My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  That she admired the preacher was well enough known to Eudocia Flynt, of Monson, for her to send the poet on January 4, 1858, “Mr Wadsworth Sermon—preached in Phil.” The sermon was probably the just published “Religious Glorying,” which wrote off lyric poetry as a weak, backward-looking wail.

  Dickinson lives for us because she was able to pack grief, gaiety, memory, and so much more in a tight, always fresh, lyric package. The unsettling irony is that when she sought pastoral advice, she turned to a man who went public at an early age with his precocious verse and then found success by repudiating poetry and the past and celebrating the triumph of modern, industrial Protestantism. According to Austin, the poet “reached out eagerly, fervently even, toward anybody who kindled the spark.” Even though we know next to nothing about her relationship with her chosen shepherd, “born without a memory,” it seems obvious it can’t have been an easy one for her.

  Austin Converts

  In May 1853 Edward Dickinson was apprised of Austin and Sue’s secret engagement. The next time church let out in the evening, he proudly escorted his daughter-in-law-elect to the Cutler house, delighting Emily with the thought of all the turning bonnets (“I thought the folks would stare”). There was an instant rapport between Sue and Father, who felt, as Emily put it, that “she appreciates him, better than most anybody else.” Sue adored his severe, upright manhood, his stylish horsemanship in particular, “sitting very erect, reins taut,” compelling the animal to hold its head as high as his own. To catch the Squire (as he, too, was now known) driving Amherst’s quiet, unpaved streets in his 1851 carriage was to see on display all his expertness, discipline, pride.

  Austin also presented himself well, striking others as a “smart” or “fine” fellow. After the engagement was made public, Sue described him in a letter to her brother Dwight as “strong, manly, resolute—understands human-nature and will take care of me.” But the one point at which she expressed any real fervor was in connection with the “long-cherished wish of my heart to have a home where my brothers and sisters can come.” Austin she spoke of merely as “the man I love well enough to marry.” This lukewarmness calls to mind her enthusiasm for singleness and sisterhood in Tennyson’s Princess, and her lingering eye for Ned Hitchcock, now teaching at Williston Seminary. *89 But what chiefly troubled her was Austin himself—his basic inner quality.

  After all, how manly and resolute was he? Still “poor and young,” with his fortune to make, did he measure up to his father or her brothers? Once, sounding like the much-indulged boy he was, Austin assured Martha Gilbert that “the world is very wide & Fortune very kind & fears & doubts are for the [weaker?] & the wicked,” as if an orphan’s vigilance were a mark of weakness. In winter 1854–1855 he traveled west to look for business openings, mainly in Chicago, it seems, where John Thompson, his college roommate, was launching a legal career. Whether there was any real testing of fortune isn’t known. The feeler led to nothing.

  John Cody has cogently argued that Sue’s doubts about her fiancé gave her “the upper hand.” From time to time Austin was overcome by a fear “like the wasting Simoon . . . [P]erhaps I shall not be able to [illegible] you happy—perhaps I shall not satisfy you.” When she confided that the “mere relation of wife” left her with “gloomy thoughts,” he made the possibly tactical concession that their union need not be physical: “can I not say that you may live just exactly as you are happiest in living . . . as you please just like a girl always if so you are happiest—that I will ask nothing of you take nothing from you—you are not the happier in giving me” (italics added). He was especially concerned to assure her that their first year of marriage need not be “a year of ‘fearful unhappiness.’”

  In religious matters, Austin also gave away a great deal. When Sue opposed his attending a Unitarian church in Cambridge, he stopped going. When she voiced her suspicion he would “turn away from [her letter] to live on . . . indifferently to the great truths of religion,” he earnestly promised (at much greater length than this) “to think more seriously on the subject.” And so he did, apparently reading the religious literature she pressed on him, such as The Christian Life Social and Individual by Peter Bayne. Inscribed “Austin—from Sue,” this book opens with a prefatory scuttling of the notion that “evangelical religion . . . comports ill with solidity and compass of intellect” and ends with one of the recipient’s bow ties pressed between the pages. His one courtship letter preserved with Sue’s papers gushes over her saving role: “Oh the mystery—the mystery of love! it affects me all the more, that it has not been my wont to believe in realities—I never felt anything real before. . . . Perhaps God has chosen this way to bring a naturally pure, honest, inquiring soul from the deep darkness of such infidelity into the marvelous light of the real.”

