My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  A letter reacting to Whitney’s absence makes a telling contrast. On May 13, 1882, in unrelated illnesses, her brother Josiah lost his wife and a married daughter, the latter leaving a baby girl. In a fit of generous zeal, fifty-one-year-old Maria offered to care for the infant, a job that required her to leave Germany and give up her study of Old Norse. Even though she and Josiah had never gotten on, she joined him in Cambridge and, devoting herself to the baby, tried to “reform” its “habits” and cope with her brother’s silent ungraciousness. By the following May, exhausted and embittered by her unsuccessful effort to act as mother, she was taking “morbid views of things” and performing her duties with a hard-bitten exactness. Earlier, she had hoped to visit Amherst when the apples were blossoming. Now, all she could do, it seems, was to send an account of her hard winter.

  This ordeal was what Dickinson had in mind when she wrote her “absent friend,” probably in May 1883. Alluding to Jesus’ statement that the lilies of the field neither toil nor spin, yet “Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these,” she announced that the sight of this flower made her want to disrobe—and “were I sure no one saw me, I might make those advances of which in after life I should repent.” She empathized with Maria’s pained “fondness for the little life so mysteriously committed to your care” and trusted the experience would be of value: “the early spiritual influences about a child are more hallowing than we know.” Where Whitney tried to break the baby’s nightly dependence on its wet nurse, Dickinson took an indulgent view of children’s “ravenousness of fondness,” asking, “Is there not a sweet wolf within us that demands its food?” *163 If the poet had little practical experience in tending a baby, she still knew how to amuse, stroke, stretch an exhausted caretaker. That was part of her work now: easing distant trouble.

  Energetic, competent, learned, responsible, Whitney took on the world as few women of her time dared. One of the results was the nagging sense of homelessness and unfulfillment she tried to assuage in her nursing stints. Another was the stiffly carapaced look evident in her photographs. Did Dickinson see her as unduly expert and armored? Possibly, judging from a poem sent to her that speaks of an unarmored kind of wisdom:

  Our ignorance our Cuirass is –

  We wear Mortality

  As lightly as an Option Gown

  Till asked to take it off – . . .

  Fr1481B

  When an autumn frost killed Emily’s plants, she wrote Maria with seeming casualness how they “went into camp last night, their tender armor insufficient for the crafty nights.”

  “I feel Barefoot all over as the Boys say,” Emily had jotted down in that unusually relaxed summer of 1877. Undressing and cheerful simplicity and not taking morbid views: these were the topics that had risen to the surface in her correspondence with Maria. An exchange founded on Samuel’s memory had acquired an impetus based on the two women’s actual relationship. “I am glad you accept rest,” Emily wrote a few months after the failed experiment in mothering; “Too many disdain it.” Then came flat disagreement on another issue: “You speak of ‘disillusion.’ That is one of the few subjects on which I am an infidel.”

  Although the letters to Whitney remind us now and then of the morbid Dickinson of legend, they mostly tell of her high spirits in her late forties and fifties. Having lived past the end of her excruciating story (adapting Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s useful title), she became a hidden presence in others’ lives by means of her letters and poems. It says something about her that she chose to get involved with a formidable stranger like Whitney. It was a risky assumption of responsibility—not Whitney’s kind but just as fearless.

  Judge Lord and the Wildest Word in the Language

  It is that happy freedom and fearlessness that we see in Dickinson’s astounding love letters to Otis Phillips Lord, an elderly judge on Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court. These letters, or rather drafts of letters (the distinction is crucial and the source of much controversy), raise the presumption that, whatever her earlier experience, she had the thrill of mutual love with a man.

  Born in 1812 and thus closer to Edward’s generation than her own, Lord may have been the single most intimidating person on her impressive short list of friends. At his death, the tributes from attorneys emphasized his principled severity and fearsome courtroom presence. “His dynamite was all in his eye,” said one lawyer, adding (as if the stipulation was necessary) that his name would never be equivalent to “murder.” “No one who met him,” said another, “could fail to feel his force, his strength, his grip.” Once, cross-examining, his “sudden and powerful mental grip” made a nervous witness faint. His oral powers were spoken of with awe—his gift for succinct clarity, his sly and deadly humor.

