With no warning, Mr Dickinson, aged seventy-two, died on 16 June 1874. He was stressed at the time. As the years passed he had not managed to repay what he had borrowed from the inheritance of his wards who had lived at The Evergreens. This pressed upon him in 1874 when Anna Newman, the youngest, married. Then too his accounts as Treasurer of Amherst College had been in disarray when he resigned in 1872, a repeat of the unhappy situation of his own father, who had then left town. Samuel Dickinson had died far from family and all he held dear. Edward Dickinson too was away from home, serving in the Massachusetts legislature, when his heart stopped.
His last letter from Boston had been written in his dry lawyer’s voice:
June 8.74
Dear Family,
The day is extremely hot — I came down from the House, about 5 o’clock, & found Louisa & Fanny … at the ‘Tremont House’ [hotel] … Nothing more to-night.
Yours affy,
E. Dickinson
Crowds came through the gate of the Homestead for the funeral: all the worthies of Amherst, fellow members of the legislature and the senators for Hampshire County and Sunderland. An overflow from the house sat on chairs and sofas on the lawn. The coffin was open and a reporter (probably Bowles, who saw Emily for the first time in twelve years) observed that Mr Dickinson looked ‘as self-reliant and unsubdued as in life’. A wreath of white daisies from the Dickinson meadow were the only flowers allowed.
The Revd Mr Jenkins read from the first book of Samuel: ‘Samuel died, and all the Israelites were gathered together and lamented him, and buried him in his house at Ramah.’ Like the high priest, Mr Dickinson had administered justice and maintained integrity in his position as ‘Father to Amherst’. His alarming manner, the minister went on, had concealed a ‘hidden gentleness’. It was ‘not a gentleness that expended itself in pleasant speeches and manners assumed for effect, but a gentleness that felt others’ pains and losses, and exerted efforts for relief’. The Puritan in him, simple, stern, had abjured sentiment, while delicacy concealed choice feelings. Unconventional in his faith, not caring for ceremony and doctrine, Mr Dickinson had been (in his own words) ‘melted to tears’ at the remembrance of his conversion: ‘what we saw and felt of the working of God’s spirit among us in 1850’.
The sermon ended with a warning to survivors: ‘A great burden which strong shoulders have borne hitherto is rolled upon us …’.
Shaken, unprepared, Emily remembered that the day before her father left for Boston she had wanted to spend time with him, and as the afternoon stretched out he had said, ‘I would like it to not end.’ She still heard his voice at prayers. ‘I say unto you,’ he would read in such militant accents he would startle her — she who startled others with words of her own. Without him, home seemed ‘a House of Snow’. She recalled a scene in April: unseasonal snowstorms had brought birds to the kitchen door one frozen morning. She had spied her father in slippers, on his way to the barn to fetch them grain. Now she saw this protector removed to the ‘Palace’ of his coffin, to a narrow prison in the ‘Marl House’.
Then, on the first anniversary, with grief as cutting as ever, Mrs Dickinson had a stroke that left her paralysed. She would need to be nursed for the rest of her life. A line from the Psalms echoed in Emily’s head: ‘He giveth to the beast his food and to the young ravens which cry.’
Their mother had only to sigh and Emily heard it, which meant that she no longer shut her door unless Vinnie were there, feeding, washing, combing. Responsible Vinnie, knowing ‘no shadow — brave — faithful — punctual’ was ‘spectacular as Disraeli and sincere as Gladstone’. Emily’s hyperboles set domestic affections above politics, even George Washington. If his name came up, she flashed back, ‘George Who —?’
Vinnie, she said, was more hurried than Presidential candidates and ‘in more distinguished ways, for they have only the care of the Union, but Vinnie the Universe —’.
Tenderness was the only God whom Emily was prepared to know, a faith for a household of women. While Vinnie undertook the hands-on care, Emily read to her mother, fanned and encouraged, so that it seemed to her she had hardly said, ‘Good morning, Mother’ when she heard herself saying, ‘Mother, good-night.’ As the years passed it was a relief each morning to find that timid face awake on the pillow.
