The poet and the colonel

Unlikely alliance and its echoes in American letters

White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson
By Brenda Wineapple
Knopf, 416 pp., illustrated, $27.95

"Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?" The question was Emily Dickinson's, put in 1862 to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whose essays she had read in The Atlantic. One of them, "A Letter to a Young Contributor," advised would-be writers on how to proceed, and Higginson told the magazine's editor, James T. Fields, that he foresaw that "'Young Contributors' will send me worse things than ever now." Dickinson sent four poems, one of them "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers." Higginson replied with questions about her life and suggestions that gently attempted to guide her poetry into more established patterns. She found his "surgery" "not so painful as I supposed," and thus began a relationship. "But, will you be my Preceptor, Mr. Higginson?" she asked in a later letter. Over the next two decades she would send him about a hundred poems.

After Dickinson's death, in 1886, Higginson, along with Mabel Loomis Todd, edited a volume of her poems, and since numerous editorial "improvements" were made - adding punctuation, changing words - Higginson has been villainized (although David Porter's excellent 1981 "Dickinson: The Modern Idiom" is sympathetic toward him). Brenda Wineapple wants to rescue Higginson from obloquy and to replace the portrait of a "frail recluse of Amherst . . . victimized by a bourgeois literary establishment" Higginson is taken as representing. Since almost all of his letters to Dickinson are unavailable - probably burned by family members - Wineapple must work hard to demonstrate that he was a sympathetic and discerning friend, truly gripped by the originality of a poet. She will do this, she declares, not by writing a biography of Higginson, nor of Dickinson - of whom, she says, "biography gets us nowhere" - but by juxtaposing events, in Dickinson's case mainly verbal ones, from the two lives so as to suggest how they "bear a fraught, collaborative, unbalanced and impossible relation to each other." To write about an impossible relation is, to say the least, a challenge.

Wineapple recognizes the challenge explicitly when, at the beginning of her book's second part ("During"), in which Higginson and Dickinson are most fully in relation (he visited her twice), she announces, "Emily Dickinson stops my narrative." For while Higginson is "narrative," in his varied life as abolitionist, Civil War commander of a regiment of black troops, essayist of nature, and aspiring poet, Dickinson "seems to exist out of time, untouched by it." Wineapple thinks this is true of her poems as well as her life, calling them "lyric outbursts" that "whisper their wisdom from deep, very deep, within ourselves." So rather than write what she calls conventional literary criticism, she is mainly content to quote the poems, making perceptive if sometimes glancing remarks about their originality of diction and movement.

The difficulty of her enterprise is most evident when she suggests that Dickinson's poems, in their deep wisdom from within, also, somehow, may refer to or even incorporate Higginson, the secret sharer. For example, about one of them she sent him, the lovely "As imperceptibly as Grief / The Summer lapsed away," Wineapple muses, "Her description of the summer may be her description of him: the guest that would disappear, if he ever came, and her idea of him never quite fulfilled by his presence." This seems a tenuous claim, which is not made firmer by Wineapple imagining Higginson's reading it - "And he could assume that the diaphanous summer . . . is like Dickinson herself." "Could" indeed, but we are invited here into very intangible matters. The poet Philip Larkin once observed about Dickinson that too often one of her poems "expires in a teased-out and breathless obscurity." Wineapple notes how often her letters "tease" not only Higginson but the reader, and in response to such teasing she sometimes gets into a "Was she saying" mode (was it this, or was it that, or was it both?). This is likely to happen to anyone writing about a figure who "stops" one's narrative.

Wineapple says she is not writing biography, yet this book of over 400 pages, since it also eschews literary criticism, is largely made up of historical narrative in which the two central figures play out their stories. Earlier this year Christopher Benfey, in "A Summer of Hummingbirds," contributed an excellent portrait of Higginson; Wineapple treats at greater length and very sympathetically this fascinating "minor" figure. Indeed she is hospitable to all her characters except William Dean Howells, whom she patronizes as "callow" and calls a "pudgy wunderkind" (Howells and Higginson clashed). But Dickinson, already so fully written about, is harder to see freshly, and Wineapple revisits a lot of familiar territory, including (once more) the adultery between Austin Dickinson and Mabel Todd. At times she seems to be writing fiction, as when, at the moment of Higginson's first visit to Dickinson, we are told, "He now stood at the door of the frowning Homestead, brown brick, with its gracious side garden and its tall, unwelcoming trees." Why did the Homestead frown, and how were the tall trees unwelcoming? At another "novelistic" moment, Higginson in Newport "stretched his long legs along the crooked streets . . . or poked about the old hulks. . . . ambling over the sturdy unpainted wharfs." It's possible that letting one's imagination loose in this way is a consequence of determining to write, at length, about the "impossible" relation between two complex people.

William H. Pritchard is professor of English at Amherst College. His most recent book is "Updike: America's Man of Letters."