The family had such distinction and ease, Mr. Dickinson in particular, so “dignified & strong and a little odd.” He seemed to take a special interest, there were walks and drives, the chemistry was right, and on September 11, 1882, a day after Emily had listened to Mabel in the darkness, she and Austin spoke their love face to face on a quiet walk, and then declared it over and over in an impassioned and now famous exchange of letters. Ardent and unreserved, Mabel had a “premonition” they would soon be able to express their love fully. Austin, writing with the mature strength he had not known how to command three decades earlier in courting Sue, never complained, accused, placated. In all respects it seemed a perfect union. Even David proved compliant. There was only one problem: Sue.
The affair had all the elements: ecstasy, an alternating stealth and brazenness, the spurned wife’s developing suspicion. Terrified by Sue’s icy formality, Mabel, with Austin’s approval, sought and found an ally, an unwitting one, in Vinnie. In early 1883 Austin blustered that “Conventionalism is for those not strong enough to be laws for themselves.” *174 In June he had a “blow out” with Sue, and in July he promised Mabel to “straighten the matter out before the summer is over, or smash the machine.” That fall the couple began to make use of the Mansion as a kind of safe house, having their first intercourse there in December. They also used the Todds’ house.
Years passed before Mabel’s daughter, Millicent, could admit how disturbed she was by Mr. Dickinson’s presence in her early life. Why was that tall, unsmiling man always going into Mama’s bedroom and locking the door behind him? What did it mean when Mama was overheard murmuring “My King” to him? In his own home, Austin was more silent and detached than ever, exercising what he called his “supreme independence.” That, not smashing the machine, was his real strategy, leaving an impossible situation unresolved. Sue’s strategy, drawing on her grief, sickness, and betrayal, was to make sure the children took her side. Writing Mattie in December 1884, she was not just the bereaved but the martyred wife: “I carry very heavy burdens, so heavy that I sometimes feel that you and Ned will be left ere very long without any one but each other, to tell all your griefs to—My soul is heavy much of the time and hope lies far behind me.” The tacit implication was that Ned and Mattie were already fatherless. The spurned wife was not without weapons on the domestic front.
Outside the family, Austin’s best cards were his standing in the community, his intimidating dignity, and his stony refusal to explain or justify. When Mabel took out a loan from a local bank, he brazenly cosigned. To enable her and her husband to build a house, he carved a lot from the Dickinson meadow and somehow got his wife to sign the deed. It became an open secret that he was alienated from Sue and drawn to Mabel, but it was left to others to define the connection. Of course there was gossip, but it is a mistake to assume the liaison was generally understood to be sexual and condoned as such; there is simply no solid evidence of this from the 1880s. What is obvious but inconvenient is easily denied, and what was less convenient in conservative nineteenth-century Amherst than that the town’s leading citizen was having an affair with Mrs. Todd? By 1889 the couple had been intimate for five years. That March Doc Hitchcock pressed Austin to take action against a disorderly lodging house used by students, in which, it was said, “one of the females of the house did sleep with one of the male occupants, & he not her husband either.” It seems unthinkable that Austin’s old friend could have written this if he had realized the truth. *175
In her later years Dickinson often defended acts of theft and stolen love. A poem from about 1882 benignantly glances (in an alternate phrase) at “The happy guilt of boy and girl” (Fr1583[B]). But at that point Austin and Mabel weren’t “guilty,” and in any case, Dickinson, like Emerson, was less lawless than a first acquaintance suggests. When a stableman named Dennis Scannell got drunk, she feared “for the rectitude of the Barn” and sent Ned a tattling warning that ends, “Love for the Police.” How deeply law and limits were engrained in her is evident from her riff on Simonides’ epigram on the Spartans killed at Thermopylae (of which William Lisle Bowles’s translation reads, “Go tell the Spartans, thou that passeth by,/That here, obedient to their laws, we lie”). Dickinson asks if the defenders were motivated by “a Lure – a Longing?” only to deny that psychological explanations like these can explain absolute commitments:
Oh Nature – none of this –
To Law – said Sweet Thermopylae
I give my dying Kiss –
Fr1584 (about 1882)
Do we call this erotic sublimation, or do we say that the erotic has come to stand for something more ultimate? Not to dwell on the matter, it appears that Dickinson was a voluptuary of the “Law” as much as of the word “No,” and that she was bound to each of these in ways her marriage-fracturing lawyer-brother wasn’t.