The sisters had sufficed for each other before their father’s death. Emily had explained to Mrs Holland what Vinnie meant to her: ‘She has no Father and Mother but me and I have no Parents but her.’ Now the sisters stood closer than ever. They had long relieved their mother of household care, with the help of an Irishwoman, Margaret (Maggie) Maher. She too called Mrs Dickinson ‘Mother’. Warm and wild and noisier than the Dickinsons, ‘the North Wind of the family’, Maggie alone was in the poet’s confidence about the booklets in the bedroom chest. She agreed to secrete them in her trunk.
By the 1870s, the existence of poems in the Homestead had got about and Miss Emily had begun her long career as ‘the myth’. Curiosity grew about the recluse, the kind of talk that would captivate Mabel Todd when she arrived in Amherst. House guests continued to stay: for one their father’s sister, Aunt Elizabeth, tall, imposing in royal purple, leaving behind her an atmosphere of court martial. In her forties she had married a tame widower. ‘Eagles have the right idea,’ she said to her miserable stepdaughter. ‘They push the eaglets out of the nest.’ Aunt Elizabeth was now Mrs Currier, but called privately ‘Aunt Glegg’ (after Maggie Tulliver’s carping aunt in The Mill on the Floss), her bossiness so invasive that visits had to be borne as a joke. Aunt’s heels clunked up and down the stairs. There was no stopping her. But no one would detect poems in the servant’s room.
In business matters the sisters now leant on their brother, who took over his father’s partnership in the law office. He had already taken over his father’s post as treasurer, a position commanding all college decisions. Austin Dickinson’s appointment in 1872 was not uncontested, but when it came to finance he proved able. He sorted out his father’s accounts and landscaped the college grounds. Like Emily, he had botanical taste and expertise.
Another man to rely on was Mr Dickinson’s old friend Otis Phillips Lord, a judge in the Massachusetts Supreme Court. Lord had studied law at Amherst just before Emily was born and during the first eighteen months of her life. He had graduated in 1832, a classmate and friend of Cousin Zebina, and Amherst had conferred on him an honorary Doctor of Laws in 1869. He was married to Elizabeth Farley, a high-minded descendant of John Leverett, president of Harvard. They were childless and lived near the witch-house in Salem, the town famous for the witchcraft trials of the 1690s. The Lords from Salem used to stay at the Homestead, and after Mr Dickinson died ‘the dear Lords’ continued to come. The Judge appears to have come on his own for a week in October 1875 when Emily, far from reclusive, spoke of his visit as being ‘with me’.
Since Lord had known Emily all her life he did not hesitate to enquire after her health in a fatherly way. She was dreaming of her father every night (always a different dream) and prone to forget what she was doing during the day, ‘wondering where he is’. This absence of mind may have troubled her sister, since it was with Vinnie that Lord raised his concern: ‘… Knowing … how unwilling [she is] to disclose any ailment, I fear that she has been more ill, than she has told me. I hope you will tell me particularly about her.’ Unsure what her sickness was, he wished Vinnie to report fully, though he respected Emily’s reticence on the subject.
‘Emily never thinks of herself,’ he remarked to Vinnie in March 1877. He thought her an angel, like his wife, who had rheumatism and other ills. Mrs Lord died in December 1877, on Emily’s forty-seventh birthday.
Over the next few months she turned to the handsome widower — not as a father but as a suitor of sorts. Later, a granddaughter of Dickinson’s confidante Mrs Holland suggested that Lord’s tenderness had ‘long been latent in his feeling for her’. Dickinson expert Christopher Benfey has asserted this possibility more strongly, suggesting the attraction went back to the summer of 1862 when Otis Lord came to Amherst as Commencement speaker.
Eighteen years her senior, his grey hair was shading into white; his expression calm and contained — not a man to exact attention, though his grave and upright bearing subdued others, not only the guilty, as he passed judgement. To Susan he looked forbidding, casting gloom over guests at The Evergreens; stern ‘as the Profile of a Tree against a winter sky’, Emily ventured to say. He appeared as rigid as Mr Dickinson, but she had a way with elders of this sort, breezing through their barest branches. Her amusing darts disarmed men of law who were accustomed to wither lesser beings; the drafts of her letters to Lord are witty, confident, open (not coded like letters to ‘Master’) and playfully physical — hardly the way modest women were meant to behave. Gossip had it that Susan had been taken aback to break in on the supposed recluse, the image of white-frocked chastity, in the Judge’s arms.
