My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  In February 1869 the Dickinsons’ long search for steady domestic help came to a successful conclusion. Margaret Maher (“Maggie”), born in Tipperary and employed by Lucius M. and Clarinda Boltwood, had accompanied them on their move to Hartford. When Maggie’s father died and her brother-in-law Thomas Kelley lost an arm in a bad fall, she rejoined her family in Amherst, taking temporary jobs and intending to eventually return to Hartford or go to a brother in California. But one of her short-term employers was Edward Dickinson, and, judging from the young woman’s letters to Mrs. Boltwood, he was not about to let this faithful and devoted servant work for anyone else. Even when Maggie went to Palmer “to get the girl that worket for them before me,” the Dickinsons “would not take her.” Maggie found them kindly enough, but their home felt strange to her and she had too much time on her hands: “there is one grate trouble that I have not half enough of work so that I must play with the cats to Plase Miss Vinny.” She insisted she would “do as I like when I will get a chance without giving much notice,” but when she tried to quit, “Mr D” made her feel the Dickinsons would “be very angry with us all so we will wait for a nother time.”

  Another time never arrived. Maggie’s California brother wrote Edward he wished her to stay in Amherst “for the Preasant,” and her sister “would not give me any consent” to go to Hartford. For thirty years Maher worked for the Dickinsons as housekeeper, cook, and maid, at a salary (in the 1890s) of $3 a week. Her afternoons she spent with her family, but she slept at the Homestead. Humble and honest, loyal, eager to serve, she committed herself to a lifelong relationship defined partly by the labor market and partly by family ties and Irish and Yankee ideas of class, subservience, and patronage.

  The mix of close affection and inequality can make a modern reader uncomfortable, as when, in a letter to Louisa, Emily associated Maggie and a hired man with draft animals and pets:

  Tim is washing Dick’s [the horse’s] feet, and talking to him now and then in an intimate way. Poor fellow, how he warmed when I gave him your message! The red reached clear to his beard, he was so gratified; and Maggie stood as still for hers as a puss for patting. The hearts of these poor people lie so unconcealed you bare them with a smile.

  Over the years Maher became a strong and indispensable presence and Dickinson’s relationship with her deepened and intensified, but it was always de haut en bas. Those who would like to democratize the poet should give some thought to how she might have patronized their forebears. And those who see nothing but class privilege should keep in mind that she was a noncitizen by force of custom and law, that many doors were closed to her, and that she left behind more good hard work than any of us.

  One of the things we most want to know about Emily the poem- and breadmaker is her private recipe for mixing the high and the low. In relation to her era’s male authorities and institutions, she often presented herself as childish and subservient, or childish and disobedient. But she also had a way of pulling down the mighty, as when she ridiculed an excessively dignified judge by appealing to the Father of all: “Complacency! My Father! in such a world as this, when we must all stand barefoot before thy jasper doors!”

  Going barefoot (figuratively) was one of the strategies by which the poet defined herself in relation to society and strove for an unmediated relation to nature and spirit. But she also remained a member in good standing of New England’s Protestant patriciate. Footfree and classy, she imported her odd social position into an artistry that struck many of her Brahmin contemporaries as flagrantly careless.

  And Masters

  Edward Dickinson was the last man in Amherst who was deemed to be a “squire,” a role that mixed property, privilege, and responsibility in a way that was starting to look archaic.

  As a man of property, he continued to be an active shareholder in the Hampden Cotton Manufacturing Company, now going into decline. He also remained invested in the private, toll-charging Sunderland Bridge, on one occasion refusing to accommodate a customer who demanded special terms for a four-horse team pulling ties: “The owners have some rights, and for one, I shall execute them, if any man undertakes to rule over us.” In 1868 he and his son moved their prosperous law firm into “a very pleasant office” in Palmer’s Block, the site of his first office forty years earlier. The postwar years saw a healthy growth in his net worth: $28,700 in 1866, $32,600 in 1867, $47,800 in 1868. No longer quite so prominent in the First Church, he continued to take a keen interest in the Northampton Lunatic Asylum.

