The Dickinsons were not her readers. In his youth Austin had fancied himself a writer; Emily had seen he was not and changed the subject. He knew of her poems and sometimes when his wife read them aloud to visitors Austin must have been present, but he did not think her great. Austin was to be surprised by his sister’s fame.
Vinnie was not told of the manuscript booklets and sheets of poetry her sister was piling up in her chest of drawers. Though it was known in the household, and eventually in Amherst, that ‘Miss Emily’ wrote poems, the family, led by Mr Dickinson, would have regarded precarious health as the main fact in her life. That her poems did not interest her kin so long as she lived might have happened for ordinary reasons —familiarity, conventionality, or respect for reserve — but their incuriosity might also have been associated with their attitude to her condition: abnormal poetry born of an abnormality to be kept out of sight. What would the family have made of a poem about a sex change, an operation that must ‘rearrange’ a ‘Wife’s’ make-up?
Amputate my freckled Bosom!
Make me bearded like a Man!
Modest blushes are swept aside by the speaker’s pride in a ‘constant’ love that ‘never leapt its socket’ and by acceptance of a gender shift ‘when they dislocate my Brain!’ Here is another secret: ‘Big my Secret but it’s bandaged’ for the rest of her life. Dramatically, a ‘Wife’ — a socially unacknowledged wife — blurts what she stifles. Conjoining issues of sickness and gender, this poem was not published until 1945.
The more daring her imagined confessions, the more the poet had to guard the facts of her life. She cannot name ‘Master’. Nor can she name her sickness. The sacred or falling sickness was always unnameable when it struck a female. With males, secrecy was less strict, and fame in a few — Caesar, Mahomet, Dostoyevsky — over-rode the stigma, but a woman had to bury herself in a lifelong silence. It’s therefore remarkable that Dickinson developed a voice from within that silence, one with a volcanic power to bide its time.
Publication, under the circumstances, had to be postponed indefinitely. When Higginson suggested that she delay to publish, she assured him that publication was as foreign to her intentions ‘as Firmament to Fin’. She owed it to her father’s name not to expose her oddities: ‘A modesty befits the soul / That bears another’s — name —’. A deeper reticence held up this shield of modest womanhood, and it was not an act; she could defer to others while protecting her gift. In this she was not all that unusual amongst women writers. But she stood alone in her avoidance of print. Conceivably, this was not so much a matter of modesty, nor even a matter of poetic irregularities, but the intractable block of a taboo.
Amid the thousands of details amassed about the poet’s family and local environment, one link has been overlooked. It’s the curious fact that living within yards of one another were three semi-invalids who belonged to the same family, each with a member of family attached as carer. If we look at a well-known British case of the period, the poet Edward Lear, there’s the same closed-off family solution: Lear’s sister became his lifelong carer. Since these were middle-class families who could afford outside help, the issue was not economy but secrecy. A diagnosis, if made, would not have passed a family’s lips. And yet, if this guess is correct, the poet talks about ‘it’ all the time in her poetry, the pronoun pointing to its namelessness. ‘’Tis so appalling — it exhilarates —’. All the same, ‘it’ is no more than virtual death, unlike men dying ‘externally’ in the Civil War. The actuality of their deaths is a fact ‘of Blood’, whilst ‘it’ is playing ‘kill’ and the dreamer is playing ‘shriek’. A dreamer has the option of opening her eyes — safe after all, and mocking her safety: this is ‘Dying in drama — / And Drama — is never dead —’.
Dickinson tells it ‘slant’, but to tell it at all is an act of disclosure, justified only by refraining from publication and certainly not under her own name. As disclosure ‘it’ becomes exemplary of any extreme ordeal of those who live in sight of death, but more significantly for a poet, ‘it’ is formative for the jolts or leaps across space to open new pathways.
Emily Dickinson was an avid reader of Shakespeare and took similar liberties with English grammar, as when she coins ‘perfectness’ to convey a uniqueness too intractable for standard ‘perfection’. In that poem on the impossibility of objective perception (‘Perception of an Object costs’) she transforms the passive voice of the verb ‘is situated’ into an ungrammatical active form, ‘situates’. Each transformation has its rationale. ‘Situates’, like ‘perfectness’, conveys a wilful distance from definition — a disruptive energy crucial to her art. It turns the noun into a verb. Research on Shakespeare’s grammar, in particular his use of a noun as a verb (say, ‘foots it’ for dance), has demonstrated a measurable surge in the brain of his reader or audience. This research is still at an early stage, but one idea is that nouns and verbs may be processed in different regions of our brains, which means that when the usual connection is challenged a new pathway opens up. A ‘surge’ in the brain registers on an electro-encephalogram one six-hundredth of a second after we hear a novelty of transformed grammar.
This surge is said to be a kind of syncopation. In jazz, the jolt of syncopation interrupts the glide of musical pathways. This rhythm, as vital to jazz as to Dickinson’s start-stop lines, has made her appealing to composers, from John Adams’s Harmonium with its marvellously objective choral treatment of ‘Because I could not stop for Death’, to pop stars who adapt her lines. The British pop star Pete Doherty, interviewed on his release from prison in 2006, owned to stealing a copy of Dickinson from his Bedford school (as well as a copy of Crime and Punishment from Her Majesty’s Prison library).
‘Actually, I nicked one or two of [Dickinson’s] lines,’ he whispered, sipping a Guinness in London’s Boogaloo bar. ‘Aargh, she’s outrageous man! She’s fuckin’ hardcore! Can’t ignore her.’
What did he pinch?
‘I took one Draught of Life, paid only the market price,’ he quoted. ‘I added, “now I’m estranged”.’ He delivered each word with a point in the air, like an invisible karaoke ball. ‘Bom bom bom bom bom bom.’ He saw his present-day life — estranged, imprisoned, finding solace in words — in what Dickinson had to tell of her life in 1862:
I took one Draught of Life —
I’ll tell you what I paid —
Precisely an existence —
The market price, they said …
Curiously, Doherty expresses a Dickinsonian aversion to public eyes. To perform in public is a nightmare, like war, ‘but to sit down and write in solitude is like a dream’.
The lyrics of pop stars and the handwritten poems of Dickinson function outside the standardising rules of print. Polished as her poems are, they remain at odds with publication. Their explicit claim on immortality turns on the question of transmission. Dickinson famously resented editorial interference in the matter of a comma in one of the poems Bowles published. With so few poems printed in her lifetime and none of them reliably, there is the extraordinary phenomenon of an entire oeuvre without the finalisations of print. This leaves her poems provisional, as in fact they were.
The manuscripts exist in variant versions sent to different recipients. Many words keep in play a choice of variants listed at the bottom of her page. Even after Dickinson copied poems in her booklets she continued to alter them, dividing long stanzas into quatrains, shifting punctuation, substituting words. Her lineation too must remain in question as her hand reaches the right-hand edge of the page: is it a run-on line or the start of a new line? No one can be sure. Most debatable of all: what is the meaning of her idiosyncratic punctuation, the variegated dashes standardised in print?
The only solution would be to shun print culture. The Dickinson editor and critic Martha Nell Smith makes a persuasive case for reading Dickinson’s manuscripts as scans posted on the internet. From this point of view the standard three-volume edition with its laborious apparatus (and even more a ‘reading’ edition) becomes the unsatisfactory alternative: a construct of print conventions and editorial decisions which may or may not accord with the poet’s intention.
Dickinson’s distance from print retains the manner of improvisation. A confessional ferment invites reciprocity from readers who, ideally, will apply the ferment to our own lives. Dashes, pushing the language apart, create spaces for readers to fill. To join with her can give an ordinary mind an amazing surge. Print culture, by contrast, renders the reader more passive, an inert receptacle for the book trade. Virginia Woolf, a hands-on publisher who often set the type herself, suggests that Caxton’s press (established in 1478, the first in England) ended the improvisations of the anonymous. As she put it, ‘Caxton killed Anon’. The spontaneity of Anon is revived by Dickinson’s hand as it moves across her page. The brevity of her provisional statements, sustained by the long pause — the interrogative wait of her dash, like the ‘interrogative’ note in her live voice — tugs us to participate, while her transformations of grammar stir up our brains.
The participatory ‘surge’ in the brain, drawing on Dickinson, is marked in the innovative theatre of British director Katie Mitchell. Her staging of The Idiot as ‘… some trace of her’ uses Dickinson to extend Dostoyevskian intensity on the verge of seizure. A screen-filled photograph behind the actors distils a poetic image from the time-tied action on stage. Mostly, the scenes fixed on screen derive from the slow routines of nineteenth-century domestic life, much the same as Dickinson’s homebody in ‘I tie my Hat — I crease my Shawl —’ who puts new flowers in the glass, not expecting a strike to the soul. On Mitchell’s stage, basins are brought in for washing, tables are laid and disassembled, yet these scenes are shot through with extremes of experience like Dickinson’s whose voice ‘tells’: the shadow on the grass announcing what is to ‘pass’. On stage, a full-blown seizure embodied in a swiftly fluttering hand co-exists with mental suffering on a par with Dickinson’s ‘Hour of Lead’; in the darkness of the auditorium we’re compelled to participate in an act of creation. The point of each poem or scene is not so much the passing impact of horror and sublimity; more the continuous improvisation of a lit-up brain.
For Dickinson, the vital open-endedness of improvisation outweighed the permanence of print. Here was a positive reason to develop an alternative to publication: the well-established practice of circulating manuscripts. This was customary, of course, before Gutenberg invented printing, with one of the first books as we know them, Malory’s Arthurian legends, coming off Caxton’s press in 1485 and reaching a readership beyond the purview of the author. Private circulation of manuscripts would seem to be superseded; still, the practice did not end. During the Renaissance, aristocrats circulated sonnet sequences amongst themselves. In the early nineteenth century, Byron, as an aristocrat, scorned publication and affected to toss off poems with careless ease, though he did stoop to publish — upon persuasion — and in 1812 famously woke up famous. Dickinson outdid Byron in shunning the marketplace: ‘Publication’, she said, ‘is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man —’. In the first half of the twentieth century innovative Modernist works like Ulysses circulated in avant-garde milieus — Pound’s ‘Men of 1914’ and the Bloomsbury Group — before they were published, at first, in coterie magazines. It was part of the Modernist ethos to speak only to discerning readers, while in the Soviet bloc dissident literature was disseminated privately because publication was dangerous.
So, for aristocratic, political, or experimental reasons, texts continued to exist in private hands, often associated with contempt for the compliant herd. This elitism puts the unpublished text above the masses; it reverses the educative mission of print, to be found in mid-nineteenth-century novelists like Dickens, whom the Dickinsons read and quoted. All the same, despite his pleading for the poor, Dickens did not jar the well-to-do; he upheld social divisions.
It was not only sickness that kept Dickinson apart. She could not lend herself to the ‘surrounding Bog’ of banalities and she thought less well of her mother for wanting to hear the stale words of visitors. She threw ‘don-keys’ over her shoulder as she fled them. ‘The Soul selects its own Society / Then shuts the door’. That door of her intelligence opens to Susan, to whom she writes as ‘Rare to the Rare’; they are ‘sovreign People’. A poem jokes at the ‘altitude of me —’ when her speaker hangs a Christmas stocking too high for Santa Claus to reach.
Imagine this elevation conjoined with the status of royals, and we approach the private importance the Dickinsons felt. It capped that sense of importance to advance in the religious life. Emily Dickinson did reject the bombardments of evangelism; she did shake off the creepy hand of Miss Lyon fingering her soul; yet that soul does, after all, late in 1862, signal its election:
Mine — by the Right of the White Election!
Mine — by the Royal Seal!
Mine — by the sign in the Scarlet prison —
Bars — cannot conceal!
Mine — here — in Vision — and in Veto!
Mine — by the Grave’s Repeal —
Titled — Confirmed —
Delirious Charter!
Mine — long as Ages steal!
In her late teens Dickinson had declared herself wicked in the terms of her society; in her late twenties she had conceived her adulterous drama with ‘Master’ and morally deserved to wear the Scarlet Letter; nevertheless she had some unmistakable sign: a vision or visitation. ‘The Wife — without the Sign’ was to be saved at about the time she shut her door on Sam Bowles when he came to see her on his return from Europe. In 1873 Mr Dickinson was still preparing for election in his plain style: ‘I give myself to God.’
The New England Puritans, taking their moral pulse, made distinctions between church members, cutting off sinners from the chosen. This distinction is definitive for the Dickinson family (as for others of their kind, like Eliot). Exclusive habits of mind encouraged Dickinson’s freedom to choose her readers.
With poems copied in her own hand, Dickinson reached out to others. ‘I grope fast, with my fingers, for all out of my sight I own — to get it nearer —’, she explained to Sam Bowles. I own. Her verbs assert her estate: ‘my friends are my Estate’, she declares, extending the boundaries of friendship as friends become her readers. Sue made her think of Peruvian mines; Bowles, the Roman mines in North Africa; each had gems for this poet. Sue had taught her, as the poet saw it, to ‘esteem’ her ‘poverty’ for the sake of ‘Life’s Estate — with you!’ Her reach is an act of possession. Lassoes of letters went whirling out from the Homestead to more than forty correspondents. A lifelong correspondent, Elizabeth Holland (whose Amherst family had been old friends of the Dickinsons), was tugged back when she slipped out of reach, retrieved with this lasso:
c. September 1873
… I have lost a Sister. Her name was not Austin and it was not Vinnie. She was scant of stature though expansive spirited and last seen in November — Not the November heretofore, but Heretofore’s Father …
Possibly she perished?
Extinction is eligible …
Emily
Mrs Holland, who had moved to New York a year earlier, and Jane Humphrey, teaching in the Midwest, took advantage of physical distance. Sue had tried to do so when she took refuge with her brothers in Michigan in 1854 and would not reply to Emily’s letters, but Austin managed to reel her back. From then on, the family possessed this restive orphan, an acquired Sister only ‘a hedge away’. The in-house sister and the reader-sister: both, the poet insists, ‘belong to me’. In 1877, she still exults to ‘own a Susan of my own’.
Poems were part of the owner’s letters, and the person to whom she sent a poem is part of its meaning: Bowles or Sue are imagined participants, not passive readers. The poems cast Sue as one who appears stranger the closer you get, flashing gifts of mind and shadowed by an un-acted part in another life she might have lived.
Sue believed that poems addressed and sent to her were written for her exclusively. Many were, but on occasion the poet would adjust the pronouns and send the same poem to Bowles or someone else. The intimacy was not always as exclusive as a recipient might have thought.
Her letters to Bowles cast him as consort to a ‘Title divine’. It was part of his appeal that he responded so readily, looked so ‘Arabian’ as he exercised his responsiveness, and appeared so romantically wretched in the misery he was making at home. Bowles, teased too far by the poet’s beckonings and refusals to see him, roared up the Homestead stairs in 1877, ‘I’ve travelled all the way from Springfield to see you. Come down at once, you damned rascal.’ She did come down, so the story goes, conversed with even more than her usual wit and signed her next letter ‘Your “Rascal”’ — leaving out the ‘damned’. A note at the foot of the letter draws attention to this: ‘I washed the Adjective.’
Her claim on her readers does not evoke a fragile creature shut off from the world. She invited, even demanded, attention, passing on her ‘bolts’ to correspondents. Her most active year was 1863, when she sent out no fewer than 295 poems. Receiving a letter was an event to be relished to the full behind a closed door. Only through letters — many revised with the professionalism she gave to poems — was she able to control distribution to her audience, mainly ‘sisters’, an obscure form of life addressing other obscure forms of life. ‘Are you — Nobody — too?’ ‘Nobody’ was superior to a ‘Somebody’. Her Nobodies included Loo and Fanny Norcross in Boston. It was common at the time for private letters to be circulated to far-off confidantes (in the way Charlotte Bronte passed on letters to her friend Ellen Nussey for comment or Emily Dickinson was allowed to read Cousin Loo’s letters from Maria Whitney: ‘We will preserve them carefully,’ she promised Loo. Preserve. She expected no less from others.)
Her circle of Nobodies included, also, Sue’s schoolfriend Kate Scott Turner, whom Dickinson had approached as a ‘Candidate’ for her society of ‘strangers’. This is how she envisaged an alternative audience. ‘My heart votes for you,’ she’d told Kate, drawing her towards the deep-sea passage to her habitations. Love would row her out. Her letter ‘touches’ Kate’s face, puts a cheek to hers, strokes Kate’s hair. This tender love comes easily into being at the same time as the poet dreams up a wounded love for a stern ‘Master’ bound to her by drops of blood. To Bowles she offers a drama of Martyrs who, fixed in their destined course, resist ‘Temptation’ and ‘Convulsion’. What was he to make of this poem-letter that begins: ‘Because I could not say it — I fixed it in the Verse — for you to read’? The verse tells, yet does not tell, what ‘it’ is. The riddle did for a time exert its hold, but there’s a risk in refusing to solve a riddle. A busy journalist like Bowles, at first intrigued, was bound to turn away.
She understood her own ‘mad’ manner well enough to be suitably cautious with her new mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Her first letter included four poems, including her spoof of a deadly heaven in ‘Safe in their Alabaster Chambers’ (published in Bowles’s paper six weeks earlier).
‘Are you too deeply occupied’, she asked, ‘to say if my Verse is alive? The Mind is so near itself — it cannot see, distinctly — and I have none to ask.’
Higginson’s response to her originality was heady enough to bind her to him. She had ‘few pleasures so deep as your opinion’, she replied, close to tears. At the same time he warned against ‘spasmodic’ rhythms and idiosyncratic grammar. Though she thanked him for his ‘surgery’, she made none of the changes Higginson advised. When he invited her to join Boston’s literary society she declined. She could not tell him why she could not leave her house, not even to hear Emerson.
One of the first things she did tell Higginson was untrue. It was the same untruth she’d told Newton’s minister, Mr Hale, when she’d presented herself as a child-friend: the same cover of a harmless, humble Little Me. To Higginson she presented herself as an unambitious amateur in need of advice. She listened with apparent submission when he thought her poems uncontrolled, disorderly, ‘wayward’.
She needed, she nodded, to be ruled. ‘I had no Monarch in my life, and cannot rule myself, and when I try to organize — my little Force explodes — and leaves me bare and charred —’.
He chided her for owning to small mistakes, unaware of her larger ignorance.
She had only just then begun to write, she lied, warming to her role. ‘I went to school,’ she told Higginson, ‘but … had no education.’ She asked this new ‘Master’ to ‘punish’ her poems. It’s like the master—pupil drama in Villette: an accomplished teacher in one of the world’s great cities and a provincial young woman, unassuming, untrained in the way of formal discipline, who reveals an irresistible gift for expression. It stuns her teacher. The erotic undercurrent of this exposure — the excitement of being seen for what she feels herself to be — would explain the edgy propriety of Dickinson’s tone: the snowy heroine who is rising, burning, speaking to a teacher commensurate with her buried fire.
This was the fantasy scenario. In reality, Higginson — Colonel Higginson, as he became in the Civil War — was a man of principle and, if not her match, an attentive friend to Dickinson, as biographer Brenda Wineapple has shown in a reassessment of the relationship that rightly refuses to see Higginson off as the blunderer he has appeared. He was a high-minded man who fought for the rights of the disenfranchised: freed slaves and women. He backed women’s suffrage and education (and was later a founder of Radcliffe College). As a militant abolitionist he was to lead a regiment of nine hundred freed slaves in an assault on Jacksonville in Florida: the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first federally authorised regiment of former slaves. He bore out Mr Dickinson’s anti-slavery politics — more, in fact, than Mr Dickinson’s son who, like many who were drafted, paid another man to take his place in the Union army. It was during Higginson’s service in the army that he contributed to the preservation of Negro Spirituals by copying dialect verses and music he heard sung around the campfires. This, then, was a man unusually alert to unrecognised forms of poetry.
Emily Dickinson kept up this tie. ‘Sweetest of Renowns to remain Your Scholar —’, she ends a letter when she was forty-five and for the last eighteen years had been writing what well she knew were great poems. At least twice she had to tug Higginson back. After she had sent him five insistently remarkable letters over the first six months, to four of which he had duly replied, he paused. There would have been other matters on his mind: he was about to take off for the battlefields of the Civil War in November 1862. Just then, his ‘plaintive’ correspondent — unconcerned, it appears, with Higginson’s imminent participation in a war that was piling up ghastly death tolls and would kill more than half a million men — roped him with the politest of queries:
6 October 1862
Did I displease you, Mr Higginson?
But wont you tell me how?
Your friend,
E. Dickinson —
About ten years on, when Higginson again paused, she was as terse and more direct: ‘Will you instruct me then no more?’ was all she wrote on a card.
