A Solitary Visionary

For a poet who didn’t get out much, Emily Dickinson has certainly inspired some big literary biographies. The sheer size of the books, several having more than 500 pages, would seem unnecessary if the poet were simply the half-mad hysterical recluse of Amherst retreating in terror from the cultural changes of the 19th century or if she were simply the author of some of the most quotable first lines ever written: “The heart has many doors”; “I heard a Fly buzz--when I died”; “Success is counted sweetest/By those who ne’er succeed”; “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.”

But as Alfred Habegger’s “My Wars Are Laid Away in Books” reminds us, Dickinson’s life was as complicated as the poems. They are rich explorations of the world she knew, of the nature of loss, of the fragile possibilities of hope, of bliss and of despair. They are poems that chafe against history and against the role she was forced into as a daughter and as a woman in Victorian New England.

Dickinson’s life, perhaps because of its very oddness, is important precisely because it illuminates the poetry and because it tells us some essential things about our cultural history. Even though Habegger--who has already established a reputation for himself as a thorough and eminently readable biographer (his life of Henry James, father of the novelist and philosopher, is deservedly admired)--says that “straight autobiographical detail” remains “essentially out of place in her verse,” he makes a strong case that Dickinson’s genius is essentially linked to her time and place.

Born in 1830, she seldom left her hometown of Amherst, Mass. By 1860, she had become mostly a recluse, living with her parents and sister, next door to her brother and sister-in-law, Susan, with whom she had a passionately demanding intellectual and spiritual relationship for most of 30 years. During the last 15 years of her life, she seldom left her own house and talked even to some old friends from behind the protection of a half-closed door. Over the course of this seemingly restricted life, she wrote her large body of impassioned poetry. During the period 1862 through 1865, while the rest of the country exploded in the Civil War, Dickinson wrote in a white hot creative fire, completing hundreds of poems each year. Habegger has done a good deal of digging, finding new relationships among biographical detail, the composition of some of Dickinson’s brilliantly emotional letters and the making of her poems. He has incorporated much of the textual study done with Dickinson’s manuscripts in recent years, particularly that of R.W. Franklin in his 1998 edition of the poems. He has learned from the historical work of feminist scholars who have begun to trace the networks of support and education available to American women in the early years of the 19th century. He has studied the critical work of psychoanalytic critics and gender theorists who have tried to explain Dickinson’s attitudes and oddness through their interpretive lenses (although Habegger does not subscribe to any of the more extravagant claims about the poet’s sexual activity or orientation).

His Dickinson remains very much a woman whose life was circumscribed by her times, although her imagination and completely unconventional interpretation of her world made her the solitary visionary we know. He writes, “Her work in life would be to attempt and achieve an unprecedented imaginative freedom while dwelling in what looks like privileged captivity.”

Habegger is perhaps most interesting in his discussion of the religious movements that surrounded the poet and her ability to resist the pressures to draw her into an unthinking acceptance of metaphysical interpretations. He insists that “one of the biggest mistakes we make with Dickinson is to detach her from the religious currents of the 1850s, without which she could not have become herself.” Several waves of Evangelical fervor swept through New England in the first half of Dickinson’s century, replacing a severe Puritanism with the more emotional demand for an individual conversion experience. This new conformity could only further isolate a thinker as independent as Dickinson. Habegger contends convincingly that one of the major intellectual moments of her life was “her struggle to devise a nonorthodox ‘hope’ of her own.” And that “hope” would become the central moment of much of her poetry.

It is surely the highest praise for a literary biography to say that it sends us back with renewed appreciation to the work of the author it discusses, and Habegger is best when he discusses Dickinson’s poetry. In one of the many examples throughout this book, he discusses a lovely little lyric that I had never paid much attention to before:

Our lives are Swiss--

So still--so cool--

Till some odd afternoon

The Alps neglect their curtains

And we look further on.

Italy stands the other side.

While like a guard between--

The solemn Alps--

The siren Alps

Forever intervene--

Then he writes admiringly that “this voice does not command or moralize in the fashion of so many Victorian voices, even Whitman’s,” while broadening the lyric with its cultural context: “Growing up in a culture that saw nature and human experience as hieroglyphs of heaven, she early acquired the art of rendering exemplary her own life turning it into story or drama.” Finally, he personalizes the poem, telling us that Dickinson sent it next door “to Sue in late 1859 ... [it] reminds us of the writer’s captive spectatorship in winter, her bedroom looking south to the Mount Holyoke Range and west to the curtained windows of the Italianate villa next door. Yet to limit the poem to these perspectives would kill it.”

By gently and unpretentiously providing cultural, philosophical and personal contexts for the poem, Habegger has revivified a reading of it. “My Wars Are Laid Away in Books” is a big book about the author of small poems. But Habegger is never dull. He is absolutely convincing about the importance of his subject. He has brought together a couple of generations worth of scholarly work on the life, texts and time of Emily Dickinson, and he has applied it all in a generous rereading of her unforgettable poetry.

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DARE YOU SEE A SOUL AT THE WHITE HEAT?

Emily Dickinson

Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?

Then crouch within the door -

Red -is the Fire’s common tint -

But when the vivid Ore

Has vanquished Flame’s conditions,

It quivers from the Forge

Without a color, but the light

Of unanointed Blaze.

Least Village has its Blacksmith

Whose Anvil’s even ring

Stands symbol for the finer Forge

That soundless tugs -within -

Refining these impatient Ores

With hammer, and with Blaze

Until the Designated Light

Repudiate the Forge

*

From “The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson,” edited by Thomas H. Johnson (Back Bay Books: 770 pp., $16.95)