White Heat Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction: The Letter

  One: The Letter

  Part One: Before

  Two: Thomas Wentworth Higginson: Without a Little Crack Somewhere

  Three: Emily Dickinson: If I Live, I Will Go to Amherst

  Four: Emily Dickinson: Write! Comrade, Write!

  Five: Thomas Wentworth Higginson: Liberty Is Aggressive

  Part Two: During

  Six: Nature Is a Haunted House

  Seven: Intensely Human

  Eight: Agony Is Frugal

  Nine: No Other Way

  Ten: Her Deathless Syllable

  Eleven: The Realm of You

  Twelve: Moments of Preface

  Thirteen: Things That Never Can Come Back

  Fourteen: Monarch of Dreams

  Fifteen: Pugilist and Poet

  Sixteen: Rendezvous of Light

  Part Three: Beyond the Dip of Bell

  Seventeen: Poetry of the Portfolio

  Eighteen: Me—Come! My Dazzled Face

  Nineteen: Because I Could Not Stop

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Emily Dickinson Poems Known to Have Been Sent to Thomas Wentworth Higginson

  Emily Dickinson Poems Cited

  Also by Brenda Wineapple

  Copyright

  In memory of Sybille Bedford

  Illustrations

  Edward Dickinson, year 1853. (MS Am 1118.99b [17]. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University)

  Emily Norcross Dickinson. (2007.1.1.2.L1.2.14NEG, Courtesy of the Monson Free Library Archives Association)

  North Pleasant Street home, Amherst, Massachusetts, 1840–1855. (MS Am 1118.99b [89]. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University)

  William Austin Dickinson, 27 years old, 1856. (MS Am 1118.99b [14]. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University)

  Lavinia Dickinson at 19, in 1852. (MS Am 1118.99b [28]. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University)

  Emily Dickinson, daguerreotype, 17 years old, 1847. (Amherst College Archives and Special Collections by permission of the Trustees of Amherst College)

  Dickinson family silhouette, 1848. (MS Am 1118.4. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University)

  Susan Gilbert. (Courtesy Todd-Bingham Picture Collection, Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University Library)

  Dickinson Homestead, 1858. (Courtesy Todd-Bingham Picture Collection, Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University Library)

  Samuel Bowles. (MS Am 111899b [6]. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University)

  Anthony Burns, 1855, broadside. (Boston: R. M. Edwards, 1855. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Department of Prints and Photographs)

  Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1857. (Courtesy of the Rare Book Department, Boston Public Library)

  The Evergreens. (By permission of the Jones Library, Inc.; Amherst, Massachusetts)

  African Americans, Beaufort, South Carolina, from the collection of Rufus Saxton. (Courtesy Rufus and S. Willard Saxton Papers, Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University Library)

  Smith Plantation, Beaufort, South Carolina, 1862. (Courtesy New-York Historical Society, War of the Rebellion. Edisto Album PR-002-347.20)

  Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, First South Carolina Volunteers, 38 years old, 1862. (Courtesy of the Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Prints and Photographs, University of Virginia)

  Robert Gould Shaw, 1863. (Boston: John Adams Whipple, 1863. Courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum)

  Thomas Wentworth Higginson at 46, in Rhode Island, 1870. (Courtesy Special Collections, Tutt Library, Colorado College, Colorado Springs, Colorado)

  Helen Hunt Jackson, 1875. (Courtesy Special Collections, Tutt Library, Colorado College, Colorado Springs, Colorado)

  Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in photograph sent to Emily Dickinson, 1876. (MS Am 1118.99b [45]. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University)

  Judge Otis Lord. (MS Am 1118.99b [55]. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University)

  Higginson home, Buckingham Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Department of Prints and Photographs)

  Edward (Ned) Dickinson, 20 years old, 1881. (MS Am 1118.99b [19]. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University)

  Martha (Mattie) Dickinson. (MS Am 1118.99b [2]. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University)

  David Todd and Mabel Loomis, engagement photograph, 1877. (Courtesy Todd-Bingham Picture Collection, Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University Library)

