My Wars Are Laid Away in Books Read online

  None stir the second time –

  On whom I lay a Yellow Eye –

  Or an emphatic Thumb –

  Fr764 (about 1863)

  A later and less enigmatic poem concerns the unavoidability of “fighting” for one’s life “In that Campaign inscrutable/Of the Interior” (Fr1230). Another, “My wars are laid away in books” (Fr1579), obviously retrospective, dates from about 1882, not long before the reunion. Hard battle resulting in victory or defeat was a central, lifelong metaphor for her. Far from being a wispy escapist, she was as martial a Dickinson as any of them. Yet she had no one’s blood on her hands and paid little or no attention to family or local history, including her father’s toast at Hadley’s 1859 bicentennial invoking the by now moss-covered theme of New England’s errand into the (so-called) wilderness.

  What complicated this inheritance for the poet was that she was not only disqualified by her sex from entering public life but actively instructed not to define herself in terms of the collective struggles of her time. Unlike her father, Edward, a conservative bulwark of the public world as she knew it, she was relegated to the private sphere, and that at a time when specifically domestic and affectionate qualities were assigned to women and given an extreme emphasis and development. Also, sentimental writing by both sexes was in vogue. If Emily’s letters and poems often express a kind of ultimate in exquisite tenderness, we should bear in mind that the energies that might have been expended otherwise in different conditions were, with her, compressed into writing that had to remain a part of private life, even when confided to close friends.

  One of her poems from early in the Civil War sums up a woman’s life and death by tracing her footprints into a deserted and unfamiliar place. Although the woman’s path is untraveled by others, it is, paradoxically, already there, familiar, old:

  ’Twas the old – road – through pain –

  That unfrequented – One –

  These lines take us back to the old Puritan allegories of life’s hard and lonely course, except that here the journey begins not in sin but in anguish. Observing the woman’s tracks as if from just above, the speaker follows with breathless engagement:

  This – was the Town – she passed –

  There – where she – rested – last –

  Then – stepped more fast –

  The little tracks – close prest –

  Then – not so swift –

  Slow – slow – as feet did weary – grow –

  Then – stopped – no other track!

  The footprints hint at an extreme and convulsive effort, which appears to have failed. But the story isn’t over:

  Wait! Look! Her little Book –

  The leaf – at love – turned back –

  Her very Hat –

  And this worn shoe just fits the track . . .

  Fr376

  In the end, we are assured the traveler has been translated to a bed in “Chambers bright.” That her place of rest is made up by women, not angels, hints that her impassioned but unknown errand into the wilderness was in some way specific to her sex.

  The only friends to whom Dickinson is known to have sent the poem were two first cousins on her mother’s side, sisters, of whom she was especially fond. At the time she copied it in her secret manuscript books, about 1862, her own tracks were also extremely “close prest,” resulting in 227 poems for that year alone, by R. W. Franklin’s count. Her book, too, was dog-eared at love, and pain and solitude, and laughter and risk and freshness and power and so much more. Devious, disguised, and mostly obliterated, Dickinson’s tracks are going to be harder to read than those of the risk-taking woman she wrote about. Is the poem about a single woman whose capacity for love drives her into panic, solitude, and death? At times it will look as if the poet was on that “unfrequented” road. But hers kept going where the other woman’s stopped.

  In 1850, writing the future president of Dartmouth College, Charles Hammond described Amherst, the town Dickinson passed, as “the land of the fathers,” the place where “the ancient altars” were still honored and tended. To follow her road to greatness, we have to go back to her paternal grandfather, whose dedication to those altars helped set the terms within which she defined and dared to exercise her high calling—an artist’s heroic errand into and out of a wilderness all her own.

  All the Armor of Fortitude and Determination

  Samuel Fowler Dickinson, the poet’s grandfather, embodied much of her paternal heritage, being both a man of means and a man of thought—a promoter of education, a community leader, a defender of Calvinist orthodoxy. He rose to greatness as a cofounder of Amherst College, but he also proved an obsessive, unbalanced, and scattered man whose judgment went astray and whose life ended in a shambles.

  After graduating from Dartmouth as Latin salutatorian in 1795, Samuel spent a year teaching school, an occupation he found too dependent on the “whims” of constituents. His lungs unwell, he underwent a conversion and began studying with the Reverend Nathanael Emmons, one of New England’s most energetic and eminent Calvinists. Four months of Emmons convinced the young man he was not cut out for the ministry, but he continued to regard his instructor as a “great Divine.” Indeed, judging from Samuel’s intense lifelong drive, it looks as if he took to heart Emmons’s curious “Exercise Scheme,” a religious teaching that gave unusual emphasis to the power of the will and the obligation to use it. *2

  Returning to Amherst, Samuel put himself under the tutelage of Judge Simeon Strong, the town’s leading lawyer and the owner of much valuable land in its center. In a letter to a college friend dating from this period, the young man wrote that “for entering the world we need all the armour of fortitude and determination.” This statement, that of someone putting the Exercise Scheme into motion, catches the embattled drive working within Samuel and some of his descendants: all the armor and determination was precisely what they required. His imagery gives us our first sight of the resolute will to be great that his granddaughter would quietly assert some sixty years later.

