White Heat

by Brenda Wineapple

  Dickinson Homestead, 1858.

  In the spring of 1855, Edward paid six thousand dollars for the place—a bargain, he reckoned—and then forked over almost the same amount, it was rumored, for renovations. He needed to leave his own mark on the wainscoting and balustrades, and after overseeing six months of hauling, nailing, plastering, and painting, he had a conservatory, servants’ quarters, a cupola, and a new east wing, which opened onto a magnificent garden. To the west a veranda faced the Evergreens, the home he built, on his land, for Austin and Sue, married in July of the following year. And he planted a hedge of cedar trees to the front of the Homestead, as if to seal off the place from the street.

  Though important for Edward, moving proved hard on the family. “I am out with lanterns,” Emily bleakly remarked, “looking for myself.” Displacement shook the myth of home at its very foundation. Mrs. Dickinson sank into a lingering depression and seldom left her chair for long during the next four years. “I cannot tell you how we moved,” Emily wrote, recounting the upheaval to her friend Elizabeth Holland. “I had rather not remember. I believe my ‘effects’ were brought in a bandbox, and the ‘deathless me,’ on foot, not many moments after…. It is a kind of gone-to-Kansas feeling,” she concluded, “and if I sat in a long wagon, with my family tied behind, I should suppose without doubt I was a party of emigrants.”

  For Higginson, the settlement of Kansas as a free state would be a political necessity, invigorating and imperative; for Dickinson, a horror: families dislodged, their earthly possessions crammed into packing crates, things and people displaced, confused, stranded.

  She continued to withdraw.

  To put this World down, like a Bundle—

  And walk steady, away,

  Requires Energy—possibly Agony—

  ’Tis the Scarlet way

  Emily might tiptoe across the grass to visit Austin and Sue at the Evergreens, but if a guest should pull the bell, she would run back. “In such a porcelain life, one likes to be sure that all is well, lest one stumble upon one’s hopes in a pile of broken crockery,” she wryly noted.

  With Mrs. Dickinson incapacitated, Vinnie assumed her role, offering Emily the protection she needed more than ever. “I would like more sisters,” she sighed when Vinnie left to tend an ailing aunt, “that the taking out of one, might not leave such stillness.”

  To Vinnie, Emily’s withdrawal was nothing special and implied nothing morbid. Emily simply got in the habit of staying home, Vinnie later explained—“and finding the life with her books and nature so congenial, continued to live it, always seeing her chosen friends and doing her part for the happiness of others.” Perhaps Vinnie also suspected that if her sister was becoming less interested in setting foot past the front gate, she was exploring recesses of feeling, thought, and imagination—what Dickinson later called a “route of evanescence”—that made contact with the humdrum world superfluous. Emily told Abiah Root and Jane Humphrey that she was undertaking “strange things—bold things”—poems probably—and like the exceptional women of her time, mainly but not always poets (Elizabeth Whittier, Christina Rossetti, the Brontës, Margaret Fuller), she was choosing her own society, then shutting the door. That door, in fact, appears over and over in her poetry as an image of protection, solitude, and exits and entrances: “The Heart has many Doors—” but “Doom is the House without the Door—.”

  And as was the case when she played the piano for John Graves, she nudged the door slightly open.

  So we must meet apart—

  You there—I—here—

  With just the Door ajar

  NO ONE KNOWS EXACTLY when Dickinson started composing poetry, especially since after 1855 the record of her daily life grows thinner. There was no need to write to Austin anymore because he lived just beyond the hedge. Ditto Sue, and overall many letters to Dickinson’s friends have not survived. And those extant few, though charged with meaning, are often disconcertingly oblique. Yet they do tell us something. “We used to think, Joseph, when I was an unsifted girl and you so scholarly,” she half-explained to Joseph Lyman, “that words were cheap & weak. Now I don’t know of anything so mighty…. Sometimes I write one, and look at his outlines till he glows as no sapphire.”

