In Emily Dickinson's Garden

by GEORGE F. WHICHER

1

AT SOME time unknown, but presumably late rather than early in her poetic career, Emily Dickinson wrote an eight-line lyric, beginning

Quite possibly the subject of hatred was not altogether academic or remote from her experience, but was pressed upon her attention as a matter that concerned her nearly and dearly. In electing for her own occupation, not the enmity that she could never live to finish, but “the little toil of love,” she may have been quietly drawing a magic circle, her own circumference, over which no evil thing should pass. And more immediately, perhaps, she was defining a difference between herself and an alien kinswoman in the house next door.

For Emily’s “Sister Sue,” the wife of her brother Austin, was what the village called a good hater. In her schooldays, as one of the numerous orphan children of a too convivial tavern keeper, Susan Gilbert had been a vibrant, attractive, and ambitious girl. Her marriage in 1856 to the son of Squire Dickinson was an intoxicating triumph, opening to her eager vision ideas of social consequence. But when she proceeded to act the part of a great lady in Amherst, she encountered mortifications of her vanity from neighbors who were not impressed by her pretensions. She fared better with outsiders, to whom she appeared a vivacious hostess.

Little by little, however, Susan Dickinson became a restless and dissatisfied woman. Her husband, as he sank deeper into the rut of village routine, was not giving her the brilliant life she wanted. Their third and last child, named Gilbert after her family was born in 1875. Soon afterward tiny signs of strain begin to appear in Emily Dickinson’s references to her sister-in-law. About 1878, in a letter to her friend and mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, she spoke of a “pseudo sister” in the nearest house, choosing a word that rather conspicuously lacked the ring of true affection. Again in March, 1883, she told a correspondent that “my brother is with us so often each day, we almost forget that he ever passed to a wedded home.” Making allowances for New England reticence, this meant that Austin was fleeing from the domestic storm. “Vesuvius” was Emily’s cryptic word for it.

When little Gilbert Dickinson died in October, 1883, the last link that held Austin to his wife snapped. Thenceforward the rift in the Dickinson family was plain to all beholders. Sue and her two children, Ned and Mattie, were ranged against Austin, while his sisters, Emily and Lavinia, as far as they took part in the quarrel, were devotedly loyal to him. And Austin was finding other allies.

In the autumn of 1881, young David Peck Todd was appointed an instructor in astronomy at the college from which he had graduated six years earlier. He brought to Amherst with him his vivid and talented wife, Mabel Loomis Todd, and an infant daughter. As an attractive young couple the Todds were promptly taken up by Mrs. Austin Dickinson, but her cordiality cooled as soon as the newcomers manifested a reluctance to become her exclusive property. On the other hand, a more intimate and lasting relationship developed between the Todds and Austin. Their comfortable living room became his favorite refuge.

Austin’s sisters Emily and Lavinia were not members of his household, but lived in seclusion behind the hemlock hedges of their father’s house. No one had guessed the secret of Emily’s genius, though her brother and sister treated her as something rare and exquisite. For her entertainment Mrs. Todd sometimes played on the square piano in the Dickinson parlor, while an unseen auditor listened from the hall or upstairs. They exchanged a few notes and neighborly “attentions,” as little gifts of flowers, fruit, or dainties were called, but they never talked face to face. Late in 1883 Emily became seriously ill. On May 15, 1886, she died. The greater part of her poetry was undoubtedly written before the advent of the Todds.

The discovery of this poetry after her death did not at first cause a ripple in the placid life of a country town. It was taken for granted in the family that Susan would do something about it, since she was acquainted with literary people. But Susan dawdled. Lavinia Dickinson, the inheritor of the manuscripts, then turned in desperation to Austin’s friend Mrs. Todd, and Mrs. Todd, soon falling under the spell of the strangely dynamic lyrics, gave effective aid. With Colonel Higginson lending the authority of his name and critical judgment to sanction the enterprise, a suitable number of poems were chosen, prepared for the press, and published late in 1890. They caused a literary sensation.

