My Wars Are Laid Away in Books Page 24

  He ate and drank the precious Words –

  His Spirit grew robust –

  He knew no more that he was poor,

  Nor that his frame was Dust –

  He danced along the dingy Days

  And this Bequest of Wings

  Was but a Book – What Liberty

  A loosened Spirit brings –

  Fr1593

  As is generally the case with Dickinson’s verse, this poem is itself “loosened” from particular circumstances, naming neither man nor book and thus achieving an extended applicability. But it should be noted that the man’s poverty, weak frame, dingy circumstances, and cheerful spirit are congruent with Newton’s basic facts, and also that the poem was written several months after Emerson’s death in 1882. His passing called up her last known reference to Newton: “Ralph Waldo Emerson – whose name my Father’s Law Student taught me, has touched the secret Spring.”

  It seems unlikely that Dickinson’s correspondence with this “tutor” had a romantic character. If his first letter from Worcester had been as personal as that, she wouldn’t have wanted to share it with Jane, or have described it and Emerson’s Poems as equally “pleasant.” Since Dickinson does not say she may but rather “can write in about three weeks,” it may be that Newton’s circumstances, not parental orders, delayed her reply. Her “I shall” leaves no doubt as to her eagerness and determination.

  What little we know about the correspondence indicates that Newton made clear his high regard for Dickinson. In 1862, after Higginson praised some of her poems, she compared her feelings to those her former “tutor” had aroused:

  Your letter gave no Drunkenness, because I tasted Rum before – Domingo comes but once – yet I have had few pleasures so deep as your opinion, and if I tried to thank you, my tears would block my tongue –

  My dying Tutor told me that he would like to live till I had been a poet.

  Higginson moved her, but it was Newton who conferred the primal intoxication that no later rum, “Domingo,” could possibly match.

  Apparently, that was because he was the first to announce her to herself, foretelling her vocation. In the gospel of Luke there is a righteous old man named Simeon who believes he will not die before seeing the Messiah, and who, when the infant Jesus is brought to Jerusalem, says, “Lord, now let thy servant depart in peace.” When the dying Newton wrote Dickinson he “would like” to live till she achieved the greatness he foresaw, he was acting out—and altering—this classic recognition scene.

  Dickinson’s last and somewhat obscure reference to Newton’s messages may be read with that in mind. Writing to Higginson in 1876 and perhaps referring to the same letter as before, she said, “My earliest friend wrote me the week before he died ‘If I live, I will go to Amherst – if I die, I certainly will.’” In their original context, these words were apparently connected to his prophetic sense of her vocation. Dying from tuberculosis and straightening up his affairs, Newton seems to have sent Dickinson a final statement, reaffirming that he had seen the poet in her and meant to see her crowned with glory. If she won her laurels before he died, he would go to Amherst to observe the coronation. If after, he would still be a witness. He was that convinced of immortality—hers as poet, his as spirit. This seems to have been one of the ways in which, as she later put it, he “taught me Immortality.”

  No one who receives the attestation of that kind of faith from an admired teacher ever forgets it, or the drunken bliss it inspires. Yet Dickinson’s evangelical roots went too deep for her to transform herself into a Romantic of the Wordsworthian or Emersonian type. The early liberalism and serenity and strong masculine entitlement of these two poets were not hers for the taking. Newton gave her a vision of vocation and mastery, but the path would be long, uncertain, and painful, taking her through a wilderness her tutor could not have foreseen.

  Reading

  The oration Austin delivered at Commencement, “Elements of Our National Literature,” hints at the literary concerns that occupied him and touched his sister’s thinking. Thanks to him and other young men, a handful of novels had a major impact on the poet during the two years after her schooling ended.

  In summer 1849 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s mellow treatment of New England village life, Kavanagh, entered the college and then the Dickinson home, where Emily’s brother hid it under the “piano cover” for her. It was a good hiding place: the volume was not only slender but had the gloss of “culture,” transforming the region’s religious and other characteristic aspects into picturesque genre scenes, rigged out with allusions to European art and a line of poetic (but earnest) commentary. The notice in the July Indicator acknowledged the novel’s avoidances—“no deep emotion, no great truth”—but found it a charming read. So did Emily, who probably took its quiet local color as Amherst seen en rose. One of the bits that stuck with her was the exodus of the Pendexters, “turning their backs” on the parish when a modern, liberal, and cultivated minister takes charge.

