White Heat Part 2

Besides Austin, there was Vinnie, the youngest, less literary than her siblings and not as pressed as they by religious doubts or angst. Or if she was, she resolved them in more traditional ways than did sister Emily. Neither introspective nor inhibited, with large wide eyes and a soft, brooding mouth, Vinnie was pretty, plump, warm, and cheeky. She entertained a number of suitors, among them Austin's roommate at Williston Seminary, Joseph Lyman, whose affection waned after he moved to New Orleans-and when Vinnie's parents stiffly rejected him, apparently because of his Southern sympathies. There were other men, other interdictions; she received at least one offer of marriage. Edward, though he liked the young man, seems to have disapproved. A dutiful daughter, Vinnie trembled before her father even after he died and resented him a very long time. In later years, after Emily's death, she eagerly recounted tales of their father's tyrannies, unbottling years of pent-up rage.

William Austin d.i.c.kinson, 27 years old, 1856. "We're all unlike most everyone."

Lavinia d.i.c.kinson at 19, in 1852. "The tie is quite vital."

Mostly, and like all d.i.c.kinsons, she did not publicize regret. Instead she grew tarter, meaner, slyer. Born sickly, Vinnie was the d.i.c.kinson child closest to Mrs. d.i.c.kinson, the one most spoiled by her. Emily, in the middle, knocked against the sainted Austin on one side and her babied sister on the other. Yet her bond with Vinnie was, as she would say, "early, earnest, indissoluble. Without her Life were fear, and Paradise a cowardice, except for her inciting voice." Vinnie bucked up her siblings. "I, you must know," a friend recalled her saying, "am the family inflator. One by one the members of my household go down, and I must inflate them." Her loyalties were ferocious. "Vinnie is full of Wrath," Emily would remark, "and vicious as Saul-toward the Holy Ghost, in whatever form."

Their being unlike each other kept the sisters close. "The tie is quite vital," Emily acknowledged. "Yet if we had come up for the first time from two wells where we had hitherto been bred her astonishment would not be greater at some things I say."

"A dire person!" an acquaintance of Vinnie's declared. "Perhaps she partly explains her sister."

ALTHOUGH THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON'S father helped organize the Harvard Divinity School, his religious upbringing was tolerant and mild. True, the pretty Mrs. Higginson allowed only sacred music played on the Sabbath, but she considered all good music holy, and despite his family's regular attendance at Sunday church, Higginson claimed that as a boy he never heard of h.e.l.l, never read the Old Testament, never professed his faith, and, most remarkable in a man headed to the ministry, never experienced religion. father helped organize the Harvard Divinity School, his religious upbringing was tolerant and mild. True, the pretty Mrs. Higginson allowed only sacred music played on the Sabbath, but she considered all good music holy, and despite his family's regular attendance at Sunday church, Higginson claimed that as a boy he never heard of h.e.l.l, never read the Old Testament, never professed his faith, and, most remarkable in a man headed to the ministry, never experienced religion.

If Higginson slipped free from the cold clutches of New England Calvinism, Emily d.i.c.kinson decidedly did not. Sin, death, and the frailty of humankind were kith and kin to Amherst, where the old orthodoxy had not lost its grip. And d.i.c.kinsons were good evangelical Christians. Grandmother Lucretia Gunn d.i.c.kinson never tired of warning her children to improve the hour by declaring publicly their love of their Savior, and the younger Mrs. d.i.c.kinson professed her allegiance to Jesus Christ in 1831, when daughter Emily was but a year old.

Evangelical Christians, then as now, demand a conscious experience of conversion in order to receive G.o.d's love. Frequently inspecting their souls for sin-in England the evangelical Protestant William Wilberforce, member of Parliament, presumably kept a pebble in his shoe to remind himself of his imperfections-they also commit themselves to preaching the Gospel with the hope of enlisting more converts. Mrs. d.i.c.kinson, however, confined her vocation to her husband, a worldly man who desired worldly things, albeit with a measure of guilt. Not by nature a believer though plagued by the demon of doubt, Edward hewed to the orthodox theology of his rigorous parents, his rigorous community, his father's college, and his resolute and religious wife. "Were I a christian, my dear," he told her early on with deep regret, "it would give me great pleasure in antic.i.p.ating the happy times, when you and I should be spending that eternal sabbath of enjoyment, in company, which is possible to all who are redeemed."

