White Heat

by Brenda Wineapple

  Though feeble, Mrs. Dickinson was alert enough to draw up her will. Her husband had died intestate, and she wanted to make sure her estate went to her daughters. Emily, too, decided to do the same thing, bequeathing everything to Lavinia. Austin could take care of himself and his family, she reasoned. “Knowing that his fraternal love towards me is undiminished, I am sure that his judgment concurs with mine in the disposition of my estate; and my beloved and honored mother also will feel that such disposal, while it is less onerous to her, will be as beneficial, as if I had given all to her.” Emily named Vinnie her executrix.

  In the meantime, Austin’s control of their father’s estate left the Dickinson women dependent, for the moment, on the residents of the Evergreens. Vinnie’s resentment of this situation, long smoldering, would ultimately result both in the publication and the eventual suppression of her sister’s poems.

  IN BOSTON IN THE FALL OF 1875, Higginson recited several poems Dickinson had sent him, along with his sister Louisa’s, to the assembled ladies of the Boston Woman’s Club as they sat expectantly in a large parlor, their feet crossed over Aubusson carpets, their silence rising to the high ceilings. Loyal, he would not divulge Dickinson’s identity even though, as he acknowledged, her poems’ “weird & strange power excited much interest.”

  He had also recited Dickinson’s poems in Newport, his literary friends arranged expectantly on the couches at Mrs. Dame’s, shaded gas lamps warming the room with spectral brightness. Enthusiastic, bighearted, brisk, and a little pushy, Helen Hunt Jackson was thrilled. “I have a little manuscript volume with a few of your verses in it—and I read them very often—,” she wrote to her old playmate. “You are a great poet—and it is a wrong to deny to the day you live in, that you will not sing aloud. When you are what men call dead, you will be sorry you were so stingy.”

  But Dickinson was not stingy with Higginson. (She had been called stingy before, as she had told Higginson in 1862, when editors “asked me for my Mind—and when I asked them ‘Why,’ they said I was penurious—and they, would use it for the World—.” She did not want her mind used for the World.) Likely she granted Higginson permission to read the poems she kept sending him; one doubts he would have done so without it. And again she had drawn closer to him. Their intimacy sustained by distance and a vague reassurance, often repeated, of another visit at some unspecified time, she invited him to Amherst again and again. “My Brother and Sisters would love to see you. Twice you have gone—Master—Would you but once come—.” She then mailed him as many as thirteen poems, much as she had when they first began corresponding. Five were sent in January: “The last of Summer is Delight—,” “The Heart is the Capital of the Mind,” “The Mind lives on the Heart,” “The Rat is the concisest Tenant,” and “‘Faithful to the end’ amended.”

  Though she was no longer sewing groups of poems into packets—the forty booklets of earlier years—she occasionally gathered several together, intending no doubt to put them in a booklet at a later time. This is the case with three of the poems she recently mailed to Higginson. Part of a larger set, they speak to one another as they speak to him: the last days of summer are a delight, though during them we look back, she suggests in another poem, because the heart is capital of the mind. But the mind also feeds on the heart “Like any Parasite—,” hungry, needy, in search of nourishment, and “if the Heart omit”—or, in an earlier version, “be lean”—it will “Emaciate the Wit—.” And the rat, who is the “concisest Tenant”: “Balking our Wit,” it shows that our conscious selves—our minds, our wisdom—have limits.

  Central to these poems is the image of the heart, and it’s even part of “‘Faithful to the end’ amended,” where Dickinson replies to Christ’s injunction in Revelation, “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.”

  “Faithful to the end” amended

  From the Heavenly clause—

  Constancy with a Proviso

  Constancy abhors—

  “Crowns of Life” are servile Prizes

  To the stately Heart,

  Given for the Giving, solely,

  No Emolument.

  Faith, constancy, loyalty, poetry—all ends in themselves, given freely without recompense or the slightest expectation of it. “The stately Heart”—capital of the mind—loves what or whom it pleases. Sovereign, independent, brave—it is in its own way immortal: it exists in poetry.