  The tiny but emphatic vertical marks Emily made beside the passages she liked are easily distinguishable from Austin’s longer and lighter ones. It is instructive to see what caught her eye: the account of Alice and Cecelia’s loving friendship (also marked by another); aphorisms on love; expressive passages (“poems that rhymed with the running water”); and, most tellingly, reflections on the work of communicating thought and representing life. The novel’s theme, the imperative of doing, is exemplified by a schoolmaster who never starts the great romance he spends his life planning to write. The suggestion that he is weighed down by knowledge—“too deeply freighted, too much laden by the head”—was marked by Emily, as were passages on inchoate awareness and the role of art in voicing thought. *56

  Was she thinking of the task before her? One of the book’s characters is a would-be poet, Hiram Adolphus Hawkins, who has an exalted idea of his merits and whose general tone is “sad, desponding, perhaps slightly morbid.” In a letter from 1853, Dickinson associated herself with this poseur: “I wrote to you last week, but thought you would laugh at me, and call me sentimental, so I kept my lofty letter for ‘Adolphus Hawkins, Esq.’” At the time she was far from having vindicated Newton’s dying faith in her.

  Another novel read in 1849, X. B. Saintine’s ingenious and facile Picciola, she also applied to herself. An international best-seller, it tells of the inner pilgrimage of the Count de Charney, who loses his faith, becomes a skeptic, and, after giving himself to various pursuits, joins a pointless conspiracy against Napoleon. He is imprisoned in a fortress named Fenestrella, and the story then becomes one of spiritual recovery during captivity. The agent of redemption is a plant Charney finds growing between two paving stones and which he carefully tends, naming it Picciola, little one. It was probably because the book builds an argument for religion that it was bestowed on Dickinson by William Cowper Dickinson, soon to begin his ministerial studies.

  After reading part or all of this clever didactic novel, Dickinson conveyed her thanks:

  I’m a “Fenestrellan captive,” if this world be “Fenestrella,” and within my dungeon yard, up from the silent pavement stones, has come a plant, so frail, & yet so beautiful, I tremble lest it die. Tis the first living thing that has beguiled my solitude, & I take strange delight in its society. It’s a mysterious plant, & sometimes I fancy that it whispers pleasant things to me – of freedom – and the future.

  Plainly, the book struck a chord. Although Dickinson’s life at the time (Valentine season) was hardly solitary, she evidently saw a deep resemblance between Charney’s restorative confinement and her own situation. The idea of imprisonment, so central in her later writing, had caught her attention. Still, her present hopes were clearly set on freedom and the future.

  A poem she recorded in her manuscript books about 1859 shows close affiliations with her response to Saintine’s novel:

  My nosegays are for Captives –

  Dim – long expectant eyes –

  Fin
gers denied the plucking,

  Patient till Paradise –

  To such, if they sh’d whisper

  Of morning and the moor –

  They bear no other errand,

  And I, no other prayer.

  Fr74

  Whispering of another world to those deprived of freedom and pleasure, Dickinson’s “nosegays” (poems) have the same mission as Charney’s Picciola. And like this flower, which dies and is forgotten once his faith is restored, the speaker claims to have no aspirations for herself.

  A book that engaged Dickinson’s energies much more fully was Jane Eyre, lent to her by Elbridge Bowdoin in late 1849, just before she was given Emerson’s Poems. By this time the novel’s pseudonymous author, Currer Bell, had been heatedly condemned by various defenders of right thinking. The British Quarterly Review characterized him/her as “a person who, with great mental powers, combines a total ignorance of the habits of society, a great coarseness of taste, and a heathenish doctrine of religion.” The book’s “great and crying mischief” was that Jane’s moral strength was that “of a mere heathen mind which is a law unto itself”: she epitomized the “unregenerate and undisciplined spirit.” The Connecticut Valley’s young readers were more receptive. William Gardiner Hammond’s largely admiring review in The Indicator sketched the heroine’s leading trait as something “like self-reliance . . . a sort of self-concentration—a disposition to . . . look within one’s self rather than to the world without for motives and rules of action.” A young woman who enjoyed the novel more than she thought she ought to wrote, “I read Jane Eyre and was quite interested in it—I did not see anything so very objectionable in it—I dont know whether it is because I have not right views of propriety or because I did not appreciate the improper things in it.”

  Dickinson’s response, preserved in the note she sent when returning the book, is so short and takes so much for granted it is easily misread. Since flowers were out of season, she attached a bouquet of fragrant box leaves. The entire note reads, “If all these leaves were altars, and on every one a prayer that Currer Bell might be saved – and you were God – would you answer it.?” The question, as savvy as it is naive, assumes that Bowdoin is well aware of the novel’s improper and heathenish things, and that Currer Bell is unlikely to be saved by a properly orthodox deity. Dickinson asks it because she is already a strong partisan of the controversial book and is groping for some sort of heterodox immortality for the unknown author; Druid-like, she even turns the box leaves into altars. The double punctuation at the end seems to catch her in the act, disguising her risky opinion as a question deferentially presented to a man almost ten years her senior.

  The tantalizing question about Jane Eyre was the unknown author’s sex. In The Indicator Hammond expressed certainty that “no woman in all the annals of feminine celebrity ever wrote such a style, terse yet eloquent, and filled with energy bordering sometimes almost on rudeness.” One would like to know how Dickinson reacted when it was disclosed in 1851 that this unfeminine and incendiary novel was written by Charlotte Brontë. Several years later, she wrote an elegy on the novelist that not only granted her salvation but made heaven the beneficiary:

  Oh what an afternoon for Heaven,

  When “Bronte” entered there!

  Fr146

  There is so much one would like to know about Dickinson’s encounter with her first major woman’s text. Having herself resisted indoctrination at freezing Mount Holyoke, what did she think of Lowood, the Calvinist school for girls (but run by a man)? How did she feel about lordly, romantic Rochester, or dictatorial St. John Rivers, who insists that Jane become his missionary wife, or the diminutive heroine herself, repeatedly defying authoritative men after first obeying them? Jane Eyre is full of explosive material that looks like a twisted or idealized account of Dickinson’s own experience.

  The winter she read the novel she acquired her first and only dog, a Newfoundland. This may have been Father’s way of seeing that she was guarded when away from home. By Valentine’s Day, 1850, the dog had been given the same name as St. John Rivers’s dog, Carlo. Years later, villagers recalled the large animal as the poet’s frequent companion on walks and visits.

  In the copy of Jane Eyre that Charlotte Sewall Eastman gave the poet in 1865, two passages describing the sternly devout Rivers are marked with short penciled lines: “The humanities and amenities of life had no attraction for him—its peaceful enjoyments no charm. Literally, he lived only to aspire.” “At the fireside, [he was] too often a cold, cumbrous column, gloomy and out of place.” Some believe that Dickinson was thinking of her increasingly remote and dour father. Judith Farr has proposed that in her second and third “Master” drafts she assumed the role of Jane. A letter of the 1870s that abruptly quotes what Rochester says to Jane after she saves him from his burning bed—“I find your Benefits no Burden, Jane”—shows how well the poet knew Brontë’s novel and how easily she drew on it.

  What might be termed evangelical hermeneutics—the duty of making a personal application of sacred texts—had a profound effect on Dickinson. More than most readers, she seems to have defined herself partly through her books, as when she retooled her dependency on male tutors by appropriating Jane’s attitude toward Rochester or the narrator’s attachment to Paul Emanuel in Brontë’s Villette (of which Dickinson owned an 1859 edition). For Dickinson no less than for these Victorian heroines, humble veneration was compatible with great inner strength. Indeed, she exercised that strength as she read, seeking and extracting what she could make her own. She wasn’t like Kavanagh’s unproductive schoolteacher, sinking beneath the weight of excess knowledge.

