My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson VI

I've finally reached the end of this long biography, and here is the wrap-up.  

Her 1862-to-1865 period, when she first corresponded with Higginson, was probably her most productive. However, she remained reclusive and did not meet Higginson until 1870, when he visited Amherst. Fortunately, he wrote a detailed account of this visit. So much of this book is a recording of her interactions with family members and routine acquaintances that I found Higginson's impressions far more useful: he was a worldly outsider and far better positioned to make an objective evaluation. He found the household strikingly individualistic.

In the entry hall he heard a "step like a pattering child's & in glided a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair...in a very plain & exquisitely clean white pique & a blue net worsted shawl."...Twice he used the word "childlike." His hostess presented him with two day lilies as her "introduction," then asking him to "[f]orgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers & hardly know what I say," she began talking. She talked "continuously" but "deferentially–sometimes stopping to ask me to talk instead of her"–and then resuming....he judged her to be "thoroughly ingenuous & simple." Although he doubted his wife would care for her, he considered much of what she said "wise."

"Her father was not severe I should think but remote."

"I was never with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her." Decades later, in a final attempt to sum up his impression, he availed himself of a newer psychological vocabulary: "The impression undoubtedly made on me was that of an excess of tension, and something abnormal." 

As Habegger notes, this is probably the best existing description of Dickinson and her household. Emily became increasingly reclusive as she aged, and she was only thirty-nine at the time of this visit. Higginson saw her only one other time, in 1873, and that appears to have been uneventful.

Edward, her father, died in 1874, at the age of seventy-one. In true patriarchal fashion, he left no will, and it was simply assumed that Austin would thereafter take control of the household, with the three women having no rights or inheritances. From here on, the book is mainly a sequence of deaths. In 1882, her probable "Master," the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, died. Emily came to know the popular judge, Otis Phillips Lord. He was about eighteen years older than her. His wife had died in 1877, and, after Emily's mother died in 1882, he apparently proposed to Emily. She did not accept. It's probably just as well, because he died in 1884. Emily herself died in 1886, at the age of fifty-five. At the time, the stated medical cause of death was basically mumbo jumbo. A more recent analysis suggests that she died from hypertension, which would certainly make sense.

 Austin was having an affair with Mabel Loomis Todd (1856-1932) then. She was the wife of an astronomy professor at Amherst. She was a spirited person, liked sex, and had an open marriage – nothing like any of the Dickinsons. Todd worked with Higginson to produce the first book of Emily's poems. There has been criticism of their editing, but the book sold exceptionally well, and Emily's reputation as a poet was immediately established.

Habegger reproduces the entire title poem, which is about death:

My Wars are laid away in Books—

I have one Battle more—

A Foe whom I have never seen

But oft has scanned me o'er–

And hesitated me between

And others at my side,

But chose the best—Neglecting me—till

All the rest have died—

How sweet if I am not forgot

By Chums that passed away—

Since Playmates at threescore and ten

Are such a scarcity—

I've been thinking about the main influences on Emily Dickinson. Although she apparently admired Elizabeth Barrett Browning, her style is probably much closer to that of Emily Brontë. She also admired George Eliot, but George Eliot was vastly more knowledgeable than Emily – and a bad poet. While Emily seems to have been well-read – apparently she did like Henry David Thoreau – as a practical matter she was challenged by direct interactions with people, which excluded her from the kind of knowledge that makes good novelists. Still, I find some of Dickinson's poems to be remarkable little gems.

My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson V

Emily Dickinson left behind three unsent drafts to a person who was addressed as "Master." This has caused a great deal of scholarly speculation, which, according to Habegger, isn't really all that important. One possible candidate was the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, who had visited her at least once. They appear to have been written in the late 1850's and early 1860's. At a later date, in April, 1862, she read the article in Atlantic Monthly, written by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, which I discussed earlier here in connection with Renée Bergland's book, and Higginson thereafter became her de facto "Master," though probably not at an exalted level. The intellectual men who attracted Dickinson's attention tended to have religious training, and that even included Higginson.

Habegger's book is full of minutiae regarding boring bourgeois life in the last days of Puritan New England. He is dutifully reporting it, given that he is a scholar of the subject, but, understandably, this is not a particularly exciting topic, to me at least. Even so, it is still of some value to know that the people in Dickinson's life faced problems different from the ones we have now. Besides the Civil War, with a lack of effective contraception and a primitive state in medicine, people tended to have enormous families, and they were often ill, dying or going bankrupt. Dickinson herself had eye problems and spent a lot of time in Cambridge getting treatments.

As I am reaching the end of the book, I am tending to think about Dickinson in the context of the history of poetry. Since the only other poet I know much about is Denise Levertov, I am often making comparisons. They had a few things in common and a few major differences. They both had hard times establishing their footings as poets. Both wrestled with their religious backgrounds. Levertov's father was a fringe Jewish theologian who came to recognize Christ, and she grew up admiring Rilke. Dickinson's family consisted of rather bourgeois lawyers. Her brother, Austin, lived next door in a showy house; he became an art aficionado, making special trips to New York City to purchase art objects, and this perfectly fits my model of a social climber. Levertov had greater political proclivities than Dickinson; her sister had traveled to Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and Denise actively opposed the Vietnam War. Both Dickinson and Levertov had very strong religious interests, and in this area, Dickinson seems to have been more sophisticated because of her awareness of science, as discussed in Natural Magic. Levertov, on the other hand, was scientifically illiterate, and she seemed to go off into a haphazard religious exploration at the end of her life. 

I was intrigued that both Dickinson and Levertov used the word "Master" to designate people who could guide them in their poetic development. In Dickinson's case, there was no existing blueprint for female poets in the U.S. at the time. She really wanted guidance, and I don't think that she ever found it. By 1862, she had settled into the idea of writing for posterity, and there does not seem to be any evidence that she wanted a public life. She was bound by her family culture and the artistic environment of Massachusetts at the time. Thus, for her, Walt Whitman was not an acceptable or even a readable model, and even Emerson and Thoreau may have been too risqué for her. In Levertov's case, she knew from an early age that she wanted to be a poet and unselfconsciously engaged in networking until she became established. Her transition to the poetry ecosystem within the U.S. after World War II was challenging, and she at one point designated Robert Duncan as her "Master." Because she had worked in Massachusetts for several years, she may have picked up the term from Dickinson. 

Dickinson and Levertov are two of my favorite poets, and they both occasionally seem like mystical visionaries. At the time and place of Dickinson's life, it was impossible for her to have experiences similar to those of Levertov. Thus, what we see is a restricted artistic expression, which I think demonstrates a restrained challenge to religious dogma, along with a remarkable linguistic inventiveness. Levertov lived during a far more propitious time for female poets, and her poems cover a wider range of human experience than Dickinson was capable. However, because Dickinson's work was essentially private during her lifetime, she never had to make compromises for commercial considerations or the prevailing views of the arts crowd.

I expect to finish the book soon and will make a final post.