My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  It was perhaps during these visits that plans were made for his wife and children to visit Washington that spring, both daughters being at first included. But an exception had to be made for the one who hated traveling, and whose spiky will required delicate handling. As Edward put it to Austin, “I have written home, to have Lavinia come with yr mother & you—& Emily too, if she will—but that I will not insist upon her coming.”

  This journey, the longest ever taken by Mrs. Dickinson and Vinnie, entailed weeks of anxious sewing and shopping. The letters Emily wrote during these preparations show no regret whatever at missing the grand excursion. Vinnie was in a quandary whether to “leave Emily alone,” but then it was decided to bring Susan Gilbert in as companion and Cousin John Long Graves, a student at Amherst College, as guard. Everyone took for granted the twenty-three-year-old woman could not be left by herself.

  Seventy-five years later, Graves’s elderly daughter recalled for the Boston Sunday Globe what her father had told her: “Mr Dickinson’s duties as Representative from Amherst often kept him in Washington,” and when his women needed “a man to protect them,” Graves moved into their house. Sometimes, after being waked up by distant piano playing, he was told by Emily in the morning that she could “improvise better at night.” This memory finds confirmation in a letter Emily sent Graves in 1856: “I play the old – odd tunes yet, which used to flit about your head after honest hours – and wake dear Sue, and madden me, with their grief and fun.”

  Sue’s report of the nights on West Street has a different ring. “I forgot to tell you,” we read at the end of a letter revealing she has been “blue all day” and longs to see Martha and the Bartletts, “I am keeping house with Emily, while the family are in Washington— We frighten each other to death nearly every night—with that exception, we have very independent times.” Implying that the two go their separate ways during the day, the letter conveys little or no pleasure in Emily’s companionship. The night-frights are consistent with the youthful terrors Sue recorded in later years, *83 but they seem at odds with the poet’s piano-playing enjoyment of her home after dark. It so happens that every letter of Emily’s expressing a fear of the dark dates from after her family’s move back to the Homestead in 1855.

  In Washington, Edward was assigned to a special House committee on the national armories at Springfield and Harper’s Ferry. At issue was whether these arms factories and depots should be under military or civilian management. Springfield was in Edward’s district, and as he well knew, the issue had been a hot one ever since an army officer took charge in 1842, sacking many mechanics. Curiously, Springfield’s leading spokesman for civilian control, Charles Stearns, had been Amanda Brown Norcross’s second husband. A self-educated master mason, Stearns belonged to a Whig faction that lacked access to the press and other levers of power. Unlike party regulars, he championed the civil liberties of skilled workingmen. His son, a militant abolitionist, would publicize the story of Henry Box Brown, whose hiding place while escaping north became his middle name.

  As a young man, Edward had defended the benefits of military academies and favored a militia reform few other state officers would have tolerated: supervision by West Point. Now, ignoring local sentiment, he fought tooth and nail against the resumption of civilian control. Stymied by the Democratic leadership, he visited the Springfield armory on his own, then returned to Washington to announce that the workers were happy and productive, the factory modern and efficient, and the steam engine “the most beautiful piece of machinery that I ever saw.”

  Edward made these statements on the House floor after his committee had ended its hearings and the chair had tacked the restoration of civilian control onto a regular appropriations bill. Denouncing this move in an indignant one-hour speech, Edward complained of the chair’s discourtesy, unfairness, procedural incompetence, and “complete monomania” (making, one notes, yet another accusation of insanity). “There never was a commission authorized by anybody on earth, for the discharge of important duties, which failed so completely.” This, Edward’s one major speech during his term in the House, raises questions about his effectiveness as legislator. Did he have to be so principled and clearsighted and combative and humiliating? Was it wise to reduce the issue to superlatives and ultimates, to leave no room for conciliation, to trample on local opinion? To answer yes, one would probably have to agree that the real issue was the defense of rightful authority—Edward’s “monomania.”

