My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  For Emily, the interview had a sweeter aftertaste. A few months before Samuel’s visit, William S. Robinson, the Republican’s Boston correspondent with the pen name Warrington, had died, but not before entering a serene state that removed all doubts of an afterlife. On the verge of death, the correspondent not only saw how “this world is but the anteroom to the life beyond” but observed crowds of “heavenly visitants.” As Samuel’s talk with Emily drew to an end, he told her of these “revelations of immortality,” then just published. As soon as her friend left (Emily informed him afterward), she returned to “the Room . . . to confirm your presence,” then drafted a response to the visit and to Warrington’s supposed revelations. Tellingly, it was to the effect that the afterlife meant little or nothing to her apart from her present ties to close friends:

  I have no Life but this – . . .

  Nor tie to Earths to come,

  Nor Action new

  Except through this Extent

  The love of you.

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  Elsewhere, she titled this “a Word to a Friend.” That it was a word of good-bye gives us the necessary perspective on the last four words, both more and less than a romantic declaration. The tacit implication is that it was time to be generous and final.

  The editor’s own gallant follow-up to the visit was preserved in his stenographer’s original shorthand and published in George Merriam’s biography as “written to a woman friend.” This is the only letter we have from Bowles to Dickinson.

  It was very sweet to see you at last. I hope I may oftener come face to face with you. I have little spare strength or time for writing and so testifying to my remembrance, and you are very good to like me so much and to say such sweet and encouraging things to me. . . .

  He added that Warrington’s visions were “greatly impressive to me. Here is the record. You may like to read it, even from an enemy.” The “record” was the relevant segment of “Warrington” Pen-Portraits. The Boston correspondent had been an “enemy” ever since his 1861 attack on Edward (“fossil,” “bigot,” “mouse”) for declining the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor. Who knew better than Bowles that Dickinsons never forgot a slight?

  Higginson was sent the same poem as Bowles, but with a material substitution in the last line: “realm” in place of “love,” which would have been out of keeping. The new word was exactly right now that the vast space left by Major Dickinson was partly filled by Colonel Higginson. In 1876 he received more letters from her than during the previous five years, or than went to Bowles from 1874 on. If she needed authorization not to publish “when troubled by entreaty,” it was to Higginson she appealed. When he returned from abroad in 1878, she said, “I missed yourself and Mr Bowles, and without a Father, seemed even vaster than before.” When Mary Higginson’s health worsened, Dickinson sent her Emerson’s Representative Men, calling it “a little Granite Book you can lean upon.” It was this phrase and gift (whose title neatly captures her need of male bulwarks) that drew Higginson’s often quoted remark about “my partially cracked poetess.”

  Since Dickinson’s letters to Charles Wadsworth were apparently burned, we cannot know the new terms of their relationship. But it is clear that by fall 1876 she was once again in touch with her Philadelphia “Shepherd,” reaching him now by way of the Hollands, who addressed her envelopes and mailed them from New York. In writing other correspondents, she sometimes asked Luke Sweetser and George Montague, *156 old and trusted neighbors, to perform this service; once she asked Maggie Maher. If the practice was designed to secure a legible script, the main purpose was undoubtedly to shield her exchanges from prying eyes. It was the Hollands’ understanding that she sought their help with Wadsworth to elude “the scrutiny of a village postmaster,” and also that she wasn’t sending real “love letters,” which would have “betrayed their confidence.” Still, one notes that, while local address writers sufficed for other correspondences, this one was hidden from everyone in town. One of the few things we know about Dickinson’s relationship with Wadsworth is that she took extreme measures to keep it secret. A letter to Elizabeth Holland alluding to her special help thanks her for “beloved Acts, both revealed and covert.”

  The most erotic poem composed by Dickinson between 1870 and 1878 has been assigned to the same year, 1876, for which we have the first evidence of her renewed correspondence with Wadsworth:

  Long Years apart – can make no

  Breach a second cannot fill –

  Who says the Absence of a Witch

  Invalidates his spell? *157

  The embers of a Thousand Years

  Uncovered by the Hand

  That fondled them when they were Fire

  Will stir and understand

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  The eye-catching detail, the man witch, exemplifies Dickinson’s free hand with the gendered specificities we make so hard and fast. Her witch is a wizard whose spells are permanent, who covers the fire he has lit and then a thousand years later uncovers it.

  “Uncovered by the Hand.” Prior to Wadsworth’s death, the poet’s surviving letters have only one comment on him. Writing the Hollands after their trip to the Philadelphia Centennial, Dickinson offered to send them the minister’s Thanksgiving message, “God’s Culture”: “The Sermon you failed to hear, I can lend you – though Legerdemain is unconveyed.” What she meant was that the printed text could not convey the drama of Wadsworth’s voice and delivery. But her diction is thinking of a magician’s hand, not a speaking voice.

