My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  This dream reaction to her lover’s death has less to do with grief than with disrobing and privacy and her intermittent fear of being “too frank.” Of course, the romance became known. At the poet’s funeral, Vinnie laid “two heliotropes by her hand ‘to take to Judge Lord.’” On Lord’s side, his Kimball relations knew enough that when a descendant read Bingham’s Revelation seventy years later, she suddenly realized that her mother, born in 1871, had always spoken of Cousin Otis as Emily Dickinson’s friend and never as Edward Dickinson’s.

  Whether or not Otis was Edward’s best friend, as Emily claimed, it is significant that she saw her lover in that light. Each man was an old-fashioned and unbending Whig lawyer who could be identified with the very idea of law, thus making possible some complicated games involving obedience and defiance. The “best little girl in Amherst” delighted in setting Lord up as an embodiment of the right to punish, then daring him to become her accomplice in a lawless frolic. A roughed-out poem in one of her drafts to him declares

  How fleet – how indiscreet an one – *170

  how always wrong is Love –

  The joyful little Deity

  We are not scourged to serve –

  Fr1557, ca. 1881

  The reverse of masochistic, this poem is about how not to be whipped for being “always wrong.” Otis was the perfect lover, standing for dignity and order even while being a supple version of Edward (who “never played”). “Papa has still many Closets,” she twitted the Judge, “that Love has never ransacked.” After his death, she described him as an unstable union of “Calvary and May”—lawgiving Jehovah and troublemaking Cupid. The last of the strong, authoritative men in her life, he had little in common with the “aesthetic” type, much talked of in the 1880s, or with a class she derided as “Manikins”—professors.

  Emily proved surprisingly expert in handling her dominating lover, as if this was a relationship she had trained for. The two of them evidently had a glorious time writing and embracing, she made no commitments, and though she was grieved by his death on March 13, 1884, she wasn’t shattered. Had his last illnesses and impairments reduced his appeal? After his retirement from the bench in December 1882, as a colleague diplomatically noted, the judge’s “mind, brooding over doubts and dangers, might have grown morbid in what some of his friends regarded as prejudices, and his utterances . . . more emphatic and severe.”

  Dickinson’s decision not to marry Lord has been seen as another sign she lacked the “capacity to enjoy personal exchange and closeness and then to let go.” Because of all the ambiguities in the relationship, it seems unwise to be quite so categorical in summing up. Indeed, it may be that what the poet did her last time around was precisely to have a good time and then let go. Her suitor’s feelings can only be imagined, yet we should remember that, as his literary friend put it, “Good times are always mutual; that is what makes good times.” Chances are, Lord enjoyed himself.

  Of one thing we can be certain: it would have been a disaster if Emily Dickinson had given up her life for the crusty old man and his implacable niece.

  Resolution

  One of the things the Reverend Charles Wadsworth brought back to Philadelphia from San Francisco was “an affection of the throat [that] hindered his enunciation” and was perhaps related to the “nervous debility” a California paper mentioned. The trouble was persistent enough that at his funeral a mysterious “diminution of the powers of the organs of speech” was blamed for his reduced effectiveness. In the Philadelphia Inquirer’s long obituary, however, we read that he preached “in improved health and with growing popularity” after his installation at the Clinton Street Immanuel Church in 1879.

  The next summer—the same one, in all probability, that saw the beginning of Dickinson’s romance with Judge Lord—Wadsworth came to Amherst and saw her for the second and last time. She was tending her flowers when he rang, evidently assuming he would not be turned away. Vinnie heard him speaking to Maggie and said, “the Gentleman with the deep voice wants to see you, Emily.” In her “glad surprise,” she asked why he hadn’t notified her in advance, to which he replied that he had come on impulse, “stepped from my Pulpit to the Train.” The answer, an odd one, suggests that a partial recovery of his powers of speech may have influenced his decision to come and see her. In her two accounts of the visit, nothing is said about a vocal impediment.

  But he gave her to understand he was “liable at any time to die.” Two years later, having contracted pneumonia, the minister was advised that his condition was terminal and he should prepare for death. “I have no preparations to make,” was the reply; “they have been made.” He died early in the morning on April 1, 1882.

  The last words of Wadsworth’s sermon the previous Sunday—“going home, going home”—were publicized in an article that evidently reached Dickinson. In April 1886, a few weeks before her own death, as she wrote her last known letter mentioning the minister, she twice repeated these words, placing them in quotation marks. The recipient was one of his closest friends. “Excuse me for the Voice, this moment immortal,” her letter concludes.

  It is a curious fact that although Dickinson wrote about Wadsworth to none of her correspondents except Elizabeth Holland prior to his death, afterward she made a point of telling several men how vital this friendship had been to her. In a letter to Higginson she called the minister her “closest earthly friend,” but without naming him. To Lord, she sent a reminder that “My lovely Salem” did not enjoy exclusive rights in her: “it has been an April of meaning to me – I have been in your Bosom – My Philadelphia has passed from Earth, and . . . Ralph Waldo Emerson . . . has touched the secret Spring.”

