Emily Dickinson makes me tongue-tied.
How about you?
I’d wager that there’s a whole bunch of us. Once in a poetry seminar we began the session
by reading aloud “It was not Death, for I stood up” (509). The teacher then asked for our
reactions. There was lots of gentle
murmuring approval, and all stared fixedly at the page, trying to suss out the
poem or avoid making eye contact with the teacher.
Fortunately there are individuals who are not afraid to
raise their hands and say something; and, even better, there are individuals
who say very interesting things and who incite the rest of us to sing, cluck,
and howl in response. Were she in the
classroom that day, I am certain that Brenda Wineapple would have been that
person. Her book White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth
Higginson shepherds the respectful but shy reader a little closer to Emily
Dickinson. We practically get a
face-to-face introduction.
One of the reasons that White
Heat is so successful is that Wineapple is in command of nineteenth century
America – its terrain, its history, and in particular, the disposition of New
Englanders – and has chosen as her subject a curious friendship between a man
and a woman that brought about great art. Beginning in 1862, when Dickinson wrote to Higginson to ask if he would read her poems, the two sustained a
decades-long epistolary relationship punctuated by two visits. Wineapple chronicles the age in which these
two friends lived, the lives of each individual, and how the two affected one
another. Dickinson is clearly the star
of the narrative – there probably would be no narrative if not for her – and
yet Wineapple proves that Higginson was a compelling figure in his own right,
one to whom we owe admiration and empathy.
After all, we are a lot like him. No one was more tongue-tied around
speaking engagements he did not turn down and those essays he wrote almost
compulsively, as if addicted to the immediate gratification of seeing his name
in print.” The prolific Higginson nevertheless lost his swagger before Dickinson,
admitting that “I should like to hear from you very often, but 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.” Higginson
was a performer, a man of action (“of daylight” as Wineapple so aptly advances)
yet when faced with Dickinson
Higginson caught stage fright.
And throughout White
Heat, we see –- or remember –- why. The poems are as astonishing as ever. Wineapple insists in her introduction that the book is not a biography
of either Dickinson or Higginson, and while one might contest that claim (we
certainly get a rich view of each friend’s life), the book honors the poems,
examining them without final judgment, giving the reader greater access. It is, very happily, dogma-free literary
criticism. Wineapple creaks the door
open a few more inches to observe the immortal presence — who knows we’re
there, peeking, curious – -and continues working, warmed a little. What is heat but code for awe? A word Dickinson herself often uses: “I work
to drive the awe away, yet awe impels the work.” As for Higginson, it took many years, but he
eventually found a way to speak about his remarkable friend, writing in the
Atlantic Monthly’s October 1891 issue: “The impression of a wholly new and
original poetic genius was as distinct on my mind at the first reading of these
four poems as it is now, after thirty years of further knowledge; and with it
came the problem never yet solved, what place ought to be assigned in
literature to what is so remarkable, yet so elusive of criticism.”
Brenda Wineapple will speak on Monday October 20th at
at 66 Fifth Avenue
alumni.
— Jill Baron