The Life and MInd of Emily Dickinson

Front matter

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Dedication

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Foreword

MIRACLE IE MGM Me MEE NEE NEY

OME DEPENDABLE LIFE OF EMILY DICKINSON SHOULD

have been written thirty-five years ago when her

poetry first encountered fame; now, a hundred years after her birth, we realize our loss. Only a small number of the twelve hundred poems catalogued in 1892* have been published; a scandal and a lawsuit ended the editing of the poems and deterred the memoir some friend might have written. As for a detailed life, there seemed to be no life to write, in the professional manner of the nineties, and so none was written.

By 1900 the lively memories of the old people ceased, one by one, and those who might have recalled an Emily in a coloured dress gave place to those who could remember only the latter half of her Amherst existence. For these people, some of them still alive, Emily was always

1 “ After her death her sister and her friends were amazed at the immense amount of literary material which she had left behind her. Besides the poems collected in the first volume, which is now in its eleventh edition, and in the second series, which has reached a sale of over five thousand since November, there are at least twelve hundred poems catalogued, and no one knows how many more ina mass of notes manuscript found among her possessions — enough to make several stout volumes.” — From the Book Buyer, Vol. ix, no. 4 (May 1892), pp. 157-8.

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™ FOREWORD F just going through a door or into the house as they came near. We do not remember much but legend of a person when we have only half seen a hurrying whiteness.

Where shall we find her, then? Where is she hidden? For there was an Emily Dickinson in the town of Amherst. We can see her own door-posts, and, beside her window, the pine-tree she looked at. And her name is cut in veritable stone in the West Cemetery, to say that she undoubtedly lived before she died. Her words say that she lived —and to her words, nearer to her life than stone and tree, we must return to find her. There is no unspeakable mystery in her words — none was ever intended. On several occasions Emily greatly embarrassed friends by telling more of her life than they were prepared to hear; she told more than the urbane Mr. Higginson told of himself in all his intimate papers, more than Mr. Bowles, “free lance and heretic,” thought proper to tell. What has been called mystery is character; and character is the key to this extraordinary story — Dickinson family character and Emily’s, at one and the same time the epitome and the antithesis of the family, under the pressure, the light and shade, of the moral climate of Amherst. We have forgotten character, if we have not destroyed it, in our modern study of motives.

When Emily Dickinson’s letters are carefully assembled and studied, and three or four downright and candid sentences of her own about herself taken seriously, we have a story which tells itself, and a life the poems verify. Hitherto her letters have been read for their singular “ style ”;

and mystery has been an agreeable accompaniment, in her Xl

™ FOREWORD & poetry, to its “fancy” and its “ mysticism.” This lazy poetic inclination in the reader would disappoint an Emily who seized on essentials. She knew the secret of biography, for she said (and I feel her eyes, large and piercing, like her father’s, upon me as I write):

No romance sold unto, Could so enthrall a man As the perusal of

His individual one.

Of her own “ romance,” whose existence was at times privately questioned by her friends, Emily grants that it isn’t plausible:

Tis fiction’s, to dilute

To plausibility

Our novel, when tis small enough

To credit, —tisw’t true!

One word of caution to the reader who assumes that he may with little effort construe a life from Emily Dickinson’s own words and by such authority call his version the correct one. The most common error is to assume that the positive statements, in the poems especially, should hold true for a lifetime. We cannot date these poems exactly; and so we cannot tell which of Emily’s innumerable aphorisms came last from her pencil. Obviously, some of the states of mind shown in poems seemingly written shortly after her love and renunciation cannot be supposed to stand for the refinement in vision that continued without pause for another thirty-six years. And we should remember that poets change their minds; that poets are

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™% FOREWORD ¥& capricious; that they often choose odd forms for secret truth. Emily was rooted like a plant in water; she was rooted, but she swayed. We should remember, as well, that absolute statement in poetry cannot describe relative fact in daily life. Another even deeper difficulty comes of assuming that cerebral events recorded in her poetry had always a counterpart in the events of her temporal life. Emily implored Mr. Higginson to remember that the <<] » of the verse was a supposed person and not necessarily ‘herself. She would implore us, as well. She was writing about life, not merely, or even left-handedly about her life, much of the time. Another difficulty for the literalminded reader is the fact that Emily was a symbolist; some readers understand her meaning at sight; others never will. This is a trap for a host of commentators. And, finally, unless the reader is steeped in Emily’s ways of thought, he cannot but mistake certain sentences in the letters. Consider Emily’s use of the word “ love.” If a scrap of paper were found tomorrow, in her indubitable script, declaring Emily’s love for so-and-so, many would suppose that the old query had at last found an answer. The accustomed reader would know enough to be wary, having already met with the many gradations to her meaning for the word. Only the total Emily will do for our study.

| This book tells the story of two lives in one person — lives that interlocked, but did not interfere. Why only two? Were there not many, if more than one? I find only two. And I find the reasons for the two. A central relationship governed and divided this life; \thé primary im- XIV

~rFOREWORD

\ pulses were sublimated, intensified, and then turned over to the hidden self. Because her life was forcibly double and her mind divided, Emily’s eye saw a double reality; and she was for ever at work to compose that external contradiction into one. It was this troublesome “double” that compelled her to be a poet.

My book starts with a crucial adventure of the note sent with four poems to Mr. Higginson, because at that point, .and.only that once, did Emily’s inner life emerge in action. Thereafter the book is woven of two strands, Emily’s outer and her inner existence, the outer becoming less significant, and the inner more so, and often very contradictory, as the story progresses. In telling this story I have had to follow _Emily’s presentiments and repetitions. I have had to tell the story, not as one draws a line from left to right, marking birth at the left, and death at the right; but as one ponders while he turns a relic over and over in his hands.

After a hundred years Nobody knows the place, — Agony, that enacted there, Motionless as peace.

Weeds triumphant ranged, Strangers strolled and spelled At the lone orthography

Of the elder dead.

Winds of summer fields Recollect the way, — Instinct picking up the key Dropped by memory.

fefaliva sine 4 oo,

Contents

MMMM IAM MIA MM AE il Roulette, War, and Ghosts: 1862 + 3

II The Business of Being Dickinson - 18

Ill A Fealous Gentleman, God - 30

Chapter I Me Aral Mme Ieice My Me Meng A

ROULETTE, WAR ann GHOSTS: 1862

NE APRIL, PAST THE MIDDLE OF HER LIFE, EMILY () rrcxrsot wrote a little note, six sentences long,

and got someone to post it off before she should change her mind.

Because she had never done anything so perilous before, the letter grew more and more crucial as Emily depicted it on its way to Boston, and by the time an answer got back to Amherst — as if it might be coming from God — Emily had persuaded herself that the verdict would be final.

Meanwhile to the matter-of-fact eye of a gentleman hurriedly scanning his mail in the post-office at Worcester, Massachusetts, where the letter arrived, Emily’s was only one of several peculiar petitions.

For twelve years Emily had been cultivating her garden in stoic silence, her face bent to the ground. Two ghosts often came between her and her azaleas, printing thin shadows across her working hands. She weeded and crumbled sod. Although she seemed to be ignoring them while she worked, bending and rising as if she listened to

* EMILY DICEKEINSCA nothing but the innocent birds, much was exchanged between herself and her visitors without stirring the flowers on their stems. The first ghost came in 1850; he stayed; he did not excuse himself and go when, four years later, the ghost of a man not yet dead entered the plot and interrupted a conversation about poetry between Emily and the first comer. After a little time the two shades dwelt together in peace, for although they had the energy of her memory, they also had its calm. And when Emily went into the house, they waited outside together.

Inside the house Emily had another life. The winters were long, and in consequence the other life was often tedious. But even inside the old brick mansion Emily kept her soul upon the window-pane and lived, with secret devices of many sorts, gradually becoming a spinster, a recluse, one of the queer women of New England. Poetry had long been self-forbidden. Why? the first ghost wanted to know. Before he died, Emily aspired to become a poet; she commenced the process bravely, with a light heart. And then, abruptly, she stopped. Why? If the first ghost asked, Emily only shook her head and went on weeding. Amherst said that she was unfortunate, that she was proud, that she was a Dickinson. Emily made no comment to explain why, years before, she had renounced life and — what was harder — had renounced writing poetry. But while Emily was refusing to write poetry, she was nevertheless preparing to write it, and her impervious silence only served to distil what she was thinking about. Bright flowers spread their petals like fans, vines ran blooming, and clusters fell in cascades, while Emily carried on a very complicated inquiry which continued for years and years — twelve years.

The lark argues with God and we call it song. Emily wished to argue, for she had much to say, and sometimes she wrote down what she felt, but she did not call it song. Now and then she indulged in an epigram which budded before her eyes, growing rhymes and a leafy charm. But often when she hurriedly scribbled on a scrap of paper and put the scrap into her pocket or into her copy of Shakspere — only to take it out again in a minute, and then hide it again, and then go about humming — usually it was only a bare little thing nobody would call a poem. Even while she hummed, Emily did not call it a poem. Still she jotted

‘the bits down and cherished them. When the temptation to write grew too strong for her, she weakened and wrote. But the phrases were quite without ambition; they would never make their poetic way in the world.

And then a most unlikely event broke her coma. The twelve years stood up on end and became the past. Emily began to write furiously. She was thirty-two years old, she had been quite forgetful of time. The ghosts in the garden had made her forget and the flowers all about her had seemed timeless. But the winters had been growing more morbid, and half the year her garden lay remote under the snow. Summers, while the ghosts came visiting, were chiefly the substance of memory; spring and summer and autumn were themselves ghosts of seasons gone, while each year closed in nearer, as if trying to behold something that was happening in Emily herself, swinging back, after a period of summer exuberance, with skeleton lines and an iron sky. But the winter of 1861 was beyond proportion introverted, bare, and strict; it had a terror unlike those terrors native to the mind. Emily could not cope with it, not put it down in secret; it was the Civil War.

That is, it was partly the Civil War. We shall come to the true trouble slowly. Can anyone long remain fanciful and merely introspective about a war? One morning a man is alive, by noon he dies, “his big heart shot away by a Minie ball.” . . . Emily may read about it two days later in the Springfield Republican. One battle may stop a war, but nothing can explain why it stops or why it begins, although every pulpit in the country tries each bitter Sabbath to do so. And nobody can put the young men back where they were six months ago, behind the counter and the plough. These very obvious reflections began to clamour in Emily’s head during the winter of 1861, and by spring the world was quite changed, and mildew and death hid beneath the spring surface. Let us use the usual language regarding Emily Dickinson: she was an eccentric, a recluse, an old maid, one of the many in New England. She had been living in an enclosed universe and now found the new styles of living and dying troublesome and disorderly. . . . As would be said of any such person, the war gave her something to think about.

We reconcile ourselves with the past because it is past, and nothing can be done about it. The present keeps us in another state of mind. There is the illusion of action; one’s contemporaries seem to be making the present, sending it through some sort of machine, from which it emerges, confused and elaborate, in unfinished segments of days and weeks and months, bracketed. All during 1861 the Civil War kept getting bigger and bigger in design, and more people were involved in the pattern daily; the war was both visible and invisible, personal, but like an engine; it was not yet the Civil War of our text-books, where it has what is termed a happy ending. It was unsure, and as yet very unhistorical. And although it was familiar when it came — because it used old bitternesses and the principles expounded, north and south, for years, sending forth with muskets in hand all kinds of old economic anxieties — it was unreal, too, as the present is always a little unreal.

Wars are mutations; epochs pass in minutes. Barefoot armies, battles like Bull Run, and men operated on without anesthesia are visible bits of a shocking process; war reveals what always lies beneath the surface. The place to be, undoubtedly, is at the centre. Stonewall Jackson, secure in God, even under fire, illustrates Emily’s remark that Action is Redemption. Emily was idle.

And violently imaginative. An introverted person (that is, a person with a compulsion to fancy, refine, extract pain and truth and half-truth and lies, all in the experiment of thinking), unless he rushes into the front line of battle, will force himself to see more of the process than is good for him. He will endure in a double existence, consciously and unconsciously, as much as any soldier, in another scale of pain. Emily, ignorant of physical wounds, was to say he endured more.

The war broke her coma. For twelve years she had lived meagrely by a set of axiomatic ideas. The war upset the ideas by which she lived, it tilted life suddenly from a i level of understanding to an oblique angle and so seesawed issues which had seemed in equilibrium that she found herself writing without leave, without premeditation, forced to put things down while they still burned... . She looked at the rapid lines of script late at night in her little bedroom, read them through once more, changed a word or two as one would tune a machine to top pitch by the turn of a screw —and then hid the papers.

In bed that winter, mingling battlefields with her personal grief, she must have lain stark awake for hours, numb and tired, saying the verse sentences to herself.

She had renounced life, and she supposed that she had renounced poetry.

She had renounced life; but poetry had sprung up out of the impersonal mind, having no relation to any other poetry, and no relation to Emily herself, it seemed, except to use her as a polisher and keeper of the mind. Emily was astonished —and called it poetry, at last. It seemed beyond herself; and yet, like herself, it had no education, and its subjects, its reverences, its poetics, and its rhymes were all heterodox. Still, whether of this world or not, it was by her own definition poetry and an absorbing delight — a new thing, like a child. She wrote it secretly in her chilly bedroom at night when no one could suspect her of employing the black art.

And after writing certain of these poems she had the natural desire to show them to someone.

But not to those who customarily called Emily eccentric, lest they call her poetry eccentric too. Emily protected her poetry from the jury of Amherst opinion; even 8

SVEMILYADICKINSION 7 if she had dared to be a poet openly, as she did not dare, she would have kept her poetry from the verdict of an Amherst that was ready for anything Emily might do — its mind made up. Finally after a long hesitation she took her power in her hand and exported it to a kindly person who loved to discover and abet persons of talent. Everything would depend upon his verdict.

And so one April Emily wrote a note and put four poems in an envelope while the spring campaign was starting on the Shenandoah. Prisoners sometimes make their escapes from jail-cells during earthquakes. And if a subtler chain holds another kind of prisoner, we remember that the bedridden, when a house catches fire, will often rise and walk out of doors, released by the extremity. Nothing had happened to Emily for years; but now she was breaking rules and superstitions right and left and burning candles in her bedroom late every night.

Self-sufficiency began to look artificial by the war’s glare; her candle burned, a yellow tulip, itself lit by volcanic red. The practices of a recluse did very well for a rigid life, an almost dead life —a life of undisturbed states of mind. But when Emily began to live and poetry to be written, self-sufficiency seemed false. Except that, as Emily continued to write more poems while waiting for an answer, she grew a little indifferent to anyone’s opinion. In a sense it did not matter what the stranger critic might say. In another sense it did.

But she was a little shocked at her boldness. By the time the letter got to its destination, Emily was proposing to herself that she had engaged in a game of chance, a game she might play once only, since—and this made the suspense even greater — everything she had was ventured upon a single throw. She could never do anything like this again. She never did.

The assumption is that Fields, the editor of the Atlantic, redirected the note to Worcester. It may have gone direct. Boston is not far, and Worcester is psychologically only a stone’s throw from Amherst. Opinion in Amherst agreed tacitly that Emily was that generality wrong, and Amherst, by majority, of course right. Not in one instance, but in all instances. It was perhaps necessary for Amherst to find this flaw in the proud family, after impeccable Edward. Emily was Edward Dickinson’s daughter, Austin Dickinson’s sister, a spinster, a town character although invisible, who said things people repeated, wore white, and made superb charlotte russe and julep, who had stopped going anywhere now, even to church. As widening circles diminish, so the more un-Amherst of her friends, who had known her longer than most, tolerated, loved, approved, and even at times would applaud. . . . The modulation of the verdict on her ways of thinking, acting, talking (in short, living), from No in Amherst, to Yes at other points on the periphery, made the difference between suffocation and breath. This fact she tried long and arduously to deny to herself, only in the end to affirm. There are limits (and Emily knew because she had tried) to a regime of complete self-sufficiency.

Letters had served as a means to breath for a long time. At fifteen she had begun these forays. While she still wore

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PHOTOSTAT OF THE UNSIGNED ARTICLE THAT IN- STIGATED EMILY DICKINSON’S PRIVATE CAREER AS A POET. CF.:‘‘TO TAKE THE LEAD IN BRINGING FORWARD A NEW GENIUSIS AS FASCINATING .. .”

— Reproduced from a Photostat

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Ae MatxY DICKINSON © sprigged muslins and went to parties, it was possible to write witty and effusive epistles and not be considered too literary or too unduly ambitious. All young ladies learned to write stylish little letters, just as they learned penmanship with flourishes of doves’? wings and how to work needle-books and watch-cases; as they learned to play on the piano— not well, necessarily, but pleasingly. It was pre-nuptial employment, and it suited the basques and the Empire gowns, the bonnets, shawls, and Mount Vernon bandboxes, the old silver, snowy blankets, lace, and fine linen that belonged to a girl as her trousseau and dowry. A woman who didn’t have too many children would go on exercising herself as a letter-writer for ever. Many ‘spinsters kept journals; lacking the joys of wedded life, they were permitted some of the frills and furbelows of Victorian authorship.

Emily did not indulge in the sententious habit of the journal, but she liked writing letters. She liked sketching a series of epigrams in half-rhyme, down the page —the nimbler the sentiment, the better the phrases ran. With a pencil in her hand Emily’s fancy would drive words into delightful designs; the design was speedily past the requirements of letter-writing — Emily posted her enigmatic essays to friends, who must have found the task of answering in kind a very considerable effort.

When it came out in speech, her family found her wit a little too witty; father would silently leave the table when Emily’s talk escaped bounds— his displeasure numbed her manner, but could not change its flavour. The exercise of her powers in letters and conversation had its checks and hurts. Emily went over everybody’s head when she had poetry to show.

The soul selects her own society, « Then shuts the door;

says poem XIII. She selected Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

Pve known her from an ample nation

Choose one.