  The poem was also one of gratitude. Dickinson recognized that Higginson generously gave what he had to give, and she appreciated his constancy, his commitment, his articulation, at least, of the values she held dear. Particularly vis-à-vis her chosen vocation: “the writer, when he adopts a high aim, must be a law to himself, bide his time, and take the risk of discovering, at last, that his life has been a failure,” he had said.

  They were writing each other frequently. “I often go Home in thought to you,” she admitted. She wanted to send him a copy of George Eliot’s new novel, Daniel Deronda. “It makes me happy to send you the Book,” she told him; he promised not to read it beforehand in its serialized version. “To abstain from ‘Daniel Deronda’ is hard—you are very kind to be willing,” she replied. And they discussed her poems. The one they called “Immortality” (“‘Faithful to the end’ amended”?) had pleased him, he told her. “I believed it would,” she answered. She also asked to see some of his verse. “You once told me of ‘printing but a few Poems.’ I hoped it implied you possessed more—Would you show me—one?” He mentioned he would come to Amherst—the constant theme—but could not just yet. “I was lonely there was an ‘Or’ in that beautiful ‘I would go to Amherst,’ though grieved for it’s cause,” she answered. Mary was ill.

  She showered him with compliments. She reread his work.

  I sued the News—yet feared—the News

  That such a Realm could be—

  “The House not made with Hands” it was—

  Thrown open wide—to me—

  What better praise?

  Yet Higginson did not come. She wrote again. It was the spring of 1876.

  The things we thought that we should do

  We other things have done

  But those peculiar industries

  Have never been begun.

  Mary was sicker than ever, he explained. “I wish your friend had my strength for I don’t care for roving—,” Dickinson answered. “She perhaps might, though to remain with you is Journey.” Though she now frequently asked after Mary’s health, she calmly referred to her as Higginson’s “friend,” not his wife.

  As if she worried that his friendship depended in part on Mary’s approval, Dickinson reached out to this “friend,” dispatching notes and rosebuds and an occasional poem. Softening, Mary responded to the poet’s attentions with her own gift. “May I cherish it twice, for itself, and for you?” Dickinson replied, and to the Colonel she said, “I am glad to have been of joy to your friend, even incidentally.” At Christmas, Emily reciprocated, sending Emerson’s Representative Men, “a little Granite Book you can lean upon,” as she aptly called it—Emerson tried-and-true—and when Mary’s father died, in August, she tenderly commiserated. Wentworth thanked her. “I am glad if I did not disturb her,” Emily answered him. “Loneliness for my own Father made me think of her.”

  Totemic assumptions about Emily Dickinson and Thomas Higginson do not for a moment let us suppose that she, proffering flowers and poems, and he, the courtly feminist, very much married, were testing the waters of romance. But about their correspondence is its faint hint or, if not of that, then of a flirtation buoyed by compassion, consideration, and affection. Surely neither of them expected or wanted their dalliance—if that is the word—to lead anywhere specific. Yet each of her notes bursts with innuendo, attachment, warmth, flattery. She startled him—made him self-conscious—and that startled her in return. “Your letters always surprise me,” she had told him. “My life has been too simple and stern to embarrass any,” she declared, di
smissing with obvious pleasure, his shyness. He recommended Turgenev to her; she still wanted to read Higginson’s poetry. “I hoped you might show me something of your’s—one of the ‘few Verses’—the ‘scarcely any,’ you called them. Could you be willing now?” she asked in 1877.

  She said she consumed everything he wrote: if true, it was no small feat. “Thank you for having written the ‘Atlantic Essays,’” she once told him. “They are a fine Joy—though to possess the ingredient for Congratulation renders congratulation superfluous.” She beguiled him. She took Oldport Days off the shelf. “I was re-reading ‘Oldport,’” she said. She liked the final chapter, “Footpaths,” best. “Largest last, like Nature.” Then she added a poem, signing it “Your Scholar—.”

  A Wind that woke a lone Delight

  Like Separation’s Swell—

  Restored in Arctic confidence

  To the Invisible.