  The power of words: assuming several voices, she used them to speak her life—as penitent young woman in search of divine assistance, as impenitent rebel unable to believe, as coy mistress indulging flights of fancy, as good daughter, smart-aleck sister, as lover. She traveled far, and like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando years later her personae leaped across time and sex and culture. A Valentine’s Day spoof, in a way her first publication, appeared in 1850 in a college paper, The Indicator, and it bursts with “what they call a metaphor in our country. Don’t be afraid of it, sir, it won’t bite!”

  But the world is sleeping in ignorance and error, sir, and we must be crowing-cocks, and singing-larks, and a rising sun to awake her; or else we’ll pull society up to the roots, and plant it in a different place. We’ll build Alms-houses, and transcendental State prisons, and scaffolds—we will blow out the sun, and the moon, and encourage invention. Alpha shall kiss Omega—we will ride up the hill of glory—Hallelujah, all hail!

  The hill of glory shall be made of metaphors far-flung, blowing out the sun. Her rhythmic sentences swing and fold, and though she did not imagine herself battering down courthouse doors, as Higginson would do, she declares that we can change the world through language.

  Yet world there was, with real almshouses and scaffolds and auction blocks: while at Holyoke she had dreamed the family field had been mortgaged to the local postmaster, a Democrat derisively called a Locofoco (after the matches a group of anti-Tammany Democrats used in 1835 when the gaslights had been turned off ). “‘I should expire with mortification’ to have our rye field mortgaged, to say nothing of it’s falling into the merciless hands of a loco!!” she wrote Austin, doubtless mimicking her father. But who was the presidential candidate? she asked in mock consternation. “I have been trying to find out ever since I came here & have not yet succeeded. I don’t know anything more about affairs in the world, than if I was in a trance…. Has the Mexican war terminated yet & how? Are we beat? Do you know of any nation about to besiege South Hadley? If so do inform me of it, for I would be glad of a chance to escape.” Leaping from the stuff of the world to the stuff of fancy, from concern to comedy, Dickinson was very much aware of the political life around her. One detaches from something, after all; for it was this world, steeped in ignorance and error, that she affected to spurn but could never forget, no matter what we might like to believe about her vaunted reclusiveness.

  But her real domain—her huge gift—lay elsewhere. “Write! Comrade, write!” she commanded Sue. That was in 1853. And when Austin picked up a pen, she put him straight. “I’ve been in the habit myself of writing some few things,” she swiftly told him, “and it rather appears to me that you’re getting away my patent, so you’d better be somewhat careful, or I’ll call the police!”

  Writing demanded commitment. Her frolicsome Valentines anticipated the witty irreverence of her poems; she told Higginson that “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church—/ I keep it, staying at Home—/ With a Bobolink for a Chorister—/ And an Orchard, for a Dome—.” She kept the Sabbath by writing poetry, in fact, and pledged herself to a life of it: “I’m ceded—I’ve stopped being Their’s—/ The name They dropped opon my face,” she exclaimed in one of her many declarations of independence. And since poetry implied freedom as well as commitment, in one way the critic R. P. Blackmur was partially right when he said Dickinson married herself; her point of view hers alone, she played off big and small, near and far, high and low: “When we stand on the tops of Things—/ And like the Trees, look down,” she wrote, altering perspective at will and, taking up the imperative, snapping out orders: “If your Nerve, deny you—/ Go above your Nerve—.”

  Poetry also offered a form of grace:

  I reckon—When I count at all�
��

  First—Poets—Then the Sun—

  Then Summer—Then the Heaven of God—

  And then—the List is done—

  But, looking back—the First so seems

  To Comprehend the Whole—

  The Others look a needless Show—

  So I write—Poets—All—

  Sly humor, poetic declamations, and peremptory commands aside, she also worked hard to be incongruous, her analogies bold and startling and composed with the technical precision of a Donne or a Herbert or a Vaughan, her images violent, corporeal, sexual:

  He fumbles at your Soul

  As Players at the Keys

  Before they drop full Music on—

  He stuns you by degrees—

  Prepares your brittle nature

  For the Etherial Blow

  By fainter Hammers—further heard—

  Then nearer—Then so slow

  Your Breath has time to straighten—

  Your Brain—to bubble Cool—

  Deals—One—imperial—Thunderbolt—

  That scalps your naked Soul—

  When Winds take Forests in their Paws—

  The Universe—is still—

  These were strange and wondrous lines: the musicality of “fainter Hammers—further heard” the unabashed brutality of verbs like “fumbles,” “stuns,” “scalps” the anthropomorphizing of “wind,” giving it “paws.” And these together create—with terrifying faith, angry passivity, and sheer ingenuity—a spectacularly original poem.

