My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  Like many of the poet’s messages to others, this one looks back at a relationship from a vantage point outside daily life. She had repeatedly written “off charnel steps.” With Sue, she had again and again drawn back in order to sum up their close yet distant friendship. But 1884–1885 was the time for ultimate statements of encouragement.

  Yet Dickinson was by this time so frail that such efforts were extremely costly. Instead of writing from a position of weakness (as Sue did to Mattie, her future champion), she drew prodigally on the strength she increasingly lacked. Her wars weren’t laid away in books after all: again and again she was driven to assert the priority of freshness and possibility over powerlessness, tragedy, death. It was partly because of this great effort, as was later realized, that her terminal decline began with Gib’s shattering death. “Not to outgrow Genesis, is a sweet monition” says a note to a minister’s wife from 1885 or 1886, meaning, perhaps, that we should not leave innocence and give in to experience.

  When Sarah Tuckerman’s husband died in March 1886, the poet sent a note exclaiming, “How ecstatic! How infinite! Says the blissful voice, not yet a voice, but a vision, ‘I will not let thee go, except I bless thee.’” She was quoting from the story in Genesis 32:24–32 of Jacob’s wrestling through the night with a supernatural being thought to be an angel. At dawn, not knowing whom he has been fighting, Jacob says, “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me,” *178 only to find he has been wrestling—has in fact prevailed against—the Almighty, who then both blesses and wounds: blesses by changing Jacob’s name to Israel, wounds by touching the inside of his thigh and giving him a permanent limp. As if it were not enough to wrestle the deity, Dickinson audaciously reversed the relative position of God and man: “except I bless thee.” The switch in pronouns was apparently not a slip. The spring she died, she ended her last letter to Higginson with the same reversal: “Audacity of Bliss, said Jacob to the Angel ‘I will not let thee go except I bless thee’ – Pugilist and Poet, Jacob was correct –”

  The other thing she added to the story, the word “poet,” shows how well she understood that her lyric vocation was a function of her essential lifelong struggle. Yielding to the nature of things no more than she had “given up” to the Savior during the revivals of her youth, she asserted her own powers of “pagan” ecstasy and sublime thought. She had been a fundamental rule-breaker, and now, in her last defiant paradox, she declared that that was what had made her “correct.”

  It would be melodramatic to see Dickinson as some sort of God-defying Captain Ahab, who had nothing to do with “Bliss,” but she did insist on reinterpreting, transcending, what she had been handed by her father, her religion, her culture. As the end approached, she saw herself as having triumphed, like Jacob. It would be hard to disagree. Both won their match. Yet there is a singular difference in that, where Jacob was given an obvious limp, Dickinson hid her own deep wound behind a gated partition, a “vail.” Nowhere in her writings did she admit that the limits imposed on her did any serious or fundamental damage. Instead, mustering all the Dickinson determination in her effort to make “No” the wildest word in the language, she devoted her incomparable resources to a kind of virgin closed-door mastery.

  That is the other difference between her and Jacob, who had wives and sons and daughters and whose new name became that of a people. Jacob/Israel was a patriarch for whom the blessing and the wound were distinct and separate. Dickinson was a single woman who simultaneously obeyed and defied the patriarchal order, and for whom the blessing and the wound became one and the same. What that seems to mean for us is that her great genius is not to be distinguished from her madness.

  An Adjourning Heart

  The physician who chiefly attended Dickinson, Dr. Orvis F. Bigelow, gave the cause of death as “Bright’s Disease” and its duration as two and a half years—since Gib’s death. If we go to Bigelow’s copy of Richard Quain’s Dictionary of Medicine (1883), we find “Bright’s Diseases” listed as a plural and designating three different kidney disorders: inflammatory, waxy, cirrhotic. That the doctor failed to indicate which of these it was raises a question about the accuracy of his diagnosis.

