My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  Dickinson’s three later letters to Kate were equally direct, intense, impassioned, humorous. Referring to her widowhood as something the two of them had not discussed, the poet stated that she had also seen dear ones buried and flowers blooming on their graves: “I, too in Daisy mounds possess hid treasure – therefore I guard you more.” Speaking quite lyrically of those who have lost their loved ones (“through the snow go many loving feet parted by ‘Alps’ how brief from Vineyards and the Sun!”), she echoed her poem on how “The siren Alps – Forever intervene.” Composed the previous winter, this poem pictorialized the icy blockages the letters fervently tried to melt.

  Who could keep pace with someone always writing, playing, joking at this white heat? “You cease indeed to talk,” Emily wrote in her second letter, only to proclaim her determined faithfulness to the new friend. The next letter, from summer 1860, begins by spurning Kate’s excuse for being so remiss a correspondent: “The prettiest of pleas, dear, but with a Lynx like me quite unavailable.” No one could possibly keep up with—or elude—Emily.

  Emily-the-lynx’s unrelenting pursuit is apparent in the teasing lines that accompanied a pair of garters she knit for her new friend:

  When Katie walks, this Simple pair accompany her side,

  When Katie runs unwearied they follow on the road,

  When Katie kneels, their loving hands still clasp her pious knee –

  Ah! Katie! Smile at Fortune, with two so knit to thee!

  Fr49[A.1]

  Attractive and flirtatious, Kate was also a serious Episcopalian. Her first husband had been extremely devout, and when she went to Europe in 1872–1873 with the second one (also dying), she faithfully observed the ecclesiastical calendar and gave her mind to sermons and works of devotion. Dickinson knew all about the pious attitude. Mischievously clasping the pious knee, she was not about to leave it to its devoirs.

  Samuel Bowles

  Another person who entered Dickinson’s life by way of the Evergreens was Samuel Bowles, the influential owner and editor-in-chief of the Springfield Republican and possibly her most dynamic, volatile, and fascinating male friend. A relaxed intimate of Sue and Austin’s, he was known to their children as Uncle Sam. For Emily, he remained either Mr. Bowles or (in a much later letter to Maria Whitney) “that Arabian presence.” It wasn’t love, or love exactly, but whatever it was it brought out some of her most intense writing.

  Sue’s draft essay about her prominent guests, “Annals of the Evergreens,” names Samuel as the first important visitor to “our newly married home.” He had come to Amherst in the company of a “lady friend” to “report the result of some agricultural experiments on an estate near us, for the ‘Springfield Republican.’” Though Sue tended to move dates back in time and inflate mundane facts (she wrote “farm” first, then substituted “estate”), the event she recalled was in fact well documented by the newspaper she named, which had a weekly “Farm and Garden” feature and gave extensive coverage to horse fairs and fall cattle shows. On June 30, 1858, on the large North Amherst farm of Levi D. Cowles, there was a competitive demonstration of some experimental machines designed to replace scythes. The next day the Republican ran a story on the well-attended contest—“Trial of Mowing Machines in Amherst.” This was the event that brought Samuel to Sue and Austin’s home and into the poet’s world. *102

  Two years earlier, Edward had taken the lead in developing the First Church’s basement into an agricultural hall. The Dickinsons not only shared Bowles’s interest in agricultural progress, but wintered their stock on hay from their own field, easily visible from the poet’s south window. A letter she sent Bowles the following year introduces the topic of haying with the abruptness that bespeaks a shared reference: “The men are mowing the second Hay. The cocks are smaller than the first, and spicier.”

  Both Samuel and his wife, Mary, were Unitarians, with liberal views on religious and social questions. Eagerly responsive, Dickinson made sure the couple realized from the outset that she spurned her pastor’s teaching that “we are a ‘Worm’” (Natural Depravity) and took no interest in “‘Cephas and Apollos’” (leaders of doctrinal schools in I Corinthians 1:12). When Mary gave her a book by the controversial Theodore Parker, she replied, “I heard that he was ‘poison.’ Then I like poison very well.” The book is thought to have been The Two Christmas Celebrations, which explains in Parker’s downright fashion that Jesus was not the Savior but “a good man with a genius for religion,” and that after his death his true history was lost to sight, “overgrown with a great mass of fictions.”