But the presumption of Mrs. Todd in editing Emily Dickinson’s verse, and still more the success of the little gray and white volume, were affronts that Susan could hardly endure. She had made up her mind that her clever daughter Mattie was to be the literary light of the family. Mother and daughter had for years been in the habit of neglecting and even of ridiculing the two queer spinsters next door, who did not count socially. Mattie had dished up Lavinia in a satirical skit called “My Surviving Aunt.” Indeed, while it was still fashionable to poke fun at Emily Dickinson’s abrupt lyrics, Mattie had composed a parody for her friends’ amusement: “This is the way my Aunt Emily writes.” But if in spite of ridicule this poetry should turn out to be the real thing, if this Todd upstart had stolen a march on them and snatched prestige and social applause from under their very noses, then Susan and her daughter would find themselves on the wrong side of the fence, and that was just where they could never bear to be.

It is not necessary to suppose that Mabel Todd was more than a sympathetic friend to Austin Dickinson in order to appreciate the fury of Austin’s wife. Robbing her of her husband would not have touched her as nearly as did Mrs. Todd’s success in stealing the lead, socially, by means of poems that were Dickinson property. Sue now fondly thought of them as her own possession. The feud was on, and she was implacable. She conceived for the interloper a malignancy of hatred that produced a chain-reaction of enmities. The high temperatures resulting from neighborly fission devastated the community for years to come.

The Dickinson-Todd feud is of minor importance, except when it threatens to come between us and the poetry that unluckily became one of the chief bones of contention between the warring factions. There was hope that it had almost faded out of memory. But recently all the circumstances have been minutely revived in Millicent Todd Bingham’s Ancestors’ Brocades, a book which devoutly seeks to attach a Mrs. Todd myth to Emily Dickinson’s legend. And looking back at Emily and her family through the shimmering heat-waves of Dickinson-Todd hostilities, Bernard DeVoto has come to entertain some very curious and I believe preposterous notions of her as person and poet. It is a matter of concern that such misunderstandings should be promptly dispelled.

2

THE cardinal fact about Emily Dickinson is that she was a product of her time and place. Her connection with Amherst was closer than that of any other American author with the spot where his life was passed. She was born of the stock that originally settled the Connecticut Valley. Her mind was shaped by church, school, and college, which in her time expressed with dynamic vigor the intellectual and spiritual energies of the Puritan tradition. It was in her father’s house on Main Street that she was able to achieve the seclusion which her nature more and more insistently required as she turned to poetry as her only means of personal fulfillment. It was there that she died.

If Emily Dickinson found her lot bleak and New England a lonesome place, she arrived at these judgments by turning the guns of the region back upon itself. It was her fate and her forte to “see New Englandly.” Take from her poetry all that it owes to landscape and climate, gardens, household ways, village sights and sounds, and Puritan modes of thought, and there would remain indeed a precious, timeless residue, but it would not be the Emily Dickinson that so enthralls us.

Any true understanding of this poetry must begin with a study of her background. This fundamental insight was stated early by a man who knew at first hand New England life in her own generation. “Emily Dickinson,” said Samuel Gray Ward, one of the writers for Emerson’s Dial, “is the quintessence of that element we all have who are of Puritan descent, pur sang. We came to this country to think our own thoughts with nobody to hinder. . . . We conversed with our own souls until we lost the art cf communicating with other people. The typical family grew up strangers to each other. . . . It was awfully high but awfully lonesome. . . . This is where Emily Dickinson comes in. She was the articulate inarticulate.”

This perception of the poet’s intimate identification with her setting was duly printed by Mrs. Todd in her first edition of Emily Dickinson’s Letters, but its implications were never fully comprehended. The kind of family life described by Ward simply could not be understood by a newcomer accustomed to the cosmopolitan drawing rooms of Washington, a butterfly dynamo of innumerable women’s organizations. As seen by Mabel Todd, Emily Dickinson was a being apart from time and place, best described as Melville Cane in his recent amusing poem describes her, as an “anomaly.”

Or if connected with her family at all, the connection is to be explained in psychiatric terms. This is the latest wrinkle. Bernard DeVoto, who is a capable and trustworthy social historian when he is dealing with Mormons, life on the Mississippi, the Mexican War, and cannibalism in the Rockies, is not content to use the historical method when considering the poet of a quiet New England town. Instead he has attempted to make a Freudian analysis of Family Dickinson in the effort to determine the nature of the psychic drive which resulted in the production of what he truly discerns is “poetry which has a higher voltage than any other an American has written.”

But the upshot of his investigation is a curiosity of critical ineptitude. Emily Dickinson, he finds, “was the supreme poet of hate and it is only by sifting and assaying complex hatreds that criticism will ever see her plain.” The source of her extraordinary power, according to DeVoto, was the fact that in common with all the members of her household she was singed in the fires of hell. The Dickinsons are to be equated with the dire figures of Greek tragedy — Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes, Electra. “Whoever else might live in that stately house, there was always one living there whose name was Atreus. The house was a crucible for the distillation of terrors and hatreds more intense than any our literature has chanced to embody elsewhere.”

It is news for classicists that Atreus might once be addressed at 280 Main Street, Amherst. There is also a certain piquancy in the circumstance that the critic who a few years since was labeling Eugene O’Neill “our model-T Euripides” should in this instance have slipped so readily into the Mourning Becomes Electra groove. Austin Dickinson and his sister Lavinia were still living a little more than fifty years ago, and many older residents of Amherst recall them as they were. To hear a writer from a distant state describe these former neighbors as “dire figures who begin by looking like stylized rustics in a drawing of a country frolic but come to wear faces like the masks of Iroquois devil-dancers or like the masks of any demons in any primitive rite of evil” — this very considerable flight of fancy will seem to those who remember Mr. Dickinson and Miss Vinnie nothing less than quaint. How, they will be tempted to ask, could even an outlander from the wild and woolly spaces succeed in remaining so guilelessly outlandish? How could he let himself be so completely sucked in?

The answer is that he had been reading Mrs. Bingham’s Ancestors’ Brocades. Finding in that longmeditated book some details that seemed to confirm a pet theory of his own, DeVoto threw all his critical acumen to the winds and accepted every statement in the book at face value. But the reliability of Mrs. Bingham’s portrait of the Dickinsons is precisely what should be called in question, and the critic should have begun his investigation by testing her qualifications as a witness. The kind of truth which, like ancestors’ brocades, can stand alone as self-evident in an author’s mind is not always to be preferred to the homely truth which requires the support of evidence.

3

IT is obvious at once that Millicent Todd Bingham writes as a devoted daughter who from earliest childhood has idolized her brilliant mother. Mrs. Todd’s diary and letters, amplified in many later conversations, have supplied her with much of her information. She cannot help seeing the Dickinsons through her mother’s eyes, and her mother was not in the position of an impartial observer. Mrs. Todd was deeply attached to Austin Dickinson; in the opinion of half of Amherst, much too deeply attached. She was at daggers drawn with Austin’s wife and daughter. And she considered herself a victim of perfidy when in 1896 Lavinia Dickinson entered suit for the recovery of an inconsequential strip of land which she claimed she had been fraudulently induced to deed to the Todds, and won the case.

Moreover, Mrs. Bingham could never forget that she had to prepare the public mind for an uncomfortable revelation: the disclosure that when Mrs. Todd broke off relations with the Dickinsons after the lawsuit, she did not see fit to return to Lavinia or to her heirs the manuscripts of Emily Dickinson which had been entrusted to her, and that Mrs. Todd and Mrs. Bingham between them have presumed to withhold from publication about one third of the entire work of a major American poet until, after a lapse of nearly fifty years, it became possible for this material to be brought out under Todd auspices. It would be a miracle if a book undertaken under such conditions could avoid unconscious bias.

This is not the place for a complete overhauling of a long and involved work. It will be sufficient to test Mrs. Bingham’s handling of her material in two crucial instances. The distorted representations of Emily’s father and sister, as refracted through the Todd mind, have been primarily responsible for bringing down the psychiatric avalanche which was poised and ready to fall.

The portrait of Edward Dickinson given in Ancestors’ Brocades ignores all those qualities in him which led Emily Dickinson to exclaim after her father’s death, “His heart was pure and terrible, and I think no other like it exists.” Instead it stresses with petty iteration anecdotes of his unbending demeanor and social stiffness. But it was not as a stuffed shirt that Edward Dickinson impressed his contemporaries when they again and again elected him to public office and acknowledged his leadership in community affairs for nearly fifty years. Who would guess from anything Mrs. Bingham records that the Squire was capable of ringing the bell of the Baptist church to call the attention of the town to a remarkable sunset?

Mrs. Todd, though she had reason enough before she was through to realize Lavinia’s talent for irresponsible and dramatic mendacity, allowed herself to be completely taken in by some of Vinnie’s favorite little fables. None of these was more wildly inaccurate than the picture she was fond of drawing of her father’s harshness to herself and Emily when they were girls. Vinnie rather fancied herself m this pose and let her imagination run. Thus Mrs. Todd notes: “Some of Vinnie’s stories were appalling — of the way they were watched and guarded for fear some young man might wish to marry one of them. It made me indignant.” Later she enlarged still further on the notion of Edward Dickinson as a provincial counterpart of Mr. Barrett of Wimpole Street.

But contemporary documents, many of them printed by Mrs. Todd herself, furnish evidence that completely demolishes the pathetic story. The few scraps from Lavinia’s diary that have been allowed to appear include entries like the following, dating from the early 1850’s: —

March 24 Walked with Jennie. Tutors Edwards and Howland called. Joseph and Emilie went to walk.

June 23. Spent evening at Abby Wood’s with Emily, Howland and Edwards. They escorted us home.

July 3. Rode horseback with Howland to Pelham Springs.

September 8. Mrs. C. called. Called on Miss F. with Austin. Emilie rode with Mr. Leavitt.

September 13. Went to ice-cream saloon with Joel, Austin and Emilie.

Where was parental supervision during these walks, rides, and visits to Fuller’s ice-cream “saloon”? An incomplete list of Emily’s special friends among Amherst students of the late forties and early fifties contains the following names of young men who called at the house: William Howland, George Howland, Leonard Humphrey, Henry L. Edwards, John M. Emerson, George H. Gould, Henry D. Root, Henry Vaughan Emmons, Hasket Derby, and Richard Salter Storrs. How many others there may have been we cannot say, but there were others. To some Emily wrote teasing valentines in the fashion of the day. With several she corresponded. Occasionally she confided to her brother that she was bored by the visit of one or another, as she would hardly have done if young men had been rare visitants.

An older man, Bishop Dan Huntington of the class of 1839, could write in the nineties: “It was long ago that she gave me her confidence & made herself my friend, tho’ afterwards I scarcely saw her.” Emily herself could write of her friend Ben Newton that “he became to me a gentle, yet grave Preceptor, teaching me what to read, what authors to admire, what was most grand or beautiful in nature, and that sublime lesson, a faith in things unseen, and in a life again, nobler and much more blessed.”Are we to suppose that all this was imparted in stolen moments while a stern papa was dozing?

No, Lavinia’s tall-story telling will not stand the test of comparison with available evidence, and this item in Mrs. Todd’s indictment of Edward Dickinson may be dismissed as contrary to fact.

Of Lavinia herself probably nothing is told in Ancestors’ Brocades which is demonstrably untrue, but the facts are so selected and shaded as to create an impression which is conspicuously one-sided. To begin with, Mrs. Bingham relies upon her childhood recollections, when she enjoyed a child’s privilege of unceremonious entry, to draw a revolting picture of Lavinia in her old age, a witch-like figure, eccentrically dressed, dirty from work in the garden, combing with arthritic fingers her masses of graying hair. Every least one of Vinnie’s peculiarities, and she had many, is sedulously collected and exhibited in the worst possible light. She is made to appear an incompetent, treacherous, unlovely hag, terror-stricken and rapacious by turns. The fact that she failed to compensate Mrs. Todd adequately for editorial services is insisted on over and over again, even to the point of reproducing in facsimile a royalty check which Vinnie received and did not share.

We are given to understand in no uncertain terms, moreover, that Emily’s sister had no real comprehension of the poetry that she all but worshiped. The corollary is, of course, that Mrs. Todd was indispensable as an interpreter. However that may be, Lavinia as she saw the poems being groomed for the printer by Mrs. Todd and Higginson had a sufficient sense of literary appreciation to say, “The rules of printing are new to me & seem in many cases to destroy the grace of the thought.” And in that respect Vinnie would seem to hold an advantage over the two friends who were busy making changes in Emily Dickinson’s phrasing so that conventional reviewers would have less reason to object to her hinted rhymes. What Mrs. Bingham never allows to appear is that people found Miss Lavinia an exciting personality, whose life was a continuous drama, never dull. Fortunately, enough perceptive and unprejudiced accounts of what she was like have been preserved so that the values carefully suppressed or ignored in Mrs. Bingham’s portrait will not be permanently obliterated.

4

BERNARD DEVOTO, however, is assured of Mrs. Bingham’s entire sufficiency. He does not question a single statement of fact or judgment in her book. Instead he seems convinced that anything that conflicts with her views is merely the result of literary people sweetening the sinister facts of life for a public that feeds on spun sugar.

A footnote to Ancestors’ Brocades reports the words of a certain Mrs. Robinson who surmises that Miss Lavinia “was the important character of the family. A dire person! Perhaps she partly explains her sister.” A word to the unwise! All that was needed further was to supply some convenient psychopathic stereotypes, and, presto! Emily Dickinson’s inmost mind would be revealed for all to see, and by the same neat stroke exponents of what DeVoto loves to describe as the “literary fallacy” would be slapped right back on their heels. “When realism comes into conflict with literature,” writes DeVoto, “it loses every time.” I propose now to examine what happens when reality comes into contact with Bernard DeVoto.

Like the irrepressible artist that he is, DeVoto begins his essay by improving on Mrs. Bingham’s portrait of Vinnie the hag. We are invited to consider her as the incarnate New England spinster, squabbling with her sister-in-law over the disposition of a compost heap, solicitous for her innumerable cats. “Toward the end of her life she was hideous indeed. . . . She was a terror to salesmen, with a talent for diatribe and a railing voice sooner or later loosed against everyone except her pussies, and aggressive malice and suspicion eventually directed against everyone, eventually alienating everyone except the even more frightened creature who was her servant.” One cannot too much admire the deft skill of this sketch, but as a record of fact it leaves something to be desired.

Where, for example, did DeVoto get that touch about the cowering servant which so perfectly harmonizes with the effect he desires to create? Not, alas, from historical investigation. Maggie Maher, the Dickinson’s maid, survived her mistress for many years and is well remembered. She was not a frightened creature, but a buxom, big-hearted Irishwoman, who took the little Dickinson ladies under a motherly wing. DeVoto probably encountered in Ancestors’ Brocades a note of Mrs. Todd’s describing a night of wind and rain mounting almost to hurricane violence. Windows were blown in and trees went down. “[Vinnie] and Maggie,” wrote Mrs. Todd, “thought the end of the world was coming last night, and sat up in a dark passageway for hours.” No more was needed to fire the imagination of a veteran concocter of fiction. The terrified servant was promptly transferred to his glowing canvas. This little point, unimportant in itself, tells us that DeVoto is approaching the analysis in a free creative spirit, not as a historical critic. It is just as well to be aware of such things.

For if he had chosen to play the part of historia, he would certainly have felt it appropriate to view Emily Dickinson in terms of the period of her formative years, the three decades before the Civil War. Instead he has preferred to join Mrs. Bingham in viewing her from the alien perspective of the nineties, ten years after Emily’s death. By doing so he is enabled to quote as a relevant document Mrs. Rebecca Harding Davis’s article called “In the Gray Cabins of New England,” which emphasizes the dying out at the end of the century of the intellectual vigor which Mrs. Davis admits had characterized the region “a hundred or even fifty years ago,” or during the childhood of the Dickinsons. Against a background of New England in its cultural decline it is easy to exaggerate Lavinia’s vitriolic vividness and personal freaks into something that suggests a mind on the verge of insanity.

DeVoto compiles a portentous list of all the queer things Vinnie did, but never under any circumstances stops to inquire whether any of them might have a simple and natural explanation. Thus he pounces on the fact that when she entertained a friend for lunch she rarely sat and ate with the guest; he does not ask whether or not she was embarrassed to eat in company by ill-fitting false teeth. That would not help to make her seem a psychopathic personality, and what would become of the ghostly presence of Atreus then? No, DeVoto must have Vinnie shriveling like Jonathan Edwards’s spider in fantastic hell-nres. Otherwise he could not venture the next step, or rather leap, which is to claim that what happened to her “happened also in some degree to every other person who ever came within the influence of that house. What happened to Lavinia is a clue to the far more important, far more terrible story of her sister Emily.”