  Gilbert (Gib) Dickinson, age 4. (MS Am 1118.99b [25]. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University)

  Higginson and daughter Margaret on tricycle, Cambridge, 1885. (Courtesy Todd-Bingham Picture Collection, Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University Library)

  Emily Dickinson, in photograph marked “Emily Dickinson,” from daguerreotype taken ca. 1853. (Courtesy the Collection of Philip and Leslie Gura)

  Mabel Loomis Todd in 1885, at 29. (Courtesy Todd-Bingham Picture Collection, Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University Library)

  Austin Dickinson, 61 years old, 1890. (Courtesy Todd-Bingham Picture Collection, Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University Library)

  Lavinia Dickinson, 1880s. (Courtesy Todd-Bingham Picture Collection, Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University Library)

  Thomas Wentworth Higginson at 80, in 1903. (Courtesy of the Rare Book Department, Boston Public Library)

  Introduction

  The Letter

  ONE

  The Letter

  This is my letter to the World

  That never wrote to Me—

  The simple News that Nature told—

  With tender Majesty

  Her Message is committed

  To Hands I cannot see—

  For love of Her—Sweet—countrymen—

  Judge tenderly—of Me

  Reprinted by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel

  Loomis Todd in Emily Dickinson, Poems (1890)

  Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”

  Thomas Wentworth Higginson opened the cream-colored envelope as he walked home from the post office, where he had stopped on the mild spring morning of April 17 after watching young women lift dumbbells at the local gymnasium. The year was 1862, a war was raging, and Higginson, at thirty-eight, was the local authority on physical fitness. This was one of his causes, as were women’s health and education. His passion, though, was for abolition. But dubious about President Lincoln’s intentions—fighting to save the Union was not the same as fighting to abolish slavery—he had not yet put on a blue uniform. Perhaps he should.

  Yet he was also a literary man (great consolation for inaction) and frequently published in the cultural magazine of the moment, The Atlantic Monthly, where, along with gymnastics, women’s rights, and slavery, his subjects were flowers and birds and the changing seasons.

  Out fell a letter, scrawled in a looping, difficult hand, as well as four poems and another, smaller envelope. With difficulty he deciphered the scribble. “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”

  This is the beginning of a most extraordinary correspondence, which lasts almost a quarter of a century, until Emily Dickinson’s death in 1886, and during which time the poet sent Higginson almost one hundred poems, many of her best, their metrical forms jagged, their punctuation unpredictable, their images honed to a fine point, their meaning elliptical, heart-gripping, electric. The poems hit their mark. Poetry torn up by the roots, he later said, that took his brea
th away.

  Today it may seem strange she would entrust them to the man now conventionally regarded as a hidebound reformer with a tin ear. But Dickinson had not picked Higginson at random. Suspecting he would be receptive, she also recognized a sensibility she could trust—that of a brave iconoclast conversant with botany, butterflies, and books and willing to risk everything for what he believed.

  At first she knew him only by reputation. His name, opinions, and sheer moxie were the stuff of headlines for years, for as a voluble man of causes, he was on record as loathing capital punishment, child labor, and the unfair laws depriving women of civil rights. An ordained minister, he had officiated at Lucy Stone’s wedding, and after reading from a statement prepared by the bride and groom, he distributed it to fellow clergymen as a manual of marital parity.

  Above all, he detested slavery. One of the most steadfast and famous abolitionists in New England, he was far more radical than William Lloyd Garrison, if, that is, radicalism is measured by a willingness to entertain violence for the social good. Inequality offended him personally; so did passive resistance. Braced by the righteousness of his cause—the unequivocal emancipation of the slaves—this Massachusetts gentleman of the white and learned class had earned a reputation among his own as a lunatic. In 1854 he had battered down a courthouse door in Boston in an attempt to free the fugitive slave Anthony Burns. In 1856 he helped arm antislavery settlers in Kansas and, a loaded pistol in his belt, admitted almost sheepishly, “I enjoy danger.” Afterward he preached sedition while furnishing money and morale to John Brown.