  The one acquaintance Dickinson shared with Wadsworth was the man she had briefly met some two decades earlier, James Dickson Clark, a person (luckily) “of warm and generous affections.” Suffering from a spinal complaint, Clark had been living since the early 1870s with his father and brother on Degraw Street, Brooklyn, from which he sent her a volume of Wadsworth’s sermons, in press at the time of his death. If she read them, she would have found a defense of the “old-fashioned doctrinal preaching” she disliked, along with some ardent dramatizations of release and rapture: “[They] feel the immortality beating within them, and burst from these poor limits of sense and sin, and soar! soar! soar! to the everlasting glory.” During her ensuing correspondence with Clark, Dickinson sought more information about the man who had been at once a stranger and her dearest earthly friend. In the process, she accomplished what she had done with Maria Whitney following Samuel Bowles’s death: transformed the termination of one connection into a basis for another. By now, her social world was so thinly populated that each death was catastrophic.

  After Clark died in June 1883, Dickinson exclaimed (in a passage deleted from her edited letters), “The Friend and then the Friend’s Friend! what an entire loss!” Turning to his brother Charles, she wrote him fifteen times in her last three years, without ever meeting him. Wadsworth was still the focus: her memories of him, his problems with his children, why he once compared the poet to his son Willie. To read these letters is to get a shocking sense of the tenuity of the poet’s link to the man who had meant so much to her. Indeed, to read is to follow her in the act of creating further tenuous links with the Friend’s Friends.

  The Clark correspondence makes clear that Wadsworth was central for Dickinson. One letter anticipates his “assist[ing] me in another World.” Another dares to call him “my ‘Heavenly Father.’” Neither, however, brings up that old conceit of the separated lovers’ first mutual gaze in heaven, and nowhere do we find expressions of grief like those elicited by her father’s death. Yet, whatever her feelings about the minister (and they do seem to have moderated), we would not expect her to explore the end of her most private relationship anywhere but in her poetry.

  In fact, she seems to have done so, in a poem that opens with the death of someone toward whom her life has been pointed:

&n
bsp; I did not reach Thee

  But my feet slip nearer every day

  Three Rivers and a Hill to cross

  One Desert and a Sea

  I shall not count the journey one

  When I am telling thee

  Succeeding stanzas recount the journey’s hardships. The speaker does not characterize the person she has tried to reach, though she does mention a waiting and helpful “Right hand.” Just as in some poems from the early sixties on the remote lover, “telling” is what she looks forward to. At the end, urging her feet to “step merry,” she wades into the final sea:

  The waters murmur new

  Three rivers and the Hill are passed

  Two deserts and the Sea!

  Now Death usurps my Premium

  And gets the look at Thee –

  Fr1708

  Clearly a major summing-up, the poem gains significance from a companion piece written in 1863, the year after Wadsworth’s trip to California. Here, too, Dickinson seems to fantasize a far western trek as her essential inner act:

  I cross till I am weary

  A Mountain – in my mind –

  More Mountains – then a Sea –

  More Seas – And then

  A Desert – find –

  And my Horizon blocks

  With steady – drifting – Grains . . .

  Fr666

  Persisting, she “shout[s]” her feet forward by promising them “the Whole of Heaven/The instant that we meet.”

  Adding to the power of these strange matching allegories—the earlier one hopeful, the other frustrated—is the parallel with Moses’ disappointment following the Exodus and before the entry into Canaan. In 1855, the year after Emily’s friend, Henry V. Emmons, presided over a local mountain-naming expedition and then wrote about it in an essay she quoted back at him, the Amherst College library acquired The Sacred Mountains by J. T. Headley. In the chapter on Mount Pisgah we find what looks like Dickinson’s raw material:

  The sea had been passed—the murmurs of the people borne with—the long weary desert travelled over—forty years of the prime of life exhausted, to secure one single object, and then [Moses] died with that object unreached. . . .

  Unfortunately, since “I did not reach thee” is preserved in Sue’s handwriting only and thus isn’t datable, we can’t be certain it was occasioned by Wadsworth’s death. We can only recall what Bianchi has told us, namely, that Emily confided her love of him to Sue, and Sue kept the secret. These apparent facts may explain why “I did not reach thee” was entrusted to the sister-in-law, and why she eventually destroyed the manuscript after copying the poem: there may have been a telltale accompanying message.

  Two years after Wadsworth’s death came that of Judge Lord, in March 1884. Mentioning it to Elizabeth Holland, the Norcross cousins, Catharine Sweetser, and Charles H. Clark, Dickinson generally identified him as “another friend” she had lost; to Sweetser, she described him as “our latest Lost.” Throughout, her point was not that she had incurred a once-in-a-lifetime loss but that this was the last of a series that left her frighteningly bereft. “[H]ow to repair my shattered ranks,” she wrote Clark, “is a besetting pain.” Nowhere does she give the impression of a unique termination. This is not to deny her grief, but, rather, to pay attention to how she understood and represented it. In a poem incorporated in one of these letters, she is a robin searching for “The Birds she lost” (Fr1632). In another, “Each that we lose takes part of us,” she is a waning moon who will soon be “summoned by the tides” (Fr1634). The ocean, often present in her verse, takes on a powerful undertow now. “Rest and water are most we want,” she wrote her cousins. To Sarah Tuckerman she sent a compelling evocation of the desire to be floated away, as on wings:

  How slow the Wind – how slow the Sea –

  how late their Feathers be!

