My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

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My Wars Are Laid Away in Books Page 35

by Alfred Habegger


  But then the letter undergoes a surprising transformation. In a gesture that one would not expect from Sue, Emily offers a generous poetic tribute to her alienated friend:

  I have a Bird in spring

  Which for myself doth sing –

  Although this bird flies away “as the summer nears,” the speaker trusts that it will learn a new melody elsewhere and that “each little discord here” will be resolved:

  Then will I not repine,

  Knowing that Bird of mine

  Though flown

  Shall in a distant tree

  Bright melody for me

  Return.

  Fr4A

  The last lines imply that even if Sue does not come back to Amherst, she can still restore the friendship by writing.

  Written during the heat of a quarrel, this communication exhibits the hopeful and giving turn (“return”) that made a poet out of Emily. Her attachment stretched to the limit, she shifts from a damaged relationship to the larger generalities of art. Although the poem constitutes a “private message” (as Cristanne Miller puts it in another connection), it is “universalized by a double release from private circumstance.” The release is simultaneously emotional and artistic, so that what begins as a letter conceding the end of a relationship turns into a poem that foresees a consolatory alternative. We here observe a generative moment in Dickinson’s art, which comes into being just as her isolation seems about to triumph. In part a surrogate for the relationships she hasn’t been able to realize, her poetry arises as an act of transcendence or resurrection, in a way fulfilling her youthful idea that heaven is necessary in order to complete earth’s frustrating friendships.

  If Eliza Coleman had learned about the quarrel during her Commencement stay with the Dickinsons, as seems likely, that would help explain her counsel to look to the hills for strength. Staying in touch with the poet, she wrote John Graves that autumn that “Emilie too, sends me beautiful letters & each one makes me love her more. I know you appreciate her & I think few of her Amherst friends do. They wholly misinterpret her, I believe.” The operative distinction here is between the poet’s Amherst friends, among whom Sue was preeminent, and friends from elsewhere (Emmons, Graves, Coleman); the implication is that Sue remains unforgiving. When Dickinson learned that Graves had patched things up with an alienated friend, “tears of happiness came shining in my eyes.” She wrote this at a time when her own conciliatory gesture was still unsuccessful.

  In late August or September, hearing nothing from her flown bird, Emily tried again. This time she sent an apology laced with humor and not a hint of recrimination: “I was foolish eno’ to be vexed at a little thing, and I hope God will forgive me, as he’ll have to many times, if he lives long enough.” Without specifying the “little thing,” she told how her feelings had shifted from resentment to forgiveness: though “much of sorrow has gathered at your name, [so] that ought [i.e., “aught”] but peace was ’tween us, yet I remembered on, and bye and bye the day came.” She confided that she had concealed Sue’s silence from everyone except Austin and Vinnie, then concluded with a signal that it was her friend’s move: “Write if you love, to Emilie.”

  Sue did write, eventually, from Grand Haven, though it isn’t known whether the letter was addressed to Emily or another. Seizing on the news that Sue walked and sewed alone, Emily assured her that “I walk and sew alone” as well. This, however, was not a very rich connection, and in her frustration the poet wished she could “paint a portrait which would bring the tears” to her hard-hearted friend: “the scene should be – solitude, and the figures – solitude – and the lights and shades, each a solitude.” Austin being about to leave for Chicago, she exclaimed: “He will see you, Darling! What I cannot do. Oh could I!” Full of irony and exclamation, her thoughts racing, the writer seems to have been less despondent than a hasty reading might suggest. Or perhaps the act of writing picked her up. One thing is clear: she was working her seductive powers of language for all they were worth.

  By late January 1855, Emily was indignant. Recalling the front doorstep where she exchanged confidences with her friends, she all but demanded an answer:

  I love you as dearly, Susie, as when love first began, on the step at the front door, and under the Evergreens, and it breaks my heart sometimes, because I do not hear from you. I wrote you many days ago – I wont say many weeks, because it will look sadder so, and then I cannot write. . . . I fall asleep in tears, for your dear face, yet not one word comes back to me from that silent West. If it is finished, tell me, and I will raise the lid to my box of Phantoms, and lay one more love in. . . . Why Susie – think of it – you are my precious Sister, and will be till you die.

