*66. According to Joseph and Laura Lyman’s Philosophy of House-Keeping (1867), “a column of air that can pass through the key-hole of a door upon a person sitting in a warm room will often lay the foundation of a disease which may result in death.”
*67. Years later, to avoid embarrassment, Fowler replaced “M” with “Ford” in the copy she made for the 1894 Letters. In 1958 this doctored version entered the Harvard University Press edi-tion of Dickinson’s letters, where it was dated spring 1854, consistent with the misrepresentation. The true date is soon after May 10, 1852, when Vinnie noted that Fowler was gone for the summer.
*68. March went on to a long and distinguished career as professor of English at Lafayette College. An early proponent of the teaching of Old English and the philological (word-by-word) approach to modern literatures, he became president of the Modern Language Association in 1892, succeeding James Russell Lowell.
*69. Her uncle Ebenezer White Arms graduated from Yale and became a successful lawyer in Aurora, New York. Her two older brothers helped found Grand Haven, Michigan, and made fortunes in timber and lake shipping. By 1870 each was worth well over $100,000, and one was a regent of the University of Michigan.
*70. Edward Dickinson was an early informant for the national credit rating agency that in time became Dun and Bradstreet. In 1850, when informants’ initials had not yet given way to the safer anonymity of numbers, “E. D.” reported that the firm of Luke Sweetser and William and George Cutler “is a no. 1.—money eno.”
*71. Johnson, Leyda, and Hart and Smith mistakenly assign this letter to late 1850 even though Martha had not yet arrived from the West. She does not appear in Vinnie’s diary prior to February 27, when the Dickinson siblings called on the Cutlers, an occasion evidently marking Martha’s reentry in Amherst’s social life.
*72. Emily was referring to the hostile letter Austin sent Aunt Elizabeth in fall 1850. Her reply, a fifty-stanza poem completed December 10, complained about his quarrelsome and verbose attempt “to show me up” and accused him of wandering in a transcendental fog and surrendering to the power of “full-orbed Fancy.” The next year, seeking a reconciliation, she promised not “to insist upon any recollections, which are not very agreeable.”
*73. There is no foundation for a scholar’s assertion that Austin became “active in the Know-Nothing Party.”
*74. “At the present day we hear much of a disease called Neuralgia,” Dr. James Jackson wrote. “This name is applied to any case of severe pain which cannot be traced to inflammation, nor to any organic affection.”
*75. This rebuke made an opening for Vinnie, who promptly wrote at greater length than usual: “Emilie has fed you on air so long, that I think a little ‘sound common sense’ perhaps wouldnt come amiss Plain english you know such as Father likes.” Austin sent Sue a complaint about “a sort of land of Canaan letter” from Emily, who was “too high up to give me any of the monuments on earth.”
*76. Here and elsewhere, words that are bracketed and italicized were erased much later by someone else but are still barely legible.
*77. A central character in the other Craik novel Dickinson may have read that spring, Olive, is the unloved wife, Mrs. Rothesay. The novel is partly about rejection—what it is to be “a thing sighed for, snatched, caressed, wearied of, neglected, scorned!”
*78. Although this person has been identified as the Reverend George Cooke, the parish audit shows that “Ph. Cook” was paid $99 on April 5, 1853. The original March 17 voucher survives, authorizing payment of $109. On it the tough and honest old man wrote, “Error of ten dollars deducted leaving it ninety nine. Phinehas Cooke.”
*79. That such passages were part of the oratorical culture of the day is shown by an 1852 speech in the House of Representatives, in which George T. Davis urged his opponents “to put their hands upon their mouths, and their mouths in the dust, and apologize.”
*80. The statement is followed by one of her few epistolary references to marrying: “Frank Pierce thinks I mean berage vail, and makes a sprightly plan to import the ‘article,’ but dear Susie knows what I mean.” “Berage” is “marriage,” spoken with a head cold.
*81. When Thomas Hastings of South Amherst took a hostile petition to the Supreme Judicial Court in 1852, the legal team that defeated him, Edward and Conkey, belonged, not by accident, to the railroad’s board of directors.