  Fr1607, ca. 1883

  What had happened to her sense of an unbreakable attachment to one man and one man only—that strongly gripped idea in her work of the early 1860s? Putting the question more manageably: how had this idea been modified once Lord declared himself? An answer flashes into view in one of her last letters to him, one that seems to dawdle in a sleepy and undirected monologue, almost a fugue—a way of writing she fell into with no other correspondent. The date was November 11, 1882.

  Please Excuse the wandering writing. Sleeplessness makes my Pencil stumble. Affection clogs it – too. Our Life together was long forgiveness on your part toward me. The trespass of my rustic Love upon your Realms of Ermine, only a Sovreign could forgive. I never knelt to other. The Spirit never twice alike, but every time another – that other more divine. Oh – had I found it sooner! Yet Tenderness has not a Date – it comes – and overwhelms. *171

  Voicing an old regret (“Oh – had I found”) that she at once overcomes (“Yet Tenderness”), this passage gives the poet’s last thoughts on her experience of erotic love. In the act of denying she knelt to another, she seems to recall that in fact she had, whereupon she introduces a modification: “The Spirit never twice alike . . .” That is, with each new loved one, love is different and better. Love itself is single and all-powerful, but now it can embrace more than one person—a heretical notion in the early 1860s. As she warned Lord, she was “but a restive sleeper and often should journey from your Arms.”

  Erotically, Dickinson had achieved not just an “inner” but a very real and tough freedom. It had been gained in the course of her fighting years, which disciplined her fixation on an out-of-reach man and hugely expanded her personal and imaginative powers. One of her strangest poems, written about 1872 or 1873, when the fight was won and her correspondence with Wadsworth had yet to resume (Lord being even deeper in the wings), registers her “bleak exultation” at her achievement:

  Through what transports of Patience

  I reached the stolid Bliss

  To breathe my Blank without thee

  Attest me this and this – . . .

  Fr1265

  Glancing at “this and this” without identifying them (bundles of letters? her manuscript books? parts of her body?), the speaker asks these things to vouch for what she has attained, namely, a dulled ability to get through her vacuous life “without thee.” Having reached a perfect and pointless equilibrium, she sums it up in a series of bitter oxymorons. Her only transports are those of waiting, not having. Her only bliss is stolid. Instead of living her life with him, she breathes her blank without him. Not her usual mood, this was nevertheless one of the ways she felt before her fling with the Judge.

  A poem composed about 1882, after the romance had ripened, begins with the statement, “I groped for him before I knew” (Fr1585). Is it a trace of that groping that the poem just looked at, “Through what transports of patience,” was drafted on an envelope Lord had addressed to her? After his death, in a confiding letter to the Norcrosses, Dickinson came back to the question of how her passion for him related to the fierce exclusiveness of first love. “Till the first friend dies, we think ecstasy impersonal, but then discover that he was the cup from which we drank it, itself as yet unknown.” The phrases dovetail: “before I knew”; “as yet unknown.” Hostile Abby Farley called her “crazy about men.” A better way to put it is that her romance with the judge brought her old and frustrating fixation on Master to a satisfactory emotional resolution. Among her discoveries in Lord’s bosom (her nearest approach to erotic pleasure?) was the difference between love and the man. Learning this lesson after her obsession with a single “atom” had moderated, she (mostly) let drop her fantasy of the mutual gaze in heaven and tried to get some solid facts about Wadsworth from the Clarks.

  After 1882, if editors’ dates are correct, there were only one or two more treatments of love. Leaving the subject for good, Dickinson composed the following definitive work of retrospection, with “Chum” and “Playmate” in the plural:

  My Wars are laid away in Books –

  I have one Battle more –

  A Fo
e whom I have never seen

  But oft has scanned me o’er –

  And hesitated me between

  And others at my side,

  But chose the best – Neglecting me – till

  All the rest have died –

  How sweet if I am not forgot

  By Chums that passed away –

  Since Playmates at threescore and ten

  Are such a scarcity –

  Fr1579

  Love—its pain, its play—had been completed, turned into art, and laid away in the poet’s secret homemade manuscript books.

  Chapter 22

  1880–1886: Exquisite Containment

  For the other inhabitants of the Dickinson compound, some very hard lines had been drawn and the wars were just beginning. Terminally alienated from Sue, Austin fell in love in 1882 with Mabel Loomis Todd, a young faculty wife who ardently returned his feelings. The next year brought the tragic death of Gib, Austin and Sue’s youngest child, born in their middle age and a family favorite. Emily, in her fifties and deeply attached to all members of her family, had no choice but to deal with these and other troubles. How she did so tells us a great deal about her sense of family and her conception of her place in the world during her last years.