My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  The next morning Edward addressed the House on an aspect of the railroad question. It was hot, and as he spoke he “felt faint” and had to sit down. The House adjourning, he walked the quarter-mile to Tremont House, where, according to one account, he dined and then experienced an “apoplectic attack”—a stroke. According to his family’s version of events, he began packing for home, and when the doctor who had been sent for arrived, he diagnosed “apoplexy, and proceeded to give him opium or morphine, a drug which had always been poison to him.” One reason the Dickinsons favored this story was that it placed the onus on a bumbling physician. But Edward’s attempt to pack for home tells us he was already in big trouble and knew it. Unconscious most of the afternoon, he died about six P.M.

  Emily was at supper when Austin walked in with a telegram from Boston. As she wrote a few weeks later, she instantly saw “by his face we were all lost.” Father was “very sick,” and Austin and Vinnie must start at once for Boston, even though the last train had gone. But before the horses were harnessed, word arrived he was dead.

  Three days later a simple funeral was held in the Mansion’s packed entrance hall, with ranks of settees on the front lawn for the overflow. Eight-year-old Mattie was stunned by the intensity of her father’s grief. Vinnie formed part of the “mourning circle,” but Emily stayed in her room with the door cracked open.

  She also could not and did not attend the memorial service on June 28, when the First Church was filled with laurel and other flowers and the Reverend Jenkins delivered a sermon comparing Edward to Samuel, Israel’s last combined prophet-and-judge. The parallel, an apt one, brought together two strong defenders of a faith, a people, and a locality. It was Samuel who erected the boundary-marking “Ebenezer” after a victory over the Philistines, an act Edward invoked after crushing the opposition to Amherst’s railroad: “We here ‘set up our Ebenezer.’”

  The Springfield Republican’s long obituary, undoubtedly by Bowles, praised Edward for having “in these days of cowardly conformity . . . the courage of his convictions.” He was an anachronism in another way as well, being “a Puritan out of time for kinship and appreciation.” His great failing was that “he did not understand himself.”

  It is a tribute to Edward’s candor that his memorialists felt they should bring up his faults. Jenkins, too, had a reproach—that he had “so carefully, and may I say, so unwisely, concealed” his gentle nature. Was that because he had “the Puritan notion that sentiment betrayed weakness, or was it his training in that elder school whose primal precept was repression?” To these conjectures, each fairly generic, we add that, like Samuel, prophet and judge, Edward had seen himself as a bulwark for family, community, and college, all of which he spent his life protecting against endless threats: his father’s financial collapse, assaults on the Constitution, the corruption of the times. He had chosen to marry a “timid” woman who would need his protection, and his two daughters depended on his manly firmness. That was how he understood his place in the world.

  Yet he died intestate. With anyone else, one would assume this was inadvertent, caused by delay or avoidance. With Edward, however, we have a fanatically anxious caretaker who cast annual balance sheets, bought large life insurance policies from 1851 on, and demanded constant assurance when away from home that no one was slipping on the ice or catching scarlet fever or being crushed by railroad cars. In all probability, the reason he did not write a will was that he did not intend to do so. A will would have involved an inventory and a distribution supervised by a probate judge in accordance with state law, all of which would trespass on the privacy of the Dickinson compound (“Boy, shut that gate”). One of the most painful cases in Edward’s legal career had involved judicial restrictions on Loring Norcross’s handling of trust funds created by a will. A will would not be needed, however, if there was an understanding with Austin that the old arrangement should be continued—that the Mansion’s helpless females should be guarded in perpetuity by Edward’s son and partner. Indeed, since the Evergreens had not been deeded to Austin and there was no fence between it and the Mansion, the two entities were legally and physically one.

  It is not known for certain how the poet’s father regarded women’s property rights, but there were certainly many men who opposed the reform legislation on this issue. Among them was Dr. Holland, who declared about 1866 that “it is doubtful whether the laws which give the wife the independent control of her property, and thus establish separate pecuniary interests in the family, have done more good than harm.” We remember how Lavinia Norcross gave Loring a free hand with her large trust estate.