  Handsome, energetic, still in his early thirties, Bowles was very much a man on the rise. With his flair for what was new, daring, and controversial, he was turning the Republican into one of the nation’s most progressive and influential newspapers. Before the Whig collapse of 1854, the paper backed Edward Dickinson and other conservatives. Afterward, it generally supported the Republican Party but retained a lively interest in independent challenges. It was thanks to Bowles that the paper exemplified “that rare type of journalism, which, placing the public welfare above private interests and party affiliations, is ready to risk popular antipathy and even financial losses to support causes it deems just.”

  But the man was canny as well as conscientious, making frequent calls on leading politicians in Boston, New York, and Washington, then using his paper to push breaking developments. *103 In August 1861, for example, the Republican floated the idea of a needed shake-up in Lincoln’s war cabinet. The next day George Ashmun wrote Nathaniel P. Banks to put him in the picture: “A free conversation with Mr Bowles led to his Editorials of yesterday. . . . They were intended rather to prepare for the breaking of the ice—than to break it.” Ashmun had presided at the Republican National Convention that nominated Lincoln. Banks had been Speaker of the House and, for three terms, governor of Massachusetts. Another sign of how powerful Bowles was is that fifty years after his death he was remembered as one of a small group who “from private stations largely governed Massachusetts.”

  The editor could not get on a train without meeting or making an acquaintance, and this unreserved openness showed up in his writing, which was always straining to sum up everything to date as rapidly as possible. Like Dickinson, he took liberties with standard English. Unlike her, he was so graphic, breezy, and current his newspaper gained a reputation for “slang.” He could be a thrilling companion for alert single women conscious of being denied a man’s entrée to the world. When Maria Whitney accompanied him to Washington in 1872, she was amazed by his “hosts of friends” and the “glimpses behind the scenes of political life & strife.” The poet also responded to Bowles with startling intensity, but she filtered out the politics that excited Whitney. When Governor Banks stayed at the Homestead for the 1860 Commencement, Dickinson’s only known reaction to the visit, sent to Sue with thanks for an extra loaf of bread, was: “Wish Pope to Rome – that’s all.”

  The 163 letters that Samuel is known to have written Austin and Sue from 1858 to 1877, his last full year, suggest they may have been his best friends. He and Austin shared a commitment to Amherst College, art collecting, and an up-to-date style of ease and privacy. Both disdained stuffy bores. “How are you, grease spot?” begins one of Samuel’s letters. Another ends in sardonic exhaustion: “Are you going to keep a livery stable? Do you, & I will open a nursery, & vegetable garden. Then we shall live.” That he had missed out on the education Austin received seems to have strengthened his sense of attachment, as Sewall perceived. Tied to a wife whose withdrawn and prickly tendencies were aggravated by chronic asthma, Samuel more than once took his marital troubles to the Evergreens. Four years into the friendship, he began calling Sue by her first name, going on to discuss such delicate matters as his temptation to infidelity (rarely yielded to). He saw her as a masterful and fascinating woman, one of the “aristocrats,” the “Queen of Pelham.”

  That Sue and Austin were more conservative than the editor made litt
le difference. He clearly needed this couple, needed to see them at regular intervals and keep them posted on his dizzy life. Perhaps they helped him manage the enormous centrifugal forces always about to tear him apart. Certainly, he depended far less on Emily, who is spoken of only eleven times in the voluminous correspondence.

  Accompanied by Mary, Samuel made another visit to the Evergreens in late 1858, when Austin was still feeling the effects of typhoid fever. On January 2, dashing off a New Year’s greeting to this new friend, the editor said he had written him “a dozen imaginary letters since we ‘visited you in affliction.’” He also invited either “of the girls from the paternal mansion” to come to Springfield. The offer reflects the same etiquette that prompted the Hollands to invite the Dickinson sisters after Elizabeth’s first visit in 1853. At that time Emily went with Vinnie. Now, with her sister in Boston, she no doubt declined.