5

A CRITIC hot for clues will seldom fail to find what he needs; especially if he is a Freudian who, like the devotee of jigsaw puzzles, is much more concerned to fit missing pieces into a preconceived pattern than to evaluate the rather commonplace picture that emerges as a result of his efforts. DeVoto lights upon his clue to Dickinson psychology among the trivial odds and ends of gossip recorded by Mrs. Bingham. It seems that when Lavinia lay dying in the autumn of 1899, Susan Dickinson annoyed her by taking for her own garden the manure pile that Vinnie was counting on using for “Emily’s” roses.

Here is a hint of malignant hatred. Project it backward indefinitely in time, inflate it until it overwhelms all members of the family, until indeed the house can be made to appear “a crucible for the distillation of terrors and hatreds more intense than any our literature has chanced to embody elsewhere,” and finally produce by rhetorical incantation from this witch’s brew the apparition of a great poetry. Since Freudian criticism resembles a famous croquet game played with flamingos for mallets and hedgehogs for balls, it will surprise no one to learn that “ the most spiritual, the most incorruptible of our poets was created, shaped, and given immortality by hatred,” and further that the great poetry inspired by hatred “almost all begins with love or God or else comes in the end to love or God.”

But outside of the Freudian Wonderland it should be an accepted rule of criticism that what happens to the manure pile of a poet’s sister more than ten years after the poet’s death is not relevant to the study of the poet’s literary creation. DeVoto has seen fit to violate this rule. Criticism, he has said, cannot possibly evade the obligation to appraise the matter of the manure pile. So be it. I insist only that he face all the implications of the manure pile he has invoked.

Lavinia Dickinson’s dying concern that her sister’s roses should be duly fertilized reminds us that if there is any one thing indisputably established concerning Emily Dickinson, it is that she was from girlhood to old age an enthusiastic gardener. She loved flowers and had an instinctive knack with them. During her years of seclusion she often tended her flower beds in the early twilight of summer evenings, kneeling on an old red army blanket. And a considerable section of her poetry, a section not to be brushed aside as “trivial, arch, coy, irritating, thin, maidenly, and barren,” is devoted to flowers, trees, the small living creatures of house and garden, the aspects of day and night, climate, and the seasons. Very little of this considerable section of her poetry has anything to do with love or God.

Why does DeVoto ignore one whole side of Emily Dickinson’s total poetry? Could it be because a person fiend-driven by hatred has no leisure to bestow on flowers, bees, clouds, and sunsets? Any experienced psychiatrist will testify that these two elements in combination constitute a most unusual finding. They do not go together. Since Emily was a poet of gardens, it is next to impossible that she could be also a supreme poet of hate.

If there is any doubt, consider a further fact that DeVoto seems to have forgotten: that Emily Dickinson’s poetry is permeated with humor and marked by an unmistakable personal humility. Neither humor nor humility is a quality that denizens of the house of Atreus can possess. Terror and hatred drive the soul in upon itself and wither its capacity for the wider awarenesses that humor, for example, demands. Clytemnestra and Electra do not collect jokes as Emily loved to do.

I am far from wishing to suggest that Emily Dickinson was a serene and untroubled spirit. The reverse is too obviously true, as her poems and letters clearly attest. But her purgation was wrought by suffering, not by the smoldering fires of hatred. Furthermore the causes of her agony are not reducible to any simple Freudian cliché that happens to be handy. They were intricate and ever changing.

Among the psychic pressures that drove her to find relief in expression may be listed (and the list is inevitably incomplete) a deep-seated Puritan conviction that such talents as she possessed must not be lodged in her useless, a dismay at finding herself unable to share the religious beliefs of her family and her closest friends, a torturing doubt of the truth of what she had learned to accept in childhood as spiritual certainties, a sensitive and perhaps morbid brooding over the fact of death, a sense of deprivation and loss as none of her attachments to young men matured into love and marriage, a catastrophic collapse of a dream of intellectual companionship that she too rashly allowed herself to entertain, the pain of what she seems to have regarded as a betrayal of her confidence on the part of her brother’s wife, and finally (what we who have known the shock of Pearl Harbor should not forget) the strains incident to living at the time when the Civil War was rending the nation apart.