  In Edward’s case, the key document is Austin’s petition to administer the deceased’s estate, a standard printed form with the blanks filled in and the administrator’s, Austin’s, signature affixed. At the bottom, in the space reserved for “the parties interested in the foregoing Petition” to declare their consent, a consequential act, we read the signed names of Emily Norcross Dickinson, Lavinia, and Emily, in that order. The date was August 3, 1874. Presumably, the application was granted by the judge of probate. And that was it: for the next twenty years Austin did nothing to settle the estate by dividing it among the heirs. A statement filed by Vinnie after his death in 1895 declares that he did not even keep separate accounts for the individual heirs or the two households. The sisters’ economic dependency on their brother is hinted at by the friend of Vinnie who wrote (no doubt exaggerating) that she “never had one cent of money.” *152 It was by not making a will that Edward gave Austin the means to take protective custody of his mother and sisters without anyone’s interference.

  A defect in this arrangement was that it depended on Austin’s continuing to live. In fall 1876, when he was confined for months with “malarial effects,” neighbor Amelia Tyler noted that Sue and Vinnie were “hardly on speaking terms. It seems there has never been any division of the Fathers property and Vinnie is really full of trouble— For the sake of his Mother and sisters I hope Austin will live.” Austin did live, but the Evergreens inevitably assumed a patronizing attitude toward the dependent Mansion. Two years later Tyler told her son that the Mathers felt “very sorry for Miss Vinney. Mrs Austin rides it rough shod over her—Prof M. says Ned. D grows lordly and cynical.” Ned’s attitude toward the queer and impractical aunts next door comes out clearly in his letters to his sister, Martha, as when, three years after the poet’s death, he confided: “Our surviving Aunt is boring Mother, while I write, what a pity it is that she isn’t interesting.” When Martha’s poems began appearing in the 1890s, he assured her that Aunt Emily’s verse looks “very wraith like, and impossible beside her stronger, and saner niece’s.” *153

  The striking anomaly in Austin’s petition to administer his father’s estate is that Emily Norcross Dickinson did not sign for herself. Her “signature” was entered by Vinnie, presumably with Austin’s approval. Since the poet was the last to sign, she must have noticed the forgery, which sums up as nothing else her family’s no-nonsense view of legal protocol and helpless females. When Emily Fowler Ford’s father died and she discovered that his will gave preferential treatment to her brothers, she expressed bitter disillusionment. Compared to Ford, with her modern filial and financial attitudes, Dickinson looks flatly archaic. She not only voiced no bad memories but signed her consent allowing the benevolent despotism under which she lived to pass from father to son. If, like Vinnie, she had second thoughts about the estate arrangements, there is no record of them. As a matter of fact, the year Edward died she composed a poem in which a king’s realm proves more loyal to him after he “relegates” it by dying:

  From his slim Palace in the Dust

  He relegates the Realm,

  More loyal for the exody

  That has befallen him.

  Fr1339

  That would seem to be how she felt about the transfer of custody—her own, as it were.

  Living Without a Father

  The first time Mattie saw Aunt Emil
y after the funeral, there were “a few choking words,” then “uncontrollable” tears. At night, going upstairs, the poet realized she had associated Father’s door—that image again—with “safety.” Her statement that he was “quenched so causelessly” suggests she accepted the theory that the opium was to blame. “His Heart was pure and terrible,” she wrote Higginson, referring to the severe integrity and self-containment and locked-up affection, “and I think no other like it exists.” Friends received a poem idealizing his stoicism: “To his simplicity/To die was little fate” (Fr1387B).

  A bulwark was gone, and because it was part of her mind as well as her daily life, her grief was profound and persistent. She could not stop thinking about “Father’s lonely Life and his lonelier Death,” or “resist the grief to expect” him. Two years later, during a summer hotter than when he died, she dreamed about him “every night, always a different dream, and forget what I am doing daytimes, wondering where he is. Without any body, I keep thinking. What kind can that be?” Her niece never forgot “her husky whisper, ‘Where is he? Emily will find him!’” This mysterious promise is partially explained by a remark she made about him and a deceased friend a few years later: “To seek to be nobler for their sakes, is all that remains – and our only Plot for discovering them.” A poem addressed to a professor of mathematics who died young *154 says the same thing: “Brother of Ophir/Bright Adieu –/Honor, the shortest route/To you” (Fr1462C). Living up to Father’s absoluteness would be the one sure way to “find him.”