The question stands, did she know it was adultery? In the winter of 1882–1883, when Sue became suspicious, the lovers turned to the Mansion for a refuge. Mabel, friends with Vinnie, was told by Austin to address him at her post office box, where he collected the mail. In mid-March, Emily commented on the frequency of his visits: “my Brother is with us so often each Day, we almost forget that he ever passed to a wedded Home.” Does this suggest she knew of the marital rift next door? Very likely: that summer she addressed Mabel as “Brother and Sister’s dear friend,” apparently excluding Sue; she used the same formula in 1885, when Sue could not possibly have been the sisterly friend. Twice that summer Austin informed his lover he was seeing “Vin and Em more than I did—and you are the constant theme.” But there were limits to Austin’s confidences. The same year, charmed by one of Mabel’s letters, her lover wrote that he would like to “let Emily read it sometime, when it comes right, that she may know of what stuff you are.” Sympathetic as Emily was, she was not, in her brother’s opinion, ready for the truth. We remember how the news of a Holland family pregnancy went past her. In sum, it seems unlikely she could have been aware of, let alone complicit in (as some assert), the physical side of the affair.
How we answer the question has consequences for how we read her messages to Sue. One of the most arresting of these says, “With the exception of Shakespeare, you have told me of more knowledge than any one living – To say that sincerely is strange praise –” The note survives only in Martha’s facsimile and in photostats, which show a tear across the paper below the last words. Martha’s motive in publicizing a note comparing her mother to Shakespeare is obvious. The real questions are: was there more to the note, and what do the two sentences mean? The first seems to imply that Sue has again contributed something substantial to Emily’s stock of knowledge, but the second does not so much thank her for this as admit that it is strange to do so sincerely. Was Emily being magnanimous in acknowledging what Sue had disclosed? Was the information sufficiently disillusioning that the poet’s acknowledgment was “strange praise”?
In Emily’s many warm messages to Sue, there is never a hint of criticism of Austin or, for that matter, Mabel. Sue’s exclusiveness and vindictiveness made many enemies, including Vinnie, who sided with Austin against her, but Emily seems to have remained unpolarized, contriving to side with but not against. If this achievement was made possible by a habit of withdrawal, it also reflected an irenic temperament and largeness of spirit. Living among the most intimate and irreparable of betrayals, ruptures, hatreds, she found a way to live peaceably, nonviolently, with feuding camps. That was one of the benefits of “exquisite self-containment.”
Gib’s Death
More devastating than Austin’s infidelity was the death of his and Sue’s third child, Thomas Gilbert, barely eight years old. Conceived after Ned’s heart trouble had declared itself, Gib, as he was called, was a charming and intelligent boy whose “fascinating ways” and “witty little sayings” won everyone. The product of his parents’ middle age, he was not only the last best hope for the family lineage under the Dickinson name but the one child affectionately att
ached to both father and mother.
In fall 1883 Gib contracted typhoid fever. He was tended night and day by his increasingly exhausted parents, but to no avail. The day he died, October 5, a camping outfit was unknowingly mailed to him from Duluth by a cousin. A large tent had been pitched in the yard for him and his playmates that summer; his boyhood adventures had just begun. According to Vinnie, Austin looked “like death.” “God help all you poor broken hearted ones,” wrote Sue’s sister Martha, who felt sorriest for the father; she kept seeing his “pale face.”
