My Wars Are Laid Away in Books Page 5

  The next trace comes from 1821–1822, when a certain Caroline P. Dutch, then in her early twenties, served for one year as the academy’s “preceptress.” Her evaluation of Emily’s performance, written on a neatly scissored slip of paper, was never discarded:

  Miss Emely Norcross, for punctual attendance, close application, good acquirements, and discreet behaviour, merits the approbation of her

  Preceptress. C. P. Dutch.

  Miss Dutch also superintended the “Female Department” of the church’s Sabbath School during her year in Monson. The daughter of a minister, she of course paid close attention to her pupils’ religious and moral training. Her report on Emily Norcross puts the emphasis on effort and conduct.

  But the teacher’s painful formality did not preclude warm personal affection. On the notes Emily took of a sermon, written sideways below point number two (“How happy is the christian’s lot”), we find this smuggled message:

  Oh! my dear Caroline

  Remember me

  for

  forever

  If this was Caroline P. Dutch, she did remember. In 1823 she returned to Monson for a visit, and a few days later her punctual and discreet former pupil, then in New Haven, received the welcome message that her teacher “wanted to see you very much.”

  Remarkably, after marrying the Reverend William W. Hunt, this admired preceptress not only ended up in Amherst but became one of the poet’s own early teachers at Amherst Academy. That this coincidence has escaped scholarly notice shows how badly the mother-daughter connection has been slighted. One wonders: Did the two Emily Dickinsons share notes on the instructor they had in common? Does the mother’s attachment to Caroline help explain why the daughter was “always in love with my teachers,” as she once said? Unfortunately, we have no record of the poet’s feelings about this particular teacher.

  Emily Norcross’s one surviving schoolgirl composition is titled “On Amusements: A Dialogue between Mary & Julia.” This may have been a collaborative effort designed for oral delivery at an exhibition: above Mary we find the name of Sarah; above Julia, Emily. Moralistic and uncombative, the dialogue begins with the other girl saying, “when we last met, we were conversing upon Amusements: you thought them criminal and injurious. I cannot think that your sentiments are correct for what can be more innocent than the Amusements of the Theatre, the Ball room, and the like.” Remembering that the exhibition of 1819 had been followed by a ball, it is clear that this dialogue, stilted as it is, concerned the live local issues of the day. Speaking up for control and repression is Julia/Emily:

  O my dear Mary, what can be more pernicious to the youthful mind, than the Amusements which you are now pursuing: when you reflect upon the precious time which you have wasted in vain recreations, will it afford you any real satisfaction? O No far from that: be assured Mary that it will cause many a sigh and bitter remorse of conscience.

  After a token defense of her position, the other girl is persuaded by Julia/Emily’s “cheerful countenance” that “religion is not that melancholy gloomy thing which I have long imagined.” Now quite reformed, she voices Julia/Emily’s austere ideal of the pleasures and rewards of friendship: “Oh favour me with your society often for I think your conversation will ever be a sourse of instruction to me.”

  Compared to the pugnacious colloquy in which Edward and another young man fought it out on an issue of consequence, Emily’s dialogue seems something of a charade, sadly controlled and unreal. If this contrast says something about the emphases in boys’ and girls’ education, it also exhibits one of the big differences between these two persons. Proper, formal, strained, Emily’s part of the composition shows no pleasure in writing, no impetus to put herself onto the page. Instead, she persuades another girl to give up some amusing activities in favor of conversation seen as “a sourse of instruction.”

  All her life Emily Norcross seems to have regarded writing as a chore that bore no relation to the heart’s needs; certainly, she proved an inexpressive and dilatory correspondent. In March 1824 her brother William, then at Yale, reproached her for a silence of six weeks. A few months later, trying another tack, he said he wouldn’t “scold” her anymore for not writing. After she married and left home, her sister Lavinia was dismayed to find that “Emily does not trouble herself about answering my letters.” Regarding Edward as more responsive, Lavinia confided that her sister’s letters were “so short I must complain can she not fill a sheet.” His own sister Lucretia was so put out by his wife’s silence she sarcastically asked him to have her sign “her name in your next letter” lest she “forget how to write.” The poet’s mother’s preferred methods for communicating with people at a distance were, one, not answering, and two, leaving the page mostly blank.

  The most revealing pieces of writing from Emily Norcross’s first two decades may be her sermon notes and outlines. Like other orthodox societies, Monson’s First Church had two services each Sunday and thus two sermons to listen to. On June 3, 1821, when a visiting minister selected John 13:27 as his text (“That thou doest, do quickly”), she recorded his main points:

  1st Life is short and uncertain

  2nd The period for working out our own salvation will [be] short as short as our stay on earth

  Another Sunday, as if preparing for parenthood, she dutifully noted all the things she would have to explain to her children. The fourth point was: “You must teach them . . . that the carnal mind is enmity against God and they possess the carnal mind.” The sixth: “Further teach them the truths respecting death judgement and eternity.” These outline-covered pages probably give an accurate picture of the laborious intellectual and spiritual labors the poet’s mother grew up taking for granted. There was so much hard work, so much discipline, so much to take seriously. That her sermon outlines are mostly in ink tells us (given the awkwardness of using pen and ink in a meetinghouse pew) that she went to the trouble of recopying her original penciled notes. And all the while, technically unconverted, she could not regard herself as ready for eternity.