  The tributes did not stop. “Though inaudible to you, I have long thanked you.” She admired his gravitas. “Your thought is so serious and captivating, that it leaves one stronger and weaker too, the Fine of Delight.” She admired his probity. “That it is true, Master,” she wrote him in January 1876, “is the Power of all you write.” And wittily she admired his candor. “Candor—my Preceptor—is the only wile,” she reminded him. “Did you not teach me that yourself, in the ‘Prelude’ to ‘Malbone’?”

  She again broached the possibility of his visiting Amherst. “I almost inferred from your accent you might come to Amherst,” she exclaimed. “I would like to make no mistake in a presumption so precious—but a Pen has so many inflections and a Voice but one, will you think it obtuse, if I ask if I quite understood you?” She had not understood; he did not come, and likely that was better for both of them. Imagination kept them strong and constant and truthful, after Dickinson’s fashion. They spoke to each other without bounds, or at least that’s what they aimed for; letters drew them together as solid flesh could not.

  And she trusted him, or she counted on him enough to use him as a ruse when Helen Hunt Jackson requested that she contribute a poem to the “No Name” volume of contemporary writing soon to be published by Roberts Brothers of Boston. The contributors would be anonymous, Jackson reminded her, and if Dickinson wished, she would write out Dickinson’s poetry in her own hand. “Surely, in the shelter of such double anonymousness as that will be, you need not shrink.” Dickinson was silent. Visiting Amherst, Jackson again importuned the poet, this time in person; Emily must submit her poems. “I felt [li]ke a [gr]eat ox [tal]king to a wh[ite] moth,” Jackson afterward apologized, “and beg[ging] it to come and [eat] grass with me [to] see if it could not turn itself into beef! How stupid.” Dickinson didn’t budge. Jackson lobbied harder. “Let somebody somewhere whom you do not know have the same pleasure in reading yours,” she begged.

  Not wanting to offend the well-meaning and effusive Mrs. Jackson, Emily asked Wentworth for his help. “I told her I was unwilling,” she wrote him,

  and she asked me why?—I said I was incapable and she seemed not to believe me and asked me not to decide for a few Days—meantime, she would write me—She was so sweetly noble, I would regret to estrange her, and if you would be willing to give me a note saying you disapproved it, and thought me unfit, she would believe you—I am sorry to flee so often to my safest friend, but hope he permits me—.

  Dickinson was telling the truth when she told Jackson she was incapable of publishing her poems. Like her, they would not cross her father’s ground.

  If Jackson did not grasp Dickinson’s position, Emily could count on Wentworth to act as paternal gatekeeper. He could declare her poetry—and herself—unsuitable for public consumption. This was a ploy, of course, for she had published, she could publish, and she did not wish to publish except in the ways she chose, when she chose. But Higginson collaborated with her in her reticence, their unspoken pact sealed by their commitment not to each other but to art. Quoting from “Letter to a Young Contributor,” the essay that, fifteen years earlier, had brought her to him in the first place, she reminded him of what it had meant to her: “Often, when troubled by entreaty, that paragraph of your’s has saved me—‘Such being the Majesty of the Art you presume to practice, you can at least take time before dishonoring it.’”

  Misunderstanding her request, Higginson had assumed she had been asked to contribute a story, not a poem, to the No Name Series, possibly because its first publication happened to be Jackson’s own novel, Mercy Philbrick’s Choice. Under the circumstances, he tried to be as supportive as possible. “My dear friend,” he tactfully responded. “It is always hard to judge for another of the bent of inclination or range of talent; but I should not have thought of advising you to write stories, as it would not seem to me to be in your line.” The mistake discovered, he again encouraged Emily, as if he couldn’t help himself, to seek a wider audience—and the fame it would surely bring.

  Helen Hunt Jackson, 1875.

  She replied with typical savvy. “I thought your approbation Fame,” she gently said, “and it’s withdrawal Infamy.”