For the one and only time, Austin’s meticulously kept diary goes blank, for nearly two months. Then, on December 13, two weeks after it resumes, we find the first instance of the double lines signifying his and Mabel’s sexual unions, ___. Austin was alive again, but for the bereaved mother death had to be dealt with in other ways. A letter received from Geneva indicates how Sue must have described her sense of desolation: “Your days are like mine,” wrote the now widowed Martha Smith; “I go to bed nearly every night so tired and lonely.” According to Sue’s daughter, she “would see no one, would not even be driven through the village for more than a year.” The grief for dead Gilbert family members that she had tried to give up when she married now returned for good.
But the suffering next door may have been worse. A family letter by Harriet Jameson, the postmaster’s wife, reveals that Dickinson “went over to Austin’s with Maggie the night Gilbert died, the first time she had been in the house for 15 years—and the odor from the disinfectants used, sickened her so that she was obliged to go home about 3. A M—and vomited—went to bed and has been feeble ever since, with a terrible pain in the back of her head.” A letter from Vinnie confirms that her sister went next door and “received a nervous shock the night Gilbert died & was alarmingly ill for weeks.” Jameson had the impression that “sympathy for Austin” was retarding her recovery. Three months after the event, Vinnie informed a former pastor and his wife that Emily had been “very frail since Gilbert died & I’me constantly anxious about her.” All these reports seem reliable, yet Emily’s own notes and letters reacting to Gib’s death command so much strength they remind us of what Charlotte Brontë had said about her sister Emily (words quoted by Dickinson in 1881): “Full of ruth for others, on herself she had no mercy.”
The poet’s response to this tragedy did not exactly conform to orthodox Christian teaching as exemplified by Wadsworth’s sermons. “God’s Culture” proclaimed that “to the eye of Faith, nothing is fairer than the death of young children.” “Death is not destruction! Death is not even decay! Death is HARVESTING!” Similarly, “Ministrations to Angels” (also in her possession), pictured a family that was desolated by the loss of its beloved “idol,” then offered a corrective vision based on metaphor and fervent exhortation: “Had you known it, a crowned creature from eternity had crossed your threshold on a mission of heavenly love, to teach you priceless lessons.” Like Wadsworth’s sermons, the first of Dickinson’s consolatory letters to Sue insisted—and with even greater fervor—that tragedy was triumph. But she altered the program by making no reference to God and interpreting Gib’s death as his own transcendent achievement:
Gilbert rejoiced in Secrets –
His Life was panting with them . . .
No crescent was this Creature – He traveled from the Full –
Such soar, but never set . . .
Without a speculation, our little Ajax spans the whole . . .
Ajax was a classical hero known for his strength. Like him, the poet was struggling mightily to see her nephew as a figure of unique daring and wisdom, a master of ultimate secrets. Her vision seems consciously “pagan,” a term she elsewhere applied to herself. She agreed with Wadsworth that it was imperative to convert tragedy into victory—that all the resources of language must be harnessed to this end. The difference was that, where the minister’s language rested on Scripture and orthodox theology, the poet’s language rested (if that is the word) on itself.
Later messages, as intense, absolute, and final as anything the poet sent her sister-in-law, were clearly meant to lift up and encourage. One of the most moving considers the spirit’s resilience—the way a sense of life and openness comes back after the suffocation of despair:
Hopelessness in its first Film has not leave to last – That would close the Spirit. . . .
