with orders from head-quarters,” meaning Father,

  to bring me home at all events. At first I had recourse to words, & a desperate battle with those weapons was waged for a few moments, between my sophomore brother & myself. Finding words of no avail, I next resorted to tears. But woman’s tears are of little avail & I am sure mine flowed in vain. As you can imagine, Austin was victorious & poor, defeated I, was led off in triumph.

  This account, sent to Abiah, reveals a new and crucial aspect of the poet’s sense of identity. Here, father and brother are not only a part of home but members of a superior conquering power, the army of men. Her implicit metaphor, reappearing elsewhere, may have come from a poem she had just read, Alfred Tennyson’s The Princess, which tells how a female university is undone by a group of determined knights.

  Even the signature hints at a subtly reconfigured feminine selfhood. Changing her name for the first time, the writer signed off as “Emilie E. Dickinson,” in this way adopting one of the spellings of “my room-mate, Emilie.” Had her cousin effected a kind of conversion after all? The poet never used this spelling in legal signatures, but she alternated between it and “y” during the 1850s, “ie” being the dominant form in letters to Austin, her close friend Susan Gilbert, and the Hollands. Its last known use dates from 1860, after which she returned to “y.”

  Dickinson had good reasons for not wanting to be dragged back to Amherst. She had held her own in spite of the rules and the revival and was doing well in her studies. No doubt she feared she would be forced to miss the rest of the school year, as in 1846. Most of all, she resented the medical humiliation—in public a pitiable spectacle, in private a victim of Father’s unrelenting doses. *54 A letter to Abiah tries to explain the inconsistency between her tears and her attachment to home:

  You must not imbibe the idea from what I have said that I do not love home – far from it. But I could not bear to leave teachers & companions before the close of the term and go home to be dosed & receive the physician daily, & take warm drinks & be condoled with . . . by all the old ladies in town. . . . Father is quite a hand to give medicine, especially if it is not desirable to the patient, & I was dosed for about a month after my return home, without any mercy, till at last out of mere pity my cough went away.

  “Havnt I given a ludicrous account of going home sick from a boarding school?” wondered Emilie/Emily. The question epitomizes the uneasy and unsimple identity that had crystallized during her year in the army of girls. First, she discovered how vitally she was attached to her dear home in Amherst, and then she put up a fierce, instinctive resistance when compelled to return ahead of time. When she finally came back for good in August, no doubt happily, none of her big questions had been resolved. Mount Holyoke Seminary had not achieved what it was supposed to.

  Chapter 11

  1848–1850: First Drunkenness

  Emily’s schooling having ended, the question of her future was now more insistent. Since her mother continued to perform much of the household labor, including the baking that eventually became the poet’s department, it was a question for which she had sufficient leisure.

  She got a taste of one possible future in spring 1850, when Vinnie was attending Ipswich Female Seminary and Mother was invalided with “Acute Neuralgia.” Even though Father may have found the “girl or woman who is capable of doing the entire work of a small family,” for whom he advertised, the cooking and dishwashing seem to have devolved on Emily for the time being. A letter expressing her feelings about these responsibilities makes clear that until now she had “neglected the culinary arts.” She boasted with beginner’s pride about the “twin loaves of bread . . . born into the world under my auspices,” but she also pitied herself as an enchanted captive out of the Arabian Nights: “Would’nt you love to see me in these bonds of great despair, looking around my kitchen, and praying for kind deliverance, and declaring by ‘Omar’s beard’ I never was in such plight. My kitchen I think I called it, God forbid that it was, or shall be my own – God keep me from what they call households!” One wonders what Abiah, the letter’s recipient, thought about this brazen petulance, in which the discontented writer made no effort to come to terms with her probable female destiny.

  Unlike Grandmother Sarah, Cousin Emily Lavinia, and various friends, Dickinson probably never gave a thought to teaching as an interim possibility. In August 1848 her friend Jane Humphrey returned to Amherst to become the academy’s preceptress for five terms. When Dickinson looked back at this interval, recalling how the two friends sat “in the front door, afternoons after school,” what she emphasized was not the need to be serious and defined but the indolent freedom from work—how there would be “some farmer cutting down a tree in the woods, and you and I, sitting there, could hear his sharp ax ring.”

  With older girls such as Emily Fowler, one of Amherst’s most accomplished “belles,” Dickinson was on a more equal footing now. When Abiah came back to Amherst for a week in January 1850, Emily got “to know her anew as a splendid girl” and they agreed to resume their letter-writing, which, on the poet’s side, sounded some new and restless and at times quite wounding tonalities. On the whole, she was beginning to feel constricted by these two girlfriends: once, informing Abiah what she had been reading, she accused herself of pedantry. No such apologies were needed with Susan Gilbert, bright, ambitious, and with a haughty edge that attracted and punished admirers. Susan would do a great deal to widen Dickinson’s horizons.