  Again and again, the slender evidence as to the identity of the man Dickinson loved points to Wadsworth. Every other known candidate of either sex can be ruled out; he never is. Yet he is never confirmed. The probable explanation is that the love was on her side only, it was a question of feeling and imagination more than action, she covered her tracks well, and the intensely private Wadsworth was equally careful. Also, her family shielded her—and then whispered among themselves about that married Philadelphia clergyman. His children, one of whom was a minister and another the Philadelphia coroner, undoubtedly did everything in their power to protect their father’s reputation, especially after Martha Bianchi went public in 1924 with her foolish version of the story. *158

  Dickinson’s letters to Wadsworth from 1876 on probably had nothing resembling the tragic neediness of her Master drafts. Certainly, her posthumous queries to his friends, the Clark brothers, do not suggest a grand passion. Transgressive as she was, by her late forties the poet was a mature and disciplined woman with a vast experience in managing epistolary friendships. For all her talk about magic and revolution and ecstasy, she may have felt there would be no sweeping changes in her life; perhaps she didn’t want any. Extrapolating from her letters to Bowles and Higginson, we may surmise she approached Wadsworth as a select counselor and friend, and that no heavy appeals, confrontations, misunderstandings resulted.

  But romance wasn’t done with her. On December 10, 1877, in Salem, Elizabeth Farley Lord, wife of a good friend of the Dickinsons, died of cancer. It was the poet’s forty-seventh birthday and there was to be an immense consequence for her.

  Chapter 21

  1878–1884: Late Adventures in Friendship and Love

  Readers put off by Emily Dickinson’s class privileges should not forget that she was far more exposed to pain and disease than most of us. One October night in 1877, after Lizzie Mather was taken for a drive by Austin, a vessel burst in this consumptive neighbor’s lungs and she drowned in her own blood, her family hearing her thumpings on the floor. Would we be tough enough to send the bereaved husband the message that came from across the street? “When you have strength to remember that Dying dispels nothing which was firm before, you have avenged sorrow.”

  Two months later, when Vinnie came down with a complaint a neighbor called “dropsical,” and Emily and Maggie had to spend most of their time nursing her as well as the bedridden, memory-impaired, and much complaining mother, the poet wrote her frie
nd Elizabeth Holland: “This is Night – now – but we are not dreaming.” Events took a toll on Dickinson but never qualified her inimitable and noble mischief. Even in her last two and a half years, enfeebled by illness and a series of deaths, her voice never sounded old or defeated. How many writers, getting on in years, have complained so little? It was a question of temperament, of course, but there were also huge outlays of attention, finely calibrated effort, energetic compensation. Because these had become second nature, what looks from a distance like effortless coasting was almost certainly more costly.

  A Tender Permission

  When Maria Whitney returned from Paris in fall 1877, ready to begin teaching at Smith, she found Samuel Bowles “shockingly changed . . . feeble to the last degree & with a distressing cough.” At last he seemed willing to take care of himself, but she feared it was too late, and it was. In December, after he nearly died, his devoted female friends rallied around him. Sue strenuously advised electricity—“I know what I am saying, having known of remarkable cures”—eliciting the doctor’s frank counsel that “we must give him up.” Mary Clemmer Ames composed a tribute to the “prostrate King” lying “with broken lance,” and Maria went back and forth between Northampton and Springfield and kept Amherst posted. Dickinson’s first letter to “Miss Whitney” acknowledges her “delicate kindness” during “these acuter days.” *159 On January 16, 1878, officially from apoplexy, unofficially from “too close application” to work, the editor died. He was fifty-one.

  It is clear from Dickinson’s several postmortems both how much she mourned and how much her mourning was on behalf of others. To her devastated sister-in-law, she sent a sharp aperçu on the man’s chronic unfinishedness: “His nature was Future – He had not yet lived.” It was the same thing she had spotted in busy Higginson, who “forgot to live.” The consolatory notes she sent Mary Bowles show a graduated allowance for her prickliness. At first, Emily praised the widow’s generosity for accepting her messages: “Sorrow almost resents love, it is so inflamed.” But in the third note, written several months later when grief was less sore, Mary was tactfully admonished to make a self-improving use of her husband’s death: “The time will be long till you see him, dear, but it will be short, for have we not each our heart to dress – heavenly as his?” The poet was recommending something like the self-regulatory discipline she herself practiced.

  Of all the people Dickinson wrote to about Bowles, her most impassioned remarks went to Maria Whitney, who for many years had been extremely close to the editor, once addressing him as “my dearest friend.” This attachment, of great interest to the poet and thus something we must try to see clearly, has been distorted by Dickinson scholars, who assume that Whitney was a frequent or constant member of Bowles’s household *160 and possibly his mistress. In fact, she lived with the family for little more than a year: three months in 1863 in a New York hotel, with Samuel showing up on Sundays; a few brief intervals in 1867; and from September 1867 to April 1868. These caretaking stints coincided with two of Mary’s births, which added to the nursing and managerial headaches. Worst of all, Mary proved as resentful as she was helpless by contributing to a scandalous rumor in spring 1868 about her husband and Maria, who was alarmed and embittered; she had an extremely punctilious sense of duty. The tale must have reached Amherst, for ten years later, when Emily heard that Mary Bowles had spoken of Maria “with peculiar love,” she instantly passed it on, hoping her friend would find it “sweet” to know that “long fidelity in ungracious soil [Mary] was not wholly squandered.” Among other things, the letter illustrates Emily’s permanent effort to bolster Maria’s faith in life.

