My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  Outside the family, we find as few contemporary references to Mrs. Dickinson’s invalidism as within it. The most revealing comes from Jane Hitchcock, detailing the news of September 1856: “Eliza Coleman is visiting Emily & Vinnie at present, while they are housekeepers; for Mrs. D’s health is poor & she is at the water-cure in N. Hampton.” Water cures, in vogue from the 1840s, specialized in applications of hot and cold towels and were prescribed for a variety of physical and nervous disorders. In 1864 Northampton’s reputation as an up-to-date hydropathic center would attract young Henry James for a few months. As long as Emily Norcross Dickinson was a patient there, Emily and Vinnie automatically became dual housekeepers, charged with running a large house still somewhat new to them. The stressed sisters were probably glad to have Eliza on hand.

  At the end of 1857, a friend in Cincinnati was “gratified to hear of any improvement in Mrs Dickinson’s health.” In August 1859 she ascended Mount Holyoke with her husband, Vinnie, and Charlotte Sewall Eastman, probably riding in a horse-drawn rig most of the way. That winter she was able to visit Mary Shepard, who promptly reported that “among the callers, we have had—was Mrs. Edward Dickinson, last Thursday P.M. appearing as well, as 4 years ago—when last she was here.” The next morning Shepard sent her caller a note that all but rustles with stiff millinery proprieties: “Will Mrs. Dickinson be kind enough to lend me her winter Bonnet, to look at; & keep through the day? And if she recollect the quantity of silk, in it, please to mention it.” That this flattering trifle was preserved among the recipient’s few letters says something about her life’s social bareness.

  In later years, daughter-in-law Sue, with her keen sense of social punctilio, often presided over weddings and funerals, receptions and excursions. Her great difficulty in planning her own wedding on July 1, 1856, was that Amherst’s two locations were each unsuitable: Austin’s house lay under a pall of invalidism, and the Cutler house was ruled by an intolerable paterfamilias. Her decision to have the ceremony performed in Geneva, at the home of Aunt Sophia Van Vranken, seems sensible enough, yet it met with strong opposition in Amherst, causing, in Sue’s words, “great shaking among the old plans, and thawing of fancy’s frost works.” She didn’t specify the bearing of these metaphors, which point to Austin and Emily among others: Austin always planning the couple’s perfect future, Emily often fancying intensities of friendship. *92 Sue’s two extant wedding letters do not mention the Dickinsons, referring only to Gilbert brothers and sisters and “a very few of our special friends.” The omission seems odd, even allowing that Mrs. Dickinson’s incapacity would have kept Emily and Vinnie from traveling to Geneva. It almost looks as if Sue began wedded life with a symbolic act of exclusion.

  As to the nature of Mrs. Dickinson’s trouble, clearly more serious than her recurring “neuralgia,” we might note the fatigue and depression that overcame her sister Lavinia in the early days of her marriage: “I do not go out a great deal it tires me to walk or makes my back ache. . . . A great deal of the time I look very pale the truth is I feel as tho every thing was a burden.” The arresting detail—that Emily Norcross Dickinson collapsed after moving back to the house she had occupied in the early years of her own marriage—invites us to think about the hidden life of old feelings and the conditions under which they revive. Recalling the insecure domestic arrangements of her early married years, her drivenness as a housekeeper, her inexpressiveness, and the many deaths in her own family, we may wonder if her old and unresolved emotional issues had resurfaced. Did the grief she hadn’t been free to entertain in her hard-pressed younger days now return, leaving her too tired to want to do anything? Did it worsen her malaise to have a haughty, highly literate, and socially expert daughter-in-law living next door? Why is it that none of Sue’s writings have anything to say about her mother-in-law?

  Another event that undoubtedly weighed on Mrs. Dickinson was the financial collapse of sister Lavinia’s husband. At first, with the resolution of Norcross and Wood’s bankruptcy in 1852, Loring seemed to land on his feet. He continued serving on the Boston School Committee, and when Sarah Vaill Norcross drew up her will with Edward Dickinson’s advice, she made Loring an executor; he was still seen as solid enough for that. *93 Then came 1854, a year of “great commercial depression and disaster” for commission merchants. Loring kept creditors at bay by writing and endorsing six- or nine-month drafts payable to himself, but when the rubber money bounced he was taken to court. For four years beginning in 1855, the city of Boston assessed his taxable property at zero. The city directory for 1856 does not even give a business address for him.

