Dickinson Rediscovered

...In this case, however, the story of the poet's uncompromising Calvinist and military forebears effectively sets the stage for a better understanding of her...

...One of the remarkable aspects of Dickinson's poetry is its terse, elliptical language...

...Thus she modeled herself on the willful Brontë female characters, who do not bow to convention but abase themselves in the face of a powerful beloved male...

...Most famous were the enigmatic "Master" letters—drafts addressed to an unknown male mentor (probably also the love object described in "Wild nights'" and the poem about being "the Wife—without the sign...

...While there is considerable evidence of an earlier secret romance with an unavailable man, Habegger opts for the original candidate suggested by the Dickinsons, the reclusive Reverend Charles Wadsworth, whom she was attracted to in her 20s...

...The warfare between the two families raged fiercely, with each publishing from their separate store of poems and letters, each trying to cast the poet's life in a light that would favor their side...

...Later, biographers posited a lesbian disguising an affair with her sister-in-law as an unconsummated romance with an imaginary male...

...As Habegger observes in explaining his title (taken from one of Dickinson's poems), "Hard battle resulting in victory or defeat was a central, lifelong metaphor for her...

...In an age when poets tended to explain everything, no matter how obvious, and strove toward epic—think Whitman, Tennyson, both Brownings—she whittled her ideas until each poem seemed the kernel of whatever she wanted to express...

...When the poet died (not of Bright's disease, as has long been claimed, but more likely of hypertension), the literary Sue wanted to collect her former sister-inlaw's poems...

...Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and the poems of the pseudonymous Ellis Bell helped form her sensibility...

...Regardless of how much we learn about Dickinson, therefore, she will continue to elude us, to guard at least some of her secrets...

...Victorian sentimentality portrayed a virginal "pure soul" who had renounced a great but forbidden love, and afterward immured herself in solitude...

...As for the second and third, he notes that she wrote erotically charged letters and poems to both men and women, yet was almost surely inexperienced sexually until her affair with Judge Otis Phillips Lord when she was in her 50s...

...Not so Alfred Habegger in My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (Random, 784 pp., $35.00...

...Habegger writes: "Sometimes her speakers voice her private situation (aspects of it) frankly and directly...

...Far from being a wispy escapist, she was as martial...

...From family descriptions and Higginson's record of his interviews, Dickinson gives the impression of having been a manic-depressive...

...That tore them limb from limb to death, With blood, and groans, and tears...

...Yet she had no one's blood on her hands and paid little or no attention to family or local history...

...Having already produced books on Henry James and his father—both notoriously private men who went to great lengths to discourage or mislead potential biographers—Habegger knows something about patient scrutiny of sources...

...Then there was Emily's well-known affinity for Thomas Wentworth Higginson, from whom she sought poetic advice in deferential and cajoling terms...

...The judicious Habegger points out that while not entirely accurate, as the record shows, this theory may not have been wholly fictitious, either...

...He used Emily and Vinnie's house as a trysting place to meet his mistress...

...Small wonder that all three Dickinson children began to dread being far from home...

...Todd Bingham's attitudes were ambivalent as well, though she proved the better editor...

...Along with other parents of that time and place, he exposed his children to horrifying tales of divine punishment, frequently meted out for comparatively minor infractions...

...Sometimes they are the actors of her favorite fantasies, fictions, projections...

...Because of all the mystery, recent studies have concentrated on what can be gleaned about her "inner life" from the poems and have largely avoided biographical interpretation...

...Meanwhile, Dickinson herself continues to stare out at us through her one known portrait (and through the memorable poems) with a sphinx' suggestion of a smile, knowing her secrets can never be entirely unearthed...

...In the process this hefty volume brings much that has been cloudy into clear focus...

...As Habegger acknowledges, this is part of her appeal and strength...

...Even when she was a reasonably social schoolgirl, she seemed to relish remaking herself as a comic or outrageous character in letters to friends...