  Yet it is true that Maria loved Samuel, and also that his letters to her, full of talk about literature and religion and politics, are in every way more alive than those to his wife. Underneath the idealism and intellectuality that cemented this friendship lay a rich tangle of emotions. Samuel had an ego that demanded perfect loyalty from women, and was not above exploiting Maria’s devotion to secure her care of his wife and children. He resented it when her enthusiasms took her out of his reach, as when she aided Charles Loring Brace or went to New Haven to tend a brother’s children. On her side, though she obviously had a life of her own, there was no man who compared with Samuel; certainly, none with his command, charm, brilliance. The unofficial nature of their relationship, along with the fact that his last illness coincided with the beginning of her anxious work at Smith College, made the strain of “keeping up” (her phrase) during his last weeks all but intolerable. A numbed remark to a sister-in-law hints at her unvoiced anguish: “It all seems still utterly incomprehensible, impossible to me; my mind utterly fails to grasp the idea. I only know something dreadful has happened & that I have got to go on, with the sky all gone out of my life.”

  During the sixteen years of Sue and Austin’s friendship with Maria, Emily had made no significant overtures toward her; there is no evidence they met. Now Maria’s skylessness gave her the opening she needed. It was probably in January or February 1878 that the poet sent one of those messages she alone could write:

  I have thought of you often since the darkness – though we cannot assist Another’s night – . . .

  I hope you may remember me, as I shall always mingle you with our Mr Bowles – Affection gropes through drifts of Awe, for his tropic door –

  I hope you have the power of Hope . . .

  It was a typical combination of boldness and delicacy. Taking for granted Maria’s private rights as mourner, Emily dared to connect, “mingle,” her with Samuel, even imagining a wintry groping for his “tropic door.” At the same time, respecting Maria’s privacy, she refrained from thrusting any standard consolatory sentiments on her.

  To “hope you may remember me” was a politely ambiguous way of asking for a reply. When it came, Emily made explicit the basis on which the friendship would move forward: “Your touching suggestion that those who loved Mr Bowles – be more closely each other’s, is a tender permission.” Since Maria’s part in the ensuing correspondence is lost, we don’t know how it played out for her, or what this active, well-traveled, and very correct and reserved woman thought of the poet. Emily is never mentioned in her family correspondence from 1862 through 1887 or in her five surviving notes to Sue (one of which unsentimentally recalls “Sam’s last struggle for life”). But it is clear from the poet’s seventeen complete or fragmentary letters to Maria that she used the latter’s “tender permission” as an authorization to make their friend a kind of glowing focus: “You will be with us while he is with us and that will be while we are ourselves – for Consciousness is the only Home of which we now know.” Here, “Consciousness” almost looks like a private cult in which the two votaries can worship side by side at that “tropic door.”

  Early in the correspondence Emily sent Maria the editor’s last communication, probably the one on Warrington: “I lend you the last I knew – of the One who taught us of you – to whom we instinctively confide you – The Crucifix requires no glove.” That strange final sentence says that anguish does away with the need for formality, the implication being that in this case the widow may be ignored and the letter trusted to Maria, who has special rights on the basis of love and grief. There are only four letters to her that do not mention or allude to the editor. Six years after his death, when Whitney had ceased mourning, the subject remained fresh for the poet, who wrote that she “dreamed Saturday Night of precious Mr Bowles – One glance of his would light a World.” *161

  Dickinson had many reasons for returning so obsessively to precious Mr. Bowles, among which was that he gave her something to say (and a way to relate) to a woman with whom she had little in common. He also afforded an occasion for reflections on memory and desire, and, more personally, for the fraught topic of secret devotion. Once, hinting at an attachment of her own, Dickinson brought out her old idea of the moment of reunion in heaven: “I fear we shall care very little for the technical Resurrection, when to be
hold the one face that to us comprised it – is too much for us and I dare not think of the voraciousness of that only gaze and its only return.” But her basic purpose was advisory, not confessional – to offer the consolation of human contact and relieve the aridities of Whitney’s life: “though we are each – unknown – to ourself – and each other – ’tis not what well conferred it, the dying soldier asks – it is only the water.”

  Whitney came to Amherst twice in 1880: in late March, when she was looking forward to a summer away from Northampton, and on July 31, as she made her farewell calls before sailing to Germany (she had resigned her position at Smith in May). On one of these visits, she saw the Dickinson sisters. Afterward, Emily wrote that the caller had spoken “very sweetly to both of us and your sewing and recollecting is a haunting picture.” “Recollecting” meant Samuel, of course, at whose image the poet all but smacked her lips: “One sweet sweet more – One liquid more – of that Arabian presence!” She said nothing about Maria’s professional life—her teaching, her study of languages—subjects never brought up in letters to this correspondent. In her closest reference to the upcoming move, Emily noted that the distant sound of the Northampton bell would no longer mean “Miss Whitney is going to Church.” She repeated “sweet” or “sweetly” five times. That this is the one letter responding to Whitney’s presence is another hint that Dickinson was at her best when she was not seeing her friends. *162