These Fevered Days Read online

  THESE FEVERED DAYS

  Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

  MARTHA ACKMANN

  FOR

  JOANNE DOBSON

  AND THE MEMORY OF KAREN DANDURAND

  (1946–2011)

  WITH LOVE AND GRATITUDE FOR WHERE THIS

  CONVERSATION BEGAN

  These Fevered Days – to take them to the Forest

  Where Waters cool around the mosses crawl –

  And shade is all that devastates the stillness

  Seems it sometimes this would be all –

  F1467

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  One All Things Are Ready

  Two It Is Hard for Me to Give Up the World

  Three I’ve Been in the Habit Myself of Writing Some Few Things

  Four Decided to Be Distinguished

  Five Taller Feet

  Six Are You Too Deeply Occupied to Say If My Verse Is Alive?

  Seven Bulletins All Day from Immortality

  Eight You Were Not Aware That You Saved My Life

  Nine Success Is Counted Sweetest

  Ten Called Back

  Acknowledgments

  Illustration Credits

  Permissions Credits

  Notes

  Index

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  On the surface, Emily Dickinson lived an ordinary life: she resided in one town, went to school, never held a job, lived in her parents’ home, remained single, and died at age fifty-five. To many who knew her, Dickinson’s only acclaim was winning second prize for her rye and Indian bread at the annual cattle show. When she died, her death certificate listed her occupation as “at home.” Dickinson’s internal world, however, was extraordinary. She loved passionately, wrote scores of letters, anguished over abandonment, fought with God, found ecstasy in nature, embraced seclusion, was ambivalent toward publication, and created 1,789 poems that she tucked into a dresser drawer. Only after her death, when her sister opened the drawer, did the world begin to realize that the life of Emily Dickinson was far from commonplace. “My Business is Circumference,” she once declared, and the work she produced over a lifetime is dazzling.1

  These Fevered Days takes its cue from Dickinson’s own words:

  This was a Poet –

  It is That

  Distills amazing sense

  From Ordinary Meanings –

  And Attar so immense2

  This book intentionally concentrates, extracts, and distills Dickinson’s evolution as a poet. It does not claim to be a comprehensive, cradle-to-grave biography. Rather it seeks to shed light on ten pivotal moments that changed her. Too often, readers see Emily Dickinson as an artifact in amber: an eccentric spinster who locked herself away from the world. That perspective, while incorrect, is partially understandable. Dickinson did indeed keep herself at a distance—in her own lifetime and ours. “Biography first convinces us of the fleeing of the Biographied – ,” she wrote—as terse a warning to future biographers as there ever was.3 Yet while part of Dickinson will always be unknowable, much can be discerned. There are the poems to help us, of course. Fragments, too. Volumes of letters also are essential. And thousands of archival documents related to her life in Amherst, Massachusetts; her education; her travels to Washington, DC, Philadelphia, and Cambridge, Massachusetts; her reaction to the Civil War; and memories about her from family and friends. The tangible world surrounding Dickinson is another resource: her home, the paths she walked, the flowers she loved, the light in her bedroom. For America’s most enigmatic and mysterious poet, Emily Dickinson left a trail of clues.

  Readers unfamiliar with Dickinson may benefit from a brief biographical overview that situates these ten moments. Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830, to Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson. She had an older brother, Austin, and younger sister, Lavinia. Her father was a lawyer, and later a politician. Her mother kept the family home. Emily received superior schooling at Amherst Academy, and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in nearby South Hadley, Massachusetts. She had many friends, and—early on—teachers commented on her facility with words. When she returned home after one year at Mount Holyoke, she settled in, helping with housework and making social calls. The tedium wore on her. Her first publication appeared in an Amherst College student magazine when she was twenty-one. The prose work—not poetry—was printed anonymously. A few years later, The (Springfield, Massachusetts) Republican published her first poem, also anonymously. Emily Dickinson remained single, and gradually became reclusive. The family’s financial status made it possible for Emily to stay home and not teach, sew for a living, or have other outside employment. By her late twenties, she was seriously writing poetry and gathering her verse into hand-sewn packets later called fascicles. She shared her love of words with her beloved sister-in-law, Susan, who read her verse and offered advice.