  Why was no melody returned?

  Unbreakable but unreturned affection; thoughts of heaven that wouldn’t go away; a father’s absoluteness in defeat; art as metaphor and vision; the artist as wounded; the artist as constant; a very private box: the elements of the poet’s situation were being assembled.

  Chapter 15

  1855–1858: Troubles and Riddles

  The period from 1855 to 1858, marked by obscure and painful trials, collapses, transformations, ended with Dickinson’s long-gestated emergence as a working poet who knew what she was about. The documentation of her life in these years is so slender that some have concluded she had an incapacitating and well-covered-up breakdown, perhaps even a fully psychotic episode. As with other hypotheses that seek to explain this writer, nothing proves quite so useful as gimlet-eyed scrutiny and an insistence on plausible evidence. That she experienced severe and mounting troubles is clear. That she became any less capable of performing her usual functions, domestic and compositional, is not. The sharp reduction in the number of her surviving letters has several explanations: most of her earlier friendships had lapsed; many ongoing or new correspondences were destroyed in their entirety; and with Sue and Austin settling in next door she had no occasion to produce the detailed record of the early 1850s. Most important, her continuing shift from reportorial to lyric modes tended to throw another veil over her life, the thickest one yet. To an extent, she disappeared into her poems, which, in 1858, apparently without telling anyone, she began preserving in small, neatly copied, hand-sewn booklets. Increasingly, her bulletins would come from a place no one we know had seen or visited.

  From Washington to Wadsworth

  Representative Dickinson and his two daughters checked in at Willard’s Hotel in Washington on February 10, 1855—the same day the Gilbert sisters planned to return to Amherst. Just missing Sue in this way made Emily all the more averse to the long trip south, but Father was not to be withstood, it seems. A trip to a city was one of his standing remedies for village doldrums; Emily needed an enlivening shaking-up, as when she went to Boston in 1851; and since Edward was now a lame-duck congressman, this would be her one chance at the sights and society of the nation’s capital. But her new and fashionable outfits made her feel like an “embarrassed Peacock.”

  This note of discomfiture stands out in Emily’s letters home to Sue and the Hollands (those to Austin, who stayed behind with Mother, have not survived). Unlike Vinnie, who wore herself out walking with the ladies she met, Emily was glad to be excused from the “gaities” by illness, “tho’ at that,” she quickly added, “I’m gayer than I was.” Feeling that “all is jostle, here – scramble and confusion,” she remained within the circuit of her preoccupations, as we see in a family story about her falsely naive reaction to a flaming plum pudding brought on at dinner: “Oh, Sir, may one eat of hell fire with impunity here?” Her dismissal of official and social Washington—“the pomp – the court – the etiquette – they are of the earth – will not enter Heaven”—resembles her equally sweeping judgment of Boston four years earlier. Even when she expressed appreciation of the “many sweet ladies and noble gentlemen [who] have taken us by the hand and smiled upon us pleasantly,” her social discernment remained strikingly rudimentary.

  Dickinson’s
only known sightseeing excursion on this trip was by boat to Mount Vernon, then recently opened to the public and exhibiting a weathered and unpainted exterior. She told the Hollands how, after landing, “we reached the tomb of General George Washington, how we paused beside it, and no one spoke a word, then hand in hand, walked on again, not less wise or sad for that marble story; how we went within the door – raised the latch he lifted when he last went home – thank the Ones in Light that he’s since passed in through a brighter wicket!” Making allowance for the simple tone she often took with the Hollands, it is dismaying to reflect that this unobserving and insipid prose issued from the pen of a great poet. But Dickinson was as radically out of place in Washington as she would be in the no less chaotic postwar era, when the rising young writers—Mark Twain, Henry James, W. D. Howells—established themselves precisely through travel writing and exact social description. Dickinson’s powers became inoperative in the public realm this new generation helped teach the nation to see. In fact, she already thought of herself as “so old fashioned.”

