My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  Again and again Dickinson recorded how she had taken control of her ordained victimhood, turning deficits to assets. In “God gave a Loaf to every Bird –/But just a Crumb – to Me,” she tells how she converted deprivation into a state of wealth that makes her “Sovereign of them all” (Fr748B). In another work, one of the few in iambic pentameter, she presents herself as an encouraging case of recovery from disaster:

  If any sink, assure that this, now standing –

  Failed like Themselves – and conscious that it rose –

  Grew by the Fact, and not the Understanding

  How Weakness passed – or Force – arose – . . .

  Fr616

  As humble as they are proud, these lines offer an impressive statement on the obscure process by which “Force” is regained—a process that eludes understanding yet requires thought and effort to make it work. To stand after sinking: Dickinson had done that no less than the mortally wounded Gertrude Vanderbilt.

  The most revealing poems may be those that make the connection between psychic recovery and the work of writing. “God made a little gentian,” entered in the manuscript books about spring 1863, a year after Wadsworth’s departure and a few months after Bowles’s humiliating betrayal, concerns a flower that wants and fails to be a rose. Laughed at by “all the Summer,” the fringed gentian blooms only after other flowers are killed by autumn’s frost: “There rose a Purple Creature –/That ravished all the Hill.” Dickinson ends her story of this royal but painful triumph by asking, “Creator – Shall I – bloom?” (Fr520).

  Such poems, anticipating production, are outnumbered by those that look back and assess it. Of these, one of the most arresting treats her poetry writing as a kind of self-therapy. She begins by addressing the special person she misses:

  Severer Service of myself

  I hastened to demand

  To fill the awful Vacuum

  Your life had left behind –

  I worried Nature with my Wheels

  When Hers had ceased to run –

  When she had put away Her Work

  My own had just begun –

  I strove to weary Brain and Bone –

  To harass to fatigue

  The glittering Retinue of nerves –

  Vitality to clog . . .

  Nothing else written by Dickinson so vividly evokes her lamplit bedroom, laborious nights, and disciplined effort to quiet her “nerves.” Not stopping there, however, the poem goes on to admit the failure of her program: “Affliction would not be appeased” and she remains in “Darkness.” The lesson the last stanza draws is that essential problems are not to be remedied:

  No Drug for Consciousness – can be –

  Alternative to die

  Is Nature’s only Pharmacy

  For Being’s Malady –

  Fr887

  The poem is so honest and tough we must be careful not to take it as the “real” story of Dickinson’s life in writing. As always, her full truth was more complicated; certainly, she herself gave other explanations for her drive to expression. *130 Still, “Severer service of myself” does suggest a motive for her phenomenal production even as it tells us not to make the therapeutic perspective our primary one. As those astringent last lines warn, psychology, the “Retinue of nerves,” was not what she was ultimately concerned with.

  This and other survival narratives are closely allied to the many poems on the soul’s sovereignty that were given to Sue. Also related are various meditations on what might be called the power of growth. “Through the Dark Sod – as Education –/The Lily passes sure” (Fr559B) was sent to Louisa and Frances Norcross, perhaps about 1863, a dark time for the newly orphaned cousins. That year there were other poems about the mysterious push upward:

  The Mountains – grow unnoticed –

  Their Purple figures rise

  Without attempt – Exhaustion –

  Assistance – or Applause – . . .

  Fr768

  The subject here is in part the poet’s own creative effort and achievement: the second line restates the gentian poem’s “There rose a Purple Creature”; the fourth reminds us that Dickinson’s private monument building did not depend on others’ advice or approval. Manuscript book 37, also from 1863, repeatedly considers the inherent dignity of things that act independently: “You taught me waiting with myself” (Fr774), “Life and death and giants” (Fr777), “Four trees opon a solitary acre” (Fr778), and “Growth of man like growth of nature.” The last of these, a major statement, welds the idea of autonomy to vocation:

  Each – its difficult Ideal

  Must achieve – Itself –

  Through the solitary prowess

  Of a Silent Life –

  Effort – is the sole condition –

  Patience of Itself –

  Patience of opposing forces –

  And intact Belief –

  Looking on – is the Department

  Of its Audience –

  But Transaction – is assisted

  By no Countenance –

  Fr790

  The poem states what no reader of Dickinson must ever forget. To date, as far as we know, no one, not Bowles, not Higginson, not Susan Dickinson, had “countenanced”—seen, approved of—very much of her best work.