  An old-line Whig like Edward Dickinson, Lord had been speaker of the Massachusetts House in 1854. After his party’s rout that fall, he kept insisting (again like Edward) that “the great heart of Massachusetts is Whig to the core.” At the 1855 Whig state convention, he gave a rousing speech defying all compromises: “To-day we are Whig, and we are not anything else. (Laughter and applause.) We have no outsiders to catch to-day; we have no baits to throw to any gudgeons. We stand to-day Whigs upon Whig principles, and we stand there or we fall. (Cheers and cries of ‘good—good.’)” In July 1862, giving a Commencement address at Amherst College, by then heavily Republican, he blamed the war on “the uneasy men, in all parts of the country” and defended the Bell-Everett program: “the Union as it was and the Constitution as it is.” That meant defeating the rebels without compromising their property rights in slaves. Appointed to the Commonwealth’s highest court, he was the subject of frequent complaint for harshness and partiality. When Henry Ward Beecher was tried for adultery, Lord examined the minister’s self-defense with his steeltrap mind and came out with a ferocious brief for his guilt and hypocrisy. Filling four columns in the Republican (which backed the analysis), it must have been seen by Emily.

  In private life, Lord was said to be “one of the kindest and most genial of men.” His gift for chiseled utterance made him a good talker, “piquant and racy,” though only with intimates and kindred spirits. At the Evergreens, according to Sue, he “never seem[ed] to coalesce.” Once at dinner, however, when Austin was ill and Vinnie was leading him on and the talk turned to New England’s hymns, he made himself “more stiff and erect behind his old-fashioned silk stock” and recited the whole of Isaac Watts’s grimmest song:

  My thoughts on awful subjects roll,

  Damnation and the dead;

  What horrors seize the guilty soul,

  Upon a dying bed.

  Lingering about these mortal shores,

  She makes a long delay;

  Till, like a flood with rapid force,

  Death sweeps the wretch away.

  Then, swift and dreadful she descends

  Down to the fiery coast;

  Amongst abominable fiends,

  Herself a frightened ghost . . .

  The response, Sue remembered, was “nervous laughter.” *164

  The judge had a memory for images of being swept away. After his death, when Mary C. Farley drowned in Walden Pond, Dickinson recalled how much he savored the phrase, “an envious sliver broke,” from Gertrude’s narration of Ophelia’s drowning.

  Like Dickinson, Lord had the old-fashioned idea that literature was to be cultivated in private with one’s friends. His 1871 memoir of Asahel Huntington contains a surprisingly detailed account of the man’s close friendship with a “gifted poetess,” Hannah Flagg Gould, who lived with her father and whose humorous epitaphs were “distinguished by delicacy and purity of sentiment and by exemplary correctness of versification.” James Guthrie has conjectured that some of Dickinson’s humorous poems, beginning with “The judge is like the owl” (Fr728) of 1863, may have been sent to Lord, who came to Amherst for college functions or when holding court in Northampton; he was class of 1832.

  The first solid evidence of frien
dship with Dickinson dates from 1872 or 1873: an envelope addressed to her by Lord on which she drafted a poem (Fr1265). In 1873, when Sue was at the seaside near Salem, the poet sent “Love for . . . the dear Lords.” From about 1874, on the back of Fr1337, we have her draft of a note to his niece, Abby Farley. In October 1875, a year after Edward’s death, the Lords spent a week in Amherst and the poet and her mother made their wills, no doubt with the Judge’s legal advice; his wife, Elizabeth, was a witness. His recitation of the hymn probably took place during Austin’s malarial illness of fall 1876. The following January, anxious Vinnie sent him a query about the wrecked Sunderland Bridge. In reply, he said he knew nothing about the matter, was too “jaded” for anything but solitaire, and often thought “of you & of Emily, whose last note gave me a good deal of uneasiness, for knowing how entirely unselfish she is, and how unwilling to disclose any ailment, I fear that she has been more ill, than she has told me. I hope you will tell me particularly about her.” Not realizing his wife had cancer, he spoke of her “rheumatism or neuralgia” and asked once again for “full accounts of the health of each of you.” Clearly, he was not only in touch with the poet before Elizabeth Lord’s death on December 10, 1877, but anxious about her well-being.