  When Emily was thirty-one, she took the uncharacteristic step of sending several of her poems to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a well-known essayist who had published an Atlantic Monthly article offering advice to aspiring writers. Higginson would become Dickinson’s literary mentor and one of the most important people in her life. He read her poems with interest, tried unsuccessfully to “correct them,” and—while continuing to write her—eventually gave up offering critiques. After the Civil War broke out, Emily composed poetry with the greatest intensity of her life—sometimes a poem a day. These were compressed verses with striking imagery that focused on her great literary themes of nature, faith, pain, love, and immortality. Toward the end of the war, Dickinson faced a medical crisis. She worried she was losing her eyesight. Emily traveled to Boston on two occasions to be treated by a physician, and lived in a Cambridge boardinghouse. When her personal trouble was finally behind her, she met Higginson face-to-face. That 1870 meeting was remarkable, and Higginson’s vivid memory of it offers the best account ever recorded of what it was like to sit across from Emily Dickinson and hear her talk—nonstop. As her reclusiveness intensified, so did the mysteries around her. One riddle concerned Charles Wadsworth, a minister Emily had met on a trip to Philadelphia. The two had written each other and Wadsworth had visited the Homestead. There were also three Master Letters—drafts or possibly copies of mailed letters—later found among her papers. No one knew who the unidentified Master was, or even if he actually existed.

  As she grew older, one person Emily knew as a child came back into her life: Helen Hunt Jackson. Jackson had become a renowned poet, essayist, and novelist. She also was a friend of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and he reacquainted the two women with each other, and their literary work. In 1876, Helen visited Dickinson and implored Emily to submit her verse for publication. The poet refused. In her final years, Emily Dickinson endured one loss after another. First her father, then friends, then others close to her. She kept writing, but admitted, “the Dyings have been too deep for me.”4 Ill health overtook her slowly and she died on May 15, 1886. She was buried next to her parents in West Cemetery in Amherst. Emily Dickinson had published only a handful of poems during her lifetime, and all anonymously. It was not until after her death, when her sister discovered sheet upon sheet of poems, that the staggering sweep of her literary achievement became known. The first edition of her poems was published posthumously in 1890.

  Which ten moments are the subjects of this book? Chapter One introduces Emily’s family and her budding artistic sensibilities. The chapter focuses on an important announcement she made to a friend: a statement declaring, “All things are ready.” Chapter Two presents an evening at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where the school’s legendary founder, Mary Lyon, asked Emily if she felt prepared to profess her faith. Chapter Three tr
aces the chain of events that led to the publication of Dickinson’s first poem. Chapter Four zeroes in on a wintry morning when Dickinson announced she wanted to be distinguished. Chapter Five details the composition of Dickinson’s masterful poem “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers.” Chapter Six chronicles the day Dickinson took the most startling step of her life and sent four poems to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, asking for advice. Chapter Seven depicts Dickinson during the Civil War under the care of a Boston physician and in the throes of a medical crisis. Chapter Eight portrays the momentous day when the poet met Higginson for the first time. Chapter Nine describes Dickinson’s childhood friend Helen Hunt Jackson paying a call and chastising the poet for not publishing. Chapter Ten recounts the day Emily Dickinson died, the subsequent discovery of her poems, and the enduring legacy of her work.

  The conceit for this book—its focus on ten pivotal moments—originated in my teaching. For nearly two decades, I taught a Tuesday afternoon class on Emily Dickinson in the Dickinson Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts. My Mount Holyoke College students discussed Dickinson in the very rooms where the poet created her work. Sitting around that seminar table, the students demonstrated that they understood Dickinson’s life and work more deeply when our conversation centered on an important moment in the poet’s life. When we considered the poet’s stance on religion and poems that confronted God, for example, we found it useful to look at a February night in 1848 when Emily Dickinson went head-to-head with the formidable founder of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. What did Emily say about that event in letters? Did that moment affect the rest of her life? Do her poems reflect the choice she made then? There were other days that were similar—when the poet was altered, pivoted, and not the same as she was before. Something had transpired in those moments that had moved Emily Dickinson toward the poet she would become. The change might have been prompted by a letter she was writing or had received, an emotion she articulated, a passing thought, a visit, a trauma, a conversation, an event that was supposed to happen but didn’t. The moments we studied in class and others that I have added here span almost the whole of Dickinson’s life from the time she was fourteen years old until the day she died. The ten moments are chronological, but not consecutive. Each chapter revolves around a specific day and a particular change: a day when the poet was different, say, at ten o’clock at night from how she was at ten o’clock that morning. Other Dickinson scholars could surely offer a different set of moments for reasons that are entirely different from my own. Over the years, selecting ten turning points in Emily Dickinson’s life has been a kind of parlor game I have played with colleagues who have long studied Dickinson. My list of ten is not definitive. No list would be. But after forty years of teaching and studying the poet, this set of ten makes the most sense to me.

  Emily Dickinson did not keep a diary. Sometimes months went by without a word. Large gaps frequently appear in her correspondence: there is not a single letter for 1857. We also must be reminded that the poems and letters that we have today are the ones that have been recovered. Who knows how many manuscripts have been lost? Compounding these challenges is the fact that Dickinson rarely dated her poems. Establishing an accounting of how she spent her time, while not impossible, can be a hard row to hoe. In addition, Emily Dickinson’s life was not filled with action, at least not in the conventional sense of the word. The poet moved through her days in ways some people would see as inactive: she tended to her house and family, read, and wrote. But Suzanne Juhasz in her landmark essay, “The Landscape of the Spirit,’” argues that Dickinson did indeed have an active life, a life that was lived in her mind. Juhasz believes the poet did not retreat and run away from the world. Rather she “was capitalizing upon a technique that women have always known and used, for survival, using the imagination as a space in which to create some life other than their external situation. What Dickinson did,” Juhasz states, “was to make art from it.”5 If we read Dickinson’s letters looking for action in the usual sense—where she traveled, what chores she did, whom she encountered—we find some details for reconstructing her days, but not many. But if we read the letters for what the poet thought, her interior world opens. Reading Dickinson’s letters in this alternate way was a revolutionary shift for me. This book attempts to crack open that interior world, re-creating a landscape of Dickinson’s consciousness. While each chapter circles around a specific day, it also spools back through time to past thoughts and events informing that moment. For example—in Chapter Nine, Dickinson and Helen Hunt Jackson had difficulty finding a time to visit each other: the poet was grieving her father’s death and Jackson had recently married. Certainly those two life events had bearing on the day they eventually met, what they said, and how they acted. “Forever – is composed of Nows – ” Dickinson wrote.

  Let Months dissolve in further Months –

  And Years – exhale in Years – .6

  Each of these ten chapters, then, is a snapshot of Dickinson’s present moment with the past in dissolve like a multiple exposure.