  But Susan did not really enter the picture until the last half of 1850. For the moment, it was a certain group of literary young men who brought about a major expansion in Dickinson’s reading and intellectual interests. Amherst College had always offered a variety of public exercises for her to attend in others’ company, from the recurring exhibitions, senior levees, and commencement ceremonies to onetime events like the dedication of Appleton Cabinet in 1848 or the library in 1853, but now that Emily was older and her brother an upperclassman, the school became an indispensable resource. Indeed, it was partly owing to Austin’s membership in the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity that his Senior year, 1849–1850, had so much zest for her. Most of the students and tutors who called on her and Vinnie prove to have been members of this, the leading “secret society.” *55 John Laurens Spencer, one of two college students who joined her and others in an ascent of Mount Holyoke in October 1849, belonged, as did George Henry Gould, the lanky Senior who sent her an invitation to a “Candy Pulling!!” the following February—on the back of which, a quarter century later, she drafted a poem about winter’s unwished-for approach.

  Between Emily and the more devout students, such as William Cowper Dickinson, son of an eminent preacher, one can feel a definite tension. A Valentine this young man composed for her made her bristle, its tone being “a little condescending, & sarcastic . . . a little like an Eagle, stooping to salute a Wren.” Another semi-clerical friend was James Parker Kimball, class of 1849, who gave her a copy of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Poems. Kimball entered the ministry a few years later (as did William Cowper Dickinson), but well before that Emily twigged him as “our ‘Theologian’” and “young ‘D.D.’”—Doctor of Divinity. After he angered her in some way, she sent him a sharp letter intended to make him “feel some things.” “I only prayed for pride,” she informed Jane; “I have received yet more; indifference.” The obscure quarrel may be related to a note of hers that has been assigned to 1850 on the basi
s of handwriting:

  With the sincere spite of

  a Woman.

  The folded paper shows the indentation of a round object attached to a chain, perhaps a medallion or locket. It may be that Dickinson took offense at something Kimball said about women and returned a gift.

  Many of those whose company she enjoyed at this time were not conspicuously pious. The preferred social tone shows up in a letter written by her brother when he and Emily were alone at home: “We are anticipating a fine time in the absence of the ancient people [the parents]. Wish you were here to help us laugh—I think there is a chance for our having some company tonight.” The letter was sent to Joseph Lyman, a fellow free spirit. Another comrade, Elbridge Gridley Bowdoin, Edward’s junior law partner from 1847 to 1855, belonged to the First Parish but not the church proper. Ten years older than Emily and typed as “a confirmed bachelor,” the laconic Bowdoin amused her and stimulated her first known effort in verse, a teasing Valentine poem. He also lent her Jane Eyre, the riveting and subversive novel by a new but unidentified British writer.

  But it was another young attorney, also in his late twenties and equally alert to contemporary literature, who had the greatest impact on the eighteen-year-old woman, doing more to make a poet out of her than all previous teachers combined.

  My Tutor

  Born in Worcester in 1821, Benjamin Franklin Newton was nine years older than Dickinson and, unlike nearly everyone else in her social orbit, not orthodox. He belonged to Worcester’s second Unitarian society, the Church of the Unity, of which Benjamin F. Thomas, the judge who launched his brief legal career, was a charter member. In early nineteenth-century Massachusetts, as George Merriam noted, “a social partition line had run between Orthodox and Liberals.” Newton was the first person from the other side of this divide to make a strong impression on Dickinson.

  Writing to a stranger after his death, Dickinson explained the relationship by saying he had been “with my Father two years, before going to Worcester – in pursuing his studies, and was much in our family.” Newton’s apprenticeship with Dickinson and Bowdoin may have begun about the time she left for Mount Holyoke. Shortly before she returned for her four-day Thanksgiving holiday, she asked Austin whether Newton would be “going away” before she got back. The question suggests she looked forward to seeing him.

  In August 1849, as Newton’s stay in Amherst was coming to an end, he entered a choice remark in Emily’s autograph album:

  All can write autographs, but few paragraphs; for we are mostly no more than names. —B. F. Newton

  As engaging for its wit as its modesty, the quip hints at the personal qualities that inspired a phrase in the young attorney’s obituary: “universally esteemed for his suavity of disposition and high moral integrity.”

  Dickinson’s tribute to her friend, written in early 1854 almost a year after his death and sent to a Unitarian clergyman, characterized him as the formative influence on her mental and spiritual growth:

  I was then but a child, yet I was old enough to admire the strength, and grace, of an intellect far surpassing my own, and it taught me many lessons, for which I thank it humbly, now that it is gone. Mr. Newton became to me a gentle, yet grave Preceptor, teaching me what to read, what authors to admire, what was most grand or beautiful in nature, and that sublimer lesson, a faith in things unseen, and in a life again, nobler, and much more blessed –

  At the time it was not unusual for gifted women to voice this sort of sweeping indebtedness to a male mentor. Summing up a minister’s influence on the heroine of Mercy Philbrick’s Choice, Helen Hunt Jackson wrote that “he taught her and trained her, and developed her, patiently, exactingly, and yet tenderly, as if she had been his sister.” Dickinson’s tribute, full of the same period flavor, was a declaration that Newton had helped her overcome some of the defects of her education. She had passed through the hands of dozens of indoctrinators, but he was the first to combine a friend’s gentleness with a master’s or minister’s gravity. This was not the last time Dickinson acted out an intense admiration for an authoritative man. Hero worship was one of the means by which she reinvented herself.