  The last books Edward gave his daughter were George Eliot’s The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems and a life of Theodore Parker, the radical Unitarian firebrand—choices that show he respected her interests, however remote from his own. A year and a half after his death, still “unwilling to open” the volumes, she offered them to Higginson. This unexplained avoidance calls to mind her treatments of the dangers of memory and also a mysterious poem of 1874, “Knock with tremor” (Fr1333), which urges extreme caution in approaching the door of certain “Caesars.” Certain awe-inspiring doors must stay closed.

  The most powerful of Dickinson’s commemorative tributes to her father draws on this strong sense of what is hidden. Her inspiration was an ingenious Decoration Day poem by Higginson that appeared in Scribner’s June 1874, the month Edward died, and that began by posing an ancient question: who among the dead is worthiest of commemoration? “Comrades! in what soldier-grave/Sleeps the bravest of the brave?” Placing his flowers at an ungarlanded plot, in which were buried

  Youth and beauty, dauntless will,

  Dreams that life could ne’er fulfill,

  the speaker reveals in the last stanza that it is a woman’s grave: she was bravest. After reading this, Dickinson wrote Higginson to express her appreciation of his “beautiful thought.” A month later, Edward having died, she asked, “was it not prophetic? It has assisted that Pause of Space which I call ‘Father.’” Again, the strange phrase suggests how Edward demarcated space for her.

  Three years later, rereading “Decoration,” Dickinson devised her own answer to the question of honoring the unknown great:

  Lay this Laurel on the one

  Triumphed and remained unknown –

  Laurel – fell your futile Tree –

  Such a Victor could not be –

  Lay this Laurel on the one

  Too intrinsic for Renown –

  Laurel – vail your deathless Tree –

  Him you chasten – that is he –

  Fr1428B

  The poem comes clear as soon as one notices the counterpoint of voices, the second sharply dissenting from the first. In lines 1–2 and 5–6, voice number one addresses itself to the Higginsonian task of honoring someone who is worthy but unknown. In lines 3–4 and 7–8, voice number two, making an aggressive rebuke, twice denies the point of this project. The second time, moderating its tone and replacing “fell” with “vail” and “futile” with “deathless,” the dissenting voice instructs the laurel that any public display would be unseemly in this, the ultimate case, where glory denied is itself the mark of highest merit. For Emily, this was the basic and bitter paradox of Father’s life, devoted to the public good and terminating in loneliness. Her poem rules out the possibility of public honors for him yet sees his kind of honor as transcendent and absolute: him you chasten, that is he. The rule held for her, too, of course, in her deeper obscurity. *155

  The letter to Higginson that incorporates the second stanza appears to mark the end of Dickinson’s mourning and the lifting of one of her heaviest veils. Written in a summer dusk three years after Edward’s death, this letter begins by saying the tired day is resting her cheek on the hill “like a child.” “Nature confides now,” and so does the unusually relaxed writer, who goes on to speak of a new sense of peace and freedom: “Summer is so kind I had hoped you might come. Since my Father’s dying, everything sacred enlarged so – it was dim to own.” She then brings up for the first and only time the unusually distressing funeral from her girlhood at which she misunderstood the officiating minister’s rhetorical question—“Is the Arm of the Lord shortened that it cannot save?” As argued earlier, this sentence was probably uttered at the funeral of Martha Dwight Strong, who killed herself in June 1844 by plunging into a well soon after Emily’s return from a recuperative stay in Boston. That was exactly thirty years before Edward died.

  “Since my Father’s dying, everything sacred enlarged so – it was dim to own.” We do not know what she saw as she looked back at her life, which had also, in a way, been dropped “Into the purple well” (Fr307), as one of her early dedicatory poems put it. But it seems evident that the gate, the door, the latch was no longer locked. After 1877 there were no more poems about the sealed house of memory. Instead, we have “No Passenger was known to flee/Who lodged a night in Memory . . .” (Fr1451A). Father’s dying had made possible a fresh seeing and owning of dim things.