He would try. He launched each d.i.c.kinson day with group prayer, led by him-"with a militant Accent," observed daughter Emily-along with a reading from the King James Bible. Still, he tarried two more decades before he embraced his Savior in an act of contrition and love. The year was 1850, the same year Vinnie, too, converted and the year that the revivalist Protestantism known as the Second Great Awakening, in its last phase, blazed through Amherst, setting souls afire. Edward, then forty-seven, said that at last he felt "the working of G.o.d's spirit among us." Others, however, remembered his conversion as typical of his parched character: the pastor had to remind him to come to Christ as a humble sinner, not as an attorney arguing a case.

But in 1850, Edward's nineteen-year-old daughter Emily was resisting the imprecations of the saved. "Christ is calling everyone here," she cried; "all my companions have answered, even my darling Vinnie believes she loves." Not she.

She had been resisting for a while, though she was not at all indifferent to the spiritual thirst her elders and friends slaked in conventional ways. As early as her fifteenth year, when the eminent scientist-theologian Edward Hitchc.o.c.k, recently installed as college president, held weekly prayer meetings at his home, Emily avoided them lest she be "deceived" by the pa.s.sions of the moment. The excuse sounds flimsy until one remembers how seriously she regarded the apostasy. "I feel that I am sailing upon the brink of an awful precipice, from which I cannot escape & over which I fear my tiny boat will soon glide if I do not receive help from above," she told her friend Abiah Root. "I feel sad that one should be taken and the others left."

Faith came hard. "I was almost persuaded to be a christian...," she again confided to Abiah, "and I can say that I never enjoyed such perfect peace and happiness as the short time in which I felt I had found my savior." But too honest to mistake a mere mood for a conversion, she admitted that she soon forgot her morning prayer, "or else it was irksome to me. One by one my old habits returned and I cared less for religion than ever."

And so she stood alone, tentative, jittery, unable to find grace. That she considered herself one of the "lingering bad bad ones" did not change her mind. "The sh.o.r.e is safer, Abiah, but I love to buffet the sea-I can count the bitter wrecks here in these pleasant waters, and hear the murmuring winds, but oh, I love the danger!" Higginson would seek danger on the plains of Kansas, she in the confines of her room. ones" did not change her mind. "The sh.o.r.e is safer, Abiah, but I love to buffet the sea-I can count the bitter wrecks here in these pleasant waters, and hear the murmuring winds, but oh, I love the danger!" Higginson would seek danger on the plains of Kansas, she in the confines of her room.

Later, to Higginson, she explained her recalcitrance by noting that as a child "I was taken to a Funeral which I now know was of peculiar distress, and the Clergyman asked 'Is the Arm of the Lord shortened that it cannot save?'

"He italicized the 'cannot,'" she continued. "I mistook the accent for a doubt of Immortality and not daring to ask, it besets me still." Her temperament nuancing, interrogative, unshuttered, she strove for the spiritual cert.i.tudes that her agile mind discounted. "Sermons on unbelief ever did attract me," she said. Paradox was her forte. "'We thank thee Oh Father,' for these strange Minds, that enamor us against thee," she would tell Higginson, grateful to whatever higher power produced a consciousness capable of doubting it.

Birds, flowers, the s.h.i.+fting quality of light and of mind thus const.i.tute her faith. Personal, pantheistic, and paradoxical, it was seldom tranquil: "Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly" as Melville explained, "this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye."

FROM THE AGE OF NINE until the age of sixteen, Emily d.i.c.kinson attended Amherst Academy. Her attendance was sporadic; coughs, influenza, or "general debility" often kept her at home. One teacher remembered the girl as slight and diffident but intelligent. "Her compositions were strikingly original," he reminisced, "and in both thought and style seemed beyond her years, and always attracted much attention in the school and, I am afraid, excited not a little envy." until the age of sixteen, Emily d.i.c.kinson attended Amherst Academy. Her attendance was sporadic; coughs, influenza, or "general debility" often kept her at home. One teacher remembered the girl as slight and diffident but intelligent. "Her compositions were strikingly original," he reminisced, "and in both thought and style seemed beyond her years, and always attracted much attention in the school and, I am afraid, excited not a little envy."

Operating in theological concert with the college, the academy offered first-rate teaching and, despite its pietism, a humanistic smorgasbord of courses: foreign languages, geology, botany, history, natural philosophy, grammar, arithmetic, music, even gymnastic exercises. (Higginson would have been pleased.) Regardless, religion underlay it all: instructors shall be "firmly established in the faith of the Christian religion," parents were told, "the doctrines and duties of which they shall inculcate as well by example as precept."