  And while writing verse like that, she fell up on Thomas Higginson.

  “Literature is attar of roses, one distilled drop from a million blossoms,” Higginson wrote in his “Letter to a Young Contributor,” words that Dickinson heeded well.

  “This was a Poet—,” she wrote as if in reply,

  It is That

  Distills amazing sense

  From Ordinary Meanings—

  And Attar so immense

  From the familiar species

  That perished by the Door—

  We wonder it was not Ourselves

  Arrested it—before—

  WHEN DICKINSON SHOWED SUE “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—,” Sue criticized the second stanza. The two friends went back and forth. “Your praise is good—to me—,” Emily replied, because I know it knows—and suppose—it means—.”

  If writing demanded commitment, it also required a recipient. There were Newton and other friends, like Joseph Lyman, George Gould, Perez Cowan, and Henry Vaughan Emmons, to whom she seems to have shown some of her early work; there was Sue, there was Higginson himself, who loved language and the outdoors, as she did, and whom, despite his “surgery,” she trusted. One need not understand everything.

  Her most perplexing connection was to the unknown person she addressed as Master in three letters probably composed in the late 1850s. Undiscovered until her death—and they were found in draft form only—these letters contain no clues to the recipient’s identity. No one even knows if Dickinson actually mailed final copies of the letters, and as in most things Dickinson, much about their origin is guesswork. The reigning hypothesis is that the Master was the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, moody minister of Philadelphia’s Arch Street Presbyterian Church, whom Dickinson apparently met while visiting that city en route from Washington in March of 1855.

  The Reverend Wadsworth, an oddball of the first order, thrilled parishioners with his overheated theatrics: he had a trapdoor cut into the pulpit floor so he might appear and disappear without having to mingle with the congregation, and a poet in his younger days, or so he had hoped, he was an ace performer, the religious thespian with brimming eyes, quivering cheeks, heaving chest, a “man of God of the old school,…a tower of strength to the wavering and distressed.” He reveled in the theology of John Calvin, calling it the single philosophical defense against blank atheism, and his sermons were said to rival Henry Beecher’s. “And the Church below, Christ’s witness unto the world, in all her ordinances and utterances, cries, ‘Come, come!’ And the Church above, with the resulting of white robes, and the sweeping of golden harps, cries, ‘Come, come!’” Though one reviewer found his published sermons florid, he admitted not having seen the eminent Wadsworth preach, which Mark Twain had. “But every now and then, with an admirable assumption of not being aware of it,” Twain reported, “he will get off a first-rate joke and then frown severely at any one who is surprised into smiling at it.”

  Likely Dickinson’s visit to her Philadelphia cousins included a Sunday sermon by the preacher she later called a Man of Sorrow. Was this Man of Sorrow the Master to whom Dickinson addressed her love letters? Jay Leyda, Dickinson sleuth supreme, doubted it though he conjectured that Dickinson initiated a correspondence with Wadsworth shortly after the move to the Homestead and about the time her mother fell ill. Dickinson did contact Wadsworth about something troubling her, for he answered kindly, referring to “the affliction which has befallen, or is now befalling you.” And in 1860 he called at the Dickinson home, “Black with his Hat,” as the poet later recalled, telling her “My Life is full of dark Secrets.” We don’t know much more than this, but it does seem that Dickinson turned to Wadsworth, seeking relief for an affliction that likely had nothing to do with him. And if the affliction refers to a romance with the Master, then the Master is someone else.