  Several themes emerge when considering all ten chapters as a whole. First, Dickinson was ambitious. From an early age, she keenly felt the passage of time and wanted to make the most of her days. As a girl she dedicated herself to a year of improvement, as a young woman, she announced she wanted to be distinguished, and after her first serious poem was published, she thought about fame. While publication was never something Dickinson actively sought, she frequently imagined a future when poetry would bring her renown. Another theme is Dickinson’s long view toward her work. Poems never seemed to fade from her mind, and she constantly revised. When she recognized a good phrase, she reused it, altered images for different purposes, and returned to lines sometimes decades later to make the slightest of shifts. I share Karen Dandurand’s view that Dickinson did not publish because poetry to her was never finished. She looked upon her verse as constantly in play and the work of a lifetime. Her attitude is reminiscent of Paul Valéry’s assessment: “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” She was—as her nineteenth-century contemporaries would have said—“long-headed.”7 Looking at the span of Dickinson’s life, I am also struck by how much the poet knew her own mind, both in terms of her need for solitude and what she hoped to achieve in her work. Dickinson recognized that she required the isolation of quiet days. While she was aware that others occasionally viewed her as strange, she never wavered in seeking solitude and never apologized for it. The poet also knew what she wanted to achieve in her verse. When she sent her sister-in-law “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” for critique, she listened to Susan’s advice but went in another direction. She reacted the same way to Higginson’s recommendations: open to his criticism, but holding fast to her own point of view. A final theme that runs throughout Dickinson’s life is her belief in the sustaining power of art. Early in her life, Emily witnessed how her aunt Lavinia Norcross confronted sorrow by turning to music and art. No doubt the young Dickinson was already inclined in that direction, but Aunt Lavinia’s example was profound. It’s hardly surprising that Dickinson wrote with such ferocity during the Civil War. High emotion fueled her. She turned to writing poetry in times of joy and love, and especially in hours of anguish. “I must keep ‘gas’ burning,” she wrote, “to light the danger up.”8 Creative expression was the fundamental force of Emily Dickinson’s life, and writing poetry both defined and sustained her.

  In researching These Fevered Days, I have consulted Dickinson’s letters and poems, and also archives at the Jones Library in Amherst, Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Harvard University, and many others to consider the importance of the town of Amherst, the role of women’s education in the nineteenth century, boardinghouses in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and myriad other details. But because this is a work of narrative nonfiction that seeks to animate Dickinson and bring her story to life, I also wanted to convey the shape and texture of her world. Since I have lived near Amherst for many years, I am familiar with the play
of seasons here, the sheltering mountains that ring our valley, and the sound of the train that ran by her house and now runs by mine. But as familiar as I am with Amherst and Dickinson’s home, there were still details I needed to ferret out, and for that I relied on friends and neighbors. Chapter Eight opens with Emily returning from medical treatment in Boston and climbing to the family attic to read Shakespeare out loud. She detailed the moment in a letter to her cousin. To gain a better sense of the sound, smell, and feel of that long-ago reading, I asked Dickinson Museum executive director Jane Wald if I could go into the Homestead attic and have a look. Jane has always been gracious to accommodate my capers and obliged again this time. The attic hasn’t changed much since Emily read Henry VI up there. I spent an hour examining the dappled light that filtered across wood-hewn beams and read some Shakespeare to test how sound vibrated across the rafters. I sought other experiences as well to bring sensory verisimilitude to this book. I paced off the distance in a snowstorm between the Dickinson house and her brother’s home next door for the opening in Chapter Four. I turned the pages of fragile, yellowed newspapers to examine what Dickinson read every day. When I wanted to know what the night sky looked like on the day Dickinson died, Alfred Venne at Amherst College projected it for me on the curve of the Bassett Planetarium ceiling. Weather is not far from people’s minds when they reflect on a particular moment. “The day was cloudy,” they will remember or “freezing cold” or “hot as blazes.” For climate specifics, I consulted the pioneering work of Ebenezer Snell, Emily’s neighbor, a nineteenth-century Amherst original, and a man utterly obsessed with weather. For over thirty years, Snell kept a meteorological journal recording Amherst’s temperature, precipitation, cloud formations, and atmospheric phenomena. I used his large leather-bound journal and the record his daughter continued to keep after his death to begin each chapter. Most memorably, I spent hours writing this book in Dickinson’s bedroom, listening to the sound of footsteps on the stairs, looking out her windows, and feeling the warmth of afternoon sun. I hope these details lend a palpable way to imagine the ten moments, and offer an intimacy and immediacy not found elsewhere.