  Edward’s biggest achievement for the decade was to help bring Massachusetts Agricultural College to Amherst. In securing this, the town’s second college (today it is the University of Massachusetts at Amherst), the local citizenry had to pledge the large sum of $50,000 in order to get the charter. Following in the old squire’s footsteps, Edward played a major role in pushing things through and quashing opposition. When a bitter fight broke out over the campus layout, he was an active behind-the-scenes operator, going “to see the Governor” and keeping in touch with the landscape consultant Frederick Law Olmsted.

  Father’s distinctive voice comes through loud and clear in two letters of the time. On Christmas 1868, after Samuel Bowles’s attack on a crooked financier landed the editor in jail for a night, Edward weighed in with voluminous dignity: “I would rather have borne your name, on that night in Ludlow St. jail, and have been one of the troops of friends who made New York ring with the recital of your wrongs, and the execration of the robber & thief . . . than to have owned the mines of Potosi.” Although Emily never engaged in just this sort of grandstand rhetoric, her writing shows a similar fondness for sententious peroration. The following year, she, too, made the old Bolivian silver mines at Potosí a symbol of supreme value:

  Potosi never to be spent

  But hoarded in the mind [:]

  What Misers wring their hands tonight

  For Indies in the Ground!

  Fr1162

  As the meter indicates, she moved the accent forward on PoTOsi.

  The second letter was prompted by Governor Alexander H. Bullock’s farewell address to the legislature. Singling out what he regarded as the chief executive’s most honorable acts, Edward praised him for nominating Judge Benjamin F. Thomas (who had left the Republican Party during the war), for sustaining the majesty of the law by hanging “Murderer Green,” and for making a legislative committee “appointed to insult the Governor . . . [feel] like whipped Spaniels.” Edward’s hope that the political will of President-elect Grant would be as fearless as “his military courage” shows he still looked forward to the day when firm authority would put an end to the slack compromises of democratic rule.

  Although Edward and Austin often worked in tandem, as when they got Samuel Bowles onto the board of trustees of Amherst College in spite of his Unitarianism, Austin did not seek public office or make a name for himself outside Amherst. He helped run the town, but his real interests often proved aesthetic: instead of helping to found colleges and railroads like his grandfather and father, he specialized in architecture, interior decorating, landscaping. He guided the building program at Amherst College, and he also played a key role in the First Church’s move from the old wooden meetinghouse near College Hill to a new, stylish, and expensive granite sanctuary on Main Street. Judging from parish records and other sources, the poet’s brother had a hand in the two contingent commitments that overcame the embattled opposition to this move: only if a new edifice was built would the Reverend Jonathan L. Jenkins accept a call; and only if it was built on Main Street would Henry F. Hills, the owner of a palm-leaf hat factory, contribute his thousands. Designed by the architect George Hawthorne, the church went up on the old Montague place across from the Evergreens, its tall spire and massive grace and stained-glass windows announcing that Amherst, the Dickinson quarter especially, was a place of distinction. It isn’t known whether Emily ever crossed the street to look inside. According to Vinnie, she crept to the Evergreens’ hemlock hedge
one night and peered through.

  Unlike his father and grandfathers, who worked hard for their local standing, Austin pretty much took privilege for granted. In him, the Dickinson determination devolved into the sort of haughtiness that sees pleasure as its due and solaces itself with vengeful fantasy when balked. When the Agricultural College’s enemies happened to win a round, he wrote Sue that if he could “come suddenly upon the managers against us felicitating . . . I’d make a rattling among” them. When a Boston gallery tried his patience, he looked forward to the time when they would “fairly cry out down there for me to come and take anything I please at my own price. They’ve tormented and tantalized me long enough.” Austin’s way of coping with the modern world was to turn his home and his town into a charming manorial park, out of which he gazed with the cold disdain we see in his photographs. The man’s bitter superiority was a distant kin of his sister’s veiled mastery.