"We have a very fine school," Emily bragged to Abiah Root, no longer at the academy. On the surface she appears a typical teenager: roguish, affectionate, energetically devoted to her circle. And good-looking, or at least self-conscious about her looks: "I am growing handsome very fast indeed!" she joked. "I shall be the belle of Amherst when I reach my 17th year." (When Higginson requested a picture, she said she had none and went on to describe herself rather seductively as "small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur-and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Gla.s.s, that the Guest leaves.") Actually, there is one known image of her; a daguerreotype taken around that time. She is young, seated, solemn, and secretive. She faces front, unafraid, her eyes wide and clear, her lips slightly parted, her hair drawn back. She neither smiles nor frowns. She waits. She looks. And except for that expectant glance, she seems a creature of the stolid bourgeois world. Her dress is dark and well made, with dropped shoulders and tucks about the waist. She wears a ribbon around her neck clasped with a small brooch. Otherwise, she is unadorned except for the book near her elbow and the flowers in her hand, a symbol of her beloved herbarium.

The herbarium was a green alb.u.m containing 424 specimens of dried plants and flowers and finished by her when she was about fourteen years old, her pa.s.sion for botany as intense as Higginson's. Perhaps we should consider this her first book even though keeping a herbarium was the pastime of many a schoolgirl or New England dame. But how to separate the typical from the singular? This is the question underneath those well-worn anecdotes about d.i.c.kinson's refractory nature, stories that would be fragrant with forgettable petty rebellions if, that is, they didn't involve Emily d.i.c.kinson. Recalled her niece, Emily once "put four superfluous kittens on the fire-shovel and dropped them into the first convenient jar the cellar offered, her family being in church-her chosen time for iniquity."

This startling story likely contains a germ of truth even if the circ.u.mstances surrounding it have long vanished, and the real point of it may lie in her family's sense of Emily as unruly, hostile, possibly cruel if she did not get her own way. More credible is the story about Edward d.i.c.kinson's hustling his children off to Sunday school, insisting they leave the house immediately. Emily was nowhere to be found. After church, when the d.i.c.kinsons returned home, they discovered Emily in the cellar, quietly reading. Technically speaking, she had obeyed her father by "leaving" the house.

And more verifiable are those spasms of worrisome sadness. After one, precipitated by the death of her friend Sophia Holland in 1844, her parents sent her to relatives in Boston for a few weeks. That was like her too: to form heated, ravening attachments and to grieve inconsolably when, for whatever reason, the friends.h.i.+ps faded. Early on these attachments were to schoolmates like Abiah Root; then, to Sue Gilbert; and still later, to Sue's friend Catherine Scott Turner Anthon. So fierce was this connection that a scholar, writing in 1951, prematurely nominated Kate Anthon as the love of d.i.c.kinson's life. ("That her thesis is partially true," Elizabeth Bishop observed, "might have occurred to any reader of Emily d.i.c.kinson's poetry-occurred on one page to be contradicted on the next, that is.") Today Sue Gilbert is considered the prime recipient of d.i.c.kinson's erotic outpourings, but there were doubtless other loves as well, female and male, most of whom we do not know.

Chatty, affectionate, and hyperbolic, she was also compet.i.tive. In later years she was said to confide to a visitor that, on hearing Rubinstein play in Boston, she had abandoned her piano completely. This too may be apocryphal, but as her father's daughter she judged herself harshly, it seems, and despite her self-a.s.surance did in fact ask Wentworth Higginson if her verse was alive when she clearly suspected it was. At the Mount Holyoke Seminary, in South Hadley, in the fall of 1847, she was frantic about her initial exams, which she handily pa.s.sed-many did not-and despite the victory soon doubled over with homesickness, crying, "Home was always dear to me & dearer still the friends around it, but never did it seem so dear as now." Perhaps compet.i.tion produced too much anxiety. Yet Emily could hold her own.

Emily d.i.c.kinson, 17 years old, daguerreotype, 1847.

And she did when a.s.sailed by the proselytizers clucking over her spiritual health. "There is a great deal of religious interest here and many are flocking to the ark of safety," she told Abiah. "I have not yet given up to the claims of Christ, but trust I am not entirely thoughtless on so important & serious a subject."

Founded by Mary Lyon, Mount Holyoke was conceived by her as a place to save the spotted souls of young girls. An intelligent woman, formidably devout, Lyon intended not just to educate her students but to prevail on them to embrace their Savior and appreciate-especially the truculent ones-their awful sinfulness. Once they accepted their Savior with love, they too would save other impenitents from perdition. To that end, Miss Lyon held meetings, private and public, lots of them, meetings for the converted, meetings for those who hoped for conversion, meetings for the unconverted.

According to Vinnie, "There were real ogres at South Hadley then."

d.i.c.kinson's roommate was her cousin, one of the "established Christians." Not Emily. A tale from these days, credible and certainly suggestive of how others viewed her, was later recounted by another cousin. Emily said that when Miss Lyon asked all students who wanted to be a Christian to stand, she sat stock-still. "They thought it queer I didn't rise," she quipped. "I thought a lie would be queerer."

But that was after the fact. "I have neglected the one thing needful, one thing needful," she moaned at the time to Abiah Root, "when all were obtaining it, and I may never, never again pa.s.s through such a season as was granted us last winter." Again she had resisted, completing the school year as a "no-hoper"-one with no hope of conversion.

d.i.c.kinson family silhouette, 1848.

Then again, there was another place of needful comfort, where she could be herself, where grapes grew purple and peaches fat and pink, where the autumn smelled of sweet, wet leaves, and rich brown bread, freshly baked, came smoking onto the table, where the hay scented the meadow and cherry trees blossomed in spring. "Home," she would write, "is the definition of G.o.d."

SHE WAS ALLOWED TO RETURN, and the rest is history-or, since history depends on a historical record, speculation. and the rest is history-or, since history depends on a historical record, speculation.

During her first year at Holyoke, her father determined, for reasons unknown to us, that there would be no second, and if d.i.c.kinson went back to boarding school, which she thought she might, it would have to be somewhere else. There was nowhere else.

In the summer of 1848, she was seventeen, impa.s.sioned, smart, and increasingly strange. For years she had outwardly fulfilled all the ritual functions of girlhood: she sewed, learned to bake (her mother had a reputation for custards and crullers). She practiced the piano, went to parties, entertained the family's guests, and exchanged breezy letters with friends; she attended lectures, sermons, and concerts, and she presumably walked out of the Shakespeare club when its young men threatened to censor the bard's crudeness for the sake of the young ladies. In winter she tapped the maple trees for sap; in summer there were picnics. She gossiped, read German plays, and visited relatives in Worcester and Boston. Of all their social group, said Austin, she was the one always sought for her brilliance, originality, and wit.

But her friends were whispering. It wasn't just her willfulness at Holyoke but her indifference to social duties, the Sewing Circle, for instance. "Sewing Society has commenced again-and held its first meeting last week-now all the poor will be helped-the cold warmed-the warm cooled-the hungry fed-the thirsty attended to-the ragged clothed-and this suffering-tumbled down world be helped to it's feet again," she jibed. "I don't attend-notwithstanding my approbation-which must puzzle the public exceedingly. I am already set down as one of those brands almost consumed-and my hardheartedness gets me many prayers," she coolly concluded, her condescension laced with hostility and a modic.u.m of guilt.

She was firm. And firmly ensconced in her prodigious reading: Longfellow's Kavanagh, Kavanagh, Emerson's essays, d.i.c.kens, the beloved Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Brontes, Shakespeare, Tennyson, George Herbert, Robert Burns, Keats, popular novels. Soon her father's library would contain such items as Elisha Kent Kane's bestselling Emerson's essays, d.i.c.kens, the beloved Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Brontes, Shakespeare, Tennyson, George Herbert, Robert Burns, Keats, popular novels. Soon her father's library would contain such items as Elisha Kent Kane's bestselling Arctic Explorations, Arctic Explorations, the work of the historians Motley, George Bancroft, and Prescott, alongside all of Addison's writing and all of Was.h.i.+ngton Irving's, and the poetry of Byron and William Cowper. She read and used what she learned. Inventive situations, whimsical and parodic, some nonsensical, all bright and effervescent, spill out of her early letters: "vain imaginations," as she jested, "to lead astray foolish young women. They are flowers of speech, they both the work of the historians Motley, George Bancroft, and Prescott, alongside all of Addison's writing and all of Was.h.i.+ngton Irving's, and the poetry of Byron and William Cowper. She read and used what she learned. Inventive situations, whimsical and parodic, some nonsensical, all bright and effervescent, spill out of her early letters: "vain imaginations," as she jested, "to lead astray foolish young women. They are flowers of speech, they both make, make, and and tell tell deliberate falsehoods, avoid them as the snake." Yet she also complained of an excruciating melancholy that refused to let go. "Pain-has an Element of Blank-/" she would later write; "It cannot recollect / When it begun-Or if there were / A time when it was not-." deliberate falsehoods, avoid them as the snake." Yet she also complained of an excruciating melancholy that refused to let go. "Pain-has an Element of Blank-/" she would later write; "It cannot recollect / When it begun-Or if there were / A time when it was not-."

If we in the twenty-first century admire Emily d.i.c.kinson for her staunch individualism and her catlike ability, as James said of Hawthorne, to see in the dark, we need also consider the cost of originality in a sleepy village where comings, goings, and the least sign of deviance were of public note. "She was full of courage," Austin recalled, "but always had a peculiar personal sensitiveness." The price of nonconformity was loneliness. And yet one could manage nonconformity-and loneliness, too, in certain ways. Despite the pressures of convention, upper-cla.s.s women were frequently permitted eccentricity. They might live alone or with one another, not marry, or achieve the acceptable status of a talented maiden sister or dotty old aunt. These women-Higginson's Aunt Storrow, Emerson's Aunt Mary-were moral touchstones who roamed without a pack.

One cannot know to what extent d.i.c.kinson chose her nonconformity or to what extent it chose her, but over time her commitment to independence, poetry, and a handful of soul mates comes into clearer focus. Early on there was one special person, the young man she called her "first" male friend, Benjamin Franklin Newton. They met in 1847, after he, at twenty-five, had come to Amherst to study law in her father's office. Emily was sixteen and likely awed as well as flattered by his interest, for she considered his intellect as "far surpa.s.sing" her own (evidently she did not think many exceeded hers). He taught her what to read, she said, "and that sublimer lesson, a faith in things unseen, and in a life again, n.o.bler, and much more blessed-." He was her gentle, grave Preceptor, the t.i.tle she would confer on Higginson.

When his apprentices.h.i.+p to Edward d.i.c.kinson ended two years later, Newton corresponded with Emily from Worcester-unfortunately these letters do not survive-where he had likely heard of Wentworth Higginson, soon to take over the city's Free Church, a congregation far more radical than that of Newburyport. Higginson's flaming abolitionism and his incendiary preaching were by now matters of public record and, in the Free-Soil city of Worcester, approbation; his home was a well-known stop on the Underground Railroad. But whether or not Newton mentioned Higginson to Emily, she herself probably made the connection, for in her second letter to Higginson, plausibly referring to Newton, she mentioned the "friend who taught me Immortality-but venturing too near himself-he never returned-." She was alluding to his untimely death, in 1853, not long after he was appointed Worcester's district attorney, a position in which he was bound to encounter, or prosecute, Higginson.

Like Higginson, who was a year younger, Preceptor Newton was a freethinker, though a milder one, who had grown up in the brave new world of transcendentalism, where there were no sinners, everyone was saved, and G.o.d was neither angry nor intemperate. Like Higginson, too, he seemed to contemplate perfectibility, goodness, and the indwelling divinity of all living things. And he loved poetry. Shortly after leaving Amherst, he sent Emily a volume of Emerson's verse, which taught her, as she said, what was "most grand or beautiful in nature."

This was her conversion: beauty, its own excuse for being. "When half-G.o.ds go, / the G.o.ds arrive," wrote Emerson in "Give All to Love," a poem close to Higginson's heart. "My dying Tutor," she would tell Higginson, "told me that he would like to live till I had been a poet." Higginson should know that Newton believed in her. "My earliest friend wrote me the week before he died," she added. "'If I live, I will go to Amherst-if I die, I certainly will.'"

THERE WERE OTHER FRIENDS of course, chiefly Susan Gilbert, the temperamental beauty who married Austin and dwelled next to the d.i.c.kinsons for the rest of her life, outliving them all save her own daughter. Just nine days younger than Emily, Sue was dark haired, discontented, clever, and complex. Time and tragedy would harden her into the distant, stately woman swathed in black whom Vinnie, among others, hated and feared. of course, chiefly Susan Gilbert, the temperamental beauty who married Austin and dwelled next to the d.i.c.kinsons for the rest of her life, outliving them all save her own daughter. Just nine days younger than Emily, Sue was dark haired, discontented, clever, and complex. Time and tragedy would harden her into the distant, stately woman swathed in black whom Vinnie, among others, hated and feared.

That would be much later. Born in Deerfield, Ma.s.sachusetts, the youngest of seven children, she was orphaned by the age of eleven and taken in, along with a sister, by an aunt in Geneva, New York. Educated at the Utica Female Academy and for a term at the Amherst Academy, she went to live in Amherst with another sister and, resentful, never felt she had a permanent home or stable toehold in the social world. But she believed that in her marriage to Austin she had found security and position. She was wrong, but that realization would come later.

Sue was intelligent, self-possessed, and volatile, just the sort of woman to impress both Austin and Emily. Emily showed or gave Sue over two hundred poems, sharing more, it seems, of her private life with her than with any other relative. "We are the only poets," she would exclaim, "and everyone else is prose. prose."

Susan Gilbert. "Everyone else is prose. prose."

For a time Sue Gilbert might well have been the center of Emily d.i.c.kinson's erotic imaginings. "Oh Susie, I would nestle close to your warm heart, and never hear the wind blow, or the storm beat, again," d.i.c.kinson wrote to her in 1852.

Is there any room there for me, darling, and will you "love me more if ever you come home"?-it is enough, dear Susie, I know I shall be satisfied. But what can I do towards you?-dearer you cannot be, for I love you so already, that it almost breaks my heart-perhaps I can love you anew, every day of my life, every morning and evening-Oh if you will let me, how happy I shall be!

Certainly d.i.c.kinson loved a number of her female friends-Abiah Root, Jane Humphrey, Emily Fowler-with a pa.s.sion so startling it may have pushed some of them away. For, as a child wedged between Austin and Lavinia, Emily demanded of her friends that which she could never have from her family: unqualified approval.

Sue seemed to provide it, if temporarily. And Sue had earned the family's endors.e.m.e.nt, for Edward liked her, perhaps or particularly because she professed herself, and was admitted, to the First Church of Amherst on the same day as he. Soon Sue was occupying a place of honor in the exclusive d.i.c.kinson household. And there was Austin, too, the most eligible bachelor in the village, asking her to ride with him, if she thought it proper, the same summer one of her sisters died in childbirth. She dressed in mourning for the next three years-but the d.i.c.kinsons beckoned, and Austin was fervently tender. Soon she and he were vowing to think of each other at the first strike of the vesper bell when they would both eat a commemorative chestnut.

The d.i.c.kinsons would have approved of Austin's clandestine engagement had they known of it, but Austin kept mum, and anyway Sue was dragging her heels. She was teaching school in Baltimore, he in Boston, and in the fall of 1852, when Austin went to Harvard to study law, he barraged her with letters much as Edward had Emily Norcross, but Austin's were overwrought, clamorous, more plainly needy. His gnawing uncertainty caused him to worry that Sue did not love him as he loved her or misunderstood him or mistook him or regarded him amiss, particularly when he confided-he could not help himself-that though he had prayed and prayed, he could not ignore his physical desire for her. "Is there anything debasing in human love-does it rather not exalt & refine & purify our nature above all else," he desperately asked in one of the many drafts he made of his letters to her. "Has not G.o.d planted it in us-" [Crossed out: "Did not Christ teach that the love of a man for his wife should be paramount."]

As ardent and insatiable as Emily, Sue frequently fortified herself against the demands of others. Nor was she a woman to be trifled with. Over the years she would prove a mercurial friend, lover, and wife: unpredictable, hurtful, arrogant. Austin sensed as much early on. "It seems strange to me, too...," he unburdened himself to Sue's sister Martha, "that just such characters should have chosen each other to love, that two so tall, proud, stiff people, so easily miffed,-so apt to be pert...-that two who could love so well, or hate so well-that two just such could could not choose but love each other!-but we could not." Later these two would just as ineluctably choose hate. not choose but love each other!-but we could not." Later these two would just as ineluctably choose hate.

But the d.i.c.kinsons loved with greedy ardor, each in his or her own individual way, each an absolute monarch overseeing an intensely private kingdom, as Vinnie would one day remark. Together they were unified against the hoi polloi, with whom they believed they shared little. It was a matter of cla.s.s, intellect, and rampant insecurity. "We're all unlike most everyone," Emily remarked to Austin, "and are therefore more dependent on each other for delight." That would remain more or less true even when, as in the case of Austin and Sue, they were indissolubly bound by antipathy, disappointment, and self-loathing.

When Sue devised a clandestine visit to Boston to meet Austin, Emily, learning of the a.s.signation, offered to help out. And when Austin disappointed his fiancee, she consoled him: "I guess we both love Sue just as well as we can." Soon she was putting a bit of distance between herself and Sue, "a dear child to us all," she observed with defensive condescension or self-protection. For Emily's pa.s.sion-for physical love, for spiritual connectedness-palpably suffused her body and her imagination. "I feel as if love sat upon my heart, and flapped it with his wings": she marked those lines in her father's copy of the novel Thaddeus of Warsaw. Thaddeus of Warsaw. In Austin's copy of In Austin's copy of Lalla Rookh, Lalla Rookh, by Thomas Moore, she noted these: "I knew, I knew it by Thomas Moore, she noted these: "I knew, I knew it could could not last-/ 'Twas bright, 'twas heavenly, but 'tis past! / O! ever thus, from childhood's hour, / I've seen my fondest hopes decay." not last-/ 'Twas bright, 'twas heavenly, but 'tis past! / O! ever thus, from childhood's hour, / I've seen my fondest hopes decay."