  Other candidates for the Master include the family friend Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican, or someone whose identity has not yet surfaced. After her death, Austin concluded that Emily had been “several times in love, in her own way,” and years later Dickinson’s niece insisted that “my Aunt had lovers, like Browning’s roses, ‘all the way’ to the end—men of varied profession and attainment who wrote to her and came to see her, and whose letters she burnt with a chivalry not all of them requited in kind.” (The last remark is a posthumous jab at Higginson, who allowed the publication of his stash of Dickinson letters.)

  The specific identity of the Master matters less than the letters she intended for him. There we overhear the “afflicted” Dickinson, alternately passive and brash, pleading and adamant, violent, poetic, secretive, and exposed. “I’ve got a cough as big as a thimble—but I don’t care for that—I’ve got a Tomahawk in my side but that don’t humor me much, Her Master stabs her more—Wont he come to her—,” she asks in the second letter, possibly written as many as two years later. Raging, scathing, self-destructive, she was very much aware of what she was writing.

  Evidently the relationship had progressed, at least in her mind. “Open your life wide, and take me in forever, I will never be tired—I will never be noisy when you want to be still—I will be your best little girl—nobody else will see me, but you—but that is enough—I shall not want any more—.”

  And there is the third letter, written near the date of the second (or so it seems.) Its masochism is harrowing, its initial image of violence almost vindictive:

  Master.

  If you saw a bullet

  hit a Bird—and he told you

  he was’nt shot—you might weep

  at his courtesy, but you would

  certainly doubt his word—

  One drop more from the gash

  that stains your Daisy’s

  bosom—then would you believe?

  ….….

  I am older—tonight, Master—

  but the love is the same—

  so are the moon and the

  crescent—

  ….….

  —but if I had the Beard on my cheek—like you—and you—had

  Daisy’s petals—and you cared so for me—what would become of you?

  Could you forget me in fight, or flight—or the foreign land?

  Couldn’t Carlo [her dog], and you and I

  walk in the meadows an hour—

  and nobody care but the Bobolink—

  and his—a silver scruple?

  ….….

  I waited a lo
ng time—Master—

  but I can wait more—wait

  till my hazel hair is dappled—

  and you carry the cane—

  then I can look at my

  watch—and if the Day is

  too far declined—we can take

  the chances for Heaven—

  What would you do with me

  if I came “in white”?

  I want to see you more—Sir—

  than all I wish for in

  this world—and the wish—

  altered a little—will be my

  only one—for the skies—

  Could you come to New England—

  Would you come

  to Amherst—Would you like

  to come—Master?

  If the master letters are aggressive, sexy, and an amalgam of fury, doubt, pride, and supplication, they also reveal a Dickinson in complete command of herself, despite protestations to the contrary.

  This is how she loved.

  Perhaps you think me stooping!

  I’m not ashamed—of that!

  Christ—stooped—until he touched the Grave!

  Do those at Sacrament—

  Commemorate dishonor—

  Or love—annealed of love—

  Until it bend—as low as Death

  Re-royalized—above?

  BY 1858, DICKINSON WAS FASTENING GROUPS of her poems together into small hand-sewn packets, each of which contained as many as twenty poems. She sent a number of these poems to friends; others she kept and reworked. And even after she entered them into booklets, she continued to alter them, dividing long stanzas, for instance, into quatrains, or shifting some of the punctuation, or substituting words. Later called fascicles by one of her first editors, these packets survive, all forty of them, and though they cannot be dated with precision, they reveal a self-conscious poet, never satisfied with the work at hand. “‘It is finished,’” she would say, “can never be said of us.”

  Though publication was “foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin—,” as she had told Higginson, she obviously considered her verse, as she famously wrote, her letter to the World. Naturally she sought recognition, though that was not her primary aim. “It’s a great thing to be ‘great,’ Loo,” she told her cousin Louise Norcross, “and you and I might tug for a life, and never accomplish it, but no one can stop our looking on, and you know some cannot sing, but the orchard is full of birds, and we all can listen What if we learn, ourselves, some day!”