  Capping that, however, was the painful family lawsuit in which the failed merchant was unsuccessfully represented by Edward Dickinson. Since 1846, Loring and his brother Albert had been trustees of the part of Joel Norcross’s estate that went to William O. Norcross’s children. In 1849, eager to invest trust funds in a promising ten-acre parcel in Newark, New Jersey (where William resided), the brothers sought legal sanction to invest out of state. The petition, drawn up rather sloppily by Edward, was dismissed. Loring and Albert then bought the land anyway, spending $3,000 of what should have been their own money.

  It was Loring’s one smart investment, and five years later, when the property was sold for $7,000, he and Albert regarded the profit as their own. Seeing things differently, the heirs brought suit in January 1857, accusing the trustees of retaining trust income for “their own personal and private use.” The Hampden County Probate Court agreed and ordered them to pay the profit over to the trust fund. Appealing to the Supreme Judicial Court, the brothers maintained through their attorney—Edward—that the money they invested had been their own. But Edward couldn’t make the argument stick, and in its April 1858 term Massachusetts’ highest court handed Loring the worst of his humiliations. From now on, whatever the true merits of his and Albert’s position, it would look as if they had tried to defraud their nephews and nieces.

  This seems to have been the only legal fight among Joel’s heirs, still a very tight clan. It must have had a wrenching effect on Emily Norcross Dickinson, given her closeness to Lavinia and, at least formerly, to William. Never before or since, one guesses, did she take a greater interest in Edward’s law work or share with him a more rankling defeat. But one only guesses: no extant family letter mentions the suit.

  Loring’s sorry financial and legal record helps explain why his daughters, Louisa and Frances, did not allow the poet’s first editor to see her letters to them, instead making excerpts and then destroying the originals: they were shielding their own privacy as well as their cousin’s. Their sensitivity about their family’s past offers a key to some of the poet’s remarks, such as her curious 1863 eulogy of their deceased father: “the meek mild gentleman who thought no harm but peace toward all.” Writing against a background of invidious comment, she was saying (to those in the know) that the harm Loring did was not deliberate and did not reflect on his fairness and kindliness. On this delicate matter, Dickinson apparently took the same line as her family.

  Does Edward’s defense of Loring and Albert imply that he saw the Newman estate as available for his own use, given his large real estate and building commitments? One scholar has argued that he dipped into this trust fund in 1857 and thus “augmented the Dickinsons at the expense of the Newmans.” The accusation has three serious flaws: it is based on an error in reading Edward’s inventories; there is no other producible evidence; and at no time did the Newman heirs or their husbands register dissatisfaction with his oversight of their affairs.

  It’s pointless to charge Edward with criminal peculation. When the Boston Courier floated his name for governor, the argument was that his administration would be free of “the corrupting influences from which we now suffer.” In 1858 the national credit rating agency considered him and his son to be “Perf[ectly] Reliab[le] men of m[ean]s do a lar[ge] bus[iness].” The poet’s sense of her father’s incorruptibility was the communal perception.

&
nbsp; Still, the man was every inch a Yankee, capable of shaving ethics if not the law. In March 1856 he sold the Nathan Dickinson place to his brother William for $6,000 and then, acting as Newman trustee, bought it back at the same figure. In effect he was unloading his own property on the trust account he managed, using William as intermediary. The obvious question is whether the price was a fair one. One answers it by noting that he paid the same amount, $6,000, for the Dickinson Homestead and meadow but that the valuation of these properties on Amherst’s tax rolls was far from equal, the Newman place being assessed at $3,200 and the Dickinson place (before improvements) at $5,600. Even allowing for the vagaries of assessment, Edward clearly drove a much harder bargain with the Newman estate than Samuel E. Mack had driven with him. There is no getting around it: he turned a very sweet deal by selling to himself as trustee.