For his part, he was impressed enough to stick with the somewhat ineffectual role she imposed on him as decipherer of letters tending to the impenetrable. He represents the public world at its kindest as she opens up her flashes of originality. One of the poems she enclosed was ‘Dare you see a soul at the White Heat’. Higginson both dared and feared, and was honest enough to admit his mystification.
May 11, 1869
Sometimes I take out your letters & verses, dear friend, and when I feel their strange power, it is not strange that I find it hard to write … I have the greatest desire to see you, always feeling that perhaps if I could once take you by the hand I might be something to you; but till then you only enshroud yourself in this fiery mist & I cannot reach you … Every year I think that I will contrive somehow to go to Amherst & see you … I feel … always timid lest what I write should be badly aimed & miss that fine edge of thought which you bear. It would be so easy, I fear, to miss you. Still, you see, I try. I think if I could once see you & know that you are real, I might fare better.
It is hard to understand how you can live s[o alo]ne … Yet it isolates one anywhere to think beyond a certain point or have such luminous flashes as come to you …
Write & tell me something in prose or verse, & I will be less fastidious in future & willing to write clumsy things, rather than none.
Ever your friend
TW Higginson
He could not quite stifle a contrary impulse. Amongst his Boston-Brahmin set he called Dickinson ‘my partially cracked poetess at Amherst’, and he did not stop his wife when she asked why he encouraged lunatics. He mocked too a message Dickinson had sent with a gift of Emerson’s Representative Men for sick Mrs Higginson. Emily had called the book ‘granite for you to lean on’. Apt, we might think.
No one could be more loyal to those she knit to her. At the same time, she felt words so keenly that she could not relay them in a tepid conversational temperature. This led her to write an occasional rejection letter. One went to Joseph Chickering, the professor of English at Amherst, who proposed to call on her.
‘I had hoped to see you,’ she said, ‘but have no grace to talk, and my own Words so chill and burn me, that the temperature of other Minds is too new an Awe —’.
As a young woman she had refused an invitation from Abiah, by saying that she never left home. As it happened, she had recently stayed with the Hollands — he, an editor. Dickinson may have hoped he would read her poems. In fact, he judged her poems ‘unsuitable’ for publication: ‘too ethereal’. He was fixed in the common view that ‘the genuine classics of every language [are] the work of men and not of women’. Jane Eyre and Aurora Leigh may have ‘set the world in a flutter’ for a time, but their appeal was bound to be ephemeral, for women could not create ‘the permanent treasures of literature’. Dr Holland’s belittlement of women shows up in his political judgements: after the Civil War he opposed legislative reform that gave wives control over their earnings and property; he was also against women’s suffrage. So, the most powerful editor in touch with Emily Dickinson was closed off, ideologically, to her greatness.
Did her chosen readers have anything in common beyond their attachment to the poet? Readers who knew of her sickness would have had biographic access to certain poems and metaphors. At the age of twenty-five, her first mention of her machinery getting ‘slightly out of gear’ was a half-joking plea to Elizabeth Holland: ‘please … some one stop the wheel’. She spoke to her Boston cousin Loo as one who had seen her through a lot, and later, in about 1873, she wrote to Loo’s sister Fanny: ‘I was sick, little sister, and write you the first that I am able.’ The sickness was so secret that those who cherished her felt all the closer. They need not have been adept as readers of poetry; it was closeness that mattered, that and the loyalty of secret-sharers, like Sue close at hand. ‘Sue makes sick Days so sweet, we almost hate our health,’ Emily told her. On such an occasion, early in 1873, she apologised for her untidy appearance.
‘I felt so sick,’ she excused herself. ‘How it would please me if you came once more, when I was palatable.’
An artist as original as Dickinson must create her audience. She would have chosen readers attuned to the inward life. While Julia Ward Howe was writing her ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ and Whitman his Drum Taps, Dickinson demolished feats of heroism: no golden fleece, and Jason a sham. Her friends shared or tolerated her repudiation of dead words, especially the sayings of unthinking faith: dull heaven, mindless obedience, meekness and blind belief in the resurrection were all targets. She told Higginson she shunned people ‘because they talk of Hallowed things, aloud — and embarrass my Dog’.
Higginson, who thought he had been corresponding with an apologetic, self-effacing pupil, was puzzled to find himself ‘drained’ of ‘nerve-power’ after his first visit to her in 1870. He was unable to describe the creature he found beyond a few surface facts: her light steps had pattered as she approached; she had two smooth bands of auburn hair and no good features; she had been deferential and exquisitely clean in her white piqué dress and short light-blue cape (crocheted with a drawstring neck); and after an initial hesitation she had proved surprisingly articulate.