  It is thought that her autobiographical statement of 1862—“When a little Girl, I had a friend, who taught me Immortality – but venturing too near, himself – he never returned”—is another reference to Newton. The misleading words, “little Girl,” refer to the same age she earlier characterized as “but a child”—her late teens. As Dickinson aged, this “‘Little Girl’hood” of hers (the phrase dates from 1882), seems to have lasted longer and longer in her retrospects, eventually extending to age thirty. As she looked back at young adulthood from the perspective of middle age, what she saw was a childhood persisting beyond its time. It was as if her precocity had landed her in a strange, ungrown-up limbo, from which it took her years to escape.

  Her tribute’s conclusion may seem off the mark, considering that all her previous pastors, teachers, and spiritual counselors had inculcated a “faith in things unseen” and a blessed afterlife for the saved. In fact, her words record a seismic lurch in her sense of things, a shift from Calvinist depravity and discipline to the immanent dignity of life and the validity of human intuition. In this new orientation, faith does not mean “giving up” but bestowing respectful attention on what is “grand or beautiful” in nature and books. The mind has a sovereignty of its own and may be trusted to ascend to what is beyond nature. To move from the orthodox teachings on heaven to this “sublimer” perspective, as taught by Newton, was to enter a radically different register. Unlike “Eternity,” which struck fifteen-year-old Emily as “dreadful,” the law student’s “Immortality” offered a transcendence free of terror.

  One reason Newton’s lesson sank so deep was that it gave her an exit from the Calvinist evangelicalism she both accepted and resisted—in which state she was blocked, “without hope.” Whether he is judged to be cause or catalyst, he stimulated her to reinterpret her rich Puritan endowment, which she eventually transformed into a kind of Romanticism. Her account of his teaching is so full of Wordsworthian echoes one suspects him of recommending this author to her. Certainly, the developmental stages she describes—from enjoyment of nature to an apprehension of the “sublimer” things of the spirit—are in harmony with “Tintern Abbey,” where the speaker grows from an unreflecting enjoyment of natural beauty to “a sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused.” As a letter of 1852 indicates, she was familiar with Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven,” where a child voices absolute faith in the present-tense existence of dead siblings.

  The one book Newton is known to have given Dickinson surely had a liberating effect on her. On January 23, 1850, after he had left Amherst, she informed Jane Humphrey she “had a letter – and Ralph Emerson’s Poems – a beautiful copy – from Newton the other day. I should love to read you them both – they are very pleasant to me.” At the time Emerson was known chiefly for his challenging lectures and essays. That Newton chose to present his 1847 Poems, his first collected verse, suggests both an advanced taste and a sense of Dickinson’s needs. “I can write him in about three weeks,” she declared, “and I shall.”

  Included in the volume were such poems as “The Sphinx,” “The Problem,” “Give All to Love,” “Merlin I and II,” and “The Humble-Bee.” Many of them discard as ephemeral and illusory the laws, distinctions, and boundaries that constitute human reality. Uriel says,

  “Line in nature is not found;

  Unit and universe are round;

  In vain produced, all rays return;

  Evil will bless, and ice will burn.”

  “Uriel”

  Other poems make the poet a figure of vast intuitive power, whose Delphic insight penetrates to the heart of creation. Most thrillingly, the new oracle came right out of homely New England, often speaking in the laconic accents of a tough Yankee preacher:

  The God who made New Hampshire

  Taunted the lofty land

>   With little men.

  “Ode, Inscribed to W. H. Channing”

  Emerson’s influence on Dickinson, pervasive but hard to pinpoint, was backed up, as George Frisbie Whicher said long ago, with a vast cultural authority. His basic lesson was to trust oneself: all things exist for the creative mind, and no institution or precedent or prohibition is ever binding. He was not afraid to oppose common sense, to be unintelligible, to rest his case on image and metaphor—on “fancy.” He would have been anathema at Mount Holyoke. That Dickinson welcomed his poems tells us she was ready for new directions, yet she was by no means alone in this regard: soon after her mention of Newton’s gift, Amherst College’s literary magazine, The Indicator, ran its first piece on Emerson, a review of Representative Men. The reviewer disapproved of his “erratic genius and brilliant oddity” and his “complete antagonism” to Christianity, but the last word was: “we always rise from his perusal, with the consciousness that our intellects have been quickened and strengthened by communion with a master-mind.”

  The value of such communion is made clear by Dickinson’s “Strong draughts of their refreshing minds” (Fr770), which says that a drink from another’s “Hermetic Mind” enables one to “go elastic” through the desert, like a camel. A later poem treating the same idea shows how elastic the right book can make one: