Scattered effects

When Emily Dickinson was twenty-four she returned with her family to the Homestead, the ancestral house on Amherst’s Main Street that her father had sold some years before, and which the family was now in a position to take back. She recalled this homecoming in a letter to her friend Elizabeth Holland:

I cannot tell you how we moved. I had rather not remember. I believe my “effects” were brought in a bandbox, and the “deathless me”, on foot, not many moments after. I took at the time, a memorandum of my several senses, and also of my hat and coat, and my best shoes – but it was lost in the mêleè, and I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.

Dickinson knew just how to stage this comedy of selfhood lost in transit, in which a person coheres and may be dispersed as readily as her belongings, and according to which you need time to collect yourself when you’ve been moved. Perhaps, too, there’s a prognostic glance in this letter at what was to become of Emily Dickinson, a hint of the posthumous gathering and settlement of an estate in those carefully handled “effects”, though the “deathless me” coming soon after scrambles – surely just as carefully – the usual sequence of last things.

Among Dickinson’s personal effects when she died in 1886 was a locked box “containing 700 wonderful poems, carefully copied”. It was discovered by her sister, Lavinia (Vinnie), and its contents have since been edited and circulated in a variety of print and digital forms. Her first posthumous editor, Mabel Loomis Todd, also undertook the more taxing business of recovering Dickinson’s letters from the hands of their recipients: “the letters, scattered here, there, and everywhere, had to be lured from their hiding places”, recalled Todd’s daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham. It is fortunate that Todd got down to this work promptly, while so many of Dickinson’s correspondents were still living, otherwise the letters she’d written might have succumbed to the fate met by those she’d received: Vinnie followed both custom and her sister’s wishes in destroying the correspondence she found among Dickinson’s effects, save for a lucky few letters preserved by chance of their having poems drafted on their other sides. Thomas H. Johnson’s variorum Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955) has since been superseded by Ralph Franklin’s (1998) and most recently by Emily Dickinson’s Poems As She Preserved Them, edited by Cristanne Miller (TLS, November 4, 2016). Meanwhile, the standard text of Dickinson’s letters has until now remained Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward’s three-volume edition of 1958. This new single-volume Letters of Emily Dickinson, the first that aspires to completeness in more than sixty years, adds to Johnson and Ward the eighty letters discovered and published since 1958, presents the correspondence newly transcribed, redated and annotated, and – in perhaps its most significant editorial decision – adds to this epistolary haul 200 poems that, because they carry an address or signature, or both, are counted as letters. There could be no better undertakers of this complex and much-needed task than Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell.

“Our beautiful Neighbor ‘moved’ in May – it leaves an unimportance”, wrote Dickinson in a letter of 1864. The neighbour, anonymous in Johnson and Ward’s edition of the Letters, is identified here as Nathaniel Hawthorne – which makes sense, given that Dickinson was writing from Boston (the Hawthorne house was at Concord), and given a neighbouring letter in which she reported to Thomas Wentworth Higginson that “Mr Hawthorne died”. The letter itself exemplifies Dickinson’s habitual conflation of changed states and changes of address. Famously unwilling in later life to step beyond home ground (she wrote in 1854, “I dont go from home, unless emergency leads me by the hand”), she had wondered from the start at those who made transitions she could barely imagine for herself. “I continually hear Christ saying to me Daughter give me thine heart”, she wrote, aged fifteen, to her schoolfriend Abiah Root, when religious revivalism swept through Amherst and Dickinson saw her most sceptical friends “melted at once”, while she herself held back from “exchang[ing] the fleeting pleasures of time for a crown of immortality”. Marriage, too (or, as she put it in an impassioned letter to Susan Gilbert, “those unions, my dear Susie, by which two lives are one, this sweet and strange adoption wherein we can but look”), was evidently a prospect that both thrilled and alarmed her: “It does so rend me, Susie, the thought of when it comes, that I tremble lest at sometime I, too, am yielded up.”

The “amatory strain” of the letters to Susan, Dickinson’s beloved friend who married her brother, Austin, is well known. In these letters and elsewhere the distance between correspondents is often erotically charged, as when, in her forties, Dickinson drafted a number of missives to her father’s erstwhile colleague Judge Otis P. Lord. As with the three draft letters to an unknown recipient now called the “Master Letters”, it is not known whether fair copies of these were mailed; either way they are deeply knowing about the attractions of being held at a distance: “Don’t you know you are happiest while I withhold and not confer – dont you know that ‘No’ is the wildest word we consign to Language?” she wrote to Lord in 1880. Those who did confer or yield had left the younger Dickinson awestruck. When Emily Fowler Ford left for Brooklyn after her marriage in 1853, it might as well have been for another world: “when it came, and hidden by your veil, you stood before us all and made those promises, and when we kissed you all, and went back to our homes – it seemed to me translation – not any earthly thing […] I begin to know that you will not come back again”, she wrote to Ford, so equating, according to figurative convention and habit of mind, marital union and heavenly transport.

