The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I
ANCESTRY
There was nothing in the parentage or direct heredity of Emily Dickinson to account for her genius. There was equally nothing to impede its course or contradict its authority. It claimed her without those dissenting elements of being which came to her from her ideally mated but completely opposite father and mother. Her parents did not interfere with her actual life and behavior, both because they never realized her preoccupation quite fully, and because they had no will to destroy the individuality of any one of their three children.
Nothing could have been more alien to any of the Dickinsons than a desire to be peculiar—"queer" they would have called it—or to do what the later generation calls pose. Eccentricity consciously indulged in would have merely been reprimanded as bad manners. Their dignity was of the stiff, reserved type resenting the least encroachment on its individuality in character and privacy in habit—which they insured by conforming handsomely to the sense of their community, the laws of their state and country, and the will of God as expounded from pulpits of the white meeting-house in Hadley and later in Amherst, where the colonial train of Emily Dickinson's ancestors undeviatingly worshipped. There was no allowance made in her family for oddity—temperament had not been discovered yet. There was no exception to what was expected of each of the children alike, her sister Lavinia, her brother Austin, and herself. What Emily did succeed in evading and eluding and imagining and believing, and setting down for those who came after her to profit by, was her own performance, dictated by her own need for the solitude in which to write, and the time necessary for thought. She was spared none of her share in the household duties, nor did she wish to be.
Before one thinks of her as a poet and philosopher or mystic, one must in honesty remember her as an adoring and devoted daughter, a sister loyal to blows, a real nun of the home, without affectation or ritual beyond that of her gentle daily task, and all that she could devise of loving addition to the simple sum. To one who loved her it is unthinkable that she could ever be supposed to have consciously secreted herself, or self-consciously indulged in whim or extravaganza in living, which her fine breeding would have been the first to discard as vulgar and unworthy. It was her absorption in her own world that made her unaware often of the more visible world of those who never see beyond it. It was not that she was introspective, egoistic, and selfish—rather that she dwelt so far out in the changing beauty of Nature, in the loves and joys and sorrows of the dear ones she held closest, in the simple drama of the neighborhood, and most of all the stupendous and sometimes revealing wonder of life and death and the Almighty God thundered at her from the high pulpit on Sundays—and known so differently in her own soul the other days of the week—that she never thought of Emily Dickinson at all; never supposed any one watched her way of living or worshipping or acting. She never had time in all the vivid, thrilling, incessant programme of night and day, summer and winter, bird and flower, the terror lest evil overtake her loved ones, the glory in their least success—never stopped in her flying wild hours of inward rapture over a beauty perceived or a winged word caught and spun into the fabric of her thought—to wonder or to care if no one knew she was, or how she proceeded in the behavior of her own small tremendous affair of life.
Her heredity is distinctly traced for nine generations in America. Her first local ancestor settled in old Hadley and a later generation was one of the founders of the church and town of Amherst. There were Dickinsons mentioned in Hadley among the first letters of the original Indian grants in 1659. And when in 1714 the order was given for five men to superintend the erection of a new meeting-house in the middle of two streets, one of them was a Dickinson. There was also an ancestor in the famous "Shays's Rebellion" in 1786. Before that, in England, the stock from which she came was clear for thirteen generations more. Further than that her father's curiosity or pride had never gone in research.
Her own grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, was the first of her direct line in Amherst. His connection with the establishment of Amherst Academy, from which the College later sprang, is familiar local history. In his fervor for "the in-bringing of the Kingdom" he foresaw the universal education of ministers, and calculated the millennium in the near future of "about seven years." He was educated at Dartmouth College, a man of sincere piety, and a generosity that was his financial ruin. In a letter from his sister, Emily's Aunt Lucretia, to his son Edward at Yale, the following passage occurs. It is dated 1821:
Father left in the yellow gig for the Bay Road this morning. He has gone to Boston by coach to see about getting a charter for something they propose to call Amherst College. He looked so fine in his white beaver and new great coat.
Until this ardent enthusiast, almost bigot, lost all the money he had not previously given away in his fanaticism for education and religion, the family throve and were favorably known for this world's prosperity as well as in matters of piety and attainment.
His oldest son Edward, who was the father of Emily, was brought up strictly and with a regard for the needs of the missionaries first. He was sent to Yale College, driven there, too, in the family chaise upon at least one trip mentioned in the family correspondence. The family letters during that period are happily at hand and throw a profound and touching atmosphere about these earlier days of education, when it was a sacred boon possible to the few through fierce sacrifice, often, on the part of those who gave it, and not to be entered into with less than a consecrated spirit of trust for those to whom it was to be returned, transformed into a wisdom that was to help save the world.
In one letter from Samuel, who was a deacon for forty years in the First Church and whose zeal was sleepless, to Edward, his son, this passage strikes its own contrast to modern fathers and sons.
December 17, 1819, he writes:
EDWARD DICKINSON
He concludes:
Remember the importance of the present time and never forget our hereafter.