Intimacy with Mystery, after great Space, will usurp its place –
From this, building on the idea of space, Dickinson tendered an image of human greatness finding its way in a world without meaning or direction: “Moving on in the Dark like Loaded Boats at Night, though there is no Course, there is Boundlessness.” To this, she added a poem on the unknowability of heaven,
Whose rumor’s Gate was shut so tight
Before my Beam *176 was sown,
Not even a Prognostic’s push
Could make a Dent thereon –
Once again, Dickinson was standing at the closed door that was so intrinsic to her mind and art. Her two other 1883 poems that incorporate these lines conclude with them, giving the emphasis to her unsuccessful push at the limits of mortal knowledge. Here, however, she has Gib break through, leaving his mourning family to follow as they can:
The World that thou hast opened
Shuts for thee,
But not alone,
We all have followed thee –
The poem ends with a glance at the vanished explorer’s temporary abode on earth—and at his tent pitched in the Dickinson compound:
The Tent is listening,
But the Troops are gone! *177
Fr1625
Dickinson wrote Elizabeth Holland that the boy’s last words were “open the Door, they are waiting for me.” Choosing to interpret the delirious speech as visionary, she added: “Who were waiting for him, all we possess we would give to know – Anguish at last opened it, and he ran to the little Grave at his Grandparents’ feet – All this and more, though is there more? More than Love and Death? Then tell me its name!” Tortured as this is, the feeling is by no means raw or artless, with the dramatic picture of the boy’s running to join his grandparents. Yet even this degree of questioning is absent from the letters to Sue, for whom the poet obviously felt she had to be strong.
The severe illnesses and prostrations that overcame Sue in the next two years gave Emily an additional motive for encouraging her. In summer 1884 there was the curious episode of “poison trouble,” as Sue called it, which her daughter blamed on “white dogwood” (poison sumac). In an update on symptoms, the sufferer informed Mattie in August that “my face has troubled me hardly at all, and my hands tolerably quiet. Ned gave me a drive this morning and reminded me it had been ten days since I had been out.” In December, Sue again brought up her precarious health (“Your letters have made me nearly sick”) to quiet her daughter’s complaints about her difficulties at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut; soon after, as we have seen, she unloaded her premonitions of death on the girl. At some point she incurred shingles and influenza, and also a prescription of arsenic, with Ned categorically advising his sister she “must never write such a letter home again, for it has made Mother almost sick.” A convalescent letter begins, “I am up dear Mopsy [Mattie] with a wrapper on and hope not to undress before four P.M. I have just been down stairs and walked about the rooms. Saw Papa a moment and as I am very shaky I have come back to my hospital [her room].” There is a hint of Austin’s coldness here, and how it affected her. His 1884 diary does not even mention her many illnesses. Instead, on December 19, her birthday, he visited the “other house” and had some ____ in the evening. By contrast, Emily let Sue know that “every Day” she inquired of the stableman, Stephen Sullivan, “if you seem weary.” She also reminded the invalid of her son’s loving concern. Clearly, the poet understood and tried to satisfy her sister-in-law’s need of sympathy.
One of the most difficult messages Dickinson sent next door in 1884 or 1885 has drawn much intere
st in recent years. If placed against the background of marital trouble, bereavement, sickness, and depression (and also the missionary zeal that led Sue to take charge of a Sunday School in working-class Dwight, or “Logtown”), it looks like a culminating exhortation to be of good cheer:
Morning might come by Accident – Sister –
Night comes by Event –
To believe the final line of the Card would foreclose Faith –
Faith is Doubt.
Sister –
Show me Eternity, and I will show you Memory –
Both in one package lain
And lifted back again –
Be Sue, while I am Emily –
Be next, what you have ever been, Infinity –
Fr1658
As in her letter to grieving Perez Cowan many years earlier, the poet was contesting the kind of belief that claims sure knowledge of ultimate things. If heaven and all the rest were down pat ahead of time, our faith would be “foreclosed” and our minds shackled. It is our ignorance that enlivens us and makes possible our greatness. Underscoring her gravity (and her sympathy) with a second “Sister,” she adds a poem that does away with the distinction between the sacred and the human. What you call eternity, it challengingly declares, is what I call memory, both equally belonging to our infinitude. “The past is not a package one can lay away,” Dickinson had said a year or two earlier, summing up her final orientation to memory. The last lines urge Sue to be herself—noble, not relying on a petty faith, not complaining. For consolation, she should reflect that when she eventually escapes Night and finds Morning, she will be no more infinite than she has always been.
My Wars Are Laid Away in Books Page 64