My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

To waste my Guinea

  On so Broad a Heart –

  Just to be Poor –

  For Barefoot Pleasure

  You – Sir – Shut me out –

  Fr635B

  In the last line the man’s abrupt rejection dramatically wipes out the pleasure the speaker anticipates from her eager service.

  Early in 1864 Dickinson sent a poem in which nature and God are said to know her so thoroughly they impress her as the quasi-legal “Executors/Of an identity.” “Yet,” the speaker adds, drawing an implicit contrast with human perfidy, “neither – told – that I could learn.” With nature and God—if not with Bowles—“My secret” has remained “secure” (Fr803A).

  The animus these poems express seems unmistakable once one grasps how Bowles had forfeited Dickinson’s trust. Her openness with him was conditioned on an absolute matching opacity—that thick, protective “vail” she could not do without. “Good to hide, and hear ’em hunt!” begins a poem of 1865, which then goes on to speak of the even greater fun of revealing oneself to the “rare Ear/Not too dull” (Fr945). But where was that special undulled ear?

  Another poem from 1865 (this one also sent to no one) gives a dramatic rendition of the terror of exposure:

  To my quick ear the Leaves – conferred –

  The Bushes – they were Bells –

  I could not find a Privacy

  From Nature’s sentinels –

  In Cave if I presumed to hide

  The Walls – begun to tell –

  Creation seemed a mighty Crack –

  To make me visible –

  Fr912

  Since these lines deal with a fundamental aspect of Dickinson’s vulnerable and self-protective identity, they should not be read as a specific comment on Bowles’s careless betrayal. But they help explain why his “telling” disqualified him as the one rare ear and sharpened her fear of becoming “visible.”

  On his side, Bowles’s letters to Austin and Sue began to register an uneasy sense of Dickinson’s alienation. “I have been in a savage, turbulent state for some time,” he wrote in May 1863, “indulging in a sort of chronic disgust at everything & everybody—I guess a good deal as Emily feels.” It was a kind of apology, a rough effort to reestablish contact with someone he hadn’t been hearing from. He concluded with a jocular message: “Tell Emily I am here, in the old place. ‘Can you not watch one hour??[’]” Quoting Jesus’ reproach to his sleeping disciples in Gethsemane, he was playing on her identification with the abandoned Savior. And in fact she had promised just before his blunder that if he somehow alienated his “other friends – ’twould please me to remain.”

  But Bowles no longer had the key to Dickinson’s attention. As she said in a poem entered in a fascicle about autumn 1862,

  The Soul selects her own Society –

  Then – shuts the Door – . . .

  I’ve known her – from an ample nation –

  Choose One –

  Then – close the Valves of her attention –

  Like Stone –

  Fr409A

  In June 1863, as if shrugging off her offended hauteur, Samuel praised two women from Boston as “not brilliant, nor morbid, as American women are,—but cheery & pleasant.” In December, however, making one of the bruised confessions that punctuate his letters to the Evergreens, he wrote: “I see my friends falling away around me, withdrawing in disappointment, in unrealized idealism, in breaking expectation.” Two months later, in a brilliant self-analysis, he described himself as “a suggestion, rather than a realization, & elusive & spasmodic & fragmentary; but no more to others than to myself. And it tires me more than they.” *125

  Bowles’s driving personality and many troubles—overwork, terrible health, an unhappy marriage, a scattered life—go far to explain his nagging sense of failure. Did it make it worse that Dickinson slammed shut on him—“Like Stone”—the valves of her attention? Neither of these extraordinary people could begin to figure out the other: the editor torn open by his reckless embrace of modern multiplicity; the poet taking a high dive into the absolute only to plunge deep into the terrors of herself.

