A Soul at the White Heat

Brenda Wineapple's White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson is, if nothing else, worthwhile for one great feat that it accomplishes: to rescue the reputation of Higginson from that of being a mere sidenote in the story of how Emily Dickinson's poetry was first published to the masses. In Wineapple's presentation, Higginson is not so much the bumbling editor who nearly demolishes Dickinson's accomplishments in the process of preparing her poems for posthumous publication, or the product of the then-fading era of Transcendentalism who cannot recognize The New when he really sees it, as he is a man on the cusp of two movements, a man on the verge of the modern but not wholly of it, who has the sensitivity to recognize Dickinson's genius without the capacity to fully understand it. In fact, no one in Dickinson's time understood her poetry; Higginson at least realized that the future would understand her. And Dickinson realized that she had an ally in Higginson, someone who would at the least be receptive to the possibility of her genius at a time when no one else was willing to entertain the thought of it. What Dickinson sought from Higginson, despite all the talk of "precepter" and "pupil" in her letters, was sympathy, it seems.

Higginson is (and was even in his day) less of interest for his own literary efforts than he was for the way in which he captured the ethos of his time. If Emerson was the great armchair Transcendentalist who enjoyed nature best from the comfort of his study and Thoreau the man of deed who translated the attitude of the movement into action through his experimental living in Emerson's back forty, Higginson is somewhere between the two but closer to Thoreau, though more politically involved. In addition to writing essays, novels, a few poems, and yet more essays, Higginson received a saber cut while storming the gates of the federal courthouse in Boston in an attempt to free the captured slave Anthony Burns, he ran guns to free-staters in Kansas, and he--not Robert Gould Shaw--was in fact the first to lead a regiment of black soldiers during the Civil War. Higginson was a Unitarian minister, as well. For years, he was a regular contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, the medium through which he first sparked the interest of Miss Dickinson. Though his writing is not without some moments of eloquence (Wineapple cites some of the finer passages), he is not remembered as a major writer of his era for a reason. Rather, it is fullness of his life story that prompts our attention today--that and his relationship with Dickinson.

Like most biographies of this sort, White Heat sometimes veers a little too close to rank speculation. Did Higginson harbor romantic feelings toward Dickinson? The books suggests that maybe he did ... then pulls back on that assumption, because if he did he certainly did not tell anyone in any direct manner. Wineapple wisely lets most of the speculations on Dickinson's sexual behavior resonate on their own. Was Dickinson in love with her sister-in-law, Sue Dickinson? The two were close in an odd sort of way, but Wineapple stops short of drawing any conclusions. That Dickinson fell in love with Judge Otis Lord is not to be doubted; what is uncertain, however, is the precise nature of their love affair and whether it was ever consummated in full-blown fashion. Lord, the very epitome of crusty, conservative cranks, seems a truly odd choice for the feisty and spirited Dickinson, but this relationship merely furthers the point that Dickinson's private life, including the precise nature of her feelings for Higginson, whom she did meet several times before she died, will forever be fraught with unknowns.

Which bring us to the poetry itself. Any literary biography is primarily of interest in its capacity to bring greater depth and meaning to a writer's work. And in this case, our appreciation of Dickinson's poetry is enhanced by a greater understanding of how her contemporaries received it--and in particular how Higginson perceived it. Wineapple points to Mabel Loomis Todd, Higginson's co-editor in preparing Dickinson's poems for publication, as the one with the heavy hand in the editing process. The examples she presents do indicate that some blunt and savage editing work was done by Todd, though Higginson was indeed guilty of altering the poems to make them more presentable to a mainstream literary audience of the 1890s. Regardless, the poems in their current "restored" form (first published as such in 1955) still have the power to captivate a contemporary audience with their startling sensibility, and they remain the most unique and idiosyncratic body of verse in American literature--a challenge, certainly, for any editor.