My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  She added, as if in explanation or apology, “Susan is tired making bibs for her bird—her ring-dove. . . .”

  Johnson’s placement of this exchange in summer 1861 seems most unlikely, while Franklin’s date, “about 1861,” is needlessly vague. Everything points to winter: “Disc of snow” replacing a summer scene, Sue’s warming herself at a fire, the baby’s fat “ring-dove” neck crease now that he had put on some weight, *124 and the bib making that preceded weaning. Winter’s rule is even more emphatic in the third and fourth versions of the second stanza that Emily went on to draft. Even the chain lightning, normally suggestive of summer, points in this instance to December 1861 or January 1862: writing to Samuel on Christmas night, Sue was so full of “Summer visions” she had “but to open the door to see the hot lightning in the southwest.” Her note to Emily must have been roughly contemporaneous with this letter.

  The reason for getting the chronology straight is that it helps explain the existence, meaning, and tone of this unique critical exchange, in which a friendly and conciliatory tone accompanies underlying differences. It was because of the recent breach that each was making a special effort—Sue to offer detailed comment, Emily to accept and consider it. But they still failed to agree. Not only did Sue not care for the replacement stanza, but she compared it to something that “blinds us” and had the temerity to predict the poet would never equal the first stanza (surely not that good). On the whole, her comment foregrounds the delicate connoisseurship of her own sensibility. Emily’s reply—“Your praise is good – to me – because I know it knows – and suppose it means”—suggests she didn’t quite see the bearing of Sue’s shivery response but was willing to take it on faith. Her comment is one more expression of loyalty to Sue’s hidden essence, as opposed to her appearance or action.

  What do we make of the fact that Sue and Emily’s only known discussion of a poem concerns this particular one, and that the exchange took place after a period of alienation? From one point of view, the dialogue shows an uncanny symbolic aspect, as if the two living women were themselves hermetically sealed, and that that was what they were really talking about. Emily had refused to help with Jacky, and Sue had dismissed the old and exhausted Aboo, apparently without a qualm. The question of what sisterhood amounted to had often come up for the poet, as when, in 1854–1855, her future sister-in-law failed to write from the “silent West”: “Why Susie – think of it – you are my precious Sister, and will be till you die, and will be still, when Austin and Vinnie and Mat, and you and I are marble – and life has forgotten us!” There, in prophetic clarity, we have the marbled dead of “Safe in their alabaster chambers.”

  Emily remembered and used Sue’s images of the lightning and the cold. In 1862 she wrote a poem in which the speaker, a passive connoisseur of painting, music, and poetry, wonders what it would be like “Had I the Art to stun myself/With Bolts – of Melody!” (Fr348). And when Higginson visited, she told him that if a book “makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry.” Protected as she was, it can’t be said that the poet lived safe in alabaster: she was always gathering and spinning.

  Her reply to Sue’s critique concluded by offering a glimpse of the pride and ambition she had previously confided to Louisa and Frances Norcross: “Could I make you and Austin – proud – sometime – a great way off – ’twould give me taller feet.” That “great way off” has a nice ambiguity. Was she anticipating the distant time when her fame would burst on the couple, or was she signaling her determination to keep her brother and sister-in-law at a distance from her act of creating?

  The two women stubbornly adhered to their differing judgments of “Safe in their alabaster chambers.” When Sue arranged for publication in the Republican, she sent the original babbling-bee version. And when Emily sought Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s opinion of her work one month later, she submitted the Disc of snow.

  The poet’s preparatory years were behind her: the ordeal of being Dickinson had been transformed into a vocation wholly her own. Sinking deep into essential troubles, finding that who she was and what she suffered could be made the basis of an art, she had begun to wield her “stupendous” powers. Of course she would have to remain “a great way off” while doing her work, but there were advantages to that. Now it was time to get an opinion from an informed reader representing the world at large.