  All this had occurred by the time Dickinson asked him if he was too busy to read her poems, as if it were the most reasonable request in the world.

  “The Mind is so near itself—it cannot see, distinctly—and I have none to ask—” she politely lied. Her brother, Austin, and his wife, Susan, lived right next door, and with Sue she regularly shared much of her verse. “Could I make you and Austin—proud—sometime—a great way off—’twould give me taller feet—,” she confided. Yet Dickinson now sought an adviser unconnected to family. “Should you think it breathed—and had you the leisure to tell me,” she told Higginson, “I should feel quick gratitude—.”

  Should you think my poetry breathed; quick gratitude: if only he could write like this.

  Dickinson had opened her request bluntly. “Mr. Higginson,” she scribbled at the top of the page. There was no other salutation. Nor did she provide a closing. Almost thirty years later Higginson still recalled that “the most curious thing about the letter was the total absence of a signature.” And he well remembered that smaller sealed envelope, in which she had penciled her name on a card. “I enclose my name—asking you, if you please—Sir—to tell me what is true?” That envelope, discrete and alluring, was a strategy, a plea, a gambit.

  Higginson glanced over one of the four poems. “I’ll tell you how the Sun rose—/ A Ribbon at a time—.” Who writes like this? And another: “The nearest Dream recedes—unrealized—.” The thrill of discovery still warm three decades later, he recollected that “the impression of a wholly new and original poetic genius was as distinct on my mind at the first reading of these four poems as it is now, after thirty years of further knowledge; and with it came the problem never yet solved, what place ought to be assigned in literature to what is so remarkable, yet so elusive of criticism.” This was not the benign public verse of, say, John Greenleaf Whittier. It did not share the metrical perfection of a Longfellow or the tiresome “priapism” (Emerson’s word, which Higginson liked to repeat) of Walt Whitman. It was unique, uncategorizable, itself.

  The Springfield Republican, a staple in the Dickinson family, regularly praised Higginson for his Atlantic essays. “I read your Chapters in the Atlantic—” Dickinson would tell him. Perhaps at Dickinson’s behest, her sister-in-law had requested his daguerreotype from the Republican’s editor, a family friend. As yet unbearded, his dark, thin hair falling to his ears, Higginson was nice looking; he dressed conventionally, and he had grit.

  Dickinson mailed her letter to Worcester, Massachusetts, where he lived and whose environs he had lovingly described: its lily ponds edged in emerald and the shadows of trees falling blue on a winter afternoon. She paid attention.

  He read another of the indelible poems she had enclosed.

  Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—

  Untouched by Morning—

  And untouched by noon—

  Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection,

  Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone—

  Grand go the Years,

  In the Crescent above them—

  Worlds scoop their Arcs—

  And Firmaments—row—

  Diadems—drop—

  And Doges—surrender—

  Soundless as Dots,

  On a Disc of Snow.

  White alabaster chambers melt into snow, vanishing without sound: it’s an unnerving image in a poem skeptical about the resurrection it proposes. The rhymes drift and tilt; its meter echoes that of Protestant hymns but derails. Dashes everywhere; caesuras where you least expect them, undeniable melodic control, polysyllabics eerily shifting to monosyllabics. Poor Higginson. Yet he knew he was holding something amazing, dropped from the sky, and he answered her in a way that pleased her.

  That he had received poems from an unknown woman did not entirely surprise him. He’d been getting a passel of mail ever since his article “Letter to a Young Contributor” had run earlier in the month. An advice column to readers who wanted to become Atlantic contributors, the essay offered some sensible tips for submitting work—use black ink, good pens, white paper—along with some patently didactic advice about writing. Work hard. Practice makes perfect. Press language to the uttermost. “There may be years of crowded passion in a word, and half a life in a sentence,” he explained. “A single word may be a window from which one may perceive all the kingdoms of the earth…. Charge your style with life.” That is just what he himself was trying to do.

