White Heat

by Brenda Wineapple

  He deferred to her. Though timorous, she was decisive. She spoke in aphorisms, her poetry and letters demanding that the reader meet her on her terms or not at all. She replied to Higginson by sending an atypically long poem (ten quatrains), carefully prepared, copied in ink, revised, and then recopied, as if to make it precise.

  Because that you are going

  And never coming back

  And I, however absolute

  May overlook your Track—

  Because that Death is final,

  However first it be

  This instant be suspended

  Above Mortality.

  Significance that each has lived

  The other to detect

  Discovery not God himself

  Could now annihilate

  Eternity, Presumption

  The instant I perceive

  That you, who were Existence

  Yourself forgot to live—

  The “Life that is” will then have been

  A Thing I never knew—

  As Paradise fictitious

  Until the Realm of you—

  The “Life that is to be,” to me,

  A Residence too plain

  Unless in my Redeemer’s Face

  I recognize your own.

  Of Immortality who doubts

  He may exchange with me

  Curtailed by your obscuring Face

  Of Everything but He—

  Of Heaven and Hell I also yield

  The Right to reprehend

  To whoso would commute this Face

  For his less priceless Friend.

  If “God is Love” as he admits

  We think that he must be

  Because he is a “jealous God”

  He tells us certainly

  If “All is possible with” him

  As he besides concedes

  He will refund us finally

  Our confiscated Gods—

  Entrancing but opaque, the poem hinges on love and loss; the speaker acknowledges the departure of someone, perhaps her beloved, certainly her friend, and the departure gives rise to an extended farewell—a requiem of sorts. Because he is going: this provides the reason for the poem; that he is going: the speaker acknowledges, without sentimentality, the departure about to take place. But despite distance, or death, the speaker suggests that a real intimacy cannot be destroyed, even by God.

  She is also aware that the beloved or friend “who were Existence / Yourself forgot to live—.” To inhibit oneself is to forgo life’s ruddy colors. This might have been what she detected in his hesitations: he, too, loved the azure and the gold but would have preferred something else. Yet the poem is also one of assurance, for a “refund” awaits both the “I” and the “you” (speaker and listener): their friendship is a pearl of great price.

  As if she trusted him to eke out what meaning he could, she mailed the poem to Higginson, who saved it, but when he edited her poems for publication, he excluded it from both volumes. Maybe he didn’t think it good—it sustains too many referents, too many ideas, too much abstraction—or maybe he thought it much too personal to share.

  ELEVEN

  The Realm of You

  The transition to civilian life had been difficult. Writing again for the Atlantic, Higginson had immediately knocked heads with the pudgy wunderkind Howells, who had the gall to edit his work, and though Higginson kept quiet for a while, in 1871, when Howells apathetically remarked that he liked one of Higginson’s articles “‘well enough,’” the insulted Colonel marched the piece over to the newly established Scribner’s Monthly (edited by, of all people, the Dickinson friend Dr. Josiah Holland). “I hate to write in anything but the Atlantic,” he explained the change to his sisters, “but don’t quite like the look of things under the new regime & prefer to have two strings to my bow.” He wouldn’t publish in that magazine for another six years.

  It was also the end of an era. Boston was no longer the self-proclaimed literary hub of the universe (Howells himself would eventually relocate to New York). Its Radical Club folded without a trace, detractors laughing in print over its anachronistic self-importance. Younger writers like Bret Harte (whom Higginson initially admired), Howells himself (whom Higginson eventually admired), and Henry James (whom Higginson mistrusted) had been nudging aside the fusty transcendentalists of yesteryear, mocked by a sardonic Henry Adams as poorly dressed hypocrites who gazed out of windows and declared, I am raining. Thoreau and Fuller were dead, Emerson would suffer from aphasia, Whitman remained unspeakable. Dickinson was unknown. Melville was in eclipse, and only the French cared about Poe. Everything was changing. In literature, realism, not romance, was the order of the day.

