White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson Reviewed by Wayne Burke
Wineapple is a wonderful critic; she writes with a poet's sensibility and her pithily precise delineations of character are a triumph of the biographer's art. By shining a light on the life and work of Dickinson's "epistolary inamorata," Wineapple succeeds in broadening our understanding of Dickinson herself—no small achievement considering the number of books already written on the subject. Dickinson chose her man—whom she called "preceptor" or "master"—as carefully as an NFL football team selecting a first round draft choice. Higginson, a writer of some renown in his day but now forgotten, was a sort of minor Thoreau who found tranquility as well as a source of strength in the natural world—as did Dickinson. A radical and a progressive, Higginson was an ardent abolitionist and champion of women's rights and women writers. Though moderate in his personal life, even shy, with a "mix of caution and courage," he was no armchair radical. As a member of the Secret Six—the goup of influential Northerners who financed John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry—Higginson was the only one to openly admit complicity in the raid's aftermath. When ex-slave Anthony Burns was captured and jailed in Boston under the rubric of the Fugitive Slave Act, Higginson led a vigilante group to the jail and attempted by force to free Burns, while other radicals, like Theodore Parker, another of the Secret Six, merely preached resistance. During the Civil War, Higginson enlisted and served as Colonel of the First Carolina Volunteers, the original all-black troops. In 1862, Emily Dickinson approached the Colonel via letter, asking whether he thought her verses, included within, were "alive." As she must have calculated, she received a positive response in return. Higginson, though befuddled by some of the poetry, recognized, as have millions since, the peculiar power of the work—the strange utterance of a sibyl both seemingly naive and undeniably profound. Thus began an epistolary romance never consummated in the flesh, though Higginson visited Dickinson in Amherst on at least two occasions. Higginson has been derided by some literary historians who believe he could have done more to make the world conscious of Emily Dickinson's work. Wineapple exonerates Higginson of the contention, in a sense, making it clear why he did not, could not, do more in the way of publicizing the work. Higginson did not think either the public or the literary world would appreciate Dickinson's work, and that, were the poems published, they would be dismissed out of hand because they were unorthodox in form. Unlike the diamond-studded clarity of Dickinson's language, Higginson's verse was written in flowery and purposefully opaque language, an aesthetic antithetical to Dickinson's purpose and sensibility: refined opposed to savage, rough-seeming, and unregenerate. Higginson believed Dickinson needed to be spoon-fed to the public if her work were to have any chance at a fair hearing. The publication history of Emily Dickinson's work proved Higginson correct. When Emily's sister Vinnie and Vinnie's collaborator, Mabel Loomis Todd, tried to interest publishers in Emily's work (following her 1886 demise), they were turned down flat. The work was too different, too odd-seeming from anything previously known, to be readily understood or sufficiently appreciated. Only Higginson's intervention and his reputation and standing as literary critic and cultural arbiter, moved a publisher to acquiesce in the publication of the poems. The volume, a limited edition—paid for by Vinnie and edited by Higginson and Loomis Todd (whose attempt to make the work more palatable diluted content)—went through eleven printings in a few years, selling nearly 11,000 copies. The rest is history. The feelings expressed and the volume of the correspondence between "student" and "master" attests to the significance of Higginson's friendship with Emily. Higginson was a bridge from isolation for Dickinson—an anchor for her to the world that she was both a part of and apart from.
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Wayne F. Burke is a book reviewer, poet, fiction writer, and essayist. His most recent published book is titled Writers Left of Center, and is available through Northshire Press, Manchester, Vermont.
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