  And thus it came about that the poet’s last ally ceased resisting. In late 1855, listening to an afternoon sermon at the First Church, Austin was struck by the closing words, apparently “choose now.” Several weeks later he rose at an evening service and made a confession of belief that was deemed sound enough to admit him to full membership on January 6. He proved to be the only new member to join by profession of faith for all of 1856. Most converts were saved during revivals and joined in groups. Austin came in alone, saved, one might say, by Sue.

  If his confession followed the lines of the draft statement preserved with his papers, it opened with the curious (and unspontaneous) admission that “my own voice . . . as I speak almost startles me. It seems . . . as though some other must be speaking in me.” Recalling his legal training, he characterized himself as a witness who had given false testimony and now wished to amend it. Formerly, he had said that religion was “a delusion, the bible a fable, life an enigma,” and that if God “had desired to reveal himself to us, he would have done so in a way we could not have mistaken.” Now, he was sure the Bible was “no fable, that the law of love which it commands could have originated in no human breast.” Saying nothing about sin, guilt, or doctrines, he assured his listeners that Christianity was “the happiest brightest, most joyous thing” the heart could know.

  Austin had a loud, flat, carrying voice that was said to “blat.” *90 If Emily was there to hear him, his self-important peroration must have left a bitter aftertaste. Like Prince Hal repudiating Falstaff, her brother not only renounced the candid irreverence he had shared with his sister but, addressing the unsaved with his usual assurance, advised them that God is “full of love for you” and that they too should “choose while you may—tonight you may.” Tonight God “will make the darkness in you light.” And then came the old familiar threat: “the words I have now spoken may one day come back like words of fire to burn upon your soul.”

  Betrayal had been the subject of Edwards A. Park’s sermon two years earlier, a dramatic treatment of the friendship of Judas and Jesus. Two decades later, Emily remembered it as “the loveliest sermon I ever heard.” What stayed with her was “the disappointment of Jesus . . . It was told like a mortal story of intimate young men. I suppose no surprise we can ever have will be so sick as that.”

  Five years after Austin’s confession of faith, Emily ended a letter to a Unitarian friend with a series of wacky excuses for not relaying the usual messages of love. Vinnie, asleep, had gone to “meet tomorrow.” Mother was out “sweeping up a leaf.” As for Austin, he “would send his [love] – but he dont live here – now – He married – and went East.” The passage mystifies, not only because Austin and Sue’s house was west of the Dickinson Homestead but because the marriage was by now old news. The explanation may be that Austin “went East” by getting religion, and that long after the event Dickinson’s sense of fraternal abandonment was apt to revive. Her strange present tense (“I do not know of you, a long while – I remember you – several times”) nicely conveys memory’s timeless limbo, where nothing ever terminates or gets resolved.

  “The Babies we were are buried,” the poet wrote Abiah, “and their shadows are
plodding on.” Among her rare gifts was the capacity to sense where those old and shadowy selves (which Wadsworth fled) were heading. Another was the ability to give herself to her friends without sacrificing her independence and integrity. In her earlier pleas to her brother to come into her garden, to return to Amherst, to think of home as heaven, she was asking him to stay with her always in the land of memory and childhood. Of course he could not do this, but was it necessary to publicly betray her?

  Perhaps it was, given his own self-betrayal—his light and easy conversion for his fiancée’s sake. His sister’s solitude, as the next few years would teach her, was now much deeper.

