Laura Waterman
Laura Waterman is an author, environmentalist, and outdoor enthusiast. She is a founding member of the alpine conservation nonprofit The Waterman Fund. Her books include The Green Guide to Low-Impact Hiking and Camping, Wilderness Ethics, Forest and Crag, Yankee Rock & Ice, her memoir, Losing the Garden, and a novel, Starvation Shore. "Books in My Life" will appear in Calling Wild Places Home, a second memoir. She lives in Vermont.
Growing Up with Emily Dickinson
As a child, it never crossed my mind to reason out or to ponder the impact Emily Dickinson would have on my life. But that impact was profound and life-forming, giving me a slantwise view of not just the poet, but of my father too.
What does it mean to live the life of a writer? A friend of mine, a rock climber, who had set the standard for his generation, famously remarked, “Climbing is something I do, not something I talk about.” He meant it was so much a part of himself, his nature, that talking or writing or thinking about it in an analytical way would trivialize what it meant to him. Climbing was too important to his life and wellbeing to break apart, to place on the examining table under the microscope.
Did Emily Dickinson articulate to herself that she was leading a writer’s life? It makes me laugh to think this! Whether she did or not, she undeniably was, even though she was rarely published in her lifetime, and not for lack of trying.
Did my father ask himself this question? I can offer an unequivocal NO. He had probably never heard the phrase. Or if he had, would not have thought much of it. Yet, he lived it every day by rising at 4:00 a.m. and getting to work. Both were geniuses and suffered the demands of what that meant.
Partially it meant a tremendous absorption into the work itself. This could result in a shutting out of everything that competed with the work. There is an astringency here that is frightening. Whether or not you articulate to yourself that you are a writer who is living a writer’s life, and what that means only you can define, doesn’t matter. It’s the act itself that tells the story.
The writer’s work is carried on in isolation no matter how many people fill the house. By its nature, intensely private, impossible to share in the heat of creation.
And the result? That’s for the world to evaluate, and often, the verdict isn’t given out until long after death.
When Thomas Johnson presented the Complete Poems
to the public, he restored not only the capital letters
used so liberally but the unorthodox punctuation for
which she is now well known. . . Since the publication
of Johnson’s text, Dickinson’s “dashes” have been
taken seriously.
—Judith Farr
The Passion of Emily Dickinson
Most of my life people have asked me about Emily Dickinson. They think I have a special knowledge of the great American poet, and, in a sense, they are right. I was ten or eleven when Emily Dickinson slid into my father’s study and took over our family.
People want me to answer their questions. She is a poet who causes people to ask questions, because her life and work raise questions, many of which appear unanswerable. I give their questions my best shot because I’m helpful by nature. But I can hear in the way they politely thank me, and see in their eyes, that I have failed. As I knew I would.
My father was Emily Dickinson’s editor. How this happened a tale simply told. The Literary History of the United States had come out in 1948, and its four authors, my dad being one, made a splash with it. Then, his previous literary work alone, with the parson-poet Edward Taylor and the philosopher-preacher Jonathan Edwards qualified him, in the eyes of Harvard University Press, to be capable of tackling Dickinson. At this point, the early 1950s, her work was little known. Some poems were anthologized, but those in print had been forced into conventional poetic forms by her previous editors. Her main point of punctuation—the dash—was routed out for the traditional comma, or period.
The job of Thomas H. Johnson, my father, was to restore what Emily Dickinson had originally written. He did this. He began the work in 1952, and the editions in three volumes were published in 1955. Next followed a three-volume set of Dickinson’s letters in 1958, which he compiled with our dear friend Theodora Ward as his assistant editor. (My brother Tommy and I adored Theodora. She was humorous and sharp and as “wren-like” as Emily Dickinson described herself. The kind of scholarship Theodora was providing with Emily’s letters was uncommon work for a woman of her generation.) My dad’s Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography followed on the heels of The Poems, also in 1955. At one point, Robert Hillyer wrote in a New York Times book review, “There is no greater achievement of editing and research in the field of American Literature.”
The amount of work undertaken and brought to fruition—in less than a decade—still leaves me breathless, especially when I know that my dad continued to show up in his classroom at the Lawrenceville School where he taught seventeen and eighteen-year-old-boys at 8:00 a.m. He never took on the athletic duties that usually went along with a preparatory school teacher’s life. This is not, however, to say that he didn’t appreciate the natural world. He was expert at discovering perfect picnic spots for our family. I remember an open hillside, where our mother taught us to recognize steeplebush, that looked out on the distant swells of the mountains of southern Vermont. There was a stream where my brother and I could slide down rocks into water only slightly above freezing. On the bank, my father would grill a steak over an open fire. If we had visitors—often his colleagues—the main course was preceded by martinis transported in a thermos to keep them cold.
