Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson make a decidedly odd couple; an
enduring, epistolary friendship between a reclusive, oracular poet and a
gregarious magazine writer with an unfailing appetite for public life is at
best unlikely. They met only twice, though their correspondence lasted, with
vicissitudes, from 1862 until Dickinson’s death in 1886. Brenda Wineapple
stakes the friendship on Dickinson’s bold letter of entreaty to Higginson, a
man she had met only in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly: “Are you too
deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”. Born of Dickinson’s urgent
query, the friendship survived on her fevered insistence that Higginson
deserved the precious gift of her poems.
A bookish youth, rapt by Emersonian “Newness”, as he called it, Higginson
shuttled between divinity school and journalism, looking for a way to remake
the world. He found it in two causes: abolitionism and women’s suffrage,
both of which he embraced with a radical’s fervour and a reformist’s
optimism. Willing to use violence in the cause of freedom, he twice
attempted to free escaped slaves from Boston jails and in 1859 became one of
the “Secret Six”, long-distance accomplices to John Brown in his ill-fated
attack at Harper’s Ferry. As Colonel Higginson, he took command of the First
South Carolina Volunteers, the first official regiment of freed slaves.
Encamped on a seized plantation among his raw recruits, Higginson listened
to their stories and recorded their spirituals. His journal of those years,
a document that blends anthropological acuity and sappy paternalism, gave
rise to a series of essays that eventually appeared in the Atlantic and, in
1869, as a volume entitled Army Life in a Black Regiment.
But neither divinity school nor Army life prepared him for Dickinson’s poems,
which both shocked and eluded him: “The bee himself did not evade the
schoolboy more than she evaded me”, he later mused, “and even at this day I
still stand somewhat bewildered, like the boy”. On Wineapple’s telling,
Dickinson spoke to something already unhinged in Higginson, an innate sense
that in the midst of this heady “Newness”, reason, affection, faith and all
his accustomed consolations might suddenly tumble into a “fissure” of
madness. Later, after what Wineapple calls “all these bleeding and
peripatetic years”, Higginson chose domesticity, though without compromising
on the causes of racial equality, women’s rights and open immigration. But
Dickinson’s letters – often as demanding as her poems – kept his sense of
danger alive, “making him feel as if [he had] lived a multitude of lives”.
Bent on bafflement, Dickinson was (in Wineapple’s words) “a poseur deeply
sincere, a consummate flirt, a sorceress, a prestidigitator in words soaring
beyond the law”. She placed towering hopes in Higginson – but hopes of what?
For what? When he delayed a promised tête-à-tête, fleeing to Europe instead,
she could be savage: “Is this the Hope that opens and shuts . . . like the
eye of the Wax Doll?”. No wonder he was sparing with his visits.
Wineapple asks us to read Dickinson’s poems, usually quoted in their entirety,
over Higginson’s shoulder; along with him, we are left reeling. A gifted
reader of Dickinson’s poetry, she pursues such large effects to their
minutest causes; the askew off-rhymes (crumb/home); the “strong,
unpredictable verbs”; the application of a singular article to collective
nouns (“a hay”); and the famous dashes that just as often dynamite her lines
as chill them to stasis. Wineapple’s subtle strategy is not to explain
Dickinson, but to remind us that she “sang to relieve a palsy”. Dickinson
did not specify the locus of her palsy, but Wineapple hints that it was her
very selfhood – consciousness itself – that hurt. And though grateful to be
“one’s self & not somebody else”, Dickinson could not and
would not endure the keen ache of being her fathomless self alone. In her
trenchant, memorable narrative of Dickinson’s quarter-century entanglement
with Higginson, Wineapple takes us into the “white heat” they generated
together, a synergy that made their cold New England souls immeasurably
warmer.
While Brenda Wineapple takes us into the force field generated by a pair of
subjects, Christopher Benfey, by contrast, takes up several lives, male and
female, eminent and otherwise, who circle one another, often barely
touching, if they touch at all. Benfey organizes all this activity around
the image of the hummingbird, a totem in which Americans saw what they
wanted to see. Higginson and Dickinson themselves were stricken by the craze
for the birds; for Higginson, the hummingbird called to mind “some exiled
pygmy prince, banished, but still regal, and doomed to wings”, while
Dickinson perceived “A Route of Evanescence / With a revolving Wheel – / A
Resonance of Emerald – / A Rush of Cochineal . . . ”. What the nightingale
gave Keats, the hummingbird gave Dickinson: the occasion for a
phantasmagorical, plangent lyric about the impermanence of beauty.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, satirizing rich young women of fashion, named an
egregious specimen “Hummingbird”, but for the frail hummingbird she made her
pet, chose the homely name “Hum”. Benfey ventures that the accident-prone
Hum reminded Stowe of her wayward son Frederick, who took a shell fragment
in the ear at Gettysburg and, eight years later, left home for California.
(Hum, after a grim soaking, died at home, but Fred was never heard from
again.) The Congregationalist preacher of the “Gospel of love”, Henry Ward
Beecher, collected stuffed hummingbirds, which he called “winged gems”.
The ubiquitous hummingbird is the device Benfey uses to examine a loosely
gathered array of improvised lives. He writes with narrative skill and a
lightness of touch, but in the end, there is little heat generated by all
this airy whirring. The main strength of A Summer of Hummingbirds lies in
its captivating account of two people who came together for a few art
lessons and created one strange masterpiece.