  Chapter 18

  1862–1865: The Fighting Years

  Oceans Between Her Friends and Her

  In faraway San Francisco, the members of Calvary Presbyterian Church had voted on December 9 to call the Reverend Charles Wadsworth as their next pastor. Although they probably had reason to think he would accept the offer, he didn’t do so until mid-March, partly, it seems, because of hostile letters he received from opposing members. Released from Philadelphia’s Arch Street Church on April 3, he set sail for Panama on May 1 with his wife and two children, crossing the isthmus by train and then embarking on a second ship for San Francisco. He reached the raw young city on May 26 and the following Sunday began preaching the Gospel.

  Prior to Wadsworth’s departure, Dickinson may have asked Samuel Bowles to do the same favor for her the Hollands did years later: address and mail her letters to Philadelphia. A January letter to Bowles beginning, “Are you willing? I am so far from Land – To offer you the cup – it might some Sabbath come my turn,” may have requested him to direct a sealed message for the minister. The implication was that she was so at sea she had to have Wadsworth’s counsel—and could someday return the favor to Bowles. She appealed to him again in early March, not knowing he was off to Washington and New York. Learning of her mistake, she explained to his wife that she had “sent Mr Bowles – a little note – last Saturday morning – asking him – to do an errand for me.” Extremely anxious, she brought all her diplomacy and ingenuity to bear on the editor’s wife:

  Now – Mary – I fear he did not get it – and you tried to do the errand for me – and it troubled you – Did it? Will you tell me? Just say with your pencil – “it did’nt tire me – Emily” – and then – I shall be sure.

  Knowing how stern and disapproving Mary could be, Emily simply had to find out whether she was too “troubled” to render the dubious-looking service her husband apparently performed (and even he had questioned her “Snow”). Desperately uneasy, she went down on her knees before the unresponsive woman: “You wont forget my little note – tomorrow – in the mail – It will be the first one – you ever wrote me – in your life – and yet – was I the little friend – a long time? Was I – Mary?”

  Presently, Dickinson thought of an expedient for disguising her forwarding requests. In late March, apparently sending yet another to Bowles, she took the precaution of substituting her brother’s name for her own in case her letter was opened by the wrong person: “Will you be kind to Austin – again? And would you be kinder than sometimes – and put the name – on – too.” Conceivably, one of these requests could have involved the newly found photograph of “Emily Dickinson.”

  What Wadsworth’s departure meant to Dickinson is suggested by her second letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, postmarked April 28 and summing up her education. After her first tutor died, “my Lexicon – was my only companion – Then I found one more – but he was not contented I be his scholar – so he left the Land.” It is of little importance that Wadsworth wouldn’t sail for a few more days: once his departure was definite, she was already abandoned. For a homebound New Englander, San Francisco was inconceivably remote, whether one thought of it as on the far side of an unexplored continent or two oceans away via the Panama route. One of her most powerful and despairing poems, “I cannot live with you” (Fr706), speaks of her lover as one that “served Heaven” and was now “Oceans” away. Years later, she informed Higginson that, although he hadn’t known it, he had “saved my Life.”

  That Bowles also sailed that same April only added to her sense of desertion. By now the man’s
many afflictions—sciatica, headache, indigestion, sleeplessness—had forced him to delegate most of his editorial work at the Republican. Hoping to relax yet stay abreast of fast-breaking events, he made an exhausting series of trips to the centers of power, worrying all the while that his staff would “run the machine wrong.” In Emily’s eyes, Samuel was undone by working too hard and being too alive: “Vitality costs itself.” Taking a harsher view, Frederick Law Olmsted believed he had “a diseased nervous impulse to activity of the brain.” This “mental intemperance” had become so habitual that now the editor imagined he was “trying to rest, when you are really trying to beat the devil round the stump.” One of the reasons Dickinson responded so powerfully to the driven Bowles was that she could see her own hyperenergetic states in him.