  An even more ambiguous transaction lurks in the shadows of one of Emily’s most mysterious and important letters. When the panic year of 1857 put an end to what a newspaper called the “mania for railroad building,” the Amherst and Belchertown line went into financial collapse. The road survived, but only after being reorganized with a capital of $85,000, less than a third of the original investment; the stockholders seem to have been the big losers. The bondholders, on the other hand, of whom the poet’s father was one, were able to buy the line and protect their interests. Fronting for them was none other than William Dickinson, who acted as receiver at a critical moment. This obscure transaction was a major event in the lives of Amherst’s citizen-investors, yet the town’s only paper, the Hampshire and Franklin Express (controlled by Edward and the railroad clique), did not provide a clear explanation of the reorganization or so much as mention William’s name. *94

  The pattern running through these varied events—Mother’s perplexing illness, Loring’s failure, Norcross versus Norcross, the Panic, the A&B fiasco—was one of collapse and cover-up, of trouble too deep-seated to be examined in the light of day. That was how the world looked from the Dickinson mansion’s second floor as 1858 dawned. The consequence: for Amherst, a major revival with numerous conversions; for Emily, a final and decisive acceptance of a vocation.

  Great Awakenings

  Because there seem to be no extant Dickinson letters for all of 1857, it is sometimes thought she had a breakdown that left her unable to write. Yet she is known to have been in touch with a friend in New Orleans, Joseph Lyman, whose correspondence that spring and summer speaks of letters received from Emily and Vinnie. On May 24, 1857, short of paper, he expanded an envelope that had just come from Emily and used it to write his fiancée. Visible on the outside are two blurry postmarks, May 16, the posting date, and May 24, the day the New Orleans post office processed the letter. Also visible are Joseph’s name and address in Dickinson’s large, flowing, confident-looking hand. Chances are, some other correspondents, such as Eliza Coleman, also heard from her that year.

  Which is not to say she wasn’t oppressed by her mother’s breakdown and the other collapses and failures. The line dividing this world from the next, always present in her letters, became painfully salient in 1856 and 1858. Recalling the West Street parlor where she and Elizabeth Holland had met, she wrote, “We shall sit in a parlor ‘not made with hands’ unless we are very careful!” Reminding John Long Graves of “the crumbling wall that divides us from Mr Sweetser” (the Dickinsons’ neighbor to the north), she jumped to other evidences of mortality: old flowers, last year’s crickets, “wings half gone to dust.” “We, too, are flying – fading,” she moralized, adding (a glance at her poems?), “To live, and die, and mount again in triumphant body . . . is no schoolboy’s theme!” Such thoughts became so obtrusive that in February 1858 Lyman complained to his fiancée: “Emily Dickinson I did like very much and do still. But she is rather morbid & unnatural.”

  This, the one contemporary account of her state of mind, coincides with the breaking out of a revival so intense and widespread it was given a name lifted from the era of George Whitefield: the Great Awakening. Edward Hitchcock had witnessed many such stirrings, but this one had a more “universal and thoroughly subduing power” than anything he had seen. At the nightly meetings in Henry Ward Beecher’s church in Brooklyn, everyone “laughed and cried by turns, and hardly knew which to do most,” having “got over the old shame connected with tears.” At Philadelphia’s Arch Street Church, Charles Wadsworth declared that “since Christ came, there have been but three revival seasons comparable with the present; the old Pentecost, in the first century, the Reformation in the sixteenth, and the great Awakening in the eighteenth.” When news of the commotion reached France, Henry and William James’s father took it as a sign of an “immense spiritual revolution” in America.

  In Amherst, the excitement began in winter and ran into spring, bringing a total of twenty-four new members into the First Church by confession of faith. There can be little doubt Emily came in for special attention as the only family member still unconverted, or that her sense of pariahhood grew more acute. Thanking Mary Haven in early 1859 for an “unmerited remembrance,” she added, “‘Grace’ – the saints would call it. Careless girls like me, cannot testify.”