  Exactly when this friendship turned into a late-life romance is difficult to say. After the poet’s death, in obedience to her wishes, Vinnie burned the lifetime of letters she had received, presumably including those from Lord; apparently her letters to him were also destroyed. However, not only did she retain versions of what she sent her lover, but in the 1890s a number of these were given to Mabel Loomis Todd by Austin, with what motives we can only guess. Some of these are fragmentary rough drafts. Others are fair copies, with scissored deletions that tell of a deliberate act of selective preservation, the implication being that what we have is what we were meant to have. The four fair copies that can be dated all come from 1882: April 30–May 1, May 14, November 11, and December 3. Although Johnson and Leyda assigned the earliest manuscripts to 1878, that is probably too early, especially for the amorous fragment that refers to spring (letter 563). It seems impossible this could have been written a few months after Elizabeth Lord died.

  What evidence there is points to a later date for the affair’s beginning. Some months after Charles Wadsworth’s death in April 1882, Emily wrote Elizabeth Holland, “It sometimes seems as if special Months gave and took away – August has brought the most to me – April – robbed me most.” *165 Eighteen eighty is the first year after Elizabeth Lord’s death in which Otis is known to have visited Amherst in August, staying from the twenty-third to the thirtieth, longer than any other visit. Accompanied by some Farley in-laws, he and his entourage were referred to by Austin as “the Lords.” The poet used the same designation in a contemporaneous letter that has been incorrectly dated by editors. In early September, writing Aunt Catharine Sweetser, she was profuse with apology and explanation: “I designed to write you, immediately, but the Lords came as you went, and Judge Lord was my father’s closest friend, so I shared my moments with them till they left us last Monday; then seeing directly after, the death of your loved Dr. A , I felt you might like to be alone.” Otis left Amherst on Monday, August 30, 1880. The next day the pastor emeritus of Catharine’s Madison Square Church, the Reverend Doctor William Adams, died. The day after that his death notice appeared in the Republican. Ignoring for now the effect of Otis and Edward’s friendship on Dickinson’s susceptibility, one notes both the chapter-and-verse detail and the strained implausibility of her excuse for not writing. It does look as if she was trying to pull the wool over her aunt’s eyes.

  On September 23, less than a month later—the shortest known interval between the judge’s visits—he was back in town. This time, according to Austin’s diary, the Farley nieces were squired here and there by Ned, leaving Otis free and unaccounted for from the twenty-fourth to the twenty-sixth.

  It was in 1880, according to Sue, that Otis presented Emily with a costly and discriminating gift, a marbled Shakespeare concordance. No earlier gifts from him are known. *166

  The letter to Lord that Johnson and Leyda each placed first in the series looks like an early confession of love:

  My lovely Salem smiles at me – I seek his Face so often – but I have done with guises –

  I confess that I love him – I rejoice that I love him – I thank the maker of Heaven and Earth – that gave him me to love – The Exaltation floods me – I cannot find my channel – the Creek turns Sea – at thought of thee . . .

  Further on, in a rough draft of the same letter:

  . . . waking for your sake on Day made magical with you before I went to Sleep – what pretty phrase – we went to sleep as if it were a Country – let us make it one – we could/will make it one, my native Land – my Darling come oh be a patriot now . . . Oh nation of the soul Thou hast thy freedom now

  The (apparently) unguarded rapture of such passages has elicited some curious reactions from the poet’s scholarly handlers. When Millicent Todd Bingham made them known in 1954, she solemnly quoted God’s warning to Moses at the burning bush: “Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” More recently, in an essay edition that asks us to regard the manuscript fragments as aesthetic objects and refrain from “imagining a plot,” Marta L. Werner announces, “My work initiates a break . . . by proposing that the most powerful ‘revelations’ of the drafts . . . are not biographical but, rather, textual.”

  Werner’s facsimiles have much to tell us about Dickinson’s writing habits—her use of scraps of paper, the difference between her rough hand and her record-keeping hand. But most readers will surely feel that the real interest of these fragments, plot or no plot, lies in their disclosures about Dickinson’s erotic fervor and her relations with Lord. Like some of her youthful letters, they have a kind of unleashed, over-the-top playfulness now that the “soul” is in its native country. This freedom, rooted in a sense of intimacy, expresses itself in a copious and seemingly uninhibited play of language. The poet was writing to a highly literate man, and the pleasures she enjoyed were in part those of a shared imaginative and linguistic romp—what she had called in a tormented letter to Master two decades earlier “the prank of the Heart at play on the Heart.” A wordless relationship would have been no fun at all. Sometimes she “almost feared Language was done between us.”