  By the time Bowles was persuaded to take the usual remedy for American exhaustion, a trip to Europe, he was too broken down to go to Amherst to say good-bye. Nor was Sue quite ready to entertain him now that nurse Maggie’s departure had resulted in “upturning & disorder” at the Evergreens. But the baby’s weaning left the mother free to travel once again, and so Samuel invited Sue and Austin to dinner, “to stay till 4 o’clock train.” This was obviously the right arrangement—best for everyone except stay-at-home Emily, who promptly got off one of her most abject letters: “‘Mr Bowles – not coming’! Would’nt you, tomorrow – and this be but a bad Dream. . . . Please do not take our spring – away – since you blot Summer – out!” Pretending that Sue and Vinnie shared her predicament, she said, “We cannot count our tears . . . they drop so fast – and the Black eye – and the Blue eye – and a Brown – I know – hold their lashes full.” Although in the end she plaintively allowed that “Part” of the family would “go to see you,” she concluded with another display of childish need: “I must do my Good night, in crayon – I meant to – in Red.” As in her Jim Crow letter, brown-eyed Emily was making the most of her helpless side.

  On April 5, Sue and Austin went to Springfield to bid their suffering friend farewell. Afterward, regretting that his sorry condition had made the visit “too dreary,” he thanked them for showing their affection and concern. His sentence acknowledging the messages they brought spoke of Edward’s “kind & rich note, & Emily’s, considerate attentions & full words.” Could he have been referring to her “hold-their-lashes-full” moan?

  Soon after Samuel sailed on April 9, Emily sent a letter of sympathy to Mary: “When the Best is gone – I know that other things are not of consequence – The Heart wants what it wants.” Aware that Mary’s eyebrows might be going up, she immediately explained: “You wonder why I write – so – Because I cannot help – I like to have you know some care – so when your life gets faint for its other life – you can lean on us – We wont break, Mary. We look very small – but the Reed can carry weight.” As in the earlier consolatory note following Mary’s stillbirth, Emily was hinting at her own woman troubles, her own separation pains: “Not to see what we love, is very terrible – and talking – does’nt ease it. . . . The Eyes and Hair, we chose – are all there are – to us.” This was a way of talking about the man who sailed away from her.

  For once, Mary replied, as Emily informed Samuel in the first of her two transatlantic letters to him. Vaguely hoping “those Foreign people are kind,” the poet asked two easy favors of him: take note of whatever was said about Mrs. Browning, and when he visited her grave in Florence “put one hand on the Head, for me – her unmentioned Mourner.” She was afraid Amherst would look “smaller” when seen from abroad, and in fact Samuel was wrestling with the contrasts: “Paris to Amherst! I wonder if the towns ever would understand each other.” Oppressed by the impossibility of communicating his initiations, he feared that between him and Mary “a wall was building up . . . of beauty & life & experience.” More aware now of his own barbarisms, he confessed to Sue that “you always thought too well of me at your house; & I have ever been expecting the bubble would burst.”

  The letter from Samuel that anticipates his visit to Florence “& Mrs Browning’s grave” is silent about Amherst’s “unmentioned Mourner.” And it was only after finishing another letter that he scribbled along one edge, “When next you write, tell Emily to give me one of her little gems! How does she do this summer!” The passage seems to glance at her previous summer’s troubles, yet it also allows a public heartiness to do duty for friendly intimacy. Apparently, this was his only message to her from Europe.

  How appreciative was he of her “gems”? A lament on the torture of being an invalid tourist—“to see the nectar close to lips, parching of thirst, & yet have to turn away”—seems to echo a poem he is not otherwise known to have seen:

  I bring an unaccustomed wine

  To lips long parching

  Next to mine,

  And summon them to drink. . . .

  The next time the speaker looks in, the sufferer is dead:

  The lips I w’d have cooled, alas,

  Are so superfluous Cold. . . .

  Fr126

  The serving of wine or cordials had been a frequent topic in the messages Samuel received from his loyal “Marchioness,” who was always offering to restore him. The poem, however, comes closer to the truth of his and Emily’s relationship: there was little either could do to relieve the other’s “parching.”

