Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [75]
This was the fantasy scenario. In reality, Higginson - Colonel Higginson, as he became in the Civil War - was a man of principle and, if not her match, an attentive friend to Dickinson, as biographer Brenda Wineapple has shown in a reassessment of the relationship that rightly refuses to see Higginson off as the blunderer he has appeared. He was a high-minded man who fought for the rights of the disenfranchised: freed slaves and women. He backed women’s suffrage and education (and was later a founder of Radcliffe College). As a militant abolitionist he was to lead a regiment of nine hundred freed slaves in an assault on Jacksonville in Florida: the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first federally authorised regiment of former slaves. He bore out Mr Dickinson’s anti-slavery politics - more, in fact, than Mr Dickinson’s son who, like many who were drafted, paid another man to take his place in the Union army. It was during Higginson’s service in the army that he contributed to the preservation of Negro Spirituals by copying dialect verses and music he heard sung around the campfires. This, then, was a man unusually alert to unrecognised forms of poetry.
Emily Dickinson kept up this tie. ‘Sweetest of Renowns to remain Your Scholar -’, she ends a letter when she was forty-five and for the last eighteen years had been writing what well she knew were great poems. At least twice she had to tug Higginson back. After she had sent him five insistently remarkable letters over the first six months, to four of which he had duly replied, he paused. There would have been other matters on his mind: he was about to take off for the battlefields of the Civil War in November 1862. Just then, his ‘plaintive’ correspondent - unconcerned, it appears, with Higginson’s imminent participation in a war that was piling up ghastly death tolls and would kill more than half a million men - roped him with the politest of queries:
6 October 1862
Did I displease you, Mr Higginson?
But wont you tell me how?
Your friend,
E. Dickinson -
About ten years on, when Higginson again paused, she was as terse and more direct: ‘Will you instruct me then no more?’ was all she wrote on a card.
For his part, he was impressed enough to stick with the somewhat ineffectual role she imposed on him as decipherer of letters tending to the impenetrable. He represents the public world at its kindest as she opens up her flashes of originality. One of the poems she enclosed was ‘Dare you see a soul at the White Heat’. Higginson both dared and feared, and was honest enough to admit his mystification.
May 11, 1869
Sometimes I take out your letters & verses, dear friend, and when I feel their strange power, it is not strange that I find it hard to write . . . I have the greatest desire to see you, always feeling that perhaps if I could once take you by the hand I might be something to you; but till then you only enshroud yourself in this fiery mist & I cannot reach you . . . Every year I think that I will contrive somehow to go to Amherst & see you . . . I feel . . . always timid lest what I write should be badly aimed & miss that fine edge of thought which you bear. It would be so easy, I fear, to miss you. Still, you see, I try. I think if I could once see you & know that you are real, I might fare better.
It is hard to understand how you can live s[o alo]ne . . . Yet it isolates one anywhere to think beyond a certain point or have such luminous flashes as come to you . . .
Write & tell me something in prose or verse, & I will be less fastidious in future & willing to write clumsy things, rather than none.
Ever your friend
TW Higginson
He could not quite stifle a contrary impulse. Amongst his Boston-Brahmin set he called Dickinson ‘my partially