  But we must not forget that he belonged to a disintegrating minority party, or that in May 1854, soon after his family left Washington, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was approved over the vehement objection of the Massachusetts delegation. Abrogating previous restrictive agreements on slavery in the territories, this measure allowed white settlers to decide whether certain new states would be free or slave. Thomas Dawes Eliot of New Bedford, who had taken his House seat April 17 (becoming Edward’s roommate at the National Hotel), vigorously questioned the implicit disenfranchisement of free black settlers. Edward, by contrast, spoke less to the point and more belligerently. When a South Carolinian made an inaccurate remark about Samuel Hoar, one of Massachusetts’ distinguished elder statesmen, Edward rose in full bristle. “I do not wish to have my State improperly represented in this matter,” announced the warbonneted Member from 10th, adding, “there is not a purer man in the United States than Mr. Hoar.” There is no doubt Hoar had been a courageous and principled public servant, yet Edward’s angry riposte contributed nothing of substance to the debate.

  The morning after the measure passed, a group of northern Whigs gathered in Edward and Eliot’s hotel room to talk strategy. “A few still counselled adherence to the Whig party,” but most agreed that a new organization was called for—the Republican Party. Under this rubric, Whigs and Free Soilers made common cause in Michigan and elsewhere, but not in Massachusetts, and especially not in the 10th District, where the Whigs who now renominated Edward refused to censure the party’s southern wing for backing Kansas-Nebraska.

  In his reelection bid, Edward was supported by leading local papers and by Salmon P. Chase, the eminent Free Soil Senator from Ohio. But the state’s voters were disturbed, and when the 1854 elections were held an astonishing thing happened. To a man, the Whigs were driven from office, while the mysterious American or Know-Nothing Party took every single state and federal contest it entered in Massachusetts, pulling three times as many votes as the Whigs. Edward was defeated, 7,712 to 2,754. In Amherst he lost by more than two to one; in Pelham, nineteen to one. It was a repeat of what had happened to his father in the congressional race of 1828, and it had the same result: Edward was knocked out of the political arena. The victor was Henry Morris, his own student boarder of twenty-five years earlier. What may have stung most of all was that before taking his seat, Morris was induced to resign by the Know-Nothing governor-elect, who offered him a judgeship in a deal smelling of backroom chicanery.

  The 10th’s defeated congressman never recovered. During the heyday of the American Party, he accused it (with nice hyperbole) of “the wickedest . . . political rascalities . . . since the days of Judas Iscariot.” By 1860 it was already defunct, yet he continued to detect its spoor in the North’s new party and to keep his distance, unwilling to “vote for Know Nothingism . . . by the name of Republicanism.” When a family friend sent wishes for each of the Dickinsons in 1865, he hoped for “forgetfulness of the past” for Edward. The wish did not come true: the poet’s father remained lastingly unreconciled, declaring in 1869 that “since the uprising of the K. N.” organization he had ceased to vote by party. By then, no one even remembered the K. N.’s.

  Emily Dickinson interpreted her father’s insistence on the “high, strong ground” and his resolute political isolation as signs of noble character. Seeing him in this way furnished a model for defining and taking control of her own emerging fate. His fixities authorized her own, and most of all with respect to her life’s work. A central and enabling idea in
her poetry is that loyalty persists beyond hope of reward. Another is that greatness is tragic and solitary. Another is that you have to be supremely strong. “Be thou faithful unto death,” Christ is quoted as saying in Revelation 2:10, “and I will give thee a crown of life.” In taking the first part of this command to heart, Dickinson, like Father, spurned the very idea of payment. To publish would be to market her spirit and betray the integrity of her suffering. To qualify her “troth”—her fierce virginal constancy—would be thinkable only

  When they dislocate my Brain!

  Amputate my freckled Bosom!

  Make me bearded like a man!

  Fr267

  Which is to say, never!

  A couple of years after Edward’s death in 1874, Dickinson boldly corrected Christ’s words in Revelation:

  “Faithful to the end” amended

  From the Heavenly clause –

  Constancy with a Proviso

  Constancy abhors –

  “Crowns of Life” are servile Prizes

  To the stately Heart,

  Given for the Giving, solely,

  No Emolument.

  Fr1386D

  In extolling what she saw as her father’s unrewarded constancy, the poet was characterizing a vital aspect of her own vocation.