‘Could you tell me what home is?’ she had asked. ‘Is it oblivion or absorption when things pass from our minds?’ She’d read Shakespeare and thought, ‘why is any other book needed’?
It should have been exciting, but Higginson was trying to reach her through everyday talk. Not easy, especially as he sensed that questions might make her withdraw. She, for her part, had no qualms. Without his touching her she drew from him, noting with concern how he tired.
‘Gratitude is the only secret that cannot reveal itself,’ was her parting flourish. Why complicate thanks with this insistence on her secret? It seems of a piece with her wish and refusal to ‘tell’. Poor Higginson was baffled. She had said a lot of strange things, from which he deduced an ‘abnormal’ life. He left relieved not to live near her.
It’s obvious from this meeting why Dickinson found it preferable to communicate through letters and letter-poems. The question of contacts has intrigued later generations of readers. Who was being trained in her unique mode of communication? Who provoked her to further communication? Susan Dickinson above all: more than a friend of her youth, more than the sister she became, she remained a prime reader throughout the thirty years of the poet’s output. Sue, she said, looking back from their fifties, had shared the sense of ‘Infinity’; had been infinity. An initiation in infinitude was the gift Dickinson offered to the few she admitted to intimacy. Contrary to the usual view that people changed her, it was she who operated on others for the brief periods they could bear it. She created certain people in the same way as she created her poems, many of which function as letters and, in fact, were enclosed in letters as extensions of them. She half-found, half-invented a receptive reader in Susan Dickinson, ‘Only Woman in the World’, to whom she sent more than twice the number of poems sent to anyone else. In a similar way she half-found, half-invented the man she called ‘Master’.
The existence of an alternative audience prompts questions. One is whether certain members of her chosen audience fell short: did Bowles, for example, fail her when he preferred sentimental tosh and when his paper conventionalised the few poems that he published? Did Susan fail her when she advised Dickinson to cut the second stanza of ‘Safe in their Alabaster Chambers’? This is a poem about the lifelessly obedient who will lie unrisen, for ever, in their graves. Susan’s instinctive move closer to the fire was a humorous response to the chilling subject. Though she failed to see that the wheeling, oblivious universe in the second stanza is integral to this definition of death, Susan responded with eloquence and warmth:
I am not suited dear Emily with the second verse — It is remarkable as the chain lightening that blinds us hot nights in the Southern sky but … it just occurs to me that the first verse is complete in itself … You never made a peer for that verse … The flowers [Emily sent] … look as if they would kiss one — ah, they expect a humming-bird — Thanks for them of course — and not thanks only[,] recognition sister …
Susan is tired making bibs for her bird [her son] — her ringdove — he will paint my cheeks when I am old to pay me —
Sue —
Susan isn’t Emily’s hummingbird now. She’s a mother. It must have disappointed the poet to find Sister’s attention straying to her baby ring-dove. And what made Dickinson say that Katie ‘betrayed’ their love? Was it simply that Kate remarried in 1866, when their friendship seems to have ended? Ten years on she lamented that loss in a poem which admits ‘Treason’ on her own side: she closes her door to this friend, as to others, unable to speak of her sickness. This is an unsent letter-poem, signed ‘Emily’, written when Katie was visiting Amherst in 1877:
I shall not murmur if at last
The ones I loved below
Permission have to understand
Divulging it would rest my Heart
But it would ravage theirs —
Why, Katie, Treason has a Voice —
But mine — dispels — in Tears.
With Susan there were renewals and entrancing affirmations. ‘Rare to the Rare —’, Emily addressed her in 1869. At forty, custom could not stale this neighbour. ‘To see you unfits for staler meetings. I dare not risk an intemperate moment before a Banquet of Bran.’ At forty-three or four, her ardour for Sue seems undimmed in a note of three words, quoting Shakespeare’s Antony to Cleopatra: ‘Egypt — thou knew’st’. She could rely on Sue’s reading to call up the fullness of that love:
Egypt, thou knew’st too well,
My heart was to thy rudder tied by the strings,
And thou shouldst tow me after. O’er my spirit
Thy full supremacy thou knew’st, and that
Thy beck might from the bidding of the gods
Command me.