  It is only because Emily retained a few penciled notes that we have that smuggled “Oh! my dear Caroline.” This chance survival reassures us that after all there was life beneath the discipline. It also warns us how tricky it is to rely on written evidence (as we must) in order to make sense of someone who couldn’t express herself in standard written formats. That, however, was just the kind of mother Emily Dickinson required.

  In 1853, when Austin was away studying at Harvard’s law school, Dickinson informed him that “Mother was much amused at the feebleness of your hopes of hearing from her.” Mother’s odd laugh—that abrupt unmuffling of a nonstandard mind—shows up at intervals in her letters. One January when her husband was away, she informed him, “The weather still continues mild not like winter at all. I think old zero has lost very much of his self respect.” Several years later, writing in the same seasonal conditions, her fifteen-year-old daughter wondered if “Old Winter had forgotten himself.” The huge bag of tricks accumulated by the poet got a start in her mother’s small pocketful of wry.

  Herrick’s School

  Emily Norcross’s longest absence from Monson prior to her marriage took place in summer 1823, when the nineteen-year-old spent several months at a highly regarded girls’ school in New Haven run by the Reverend Claudius Herrick. Previous alumnae included Maria Flynt, a first cousin living in Monson, and Harriet Webster, daughter of the lexicographer and later the wife of Professor William C. Fowler of Amherst College. Accompanied by a cousin, Olivia Flynt, Emily had her lessons in a large five-bay, two-story house on Elm Street, along with sixty-four other girls. (Three years later, when Olivia alone enrolled for a second term, enrollment was down to thirty-eight and the school seemed “much better.”) The two Monson girls apparently lived with Elizabeth Whittlesey, the forty-nine-year-old daughter of a New Haven clergyman. On Olivia, at least, Miss Whittlesey’s “rigid restraint” left a strong impression.

  Although Emily
made “but few” acquaintances, she clearly won over Reverend Herrick, who spoke of her three years later, according to Olivia, “with a great degree of interest—says he became very much attached to you.” This report is another sign of the warm response the young woman inspired in teachers and age-mates alike. After she married, Miss Whittlesey trumpeted a message to Edward Dickinson announcing that she had “a pretty good opinion of you because you have so good an opinion of your wife.” The passage suggests that those who liked Emily understood that her good qualities might not be universally appreciated.

  Like many of Herrick’s pupils, Emily Norcross enrolled for only one term, perhaps because of the press of work at home. The following year a younger brother took for granted she would be “attending to domestic affairs this summer,” but still expressed the hope there would be leisure for “social intercourse or reading” and she would not be “continually pent up in the kitchen.” His fears seem to have been on target: in his next letter, dated November 1 (the season when hordes of flies left barnyards for the warmth of houses), he could only trust that she was “victorious over your mortal enemies, the Flies.” It may well be that a heavy workload kept the poet’s mother from cultivating her mental powers and acquiring social ease.

  Yet her own letters show how happy she was to leave New Haven for Monson, “my dear dear home,” as she called it in a letter to her sister. A very local person, she was tightly bound to family and friends, familiar routines, a limited palette of country sights and sounds. When Olivia went back to Herrick’s school in summer 1826, her letter to Emily developed the feelings she knew her cousin could enter into—how she yearned for “the retirement of our little village” and missed “that little circle of dear friends.” She acknowledged a letter from Emily (“quite too short,” to be sure) that “spoke of the dear little bird—the Whippoorwill—I have heard but one since I left home—I believe there are more of them in M[onson] than anywhere—The Cat-edid supplies its place here—presume you have not forgotten what fine music they used to make in Temple-street [Whittlesey’s home].” “Fine music” is sarcastic, but the passage still strikes the right chords: Emily’s strong local attachments, her love of rural tranquillity, and her alertness to sound—not just the dramatic whippoorwill but the background of locust- or cicada-song.

  Forty years later, when Emily Dickinson had to go to Boston for medical treatment for her eyes, she asked her sister, “Do you remember the Whippowil that sang one night on the Orchard fence?” Both the poet and her brother Austin found a special meaning in the chirping of crickets in high summer. “Musicians wrestle everywhere” (Fr229) is how she began one of several poems that register the undertone of birdsong and insect calls. It was partly owing to her mother that the country’s dispersed drone became one of the things she noticed and wrote about, while taking her own place in the chorus. She was her mother’s daughter in ways not easily got at.

  Chapter 3

  1826–1828: Winning Emily Norcross

  Nowhere do we get a more intimate picture of Emily Dickinson’s domestic origins than in her parents’ many courtship letters, all but one of which have been preserved. The only other extended exchange between the couple dates from the late 1830s, when their union had become close and stable and its tensions muffled. If we wish to parse the marriage that formed the poet, we must follow her parents’ first negotiations.