Three people claimed to have heard Sue deplore that embrace: one was Mabel at the start of their friendship in 1881; another was Mrs Halls, an Amherst neighbour; and the last, the Judge’s niece Abbie Farley. Emily, the niece is reported to have said, had not ‘any idea of morality’. She was bound to take this view for Miss Farley, aged thirty-five, was the Judge’s heir. She and her mother, Mrs Lord’s sister, were due to inherit jointly $23,000. Together with another niece on the Farley side (due to inherit $10,000), they kept house for the Judge. If he remarried he would have new claims.
‘Little hussy’, Abbie fumed over a copy of Emily’s Poems decades later when her own chief heir, Mrs Stockton, questioned her about the celebrated poet Abbie had once known. By then Abbie Farley had become Mrs West, elaborately dressed and married into a leading Salem family. ‘Loose morals,’ Abbie remembered. ‘She was crazy about men. Even tried to get Judge Lord. Insane too.’
‘I went there one day, and in the drawing room I found Emily reclining in the arms of a man’, Susan reportedly warned the Todds when Vinnie asked them to call. Mabel Todd had had no reason to distort this report. There’s a gap here, something unsaid that remains in question. Did Emily’s demonstrative ease lead Susan to suspect an improper spark while Mrs Lord had been alive? Was Susan jealous? In succumbing to marriage, one consolation for Sue had been Emily, who had knit herself to her friend and ‘Sister’. Yet now, improbably, Emily had someone else: not the figment ‘Master’ had largely been, but a man in love with her.
To Emily herself Lord’s love was ‘Improbable’. It would have been unthinkable in Mr Dickinson’s lifetime: his carefully protected daughter permitting such licence, and with his old friend. The voice of judgement, ‘I SAY UNTO YOU’ thundering through the startled air at morning prayers, had cleansed impurities from the minds of Mr Dickinson’s listeners. As Emily put it humorously, ‘Fumigation ceased when Father died’. Now, four years on, that voice no longer ruled. In her late forties and early fifties she found herself free to partake of the forbidden tree.
Lord, too, appeared to have relinquished his public character. Emily perceived, as she put it, Calvary and May struggling for supremacy. In his courtroom he was ‘merciless’ against fraud and dishonesty, and did not hide his contempt for legal technicalities that obstructed justice. ‘His dynamite was all in his eye’, according to colleagues on the bench. He could detect a fallacy at a glance and strip a case of irrelevant matter. A witness rarely left the stand with any fact concealed. To search out ‘the secret springs of action’ was more demanding, more subtle, he considered, than the mysteries of science: ‘he that becomes master of the human mind and human passions has achieved a greater triumph than he who has discovered a planet’. Susan thought him ‘a perfect figure-head for the Supreme Court, from his stiff stock to his toes’. His individuality, she said, was ‘so bristling, his conviction that he alone was the embodiment of the law, as given on Sinai, so entire, his suspicion of all but himself, so deeply founded on the rock bed of old conservative Whig tenacities, not to say obstinacies’ that he could not ‘coalesce’ with others at The Evergreens. Here was a man disposed to entertain the Dickinsons at table by reciting a hymn beginning ‘My thoughts on awful subjects roll / Damnation, and the dead’, accompanied by nervous laughter from his listeners.
With Lord, Emily was unafraid to speak up, inviting a glint of humour she called ‘the Judge Lord brand’. A smile broke when she teased him with the solemnities of courtroom language. ‘Crime’, ‘confess’, ‘punish’, ‘penalty’, ‘incarcerate’ were the words she applied to his supposed trial of her as a wanting lover. ‘I confess that I love him,’ she has to admit, but cannot pay the ‘debt’ she owes him. Can her ‘involuntary Bankruptcy’ be a crime? Will he ‘punish’ her? ‘Incarcerate me in yourself — that will punish me,’ she makes bold to suggest. The prospect of this ‘rosy penalty’ elates her: ‘the exultation floods me’, she confides, ‘I can not find my channel — The Creek turned Sea at thoughts of thee …’.