  Dust and Dew

  In her long and well-informed obituary of the poet, Sue attributed the occasional publication of her verse to friends whose admiration “would turn love to larceny.” One of these loving thefts took place on Valentine’s Day, 1866. The criminal was undoubtedly Sue herself:

  The Snake

  A narrow fellow in the grass

  Occasionally rides;

  You may have met him – did you not?

  His notice instant is . . .

  Since Dickinson had let Higginson understand she “did not print,” she feared he would consider her “ostensible,” untruthful, if the poem was picked up by other papers and he happened to see it. Explaining that it was “robbed of me,” she singled out for objection the inserted question mark, which forced a pause between the “third and fourth” lines and thus undid the effect she evidently wanted—the abrupt shock of encounter.

  You may have met Him – did you not

  His notice sudden is . . .

  Fr1096B

  This letter offers her only known comment on the unauthorized publication of her work. Her tacit acceptance of the newspaper’s conventional line divisions suggests she did not regard her manuscript’s spilled-over lines as essential to the poem’s meaning. What she resented was the tampering with content, the act of theft, and the publicity. Years later, a woman who had grown up in Amherst remembered hearing Sue confess, probably referring to this poem, that its appearance “nearly caused a breach in the close friendship of the two.”

  In September Samuel and Mary Bowles arranged for a nurse to go to the Evergreens “as desired,” and two months later, on the night of November 29, Sue gave birth to the second of her three children, a girl. Named Martha after her aunt in Geneva, she showed the same drive for dominance and self-expression as her mother and father. At about age three, she was characterized by the poet as “stern and lovely – literary, they tell me – a graduate of Mother Goose and otherwise ambitious.”

  Dickinson’s messages to Sue continued to profess an undying love—“Busy missing you” and “Susan’s idolator keeps a Shrine for Susan”—and to work out new variations on the idea that distance insures closeness. Although most of the notes and poems are so uncontextualized it is impossible to say how they contributed to the ongoing relationship, there are two buoyant and newsy letters written while Sue was summering on the coast or visiting her sister in Geneva. In one of these, Emily reports she “Dreamed of your meeting Tennyson in Ticknor and Fields – Where the Treasure is, there the Brain is also.” The dream tells us how occupied she was with Sue, and how exalted a sense she had of her sister-in-law’s literary stature.

  Some of the poems sent to Sue in this period seem to express a grimmer mood than usual. “I cannot meet the spring unmoved” (Fr1122) regards the season as a time for mixed feelings and hesitation rather than renewal. Another poem opposing seasonal expectations declares that Thanksgiving can be honestly celebrated only by those who feel “no sharp subtraction/From the early Sum”—who haven’t surrendered dear ones to “an Acre or a Caption” (Fr1110B). This surprisingly bitter statement, composed in late 1865 and sent next door about 1867, calls to mind the many Gilbert family deaths that Sue would have remembered.

  Dickinson’s most wrathful lyric, from about 1866, narrates a fight to preserve a flower from frost—the sort of effort she often wrote about in connection with garden and conservatory. In this poem, however, the frost is so snakelike, aggressive, and persistent and the speaker has such a high stake in the outcome, that it is clear that larger issues are involved. The narrator is one of a group that has struggled to save the doomed flower by taking it “to Sea –/To mountain – to the Sun.” As the frost came nearer, “we wedged” ourselves

  Himself and her between –

  Yet easy as the narrow Snake

  He forked his way along

  Till all her helpless beauty bent

  And then our wrath begun –

  We hunted him to his Ravine

  We chased him to his Den –

  We hated Death and hated Life

  And nowhere was to go – . . .

