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| Emily Dickinson |
When Emily Dickinson Mailed It In
On March 5, 1853, while her family ate breakfast, Emily Dickinson addressed four envelopes to Susan Gilbert, a woman with whom she seemed to be in love. The envelopes were empty. Though Emily had already written Sue several letters—and would, over the decades to come, write her hundreds more—these particular envelopes would not carry her words. Instead, Emily left the envelopes for her brother, Austin, who wanted to write to Sue in secret, and who happened to be in love with her himself.
Austin and Sue may already have been engaged at this point, though they wouldn’t announce it until Thanksgiving—and wouldn’t marry until 1856. They would eventually have three children. On the day that Emily addressed the envelopes for her brother, she and Sue were just twenty-two years old; Austin, on his way to law school, was a month from turning twenty-four. And yet, in a separate letter to Sue, Dickinson claimed to be imagining a future well beyond their earthly years:
Neither the distance between them nor their time apart seems commensurate with yearning on such a grand scale: Sue wasn’t across the sea, just in New Hampshire for a month. Perhaps Dickinson was responding, instead, to a separation on the horizon: the one augured, paradoxically, by the growing intimacy between her brother and her friend. But why, then, would Emily address those envelopes for her brother, and facilitate the courtship that would put Sue out of reach?
Consider the fantasy described by Dickinson at the end of the letter—one of more than thirteen hundred in “The Letters of Emily Dickinson” (Harvard), a new, definitive edition that collects, reorders, and freshly annotates every surviving letter that Dickinson sent (or drafted) to someone else, along with the handful of surviving messages that she received. What Dickinson wants is not simply to have Sue to herself, here and now. Her desire extends past any single object or fixed span of time; she wants nothing less than “Eternity,” a golden state that is presently silent and hidden, but one that will nevertheless, inevitably, unfold its arms in welcome. Those arms, in Dickinson’s fantasy, will gather together not only Emily and Sue but also Austin, along with everyone else who matters to her: “us all—all.”
For Dickinson, writing letters offered a way of making a life out of this fantasy; this is why the genre so appealed to her. When, for instance, she addressed the envelopes for her brother to send to Sue, she was of course helping the couple by hastening their courtship, but she was doing something else, too. She was insinuating herself into its private scenes. Letters untether words from bodies; they loosen and redraw the bonds of time and space, and for that matter of sexuality, marriage, and blood relation. A week later, she wrote to Sue again, describing the pleasure she had taken in arranging her friend’s correspondence with her brother: “So Susie, I set the trap and catch the little mouse, and love to catch him dearly, for I think of you and Austin, and know it pleases you to have my tiny services.”
One gets the sense that Dickinson’s desires for these kinds of tangled intimacy frequently exceeded her correspondents’ interest in satisfying them. Almost all of the letters that Dickinson received were destroyed after her death, but her own surviving letters frequently complain about epistolary neglect. To Austin, in this same stretch, she writes, “I have not heard from Sue again, tho’ I’ve written her three times.” And yet such frustration did little to curb her desire. On March 23, 1853, Austin and Sue met in the parlor of the Revere Hotel in Boston. The next day, Emily wrote to her brother: “I did ‘drop in at the Revere’ a great many times yesterday. I hope you have been made happy. If so I am satisfied. I shall know when you get home.” Hard to imagine that Austin and Sue were thinking of Emily as they sat together in the Revere. But she was thinking of them.
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Two tendencies animate Dickinson’s letters, two ways of imagining what writing might do. On the one hand, and especially as she entered adulthood, writing could feel like a mode of retreat from the world. This way of imagining Dickinson—as an eccentric recluse—became part of her mythology even in life, and it was an image that she played no small part in promoting. In 1869, when Dickinson was thirty-eight years old, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the man who (through the mail) had become her poetic mentor, asked her if they could meet: “if I could once see you & know that you are real, I might fare better.” Dickinson’s response suggested that she preferred a state of slight unreality: “A Letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.”
Dickinson did eventually consent to see Higginson in person. After their second (and final) meeting, he wrote to his sister, “I saw my eccentric poetess Miss Emily Dickinson who never goes outside her father’s grounds & sees only me & a few others. She says, ‘there is always one thing to be grateful for—that one is one’s self & not somebody else.’ ” Never going outside your father’s grounds may be a way to insure that you do not become somebody else. Dickinson’s writing, in this way of thinking, created a simulated world that took the place of the real one. She once responded to a social invitation from Sue by writing simply, “We meet no Stranger but Ourself.” Thomas H. Johnson, the editor of the standard 1958 edition of Dickinson’s letters which this new volume supersedes, took this view to its extreme when, in his introduction, he stated, as fact: “she did not live in history and held no view of it.”
The nearly seven decades of scholarship that have followed Johnson’s pronouncement of Dickinson’s reclusiveness—scholarship to which Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell, the new volume’s editors, have contributed and from which they adroitly draw—have revealed it to be a crude caricature, one that says as much about men’s fantasies about women (and about poetry readers’ fantasies about poets) as it does about the actual person who wrote those thousand-odd letters. What that scholarship helps us to see is the countervailing tendency behind Dickinson’s epistolary practice: again and again, she set her thoughts to paper and then sent those sheets of paper out into the world, where they found the hands of someone else. Writing letters could therefore be for Dickinson not only a withdrawal from the world but also a way of extending herself into many worlds, all at once.
She took great delight in imagining the varied routes that her words would take, the worlds they’d help her inhabit. In 1852, when Sue was teaching in Baltimore, Dickinson lamented that she could not close the distance between them, that she could not make their diffuse intimacy into something compact, like a poem. And yet that lamentation, as Dickinson offered it, turned into its own form of consolation:
The scholar Virginia Jackson has taken this passage as emblematic of Dickinson’s persistent attention to the “material circumstances of writing,” which produce their own kind of intimacy. The predicament faced by every letter writer is that they cannot, at the time of their writing, share a world with their reader. But, when Dickinson sets her world to paper, and mails it to Baltimore, the page itself becomes a shared object, a bit of the world that writer and reader will have had in common, though separated in time. Because the letter is itself a material object, because that object begins in Emily’s hands and ends in Sue’s, the very distance between them becomes an image of their intimacy, now manifested in the postal route that gets the sheet of paper from writer to reader.
“Mother is frying Doughnuts,” Dickinson wrote, at around this time, in a postscript to her brother, who was teaching in Boston. “I will give you a little platefull to have warm for your tea! Imaginary ones—how I’d love to send you real ones.” She can’t send Austin the doughnuts and expect them to arrive warm, but in their place she sends folded paper that bears ink from her pen—with the expectation that, when Austin unfolds it and reads, he will have been connected in a very literal way to the domestic scene from which he had been absent. Epistolary writing offered Dickinson a way to draw tenderness from separation, to make distance an image of love. In 1866, a decade after Sue and Austin were married, Dickinson sent her sister-in-law a folded sheet of paper that contained only these pencilled words:
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That sheet of paper did not have far to go. When Sue and Austin married, they moved into the Evergreens, a house on the lot adjacent to the Dickinson family home, where Emily still lived with her mother, father, and sister, Lavinia. Dickinson sent Sue more letters than any other correspondent—this edition contains nearly three hundred to her alone—and yet, for most of that correspondence, Sue was just next door. Out of view but close at hand, Sue became an ideal recipient for the poems that Dickinson, on the verge of her great outburst of creativity, increasingly began to write:
Dickinson sent the poem that begins with this stanza to the Evergreens on the occasion of Sue’s twenty-eighth birthday. The two women, born just nine days apart, had not become close friends until 1850, when they would both have been nineteen, but the poem maintains its own logic. To claim Sue as “sister,” to feel in the present the intensity of that affection, was to bring a notionally shared childhood within reach:
In her letters, Dickinson often refers to childhood nostalgically. To Austin, she writes, “I wish we were children now. I wish we were always children, how to grow up I dont know!” At other times, though, “childhood” names a world to come. Writing to Higginson, in a letter she drafts in 1870, Dickinson refers to “immortality” as “the larger Haunted House it seems, of maturer Childhood—distant, an alarm—entered intimate at last as a neighbor’s Cottage—”
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Dickinson’s father died four years later, when she was forty-three. The event arrives with a terrible poignancy in the “Letters.” The only surviving note from Dickinson to her father was written just before his death—and is blank:
Between the salutation and the signature, the editors point out, are two pinholes. They suggest that the note held an object—likely a flower—which is now gone. The next letter in the volume is from Dickinson to her two younger cousins, Louisa and Frances Norcross, and tells the story of the Dickinson children receiving word that their father had died:
Dickinson did not attend her father’s burial, and, according to the “Letters,” she never visited his grave, though her siblings did. A friend of hers, Elizabeth Holland, picked a sprig of clover from the grave and gave it to Emily, who pressed it between the pages of her Bible. A letter may indeed, as Dickinson wrote to Higginson, feel like immortality, but there is something profoundly elegiac in this circuit of exchange: the flower now missing from the note to her father, the brute fact that he cannot receive the flowers his children now bring him, the flower preserved from the grave never visited. Letters circulate such traces of organic matter, even as they implicitly bemoan their insufficiencies.
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Again and again, one feels the pathos of this collection. The editors have performed a monumental act of labor—consulting historical weather reports, diaries, and newspaper archives to reconstruct chronology; painstakingly restoring words erased by later hands—but inevitably there are things we just cannot know with any certainty about the person who produced these texts.
Nowhere is that pathos more acute than in the love letters that suddenly appear near the end of Dickinson’s life. Addressed to Otis Lord, a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court judge whom Dickinson described as “my Father’s closest friend,” the twenty letters survive only as drafts. Lord was a widower, eighteen years Emily’s senior. The romance between them began sometime around 1880; Dickinson would have been nearly fifty. They agreed to write to each other every Sunday. “Tuesday is a deeply depressed Day,” Dickinson complained in a draft to Lord; “it is not far enough from your dear note for the embryo of another to form, and yet what flights of Distance.”
According to Alfred Habegger, one of Dickinson’s biographers, Lord asked her to marry him late in 1882. Here, again, it’s impossible to know the details of what happened between the two. But, throughout Dickinson’s drafts to Lord, we have evidence of that same twinned impulse that guided her earlier letters to Sue. On the one hand, amorous withdrawal: “Dont you know you are happiest while I withhold and not confer—dont you know that ‘No’ is the wildest word we consign to Language?” On the other, an oddly chaste kind of eros: “It is strange that I miss you at night so much when I was never with you.” In the same breath, Dickinson seems to voice regret about having missed a life with Lord (“Oh, had I found it sooner!”) and an otherworldly sense that, in the face of such strong feeling, chronology is beside the point (“Yet Tenderness has not a Date—it comes—and overwhelms”). Lord died in 1884; Dickinson two years later, at the age of fifty-five. At the poet’s funeral, her sister, Lavinia, laid two flowers by her hand, “to take to Judge Lord.”
Three decades earlier, while Emily was assisting in her brother’s courtship, she wrote to Sue, “There are lives, sometimes, Susie—Bless God that we catch faint glimpses of his brighter Paradise from occasional Heavens here!” Her own life was lived in that terrestrial “here,” and also in her writing. What glimpses of paradise it gives. Very near the end of the letters collected in this volume, there is a note marked by the editors as “unsent.” Its recipient is unknown: “Were Departure Separation, there would be neither Nature nor Art, for there would be no World—”. The slip of paper has been folded once and is signed “Emily—”. The woman who signed her name there has gone away. Her note is not addressed to us. And yet, in having found our hands, it tells us that we share a world with its author.
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Kamran Javadizadeh is an associate professor of English at Villanova University and the author of the forthcoming book “Institutionalized
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