Flashing repartee of this sort exploded into intimacy within months of Mrs Lord’s death. That year, 1878, there’s immediate talk of consummation. She’s expressive about ‘hunger’. Restraint, she’s aware, fans desire.
Dont you know that you are happiest while I withhold and not confer — dont you know that ‘No’ is the wildest word we consign to Language?
You do, for you know all things — [top of sheet cut off] …
The ‘Stile’ is God’s — My Sweet One — for your great sake — not mine — I will not let you cross — but it is all your’s, and when it is right I will lift the Bars, and lay you in the Moss — You showed me the word.
I hope it has no different guise when my fingers make it. It is Anguish I long conceal from you to let you leave me, hungry, but you ask the divine Crust and that would doom the Bread.
Her letter reports to him her nephew’s curiosity, reflecting something of the family’s astonishment: such a figure of rectitude, such a paragon of the law, to be consorting so unconventionally with his aunt.
‘Aunt Emily,’ Ned asked, ‘does Judge Lord belong to the Church?’
‘I think not, Ned, technically.’
‘Why I thought he was one of those Boston fellers who thought it the respectable thing to do.’
‘I think he does nothing ostensible, Ned.’
‘Well, my father says if there were another Judge in the Commonwealth like him, the practice of law would amount to something.’
‘I think it probable,’ she murmured, recalling (as she put it in her next letter to the Judge), ‘I had never tried any case in your presence but my own, and that, with your sweet assistance … Dont you know you have taken my will away …? Should I have curbed you sooner? “Spare the ‘Nay’ and spoil the child”? Oh, my too beloved, save me from the idolatry which would crush us both —’.
During 1879 she was following Scribner’s serialisation of The Europeans, a comedy of New England manners by Henry James. What amused her most was the chill rectitude of Mr Wentworth, a replica of Mr Dickinson. ‘I fear I must ask with Mr Wentworth, “Where are our moral foundations?”’ she joked to Mrs Holland, whose husband edited the magazine. The Hollands now lived in New York, out of touch with what had happened to her.
‘Should you ask what had happened here, I should say … sweet latent events — too shy to confide —’.
She wasn’t shy when she drafted her letters to Lord: ‘lift me back, wont you, for only there [in your arms] I ask to be …’. He was her ‘lovely Salem’; she, his ‘Amherst’. Weekly letters, directed to arrive on Mondays by the Judge’s habits of punctuality, bonded Salem and Amherst. Emily’s ‘little devices to live till Monday’ — attempts to concentrate on work — gave way to ‘the thought of you’. So she said to herself, if not to Salem, in a pencilled scrap which breaks into verse celebrating the nature of love (fleet, indiscreet, wrong and joyful), drawing out a ‘glee’ lurking in Salem’s corners and capable of eluding the scourge of a puritanical religion — shades of her father warning her mother not to look for pleasure in marriage:
How fleet — how indiscreet an one —
How always wrong is Love —
The joyful little Deity
We are not scourged to serve —
Embraces sealed the nearness of words when, now, at more frequent intervals, Salem — ‘sweet Salem’ — came to Amherst. As a single man it was no longer proper for Judge Lord to stay at the Homestead; he and Emily met in the parlour. There, they held each other while the air about them fanned the question of marriage.
It was different from her feelings for ‘Master’. Lord was emotionally more guarded and this blocked the kind of desire she hoped to promote (like her mother before her): ‘How could I long to give who never saw your natures Face —’, she tried to say in a draft of a letter she may not have sent. At the same time his physical presence intensified in August and September of 1880, when he practically lived in Amherst.
During this time they may have entered into some kind of private engagement. Softly, her thin hand is offered to him in response to what she calls ‘your distant hope’. He leaves saying it had been a ‘heavenly hour’. How sweet was his candour, she wrote. It was a new fashion ‘in delight’ to hear a man call her beautiful. ‘I never heard you call anything beautiful before’, she scribbled a day or so after. ‘It remained with me curiously’. By ‘curiously’, she meant a dream where she was asked to ‘unvail’ his posthumous statue. She couldn’t bring herself to unveil him, she confessed: ‘I said what I had not done in Life I would not in death when your loved eyes could not forgive.’ It was important for her to convey that she would not take advantage of this intimacy; he was not to be used as material for poems. This was strictly a private pleasure and part of her pleasure was to release a clarity of statement that reflects a judge’s demand for directness. He would have had a lifetime’s experience in courtroom questioning — pressing for truth — but he had the sensitivity to refrain from power. He might have been a Master, but wasn’t.