  But Squire Dickinson, as he came to be known (the title being honorary only), was an overreacher, with little sense of his natural limits. Although he played a leading role in Amherst’s affairs, he never acquired the calm and powerful reserve traditionally associated with a pillar of the community. Instead, as Elizabeth Currier recalled, he gave “himself but four hours of sleep, studying and reading till midnight, and rising at four o’clock he often walked to Pelham or some other town before breakfast. Going to court at Northampton, he would catch up his green bag and walk the whole seven miles. ‘I cannot wait to ride.’” Ambitious and public-spirited, he was also frenetic, the kind of man who undoes his own success. He acquired title to a great deal of land in and about Amherst, as had Judge Strong, but he couldn’t carry the mortgages. In state elections, he was sent to the house ten times and once to the senate, but when he ran for a congressional seat in 1828 after opposing his district on the tariff issue, he was crushed 1,968 to 246, his hometown turning against him two to one. Three years later, addressing the regional Agricultural Society, he unloaded a vast collection of opinions on education, militia reform, Sabbath schools, ardent spirits, excessive government expenditures, and all aspects of farming. “He works very hard,” a daughter reported in his old age; “he thinks he cannot get along without lending a helping hand to every man’s plough.”

  The woman Samuel married on March 21, 1802, Lucretia Gunn of nearby Montague, was said by one of her daughters to be slow “to form acquaintances or attachments,” which may mean either that she was withdrawn or that she was unfriendly. Her few extant letters, mainly to her son Edward (the poet’s father), bespeak an ordinary and down-to-earth range of interests and a strikingly ungenteel directness: “We are engaged killing hogs to day of course must shorten my letter.” “Do not recollect any remarkable occurrence except Mrs. Hicks who once attempted to cut her throat last week jumped into the well and put an end to her existence.�
� In 1820 news of a revival inspired the hope her son would be converted “and not have to lament the ‘Harvest is past the Summer is ended & you are not saved.’” Curiously, 1820 seems to have been the year she herself joined Amherst’s First Congregational Church—twenty years after her husband. According to Martha Dickinson Bianchi, the poet’s grandmother “was by tradition of somewhat tart disposition, and was often referred to in moments of bad temper as ‘coming out’ in her high-strung grandchildren. If a door was banged—‘It’s not me—it’s my Grandmother Gunn!’ was an excuse glibly offered by the three small rascals.”

  Toward his children, Samuel was anything but a cold, uncaring patriarch. When a son became feverish, the Squire let everything go and “devoted my time, night & day, to him,” writing this very letter “by his bedside.” After another son contracted the same illness, the anxious father was “able to attend to little other business” despite his desperate need of money. Concerned about his daughters’ education, he was so eager to have them attend a course of lectures by the botanist Amos Eaton that he urged Edward to come home at Yale’s term break and escort his sisters. He added, uncoercively, “I do not mean to direct, but to express my desire, that you should do this.”

  By 1813 Samuel had fathered five of his nine children and it was time to enlarge his family’s living space and mark his own civic prominence. Replacing the home previously standing on the site, he erected a spacious and imposing house that looked down on Main Street from a slight elevation. Amherst’s first brick house, the Dickinson Homestead *3 was a symmetrical, hip-roofed structure in the Federal style, with four large rooms on each of its two stories. Although this was the building in which the poet was born and spent her first nine and last thirty years, it had yet to undergo the extensive additions and remodeling she would take for granted as an adult. The modifications seem to have begun quite early. A one-story wooden “office” (no longer standing) was attached to the west wall, and in 1821 a daughter noted that “Papa has had ten men to work for him all the week they are to work upon his house.” A year and a half later she triumphantly announced to brother Edward, “we have got some curtains to the west front-chamber, we expect to have our blinds up in two, or three, weeks, and when you come home you wont hardly know our house.” The change from “his” to “our” speaks volumes. The Dickinsons’ life at home was originally much more improvised than the stately mansion of the present suggests.

  In 1817, well before the Squire’s contributions to Amherst College began consuming his estate, he mortgaged this house for $2,500 (today roughly $75,000), an encumbrance he was never able to lift. The household that shaped the poet’s father was marked by high dreams and ambitions, a generosity as reckless as it was shining, worsening indebtedness, and a series of desperate expedients concluding in disaster. Having known what it was like to live without the security and dignity that should have gone with his rank, Edward Dickinson would prove extremely protective of his own family, particularly his wife and older daughter.

  Rolling Back a Flood of Error

  One of the developments that dismayed Calvinists in Samuel’s time was the growth of Unitarianism. Unlike the orthodox, who saw human depravity as so absolute that a divinely initiated regeneration was required, the Unitarians left a large space for human goodness. Where Calvinists saw true religion as necessarily containing elements of terror and psychic violence, Unitarians stood for serenity, a life of rational virtue, a view of Jesus as a model for imitation rather than a divine Savior. The war between these versions of Protestantism became extremely bitter in the century’s second and third decades, giving rise to schisms between congregations and lawsuits over church property and a pervasive social division.