He was an early riser: 4:00 a.m. He took no vacations, though we were spending summers in the mountains as a family, having by that time changed our destination to southern New Hampshire, under the shadow of Mount Monadnock. His discipline could only be described as steely. He seemed not to require down time, in the ordinary sense, though we in the family were aware he did require, at certain times of day, a liberal amount of alcohol. Yet, why not?
His relationship with the poet must have been intense beyond words. I suppose it’s no wonder that people assume I have a special pipeline to Dickinson. On one level I did—and do—but it is not that of the scholar or student; I understand little of what her poetry conveys. Yet, through my father, through her residence in his study—and, basically, she never left—I feel and understand much that is not easily put into words. My understanding of what Emily was like, of what she was trying to do as a poet, is largely intuited from an understanding of my father. Those few who knew my father well saw that Emily resonated with his own nature; during those early morning hours in communion with her words, he made her a part of his life. She seeped into his. I have heard them called soulmates.
My father had this to say about the weight and cost of Emily Dickinson’s genius:
All who have had access to material touching upon Emily Dickinson’s life and writing agree—I think without exception—that she knew during her twenties that she was uncommonly gifted; that by the time she was thirty-one, when she sought advice from Thomas Wentworth Higginson in the now famous letters written in April 1862, she did indeed crave assurance regarding a talent which at times literally overwhelmed her. “Alone I cannot be,” she wrote at this time in a remarkable poem:
Alone I cannot be—
For Hosts—do visit me—
Recordless Company—
Who baffle Key—
How was this gift to be shared? She must have been somewhat prepared to accept Higginson’s hesitation to advise publication, for it matched the opinion of other writers and critics who she knew and respected, gentlemen who knew something of her writing, notably Samuel Bowles and Josiah Gilbert Holland. She should delay submitting any letters to the world, they all told her in effect, until she had learned “control.” Since she could no more “control” the quality of the hosts who visited her than she could alter her wren-like size, she must therefore, in her own lifetime at any rate, sublimate her desire for public recognition, however compelling the wish for it may have been.
My father delivered these words in an address read before the English Institute on September 7, 1951, when he had barely begun. What had to happen first was for all the scraps and bits of paper or letters to which Emily Dickinson had committed her poems to be rounded up. By the time we returned from a year in Copenhagen, where my father had been invited to set up a program in American Studies at the university, Harvard University Press had collected most of what turned out to be nearly eighteen hundred poems. The bulk came as a gift of Gilbert H. Montague, a Harvard alum, class of 1901, who turned over his collection to his alma mater in 1950. This got the ball rolling in terms of the desires of scholars, publishers, and librarians to produce a variorum edition, meaning, “Including variant readings critically compared with all known manuscripts,” as stated on the title page.
Before we left for Copenhagen, Mr. Montague had issued an invitation to my parents to be his guests at his home in New York City. (I pictured a Fifth Avenue mansion.) They took the train from Princeton, knowing that this overnight visit was a visit of inspection. Was a prep school teacher capable of such a plum assignment? They were amused by this, and appropriately nervous, or so it felt to me, by the tone of their banter—casual, but high pitched—when they left the house for the train. But it must have gone well. They were in excellent spirits upon the return, my mother launching into a description of an elaborate dinner, just the three of them, at a long dining table illuminated by candles highlighting the heavy family silver. Maids to serve and a butler to pour the wine that changed with every course. The downstairs bathroom, my mother reported, was painted black in memory of Mr. Montague’s wife who had died not long before. This detail stuck to the story, and to our minds, something I pondered over that was sad—the death of his wife!—yet in the way of sad things to which we have no connection, especially as children, more than slightly risible.
Others of Emily’s poems had ended up at various city libraries (New York Public, Boston Public) and institutions (the Jones Library in Amherst, as well as Amherst College’s Converse Memorial, Yale’s library, the Pierpont Morgan in New York, and more). No fewer than forty individuals possessed at least one Dickinson letter or poem. Seeing publication was barred to her, this was her way of sharing her output with, if not the world, at least with friends.
So, when we returned in 1952 from our magical year among the Danes Harvard University Press sent my father what were called photostats—an early form of photocopying—that showed each poem in white letters against a black background. For the next several years when I walked into my father’s study—if the door were open, I knew I would be welcome—that’s what I saw thumbtacked into the pine paneling of his study wall. He was ascribing a date to her poems—she had dated none of them—by changes in her handwriting.
How did he do this? By close and exacting scholarship that he explains in the paper he read before the English Institute, later published as “Establishing a Text: The Emily Dickinson Papers,” in Studies in Bibliography, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, Volume Five, 1952-1953. He has this to say about it:
The progressive unlinking of letters, in this case over an eighteen-year period, is enormously useful, and made possible by a physiological change that perhaps is comparatively rare. In her case I believe it theoretically possible, if enough manuscript existed, and if each manuscript used enough letters in sufficient combination, to track down dates of composition within the limits of a given week. But the quantity of manuscripts is wanting, and even if they existed it would take years to compute and equate the frequencies without the aid of an electric eye and a robot tabulator.
Yes, my father’s painstaking work predated computers!
“He’s in there with Emily,” my mother would pronounce, waving her hand toward the study door when a visitor came, wanting to talk with my father. She also called Emily “the other woman” in her husband’s life. Of course, this made everyone laugh. She said it to amuse, to joke, but everyone knew there was more than a little truth in it. How could it have been otherwise? My father, true to his nature, remained silent. He had long ago mastered the poker face—in fact was very good at the game. My dad played his cards right up against to his chest. (Poker, and bridge too, that they played in the evening with friends.) No one knew what was going on behind those watery blue eyes.
No scholar could cross swords with a poetic power of her caliber without some bloodshed. It was to be expected if you’re fooling around with an off-the-scale genius, who happened to be a woman whose interior life was a mystery—my father’s interior life was a mystery as well—that you end up paying a price. Singed fingers from incandescent verse was not the least of it.
When my parents’ friends—fellow teachers (called masters at Lawrencevile) and their wives—who were my friends, too, came to our living room for cocktails, I might hear conversation like this: “How does she compare to Whitman, Tom? Is she pushing him off his podium?” My brother and I hung around, and I was fascinated by this adult conversation, shrill with women’s voices, and deep, solid, and virile with men’s, men who coached sports along with their teaching duties. The ashtrays filled and my father poured the drinks amid laughter on these evenings, and everyone heard from my father just what kind of new poetic genius was emerging from this wispy white script tacked to the pine paneling in his study. I found all this exciting. I felt a compelling energy, as when I rode my bike farther than I ever had before and started to fear getting lost and missing dinner. Would anyone come out looking for me? How would they know, even, where to look?
As for answering that question about Whitman, the current top American favorite, my father wouldn’t say much except, in effect, stay tuned, adding, “her originality doomed her to obscurity,” or some such opaquely perceptive comment. My father was famous for those, and to my mind, they made him sound like Emily. Both went for short, pithy, elliptical sentences or phrases that I either “got” instantly or broke my head against trying to make sense of.
My father would show me a poem from time to time. The one that made a permanent impression, “A narrow fellow in the grass,” I could appreciate. The way it ended: “zero at the Bone,” these words certainly described my own snake encounters.
They had in common that both were born in the Connecticut River Valley, Emily in the college town of Amherst, my father a few hundred miles up the river in Bradford, Vermont. He grew up on a prosperous farm until, as he was just starting high school, his family moved to the state capital when his father became the Adjutant General of the State. Emily and Tom were linked as well through the staunch connection of eighteenth and nineteenth-century philosophical thought, with its religious underpinnings through the Puritan divines that had guided my father’s earlier work. He and Perry Miller of Harvard had written a book called The Puritans. And there was the manuscript of Edward Taylor’s poetry that my father had found, most unexpectedly, in the dusty basement stacks of the library at Yale. He was well prepared to contend with Emily’s poetic output.
It seemed important to scour the hedgerows. That is, the Harvard University Press and my father wanted to make sure they had shown due diligence in searching out as many poems as could be found before launching into print. Since he had begun the work, bits and pieces from letters long saved in airless attics, damp basements, and the dusty backs of closet shelves had already turned up. My father was convinced there were more out there.
Ouija boards—a nineteenth century occult game of making contact with the spirit world—had made an appearance in the homes of the Lawrenceville faculty. No one took seriously the idea that fingers lightly resting on a wand could be steered by a question to pick out the revealing letters on the board, but my mother, always alert to the ridiculous, had the idea. Let’s contact Emily and see if she’ll be forthcoming with the mailing addresses of friends to whom she had sent her poems!
It so happened that a young poet named James Merrill, a Lawrenceville School graduate, was back for alumni weekend. He had two books out, at that point, of which First Poems, the latest, had been published in 1951. He, also, apparently, had a great affinity for Ouija boards. Jim came up to the house, and we all gathered around the board spread on the table in our living room. We were all—children and adults—in some kind of crazy high glee—Ouija boards did this to people. Yes, this is silly, we don’t really believe, but let’s see what happens! As the wand skittered from letter to letter under Jim’s deft fingers, my mother transcribing as the words formed—well, by gosh, we did believe.