  In 1864 we begin to see poems registering a sense that the struggles of youth and early maturity are over. In “The admirations and contempts of time,” death’s approach

  Reorganizes Estimate

  And what We saw not

  We distinguish clear –

  And mostly – see not

  What We saw before – . . .

  Fr830

  Another poem, contrasting “plan for Noon and plan for Night” (the last word may mean blindness as well as the end of life), says that while

  The Foot opon the Earth

  At Distance, and Achievement, strains,

  The Foot opon the Grave

  Makes effort at Conclusion . . .

  Fr1075

  From the beginning, Dickinson’s poetry was animated by a conviction that the world is a symbolic theater that directs our minds toward the infinite but that we generally misinterpret. The idea had stayed with her, but now she applied it to her experience, not her prospects. In “What twigs we held by,” she exclaims at the inadequacy of the people and things we clutch in “Life’s swift River,” in our effort at self-preservation. Only at the end, as we “pause before a further plunge,” is it apparent how flimsy are the attachments that have held us. Was she thinking of her fixation on Master, less necessary now and beginning to recede? Shifting the metaphor (as usual), the poem concludes:

  How scant, by everlasting Light

  The Discs that satisfied our sight –

  How dimmer than a Saturn’s Bar

  The Things esteemed, for Things that are!

  Fr1046

  This was said with a ripe authority Dickinson hadn’t earned in her younger and shallower judgments of the world’s “hollowness.” It is another sign of her incomparable resourcefulness that she could say what she had already said and speak more richly than ever. She was a writer whose material could not be used up: who even in looking back kept moving forward.

  The Only Woe That Ever Made Me Tremble

  Dickinson’s productivity seems even more heroic in view of the disabling eye complaint that showed up in September 1863. From late April to November 21 in 1864, and again from April 1 to October in 1865, she underwent prolonged treatment at the hands of Boston’s leading ophthalmologist, Dr. Henry Willard Williams. During these two extended periods, she lived with her cousins Louisa and Frances Norcross in the Cambridge boardinghouse to which they had recently moved.

  There is no record of Williams’s diagnosis, and of his treatment all we know is that the sessions at his office were “painful” and that Dickinson was told to avoid bright light and close work. She had to let her cousins mend her stockings, and, worse, not look “at the Spring.” Mab
el Loomis Todd was told she spent “part of the time in darkness.” The patient’s own account of her symptoms was written in Amherst between her two courses of treatment, after Louisa insisted on a report:

  The eyes are as with you, sometimes easy, sometimes sad. I think they are not worse, nor do I think them better than when I came home.

  The snow light offends them, and the house is bright . . . Vinnie [is] good to me, but “cannot see why I don’t get well.” This makes me think I am long sick, and this takes the ache to my eyes.

  Although Dickinson regretted her inability to help with the housework, what chiefly oppressed and frightened was the interdiction on reading, as she later informed Joseph Lyman:

  Some years ago I had a woe, the only one that ever made me tremble. It was a shutting out of all the dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul – BOOKS. The Medical man said . . . “down, thoughts, & plunge into her soul.” He might as well have said, “Eyes be blind,” “heart be still.” So I had eight weary months of Siberia.

  Dr. Williams’s office was in his new brownstone house on Arlington Street, on the site now occupied by the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. The books he wrote shortly before and after seeing Dickinson—A Practical Guide to the Study of the Diseases of the Eye (1862) and Recent Advances in Ophthalmic Science (1866)—reveal an easy familiarity with recent European inventions, procedures, experiments. They also indicate how concerned he was to alleviate pain and facilitate recovery. He sounds gentle and reassuring, and in fact the poet took note of his delicate excuse for wiping her cheeks—for “caution of my Hat.” All the same, Williams was very much the man in charge: an editorial by him in The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal forcefully argued that women’s “physical organization,” especially “during a portion of every month, disqualifies them” from the medical professions.