  Higginson

  The April that removed Wadsworth and Bowles brought a new Atlantic Monthly with a striking lead article by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “A Letter to a Young Contributor.” Full of witty practical advice for would-be writers, Higginson’s essay held up a high literary standard even while opening the gates to women and immigrants. He liked the hospitality of American English to foreign imports, the superiority of written to spoken language, the basic “mystery of words,” which can contain “years of crowded passion.” Warning that a newspaperman’s “mental alertness is bought at a severe price,” he urged aspiring writers not to rush into print; they should live “nobly,” for eternity. Fifteen years later, Dickinson quoted from memory one of the essay’s keenest sentences: “Such being the Majesty of the Art you presume to practice, you can at least take time before dishonoring it.” Did the author of this piece possess the one rare ear? “I read your Chapters in the Atlantic,” Dickinson explained in her second letter to him, “and experienced honor for you.”

  Like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edward Everett Hale, Higginson was an ex-minister who had quit the pulpit for freer modes of action and expression. A radical abolitionist, he had repeatedly engaged in direct and illegal resistance, as when he led a crowd of armed Bostonians that tried to save the freedom-seeking Anthony Burns from the slavecatchers and federal marshals. He also provided financial backing for John Brown’s assault on the federal arms depot at Harper’s Ferry. “What fascinates us,” he wrote in his essay on the seventeenth-century Frenchwoman known as Mademoiselle, “is simply her daring, that inborn fire of the blood to which danger is its own exceeding great reward.” Like Edward Dickinson, Higginson appropriated his Puritan ancestors’ no-nonsense boldness in the ongoing fight for justice and truth. Unlike Edward, he valued civil rights more than law and order.

  During the four years following his resignation of his Free Church pastorate in Worcester, where he still resided, Higginson had been so successful in his new career as writer and lecturer that he already seemed to be speaking for the upper reaches of the literary establishment. At ease with Boston’s literary and political elites, this radical Brahmin understood what would and wouldn’t go down, yet he also valued passion and freedom and the open-air life, knew how not to interrupt, and answered his mail. His fine Atlantic Monthly essays were attracting so much interest he began to be spoken of as a major new writer. In early 1862 Sue tried to acquire his photograph.

  An admirer of Thoreau, Higginson had been turning out a series of delicate nature essays that paid close attention to New England’s seasonal changes and flowering plants. “My Out-Door Study,” in the September 1861 Atlantic, posed the kind of question—had the world’s art and literature done anything “towards describing one summer day?”—that could engage Dickinson’s energies. The essay’s answer was even more invigorating: we are “no nearer to it than to the blue sky which is its dome; our words are shot up against it like arrows, and fall back helpless.” As Sewall surmised, the poet undoubtedly saw Higginson’s exquisite nature writing “as a firm bond between them.” One of the first poems she sent him rose to his challenge by proposing to tell “how the Sun rose” (Fr204B).

  Further qualifying Higginson as “tutor” was his advocacy of women’s rights. His sardonically titled “Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?” was an indignant plea for equal education: “We deny woman her fair share of training, of encouragement, of remuneration, and then talk fine nonsense about her instincts and intuitions.” If she has failed to match man’s achievements, that is because the “pathway of education has been obstructed for her.” Higginson’s explanation for this unfair treatment—“sheer contempt for the supposed intellectual inferiority of woman”—neatly sums up Edward Dickinson’s insistence as a young man that women’s mental powers were unequal to men’s.

  On April
15, with Bowles at sea and Wadsworth preparing to embark, Edward’s thirty-one-year-old daughter took the initiative of sending four poems and a note to busy Higginson: “Are you too deeply occupied, to say if my Verse is alive?” It was the central heart-pounding question, stated politely and with full permission to say no. Twice she used the word “honor,” in the second instance repeating what she had said the year before to Bowles: “That you will not betray me – it is needless to ask – since Honor is its own pawn.” Leaving her note unsigned, she enclosed a smaller envelope containing her name on a card—a box in a box, so to speak, with herself deep inside. Everything was in ink except for her name, written in pencil.