...All that only added to the riddles of Dickinson's life and legacy...

...She guaranteed that herself by making her mysterious lyrics seem limitless—words we can never fully interpret...

...Still, she was marked by the terror, just as she and her siblings were affected by the anxieties of their parents...

...She gave up "loquacity for concision," in Habegger's words, to become the poet we are drawn to...

...The biographer suggests that "What might be called evangelical hermeneutics—the duty of making a personal application of sacred texts—had a profound effect on Dickinson...

...We can never contain her— there will always be something fresh to discover about Emily Dickinson...

...This is why, on the one hand, she was capable of total independence, and on the other, she gloried in submitting herself to male tutors—generally through an epistolary relationship...

...Modernist critics have indignantly defended her against the charge that she might have been slightly mad...

...as any of them...

...Indeed, she exercised that strength as she read seeking and extracting what she could make her own...

...His wife simply concluded the poet was nuts...

...In addition, Habegger has studied what has long been available with such care and judicious scholarship that he has been able to assemble the most coherent account to date of Dickinson's life...

...The examination of important manuscripts, like the handwritten copies of the poet's letters before her brother Austin penciled out certain phrases, fills in some of the blanks...

...More recently, the Women's Studies movement has tried to fit her into the culture of 19th-century female writers, who often eschewed publication, as Dickinson did, preferring to circulate manuscripts privately...

...The verses bristle with enigmas and tantalizing hints that never quite solve them...

...The battle's real cause, Austin's philandering, was unknown to the public for many years...

...Although Dickinson was formally educated, the things she read on her own had the strongest impact on her...

...Subsequently, the poet remarked, "I believe the love of God may be taught not to seem like bears...

...Vinnie, becoming impatient, turned to Mabel Todd instead...

...In some ways Emily was very much a product of her upbringing...

...Though not all of her poetry is autobiographical, Dickinson makes it sound that way...

...She was obviously both compulsive and phobic in certain circumstances...

...in others, not at all...

...Bianchi, to cite one instance, was responsible for the longstanding notion that a failed love affair drove a normal, socially adept young woman to become an eccentric recluse...

...No wonder there is something both amazing and a bit disturbing about any typical poem of hers: Split the Lark—and you'll find the Music— Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled— Scantily dealt to the Summer Morning Saved for vow Ear, when Lutes be old— Higginson found Emily's intensity exhausting...

...he implied to his family, only half jokingly, that she was a kind of vampire...

...When Austin and Vinnie died, in the late 1890s, Sue and her daughter, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, entered the fray with some of the manuscripts in their possession, while Mabel's child, Millicent Todd Bingham, continued her mother's efforts, using the documents Vinnie had bequeathed to them...

...In this fashion she was able to either reveal her character or conceal it...

...But not all fathers or mothers conveyed such continuous fearfulness...

...She quickly produced what became the first published volume of Dickinson's lyrics, and ensured its success by securing blurbs from various notable writers...

...Dickinson and her brother, Austin, like their father, resisted the demand for a long time—Emily, in fact, never did make the required profession of faith...

...Despite usually being eager to please, particularly as a youngster, she kept her thoughts to herself and formed her own opinions...

...Most important, she was able to produce her writings...

...Almost invariably dressed in white, she sent cryptic poems and letters to family visitors from behind her halfclosed door, rarely letting them lay eyes on her...

...From their perspective, her "fractured thought and language" is a characteristic of high modernism...

...True, many children succumbed to disease, infections or accidents in those days...

...Without doubt, her peculiarly dense language and eccentric behavior—even before she retreated from the world—remain disconcerting...

...And since he is a compelling writer, the fortunes of the whole Dickinson clan, not merely its brightest star, Emily, become of absorbing interest to the reader...

...Emily loved to dramatize herself in letters...

...This had not always been her style...

...it was around the same time that she virtually withdrew from outside contacts altogether...