  Dickinson’s daguerreotype, together with her sensitivity to light in 1864–1865, has prompted some scholars to diagnose her trouble as exotropia—divergent, “wall-eyed” vision. A more likely diagnosis, proposed by Norbert Hirschhorn and Polly Longsworth, is anterior uveitis: what used to be called rheumatic iritis. According to Williams’s Practical Guide, the pain caused by this disease “is of an aching character and deep-seated . . . often severe, sometimes agonizing,” capable of returning “with increased severity at evening, or in the night, after a comparatively tranquil day.” His observation that “large anodynes are often ineffectual to procure sleep” brings to mind the early 1864 poem whose speaker labors into the night to wear out the “glittering Retinue of nerves” (Fr887). Another symptom is “intolerance of light.” Happily, if the disease is caught in time and properly treated, the prognosis is “almost always . . . favorable”—not the case with exotropia. As Dickinson noted, the doctor was “enthusiastic, about my getting well.”

  It so happens that during her second course of treatment, one of Williams’s medical students took notes of his lecture on rheumatic iritis on April 27, 1865. The first recommendation was “Atropine 4 grs to 1 oz once or twice a day, or oftener, or a stronger solution.” After listing other remedies, the notetaker wrote, “No mercury,” assuring us that at least on this occasion the poet escaped poisoning. Atropine was an old and standard agent, derived from belladonna. In addition to being used to dilate the pupil, thus increasing the eye’s sensitivity to light, the drug was known to prevent or break down “adhesions between the iris and lens in iritis.” Williams’s Practical Guide stressed the gradualness of recovery and the need for continuous monitoring. The patient “should be cautious, at least for some months, in regard to exposure to glare of light from the snow or from light surfaces.” The poet’s statement that her eyes were bothered by “snow light . . . and the house is bright” almost sounds like an echo of her doctor’s advice.

  Dickinson’s living arrangements in downtown Cambridge, or Cambridgeport, as the city’s commercial and administrative quarter was known, provided her first extended experience of ordinary urban life. Since the boardinghouse was at 86 (later 124) Austin Street, only one short block from the central business district, there must have been considerably more bustle, noise, and dust than she was used to. Her neighbors, spanning the usual middle-class occupations, included a grocer, an apothecary, a livery stable operator, and a customhouse appraiser. A block or so up the nearest cross street was the Prospect Street Church, which Louisa and Frances joined in January 1865. Somewhat farther, at 24 Centre Street, resided Asa and Lucretia Dickinson Bullard, and with them Catharine Newman, a schoolteacher. In nearby Lynn was Uncle Joel W. Norcross, now retired.

  A presentation inscription in the poet’s copy of Jane Eyre tells us she was probably visited by Charlotte Sewall Eastman on September 20, 1865. “How are your eyes my dear Emily,” asks a letter from Eastman seven years later. Yet Cambridgeport opened few or no social vistas for Dickinson, and in fact it is impossible to picture her joining others on the Austin Street veranda on hot summer evenings (though she complained about mosquitoes). She noted for Vinnie’s sake that bonnets were giving way to straw hats, but in general the events she deemed newsworthy—Clara and Anna Newman’s unexpected visit, the arrival of Joel’s eight-year-old daughter, Anna, the blooming of certain plants—disclose an attention riveted on the indoors. A new couple’s arrival merited notice because of the threat to privacy: “I do little but fly, yet always find a nest.”

  As for Bowles, two contemporaneous letters to Austin and Sue speak of trips to Boston without raising the question of looking up Emily. When he mentioned her and her illness, it was only in connection with family members, as when he wrote from California in summer 1865 and wished for “health & happiness for Sue; eyes for Emily; patience & a love of a bonnet for Vinnie. . . .”