Dickinson was conventional too in her concern, for those who really had made the permanent move to another world, that theirs had been a good death. She wrote in 1854 to the minister who had been with Benjamin Franklin Newton in his final hours. (Newton had been her father’s student, and became for Dickinson “a gentle, yet grave Preceptor”.) She wanted to know from Reverend Hale, “if his last hours were cheerful, and if he was willing to die”. Hale’s reply does not survive, but Dickinson was evidently reassured by it that her friend was safe: “It is sweet when friends are absent, to know that they are home”, she said, and you can hear her stepping into the metered prose – as Miller and Mitchell term it – that was her own most familiar rhythmic ground. Wordsworth’s conviction that poetic metre offers the co-presence of something regular to those in an unusual or irregular state of mind was never more evident than in the case of Dickinson’s prose. Sometimes metre’s “intertexture of ordinary feeling”, in Wordsworth’s phrase, imposes proper bounds on grief, as when Dickinson writes, “Home itself is far from Home since my Father died”; sometimes the reminiscence of ballad form renders peculiar thought as commonplace (“November always seemed to me the Norway of the Year”); and sometimes it tautens the rhetorical spring of her syntax: “I work to drive the awe away, yet awe impels the work”. Millicent Todd Bingham recalls the trap this set for editorial work on the letters: “Emily’s habit of lapsing into poetry in the middle of a letter [was] another pitfall for the editor who thus might fail to detect a poem”.

A case in point was the letter Dickinson wrote to her cousin Perez Cowan on the anniversary of his infant daughter’s death. Cowan had sent a memorial brochure of little Margaret’s brief life, and Dickinson responded with what reads, to me, as the least consoling of condolences: “May I remind you what Paul said, or do you think of nothing else, these October Nights, without her Crib to visit?”. Editors have differed in their presentation of what follows. Lines beginning “‘And with what body do they come?’”, which sound very much like Dickinson lapsing into poetry, have sometimes been lineated as prose and sometimes as the first of two quatrains. Miller and Mitchell concur with Johnson and Ward in separating them out as verse lines, but the puzzle of this incorporated poem remains, not least because its source material – what Paul said to the Corinthians – was itself a letter. Dickinson’s query about whether the baby’s “peculiar form – the Mold of the Bird” would have survived in heaven, and, if so, whether her parents should continue to worry about her (“I hope Heaven is warm – there are so many Barefoot ones”) finds its parallel in the uncertain shift between written forms – earthbound prose or elevated lyric – in which that query is posed.

Whether what she wrote counts as poetry is still a live debate among Dickinson scholars, though most have moved on from Bingham’s hunch that poems might be buried, like gems, amongst her prose, if only we could detect them. Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith, previous editors of Dickinson’s letters to Susan Gilbert, maintained that she did not distinguish between prose and poetry in her letters after the 1850s; Marta Werner and Jen Bervin have curated the scraps from Dickinson’s later life as Gorgeous Nothings (2012), or “envelope poems”, visual artefacts with the aura of holy relics. Mitchell and Miller confine such “writing notes” to an appendix. In the critical field, Virginia Jackson has argued that the category of lyric is a backward projection that homogenizes the variety of genres in which Dickinson wrote and erases their particular purposes. Insofar as this volume of the letters pursues a thesis, it is in keeping with the conviction of Miller’s Poems As She Preserved Them that Dickinson knew when she was writing a poem. Unlike Hart and Smith, who replicated the lineation of Dickinson’s manuscripts in their edition of the letters to Susan (Open Me Carefully, 1998), Miller and Mitchell “follow [Dickinson’s] practice of lineating poetry as such”, though, inevitably, there is some hedging over these questions of genre in the volume’s introduction: at one point the editors steer closer to Hart and Smith in claiming that the letters “in part suspend the distinction between poetry and prose”.