*82. To Austin after his return to Cambridge: “Did’nt you find it very lonely, going back to Mrs Ware’s?” To Emily Fowler in Francis A. March’s absence: “I fear you will be lonely.” To her after her marriage: “Sunday evening your father came in . . . I thought he looked solitary. I thought he had grown old. How lonely he must be – I’m sorry for him.” To Mary Haven (wife of an Amherst professor who took a new job in Chicago): “I know you are lonely.”
*83. One of Sue’s rough drafts tells of a nighttime descent into a “black cellar.” Another, “the most awful night of my life,” features bloodcurdling shrieks from a woman sleeping in an adjacent room and “subject to night-mare.” After waking her from “the clutches of her horrors,” Sue gave up “watching” with the sick.
*84. Years later, the references to Sue in Dickinson’s letters to Austin were erased. These tamperings, scrupulously disclosed in Emily Dickinson’s Home in 1955, have recently been interpreted as an attempt to suppress evidence of the poet’s supposed lesbianism. One objection to this line of argument is that she would not be likely to express her homoerotic desire to her brother and rival. Another is that none of the many erasures that remain legible are sexual, compromising, or personally embarrassing. “You shall have Vinnie and me [and somebody dearer than either of us] to take care of you.” “I was very happy last week, [for we were at Susie’s house(?), or Susie was at our house most all the time, and Susie(?) always makes us happy. Vinnie is down(?) there now].” The most reasonable inference is that someone meant to obliterate all references to Sue, no matter how innocuous. This accords with a statement by Millicent Todd Bingham in 1931. Quoting her mother (Austin’s mistress), she said he had been so insistent the 1894 edition of the poet’s letters not mention his estranged wife that he “‘himself erased from the manuscripts’” some passages.
*85. At this stage Austin also “collectivized” the romance. “I do love you Mattie,” he wrote his future sister-in-law, “just as well as Emily . . . & you all enter into all Sue’s & my plans for the future.”
*86. Which is partly why some of her poems look like a commentary on Bushnellian thought, particularly “A word made flesh is seldom” (Fr1715), which suggests that everyone, not just the poet, apprehends the vital new life that cannot be articulated: “Each one of us has tasted/With ecstasies of stealth . . .”
*87. The Emmons home was said to have “an air of state and elegance not surpassed in any of the old-time mansions of Hallowell.” When it burned, a large collection of books and papers were destroyed, perhaps including some of Dickinson’s letters.
*88. The “Gem chapter” (Dickinson’s phrase) was familiar to both religious and secular writers, as Rebecca Patterson has shown. Edward Hitchcock had preached on it at Mount Holyoke College in fall 1847. There is no sound basis for reading the first letters of pearl, onyx, and emerald as a coded reference to Poe, who had no provable impact on Dickinson.
*89. Nine months and a day after Ned married Mary Judson on November 30, 1853, she gave birth. When the couple showed up in Amherst with their baby, Emily sent a report to Sue in Michigan:
I called upon Mary – she appears very sweetly, and the baby is quite becoming to her. . . . Mary inquired for you with a good deal of warmth, and wanted to send her love when I wrote. Susie – had that been you – well-well I must stop, Sister. Things have wagged, dear Susie, and they’re wagging still.
Imagining what Sue’s life would have been if she had married Ned and had that baby, Emily showily suppresses her improper train of thought. The passage shows her fondness for touching on delicate matters and tr
acing alternative or phantom lives. The “wagging” things are (surely) tongues, talking about months and pregnancy.
*90. Years later, when Captain J. L. Skinner went fishing, he got a humiliating public tongue-lashing from Austin that was “blat[t]ed out in his rough way loud enough to be heard half a mile.”
*91. In the Italianate villa, the intended effect of “superior comfort or refinement” was achieved partly by making the kitchen less conspicuous than in traditional New England houses. Sue and Austin put theirs in an older preexisting house hidden behind and joined to the new and larger structure. Undergoing restoration at present, the Evergreens is open to the public on a limited basis.
*92. Sue’s only note to Dickinson commenting on a poem speaks of a stanza’s “ghostly shimmer” and how she always wants to “go to the fire and get warm after thinking of it.” She could almost be describing “fancy’s frost works.”
