My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  In general, the poems that comment on the friendship between the sisters-in-law show far less neediness than in the past. No longer complaining about neglect, *145 the poet was more dignified in her summations of the friendship’s permanent features, expressing herself in tones ranging from respectful to adulatory:

  To own a Susan of my own

  Is of itself a Bliss –

  Whatever Realm I forfeit, Lord,

  Continue me in this!

  Fr1436, ca. 1877

  At the same time, Dickinson continued to stress the near-yet-remote aspect, the most striking example being the one poem she entered into a set and then later tried to destroy:

  Now I knew I lost her –

  Not that she was gone –

  But Remoteness travelled

  On her Face and Tongue.

  Alien, though adjoining

  As a Foreign Race . . .

  Fr1274A, ca. 1872

  The fifth line points to Sue, and so does the poem’s last word, “Idolatry.”

  The definitive treatment of Sue as unknowable alien is found in a version of a poem on the mystery of wells in which her first name is substituted for the original word, “nature”:

  But Susan is a stranger yet –

  The ones who cite her most

  Have never scaled her Haunted House

  Nor compromised her Ghost –

  To pity those who know her not

  Is helped by the regret

  That those who know her know her less

  The nearer her they get –

  Fr1433C, ca. 1877

  The haunted house that had come to stand for memory is in this instance Sue herself, who resists intimacy and rebuffs those who want to know her. Was Emily thinking of herself or someone else recently antagonized by Sue—Sarah Jenkins, say, who, as gossip had it, was thought to be “pretty thoroughly disgusted with the patronizing and the flattery and the hollowness”?

  Emily’s letters to Louisa and Frances Norcross in this period show how far she was from regarding them as “a Foreign Race,” even during the two or so years they spent in Milwaukee. Living with John and Eliza Dudley, the Norcrosses passed through one of their most painful times, ending with Eliza’s death from tuberculosis in June 1871, her husband’s marriage to Marion V. Churchill (a strikingly progressive journalist and poet *146 half his age), and the sisters’ bruised return to Massachusetts in 1872. They resided in Boston’s Berkeley Hotel for about a year, then settled in nearby Concord, where they joined the liberal First Parish and made many friends, including Ellen Emerson (Ralph Waldo’s daughter) and the clubbable bachelor, James L. Whitney. After James’s sister, Maria, passed a day with the Norcrosses in 1875, Dickinson was glad to hear they “loved Miss Whitney on knowing her nearer.” She savored her cousins’ social pleasures as much as she had grieved with them over earlier troubles. There is never a hint of reproach, even when the subject is the poet’s distance from the world: “Sisters, I hear robins a great way off, and wagons a great way off, and rivers a great way off, and all appear to be hurrying somewhere undisclosed to me. Remoteness is the founder of sweetness.” The passage recalls a neighbor’s memory of her “habit of standing in rapt attention as if she were listening to something very faint and far off.”

  When others broke in upon this epicure of faraway sweetness, she was apt to unsheathe her claws. In 1872 Louisa and Frances were informed that a certain Miss P , apparently seeking poems for a benevolent cause,

  request[ed] me to aid the world by my chirrup more. Perhaps she stated it as my duty, I don’t distinctly remember, and always burn such letters. . . . I replied declining. She did not write to me again – she might have been offended, or perhaps is extricating humanity from some hopeless ditch.

  Johnson conjectured that the request came from Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, whose latest radical novel, Hedged In (1870), had confronted the social ban on impoverished unwed mothers. Another possibility would be the editor and activist Elizabeth Peabody. Whoever it was, the poet’s shortness with her is of a piece with her derision in 1850 for the Sewing Society’s winter program: “now all the poor will be helped – the cold warmed – the warm cooled . . .”

