In Rough Country (2 page)

In this, Poe resembles his younger contemporary Emily Dickinson, whose poetry is similarly timeless and “ahistoric,” though Poe was far from being otherworldly or reclusive like Dickinson. Of the thousands—millions?—of speculative critical remarks inspired by Edgar Allan Poe perhaps the most insightful is that of a fellow “outlaw” writer of the twentieth century, D. H. Lawrence:

Is this true? Is art a kind of catharsis, with the power to transform culture? We no longer believe this, if we ever did, for art has come to seem to us a phenomenon of the solitary individual, and not the collective, for whom politics has become all-engulfing as a state religion. But it is surely true, Edgar Allan Poe had a “pretty bitter doom”—from which, in his bravely imagined art, he seems never to have wavered.

A
mysterious “confluence of hummingbirds” is the starting point for Christopher Benfey's engagingly impressionistic work of literary and cultural criticism, focusing on the summer of 1882 when Americans as gifted and temperamentally disparate as Emily Dickinson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher, and Mabel Todd and Martin Johnon Heade seem to have become “fanatical” about hummingbirds:

In addition to what Benfey calls his “motley assemblage” of
dramatis personae
he has also included Mark Twain, Henry James, John Greenleaf Whittier, the capitalist investor Henry Morrison Flagler and the suffragette activist Victoria Wood-hull, and the twentieth century artist Joseph Cornell; there is even room in this leisurely constructed narrative for an exploration and exegesis of the Gilded Age phenomenon of the lavish “hotel-world” of South Florida. As if to suggest an aestheticism seemingly at odds with our more customary sense of American pragmatism and Puritanism, Benfey begins his book with a curious epigraph from John Ruskin—

—and he includes in his final chapter a passage of adulatory prose from Henry James describing the gigantic Hotel Ponce de Leon in St. Augustine, in 1905, by all reports a bizarre Disneyland of conspicuous consumption:

All of which is to argue, the reader surmises, that the post–Civil War/pre–World War I America of which Benfey writes bears a significant relationship to
fin de siècle
English culture, and that the individuals whom Benfrey discusses—Emily Dickinson, for one, of whom it's said by her sister-in-law neighbor Susan Dickinson that the reclusive Amherst poetess had not “any idea of morality”—are aesthetic epicureans of a sort, finding profound meaning in “routes of evanescence” unexpectedly akin to the Pateresque ideal of burning with a hard gem-like flame.

Christopher Benfey, poet, critic, and professor of literature at Mount Holyoke, whose previous critical works include
Emily Dickinson and the Problem of Others
(1984),
Emily Dickinson: Lives of a Poet
(1986),
The Double Life of Stephen Crane
(1994),
The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan
(2004), and most recently
American Audacity: Literary Essays North and South
(2007), has constructed an intricately woven bird's nest of a book arguing that the “seismic upheaval” of the Civil War and its protracted aftermath precipitated a psychic crisis in the national consciousness as Americans tried to retain traditional beliefs, values, and conventions in the face of ever-shifting
new social, political, and racial realities. Both during and after the war, Benfey speculates, Americans “gradually left behind a static view of existence, a trust in fixed arrangements and hierarchies”:

And the hummingbird as a creature of mysterious otherworldly beauty is most brilliantly evoked by the watercolors of Martin Johnson Heade—see Heade's masterpiece “Cattleya Orchid and Three Brazilian Hummingbirds,” 1871, which Benfey discusses in detail—and the poetry of Emily Dickinson—see the riddlesome poem indexed as #1463, which Benfey calls the poet's “signature poem” since Dickinson frequently sent it to correspondents and sometimes signed it “Humming-Bird”—“as though she herself were its evanescent subject.”

A Summer of Hummingbirds
is richly populated by eccentric personalities in addition to Dickinson and Higginson: the itinerant and obsessive Martin Heade, one of the greatest of nineteenth-century nature painters, who yearned to evoke a kind of New World Eden in his highly stylized, symbolic paintings; the beautiful and uninhibited Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd, whom Heade loved at a distance, and who conducted a scandalous love affair virtually in public, in staid Amherst, Massachusetts, with the older brother of Emily Dickinson; the flamboyant hedonist preacher Henry Ward Beecher of whom Benfey says admiringly that he was “drawn to things that flickered and flashed…He liked to tell people that he was intoxicated by art” and Beecher's Christian-messianic sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, famous as the author of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
but the author as well of a curious book-length polemic titled
Lady Byron Vindicated
(1869). More a skeptical observer than a participant of the genteel cultural scene, Mark Twain emerges intermittently in Benfey's narrative as a kind of measuring-rod for the author: the most famous writer of his time and yet harshly judged by such envious New Englanders as Higginson, who claimed to have found Twain “something of a buffoon,” and an anonymous critic for a local Amherst newspaper who, after Twain lectured in Amherst to a large audience, reported: “As a lecturer we are of the opinion that he is a first-class failure.”