  The orthodox saw Unitarianism as a betrayal of the founders, but that was not the only thing that roused a fighting spirit. The secularism that was stimulated by the war for independence, the erosion of the system in which a town was both a religious and a political corporation, the growth of an unchurched and ill-educated population in the West, and the Federalist Party’s weakness in national politics: such developments helped fuel the broad conservative reaction that has been loosely termed the Second Great Awakening.

  This movement had a vigorous life that extended into the poet’s formative years, establishing revivals as a major aspect of congregational life and stimulating the development of new institutions—Sabbath Schools, societies for distributing Bibles and tracts and commissioning missionaries, and powerful advocacy campaigns for temperance, Sunday closing laws, and other reforms. Designed to keep certain social tendencies in check and reassert a version of the ancestral errand, these institutions served to foster the mysterious inner act based on surrender or submission and known as conversion. This was the system the poet was born into and grew up taking for granted.

  One of the changes that most disturbed the orthodox occurred at Harvard’s divinity school, which defected to Unitarianism early in the century. It was because conservatives saw Harvard as having dropped the torch that was its main reason for being—training a learned clergy faithful to the Reformation—that Amherst College was founded when and where it was, and with such fervor. “We have seen error attempting to roll its desolating flood through our churches,” intoned Noah Webster at the laying of the cornerstone in 1820; “we have seen prostituted to the vile purpose of disseminating false doctrines, funds that were consecrated to the interests of truth.” This angry sense of betrayal, widely shared, helps explain how a village that turned out many college graduates but commanded little real wealth was able to organize, endow, and set in motion a first-rate college.

  Samuel Fowler Dickinson was one of the leading figures in the story, which began when he and Judge Strong’s son Hezekiah and others organized Amherst Academy in 1812. When the three-story brick building opened its doors in 1814—to girls as well as boys—it was one of western Massachusetts’s best private classical schools. Three years later the Squire was part of an ambitious fund-raising campaign to upgrade the Academy, the aim being to endow both a professorship of languages and a scholarship fund for indigent young men willing to become missionaries or ministers. After a mighty effort this campaign collapsed, only to be at once reborn when the poet’s grandfather convinced a fellow enthusiast, Colonel Rufus Graves, that instead of scaling back their goals they should enlarge them. Realizing that a grandly imposing project might have more appeal than the improvement of an existing institution, these wild dreamers resolved to create an evangelical college rivaling Harvard and Williams, then the state’s only colleges. Thus was set in motion a concerted effort to reverse what an early student called the “wide-spread defection from the faith of the fathers.”

  The first step was to raise $50,000, the minimum required by the charter (which had not even been approved as yet). And it was all or nothing: if the drive fell short, all subscriptions would be void and the project would collapse. To insure against this, Samuel and eight other supporters signed a “guaranty bond” in the summer of 1818, jointly committing them to a ceiling of $15,000. He also contributed the individual sum of $1,005. For a man already struggling with debt, such commitments were lavish to the point of recklessness. Fortunately for him, the pledge drive reached its goal in 1819.

  When South College, the school’s first edifice, went up in 1820–1821, Samuel was on the building committee and frequently intervened to rescue the shoestring undertaking. According to an early witness, the Squire

  would pledge his private property to the bank to obtain money that the work might go on. And when there was no money to pay for the teams to draw the brick or men to drive them, his own horses were sent for days and weeks till in one season two or three of them fell by the wayside. Sometimes his own laborers were sent to drive his horses, and in an emergency he went himself, rather than that the work should cease.

  Sometimes he paid the workmen “out of his own pocket, while his wife and daughters toiled to board them.” The intense domestic pressure can be see
n in a distracted letter from wife Lucretia to son Edward: “They have compleated the College our affairs are still in a crazy situation.” What “compleated” meant, as her oldest daughter explained, was that South College’s roof was on and work had ceased for the winter. The craziness at home, whatever that was, reflected Samuel’s obliteration of the line between the world at large and domestic life—a line his son would rigorously defend. Edward knew that zeal moves mountains, but he didn’t want the zealot’s family to foot the bill.

  Zeal also tends to lose track of the proportion between means and ends. *4 Looking back, Edward Hitchcock, the college’s third president and first historian, blamed the rapid early expansion of the physical plant for the load of debt that crippled the school in the 1830s, very nearly destroying it. If Hitchcock had wished to assign blame, he could have pointed at the Squire, who in 1821 undertook, as his daughter reported, “to build the [college] President’s house.” The next summer Samuel helped pay for the liquor—old rum and sling—at a function held in the president’s yard.

  The idea behind Amherst College was that a corps of pious and disciplined ministers and missionaries would roll back Unitarianism, counteract the disintegrative tendencies of American democracy, and carry an educated and resurgent evangelicalism from New England to the rest of the world. It was an idea with consequences: Robert College in Istanbul, American University of Beirut, and Doshisha University in Kyoto were all founded by the school’s devout alumni (the last by Neesima Shimeta, class of 1870 and number one son of a samurai father serving a scholarly Tokyo prince). These institutions are among the results of the vision and energy of the poet’s grandfather, on whose mind, as William S. Tyler noted, “the conversion of the world often pressed heavily.”