  This tartness and lack of sympathy are not the whole story. When Maggie Maher’s brother died in a mine accident in 1880, Dickinson used all her tact to organize some comfort: “If the little cousins would give her a note – she does not know I ask it – I think it would help her begin, that bleeding beginning that every mourner knows.” Earlier that year, when “an Indian Woman with gay Baskets and a dazzling Baby” appeared at the kitchen door, instead of locking it Emily engaged the stranger in talk, asking what the infant liked. “To step” was the answer, whereupon the poet led the unsteady toddler on a short walk: “she leaned on Clover Walls and they fell, and dropped her – With jargon sweeter than a Bell, she grappled Buttercups – and they sank together.” After observing and sharing this direct encounter with nature, Dickinson recalled a line by Henry Vaughan, “My Days that are at best but dim and hoary.” Maggie and the baby stirred penetrating thoughts about others and herself. There was no aloof classifying.

  Among Children

  Few aspects of Dickinson’s social life seem quite so defining as her entrance into the world of children, and so easy to misread. Writing by one count sixty or so poems with a child persona, refusing to leave her father’s house, and impressing those who met her with her “smallness” or “uninhibited” manner or “breathless childlike voice,” she evidently had a conspicuous childishness. At the same time, her determination, independence of mind, power of abstraction, and constant letter-writing suffice to show how much of an adult she must have been.

  What we know of her dealings with children is largely owing to one person, MacGregor Jenkins, who brought out a short article in 1891, “A Child’s Recollection of Emily Dickinson,” expanded forty years later into a memoir, Emily Dickinson: Friend and Neighbor. Born in Amherst in April 1869, Mac, as he was called, joined the pack of neighborhood children who played in the Dickinson compound and thus casually observed the poet tending her potted flowers on a rug spread for the purpose just outside the back door. The pack was headed by Martha Dickinson and Sally Jenkins, both several years older than Mac and with whom he struggled to keep up. From across the street came Alice Mather, whose father taught Greek at Amherst College and whose mother was waging a losing battle against tuberculosis. The children’s raucous noise was tolerated, but there was one rule they were obliged to keep in mind and which, when forgotten, was sure to bring down a distant, stentorian order: “Boy, shut that gate.” Nothing quelled Mac quite so much as Austin’s commanding voice. Not that it was angry: “it was the enormous volume of it and the tone of authority.”

  Oddly enough, the idea of starvation was a regular feature of the children’s games, especially Gypsy and Pirate. *147 In the middle of Gypsy, a signal would come from the Mansion, and then a basket began its slow descent from a second-story window. Mac could never decide whether the poet’s “care and deliberation were part of the game or whether they were to avoid attracting Maggie’s vigilant attention.” Without interrupting their play (a point the memoir insists on), the children stealthily made their way to the basket and removed the “gummy” gingerbread cakes it usually contained. Given the prominence of emotional starvation in Dickinson’s earlier poetry—“I had been hungry all the years” (Fr439), “It would have starved a gnat” (Fr444), both from 1862—it would seem the game comported with her fantasies as well as the children’s. Their fictions connected; they were playing the same game. As she wrote to her cousins in Concord, “Good times are always mutual; that is what makes good times.”

  “Aunt Emily stood for indulgence” was how Mattie put it. In Mac’s memory, she was always offering support to the neighborhood children, often in the third person: “Emily will see that you are supplied. Emily will see that you are not blamed.” She wasn’t one of them, yet she was on their side against the adult or
der, especially when defying Maggie by raiding the pantry for cookies or doughnuts. She greatly appealed to children, yet they watched her closely and did not take liberties, realizing she was “a creature made of a little different material.” Lavinia became Vinnie, but Emily was always Miss Emily. It was an honor to be asked to help water her conservatory plants, or assist her in the kitchen, or deliver her notes.

  Never moody, she was invariably buoyant, “joyous.” But if someone unfamiliar approached, she just vanished, closing the door behind her and giving no excuses or explanations afterward. Once, in the pantry, she said (not speaking in the third person, apparently), “if the butcher boy should come now, I would jump into the flour barrel.” The statement shows how absolute and unapologetic she was about her hiding from the world, and also how she discriminated between working-class juveniles and the neighborhood’s children of privilege.