  In spite of the joy of surrendering her brook to his sea, Dickinson was neither willing to merge nor “done with guises.” Her drafts show she had learned the lesson of desire and distance and did not contemplate any real yielding: “Dont you know you are happiest while I withhold and not confer – dont you know that ‘No’ is the wildest word we consign to Language? [new paragraph] You do, for you know all things.” *167Did Otis know, and if so, how did he like it? It may be that Emily’s “no” was too wild for him, as when she both confessed her desire and insisted on her freedom: “I am but a restive sleeper and often should journey from your Arms through the happy Night, but you will lift me back, wont you, for only there I ask to be.” Here, in a single breath, she dares to speak of their shared nights and her vagrant proclivities. She also appears to assume that “no” is not “no” but a basis for additional play, intimacy, confession. Of course, we can’t be sure the letter was actually sent. *168

  As for what Lord wanted from her, the manuscript fragments point two ways. To judge from a fair copy that speaks of a stile she “will not let you cross – but it is all yours, and when it is right I will lift the Bars, and lay you in the Moss,” he may have pressed for some kind of erotic satisfaction. Her self-defense—“It is Anguish . . . to let you leave me, hungry, but you ask the divine Crust and that would doom the Bread”—echoes a passage from Coventry Patmore’s Angel in the House, heavily marked by Sue, in which a woman who yields too soon is said to have “spoil’d the bread and spill’d the wine.”

  Alternatively, after Dickinson was released by her mother’s de
ath on November 14, 1882, Lord apparently asked her to marry him. On December 3 the poet dwelled on the nuances of his mild and considerate proposal:

  You said with loved timidity in asking me to your dear Home, you would “try not to make it unpleasant” – so delicate a diffidence, how beautiful to see! I do not think a Girl Extant has so divine a Modesty –

  You even call me to your Breast with apology! Of what must my poor Heart be made?

  This interesting passage not only suggests that the poet cowed the bluff old judge but shows how avidly she reflected on this, even speculating (with him) as to how intimidating she was.

  The basic understanding the lovers reached seems to have been literary: to write each other every Sunday. A fragment beginning “Tuesday is a deeply depressed Day” traces the poet’s stages of anticipation through the week. Another, prompted by his missing his assignment, blames her “Naughty one” for making “the bright week noxious.” Curiously, there is an independent report of the old man’s effort to keep up his end of things. On April 8, 1883, a Sunday, his niece Abby Farley informed Ned Dickinson that “Uncle Lord is writing in the next room a letter for the ‘Mansion’ such a sweet one—I suppose.” Abby’s view of the business was openly scornful: “A letter has just arrived from your neighbor containing sweet flowers, for ‘dear Otis’ I suppose. What a lot of humbug there is in this world.” Since Otis had substantial property and no children, it was in this niece’s interest to thwart a second marriage. Decades later, old and bitter, she reportedly said of Dickinson: “Little hussy—didn’t I know her? I should say I did. Loose morals. She was crazy about men. Even tried to get Judge Lord. Insane, too.”

  Among her ruses for concealing the correspondence, Dickinson had George Montague address and Thomas Kelley (Maggie’s brother-in-law) post her letters. In May 1882, when the judge was falsely reported to be near death, Tom thoughtfully appeared and the poet “ran to his Blue Jacket and let my Heart break there.” Another time, she seems to have informed her lover that a long letter hidden under her clothes had aroused suspicion by adding to her bulk. In reply, Lord called her “Jumbo,” a name with which she delightedly toyed before promising to switch stationery: “Tim’s suspicions however will be allayed, for I have thinner Paper, which can elude the very Elect.” These evasive maneuvers may have been designed to protect the judge (from niece Abby?) as well as herself. Once, she dreamed a statue was made of him after his death and that when she was asked to “unvail” it she refused. Her explanation: “what I had not done in Life I would not in death.” *169