  “Emily, You Damned Rascal”

  Knowing how devastated Emily Norcross Dickinson was by her husband’s death, Samuel Bowles sent a box of flowers for her first widowed Thanksgiving, an excruciating ordeal. From now on, without a man in the house, the three Dickinson women celebrated the holiday with Austin and Sue. One year, the thing to be thankful for was that “Mother didn’t cry much.”

  The deadliest calendar day was the anniversary of Father’s death, which the poet twice dated not June 16 but the day before, when he left home for the last time. Her mother seems to have made the same mistake: on June 15, 1875, she suffered a stroke that produced a partial lateral paralysis and an impaired memory (the forged signature dates from earlier). From now on, she often failed to understand why Edward did not come home at night, or how Emily could go to bed without waiting up for him. “Home is so far from Home,” Emily lamented, troubled less by Mother’s physical demands than by the constant need to ease her worries with palliative lies. Once the poet admitted she had “known little of Literature since my Father died.” But she still found time to produce it. “You asked me if I wrote now? I have no other Playmate,” she assured Higginson in 1877. However, the next summer Mother fell and broke a hip and became permanently bedridden, requiring even more care. That year Dickinson made half as many playmates as the previous year.

  At Edward’s funeral, Bowles was the only person out of the family to talk to her. The eleven-year freeze was over, and she resumed writing and, on at least one other occasion, seeing him. Twice her first letter skirted the question of her long silence: “You spoke of not liking to be forgotten. . . . Treason never knew you.” Claiming she had been faithful in spite of appearances, she nonetheless avoided the first person and employed a strategic negative: “treason never knew you” rather than “I was always loyal.” Her unease shows up in her opening words: “I should think you would have few Letters for your own are so noble that they make men afraid – and sweet as your Approbation is – it is had in fear – lest your depth convict us.” If not an apology, this was an ad
mission of the discomfort she felt with him.

  Now that she was in touch, it wasn’t long before her letters became exuberant: “We miss your vivid Face and the besetting Accents, you bring from your Numidian Haunts.” This was her new tone with him, making him a romantic and captivating “Arabian” or a perennial source of life others depended on. The extravagant dependency, however, was less for herself than for others. It wasn’t “I miss” but “we miss,” even more than in the old days.

  Eighteen seventy-five was a terrible year for Bowles. A major lawsuit eroded his health, he became estranged from his brother, and Maria Whitney left for Paris to prepare for her new teaching duties at Smith College; “M’s going really oppresses me,” he confided. Feeling alone and old, he suspected he would “soon be dried up & exhibited in the College Museum—not with bird tracks over me, but with traces of great grief at the cruelty & desertion of what used to be called ‘lovely woman.’”

  By 1877 he was visibly in ruins. In late June, exerting himself to attend Commencement and the installation of President Julius H. Seelye (whose appointment he had opposed), he came to Amherst. Stepping into the Mansion, he sent his card up to Emily asking to see her. When a negative came down, it was the last straw. In the story Vinnie told years later to Gertrude M. Graves, Samuel “went to the foot of the stairs and called in a loud and insistent tone, ‘Emily, you wretch! No more of this nonsense! I’ve traveled all the way from Springfield to see you. Come down at once.’” To her sister’s surprise, Emily did come down and was “brilliant” and “fascinating.” In Bianchi’s version, Samuel called her “rascal,” not “wretch.” The actual phrase, as Johnson deduced from the conclusion of the poet’s next and last letter to him (“Your ‘Rascal,’ [P.S.] I washed the Adjective”), was undoubtedly “You damned rascal.” It makes a good story, yet it seems likely the failing man was bruised by that initial refusal. A week later, anticipating the next trustees’ meeting in Amherst, he wrote the Evergreens: “I don’t mean to [come], if I can help it—that is, if I can get up courage enough to ‘cut’ you all dead for once.” It sounds as if he felt used, taken for granted.