  As one might have guessed from all this heavy veiling, the poems she sent did not include any autobiographical narratives. Along with “I’ll tell you how the sun rose,” there was a treatment of the frustrating pursuit of happiness, “The nearest dream recedes unrealized” (Fr304B). A third and more challenging poem based on stringing beads—“We play at Paste –/Till qualified, for Pearl”—was about childhood’s end, the stepped growth from dull earthbound play to divine action. Proposing that we learn “Gem-tactics/Practising Sands” (Fr282A), the poem bounced off the rage for calisthenics as exemplified in Higginson’s recent essay, “Gymnastics” [italics added]. The fourth was “Safe in their alabaster chambers”—not the version Sue preferred but the visionary one in which worlds collapse “Soundless as Dots,/On a Disc of Snow” (Fr124F). Ignoring her sister-in-law in a second way, Dickinson said she needed outside criticism but had “none to ask.” This would seem to be another strike against the theory of a shared poetry “workshop.”

  Subsequent letters usually carried Dickinson’s signature, but her envelopes bear witness to another kind of concealment. How she did it isn’t known, but after April 15 every 1862 letter to Higginson for which an envelope survives was posted in nearby Palmer, not Amherst. Her three 1866 envelopes bear a Hadley postmark, and her one 1867 letter was mailed from Middletown, Connecticut, Eliza Coleman Dudley’s home. After her initial approach, in other words, she didn’t post a single letter to Higginson from her town. Was she afraid the postmaster, Lucius M. Boltwood, would see the well-known name in her writing and make a remark? All we can say is that she seems to have been extremely anxious to shield the correspondence from public view.

  Although Higginson’s letters were destroyed, some of his comments, advice, and questions can be inferred from Dickinson’s replies. He began by performing some sort of “surgery,” as she called it, on her submissions, for which she thanked him. His second letter, on the other hand, must have bestowed some very high praise for her to write, “I have had few pleasures so deep as your opinion, and if I tried to thank you, my tears would block my tongue.” When he advised (as in “A Letter to a Young Contributor”) that she “delay ‘to publish’,” she announced that print was as foreign an element to her as the sky to a fish—“as Firmament to Fin.” She undoubtedly meant this, yet we should not be misled by the apparent modesty: the next sentence audaciously proposes that “If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her.” As with patrician political candidates in the early republic, honor would have to find her, not vice versa.

  Convinced by Higginson’s initial critique that he was prepared to take her seriously, Dickinson responded with a series of unparalleled self-disclosures. Again and again she made it clear her writing emerged from dread and ecstasy: she sang “as the Boy does by the Burying Ground – because I am afraid”; her observation of nature made her tremble, producing “a palsy . . . the Verses just relieve”; if her lines had a “‘spasmodic’” gait, that was because “I am in danger – Sir.” She confessed her “terror – since September” and dared to submit the very personal and suggestive “There came a day at summer’s full,” which tells how a scene of separation marks the start of a probationary lifelong “troth” and final heavenly “Marriage” (Fr325D). Her fourth letter carried the weighty personal poem, “Your riches taught me poverty” (Fr418B), and the tragic “Success is counted sweetest” (Fr112D). She was exhibiting her profound paradoxes, desires, abysses—the void from which creation rose—to a man she hadn’t met.

  All the same, she warned him about the fictional distancing that belonged to her sense of lyric form: “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse – it does not mean – me – but a supposed person.” This, her one remark about the status of her first-person speakers, seems to dissolve any linkage between them and herself. In fact, her poems transform her experience in many ways. Sometimes her speakers voice her private situation (aspects of it) frankly and directly. Sometimes they are the actors of her favorite fantasies, fictions, projections. Often they represent a generalized human subject. Interpreters who take the declaration as an all-purpose passport into her work tend to divorce text from person, and also to elide the question her statement must surely prompt: What if it is part fiction? What if she wished to shield herself from too-direct readings of “There came a day at summer’s full” or “Your riches taught me poverty”? It is well to keep in mind the sequence of pleasures in “Good to hide and hear ’em hunt!”—one, hiding; two, self-disclosure (optional). Another poem beginning “I hide myself within my flower” (Fr80) surely gives us the right premise: that she herself is concealed within many of her “supposed persons.” The corollary, of course, is that we mustn’t presume to find her every time. This is her game, after all.