  The poet’s connection with the Hollands had quickly defined itself as mainly with Elizabeth, but with the Bowleses she aimed at separate relationships. For three years she tried to make contact with Mary, sending the stolid woman some of her most confidential, ingenious, and moving productions, many of which presented the writer as quite powerless. In late 1859, stressing how “little dominion” she had, Emily sent Mary not a flower but “my heart; a little one, sunburnt, half broken sometimes, yet close as the spaniel, to its friends.” About the same time, declaring her “childish hope to gather all I love together,” she begged for a written expression of affection: “perhaps you could write a letter, saying how much you would like to [visit].” In her next communication her cheek was “red with shame because I write so often.”

  An early poem sent this unresponsive acquaintance compares the poet’s feeling of rejection to Christ’s:

  “They have not chosen me,” he said,

  “But I have chosen them.”

  Brave – Broken hearted statement –

  Uttered in Bethleem!

  I could not have told it,

  But since Jesus dared –

  Sovreign! Know a Daisy

  Thy dishonor shared!

  Fr87A

  Another ingenious poem, this one wrapped around a pencil stub, was probably meant for Mary, not her husband:

  If it had no pencil,

  Would it try mine –

  Worn – now – and dull – sweet,

  Writing much to thee.

  If it had no word –

  Would it make the Daisy,

  Most as big as I was –

  When it plucked me?

  Fr184

  In spite of this persistence, it was clear from the start that Samuel was the one who counted for Emily. On February 4, 1859, he ended a letter to Austin with his first remembrance for her: “let there be something over for the sister of the other house who never forgets my spiritual longings.” The passage marks his sly recognition of her double “spirituality”—her constant interest in heaven and her care to serve him the “spirits” she knew he relished (mostly sherry and homemade currant and berry wines).

  Friendship entered a new phase following Mary’s traumatic May 15 stillbirth. Answering the poet’s as well as Sue and Austin’s consolatory messages, Samuel wrote that “Emily’s beautiful thought” (which does not survive) had been “well appreciated.” This was the first time he used her Christian name, yet he didn’t thank her directly, relying instead on the Evergreens to relay the message. Perhaps it was already obvious that her social life had to be mediated by others. When he showed up at the Dickinson compound, it was the Evergreens he headed for, not the Homestead. Only after his arrival—and then not invariably—did Sue step next door and announce him. Once, when Emily was too late to present her flower and wine (and poem?), she lamented, “I did not know you were going so soon – Oh my tardy feet!” During his tour of Europe in 1862, she touched on her chronic remoteness with a far-fetched comparison: tracing his movements through the newspaper’s meager ship news was almost like his “ringing at the door, when Sue says you will call.” It takes a second look at this resolutely cheerful statement for its implications to sink in.

  The stillbirth had been Mary’s second in a row. That summer, hoping to overcome her depression, Samuel took her on a restorative jaunt whose itinerary included Amherst. Afterward, writing her one letter to both husband and wife (though thinking of him as her real audience), Emily hoped “your tour was bright, and gladdened Mrs Bowles.” Taking for granted the new attachment would bring a degree of pain, she was “sorry you came, because you went away. Hereafter, I will pick no Rose, lest it fade or prick me.” The paradox, a typical one for the writer, was borne out by Mary’s persistent refusal to write, though she did send flowers, a book, other gifts.

  Comparing a yellow and purple sunset to “‘Jerusalem,’” Emily added, “I think Jerusalem must be like Sue’s Drawing Room, when we are talking and laughing there, and you and Mrs Bowles are by.” *104 With this seemingly recherché comparison, the writer was alluding to her conversation with Bowles about the Bible’s next-to-last chapter, Revelation 21, which lists the twelve gems that are to adorn the New Jerusalem’s twelve foundations. Two decades later, condoling with Mary after the editor’s death, Dickinson recalled this very talk: “When purples come on Pelham, in the afternoon we say ‘Mr. Bowles’s colors.’ I spoke to him once of his Gem chapter, and the beautiful eyes rose till they were out of reach of mine.”