  Her one account of a new acquaintance seems typical. After Vinnie was introduced in the hotel parlor to an officer named Rufus Saxton, a relation of Sue’s, Emily was persuaded to descend in company with her sister. On being introduced (as she told Sue and Martha), “we walked in the hall a long while, talking of you, my Children, vieing with each other in compliment to those we loved so well.” Did she realize that Lieutenant Saxton had recently participated in a major expedition through the Missouri and Columbia River drainages . . . and would it have mattered? In every way, including the mild adventure of walking in the hall, the episode reveals the tightly circumscribed boundaries within which she would have to devise some kind of freedom.

  What little we know about Dickinson’s exposure to Washington society comes mostly from others. On February 19 a woman who had checked into the hotel two weeks earlier, Mrs. James Brown of Alabama, gave the Dickinson sisters an inscribed copy of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s posthumous volume, The Last Leaf from Sunny Side. When Emily met the William G. Bates family, fellow hotel guests from Westfield, Massachusetts, she impressed the daughter, Jeanie, “as a girl with large, warm heart, earnest nature, & delicate tastes, & we soon became friends.” In 1890 Vinnie recalled, how accurately one cannot say, that she and her sister “had an adoring love” for Edward’s colleague in the House, Thomas Dawes Eliot, looking up to him as “their girlish ideal” of the perfect man. He, too, was staying at Willard’s.

  After three weeks of Washington, Edward took his daughters to Philadelphia and then went home, leaving Emily and Vinnie to spend at least two weeks with their friend and second cousin, Eliza Coleman, on Nineteenth Street below Chestnut. Hotel life was over now, and the poet was back in the familiar world of private connections: Eliza’s father, Lyman, was her old German teacher. Now he ran Philadelphia’s Presbyterian Academy, the school of choice for the denomination’s local “families of position.”

  Although the sequence of events will no doubt always be obscure, it is thought Dickinson was taken to the Arch Street Presbyterian Church to hear the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, and that he made such an impression on her she later solicited his counsel and thus initiated one of her most vital friendships. There is no doubt his pulpit oratory had made him the most famous of the city’s ministers, the one “the stranger within the gates” went to hear, and that he was well and active in March 1855. It is also certain the poet corresponded with him before he moved to San Francisco in 1862. At his death she variously typed him as “my Philadelphia,” “my Clergyman,” “my dearest earthly friend,” “my Shepherd from ‘Little Girl’hood.” The relationship was obviously a central one for her. In trying to understand it, we seem to get, if not the key, at least a rough period template from the nineteenth-century life of Emily Brontë that speaks of “the reverent, eager friendship that intellectual girls often give to a man much older than they.”

  Judging from contemporary reports, Wadsworth’s deep bass tones, reserved emotional power, and luminous language, combined with his original exposition of Old School Presbyterian thought, produced an unforgettable effect. He impressed believers and unbelievers alike, including Mark Twain, who heard him in San Francisco and liked his humorous glare. Extremely reclusive, he avoided the members of his congregation and even fellow pastors, letting himself be known only through his preaching, which seemed to emerge from dark internal sources he simultaneously protected and pointed to. “You feel,” wrote an admiring colleague, “that behind all he says there must be lying years of conflict and agony, of trials and sorrows, of deep gloom and despondency, of strong cries and tears.” Strong, tragic, unknowable: this was how he impressed Dickinson, who, characterizing him decades later as “a ‘Man of sorrow,’” recalled this curious scene: “once when he seemed almost overpowered by a spasm of gloom, I said ‘You are troubled.’ Shivering as he spoke, ‘My Life is full of dark secrets,’ he said. He never spoke of himself, and encroachment I know would have slain him.” According to his eulogist, Wadsworth produced the effect of “a messenger from another world.” After his death, reading something by or about him, Dickinson said, “I have had a Letter from another World.”

  Her care not to encroach reminds us of Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s wariness with her (“the slightest attempt at direct cross-examination would make her withdraw into her shell; I could only sit still and watch”). But Wadsworth’s enigmatic self-presentation was more portentous and tragic than her own, as if he were concealing an old wound too terrible to be looked at. When an alumni officer at Princeton Theological Seminary wanted an update, the minister replied that he had lived “extempore” and “was born without a memory.” Apparently, Dickinson saw him only twice after 1855. Other than that “his Life was so shy and his tastes so unknown,” she gleaned little about him.