  Of course, there were differences, the most important being that Dickinson wasn’t paralyzed by a sense of embittered dignity. Like Dinah Craik’s heroic Olive Rothesay, who finds strength in weakness, she had a sense of loving unpaid service that kept her emotionally supple. As she put it about 1864,

  The Service without Hope –

  Is tenderest, I think –

  Because ’tis unsustained . . .

  Fr880

  A Complicated Engagement

  In July 1852 Susan Gilbert and Austin returned to Amherst from their schoolteaching jobs in Baltimore and Boston. Since Emily had no reason now to write to either, we can only surmise how much she knew about their growing intimacy, or how long she maintained her wishful belief in Sue’s invulnerability to male gallantry: “If [my heart] is stony, yours is stone, upon stone, for you never yield any.”

  Technically mistaken, these words of Emily’s were deeply prophetic, applying to her own “suit” as well as her brother’s. That winter, when Sue complained to a friend about the lack of excitement and stimulation in Amherst, her statement that “the girls are all gone Abbie—Jane—and Vinnie” ignored Emily’s presence. Overlooked on this occasion, on others she served as a pretext. A note of Austin’s outlines a typical ruse: Sue will tell the Cutlers she plans to spend the evening with the Dickinson girls, then, after “a half hour or so with them—I will undertake to accompany you home—& find a carriage tied near by our door which we will avail ourselves of for half an hour or an hour.” At the October Cattle Show, they occupied one end of a table along with Vinnie, Edmund Converse, Joel W. Norcross, and other friends (Emily was absent). Gossip reported the couple as “constantly together,” and by early winter, following a “week never to be forgotten,” they were secretly engaged, beginning what Austin called a “new life exquisite as a dream.”

  Becoming more confidential, Sue lent Austin her copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Prometheus Bound, and Other Poems (still extant), and he spent a day at home reading “the marked passages.” This is the book that printed “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” the impassioned cycle of love poems stimulated by Robert Browning’s courtship. To read those that Sue marked and wanted Austin to think about is to glimpse the parallels she saw between Barrett Browning’s courtship and her own. Beside Sonnet III, which begins, “Unlike are we, unlike, O princely Heart!” we find a heavy mark. Sonnet V, also marked, evidently spoke to Sue’s sense of bereavement:

  I lift my heavy heart up solemnly,

  As once Electra her sepulchral urn,

  And, looking in thine eyes, I overturn

  The ashes at thy feet. Behold and see

  What a great heap of grief lay hid in me.

  The one poem marked with double lines, Sonnet XXXV, further describes the torment of leaving grief behind—of turning away from “dead eyes too tender to know change.” The poem ends:

  Alas, I have grieved so I am hard to love.

  Yet love me—wilt thou? Open thine heart wide,

  And fold within the wet wings of thy dove.

  These love sonnets evoke as nothing else the vectors of Sue’s conflicted passion. For the moment, she was a tamed Electra, struggling to forget her mourning and give herself to someone outside her family.

  Although the couple’s love letters were eventually burned, Austin for some reason preserved the many rough drafts of his side of the correspondence: “O, my God, I am worthy of nothing—Thou has granted me everything—I tremble in my very joy. . . . Can it be that I am dreaming—or is this all real!” When Martha sent congratulations, he replied that he and Sue “love each other—with a strength & a passion . . . mightier than you can guess—mightier than in opium dreams many have conceived of in their imagination—We love each other, Mat, with a love strong—stronger than life itself.” For three years Austin kept turning out this sort of thing, a torrent of bloviation that he probably regarded as fine writing, and that never approached what his sister easily dashed off.

  In addition to surrendering to a banal imagination, Austin was warding off the dissonances he didn’t want to recognize. To Martha, he expressed amazement that such “tall proud, stiff people [as he and Sue], so easily miffed . . . [could] speak words—& look, look, so cold—so bitter, as hardly the deepest hatred could have prompted.” This cold hate came to the surface with some regularity, as when he compared himself to the charmed victim of a snake’s “deadly embrace”: “You know Sue . . . where I waited—& shuddered—& sickened—you know the lines [in her letter to him] I read oftenest—that I read slowest.” Twice he wrote, then canceled, “serpent.” In the end he always came back to his dream of an ideal and oddly literary union: “we’ll live just as beautifully as Longfellow’s Kavanagh is beautiful.”