  Father Moves

  In 1851, when the Dickinson Mansion was owned and occupied by the aging David Mack, Emily was relieved her family did not “come home as we used, to this old castle,” which she pictured as full of specters, echoes, mold. Having lived there until she was nine, she associated the house with an ancestral past she had no interest in revisiting.

  In 1855, a year after Mack died, his son Samuel, living in Cincinnati, had to raise money quickly to cover the debts of a failed business partner for whom he had endorsed. One of Amherst’s most desirable residential properties now came on the market, catching the eye of several potential buyers, among them Judge Seth Terry of Hartford. But it was already too late: on April 20, the Amherst newspaper disclosed that “the Hon. Edward Dickinson, whose father, Samuel F. Dickinson, formerly owned the place,” had purchased it. He gave $6,000 for house and land, a great bargain according to the disgusted Mrs. Terry, who declared the seller had “no judgment & is wasting all his Father left him.” Along with the two-and-a-half-acre home lot, Edward acquired the eleven-acre “meadow” across the road. Formerly the seventeen-acre Jemima Montague place, this field had been reduced in size a few years earlier, when Mack sold the easternmost third to the A&B Railroad for tracks, depot, and factory sites.

  There is no mystery as to Edward’s motives in buying the place his father had built and lost. In addition to securing possession of one of Amherst’s finest houses, he was publicly redeeming his father’s loss of property and prestige, salving his own recent reelection defeat, and publishing his success in the world. Advertising for a mason skilled in stonework, brick, and plaster, to whom he promised six months’ employment, Edward set in motion a major and expensive remodeling, rumored to cost more than $5,000. It was at this time that the house substantially assumed its present size and configuration: a square cupola was built; the west wing was replaced with a porch; the rear ell was also demolished, and replaced with a large two-story service ell, including a kitchen; and an attached greenhouse (since destroyed) was built on the southeast. The latter structure, probably designed for the two Emilys, eventually became the younger one’s special domain. “We shall be in our new house soon,” the poet predicted in mid-October; “they are papering now.”

  A couple of weeks after snagging the old family place, Edward induced his son to give up the thought of moving west by offering to make him full partner and build a house for him and Sue. This marked the end of Edward’s partnership with Elbridge G. Bowdoin, who, “owing to ill health,” it was said, left for Iowa and settled there. The new house was to go up adjacent to the Homestead on what Edward had once called the neighborhood’s “best building lot.” Over the years he had pieced it together as if preparing for this very moment. Indeed, his realm was being consolidated everywhere: at church, where Austin bought a pew across from his family on the right aisle’s power row, and in the cemetery, where Edward arranged for the removal of someone else’s infant from what was now the Dickinson family plot. Setting himself against the usual American patterns of dispersal, Edward was creating a walled patriarchy—a project bearing comparison with Emily’s dream of gathering her friends and going “‘no more out.’”

  Informing her brother about these exciting plans, Sue addressed the tensions between Austin and herself with typical firmness and aplomb:

  Austin’s Father has over-ruled all objections to our remaining here [in Amherst] and tho’ it has been something of a sacrifice for Austin’s spirit and rather of a struggle with his pre-conceived ideas, I feel satisfied that in the end it will be best. . . . [W]e have decided to defer our marriage till another Spring and that will give me no more time than I shall need, to prepare for housekeeping. . . . Won’t I be proud to get you an oyster supper some cold night? Don’t speak of it—it makes me too happy.

  Picturing herself as about to fulfill her longstanding dream of re-creating the Gilberts’ broken home, she presents Austin as the one who has made the accommodating sacrifices. This portrayal seems accurate enough except for her claim that “we” have decided to put off the wedding; in fact, her fiancé had opposed further postponements. At bottom, though, he shared her belief that a rare dream was about to come true: “what a home you & I shall make, Sue—Did anyone else ever dream of such a home?”