  Once, when little Gilbert was in kindergarten and boasted about a beautiful white calf that proved to be imaginary, his teacher reprimanded him for the sin of lying and made him cry. Sue tried to convince the benighted woman of the validity of the imagination, but Aunt Emily, as her niece recalled, was too indignant for reasoning and “besought them one and all to come to her, she would show them! The white calf was grazing up in her attic at that very moment!” A note she drafted for the wounded boy to take to his teacher had a poem on “The vanity . . ./Of Industry and Morals” (Fr1547B) and pointedly contrasted the punitive Jonathan Edwards with Jesus.

  Curiosity was growing about this hidden woman, hidden like the white calf, and her niece was often pumped for information. The line she was to take had no ambiguity whatever: “It was impressed on my brother and myself as early as I can remember, by both our parents, that Aunt Emily was not to be a subject of discussion with outsiders.” In 1850 Austin had advised Emily Fowler that his sister was too “wild” to answer a letter and recommended she not be addressed in the next one. By the 1870s, that protective impulse had become a comprehensive policy, with all impudent inquiries stared down or dismissed.

  The policy amounted to a blanket endorsement of Dickinson’s seclusion. Among her later correspondents, the only ones who urged her to publish or get out into the world or otherwise change her way of life—Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Helen Hunt Jackson, Thomas Niles, Otis Phillips Lord—were people she had not come to know through the Evergreens. With Austin and Sue and their friends, the rule was to humor, protect, and isolate.

  How did Edward feel about his daughter’s reclusiveness? Bianchi’s surmise that her solitary life “must have been a blow to his worldly pride” probably comes close to the mark. Father had an old and cherished ideal of female excellence, and in 1872, moved by a eulogy of Eliza Bancroft Davis, he dusted it off. Sister of the historian George Bancroft, and widow of a respected senator, Davis had distinguished herself both publicly and privately, as Alexander H. Bullock pointed out in a column-long tribute in Worcester’s leading newspaper. Bullock emphasized

  the value of such a person, presiding modestly through half a century over the social life around her, among organized associations and private circles, . . . awakening the public spirit to worthy objects and making them attractive by her own poetic enthusiasm, . . . inspiring women with just conceptions of the higher methods of living.

  After reading this description of an exemplary woman leader, Edward wrote to express his hearty agreement with Bullock’s “picture of her powers, & virtues & graces & solid accomplishments. . . . You deserve the thanks of the Community, for bringing before us . . . all that entered into the constitution of an almost perfect woman.” The letter ends with a plaintive “O, for more such.”

  As a trustee of Amherst College, Bullock had attempted the previous year to establish a scholarship for both sexes, thus implicitly opening the school to women. His tribute to Mrs. Davis embodied a progressive ideal of which Edward must have been aware when he voiced his agreement. Still, there was another and deeper layer in the man. Two years later, when the Committee on Woman Suffrage held an open hearing in the State House, with such speakers as Julia Ward Howe, author of “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Edward stepped in to listen. He heard women on both sides, he wrote Austin,

  some sentimental, some belligerent, some fist shakers—some scolds—and was disgusted with the class of females which gathered there—I hope we shall soon have a chance at the subject, & begin to clear off the scum—they dont expect to get what they ask, this year, [but] . . . to agitate & agitate, till they find a legislature weak enough to report in their favor.