  Dickinson’s statement that “Mrs Bang and her Daughter [are] very kind” tells us she got on amicably with the landladies, Eunice and Louise Bangs, and their Irish-born servant, Margaret Tripper. Since Eunice’s husband, a bookkeeper, didn’t own the house and had no Cambridge real estate or taxable assets, it would appear the family took boarders to supplement a tight income. For the daughter, Louise, who never married, this was to be a lifelong occupation: fifty years after her death, a Cambridge resident remembered a respectable Sparks Street house she had run. In all likelihood, Dickinson’s accommodations in 1864 and 1865 were more than adequate. Her cousins were not so impecunious, after all, as to have to settle for an undusted, door-banging boardinghouse.

  Most of what we know about the poet’s life at this time comes from her messages to Vinnie, packed with questions and information about the ongoing life at home and in Cambridgeport. The first in the series, evidently responding to Vinnie’s demand for news, explains why Emily hasn’t written, assures her sister of her love, and (as Samuel would do) recommends patience. Like Martha in the Bible, Vinnie was needlessly “troubled about things,” such as the loose mortar left in the yard by brick masons: “don’t work too hard, picking up after Chimneys” Emily urged; “The Grass will cover it all up.” Along with the mundane advice, we see a great deal of tender familiarity, and also a running assumption that Vinnie won’t require any lofty composition: “Much love for both Houses, from the Girls and me – Is the Lettuce ripe –” When it was time to return home by train, it was Vinnie who received the peremptory order that didn’t need explaining: “You will get me at Palmer – yourself – Let no one beside, come.” There is no evidence any poems were sent to her.

  The letters to Sue, by contrast, are highly wrought literary objects, enameled, glittering, succinct to the point of obscurity. Assuming an exalted or even transcendent grasp, these charged messages anticipate the many oracular aphorisms the poet sent next door in her last two decades. Soon after May 19, 1864, when Hawthorne died during a trip away from his home in Concord (twenty miles west of Cambridge), she wrote, “Our beautiful Neighbor ‘moved’ in May – It leaves an Unimportance.” When a gift from the Evergreens apparently went astray, she thanked her sister-in-law anyway and assured her she
wouldn’t “mind [that is, miss] the Gloves – I knew it was the Bell, and not the Noon, that failed.” This seems to mean that she knew Sue’s love (the noon) was there even if its sensory reminder (the bell—that is, the gloves) didn’t materialize. “To believe – is enough, and the right of supposing.” The basic idea, a faith in essence not evidence, comes up again and again, as in this enigmatic passage rejecting an offered gift or wish: *131 “Take back that ‘Bee’ and ‘Buttercup’ – I have no Field for them [in downtown Cambridge?], though for the Woman whom I prefer, Here is Festival – When my Hands are cut, Her fingers will be found inside.” The dramatic concluding image identifies Sue as the animating presence in Emily’s writing. However generous and exaggerated, this declaration had a core of truth: Vinnie could never have aroused the energetic writing that Sue provoked. The poet’s flights required a basis outside her birth family, who would have smiled at her “posing,” her “excess of Monkey.” Like the fantasied lover oceans away, the fantasied intimate in the house next door stimulated Dickinson to convert her kind of isolation into productive creativity.

  If Vinnie and Sue shared letters, they would have noticed each was singled out as the favorite. “It would be best to see you,” Sue was assured several months after Vinnie was told, “I miss you most.” The apparent insincerity is another trace of Dickinson’s compartmentalizations. For Sue, there were endless assurances of devotion in a union involving little direct contact and few tangible signs; for Vinnie, simple reminders of a familiar interdependency. It was the difference between sacred and ordinary love.

  No matter whom she addressed, Dickinson spoke of herself as living in exile, prison, destitution, wilderness. In “Let us play yesterday,” she had revelled in her belated escape from the “Egg-life,” but now, forced back into the shell, she told Vinnie she was “discouraged” and ominously recalled Byron’s Prisoner of Chillon, who “did not know Liberty when it came, and asked to go back to Jail.” With Sue, reverting to the lost-at-sea image, she began a letter with the free-standing phrase, “At Centre of the Sea,” and concluded with an image of unending darkness: “Should I turn in my long night I should murmur ‘Sue’?” The script, not very neat, suggests she was writing in crepuscular light. There is no doubt this was one of her grimmest periods.