  There are other reasons for doubting it. Of the sixty-nine deaths in Amherst in 1886, five were attributed to Bright’s disease and one each to uraemia and “disease of kidneys.” These numbers seem suspiciously high when compared to those from other towns in Massachusetts. Of the 90 deaths in Easthampton in 1886, or the 133 in Ware, or the 48 in Lexington, not one was blamed on Bright’s disease. Medford had 140 deaths, only two of them from this cause. We may reasonably ask if kidney disease had become a catch-all category for Dr. Bigelow.

  More material reasons for not accepting the official cause of death have been adduced by Dr. Norbert Hirschhorn and Polly Longsworth, who note that Dickinson’s youthful and unblemished appearance, often commented on, is inconsistent with the signs of uremic poisoning—yellow skin, itching, an unpleasant odor. The true cause of death, they argue, was severe primary hypertension, a diagnosis not available in 1886. This explanation seems consistent with the known facts in the case: the stress under which the poet lived; the emotional effects of her bereavements; the state of medical science at the time; and the record of symptoms in her last two and a half years, thinking particularly of her bouts of fainting and final stroke.

  After Bowles died, the poet wrote Higginson that a friend’s death reminds you “you could not begin again, because there was no World.” For someone who depended on the exchange of scripted messages with choice friends, the world began to feel bafflingly depleted as death succeeded death. Doing her best to fight back, Dickinson claimed that “Death cannot Plunder half so fast as Fervor can re-earn,” referring, perhaps, to new friendships with Whitney and the Clarks. But sooner or later she had to admit that even her powers were insufficient. “The Dyings have been too deep for me,” she said in fall 1884, “and before I could raise my Heart from one, another has come.”

  This was her way of explaining her sudden collapse that summer. On June 14, making a cake with Maggie, she “saw a great darkness coming” and, fainting, remained unconscious till late at night. Austin described the episode as “a singular attack of dizziness &c.” Coming to, as she informed her cousins two months later, the earliest she felt able to write, she found her brother “and Vinnie and a strange physician bending over me.” Then came “weeks of faintness,” during which she “gave the others much alarm.”

  The one poem she is known to have sent during this period speaks of resignation at the prospect of death: “Not Sickness stains the Brave,/. . . But an adjourning Heart” (Fr1661). Another time, remembering Gib, she abruptly broke off a letter as if sensing trouble: “But it is growing damp and I must go in. Memory’s fog is rising.” There is no evidence her doctors mentioned Bright’s disease to her. Instead, she was told she was suffering “revenge of the nerves,” the same formula she had been given following her nephew’s death. Uninterested as she was in medical science (“I do not know the Names of Sickness”), she seems to have accepted this explanation, writing Helen Jackson that September that “Nervous prostration” had kept her sedentary.

  On October 12, a Sunday, Austin belatedly discovered that his sister was having another strange and alarming episode. As he recorded in his diary, he

  went over to the other house about 5 and found Vin had been working over Emily, who had had another bad turn—since 3 o’clock alone, no one coming to help her, or within call.

  Got her onto the lounge with Stephen’s help and sent for Maggie.

  Sue’s letter to Mattie the next day didn’t mention the crisis. Her one report came nine days later after her brother Dwight, on a visit from Michigan, talked to the patient: “Aunt Emily saw Uncle last evening & he said was [sic] quite rational.” This confirms both that the poet’s mind had been wandering and that Sue was not in close touch. As for Vinnie, she was so on edge that three months later she felt anxious whenever Emily was “out
of my sight—lest some new danger overcome her.” *179 Across the street, Harriet Jameson had the impression that Emily’s survival “a year longer than we supposed possible” was owing to “her sister’s watchfulness and loving care.”

  This sense of lurking danger doesn’t show up in Dickinson’s many notes and letters from 1885. Apparently unworried, she had little to say about her health and, unlike her sister-in-law, who lived into her eighties, didn’t solicit sympathy. Continuing to take an interest in others’ lives, she commiserated with her friends’ sorrows and thanked them for the photographs of children she hadn’t seen. When Jackson died of cancer, she assured the bereaved husband that “Helen of Troy will die, but Helen of Colorado, never.” To Bowles’s son, she wrote, “Take all away from me, but leave me Ecstasy.”