  Spearheaded in America by Howells, realism meant, as Howells said, an accurate representation, not an idealization of reality: real people, their speech, their attitudes, their habits, their everyday business. Though he temperamentally agreed, Higginson had modeled his Malbone after a Hawthornean romance, just the kind of writing currently out of fashion. But to Higginson, style, not school, was the sine qua non of literature. Circumventing the debate over realism, he declared French prose writers to be unrivaled (he was thinking of Flaubert), and if their subject matter seemed a bit dour for Americans, who, as Howells famously said, wanted their tragedies to have happy endings, Higginson explained in 1867 that “they rely for success upon perfection of style and the most subtile analysis of human character; and therefore they are often painful,—just as Thackeray is painful,—because they look at artificial society, and paint what they see.” Valuing simplicity, structure, freshness, and a catholicity of subject matter, he would embrace Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Stephen Crane.

  The world had also been changing physically. Fire had demolished a large chunk of downtown Boston, which, like so many other cities, teemed with immigrants. Fortunes amassed in real estate, banking, railroads, and coal ushered in an era of voluptuous consumption—and building—nowhere better seen than in Newport, where the wealthy erected “cottages” as large as railroad terminals. Though he remained unremittingly optimistic—his reformer’s zeal depended on an unshakable faith in a brighter, better future—he despaired, too, that in America “everything which does not tend to money is thought to be wasted.”

  And at home he was miserable. He dabbled in poetry, puzzling over what he had sacrificed to his marriage—and his chronic gentility—and in 1870 anonymously published a poem, “The Things I Miss”:

  For all young Fancy’s early gleams,

  The dreamed-of joys that still are dreams,

  Hopes unfulfilled, and pleasures known

  Through others’ fortunes, not my own,

  And blessings seen that are not given,

  And never will be, this side heaven.

  Had I too shared the joys I see,

  Would there have been a heaven for me?

  Could I have felt Thy presence near,

  Had I possessed what I held dear?

  My deepest fortune, highest bliss,

  Have grown perchance from things I miss.

  But except in his journal, he dared not speak aloud the “dreamed-of joys” denied him: the children he never had. Instead he channeled his sorrow into writing of and for them, whether in his popular Young Folks’ History of the United States or his Atlantic essay “A Shadow” or one of his Oldport sketches, “Madam Delia’s Expectations,” where his identification with them is touchingly clear. A twelve-year-old orphan who works in a traveling tent show is adopted by two maiden ladies and yet so loathes the round of “well-behaved mediocrity”—as did Higginson—that she hustles back to the circus. But with the war over, Mary ill, Boston passé, Newport confining, what could Higginson do? Helen Hunt, in Newport less and less, had married William Sharpless Jackson, a railroad tycoon, and settled in Colorado; his sister Louisa had died; the circus was gone.

  Though paid one thousand dollars in advance for his Young Folks’ History, which would eventually sell far better than any
of his other books, he worked round the clock to keep his pockets full. Lee and Shepard, publishers of the History, declared bankruptcy. Higginson felt faint, complained of weakness, feared the stroke that had paralyzed his brother Waldo and killed his brother Stephen. “In spite of my fine physique this life of confinement & anxiety is telling on me,” he fretted. Mary was worse. “The walls seem only to draw closer around me year by year,” he groaned. He did not know how to escape or where to go. His trip to England had boosted his morale—he had met Browning and Trollope, Darwin, and Carlyle—but that had lasted only two months. He wondered if he was a failure after all.

  “My life indeed has disappointed me in the tenderest places and I have not had what I needed most—children and freedom. But how few lives succeed!” he tried to console himself. He went back to his writing. “The truth is,” he wrote in “Childhood’s Fancies,” an essay for Scribner’s, “that the child does not trouble himself to discriminate between the real and ideal worlds at all, but simply goes his way, accepts as valid whatever appeals to his imagination, and meanwhile lives out the day and makes sure of his dinner.” It was an enviable life. “The easy faith of children,” he concluded, “strengthens our own.”

  So, too, did faith in friendship.