Emily Dickinson had led ‘Master’ and Mr Higginson a merry dance, beckoning then giving them the slip — her superior instants furled in riddles they could not read. Her abjection as the humble little Daisy or the worshipful posture of ‘your Scholar’ teased these leaders of the literary marketplace. The Judge, with dynamite in his eye when it came to character, would have seen through such dramas. With him, she was honest.
‘I have done with guises’, she declared at the time the relationship moved forward in 1878. ‘I never seemed toward you’, she confirmed in the course of 1880.
Was she too frank for her own good? The fear did cross her mind, and it’s possible that she edited the surviving drafts or didn’t send them. Whether she did or not, her father’s friend gave her emotions a ‘fair home’, replacing the vacancy in what she still called ‘my father’s house’. And yet he was not like her father. His racy talk, familiar to colleagues on the bench, called out an unfamiliar side to Emily Dickinson.
‘I will not wash my arm’, she said, ‘twill take your touch away —’, and again: ‘It is strange that I miss you at night so much when I was never with you — but the punctual love invokes you soon as my eyes are shut — and I wake warm with the want sleep had almost filled …’.
She speaks like a guilt-free child — childlike in the Romantic sense, untrammelled by what Wordsworth called the prison-house: capitulations to social norms that blight the innocent who comes into the world trailing clouds of glory ‘from God who is our home’. To lie in Lord’s arms, to evoke his touch in bed at night was as spontaneous, as free of definition, as the way Dorothy Wordsworth lay beside her beloved brother or held his head against her breast.
Wafting through the poems is a woman playing a counter-role: this purified creature has to freeze the life of the ‘Ethiop within’. Abandoned to solitude, she retires from existence; puts on purity in her white dress; assumes ‘Cobweb attitudes’; and hangs her head in ostensible submission. In this poetic role she enacts the appealing helplessness and self-effacement of nineteenth-century womanhood, but a cutting voice finds the role absurd: ‘such was not the posture / Of our immortal mind —’. All the same, the white legend was to linger: as late as 1976, in the Broadway play The Belle of Amherst, a ‘shy’, ‘chaste’, ‘frightened’ poet charms the audience with her feminine winsomeness. The playwright called it an ‘enterprise of simple beauty’.
The sentiment of this cult invites satire. A giant (sixty-foot) puppet of the Belle of Amherst, in the signature white dress, pops out in the 1999 movie Being John Malkovich. Demurely, book in hand, this famous ‘Nobody’ decries ‘Somebodies’ who croak about themselves the livelong day. Then, in 2008, ‘EDickinsonRepliLuxe’, a futuristic tale by Joyce Carol Oates, imagines the mass-marketing of a Dickinson robot half the poet’s size. This diminutive Belle in her dimity apron is designed to be a harmless pet, a consolation for wives buried in suburban deadness — so unlike the ardent woman who flung out her lassoes.
After a springtime visit to Amherst in 1882 the Judge conducted a trial in Springfield, as reported daily in the Republican. On 29 April he sentenced the accused, Dwight Kidder, to twenty years for the manslaughter of his half-brother Charles. Emily Dickinson wrote to Lord the following day, a Sunday, unsure whether he was still occupied with the case or whether he had returned to Salem. Her letter is again extraordinarily frank in its strange allusiveness and innuendo: she appoints him ‘the judge’ of their varied moments, and herself the advocate for contentment with the status quo.