  On November 30, 1885, her feebleness and other (undescribed) symptoms were so alarming her brother canceled a trip to Boston. For the next few months the poet was confined to bed and Vinnie redoubled her surveillance. On January 19 she and Austin had a serious talk about their sister. Occasionally he took Vinnie’s place by her bed for an hour or so. His diary for March 18 reads in part, “at other house [Mansion] till 6, ___ perfect. Ev[en]ing sat an hour with Emily.”

  In spring, feeling better, Dickinson sent a last burst of letters, some much longer than usual. Telling the Norcrosses she had “lain in my bed since November,” she likened her recovery to the flowering of the arbutus in early spring. Writing Charles H. Clark in early April, she asked after Wadsworth’s children and said she was beginning “to roam in my room a little, an hour at a time.” Clark’s reply, partly about his father, eighty-one years old and still vigorous, brought the response, “Fear makes us all martial.” She probably meant fear for others, not for herself. This was her closest reference to the fear of dying.

  In the end, nothing was as thick as Norcross blood, or as compressed as her final communication to Frances and Louisa:

  Little Cousins,

  Called back.

  Emily.

  She was alluding to Hugh Conway’s popular Called Back, read a year or so earlier. This clever, spellbinding novel, which she had found a “haunting story,” “‘greatly impressive to me,’” conjoined two of the decade’s topical interests—the telepathic powers of the mind and international conspiratorial anarchism. Early in the story, the blind narrator stumbles on the scene of a fatal stabbing and hears a terrible, muffled moaning. After regaining his sight, he weds a beautiful but apathetic woman who seems to have no past, the marriage being one in name only. Disclosures accumulate, and when the couple revisit the scene of the crime in a sensational chapter titled “Called Back,” the woman recovers her memory of her brother’s murder, which flashes on the narrator in every last detail each time he touches her hand. Her psychological recovery now begins, but is not completed until the narrator makes a journey into Siberia’s vividly described prison system and finds and talks to the murderer.

  This was the book from which Dickinson, as usual taking only what she needed, extracted her succinct and ambiguous exit line. Had she been briefly called back to earth after approaching the other world? Or was she about to be called back to the infinite after an unknowing and frustrating term on earth? All we know is that her riddling was as strong and lighthearted as ever.

  On the morning of May 13, after supervising the setting out of rhododendrons and azaleas and before leaving for his office, Austin learned from Vinnie that Emily was “feeling poorly.” He decided to stay within call. According to his diary, his sister “seemed to go off into a stark unconscious state towards ten—and at this writing 6 P.M. has not come out of it. Dr Bigelow has been with her most of the afternoon.” Perhaps the doctor was the source for the Republican’s report that she was “stricken with apoplexy” (had a stroke) that morning.

  The next day Austin noted that his sister’s stertorous breathing had gone on for a full day: “Emily is no better—has been in this heavy breathing and perfectly unconscious since middle of yesterday afternoon.” Mabel’s diary describes him as “terribly oppressed.” The “heavy breathing” went on for another day, and when it finally stopped he was shattered. His record for May 15 reads:

  It was settled before morning broke that Emily would not wake again this side.

  The day was awful She ceased to breathe that terrible breathing just before the [afternoon] whistle sounded for six.

  Mrs Montague and Mrs Jameson were sitting with Vin.

  I was nearby.

  May 16 is blank. Vinnie, too, was said to be “utterly bereft.”

  Taking charge, Sue composed for the Republican a long and discriminating obituary that explained Dickinson’s reclusiveness by “her sensitive nature” and dwelled on her fineness of mind and character. She arranged for Eunice R. Powell to prepare a white flannel robe and dress the body, which was embalmed by the local mortician, Ellery Strickland. He was surprised the deceased was “so young-looking, her reddish, bronze hair without a silver thread.” Harriet Jameson, given a private viewing by Vinnie, felt that “Miss Emily . . . looked more like her brother than her sister, with a wealth of auburn hair and a very spirituelle face.”