  THE SUDDEN TRANSITIONS came in blows for Emily Dickinson, starting with the death of her father.

  A pillar of village affairs, as predictable as the church spire and utterly plainspoken—even his auburn hair shot bolt upright—over the years Edward Dickinson had remained a mirthless man, currying neither favor nor friendship. Without fail he walked the short distance between his home and his office and worked late into the night, when passersby could see the sole flicker of his lamp from the dark street. Conscientious and civic-minded and intending to put his beloved town on the Boston–Albany rail line and, having resigned his position as treasurer of Amherst College—Austin would replace him—in 1873 the seventy-year-old country lawyer decided to run again for a seat in the Massachusetts House. Never a Republican, he offered himself as an Independent in order to separate himself from the issues that he deplored and Republicans seemed to support, like woman suffrage (those women fist-shakers, he fumed, perennially in search of a weak legislature). One suspects he also detested Black Republicans, like Higginson, with their brash insistence on equality and enfranchisement.

  Dickinson won the seat, and in January 1874, as representative of the Fourth District of Hampshire County, he rode to Boston, took a room in the Tremont House, and joined his fellow representatives at the domed State House, where he was appointed to the Special Committee of the Senate and House on the Hoosac Tunnel Line of Railroads. The costly tunnel, essential to the success of the railroad project, had been underwritten by the Commonwealth and needed more appropriations. But democracy moves slowly, and the legislative sessions dragged on until June. The thermometer inched up, nothing was settled, and the State House glistened in the white sun of an early heat wave.

  On Tuesday morning, June 16, Dickinson rose to his feet to argue on behalf of appropriations for the Troy and Greenfield Railroad. His head felt light, but he managed to finish the speech and at one o’clock walked back to the Tremont House to eat dinner before packing his bag for home. He still felt ill. The physician he called diagnosed apoplexy and, according to Austin, idiotically administered opium or morphine, drugs that “had always been poison to him. Of course it killed him.” Edward Dickinson was dead by six o’clock.

  Emily, Lavinia, and their mother had been seated in the spacious dining room at the Homestead when Austin entered, a telegram clutched in his fist. “We were all lost, though I didn’t know how,” Emily recalled. Their father was very sick, said Austin, and he and Vinnie must go to Boston right away. The last train had already left. They would take the carriage. But before the harnesses were slung over the horses, another telegram carried word of Edward’s death. Alone in a hotel room: it was too horrible.

  Austin was particularly distraught. His tie to his father had not been warm, but it was deep, and when Edward’s body lay in the Homestead parlor, Austin bent down over the open coffin and kissed his cold face, murmuring, “There, father, I never dared do that while you were living.” This was a family that expressed itself in gesture: every morning Lavinia brushed her father’s white beaver hat, and Emily, as we know, stood long hours in the hot kitchen kneading dough for the brown bread her father preferred. Dickinson remembered her father’s last afternoon at home as special because when she sat with him, the two of them alone—Vinnie was asleep, Mother busy—“he seemed peculiarly pleased, as I oftenest stayed with myself,” she informed Higginson, and actually “he ‘would like it to not end.’” But the words had made her feel uncomfortable. She told her father he ought to go out and walk with Austin.

  The funeral took place on Friday. “Mr. Bowles was with us—With that exception I saw none,” she told Higginson. The shops of Amherst had closed, business was suspended, and neighbors and friends, spilling out from the large rooms of the Homestead, settled themselves on chairs dragged from College Hall to the Dickinson lawn. At the Homestead, Austin and Sue’s daughter, Mattie, scattered pale white flowers near where Edward Dickinson lay. Gazing down at him, Sam Bowles commented that he “seemed as self-reliant and unsubdued as in life.” Emily was nowhere to be seen; she stayed upstairs and wept and, according to her niece, for many weeks afterward wandered about the house, asking in a hollow voice where her father had gone.

  “Miss Vinnie told me that she and Emily feared their father as long as he lived,” reminisced a friend, “and loved him after his death.”