Though
A Summer of Hummingbirds
thrums with the interlocking tales of these idiosyncratic individuals, with inspired vignettes and gossipy asides, and the author's prevailing Olympian perspective, in a manner to suggest Louis Menand's
The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
(2002), at the core of the story Benfey finds so intriguing is an impassioned portrait of Emily Dickinson—what might be called Dickinson's most inward and erotic self, of which Benfey has written in such earlier essays as “The Mystery of Emily Dickinson” (in
American Audacity
), and here attaches to the “route of evanescence” that finds its ideal expression in the hummingbird. It isn't just that Dickinson is the most original and provocative of the individuals in Benfey's book but she remains the most enigmatic, a perennial goad to critical speculation: despite the enormous attention she has received, Dickinson “remains almost as mysterious as Shakespeare…She is part of our language without being part of our history” (
Emily Dickinson: Lives of a Poet
). As Brenda Wineapple concedes with disarming candor at the midway point in her wonderfully evocative double portrait of Dickinson and Dickinson's friend/editor/“Master” Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
White Heat
:

As Benfey's subtitle suggests, for all its shimmering web of interlocking ideas, the “scandal” of Eros is the driving force here, culminating in two seemingly ecstatic adulterous relationships—the affair of the most famous Protestant preacher of his era, Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, and one of his female admirers, Mrs. Elizabeth Tilton—“The biggest sex scandal in the history of American religion,” as Benfey breathlessly notes—which resulted in a highly publicized adultery trial in 1874; and the remarkably protracted affair of Emily Dickinson's brother Austin and the much younger Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd, the wife of an Amherst College astronomy professor. While Emily Dickinson's connection with the dashing Reverend Beecher was slight, Dickinson was well aware of her brother's longtime affair with Mrs. Todd and seems to have been, with her sister Vinnie, in some way a confidante of the illicit lovers who used the Homestead, the Dickinson family house, for their trysts. And there were Emily Dickinson's shadow-lovers, among them the “Master” to whom Dickinson alludes tantalizingly in numerous poems, and the Massachusetts Supreme Court justice Otis Lord, Dickinson's elder by eighteen years and a “crusty conservative” who emerges in Dickinson's life after the death of Dickinson's father, as a source of solace and affection, even as possible fiancé.
¹
Unhappily for Dickinson, the one man who seems to have unequivocally loved her and may have wished to marry her died of a stroke in 1884, before anything like a formal engagement was announced. Broken in spirit by this loss, as by numerous others including the terrible typhoid death of a beloved little
nephew, Dickinson herself grew ill and died in 1886, at the age of fifty-five.

Benfey locates in the poetry of Dickinson's younger years an obsession with Lord Byron—Byron's famous poem “The Prisoner of Chillon” becomes “the Rosetta stone of (Dickinson's) tortured destiny”—and a frankly sexual undertone to Dickinson's elliptically imagistic poetry of the 1860s:

The passive female being is overcome—seemingly ravished—by the mysterious Byronic “Master” who has never been definitely named by countless biographers and commentators but whose presence in Dickinson's most ardent poetry is unmistakable:

Benfey suggests that Dickinson's “Master” poems are addressed to three prominent men in the poet's life, with whom she corresponded in terse, playful, enigmatic letters very like her verse—the “handsome and worldly editor of the
Springfield Daily Republican
” Samuel Bowles; the “brooding…Byronic” Protestant preacher Reverend Charles Wadsworth of whom it was thrillingly said that his “dark eyes, hair and complexion (had) a decidedly Jewish cast” and Colonel Higginson, the prominent Boston literary man to whom Dickinson sent her verse in the pose of a school-girl eagerly seeking advice from a distinguished elder, though Dickinson was thirty at the time and had already written—and published, in Samuel Bowles's newspaper—a poem as assured as the one beginning “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers…” (21, c. 1862) (The romantic relationship with elderly Judge Lord came later in Dickinson's life.) Here is Dickinson's now-famous letter of appeal, dated April 15, 1862:

We can surmise that Higginson replied with encouragement and a predictable sort of advice, to which Dickinson responded with enigmatic dignity:

As Benfey notes, Dickinson didn't change a thing in her poems, and assures Higginson that she has no wish to be published: “I smile when you suggest that I delay ‘to publish'—that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin.”

Both Benfey and Wineapple are very good at presenting the ways in which Dickinson and Higginson “invented themselves and each other” in their epistolary friendship; in both their books, though at greater length in Wineapple's, Colonel Higginson unexpectedly emerges not as the contemptibly
pompous figure who dared to “correct” the most original poet of the nineteenth century as if he were indeed her schoolmaster, which is our usual sense of Higginson, but as a person of considerable courage, imagination, generosity, and achievement. Unlike his distinguished New England literary mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, Higginson managed to combine the intellectual life with the life of a vigorous activist: as a young man he was a Protestant minister who lost his church as a consequence of fervent Abolitionist beliefs; a radical in New England reformist circles, he was a staunch supporter of John Brown; in the Civil War he was a colonel who led a contingent of nine hundred ex-slaves in the occupation of the city of Jacksonville, Florida. (Higginson later wrote movingly of this experience in
Army Life in a Black Regiment
, 1869: “a minor masterpiece” in Brenda Wineapple's estimation.)