  September 6, 1859, the Bowleses’ eleventh anniversary, was probably the occasion for Emily’s gift of a flower and a riddling poem:

  If she had been the Mistletoe

  And I had been the Rose –

  How gay opon your table

  My velvet life to Close –

  Since I am of the Druid –

  And she is of the dew –

  I’ll deck Tradition’s buttonhole

  And send the Rose to you.

  Fr60A

  Wife Mary is the rose, and friend Emily the mistletoe—weird, more Druid than Christian, and emphatically not “of the dew.” Boldly imagining what it would be like to trade places with the wife, thus ending life on “your” table, the poet makes doubly clear how offbeat she is. But in the end she consents to follow tradition, sending the flower that stands for love.

  The first communication Dickinson received from Bowles seems to have been the pamphlet on Hadley’s bicentennial that printed her father’s toast to New England’s errand into the wilderness. In her thank-you letter she ignored the celebration, dwelling instead on personal and spiritual topics. Anxious about Mary’s health, she voiced her chronic fear lest “in such a porcelain life . . . one stumble opon one’s hopes in a pile of broken crockery.” As if to ward off a smile at her morbid preoccupation with the loss of friends, she added, “My friends are my ‘estate.’ Forgive me then the avarice to hoard them!”

  It was the old song. Every rose had its thorn. Friends were made to be lost. Intimacy created loneliness. “We want to see you, Mr Bowles,” she said, “but spare you the rehearsal of ‘familiar truths.’”

  Practicing Titanic Opera

  After 1860, we have only one letter signed “Emilie.” Her abandonment of this spelling, picked up at Mount Holyoke, was a sign her “‘Little Girl’hood” was finally coming to an end.

  A complicating element in the poet’s friendship with Bowles was his liberalism on women’s issues and his support of women’s writing. Well ahead of current opinion, the editor realized about 1860 that women’s civic freedoms and functions had to be drastically enlarged, if only for the good of society. His progressivism seems to have made Dickinson all the more sensitive about her “small,” “oldfashioned,” fugitive side. He is the only known recipient for the defensive “Perhaps you think me stooping!” (Fr273A). She was well aware how little she had in common with the modern women Bowles admired: Maria Whitney, who would teach French and German at Smith College; Lucia Gilbert Runkle, *105 a writer for the New York Tribune.

  On women’s issues, there were
far-reaching differences between Bowles and his literary editor, Josiah Holland, who owned a fourth of the Republican and was thus free to impose his opinions. His belittling unsigned essay, “Women in Literature” (1858), worked out the familiar idea that, because men express principles and women fancies, “the genuine classics of every language [are] the work of men and not of women.” Jane Eyre and Aurora Leigh “set the world in a flutter” for a time, but that was because woman’s true ministry is “ephemeral”—not to create “the permanent treasures of literature” but to give the multitude its daily bread. Holland remained a determined voice against female suffrage. After the Civil War, in his lecture “The Woman Question,” he went so far as to oppose the legislative reforms that gave wives “independent control” of their property. Given Dickinson’s friendship with both him and Bowles, we would very much like to know how their opposite views on issues related to her emerging vocation played into her explosive development. The absence of datable letters from her to the Hollands between 1860 and 1865 darkens the question.

  Unlike Holland, Bowles not only venerated Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh but discovered, published, and promoted several local women writers. There was an antagonism between the two editors, “an unseen bar,” as Holland put it in April 1860 as he began detaching himself from the newspaper. Tellingly, he was replaced with Fidelia Hayward Cooke, a widow whose poetry and fiction the paper had been publishing and who remained the new literary editor for about six years. Cooke was probably the author of “When Should We Write” (italics added), the 1860 editorial on women’s “literature of misery” that has been widely attributed to Bowles. She was remembered as “the second woman in the world” who worked as an “editor on the staff of an influential daily newspaper” (the first being Margaret Fuller). *106