  It may have been this revival that spurred her to write Charles Wadsworth. Or perhaps, as Leyda guessed, she sought his counsel earlier, when her mother collapsed. Whatever the occasion, the minister found her appeal as obscure as it was anguished:

  My Dear Miss Dickenson

  I am distressed beyond measure at your note, received this moment,—I can only imagine the affliction which has befallen, or is now befalling you. . . .

  I am very, very anxious to learn more definitely of your trial—and though I have no right to intrude upon your sorrows yet I beg you to write me, though it be but a word.

  In great hasteSincerely and most affectionately Yours—

  Wadsworth clearly intended to show his disturbed correspondent she had his complete attention. But did his pressing concern and last underlined word stir an unintended thought?

  Although scholars have varied widely in dating this note, some putting it as late as 1877, it cannot have been written after spring 1862, when Wadsworth resigned his Arch Street pulpit: the monogrammed paper is identical to that of another extant letter of his dated “Arch St Dec 19” and sent to someone else. His misspelling of the poet’s name, together with his ignorance as to the nature of her trouble, suggests the message dates from the beginning of their correspondence.

  Why was this note alone preserved out of the correspondence? Of all the explanations that come to mind, one stands out: it marked a significant new departure in a developing relationship. Arriving in a time of distress, it held out an open ear and a warm heart—a promise of understanding.

  “I Stagger as I Write”

  Austin’s conversion, Mother’s and Uncle Loring’s persistent collapses, the Norcross suit, the railroad, the revival, and the appeal to Wadsworth help us make sense of two enigmatic documents from Dickinson’s hand, probably dating from the spring and summer of 1858: a draft of a note to someone she calls “Master” and a letter to Joseph A. Sweetser. “Much has occurred, dear Uncle,” she reminds the latter, “so much – that I stagger as I write.” And there we have it: a series of outer events accompanying an inner crisis, which manifests itself in a style too disturbed to make matters clear to strangers not in the know, namely us.

  The note to Master, prompted by news of his *95 poor health, begins by disclosing that she has had another bad winter:

  I am ill – but grieving more that you are ill, I make my stronger hand work long eno’ to tell you – I thought perhaps you were in Heaven, and when you spoke again, it seemed quite sweet, and wonderful, and surprised me so – I wish that you were well.

  Evidently intending to produce a clean letter, Dickinson realized as she wrote that revision would be necessary and proceeded to introduce several interlineations. Did she go on to make a final copy and post it? Although the sense of urgency in her last words
—“Will you tell me, please to tell me, soon as you are well”—shows she had cause to do so, we cannot say for sure any more than we can identify the recipient. The letter is tender and solicitous, including the recipient among those she loves (“I would that all I love, should be weak no more”), but it is not exactly a love letter. And we detect signs of a disconnect: her “flowers” (poems?) seem to have left him mystified, and there is another point on which she must briskly correct him: “Listen again, Master – I did not tell you that today had been the Sabbath Day.” These misunderstandings, along with the man’s geographical distance, may bring Wadsworth to mind but cannot be taken as serious evidence he was the one.

  In the draft Dickinson says that the spring has inspired her with an intense desire to communicate what she sees of nature and beyond: “Indeed it is God’s house – and these are gates of Heaven, and to and fro, the angels go, with their sweet postillions – I wish that I were great, like Mr – Michael Angelo, and could paint for you.” The last sentence, her clearest hint yet of artistic aspiration, also has her earliest known use of “great” in relation to herself. How to be great and true as a painter of what she experiences has become a provoking torment, an outgrowth of the sweet pains of letter writing. There is a warm connection here between friendship and ambition.

  The other letter, to Sweetser, also involves both a current trouble and the larger torment of artistic representation. Out of the distressing events that cause her to “stagger as I write,” Dickinson focuses on one that has persisted through the change of seasons: “Summers of bloom – and months of frost, and days of jingling bells – yet all the while this hand opon our fireside. Today has been so glad without, and yet so grieved within – so jolly, shone the sun – and now the moon comes stealing, and yet it makes none glad.” The hand that chilled the fireside was probably Mother’s perplexing illness, now going on its third summer, but other troubles may have contributed to the dismal mood: the railroad mess was worsening, and Edward had just lost the Norcross suit.