One was the painter Martin Johnson Heade; the other was the unmatronly Amherst
matron Mabel Loomis Todd, Emily Dickinson’s editor, and for a short while
Heade’s student. In 1863, two months after the Battle of Gettysburg, Heade
sailed to Brazil. A self-declared “monomaniac on hummingbirds”, the
forty-four-year-old bachelor had been encouraged by the reform-minded
Emperor Pedro II. Heade set out to collect and paint Brazil’s hummingbirds,
and soon after his return he painted a series of studies of the birds in
stiff, formal poses; as Benfey writes, “It is as though these colorful birds
entered a studio in their Sunday best and asked to be painted as respectable
loving couples”. By the early 1870s, something had changed. Heade had
travelled to London, Nicaragua, and on to New York, in pursuit of his
genius, producing dense, dreamlike paintings such as “Tropical Landscape
with Ten Hummingbirds” and “Cattleya Orchid and Three Brazilian
Hummingbirds”. Once an inert backdrop, Heade’s jungle was now spangled with
alert, aroused hummingbirds, unaware that in this Darwinian hothouse, life
was brilliant, diverse, mutable and cheap.
Nineteen years later, seeking refuge from the avant-garde, Heade settled in
Washington, DC, where he met the lovely, gifted Mabel Loomis Todd, the young
wife of an up-and-coming astronomer. Todd copied Heade’s paintings, showed
him hers and before long, they collaborated on a curious project: painting
sweet-pea tendrils on to the shoulders and bodice of her new camel-hair
dress. A head-turner, Mabel Todd lavished her fabulousness on the annual
Commencement party held in Amherst by Emily Dickinson’s brother Austin
Dickinson and his wife, Susan, and soon began an unapologetic, open-secret
romance with Austin.
Todd’s liaison with Austin Dickinson brought her both pleasure and
opprobrium. But it was her odd bond with Austin’s reclusive sister Emily,
with whom she exchanged pictures and poems though they never met face to
face, that has won her an immortality few editors achieve. Working with
Higginson, Todd brought out two posthumous volumes of Emily Dickinson’s
poems; working alone, she produced a third and two collections of letters.
Here, Wineapple’s scrupulous account of Todd’s and Higginson’s labours is
indispensable, for she definitively rewrites a story that has been too often
told as a tale of sell-out and compromise. She credits Higginson not only
with navigating the landmines of Dickinson family jealousies, but also with
choosing precisely the right form – regularized punctuation, capitalization
and stanza divisions – the envelope in which to ensure that Dickinson’s
poetic “letter to the world” was well received. In fact, as Wineapple notes,
it was a “wild success”, selling out eleven editions within a year, and
almost 11,000 copies.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong when he wrote “there are no second acts in
American lives”. The labours of Todd and Higginson began a second act for
Emily Dickinson, on which the curtains may never close. Martin Johnson
Heade’s second act, in Benfey's wry account, sprang from an invitation to
join the hotelier and railroad-builder Charles Flagler in his new
Spanish-style hotel in St Augustine. This hotel, designed by the New York
architects Carrère and Hastings and fashioned of local coquina-shell stone
and terracotta tiles, was an early instance of the all-inclusive, isolated
resort, now a mainstay of our leisure–industrial complex. Instead of
nightclub performers, Flagler’s hotel boasted seven artists in residence,
who, in carefully designed studios, “performed” for vacationers the life of
an American artist. Heade, who painted and hunted and fished at Flagler’s
behest, even found happiness in marriage at sixty-four. The Hotel Ponce de
Leon also had a notable second act as Flagler College, one of America’s
“Best Value Colleges”.
By examining multiple lives, both Benfey and Wineapple reveal the “Newness” of
a country determined to make a new politics, a new society, a new art. But
their books locate the “Newness” at different moments. For Christopher
Benfey, it occurs in the decades following the Civil War, when Americans
“left behind a static view of existence, a trust in fixed arrangements and
hierarchies . . . . They came to see a new dynamism and movement in their
lives, a brave new world of instability and evanescence”. But Brenda
Wineapple, looking through Higginson’s smarting, disappointed eyes, views
those decades as a period of contracted hopes and failed dreams, an era that
gave the lie to the social revolutions with which Emerson had inspired the
young man. Ripened by experience, Higginson never lost his capacity to
perceive Newness. Living into the twentieth century, still engaged and
always writing, he reminded the Gilded Age that a new, better justice had
yet to appear, even as he glimpsed a new “Newness” on the horizon: “I wish
we had automobiles when I was a boy”, he joked. “The old times were good,
but the new times are better.”
Brenda Wineapple
WHITE HEAT
The friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson
416pp. Knopf. £25.95 (US $27.95).
978 1 4000 4401 6
Christopher Benfey
A SUMMER OF HUMMINGBIRDS
Love, art, and scandal in the intersecting worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark
Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade
287pp. Penguin. $25.95.
978 1 59420 160 8
Esther Schor is Professor of English at Princeton University. She is
the author of Bearing the Dead: The British culture of mourning from the
Enlightenment to Victoria, 1994. Her volume of poems, The Hills of Holland,
was published in 2002. Her biography of Emma Lazarus won the National Jewish
Book Award in 2006.