  Inevitably, the letters to Higginson enacted the poet’s fondness for self-dramatization. She gave heavy stress to her solitariness, naming as her only real companions the hills, the sundown, and her dog, Carlo. When her new mentor chided her for “‘shunning Men and Women’,” she retorted that people “talk of Hallowed things, aloud – and embarrass my Dog.” She spoke of a brother and sister but said nothing about her sister-in-law. Her mother didn’t “care for Thought,” and although her father bought books for her, he begged her “not to read them – because he fears they joggle the Mind.” About her family as a group, her first point was that they were “religious” and she wasn’t.

  These claims should not be taken at face value, yet they offer powerful insights into her conception of her situation. The isolation she claimed was by no means wholly fictive: she was the only family member who hadn’t joined the First Church, and there was much about her that the others, even Vinnie, didn’t know, beginning with the manuscript books. When Austin read the 1891 Atlantic essay in which Higginson excerpted and commented on her letters, he reacted like an all-knowing older brother, according to his mistress: “as to the ‘innocent and confiding’ nature of them, Austin smiles. He says Emily definitely posed in those letters, he knows her thoroughly, through and through, as no one else ever did.” It is true her brother knew her in ways we do not, but it is also the case that we know some poems and letters and relationships better than he. The fraternal view had its blind spots, like the paternal condescension toward the female mind. *126 These familial male superiorities help explain many things, including the poet’s quest for authoritative “tutors” and “masters” outside her home.

  Of course, Dickinson threw dust in her advisor’s eyes. There is little evidence that for “Prose” she went to Ruskin or Thomas Browne, both of whom just happened to be cited in “A Letter to a Young Contributor.” But her statement that she hadn’t read Whitman because she was “told that he was disgraceful” sounds plausible. The Outsetting Bard was not seen as homosexual so much as simply and flagrantly indecent. Under Holland, the Republican loudly objected to him, running a review under the terse and witty headline, “‘Leaves of Grass’—Smut in Them.”

  Regarding another daring American writer of the time, Dickinson told Higginson she had “read Miss [Harriet] Prescott’s ‘Circumstance,’ but it followed me, in the Dark – so I avoided her.” According to Sue, however, writing in 1903, the poet reacted enthusiastically to this sensational story: “This is the only thing I ever saw in my life I did not think I could have writt
en myself. You stand nearer the world than I do. Send me everything she writes.” The article containing this supposed quotation, which doesn’t sound like Dickinson, was written in Rome, probably without access to the original note. Chances are, the letter to Higginson gives the more trustworthy account of Dickinson’s final opinion of Prescott. Certainly, a number of poems express a low estimate of sensation novels:

  No Romance sold unto

  Could so enthrall a Man

  As the perusal of

  His Individual One –

  ’Tis Fiction’s – to dilute to Plausibility

  Our Novel . . .

  Fr590A

  This was sent to Sue about 1863, when Prescott was already starting to fade.

  The critical surgery Higginson tried to perform on Dickinson seems to have been sadly conventional. His later essay on her considers the poem, “Your riches taught me poverty,” which ends:

  Its far – far Treasure to surmise –

  And estimate the Pearl –

  That slipped my simple fingers through –

  While just a Girl at school!

  Fr418B

  Here, wrote her frustrated adviser, was

  manifest that defiance of form, never through carelessness, and never precisely from whim, which so marked her. The slightest change in the order of words—thus, “While yet at school, a girl”—would have given her a rhyme for this last line; but no; she was intent upon her thought, and it would not have satisfied her to make the change.

  The passage nicely catches the exasperated patience that led Higginson to call her “wayward,” and accuse her of confessing minor infractions while saying nothing about major ones.

  Yet it will not do simply to smile at Higginson’s insistence on exact rhyme, standard punctuation, correct grammar, titles, and the like. His sense of poetic form may seem rigidly time-bound, but he shouldn’t be underestimated. He not only brought the poet before the world in the first edition of her poems, he still embodies the sympathetic bafflement and even dismay of more sophisticated readers. No critic who admires everything in Dickinson can be relied on, having renounced that birthright of independent judgment we honor her for exercising. Norman Talbot, one of her shrewdest admirers, has nicely characterized “that curious tilt of naivety, elusiveness, stubbornness and impudence” that both attracts and grates on readers.