  After the editor came home in November, his friendship with Sue and Austin flourished as never before. In 1863 he sent them at least twenty-nine letters; in 1864, twenty-three. As if trying to ventilate every corner of his life, he wrote about his attachment to Maria Whitney, his troubles with his sickly and antisocial wife, his belief in marital fidelity. With the poet, on the other hand, the threshold of intimacy seemed to be raised higher than ever. When the returned traveler showed up in Amherst after Thanksgiving, Emily wouldn’t see him. Excusing her absence in a brief note, she followed up with a letter in which, while admitting that Vinnie and Austin had “upbraided” her, she claimed the loftiest of motives: “They did not know I gave my part that they might have the more.” She knew how precarious his health was and that the Evergreens was his preferred second home, but there was still something evasive and uncandid in her apology, especially when she hoped to see him “often”—a clear case of protesting too much.

  That was in late November or early December, 1862. In early January, annoyed by Maria Whitney’s interest in the work of the philanthropist Charles Loring Brace, Bowles grumbled that “the vagaries of fine womanhood are as strange as the tides, or .” (Did the blank stand for “menses”?) Four days later, to Austin, he dashed off what looks like a riposte to Dickinson’s nonappearance:

  To the [Newman] girls & all hearty thought.—Vinnie ditto.—& to the Queen Recluse my especial sympathy—that she has “overcome the world.”— Is it really true that they sing “old hundred” & China [a hymn tune] perpetually, in heaven—ask her; and are dandelions, asphodels, or Maiden’s vows the standard flowers of the ethereal?

  This irreverent treatment of Dickinson’s queenly withdrawal and obsession with heaven would not have upset someone with her keen humor, but there was an unforgettable shock in that emphatic—and public—“Maiden’s vows.” Two years earlier she had sent Bowles an ecstatic announcement of her excruciating “marriage”—“Title divine – is mine!/The Wife – without the Sign!” Insisting the matter be regarded as strictly confidential, she added, “You will tell no other? Honor – is its own pawn” (Fr194A). Now, playing with her trust, he all but dangled the great secret in front of the brother whose sympathetic understanding she no longer took for granted. That scoffing “Maiden’s vows” carried the suggestion that her fervent and private attachment to Wadsworth was some sort of virgin fancy, a product of inexperience. Could this be the case? Had she caught a wink in transit from one man to another? “Ask her.”

  When Bowles visited Annie Fields, whose Boston apartment was at the center of New England’s literary culture (her husband ran Ticknor & Fields), she felt that, talented as he
was, the editor was altogether too slapdash—too given to “careless writing and careless thinking.” This offhand and superficial nature, colliding with Dickinson’s mandarin sensibility, had now (as he had feared) burst the bubble. Because of the misdating of key documents, it hasn’t been understood that between late 1862 and 1874 she sent him no personal letters and few poems. One or two of the latter seem effusive enough, but the appearance is misleading: the relationship had been irreparably damaged, adding another betrayal to Emily’s experience and initiating a twelve-year hiatus in friendship.

  Of the five or six poems Bowles received in the years immediately following his unfortunate message, the earliest, from 1863, offers a reproach for withholding a small, unstated favor:

  Just once – Oh Least Request –

  Could Adamant refuse

  So small a Grace –

  So scanty put –

  Such agonizing terms?

  Would not a God of Flint

  Be conscious of a Sigh

  As down His Heaven dropt remote –

  “Just Once” – Sweet Deity?

  Fr478B

  In 1861 Dickinson had sent Bowles a poem on God’s parsimony, “Victory comes late” (Fr195A). Building on that line of thought, the present work was an oblique but impassioned protest at her friend’s failure to honor her tortured confidence. If even the flinty Calvinist Jehovah could respect the agony in her “Least Request” for understanding and secrecy, why couldn’t Bowles?

  In the second half of 1863 she sent him a stanza fantasizing the generosity that would have lavished everything on him:

  Just to be Rich –