  The Reverend Jonathan Jenkins conducted the simple service, and then several college professors and businessmen from the town bore the coffin—no hearse—to the graveyard. They were followed by the officers of the college, Amherst’s leading citizens, and a delegation of Dickinson’s colleagues in the legislature. At the grave site the Reverend Jenkins read the Lord’s Prayer. “His Heart was pure and terrible,” Emily afterward wrote to Wentworth, “and I think no other like it exists.”

  “Though it is many nights,” she explained to her Norcross cousins later that summer, “my mind never comes home.” She dreamed of her father—never the same dream—and in daylight wondered where he had gone, “without any body, I keep thinking.” His absence was deafening. Austin stayed at the Homestead while Sue and the children visited Sue’s relatives, but that did not dispel his father’s ghost. “Home is so far from Home,” she wrote to Higginson, “since my Father died.”

  “I have wished for you, since my Father died,” she again turned to him, “and had you an Hour unengrossed, it would be almost priceless.” She wanted him to come to Amherst; he could not now but, naturally, offered condolences to her and the family—“thank you for each kindness,” she replied—but as far as she was concerned, she continued, he had actually given her something more precious. He had once written a poem that she recalled. “Your beautiful Hymn,” she reminded him, “was it not prophetic?” In the spring of 1873, Wentworth had mailed Emily “Decoration,” the poem that he’d just read at the Decoration Day ceremonies in Newport.

  It opens with a drowsy conceit: its speaker stands “mid the flower-wreath’d tombs” of fallen Northern soldiers, bearing lilies in his hand. “Comrades!” he cries,

  …in what soldier-grave

  Sleeps the bravest of the brave?

  Is it he who sank to rest

  With his colors round his breast?

  Friendship makes his tomb a shrine;

  Garlands veil it; ask not mine.

  As if struck by the banality of his questions, the speaker then turns in a different direction:

  One low grave, yon trees beneath,

  Bears no roses, wears no wreath;

  Yet no heart more high and warm

  Ever dared the battle-storm.

  The ungarlanded grave is that of a woman, herself an unknown soldier, and the protofeminist speaker, now “Kneeling where a woman lies,�
� strews “lilies on the grave / Of the bravest of the brave.”

  At first, Dickinson’s response to the poem was mixed. “I thought that being a Poem one’s self precluded the writing of Poems,” she had teased, “but perceive the Mistake.” The Master, as she called Higginson more and more, had entered her realm unbidden. Yet she obviously appreciated his salute to the nameless woman whose work is unsung, whose battles are unheralded, and whose life unfolds in private spaces.

  And when “Decoration” appeared in Scribner’s Monthly the same month her father died, Dickinson’s hesitation about it vanished. “It has assisted that Pause of Space,” she told Higginson, “which I call ‘Father.’” The poem comforted her; that her “Master” wrote it comforted her; and the notion that someone could see what most people ignored—someone, like her father, alone, intrepid, isolated—that, too, comforted her. Perhaps she even imagined the poem to be about herself; why not? “The broadest words are so narrow we can easily cross them,—but there is water deeper than those which has no Bridge,” she wrote to Higginson after rereading it.

  Wanting to thank him but not knowing exactly how, she would give him the books, one of poetry, one about action, that her father, before his death, had brought her: George Eliot’s Legend of Jubal, and Other Poems and Octavius Frothingham’s Theodore Parker, in which “kind-hearted Higginson,” as Parker had dubbed him, was mentioned no fewer than eighteen times. She would send these, she said, if he wanted them—and because her father “had twice seen you.” Dickinson, too, expressed herself in gesture.

  “MOTHER WAS PARALYZED TUESDAY,” Emily penciled a quick note on dark paper to Wentworth in the summer of 1875. “A year from the evening father died. I thought perhaps you would care.”

  In Mrs. Dickinson’s bedroom the shades were half-drawn, and the place smelled of camphor and roses. Over and over she kept asking for Edward, wondering why he did not come. “I am glad of what grieves ourself so much—,” Emily wrote Wentworth, “can no more grieve him.”