Pining for Sue, she yearned, albeit with ambivalence, for the same physical love, vehement and consuming, that her brother longed for.

Those unions, my dear Susie, by which two lives are one, this sweet and strange adoption wherein we can but look, and are not yet admitted, how it can fill the heart, and make it gang wildly beating, how it will take us us one day, and make us all it's own, and we shall not run away from it, but lie still and be happy! one day, and make us all it's own, and we shall not run away from it, but lie still and be happy!

She continued: How dull our lives must seem to the bride, and the plighted maiden, whose days are fed with gold, and who gathers pearls every evening; but to the wife, wife, Susie, sometimes the Susie, sometimes the wife forgotten, wife forgotten, our lives perhaps seem dearer than all the others in the world; you have seen flowers at morning, our lives perhaps seem dearer than all the others in the world; you have seen flowers at morning, satisfied satisfied with the dew, and those same sweet flowers at noon with their heads bowed in anguish before the mighty sun; think you these thirsty blossoms will with the dew, and those same sweet flowers at noon with their heads bowed in anguish before the mighty sun; think you these thirsty blossoms will now now need naught but need naught but-dew? No, they will cry for sunlight, and pine for the burning noon, tho' it scorches them, scathes them; they have got through with peace-they know that the man of noon, is mightier mightier than the morning and their life is henceforth to him. Oh, Susie, it is dangerous, and it is all too dear, these simple trusting spirits, and the spirits mightier, which we cannot resist! It does so rend me, Susie, the thought of it when it comes, that I tremble lest at sometime I, too, am yielded up. than the morning and their life is henceforth to him. Oh, Susie, it is dangerous, and it is all too dear, these simple trusting spirits, and the spirits mightier, which we cannot resist! It does so rend me, Susie, the thought of it when it comes, that I tremble lest at sometime I, too, am yielded up.

Yet she could resist and she could yield, both simultaneously and, more and more, in her own way. She would not be caught or confined. "Captivity is Consciousness-/ ," she wrote, "So's Liberty-."

FOUR

Emily d.i.c.kinson: Write! Comrade, Write!

Although undergraduates from Amherst still came to call and she still rode out with them or chattered sociably, although the family still fed guests and coddled dignitaries as before, Emily d.i.c.kinson was gradually, imperceptibly, absenting herself from all forms of public life. She did not welcome strangers. They inhabited a marketplace of vanity and grime: the endless clack of the dirty horsecars, the slop on the cobblestones, the poverty, the crime, the pain, the jockeying and the mealymouthed palaver of Boston that, as Austin reported after Emily's visit, confirmed his sister's "opinion of the hollowness & awfulness of the world. world."

Home was different. "As the great world goes on and one another forsake, in whom you place your trust," Emily told Austin, "here seems indeed to be a bit of Eden which not the sin of any any can utterly destroy." Neither gritty streets nor s.m.u.tty gardens spoiled the view of the meadow from her bedroom window. No skies streaked with a mouse-colored gray, no rattling carts, no hollow, spinning world. Here was quiet, even if it was, some days, the quiet of emptiness: "And I, and Silence, some strange Race / Wrecked, solitary, here-." can utterly destroy." Neither gritty streets nor s.m.u.tty gardens spoiled the view of the meadow from her bedroom window. No skies streaked with a mouse-colored gray, no rattling carts, no hollow, spinning world. Here was quiet, even if it was, some days, the quiet of emptiness: "And I, and Silence, some strange Race / Wrecked, solitary, here-."

Her retirement-what else to call it, even if the word is harsh-mingled pa.s.sion with conviction and impudence with dread. She possessed an originality that pleased. It made her special. Yet withdrawal also springs from fear-the fear of losing or having lost. "I'm afraid I'm growing selfish selfish in my dear home, but I do love it so," tellingly she warned her old school chum Jane Humphrey, "and when some pleasant friend invites me to pa.s.s a week with her, I look at my father and mother and Vinnie, and all my friends, and I say no-no, cant leave them, what if they die when I'm gone." d.i.c.kinson clung to their physical presence; proximity was her defense against disruption, change, calamity, loss and the threat of it. When invited to visit her friend Abiah in Springfield in 1854, she again declined, carefully explaining, "I don't go from home, unless emergency leads me by the hand, and then I do it obstinately, and draw back if I can. Should I ever leave home, which is improbable, I will with much delight, accept your invitation;...but don't expect me. I'm so old fas.h.i.+oned, Darling, that all your friends would stare." in my dear home, but I do love it so," tellingly she warned her old school chum Jane Humphrey, "and when some pleasant friend invites me to pa.s.s a week with her, I look at my father and mother and Vinnie, and all my friends, and I say no-no, cant leave them, what if they die when I'm gone." d.i.c.kinson clung to their physical presence; proximity was her defense against disruption, change, calamity, loss and the threat of it. When invited to visit her friend Abiah in Springfield in 1854, she again declined, carefully explaining, "I don't go from home, unless emergency leads me by the hand, and then I do it obstinately, and draw back if I can. Should I ever leave home, which is improbable, I will with much delight, accept your invitation;...but don't expect me. I'm so old fas.h.i.+oned, Darling, that all your friends would stare."