None of the names were recognizable, but my father wrote the letters anyway. The envelopes appeared in our post office box a week or so later marked “return to sender,” news that was received, even by my brother and me, with merely a shrug.
In those early morning hours—daily, weekly, over the months and years—my father, I think, came to see the poet as a version of himself. Her love of words, her entirely original use of language, met with his own. In his Interpretive Biography my father wrote, “She seems generally to have conversed, as she wrote, in epigrams . . . in twists of phrase which haunt the memory and could often startle.” This was true of my father as well. Bruce McClellan, Lawrenceville’s headmaster, who had known my father long and well, described this in an unpublished article titled, “Tom Johnson: The Emily Dickinson Scholar”: “So, too, with Tom. His colleagues as well as students were often stopped cold in their tracks by something he said, and often would discover later, sometimes much later, that what he had said conveyed an important insight and was memorable.” I was aware of this. Sometimes what my dad said seemed to make no sense. And indeed it didn’t if it was following the cocktail hour. He was at his best at our family Sunday dinners, a meal I always looked forward to. Then I often reached the meaning behind the words in the epigrams he offered.
While this ability was what made him such a brilliant teacher, it also made him the right person to take on Dickinson. Similar minds. Both geniuses. Bruce McClellan, in that same article, called my father, “the only genius I have ever known,” and went on to say he was “exactly the right person to resonate with the genius of Emily Dickinson.”
I could add another shared characteristic—their reclusiveness. Both were obsessively shy. In my father, as in Emily, these traits became more obvious, more enigmatic, with age. When Julie Harris was portraying Emily in The Belle of Amherst, she made a point of inviting my parents to the production in New York around 1976. He turned down her cordial invitation. My mother was annoyed with him about that. She accepted with pleasure, and went to see it with the McClellans. Ms. Harris invited them to come backstage after the show and asked my mother to take her greeting home to her husband.
When the play was scheduled for performance at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, Ms. Harris tried again. She telephoned. She invited my parents, and then expressed the hope that she could come to our house and meet my dad. None of this happened. By now, my mother was thoroughly disgusted with my father. I thought he was carrying his repeated refusals pretty far myself. It would have been a lovely thing for them to talk about Emily together. But, no, I concluded, after looking at it from his point of view. Emily was too real to him. As great an actress as Julie Harris was, he did not want to confuse her interpretation of Emily Dickinson with the poet who maintained a life tenancy in his study. She was a part of him, more integral, I’m quite sure, than his own family. He had no interest in hearing (in fact was willing to appear rude to avoid hearing) Julie Harris’s view of the poet. Sharing his own was unthinkable too. It would have been like baring his own soul! Emily resonated completely with his own nature; too much was at risk.
Years later, long after my father was dead, my mother was living in a retirement home, and when someone asked her if she liked Dickinson’s poetry, I would watch as she gave a small, polite smile that did not encourage conversation. As she aged, and the censor dropped, she left out the smile and her “Not at all” was forceful, causing the questioner to take a step back. In this way she opened up for me just how challenging it was for her to live with her husband, who had turned his life and mind over to Emily Dickinson. She was proud of him, of course, but my mother would never have talked about what could have appeared to others as a triangular love affair, bounded by possible jealousy on her part with a hint of infidelity on his with this dead poet. She was true to her class and upbringing at a time when society compelled educated, intelligent, ambitious women to sublimate all that, remain in the home and raise the family. My mother, after her brood was mostly grown, worked her way out of this by dealing in real estate in Princeton, New Jersey for twenty years.
I would bet my life that she never articulated her deepest thoughts to anyone, whatever they were, about Tom and Emily. That would have been disloyal. It would have undercut her husband. It would have turned quickly into gossip. She was too smart to let this happen.
As for me, though I remain unable to answer the questions put to me about Emily Dickinson’s life and poetry, I recognize how formative for me she has been. She remains elusive, yet I feel a familiarity with her because of my father’s work, that intense period in our household when he brought her to life through her handwriting tacked to the pine paneling of his study. This familiarity works the other way: it leads me to a deeper understanding of my silent father.
I have many favorite Dickinson poems that I have read over and over in the course of my life, hoping, each time I pull out the book, that enlightenment will spring forth. But revelation is not essential. Sometimes there can come a glimmer, a spark—I’m so close!—then that narrow fellow in the grass slithers off into the underbrush. I don’t mind. I am sustained by a deepening of the glimmer. So I slide the book into its place on the shelf that holds my father’s work, waiting for the next time.