  On February 8, 1826, when the militia exercises and chemical lectures were over, Solomon Warriner, Jr., a friend of Edward, teased him about “the young Lady, who lived about a mile from our quarters, & near one of the Factories. It cannot be necessary for me to mention her name for I think the impression she made upon your heart, was too deep to be soon effaced.” That same day Edward sent the young lady a resolute and dignified love letter. “From our short interviews,” he wrote, “I imbibed an attachment for you, which I shall continue to cherish.” Not mentioning his heart, he declared his “esteem” for one “in whom so many of the female virtues are conspicuous,” and then he made a forthright declaration of his intentions: to “cherish a friendship, which . . . if reciprocated, might promote our mutual happiness.” He was proposing, not marriage, but an exchange of letters that might lead to marriage.

  It isn’t known whether Emily Norcross was surprised by this unusually explicit and possibly premature declaration. Taking three weeks to reply, she evidently found it a tricky assignment to frame an encouraging yet suitably noncommittal response. She admitted his proposal gave “pleasure,” feared “it would not be prudence in me to give you a definite answer at present,” but then concluded with as definite a reply as Edward could have desired: “I shall hear from you with pleasure.”

  On each side, the correspondents had to contend with heavy constraints. As a student at Northampton Law School, Edward was weighed down with studies and with legal research carried out for his instructors. For her part, Emily not only had little free time but felt a paramount need to be circumspect. Fearing her privacy would be compromised by the postal system, she announced in her second communication that she “could not consistent with my present fealings send letters by mail”—meaning she would rely on trusted friends to carry them. She drafted this letter in her room “without any one persons knowing how I am occupied I fear I shall soon be enquired for.”

  Because Edward saw the exchange of letters as a formal precontractual process in which each party “would be perfectly plain & use the utmost freedom of remark,” he made a strenuous effort to convey a lucid and emphatic idea of his opinions, ambitions, expectations. The opinion he voiced most often—that courage, resolution, and hard work can achieve great things—recalls his father’s youthful credo that a man starting out in the world needs “all the armour of fortitude and determination.” The last word was a favorite with Edward, who liked to underline it. “All that is wanting to make any man what he would be, is a determination to become such.” “More depends on a determination to be contented . . . than we are apt to imagine.” “A man can do almost any thing which he determines to do—the mind, says one, is omnipotent.” In back of these steely affirmations stood two awkward facts: Emily already had a comfortable home, and all he had was a debt-burdened father and a future. “I know the risk is great, on your part,” he candidly conceded.

  Four months after Edward began the correspondence, having received two widely spaced letters and made two day-trips to Monson, he dispatched a sober proposal of marriage:

  Our last interview, which was much more free & unreserved than any former one, led me to a satisfactory conclusion respecting your qualifications, & convinced me that you possessed virtues calculated to render yourself & your friends happy.—And such reliance do I place on your candor, that I feel perfectly safe in making a most unreserved avowal of my esteem, & in declaring my wish to become a friend for life to you.

  Following this came a long cautionary recommendation that Emily owed it to herself to investigate his character and history, to facilitate which he referred her to the men who ran the law school, to his fellow students, and to various clergymen, among them the Reverend Lyman Coleman, who was then courting her cousin Maria Flynt and who could speak for the petitioner’s “character in College.” *10 Adding a long account of his professional prospects, he urged her, first, to reach a decision at her convenience and, second, “to communicate it.” That was the closest he came to an expression of passionate expectation.

  In some respects this strangely eviscerated proposal was a product of its time. Although “friend for life” may look like a euphemism for wife, spouses and relatives were often referred to as friends—a usage the poet would retain long after others dropped it. Still, we cannot equate her young parents with the conventions and understandings of the period. Even for New Englanders, they had an insistent and unfashionable angularity, with obvious ceremony-cutting elements in their personalities. There was a purposeful, starting-from-scratch highmindedness in Edward’s proposal. Anyone can promise love and devotion in the
usual phrases, but he was framing a marital constitution, trying to spell out exactly what Emily might be getting into.

  During the couple’s two-year courtship, Edward sent seventy letters and Emily twenty-four. If for him the correspondence promised a full and free exchange of views, for her it was a much neglected duty, a cause of discomfort, avoidance, shame. The more open and aboveboard he seemed, the more she was hamstrung by uncertainty and embarrassment: it was as if his aggressive candor worked against a matching response. Though she had promised only to “hear,” not to speak, she would apologize at the start of her letters for not replying sooner, and in closing for not writing more. She announced she had something to say, or that “it would give me pleasure to answer all your enquiries,” but that was it: nothing followed. On rare occasions she spelled out how her time was occupied—caring for sick family members, going to Hartford to lay in winter supplies, paying a round of visits when brother William’s fiancée came from New York. Her usual rule, however, was to offer nothing but blanket excuses: “there are many things to prevent my writing of which you are not acquainted.” Once the excuses became an obligatory feature, they began to generate their own rueful humor, as when, à propos of nothing, she added the postscript “I must leave the apologies”—the abruptness of which reminds us of the poet’s sly trenchancy. But the general undertone was an uneasy feeling of not living up to her suitor’s expectations: “I am sensible that I have never exercised that freedom [of expression] which I presume you have desired me to.”