Deliberate, gracious, and self-deprecating, d.i.c.kinson filed her renunciatory rhetoric to a razor's edge, her weapon, words, charming and implacable. Otherwise, she darkly hinted, there were consequences. Going to church by herself, she had to rush to her seat and, terrified, wondered why she trembled so, why the aisle seemed so wide and broad, why it took almost half an hour afterward to catch her breath. Yet knowing when and how to protect herself, she managed her fear, and evidently her family cosseted her. When her father suggested they come to Was.h.i.+ngton in 1853, he did not insist that Emily join them. Instead, she stayed at home with Sue and a cousin, John Graves, who later remembered Emily improvising on the piano late at night: he was invited to sit in the next room while she mesmerizingly played.

In 1855, when Edward d.i.c.kinson was a lame-duck congressman, Emily agreed to visit him in Was.h.i.+ngton. She and Vinnie stayed at the smart new Willard Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, just two blocks from the White House. The sisters threaded their way through the crowded streets, wandering in new ways, as Emily put it, greeting silken ladies and high-hatted gentlemen and by all indications enjoying themselves in a city where, as a future friend would quip, "everybody knows everybody and the n.o.bodies are the most clamorous of all." She took it in stride, confounding a Supreme Court justice, according to family legend. When a flambe was served for dessert, she turned to him sweetly and asked, "Oh Sir, may one eat of h.e.l.l fire with impunity, here?"

True to form, she refused a number of social engagements, pleading illness. Was.h.i.+ngton, Boston-it made little difference. Even Amherst grew too wide. Home was best. "I fear I grow incongruous," she said with a shrug.

THE TIME HAD COME for the d.i.c.kinsons to reoccupy the Homestead. Measured against the grandeur, the psychological satisfaction, and the conspicuous prominence of the family mansion, the comforts of West Street-where Austin would say he had spent the best years of his life-meant nothing to Edward. Until he could regain the Homestead, it would stand-just blocks away-a souvenir of his misfortune. for the d.i.c.kinsons to reoccupy the Homestead. Measured against the grandeur, the psychological satisfaction, and the conspicuous prominence of the family mansion, the comforts of West Street-where Austin would say he had spent the best years of his life-meant nothing to Edward. Until he could regain the Homestead, it would stand-just blocks away-a souvenir of his misfortune.

d.i.c.kinson 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 bal.u.s.trades, 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. d.i.c.kinson 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 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." 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 d.i.c.kinson, 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 gra.s.s 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 sure that all is well, lest one stumble upon one's hopes in a pile of broken crockery," she wryly noted. that all is well, lest one stumble upon one's hopes in a pile of broken crockery," she wryly noted.

With Mrs. d.i.c.kinson incapacitated, Vinnie a.s.sumed 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 d.i.c.kinson 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 Brontes, 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 d.i.c.kinson 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 d.i.c.kinson'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." when d.i.c.kinson 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 d.i.c.kinson'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: a.s.suming several voices, she used them to speak her life-as penitent young woman in search of divine a.s.sistance, 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 s.e.x and culture. A Valentine's Day spoof, in a way her first publication, appeared in 1850 in a college paper, The Indicator, 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!" 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-c.o.c.ks, 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, d.i.c.kinson 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 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!" 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 d.i.c.kinson 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 G.o.d-And then-the List is done-But, looking back-the First so seemsTo 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 a.n.a.logies bold and startling and composed with the technical precision of a Donne or a Herbert or a Vaughan, her images violent, corporeal, s.e.xual: He fumbles at your SoulAs Players at the KeysBefore they drop full Music on-He stuns you by degrees-Prepares your brittle natureFor the Etherial BlowBy fainter Hammers-further heard-Then nearer-Then so slowYour 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 pa.s.sivity, and sheer ingenuity-a spectacularly original poem.

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