Light on a poet's imagination, and an era

BRENDA WINEAPPLE (MARION ETTLINGER)

Brenda Wineapple's "Hawthorne: A Life" (2003) was an incomparable portrait of the man, the writer, and his time. Now, in "White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson" (Knopf, $27.95), Wineapple similarly reanimates the poet and her "Perceptor" in a dual biography of astonishing depth and grace. "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?" Dickinson wrote Higginson in 1862. They met only twice, Higginson later noting that he never encountered anyone "who drained my nerve power so much."

The author of "Genêt: A Biography of Janet Flanner" and "Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein," Wineapple teaches creative writing at Columbia University and the New School. She spoke from her home in New York City.

Q: Was this book prompted by the Hawthorne biography?

A: Yes and no. After working with Hawthorne for so many years, it was difficult to think of another commensurate subject. Of course Dickinson is not only commensurate, she's an original. I guess I'm attracted to writers who are very difficult. While doing the Hawthorne research I also came across Higginson, who stayed with me, partly because he's unlike Hawthorne in every way. He's not a great writer, but he's on the right side of all the important political and social issues of the middle and late 19th century. Here was a man who led the first regiment of black troops, something that Hawthorne would never have been interested in doing.

Q: Why did this pairing attract you?

A: The friendship bears reexamining, I think, since Higginson has been largely dismissed. But if Dickinson entrusted Higginson with so many letters and poems, why would we dismiss him? Why not take her seriously about her choice of friendship, especially since she chose so few?

Q: What did she see in him?

A: One never knows, but he was kind, gracious, and yet a maverick in his own way. He took risks in a different domain than she, and I think she recognized his courage. His compassion also allowed her to trust him. We like to think that he didn't understand her; we think we understand so much more. But even if he didn't understand all of her poems, I think he appreciated how ambivalent she was about publishing and how deeply unusual she was.

Q: Yet he altered her poems for posthumous publication?

A: Higginson has been ridiculed as a second-rater who allowed too much editorial tampering when he first published Dickinson's poems, and though this is partly true, it's also true that he knew his audience wasn't ready for her radical inventions. In the second editions of her poems (the first sold out) he edited less and less. But he wasn't perfect, and he did add silly titles. Still, the poems went right to the heart of their readers, as they do today.

Q: How do you write about one of America's most analyzed poets?

A: Certainly you can't write another biography; they are already there and sufficient. I didn't think I would discover new poems or letters. But this pairing gave me a way to write about Dickinson that seemed fresh, that used her poems, her letters, that allowed her to speak for herself. . . . I also thought that Higginson could carry the plot. He does so much, while she provides so much insight.

Q: Was it important to you to give this friendship a political context?

A: I didn't have to, it's there. Dickinson lived during one of the most traumatic periods in American history. Questions of slavery, race, equality, preoccupied everyone, even someone as hermetic as she. Don't forget, her father was in the Massachusetts Legislature, her brother was active in Amherst politics. They were very much part of the world they inhabited even if she chose not to participate in ways that were conventionally sanctioned. But she read Higginson's essays in The Atlantic, for example, and was intellectually very much part of her time.

Q: Was each of these writers freer in letters than in life?

A: I wonder. To me what's interesting about Dickinson's letters is that they are forms of poetry so, yes, she was perhaps freer but not in our modern confessional way. That's why we fasten on to her, because she speaks so emotionally to us without trumpeting the self in a public, celebratory way. So there's a freedom in privacy which I don't think we understand that well anymore.

Q: You saw her letters to Higginson?

A: Yes. He saved all of them, which was so touching (and he spoke at her funeral). Most of these letters are at the Boston Public Library. Higginson must have included them with his "Galatea" collection of women writers, activists, and intellectuals. It's thrilling to see the color of the paper Dickinson used, the slant of her writing. She becomes so alive. A person holding a pen.

Q: But Higginson's letters to her disappeared?

A: Yes, although Mabel Todd [mistress of Dickinson's brother, Austin] mentions that her sister found Higginson's letters to Dickinson, so that titillates the imagination. One fantasizes about them, but I never go beyond where the material takes me.

Anna Mundow, a correspondent for the Irish Times, can be reached at ama1668@hotmail.com.