An editorial decision that does make a difference to how we read Dickinson’s works involves the 200 poems that Miller and Mitchell include among the letters. It is not so much that these poems’ being prefaced by “Dear …” or ending with a signature is news: such features of the manuscripts have been fully documented in Johnson’s, Franklin’s and Miller’s editions of the poems. Rather, it is that encountering them amid busy epistolary traffic stamps these works more firmly with markers of historical time and place, and, most obviously, redirects their modes of address. Lyric apostrophe is both narrowed and sharpened when a poem is read as a letter, pointing, for example, to specific first- and second-person referents in “Your – Riches – taught me – poverty”, so tightening the circuit of rhyme between “Dear Sue”, “you” and “A Different Peru”, and enriching the punning pronouns (“To have a smile – for mine – each day”) in a poem about treasured possessions. Dickinson enclosed the same piece of writing with one of her bold letters of self-introduction to Thomas Wentworth Higginson; but she did not send him quite the same poem because she did not address it to him.

Johnson opined that Dickinson “did not live in history and held no view of it”. But she did, of course, as witness her queries to Austin about the Mexican-American War, or the news she sent him about the railroad coming to Amherst, or her playful complaint that she couldn’t be, as her father was, a delegate to the 1852 Whig convention in Baltimore, or the numerous direct and indirect ways in which the Civil War shows its impact on the letters of 1861–5, or her quip in August 1881 that birds approached in her back yard “run and shriek as if they were being assassinated” (President James Garfield had been shot that July and died in September). Miller and Mitchell’s annotations of such details refine the texture of historical time with which Dickinson’s letters are threaded. Their decision to populate these annotations with the names and identities (Irish, African American) of paid labourers in the Dickinson household makes a significant difference to how we imagine her domestic sphere, and when “Edwin Pierce, our neighbor, was arrested last week, for beating a servant girl” these editors give the victim – Bridgett Clifford – a name, as well as the perpetrator.

Miller and Mitchell follow Johnson and Ward’s practice of putting these matters of fact, along with details of source texts and previous publication, in brief notes immediately after each letter, so that they can be seen at a glance and without cluttering the primary texts with footnote references. Sometimes the sequencing of the correspondence is set straight by a match between the weather reported in a letter and the records kept by the meticulous Amherst weatherman Ebenezer Snell. Whereas Johnson and Ward conjectured the date of one letter of 1878, about the premature putting away of a sled, on the basis of Dickinson’s handwriting, Miller and Mitchell pin it down to the snow and hail of March 13, which followed an unseasonably warm spell. The cumulative effect of this fine-tuning is to ventilate Dickinson’s writing and thought to conditions that prevailed outside, and to secure their grounding in worldly circumstance. “A letter is a joy of earth”, she famously said; a renewed joy of these letters is in their estranging by tone or figure the fixtures and fittings of ordinary life. There’s a conversation with a carpenter, for example, that Dickinson stiffens into self-caricature: “I asked what made the Door erroneous, and he said ‘it was not Plumb’. Some rigor of rectitude, I inferred, in which the Door was wanting”. There’s a raising of tone to the point of high camp on a matter of fruit: “Should Dear Mrs Tuckerman have no Pears like mine, I should never cease to be harrowed”; and who but Dickinson could have felt so relieved of her house guests as to summon the sentence, one late summer evening, “now they are all gone, and the crickets are pleased, their bombazine reproof still falls upon the twilight, and checks the softer uproars of the departing day”?

Dickinson’s cousins Louisa and Frances Norcross agreed to share with Mabel Loomis Todd the numerous letters they had received from her, but only in versions Frances had transcribed. The manuscripts themselves, which they never shared, were eventually burnt at Louisa Norcross’s death. Mitchell and Miller have found that Todd made her own changes to Frances’s transcriptions (sometimes, it seems, her rivalry with Susan Gilbert prompted her to excise Sue’s name). This archival plot thickens the intrigue around a letter sent to Louisa Norcross in 1872, transcribed by Frances, collected by Todd and set down here again by Miller and Mitchell:

Do you remember what you said the night you came to me? I secure that sentence. If I should see your face no more it will be your portrait, and if I should, more vivid than your mortal face. We must be careful what we say. No bird resumes its egg. A word left careless on a page May Consecrate an eye, When folded in perpetual seam, The Wrinkled author lie. Emily.

The editors add a note to this letter: “Frances transcribes the poem at the end without poetic lineation because she is at the bottom of the page. Todd notes ‘Last four lines a verse’.” Readers of Dickinson will know those four lines as a poem beginning “A Word dropped careless on a Page”. Finding them again here, subject to the contingencies of page space and epistolary circumstance, at three removes of transcription from their author (and, indeed, at four removes from whatever Louisa said that night), we might wonder again at the care the poet’s editors have taken over several generations. With Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell, The Letters of Emily Dickinson are in safe hands.

Fiona Green is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Cambridge

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