  Writing

  The pleasing stimulus of books got a boost from the social whirl that caught Emily up in December 1849 and January 1850, her first brilliant winter. It seems to have been Austin, “always the leader” in “sugaring parties and such pleasures,” as another girl recalled, who touched off the festivities. After spending his vacation plowing through David Hume’s multivolume History of England, he finally reached the end—“the signal,” in his sister’s words, “for general uproar.” There was a sleigh ride to Deerfield that she described as “a frolic, comprising charades – walking around indefinitely – music – conversation – and supper – set in most modern style,” following which she returned home at two o’clock and “felt no worse for it the next morning.” Then came more parties, tableaux at President Hitchcock’s home, “cozy sociables.” It was as if Father’s rules on late hours and dangerous insobrieties had become inoperative.

  Yet, even as Emily launched herself, she was not only living at home but, owing to Vinnie’s absence, weighed down as never before by household cares. Newton was gone, and when her best friend, Jane Humphrey, left town, Emily moaned, “I am alone – all alone.” For the moment her life had become a patchwork of bondage and freedom, of steadiness and giddiness—a fabric stretched with tensions, openings, solicitations. The previous summer Austin had read an exhibition essay titled “Mind developed in Action,” and then there were Longfellow’s admonitory portraits in Kavanagh of a slothful would-be romancer and a foolish would-be poet. Had the time come to act?

  In February and March 1850 Emily was so busy and absorbed she failed to answer a letter from Jane. Not till April, when a second letter arrived with the news of Jane’s father’s serious illness, did Emily write. Her excuse was uncharacteristic: “Your first words found me far out in the world, crowding, and hurrying, and busying.” What she didn’t say, not wishing to hurt her friend’s feelings, was that much of this activity had taken the form of writing: long bold letters, her first known poem, and a prose Valentine resulting in her first appearance in print. It was a burst of audacious energy, much of it directed to men above her in years or education.

  The first of these compositions was sent to Joel Warren Norcross in Boston. About the same age as Newton and Bowdoin, Joel was her youngest uncle on the Norcross side, coming between her and her parents�
� generations. Though he still boarded with his sister Lavinia in Boston, he had struck out for himself as an importer of fancy goods, making frequent buying trips to Europe and trying to cut a figure. The first Norcross to notice the world of fashion, he impressed some as eccentric, self-important, vain. During a visit to Amherst he gave Emily the impression she would be hearing from him. When he forgot and wrote her father instead, she sent him an extraordinarily vehement mock-reproach.

  It began with a dream vision of the world of men going about their work, sailing, tending their flocks, keeping “gay stores” (like Joel). They lived for pleasure and made promises of one kind or another—“and one man told a lie to his niece.” All were condemned to torment, and when the dreamer (“very much scared”) heard them crying for help and “called to see who they were . . . up from the pit you spoke!” “Not yet aroused to the truth[?]” she paused to ask, trying to sound like an evangelist with a sinner in his sights.

  Taking for granted that her uncle is too hardened to pay heed, she ratchets up the terror with a long and furious denunciation—“You villain without a rival – unparraleled doer of crimes – scoundrel unheard of before”—that culminates in a challenge to a duel and an announcement that “I shall kill you.” Enumerating the methods she may use, she threatens chloroform, entering his room and plucking out his heart, stabbing him “while sleeping.”

  Of course it is all in fun, and before she signs her name (“Emilie – I believe”), she shifts into a familiar news-sending mode (“Amherst is alive with fun this winter”). It would be naive to read her violent language as an expression of rage: her script is as small, neat, and regular as anything she wrote and strikingly out of harmony with her fulminations. Like Austin’s hyperbolic fantasies, the letter is a self-conscious exhibition of humor, verbosity, “imagination,” running in this instance over fifteen hundred words. Yet her idea of fun is more extreme and unsafe than anything Austin is known to have composed. The scenes of punishment are disturbingly direct. Anyone receiving such a letter would feel uneasy.