In later years, Emily entered into a different kind of friendship, the result of her circulating manuscripts. From about 1866 Higginson was copying and passing on Dickinson poems to Helen Hunt, who was, at the time, regarded as the foremost woman poet in America. She was the same age as Dickinson and had grown up in Amherst, the Helen Fiske whose mother had died while her daughters were at school. Helen remembered Emily at Amherst Academy, but recalled Vinnie more clearly as a playmate of her younger sister Ann. As a young married woman living in Washington DC, Helen Hunt had avoided calling on the Dickinson sisters when they’d visited their father in 1855. Vinnie had appeared to her merely a ‘fat little country lassie’. Then, on a visit to Amherst in 1860, Helen, together with her husband Major Hunt, had attended a reception at the Homestead. Emily told Higginson that she thought Mrs Hunt’s verses better than any by a woman bar Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mrs Lewes (as George Eliot was known).
Mrs Hunt, in turn, admired Dickinson’s poems and all the more for what she took to be the propriety of modest retirement. She herself published behind the ‘shelter’ of her initials in ‘the crowded obscurity of print’ and she refused to speak in public. Yet even as she abjured publicity, she was not unaware of ‘H.H.’ as a brand. As with other successful women writers — Mrs Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and Constance Fenimore Woolson (great-niece of James Fenimore Cooper) — ambition and retirement co-existed. All held off from public women demanding rights and suffrage: Bronte thought Harriet Taylor Mill manifested a heart of leather in her 1851 essay ‘The Emancipation of Women’; Helen Hunt satirised American feminist leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in ‘Good-by, Leather Stockings!’; while Dickinson ‘avoided’ the feminist writer Harriet Prescott Spofford. Domestic values drew Helen Hunt and Emily Dickinson to each other. Like an earlier vindicator of women’s rights, Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Hunt stood for the values of home — the domestic affections, nurture, listening, justness — as the right levers to ‘move the whole world’.
Some twelve years after Helen was widowed, she married a Mr Jackson of Colorado. Emily tossed off a monosyllable of joy, followed by a three-line verse muttering obscurely about ‘doom’. The bride made bold to return the verse for explanation. None was forthcoming, but after a while Dickinson threw out a lasso to Mrs Jackson who, she said, had ‘averted’ her head. Not a bit, came Helen Jackson’s reply; she had merely neglected to write while setting up home in Colorado Springs. Emily was touchy about friends who married, expecting neglect. Helen Jackson made it plain that she expected their friendship to go on as before and pressed her friend to publish — the only creative writer at the time to recognise Dickinson’s genius.
When Higginson came face to face with Dickinson for the second and last time, in 1873, he asked her how she coped with lack of occupation, day by day within the same walls. She was astonished and gave him to understand that such a question had never occurred to her. Though by then Higginson had corresponded with her for twelve years and read a good many of her poems, he was unaware that her inward life was so active, and her attention to events of nature so constant, that she felt no lack of occupation. She gardened, kept a flourishing conservatory, made the household bread since her father preferred hers and, then too, she added rather dreamily, ‘people must have puddings …’.
Her main occupation, of course, was her work, starting before dawn. One poem ‘The Birds begun at Four o’clock’ celebrates the ‘multiplicity’ of their music when there’s no one to hear: ‘The Listener — was not —’. Patently untrue, because the poet, singing at the same hour, is awake and present. Nor was it true that her voice had no audience, her poems ephemeral as birdsong. She ensured that five to six hundred fair copies were entrusted to her friends and, as a further precaution, half of her poems (presumably those she most wished to preserve) were in handsewn manuscript booklets tucked away at home, which would sing, she knew, in time to come.
By six o’clock the dawn chorus is over; the ‘Band’ has gone; the sun rises; day takes over. The poet, the unmentioned witness, is left to balance loss and achievement. This she does with perfect equanimity, closing with a neat full stop:
The Miracle that introduced
Forgotten, as fulfilled.
She tells us, generations on, exactly what we want to know: the Miracle of composition overrode public obliteration during her lifetime. Composition was not only an end in itself; it was an ‘Extasy’:
Nor was it for applause —
That I could ascertain —
But independent Extasy
Of Universe, and Men —