  The fuzzy instructions set off a huge reaction. “I foresee that ‘Young Contributors’ will send me worse things than ever now,” Higginson boasted to his editor, James T. Fields, whom he wanted to impress. “Two such specimens of verse came yesterday & day before—fortunately not to be forwarded for publication!” But writing to his mother, whom he also wanted to impress, Higginson sounded more sympathetic and humble. “Since that Letter to a Young Contributor I have more wonderful expressions than ever sent me to read with request for advice, which is hard to give.”

  Higginson answered Dickinson right away, asking everything he could think of: the name of her favorite authors, whether she had attended school, if she read Whitman, whether she published, and would she? (Dickinson had not told him that “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” had appeared in The Republican just six weeks earlier.) Unable to stop himself, he made a few editorial suggestions. “I tried a little,—a very little—to lead her in the direction of rules and traditions,” he later reminisced. She called this practice “surgery.”

  “It was not so painful as I supposed,” she wrote on April 25, seeming to welcome his comments. “While my thought is undressed—I can make the distinction, but when I put them in the Gown—they look alike, and numb.” As to his questions, she answered that she had begun writing poetry only very recently. That was untrue. In fact, she dodged several of his queries, Higginson recalled, “with a naive skill such as the most experienced and worldly coquette might envy.” She told him she admired Keats, Ruskin, Sir Thomas Browne, and the Brownings, all names Higginson had mentioned in his various essays. Also, the book of Revelation. Yes, she had gone to school “but in your manner of the phrase—had no education.” Like him, she responded intensely to nature. Her companions were the nearby Pelham Hills, the sunset, her big dog, Carlo: “they are better than Beings—because they know—but do not tell.”

  What strangeness: a woman of secrets who wanted her secrets kept but wanted you to know she
had them. “In a Life that stopped guessing,” she once told her sister-in-law, “you and I should not feel at home.”

  Her mother, she confided, “does not care for thought,” and although her father has bought her many books, he “begs me not to read them—because he fears they joggle the Mind.” She was alone, in other words, and apart. Her family was religious, she continued, “—except me—and address an Eclipse, every morning—whom they call their ‘Father.’” She would require a guidance more perspicacious, more concrete.

  As for her poetry, “I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground—because I am afraid.” Such a bald statement would be hard to ignore. “When far afterward—a sudden light on Orchards, or a new fashion in the wind troubled my attention—I felt a palsy, here—the Verses just relieve—.”

  In passing, she dropped an allusion to the two literary editors—she was no novice after all—who “came to my Father’s House, this winter—and asked me for my Mind—and when I asked them ‘Why,’ they said I was penurious—and they, would use it for the World—.” It was not worldly approval that she sought; she demanded something different. “I could not weigh myself—Myself,” she promptly added, turning slyly to Higginson. This time she signed her letter as “your friend, E—Dickinson.”

  Bewildered and flattered, he could not help considering that next to such finesse, his tepid tips to a Young Contributor were superfluous. What was an essay, anyway; what, a letter? Her phrases were poems, riddles, lyric apothegms, fleeing with the speed of thought. Her imagination boiled over, spilling onto the page. His did not, no matter how much heat he applied, unless, that is, he lost himself, as he occasionally did in his essays on nature—some are quite magical—or in his writing on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised, when he tackled his subject in clear-eyed prose and did not let it go. Logic and empathy were special gifts. Yet by dispensing pellets of wisdom about how to publish, as he did, in the most prestigious literary journal of the day, he presented himself as a professional man of letters, worth taking seriously, which is just what he hoped to become.

  This skilled adviser was not as confident as he tried to appear. Perhaps Dickinson sensed this. In the aftermath of Harpers Ferry, Higginson had more or less packed away his revolver and retired to the lakes around his home, where he scoured the woods after the manner of his favorite author, Henry Thoreau. “I cannot think of a bliss as great as to follow the instinct which leads me thither & to wh. I never yet dared fully to trust myself,” Higginson confided to his journals. He wrote all the time—about slave uprisings and Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner and also about boating, snowstorms, woodbines, and exercise. Fields printed whatever Higginson gave him and suggested he gather his nature essays into a book.