  Fr1130C

  The probable explanation of this unusually agitated response, so different from the chilled awe of “Zero at the Bone,” is that the poem reacts to the death of Susan D. Phelps, a friend about whom almost nothing is known. The friendship went back to 1854, when Phelps, of an old Hadley family, became engaged to Henry Vaughan Emmons. In the intervening years, as the engagement was broken and the young woman succumbed to a serious illness, her connection with the poet seems to have deepened. On December 1, 1865, the day before she died, her brother noted in his journal that she had been “very sick for some days under Dr. Bonney’s care Today Dr Fiske was sent for . . . but gave no hope.” Her death was reported in the Republican and other papers on December 5, the date of her funeral. It was probably the memory of this day that led Dickinson, five years later, to inscribe “December 5th” at the head of her copies of two important poems, one of which begins,

  The Days that we can spare

  Are those a Function die

  Or Friend or Nature . . .

  Fr1229C

  Phelps was thirty-eight at the time of her death, the cause of which was not recorded. Her memorial window in Amherst’s Grace Episcopal Church, dating from 1866, shows a crown of thorns captioned “My soul waiteth for the Lord,” and a crown of victory: “Till the day break and the shadows flee away.”

  About 1867 the poet sent Sue a somber reflection on the sounds of crickets and cicadas:

  The murmuring of Bees, has ceased

  But murmuring of some

  Posterior, prophetic,

  Has simultaneous come.

  These, the year’s “lower metres,” are

  The Revelations of the Book

  Whose Genesis was June . . .

  Now, they suggest, not repose exactly, as in “Further in summer than the birds,” but a steady process of mutual detachment and alienation. What the poet is finally left with, “As Accent fades to interval/With separating Friends,” are her own thoughts, now “More intimate . . . /Than Persons” (Fr1142B). It is the same idea as in one of the “December 5th” poems, “A wind that rose through not a leaf” (Fr1216C), which celebrates a certain kind of self-communing self-sufficiency.

  After 1865, according to Bowles’s friend and biographer, the editor often showed signs of “heavy shadows” on his inner life, a “deep heart-hunger.” Once, he sent Sue a vivid warning against the lassitude and isolation into which he felt himself sinking:

  Don’t you of all people grow faint & weary, & feel life & friends wearing away. Better go out & hang yourself, as I would, if I dared. There is nothing so sad as such living death; to feel your power gone, the charms fade away; the trees grow bare, & the dead leaves rustle hollow around & on you; others take your place, do your work, win your friends,—& you still cumber the ground. It is to come back, after death, & see how little you are missed.

  Anxious about Sue’s recurring prostrations, in 1868 he tried to f
latter her out of depression, declaring that “Life should not be dreary or barren to such as you.” But his letters, less frequent now, tended to dwell on the loss of freshness: “How are you? Last I heard Austin had a bad cold. Has he thawed? Tell a fellow. And the mother—and the babies—& the sisters, & all—, Speak & break the thick silence.” A lament of his in 1869 about “great passages of silence” found an echo in a poem sent to Sue about 1870, “Great streets of silence led away” (Fr1166B). It was as Emily had said (getting things exactly right): “Accent fades to interval/With separating Friends.”

  Judging from the remnants of the poet’s correspondence with Louisa and Frances, there were few cold intervals with them. In 1867, as Martha Ackmann has surmised, the cousins went to stay with sickly Eliza Coleman Dudley in Middletown, Connecticut, while her husband went to Europe. On July 2, with no male guard in the house, a man was discovered under a bed: the classic threat. The news got into the Hartford Courant and soon made its way to Amherst, eliciting a fearful and sympathetic letter: “Oh, Loo, why were the children sent too faint to stand alone. Every hour is anxious now, and heaven protect the lamb, who shared her fleece, with a timider, even Emily.” The children sent as guards were the Norcrosses and the lamb was Eliza, who had shared her fleece with Emily by shielding her “from publicity” during Commencement receptions.

  A Norcross family letter from 1868 noting that Louisa was “unusually well” suggests her health had been uncertain. It was apparently in that year that Dickinson wrote to express “grief and surprise” at an emergency and offer her best encouragement: “Not a flake assaults my birds but it freezes me. Comfort, little creatures – whatever befall us, this world is but this world. Think of that great courageous place we have never seen!” It was her customary and effective strategy: gathering strength precisely from what was beyond experience.