*93. Written in Edward’s hand and signed on July 1, 1853, at the end of Sarah’s week-long visit, this will was witnessed by him, Vinnie, and Emily.
*94. This cover-up has persisted in Dickinson biography in the repeated claim that Amherst College never lost a penny during Edward’s treasurership. In fact, as a former president, Stanley King, long ago disclosed, the school lost a third of its investment in the line its treasurer had promoted, and was “fortunate” to lose no more.
*95. I think it unlikely this person was a woman. In none of Dickinson’s letters can “master” be shown to have a female referent. She spoke of Leonard Humphrey as her “Master” after reading Jane Eyre, where this is Jane’s habitual term of address for Rochester. In Dinah Craik’s The Head of the Family, read two years later, Rachel Armstrong regards the man who has awakened her mind as her “master”; see above, page 248. In four of Dickinson’s seven poems containing the word, gendered language shows that this figure is male (Fr75, Fr133, Fr185, Fr764). In the other three (Fr395, Fr427, Fr697), the diction does not specify sex; perhaps it was taken for granted. In Fr395, “Sue,” erased, is on the back of the sheet.
*96. In 1858 the poet and columnist Mary Clemmer Ames was struck by a refined woman’s shocked reaction to a theatre placard for Julia Deane Hayne: “How utterly lost to every fine feeling of womanhood a woman must be, before she will thus allow her name to be published in the public street!” Ames explained this repulsion as “the spontaneous utterance of one whose life had been as carefully guarded as that of an exotic flower.”
*97. Decades later, as if to justify Austin’s infidelity, his mistress recorded his complaints about Sue. Second on the list was “Entire disappointment in all so-called married life.” Surviving letters make it doubtful that this disillusionment set in before the mid-1860s.
*98. In 1863, on the other hand, writing to Louisa and Frances Norcross, Dickinson spoke tenderly of Matthews’s grief for his girl. Then again, when President Garfield was shot two decades later, she flippantly equated flowers and people: “Vinnie lost her Sultans too – it was ‘Guiteau’ year – Presidents and Sultans were alike doomed.”
*99. Decades later, as shown in the facsimile edition of Emily’s manuscript books, an unknown hand, possibly Austin’s, made a laborious effort to obliterate the poem.
*100.
Delayed till she had ceased to know Fr67
So bashful when I spied her! Fr70
Went up a year this evening! Fr72
One dignity delays for all Fr77
I hide myself within my flower Fr80
She bore it till the simple veins Fr81
We should not mind so small a flower Fr82
On such a night, or such a night Fr84
In rags mysterious as these Fr102
In lands I never saw – they say Fr108
So from the mould Fr110
Ambition cannot find him Fr115
A poor – torn heart – a tattered heart Fr125
*101. It was partly because Sewall and Leyda owed a great deal to Millicent Todd Bingham that they softpedaled Sue’s importance for the poet. Anxious to restore her centrality, a more recent group of scholars, Martha Nell Smith and Ellen Louise Hart, has stressed personal erotics. Both factions radically simplify the complex social and literary functions Sue performed for ED.
*102. That Bowles entered the poet’s life after the generally received date of her first “Master” draft, spring 1858, proves he could not have been Master.
*103. One of his grandchildren was Chester Bowles, the foreign-policy maven whose vision of Southeast Asian economic development was ignored by President John F. Kennedy and his cold warriors.
*104. In the 1894 edition of Dickinson’s letters, this sentence was dropped, as were all other references to Austin’s wife.
*105. Bowles’s letters to Runkle, whom he once called “the one best woman journalist in America,” are in the Samuel Bowles Papers at Yale. On the back of one, someone, probably his son Samuel III, listed six dynamite women he was friends with: Mrs. Runkle, Rose Kingsley, Mrs. [Mary Clemmer] Ames, Emily Dickinson, Mrs. Beasley, Sue Dickinson.
*106. Some readers seem to make Dickinson the standard-bearer for a creative manuscript-based female culture writing in resistance to a standardized male print-based culture. The proponents of this view have not been aware that a woman ran the Republican’s literary department during the period of the poet’s greatest productivity.
*107. A confidential note to Sue and Austin indicates Ames’s position in Samuel’s regard: “I enclose a fresh letter from Mrs Ames—very like her, indeed. Please burn it, & forget it.” There is no reason to think he discarded any of Emily’s communications.