30 April 1882
… To write to you, not knowing where you are, is an unfinished pleasure — Sweeter of course than not writing, because it has a wandering Aim, of which you are the goal — but far from joyful like yourself, and moments we have known — I have a strong surmise that moments we have not known are tenderest to you. Of their afflicting Sweetness, you only are the judge, but the moments we had, were very good — they were quite contenting …
I am told it is only a pair of Sundays since you went from me. I feel it many years … I have been in your Bosom …
Heaven, a Sunday or two ago …
‘Impregnable’ was a word of the moment. She placed it between them, teasing a legal mind for whom words have precise connotations. ‘Could we yield each other to the impregnable chances till we had met once more?’ Anticipation might open up fantasy. This was admissible: the space, between meetings, to stage what they will. As Emily concedes that Sweetness she and Mr Lord had not known — aware of his more ‘afflicting’ frustration — his letter arrived from Salem. The following day she continues:
Papa [another private name] has many Closets that Love has never ransacked. I do — do want you tenderly. The Air is soft as Italy, but when it touches me, I spurn it with a Sigh, because it is not you … Our life together was long forgiveness on your part toward me. The trespass of my rustic Love upon your Realms of Ermine, only a Sovereign could forgive … Oh, had I found it sooner! Yet Tenderness has not a Date — it comes — and overwhelms.
The question of marriage came up more seriously in November—December 1882, after Mrs Dickinson died. Eyeing Emily’s thinness, he teased her as ‘Emily Jumbo’ (the famous elephant, Jumbo, in Barnum’s circus had recently appeared near Amherst). She tossed the joke back.
‘Sweetest name, but I know a sweeter — Emily Jumbo Lord. Have I your approval?’
He assumed that she was now freed to live with him. He replied, ‘I will try not to make it unpleasant.’
She was touched that he could invite her into his ‘dear Home’ with ‘loved timidity’. Her answer, as often when she was moved, almost falls into verse.
‘So delicate a diffidence, how beautiful to see! I do not think a Girl extant has so divine a modesty. You even call me to your Breast with apology! Of what must my poor Heart be made?’
His delicacy made her reproach herself. He was the ‘tender Priest of Hope’, and his offer needed no further glow. Meanwhile, in the bitter cold of mid-winter, the love she felt must keep him ‘sweetly warm’, though she hoped he’d wear his furs as well. His love for her was ‘a treasure I still keep …’. Writing to each other, as was their custom, on a Sunday, she willingly transferred her worship. ‘While others go to Church, I go to mine, for are not you my Church, and have we not a Hymn that no one knows but us?’
Her ‘No’ to marriage was never final. She ‘lies near’ his ‘longing’; she ‘touches’ it, but then wills herself to move away. It would have been natural to hope that her condition would lessen as she grew older but she’d had a blackout, perhaps a seizure, in April 1881, brought on by the blaze of a fire in Phoenix Row, with a wind blowing the burning shingles. Afterwards she had lain on her pillow for more than a week, while Vinnie had closed her lips even to Loo and Fanny, who were familiar with ‘the cause’. When Emily was able to lift her head she apologised to them for Vinnie’s secrecy.
In the end she did not tell Lord why she could not ‘bless’ their union, only that not to do so ‘would be right’. To keep epilepsy the secret it had to be, she must remain at home as long as she lived. But she may have had other considerations as well: the incursions of the spirit are often associated with a particular place and Dickinson’s room may have been for her thus hallowed. All that’s certain is that she had to control the tie with Lord. The forgiveness she asks for refusing to consummate their union addresses a divine Spirit rather than a leader of men.
Was Lord vital to Dickinson or was he an aftermath to her soaring? Was this a comfort after her father’s death, the slow fading of her mother and the premature death of Samuel Bowles, at fifty-two, on 16 January 1878, a month after Mrs Lord died? It’s telling that Lord does not enter her poetry. From that point of view he was a latecomer, competent, humorous, honourable and devoted, who offers the woman — not the poet — a new drama. For the first time she experiences a man’s touch and re-experiences it at night in her imagination. Lying in the dark, she thinks of Lord’s need and goes to meet it with a readiness both like and unlike that of Daisy, an innocent, eager for a momentous experience, yet uneasy at the looming Man of Noon. At forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine and into her fifties, she tried out a prospective husband; his desire held up a mirror to a ‘want’ of her own but she could not forget the red ‘Fire rocks’ of her ‘volcano’ that bound her still to ‘solitude’. By now, solitude was her habit. In the haunted house of her imagination, a bridegroom would mount her stair at midnight. He’s her poetic ‘Future’; the consummation she anticipates is posthumous. No ordinary bridegroom could compete with the footfall of the afterlife. All her days she heard it coming.