  He did not press her further. That, too, was part of the pact. But the unstoppable “H. H.” rushed in where diplomatic, well-bred Brahmin men dared not tread. Calling on Dickinson in the fall of 1878, she saw the poet at the Homestead for a second time, although Dickinson typically hid from everyone except children and Higginson. Friends of Vinnie’s who came to the house might glimpse a pale-robed Emily in the garden with her blossoms, much as if she were Rappaccini’s daughter, but as soon as she heard the gate bang, she vanished like smoke, and when Vinnie asked a group of youngsters to sing for Emily, the weird sisters sat on the second floor, invisible, while the concert took place on the first. Yet Emily had agreed to admit Helen Jackson to the Homestead and talk with her. Perhaps she considered Jackson Higginson’s emissary and did not wish to offend him, or perhaps she admired Jackson’s fierce tenacity and her even fiercer advocacy.

  After the meeting, Jackson again begged for a poem or two—she lowered the number—for the No Name Series. What about “Success—is counted sweetest,” already published? Dickinson finally relented, and her poem appeared in 1878 in A Masque of Poets, entitled “Success.” It occupies a “special place” in the book, said Jackson, “being chosen to end the first part of the volume.”

  After the book appeared, in its wisdom the literary public assumed the poem was Emerson’s.

  ON THE THIRD ANNIVERSARY of her father’s death, Dickinson hoped the Colonel might come to comfort her. “Though we know that the mind of the Heart must live if it’s clerical part do not,” she wrote to Higginson. “Would you explain it to me?”

  “I was told you were once a Clergyman,” she continued. “It comforts an instinct if another have felt it too. I was rereading your ‘Decoration.’ You may have forgotten it.” She wrote out her own version of his poem:

  Lay this Laurel on the One

  Too intrinsic for Renown—

  Laurel—vail your deathless Tree—

  Him you chasten, that is He!

  Higginson later said that Dickinson’s short poem distilled the essence of his, and when he first read it, he replied quickly, asking if she was still writing verse. “I have no other Playmate,” she responded, enclosing four samples and naming each of them: “a Gale, and an Epitaph, and a Word to a Friend, and a Blue Bird, for Mrs. Higginson.” The “Gale” begins “It sounded as if the streets were running” the “Epitaph” opens with “She laid her docile Crescent down” the “Word to a Friend” starts with “I have no Life but this—” and “After all Birds have been investigated and laid aside—” is the “Blue Bird,” sent for Mrs. Higginson.

  The first of them, “It sounded as if the streets were running / And then—the streets stood still—,” represents Dickinson at her most puckish—and her most attentive—as she meticulously re-creates the slightest atmospheric change, inner and outer, both before the onset of storm and after it subsides (“Nature w
as in an Opal Apron / Mixing fresher Air.”) The poem “She laid her docile Crescent down” is indeed an epitaph: “this confiding Stone / Still states to Dates that have forgot / The News that she is gone.” And the “Blue Bird” (the poem for Mary), which paid tribute to Mary’s strength, implicitly affirmed her own:

  After all Birds have been investigated and laid aside—

  Nature imparts the little Blue Bird—assured

  Her conscientious Voice will soar unmoved

  Above ostensible Vicissitude.

  First at the March—competing with the Wind—

  Her panting note exalts us—like a friend—

  Last to adhere when Summer cleaves away—

  Elegy of Integrity.

  The poem she called “Word to a Friend” is clearly and lovingly addressed to Higginson, though it’s not exactly a love poem. When copying it to give to him, for instance, she substituted “the Realm of you” for two earlier versions of the line, which read “the loving you” and “the love of you.”

  But if not of love, she was nonetheless speaking of something as expansive, precious, and vital.

  I have no Life but this—

  To lead it here—

  Nor any Death—but lest

  Dispelled from there—

  Nor tie to Earths to come—

  Nor Action new—

  Except through this Extent—

  The Realm of you—

  THE SUDDEN TRANSITIONS: It was Higginson’s turn. In the late summer of 1877, after long years of painful invalidism, Mary Channing Higginson died.

  “The Wilderness is new—to you”: Dickinson wrote him at once. Now it was she who could stretch out a hand.

  “Master, let me lead you.”