This review appeared as a lead story in the Sunday book review section of the San Diego Union-Tribune on October 7, 2001: THE MYTH OF AMHERST

MY WARS ARE LAID AWAY IN BOOKS
The Life of Emily Dickinson
by Alfred Habegger
Reviewed by Marie Jordan

Neighbors and townsfolk held her as an object of amusement and gossip speculating about the strange woman who lived behind the walls of her father’s big house, the peculiar "little moth" dressed in white who ventured outside only at night when prying eyes couldn’t see her.

The legend of Emily Dickinson, the poet about whom Archibald MacLeish said, "Most of us are half in love with this dead girl" has been one of the great intrigues of American literature. The Myth of Amherst’s withdrawal and isolation has been romanticized to kingdom come, and curiosity about her life has rivaled interest in her poems.

Alfred Habegger, in his new biographic volume, "My Wars Are Laid Away in Books," has tackled the daunting task of distilling the Dickinson mystique. Not intended as a chronological narrative of the poet’s daily life and mind, Habegger presents the controversies and canards of the poet’s life and writing, while undertaking a comprehensive review of known sources of scholarship and searching for new ones. Included are new perspectives and insights of the feminist writers of the 1990’s, some of the most interesting of recent Dickinson scholarship.

The popular depiction of the Myth of Amherst is that of a delicate, shy genius who was content to bake bread, putter in the garden and compose poems and letters alone at night in her room. Contrary to this idea is the picture of a psychotic recluse who needed the protection of her family to keep her nuttiness from public ridicule. Still others argue she was eminently sane and stable, but suffered chronic physical illnesses to test her patience.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, her friend of 24 years by mail, met her in person and reported, "I never was with anyone who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew me. I am glad not to live near her." In the Atlantic Monthly he described his 1870 interview with the thirty-nine year-old Dickinson as a meeting with a child.

The one existing daguerreotype we have of Dickinson doesn’t help quell the mystique, for who of us past tenth grade English hasn’t pondered that well-worn dark image of the "wren of Amherst" as a doleful teenager with large expressionless eyes, hair parted crooked, poor skin, long neck, large nose, and whose full mouth belies a slight sneer? Habegger informs us she was recovering from a threatening pulmonary episode when the picture was taken. She disliked the idea of being photographed ("mold," she called it) and yet everywhere her name appears, that sad early image accompanies. Two other photographs have surfaced, including one as recent as 2000, but are of questionable authenticity.

Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 and died in 1886. She grew up a privileged child in the prominent and prosperous household of Edward Dickinson, a lawyer who served in the general Court of Massachusetts, the State Senate and the United States House of Representatives. She attended South Hadley Female Seminary, now Mount Holyoke College, and took few trips in her life outside Amherst, a few of which were to Boston 1864-65 where she received treatment for an eye ailment.

She was a contemporary of Melville, Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman. An editorial appeared in The Springfield Republican in 1864 admonishing women with aspirations as writers: "If a woman enter the field of authorship," the article read, "let her do it always in the spirit which seeks for other rewards than the world can give; let her feel that the mission of her poem is to elevate and bless humanity, that she always speaks for the right, the true, the good."

It is doubtful Thoreau or Whitman worried about blessing humanity or seeking others’ rewards. In choosing the vocation of poet, Emily Dickinson risked psychic and social penalties that no doubt frightened her and kept her from publishing but seven poems in her lifetime. Would she have been bold enough to withstand criticism and handle public attention?

Habegger writes that Dickinson did not need boldness when her religion mandated submission and her beloved father believed in the inferiority of women’s intellectual powers and had no use for public females. It is commendable that in this controlled environment her poems could not be controlled. Emily maintained her individuality and unique voice and wrote in a style the world had never seen, rejecting traditional nineteenth-century poetic style.

She revealed her aesthetics when she wrote the famous lines: Tell all the Truth but tell it slant -- /Success in Circuit lies.

"My business is circumference," she said, meaning she was less interested in absolute answers to questions than she was in examining and exploring their "circumference."

She wrote of the simplest of experiences: domestic duties, common household items, seasons, light, robins, worms, flowers, bees. The poems overflow with irony, ambiguity and paradox, and are rich with complexities embracing themes of immortality, death, pain, loneliness, loss, faith and romantic love. Her poetry disrupts the expected patterns of sequence, is elliptical and rife with dashes and capitalized noun substantives. Because of the poetry’s disjointed, enigmatic thought and language, theorists cite her as a precursor to modernism, though Habegger is not alone in arguing the claim is a distortion of historical reality.

Many have tried to interpret Dickinson’s poetry in the light of her personal life to little avail. When she wrote, "And then a Plank in Reason, broke," we wonder if she is referring to her rational faculties giving way. In 1862 she fuels the conundrum with, "When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse -- it does not mean -- me -- but a supposed person."

She lived through the civil war and wrote to T. W. Higginson in the volunteer army that war to her felt "an oblique place." Her obsession with death, or immortality, intensified in those four years. During her life she wrote dozens of letters and poems about God and immortality. Habegger may overplay his bitterness toward religion and its influence upon Dickinson. He refers to specific scripture passages as having influence in the lives of the cast of characters, but these intrude as antagonistic conjectures when not founded on fact or testimony.

Among Dickinson’s most beautiful and haunting writing can be found in her copious letters written to family and friends. Of her poems, some 2,000 are extant (although that number is debated). Upon her death, her sister, Vinnie, was stunned to discover the enormous cache of writings in a dresser drawer including the hand-sewn booklets containing about a thousand poems the poet considered finished. Vinnie followed her sister’s orders and burned the letters, but could not destroy her poems.

"My Wars Are Laid Away in Books" has made comprehensive use of previous significant research including that of Richard Sewall, whose famous biography appeared in 1974 and Jay Leyda, whose 1960 biography laid the groundwork with historical documents at the heart of every ideographical work to follow.

Habegger has done a grand job of sifting information of the poet’s excessive neediness, her sexuality, loves, relationship with her mother, and her father’s overbearing lifelong influence. A valuable research contribution details the history of the family into which the poet was born. Catalogued are more than 200 pages of appendices including family charts, corrected dates of letters, legal signatures and notes.

One of the rewards in studying Dickinson’s life is in recognizing how vast and passionate her experiences were in her isolated existence. Without crossing the borders of her garden, she had a mind as expansive as the universe, and produced some of the most brilliant and original poetry written in the English language.

"My Wars Are Laid Away in Books" doesn’t claim to contain the whole story, due in part to the vital missing information from the inscrutable and elusive Dickinson herself. In spite of massive historical data disseminated in over a hundred years, the mysterious Myth of Amherst manages to remain just that.