  The house was paid for by Edward, who retained ownership, but his son was in charge of design. An elevation sent by one of Sue’s wealthy brothers prompted Austin to announce he didn’t “like handsome houses—home-ly houses are my kind, rather plain, [ample?] comfortable looking suggesting repose wealth and yet independence of wealth.” Still, intrigued by Dwight’s “brilliant” plan, he was willing to consider “an angle or two better than has yet been done in G.R. [Grand Rapids] domestic architecture.” It isn’t known whether the house as built, an up-to-date Italianate villa with a flat-roofed tower, wide porch, and “angles” *91 galore, was based on the Michigan design. The local builder, William Fenno Pratt of Northampton, no doubt contributed many ideas. Construction got under way the winter Austin joined the church. The first named house in Amherst, it was called the Evergreens after his interest in tree planting and landscaping. Considerable attention was given to compositional effect, from the smooth stone-colored siding and bright green shutters to the select rhododendrons scattered under the trees.

  In November 1855 the Dickinsons moved back to the Homestead, leaving for good their West Street house, its well-tended garden, orchard, and grapevine arbor, and the stand of pines—the old evergreens, planted by Austin. This was Edward’s moment: his father’s catastrophe had been wiped out, his son and daughter-in-law would soon be in their model home next door, and everyone was safely churched and bound for heaven, except Emily. But the move brought confusion or collapse to her and Mother.

  The poet’s one account of this move dwells on her feelings of dizziness and fragmentation. Remembering the Hollands’ early visit to the Dickinsons’ former parlor, she felt the memory take on “a spectral air,” with the participants turning to “phantoms” and vanishing. Indeed, she felt that she herself had been “lost in the mêlée” on moving day, and that the few wits she retained were “so badly shattered that repair is useless – and still I can’t help laughing at my own catastrophe.” Recalling the hackneyed proverb that home is where the heart is, she offered a sturdy correction: “I think it is where the house is, and the adjacent buildings.” Which was tantamount to saying, beneath the insouciance, that her own heart wasn’t in the new house.

  That said, the determined gaiety ceased and she spoke of the real trouble: “But, my dear Mrs. Holland, I have another story, and lay my laughter all away. . . . Mother has been an invalid since we came home, . . . lies upon the lounge, or sits in her easy chair. I don’t know what her sickness is, for I am but a simple child, and frightened at myself.” Not only did the two Emilys take little pleasure at returning to what the younger one rightly termed “our father’s house,” but the older one’s oddly timed collapse caused the poet to take fright at herself, fearing her own “machinery [would] get slightly out of gear” and that someone might have to “stop the wheel.”

  The letter was an extremely complicated performance, throwing any number of veils over the writer’s confusion and worry. But it made no attempt to conceal the link between Mother’s collapse and Emily’s panic, both inexplicable. The mother
’s and daughter’s time of troubles had begun.

  Breakdowns and Collapses

  Dickinson’s sketchy account of her mother’s inability, reluctance, or refusal to leave her chair pretty much sums up what we know about her long-lasting collapse. Indeed, two years would pass before any of the poet’s few extant letters from this period mention it again. Writing a professor’s wife in summer 1858, she said she would pay a call if she could leave “home, or mother. I do not go out at all, lest father will come and miss me, or miss some little act, which I might forget, should I run away – Mother is much as usual. I know not what to hope of her. Please remember Vinnie and I, for we are perplexed often.” As was always the case during Mrs. Dickinson’s illnesses, the poet’s domestic responsibilities had become much heavier. Yet the passage has a strategic opacity, providing no information about Mother’s symptoms and not making clear which parent actually obliged the daughter to stay home. The odd parallel between Mother’s not leaving her chair and Emily’s not going out leaves us wondering how much the daughter truly wished to “run away.”

  Some forty years later, when Vinnie wanted to set a reviewer straight regarding her sister’s seclusion, she said: “Our mother had a period of invalidism, and one of her daughters must be constantly at home; Emily chose this part and, finding the life with her books and nature so congenial, continued to live it.” Although this version of events oversimplifies the considerations that induced the poet to stay home, and also her feelings about this, it does look as if Mother’s illness reinforced a tendency.