It was an ample nation. Why choose Mr. Higginson? There was Emerson. Emerson had said of himself disguised as Osman: “. . . yet there never was a poor outcast, eccentric or insane man, some fool with a beard or a mutilation or pet madness in his brain, but fled at once to him. . . . And the madness he harboured he did not share.” She might have written to Hawthorne. Or why did she not send Mr. Thoreau the poetry she had written in solitude? He was a solitary; the only dogged solitary New England had. There were such poets as Lowell and Holmes— Emily had memorized their writing in her Academy days. All these men came from the same strain as Emily, and any one of them might have seen her greatness through a fancied resemblance to himself. Her choice was erratic. The poem implies as much, and continues:

Then close the valves of her attention Like stone.

Emily chose, as she describes the soul doing, and then she closed the valves of her attention. It is perfectly literal. But the poem has a middle stanza which is not literal, which never happened. Emily put the stanza in only be- 12 cause it belonged — because although it did not happen to her, it does happen in the metaphysic of the perfect event. The middle stanza is about the fame that never arrived:

Unmoved, she notes the chariot’s pausing At her low gate;

Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling

Upon her mat.

(This poem is a great piece of writing, one of Emily Dickinson’s greatest. As a poem it is quite apart from her life —it exists in itself. She wrote in order to establish the existence of things in themselves. Only in the relative world, in the hurly-burly, does it have the significance given above. We should never care to tell this story if this poem and others merely aided biography. )

In Emily’s life — which we must remember is a poor thing compared with her mind, and only attached to it by a small taut thread — Mr. Higginson never did kneel and there never was an emperor. But Emily did not need fame in order to make clear what she would do with it.

After her letter went off, just beyond her reach, so that she could not snatch it back again, she experienced all the sensations of a gambler and she must have fully enjoyed them. And she perhaps wrote during the interval two poems in the gambling metaphor. One is entitled Rouge et Noir, and the other Rouge Gagne, both from roulette.

The more explicit is one of her least poems:

Tis so much joy! tis so much joy!

If I should fail, what poverty!

And yet, as poor as I

Have ventured all upon a throw. « » «

This state of mind, manufactured at the expense of the innocent gentleman of beautiful letters.

She had never done anything so perilous before; her life revolved round the little note. Our story revolves round it. Since it was then and is now so important — just how peculiar did it seem to Mr. Higginson at first glance?

He describes the handwriting within, saying that it looked like a series of minute bird-tracks, and he remarks the fact that Emily put her name in pencil in a very small envelope, as if to hide her identity until the last moment; but he says nothing about the outer envelope (which is now lost) or the handwriting upon it, and so we assume that there was nothing peculiar about it. ... There might easily have been. At times Emily felt an overwhelming aversion to putting her handwriting on the outside of a letter; it was herself, her naked hand. She disliked enlarging her script for postmasters; she disliked having her immaculate characters stamped and smudged. Her sister often addressed her letters — for the aversion became an eccentric practice in time. When Lavinia was busy, names were clipped from newspapers and box-numbers, and the city and state assembled and affixed, too, from bits of print. Did the highly peculiar hand which wrote the note and the verses address the envelope, too? Presumably Emily took all the risks this time, composing six short sentences, selecting four poems, and writing Mr. Higginson’s name with care. But beneath the care the aversion remained — and the aversion returned with redoubled power after the note went its way; the rest of

Emily’s life was obedient to it. All the more wonder that Emily did once venture to send four poems out into the void she mistrusted, asking in her little note to know if her verse was alive. The letter went its way stamped by one postmaster; it was restamped, sorted into a pigeon-hole, and then drawn out and torn open.

Again we ask, because the question persists, why did Emily choose Mr. Higginson? Was it entirely hit or miss? A blind gesture?

Imagine a spot of light, like that intense flake cast by a hand-mirror held at an angle with the sun, playing zigzag over the earth’s surface. For a time it lingers over little places in the West, quivering while it waits, from the hand that guides it; then it swoops off to strange lands in pursuit of a person who has gone to foreign places on the map; it follows his movements from city to city. At last the light comes carefully nearer home, covering its object; it rests over a city not far distant — that is, it rests over the city of Worcester, for there the person whom it picks from the darkness has come to stay.

After ten years’ absence a tall, young, slender, and already rather stooping figure walked the streets of Worcester. Emily’s attention focused there in brightness.

And so, as if irresistibly attracted, her poems went to Mr. Higginson in Worcester. Whether Emily’s missive went direct to Worcester or not we do not know. She had read an anonymous article entitled “ A Letter to a Young Contributor” in the April Adlantic. How did she know that Mr. Higginson was its author? How did she know that he lived in Worcester? Did the tall young man recommend that Emily send her poems thither? Did the tall young man know the versatile Mr. Higginson?