  In February 1853, when Sue left for a month’s visit to the Bartletts in New Hampshire, Emily resumed her letter-writing. The first of the series, dated the twenty-fourth, discloses her awareness of the secret engagement and of her new basis with Sue. Making no sign until the letter’s end, she abruptly reverts, as if helpless to contain herself any longer, to her confidential manner of the previous spring: “Oh Susie, Susie, I must call out to you in the old, old way – I must say how it seems to me to hear the clock so silently tick all the hours away, and bring me not my gift – my own, my own!” Signing off, she transmits “my” mother’s and sister’s love but then at once corrects the pronoun, as the betrothal requires: “thy mother and thy sister, and the Youth, the Lone Youth, Susie, you know the rest!” These passages, the poet’s first recorded response to the engagement, do not exhibit the rage, jealousy, or fragmentation a few scholars believe she felt. Instead, making a conspicuous accommodation, she recalls her “old way” with Sue, signals an acceptance of the altered relationship, and gives final emphasis to Austin as the Lone Youth temporarily left behind in Amherst. *84

  Subsequent letters show the same mix of attitudes. With Sue away, Dickinson confessed she found it “harder to live alone than . . . when you were in Baltimore.” But she also made a point of recognizing the affianced couple’s preferences: “Somebody loves you more – or I were there this evening,” she wrote Sue on her return from a trip to New York, and when it was Austin’s turn to be gone she informed him she had “taken your place [with Sue] Saturday evening . . . but I will give it back to you as soon as you get home. Get home dear Austin.” She took great pleasure in serving as the facilitating confidante. When her brother left for Harvard Law School on March 5, she addressed some envelopes to Sue for him so that the couple’s correspondence could elude surveillance. And when they arranged a secret rendezvous at a Boston hotel, she reveled in the role of go-between. Afterward, parading her maiden-sister sympathy, s
he told Austin she “did ‘drop in at the Revere’ [in spirit] a great many times yesterday. I hope you have been made happy.” That Vinnie sent the same message—“I suppose you are perfectly happy to night Austin”—reminds us we are dealing with a family’s as well as a person’s unusual psychology. Even in romance, the Dickinson children held hands, so to speak. *85 Informed of the engagement well before their parents, the sisters eagerly welcomed the outsider to the exclusive inner circle. “I love the opportunity,” Emily wrote Sue, “to soften the least asperity in the path which ne’er ‘ran smooth.’”

  Sue’s response to all this participatory fervor was tepid at best. During her month with the Bartletts, Dickinson sent her a poem headed “Write! Comrade, write!” (Fr3A) and three ardent letters, the second of which pleaded, “Why dont you write me, Darling? Did I in that quick [first] letter say anything which grieved you, or made it hard for you to take your usual pen and trace affection for your bad, sad Emilie?” She evidently feared she had overstepped the line in that bit about the “old way” and “my own, my own.” In reply, she received one short note—“not much,” as she admitted to Austin. It was left to Vinnie to complain, indignantly, that Sue’s silence “made E. very unhappy & me vexed.”

  A letter of Sue’s written immediately after her return to Amherst hints at her growing anxiety and distress. Feeling “really homesick” for the Bartletts, she made the remarkable statement that when she pictured them “the world did’nt seem all hollow, [nor?] suicide as much of a relief as it does sometimes.” Brilliant and adhesive as Emily was, she seems to have had little real insight into her future sister-in-law’s queasy reserves. The same was true for Austin. When he read Sue’s afterthoughts about their meeting at the Revere Hotel, he was shocked to discover that as “you sat by my side—& pillowed your head upon my bosom & felt my arm around your neck & my lips on your cheek & my heart beating in its great love for you—Even there & then—you were doubting—doubting—questioning if after all you had any love for me.” This is the draft that calls Sue a serpent.