  The funeral, held in the Mansion’s library, was simple and short. The new minister, Reverend George S. Dickerman, read a passage from I Corinthians 15 that Dickinson herself had quoted: “For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.” Higginson, present for the occasion, said as if in rejoinder that the poet “never seemed to have put [immortality] off.” Then he read “No Coward Soul Is Mine,” the defiant poem by Emily Brontë that had been a favorite with her (“Vain are the thousand creeds/That move men’s hearts”). Viewing the body, he, too, thought the face “a wondrous restoration of youth—she is 54 [in fact, 55] & looked 30, not a gray hair or wrinkle.” Mabel Loomis Todd attended with her husband, as did Mattie, of course, but Sue’s presence is nowhere recorded, even though she had planned the funeral. Mrs. Jameson hoped that “matters [would] be a little more friendly” between Sue and Vinnie.

  The four honorary pallbearers—the president of Amherst College, Doc Hitchcock, John Jameson, and Dwight Hills—carried the coffin out the back door, and then Thomas Kelley and Dennis Scannell and Steven Sullivan and Pat Ward and two others who had worked for the Dickinsons bore it crosslots to the cemetery, their path a token of respect for the deceased’s love of privacy. It was a beautiful spring day, with flowers everywhere. The Todds joined in the procession.

  Going through Emily’s things, Vinnie did as requested and destroyed her sister’s lifetime accumulation of letters, an act she later regretted, but the huge and surprising cache of poems in small sewn bundles seemed too precious to burn. Resolving to get them published, she turned them over to Sue to select and edit. Sue’s idea, however, was to print, not publish: believing that “for all of us women not fame but ‘Love and home and certainty are best,’” she dreamed of a privately circulated collection of poems and letters. But after two years she had so little to show for her work that Vinnie turned to Mabel Loomis Todd, enlisting her as copyist. The more Todd worked, the more impressed and dedicated she became. She and Vinnie prevailed on Higginson to lend his support and know-how, and by November 1890 a selection of Dickinson’s work was ready for the late-nineteenth-century market. Todd contacted William Dean Howells, whose prestige, interest in New England manners, and long track record of welcoming brilliant newcomers made him a useful ally. He replied, “When you showed me Miss Dickinson’s poems, I did not half know how good they were. Will you kindly look over this review . . .” Appearing in Harper’s Monthly, Howells’s discerning assessment issued in the conclusion that “if nothing else had come out of our life but this strange poetry we should feel that in the work of Emily Dickinson America, or New England rather, had made a distinctive addition to the literature of the world.” Most reviewers felt the same, and Poems by Emily Dickinson quickly ran through several editions.

  When Austin and Vinnie died
in 1895 and 1899, the two deadly rivals and their daughters—Sue and Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Mabel and Millicent Todd Bingham—ended up with large quantities of manuscripts, which were brought out in a series of publications extending past the middle of the twentieth century. Bianchi had the more stifling effect on publication and interpretation, but Todd and Bingham also did their part to manage the legacy. The consequences of the poet’s refusal to disseminate her work in a faithful and orderly fashion are still very much with us.

  Something with an unheard-of brilliance and purity had come to an end, and something public, derivative, and dependent on a world of stumbling readers had begun. We may suspect the poet would have seen her lasting fame as a contemptible substitute for the limitlessness and perfection she had spent her life thinking about. But it doesn’t look as if we are going to find out.

  Appendix 1

  A Second Photograph of Emily Dickinson?

  In 2000 a dealer in bulk photographs offered for sale on eBay a photographic portrait of a woman identified on the back as Emily Dickinson. Neither the seller, Janos Novomeszky, nor the dealer from whom he acquired the job lot containing the photo, Stephen White of Los Angeles, was aware that only a single known image of the poet existed. This offering of uncertain provenance was noticed by a professor of American literature and culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Philip F. Gura, who was able to purchase the portrait for $481. *180 It is reproduced on page 2 of the photo section.