It is true, and it was a characteristic feature of her New England self-reliance, that when beset by these and possibly other agonies and driven to the verge of a nervous breakdown, Emily Dickinson had the firmness to put her mind in order by turning her entire attention to poetry. She was hurt at times, but pain was not a constant element in her life. The passage of time must never be left out of account in any psychic investigation, since human personalities are ever changing. Emily experienced the extreme crisis that she called her Calvary during the early 1860’s, and there is not a scrap of evidence that her brother’s marriage in 1856 or her relations to her sister-in-law for ten years thereafter had anything to do with the sorrow which she spoke of in later years as “that old nail in the breast.”

During the following decade she held herself well in hand and almost delighted in the rich foliation of her sufferings, which led her on and on to new poetic perceptions. Time perhaps never does entirely assuage an overwhelming grief, but it permits the stricken to outflank troubles that once seemed insurmountable. Emily well knew how to capitalize on her psychic calamities.

By cultivating her extraordinary power of fitting words to every shade of thought and emotion that she experienced, she found a means of release from the complex psychic pressures that otherwise might have overpowered her sanity. There is nothing terrible or depressing in her story. It is a tale of victory.

6

DR. JOHNSON once gave it as his opinion that no man would write unless forced to do so by need of money. Modern psychological critics have been inclined to hold that no one would write unless driven by psychoneurotic necessity. No one has ever thought it appropriate to study the relation between Paradise Lost and the £5 paid for its copyright, but unluckily a host of amateur psychiatrists are engaged in clinical speculation on the connection between neuroses and literary masterpieces, even though the value of many such investigations is about the same as that of an inquiry into the influence of stomach ulcers on Prometheus Unbound.

A great writer’s relation to his work cannot be reduced to the terms one would employ in analyzing the finger-painting of children or psychopathic patients. The author’s conscious mind exercises at least some measure of control, and hence literature may be significantly correlated with the writer’s background and education, the intellectual movements of his time, and the aesthetic tradition within which his work falls. The reason why DeVoto emerges with an impossible conclusion about Emily Dickinson is that he has confused the psychic drive that impels a poet to write with the conscious shaping intention that gives form to the work.

But in spite of a false method, DeVoto’s literary intuition has occasionally served him well. He has pointed out vigorously, although with characteristic overemphasis, the peculiar quality of Emily’s love poems, which are intense without being passionate. They are not, as he truly observes, the outcries of a poet longing for intimacy with a lover of flesh and blood. They are virginal and highly intellectualized — love poems addressed to an almost disembodied idea.

What Emily desired, and pictured with rapture, and missed with despair was companionship with a man who could give her spiritual certainty. The fact that she referred to the Reverend Charles Wadsworth as “my dearest earthly friend” and when thinking of him quoted from In Memoriam, “Of love that never found its earthly close, what sequel?” — this combined with other small indications in her letters already published or soon to be published would seem to indicate that her vision was not more abstract than was Dante’s when he worshiped a celestial ideal in the form of Beatrice.

DeVoto has also declared truly that Emily Dickinson has had no biographer — though some have tried — and he has suggested that among Americans only Nathaniel Hawthorne could have grasped the imaginative implications of her life. This idea may be tested by recalling the biography that Hawthorne did in fact write of his friend Franklin Pierce.

A more interesting hypothesis arises when DeVoto names Fëdor Dostoevski. Far apart as they seem, there is a resemblance between Emily Dickinson and the Russian novelist, not for the reason that both had gazed long into the pit, but because each was bound on a religious-philosophic quest for ultimate certainty. Their searching led them to develop an uncanny power of introspection, and each in a different way dramatized the play of ideas and emotions encountered in man’s inner world. The resulting drama is chaotic, an unresolved clash of principles.

Because of her unflinching candor and honesty Emily Dickinson was obliged to discard the conventions of Victorian verse and to search for ways of expressing aspects of truth that were not contemplated in the Victorian compromise. Hence she belongs with Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman, the group of nineteenth-century authors who carried on in this country bolder experiments in expressing “an original relation to the universe” than other writers in English were attempting. The quest begun by Puritan seekers of the time of Milton may be said to have ended two centuries later in an Amherst garden.