*108. Three possible recipients are the “lady friend” who came with Samuel to the mowing machine trial, Mary Bowles, and Sue, whose obituary of Dickinson uses “surreptitiously” in connection with the unauthorized release of her work. There is no firm evidence that Dickinson sanctioned the appearance of any of the ten poems published in her lifetime. Disdain for payment (“Publication – is the Auction/Of the Mind of Man”) can’t have been the motive for withholding her work from the Republican, since, as Bowles admitted, the paper “never paid for poems.”
In one of history’s endless twists, the private circulation of manuscripts among privileged upper-class readers is now seen by some of Dickinson’s readers as a politically radical act.
*109. Dickinson scholars prefer “Louise” to “Louisa,” often referring to her as Loo and to Frances as Fanny, the pet names the poet is assumed to have used. In fact, Louisa was the correct legal name, and, judging by Frances’s transcripts of the poet’s letters, Emily variously addressed them as Fan or Fanny, Lou, Loo, Loulie, Loolie, or Louisa (with an “a”).
*110. In a passage that was dropped from the 1894 edition of this letter and has never seen print, the poet informed her cousins that “Austin, whom Lou and Fanny might not think so thoughtful, tells how their mother and father were all the relatives he had who cared for him, a boy, and such as he could do for their little girls, would be gladly done. – says ‘Lou and Fanny are alone’ with a lower tone, and Vinnie and I reply ‘no.’ Sweet that some know better.”
*111. Built of large granite blocks and topped with battlements, this church, still intact after years of neglect, makes visible the fighting evangelicalism that erected it. When its first minister, the Reverend Lyman Beecher, resigned, it was to run the Cincinnati seminary that hired Dickinson’s grandfather.
*112. The Reverend William A. Stearns was pastor of this church before becoming president of Amherst College in 1854. Today the stately edifice bears the name Igreja Presbiteriana Cristo Rei.
*113. Dated 1864? by Johnson, this letter, L298, was correctly moved to December 1862 by Leyda, who found an announcement in the Republican of a new poem by Robert Browning. Getting the date right is crucial: it shows that, on the eve of her most productive year, 1863, the poet made the connection between the war and her growing powers.
*114. Edward’s letters to Earle give evidence of a continui
ng and enlightened concern. In 1868 he was “pleased with . . . the happy results of experiments, upon diseased bodies & minds.” After reading Earle’s medical school lectures on mental illness, he deprecated the “erroneous views . . . entertained by the community” and looked forward to the day when “Insanity [would be] generally recognised as a disease.”
*115. The allusion is to Jeremiah 13:23, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?” and the corresponding hymn in Watts and Select: “Let the wild leopards of the wood/Put off the spots that nature gives. . . .”
*116. In her distinguished study of twentieth-century women writers, Writing beyond the Ending, Rachel Blau DuPlessis suggests that nineteenth-century narratives about women contained two opposite strands, quest versus love, and that the standard ending subordinated the former to the latter. Dickinson clearly “wrote beyond the ending,” like more modern writers, yet, for her as for Rachel Armstrong, quest was saturated with desire, and erotic love led to wildness rather than to social order.
*117. The phrase “like you,” one of many interlineated additions, makes explicit the recipient’s gender and thus stands in the way of those who would like Master to be female. Martha Nell Smith has conducted something of a scorched-earth attack on these two words, calling them “redundant,” declaring the handwriting comes from a “much different time,” even suggesting they are a fraudulent interpolation “by whomever.” I have examined the manuscript and can see no basis for the last two claims.
*118. If the newly discovered photograph of “Emily Dickinson” (reproduced on page 2 of the photo section) is authenticated, as I predict it will be, its history may look something like this: sent by Dickinson to Wadsworth shortly before he left for California in 1862; entrusted before or after his death in 1882 to his friends the Clarks; discreetly kept for the next third of a century by Charles H., who couldn’t reveal its existence for fear of the inevitable gossip about the minister and the poet; and finally falling between the cracks when this faithful friend died with “no near relatives” to care for his personal effects.
My Wars Are Laid Away in Books Page 70