...By age seven, says Habegger, exposure to the "insidiously sadistic version of official and approved reality" in Calvinist moral teaching, plus an unwillingness to express her fears to adults, turned Emily into a remarkably self-reliant but neurotic child...

...Austin ultimately became estranged from his wife, Sue— the subject of many of Emily's poems of the middle period— and fell in love with a young faculty wife at Amherst, Mabel Loomis Todd...

...Writing to someone she knew when he was a young man, she remarked, "We used to think, Joseph, when I was an unsifted girl and you so scholarly, that words were cheap & weak...

...Nearly everyone was aware of the death of a friend or relative...

...As she herself observed, "The Soul selects its own Society...

...Of the Belle of Amherst he writes, "My purpose has been to tell the story that seems implicit in the documentary record that is available to us, and at the same time to let the reader behind the scenes by showing just what has been fractured...

...To stress the dangers of impenitence, for example, parents taught their offspring a notorious hymn by Isaac Watts about the children in 2 Kings 2:23-24, who mocked the prophet Elisha, and the fate that befell them: God quickly stopp'd their wicked breath...

...But the crux of Habegger's argument is that there are too many "either/or" questions about Dickinson: Was she unstable or a genius...

...Her father did not question the validity of the system, though, he only doubted his own sincerity of acceptance and worthiness...

...In her own sphere, among family and special friends, she functioned well...

...His response to the first one is that Emily was both uniquely gifted anda bit cracked...

...In particular, her father and grandfather display the same unshakable dedication to their ideals that we recognize in Emily...

...Several valentines, written in her teens (and published in the Amherst literary magazine), are rather expansive, and early letters show an ability to comically embroider an incident into mock-heroics...

...a recluse because of disappointed love or compulsive neurosis...

...She knew that for years editor friends were eager to publish them...

...But Dickinson did not need the obfuscations of the family feud to evade those near and far...

...The] poem beginning, ? hide myself within my flower,' surely gives us the right premise: that she herself is concealed within many of her 'supposed persons.' The corollary, of course, is that we mustn't presume to find her every time...

...Ironically, the way her family eventually violated her privacy after her death added to the confusion already enshrouding her...

...Beginning with the publication of Poems by Emily Dickinson in 1890, four years after her death, family members and neighbors, then critics and biographers have attempted to explain her idiosyncratic behavior and make sense of her psyche...

...Austin, Emily and "Vinnie" (Lavinia) were not allowed to go to school if snow fell, and were constantly worried over...

...She learned early on not to confide in her harried, nervous mother, and may have been more affected by family influences than her brother and sister because her unusual precociousness with words enabled her to understand more...

...Often I am put off by biographies that begin generations before the principal subject was born...

...heterosexual or lesbian...

...Now I dont know of anything so mighty...

...She cannot be fully comprehended without some grasp of the contemporary religious ethos: an orthodox Calvinism demanding its adherents to "surrender" themselves wholly to Christ (note that the metaphor can be both bellicose and erotic) in an act of willing subjugation...

...To this day, it is almost impossible to evaluate the biographical stories disseminated by Bianchi: Yes, she of course knew Emily, her aunt, and was a member of the family, but she wanted to put her mother in the most favorable light and eliminate any trace of the interloping Todds...

...Whatever toll this may have taken, it also helped form the adult poet...

...Still later, critics treated all the clues in the poems and in gossip as fictive strategies, having nothing to do with her life at all...

...And sent two raging bears...

...Sometimes I write one, and look at his outlines till he glows as no sapphire...

...But she did not make much progress transcribing the handwritten texts from their tiny, neatly sewn, homemade manuscript booklets...

...Often they represent a generalized human subject...

...For Dickinson no less than for these Victorian heroines, humble veneration was compatible with great inner strength...

...She also conventionalized some of the poet's language and rhymes, and abandoned Emily's idiosyncratic punctuation style to make the book more palatable...