  No doubt Wadsworth had his secrets, yet there seems little mystery about the basic outline of his life, beginning with his fractured youth. Born in 1814 near Litchfield, Connecticut, he was the product of prominent and well-to-do forebears, partners in one of the area’s slitting mills (for slicing iron bars or plates into squared nail rods). As he once recalled, he “never got whipped for I was a ‘Wadsor’ and my father was ‘Lord of the Manor.’” All such privileges ended in 1830, when father Henry died insolvent and everything he owned down to his clothes had to be sold to pay his debts. Left with no obvious means of support, his widow, Mary Ann, remarried in December 1834, shortly before the final liquidation. She and Charles seem to have been very close.

  Leaving Litchfield for upstate New York, the boy attended a variety of schools including the Oneida Institute, a respected manual-labor academy in Whitesboro for intended ministers. After being expelled from Hamilton College for an unauthorized absence, he graduated from Union College, at the time something of a degree mill. By then he had already gained a reputation as a poetic prodigy, his work appearing in respected outlets under the name Sedley. Adept, unforced, conventional, his verse shows traces of orthodox Calvinism, eighteenth-century “graveyard” meditation, and, interestingly, Lord Byron. Like the latter’s Childe Harold, Sedley seems weighed down by a gloomy and premature initiation into life’s sorrows. He is evidently in exile from New England and oppressed by memories of a vanished Eden and lost family members; his subjects include the night sky, solitude, the 1832 cholera epidemic. One intriguing poem, “To ,” written at age seventeen, probably at the Oneida Institute, says good-bye to a loved woman who has saved him from despair:

  Lady! I did not, could not deem,

  A year ago, that love could fling

  The witchings of its rainbow dream

  Upon my spirit’s drooping wing!

  Having gained a name as a precocious genius, Wadsworth turned to the ministry, used his expressive talents for sermon writing, and gave up poetry. This was his life’s pivot: away from the sad and artful backward look and toward the modern practical world and applied religion. “The poet, the creator of these
later times,” he insisted in 1852, “brings forth, not day dreams, but realities.” The steam engine was a “mightier epic than the Paradise Lost,” the telegraph “a lovelier and loftier creation of true poetry than . . . Shakespeare’s Tempest.” In his 1857 Thanksgiving message, “Religious Glorying,” a spirited exhortation to be of good cheer in spite of the financial panic, Wadsworth was extremely critical of “the infirmities of the poetic impulse.” He quoted from Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” only to rebuke lyric poetry as such for its unphilosophical and self-indulgent “wild plaint.” The next year he denounced “our poetry” as “mystically spasmodic—uttering transcendental nothings, very wild and very watery.” Whitman remained outside the pale for the minister, but by 1865 he had changed his mind on Wordsworth, quoting his ode with approval.

  As preacher, Wadsworth frequently used his poetic gifts to celebrate Anglo-Saxon triumphalism. It wasn’t always clear whether he had in mind spiritual or military victory:

  See yonder great Indian city, walled to the skies, battlemented with adamant, swarming with an armed soldiery, arrogant and boastful as if unconquerable and everlasting. But hark! Out of the midnight comes a strange dull sound, at first tremulous, indistinct, distant; yet now drawing nearer, waxing louder—and now you know it—the advance of an armed host; the tramp of marshalled men; the clangor of British steel; the peal of the Highland music; the grand old Saxon war-cry—the challenge of Christian chivalry unto the strength and pride of Heathenism. And now you catch, through the shadows of night, the gleam of bristling armor; the waving of plumes and banners; the march of mighty men. See! they throw up batteries—they advance the lines—they man the trenches—they rush to the assault . . .

  His San Francisco congregation, before whom he uttered these stirring and fearsome words, remembered him as “a man of one idea—the pulpit his throne, and he knowing it, endeavoring at all times to fill it with kingly presence.” In the eyes of a son, he stood out for “all who knew him as ‘a strong man.’” What evidence there is suggests that his “Saxon” force appealed to Dickinson as much as it built up the tension between them.

 

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