  Edward’s intemperate disgust at the “class of females” speaking in the forum makes clear how far he was from Bullock’s more enlightened attitudes. Resolved to quash the movement for women’s rights, he evidently held the same views he had first worked out in his 1827 Coelebs papers. This fixity helps us understand why his daughter could not assume an ordinary adult female role consistent with the exercise of her genius and why she made common cause with the neighborhood children. Yet to think of her as a victim is to exaggerate Edward’s control and belittle her ingenuity. Accepting, embracing, her exclusion from the public world, she redefined it as the freedom to do and to be whatever she chose at home. Her way of living with Father was to create a private domain of friendship, thought, and art he could not enter. What this meant, however, was that certain doors could not be opened as long as he lived.

  There is a family story, told by Vinnie to Mabel Loomis Todd, that epitomizes the poet’s mastery of closed space. One Sunday during the nine years of Margaret O’Bryan’s service (ending in 1865), Edward was

  more than usually determined that Emily should go to church, and she was especially determined that she would not. He commanded, she begged off, until they were both weary. She saw there was no further use to talk, so she suddenly disappeared. No one could tell where she was. They hunted high and low, & went to church without her. Coming home, she was still unseen, & they began to get very much worried, particularly her stern father. . . . Some hours after, Emily was discovered calmly rocking in a chair placed in the cellar bulkhead, where she had made old Margaret lock her in, before church.

  Being Serious with Higginson

  After Higginson’s visit in August 1870, Dickinson pictured him as the infusing pulse and herself as the passive receptacle: “The Vein cannot thank the Artery – but her solemn indebtedness to him, even the stolidest admit.” It is a startling image, suggesting just how invigorating his influence was at this time. Though it doesn’t explain why she got back to work after her five-year rest, there is no question but that his respectful attention gave her a new self-consciousness about her vocation. Ironically, this solemnity proved something of a distraction.

  A few years earlier she had told him, “Your opinion gives me a serious feeling. I would like to be what you deem me.” This is a dangerous attitude for a writer, especially one who, as we see from Dickinson’s October 1870 letter to her mentor, has been given high praise: “I was much refreshed by your strong Letter – [new paragraph] Thank you for Greatness – I will have deserved it in a longer time!” The first half of this letter, very different from her usual sequences of observations, offers a sustained treatment of the riddle of immortality. Quoting Jesus and Tennyson in support of the proposition that life should be founded on what cannot be proven, Dickinson almost seems to have intended a brief essay. Was she deserving her “greatness”—trying out some new idea of a poet’s serious duties? Perhaps the reason she didn’t send the letter (found among her papers) was that she knew she was somehow off her turf.

  Dickinson’s ambition was becoming more open—as she understood open. After reading Helen Hunt’s Verses in 1871, she sent Higginson her opinions of the poets of the day. She hadn’t read Joaquin Miller because she “could not care about him.” She generously pronounced Hunt’s poems “stronger than any written by Women since Mrs. Browning, with the exception of Mrs Lewes [George Eliot].” She ended with a statement in which her sententious
manner attained a serene and ultimate pomposity: “While Shakespeare remains Literature is firm.” Perhaps one reason Dickinson had little skill in making reasoned relative judgments is that she didn’t quite enter dialogue. If enthusiasm and dismissal are to be the two responses to writing, there won’t be much need for practical criticism, a highly social craft. What is the point of discussing solid achievement if one believes that “truth like Ancestor’s Brocades can stand alone”? The image is a telling one, replacing truth-seeking talk with solitary ramrod formality and dignity.

  Among the serious and responsible poems Dickinson sent Higginson was a statement on the harmful effect of orthodox indoctrination on the capacity for belief:

  Who were “the Father and the Son”

  We pondered when a child

  And what had they to do with us . . .

  Speaking partly for herself and partly for the mid-nineteenth-century generation that had discarded its authoritarian childhood faith, she argued that this collective emancipation from terror had a crippling result:

  . . . we believe

  But once – entirely –

  Belief, it does not fit so well

  When altered frequently.

  But Dickinson refused to let the poem end in agnostic hesitation, turning instead to a glorious unearned possibility:

  We blush – that Heaven if we achieve –

  Event ineffable –

  We shall have shunned until ashamed