Again, in 1819, he writes enclosing five dollars with which to discharge all obligations Edward may have entered into. He adds:
Consider the importance of every action as going to form character. Always be manly but do not expend more than you can pay, remembering that nothing is spent without sufficient cause. There are necessary uses for all our money.
Again, later on:
I hear the religious attention continues at New Haven. If, Edward, I could learn that you were among the number who had embraced the Saviour how joyful the news! Pray for a new heart. Never forget your morning and evening supplication for such mercies as you need, and most of all for your great salvation. You know we place much confidence in your upright and honourable deportment and your strict attention to every religious and moral duty.
Edward Dickinson grew up to be a rather haughty, austere man, shy and gentle, laconic and strict. He dressed in broadcloth at all times, and wore a black beaver hat glossy beyond compare with that of any young beau, and carried a handsome cane to and from his law office on the Main Street of his village. About his neck was wound a black satin stock pinned with a jet and diamond pin, with a lock of his wife's hair at the back. His hair was a dark auburn, and his eyes those that Emily repeated in time. He was on the Governor's staff as a young man and his honorable discharge with flattering mention of his services is still preserved.
He followed the family profession and went into the law, practising in Amherst, pleading at the Hampshire County Bar, settling the disputes of his friends and neighbors, and drawing the deeds that no modern court has ever been able to set aside or adjudge not binding. He was a pillar in the First Church, although he joined it later in life than was customary, and served its interests with utter fidelity. A gentleman of the old school he was, with a distinction that was elegance, and many a laborer, among the aged recalling him in their own boyhood, spoke with respect amounting to reverence of "The Old Squire." "What he said he meant," was deeply burned into his legend.
Only one of his daughter Emily's sparks of reckless fire flew from his sedate characteristics—his nearest approach to self-indulgence was his sly liking for a horse handsome and fleet. "I always intend to have the best horse in town," he said more than once, as he set off for the court in the shire town across the river. And his lifelong next neighbor, Deacon Luke Sweetser, made this no easy ambition. There was just a hint of the daughter's later flashes in her father's concession to this love of speed and shining form.
He admitted nothing in Emily as different from his other children, or from any daughter. He made no allowances for her—ever; and yet their unspoken intimacy went so deep it never came to the surface in words, but was never absent, diminished, or lost, or ceased to be even after his death had blasted her trust in life forever. "If Father is asleep on the lounge the house is full," she often exclaimed. It expressed their understanding.
That the Squire was a proud man no one doubted, but that his name was the first on any subscription to relieve want or disaster, and that his eyes were capable of suffusing at the pain of an animal or trouble of the human heart, related him to Emily's fire and dew quality.
His wife, Emily's mother, was an exquisite little lady of the old school long passed into mythology. She was the daughter of Alfred Norcross, of Monson. The family were well-to-do and she was educated and finished off at a school for young ladies at New Haven, very much in repute in her day. Upon her marriage, no railroad then reaching Amherst, her dower was brought by several yoke of brindle oxen. Her mahogany was claw-footed and pine-apple cut; her silver had the basket of flowers on the handles; her bandboxes are still in the family possession—monstrous gay affairs, with scenes of Mount Vernon on one side and Paris on the other.
Emily Norcross Dickinson feared and honored her husband after the manner of the Old Testament. She trembled and flushed, obeyed and was silent before him. He was to her Jehovah, and she was to him the sole being to whom he entrusted the secrets of his inmost heart. His letters to her were discreet, respectful, "frosty but kindly"—ending always with the assurance of his remaining her "most ob't servant, Edward Dickinson."
On one occasion he wrote that he should see her at Northampton, being with the Governor as aide-de-camp, "which will," he hopes, "not be less agreeable to her than to him." A courtly pair, with not one glimmer of their transgressing Emily's future escape from all their wellknown landmarks of thought and divination.
The society of their village was also stately, and they later played their part therein, being often sought, or, as the time-worn little notes still show, "Solicited, to an evening party" by this or that prominent household, as "Self and Lady," a form shared by even as pompous a host as Judge Delano, of Northampton. In 1821 Lucretia also stated, "There have been some splendid parties this Winter in town—one at the Strong's to which there were more than fifty invited." The lace shawls and India shawls, the gold-banded china and English blue, are mute witness to the social importance and obligation of the family, who did their part, whether any enjoyment was wrested from their conscientious performance or not, in keeping up the county standards of entertainment and hospitality.
It is impossible to derive Emily from either her stately father or her fluttering little mother, always timorous, always anxious. Treasured among the daughter's most cherished papers, was found the little yellow certificate of her mother's exemplary conduct as a girl at school:
Miss Emily Norcross, for punctual attendance, close application, good acquirements, and discreet behavior merits the approbation of her preceptress.
EMILY NORCROSS DICKINSON
And out of this human stock and precision of living came the little girl whose soul flew up and away like the smoke from the high chimneys of her home under the tall pines.