White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (review)

Wineapple brings to the writing of this book an extensive acquaintance with the nineteenth-century American scene, a fair command of the documents and secondary literature on Dickinson, a gift for succinct statement, a heightened sense of style, color, and drama, and great skill as a writer of biography. White Heat is a double biography that animates its subjects by tracing the developing relationship between them: an approach to life-writing that has an immediate and widespread appeal. The question the book raises is whether a relationship that was so fraught, peculiar, and distant, and so much more vital for Dickinson than Higginson (whose letters to her were later burned), can afford a sturdy enough platform to sustain a rehearsal of their lives—of Jumbo Emily’s in particular.

Among the things one enjoys in White Heat is the vivid presentation of the secondary characters. “Like all Dickinsons,” we read, Lavinia “did not publicize regret. Instead she grew tarter, meaner, slyer” (48). Edward is said to be “parched” (52), and there are shrewd sketches of the family in the Evergreens and of many others, especially Mabel Loomis Todd. Wineapple has a harder time pinning Higginson down, but then so did the man himself, easily distracted as he was by his chronic openness and wide range of talents, interests, and passions.

With Dickinson herself, there are many acute perceptions, especially of her strength as an independent thinker and creator. “Her temperament nuancing, interrogative, unshuttered, she strove for the spiritual certitudes that her agile mind discounted” (50). There is a sound emphasis on her refusal to convert during the 1850 revival in Amherst, and, of equal importance, on a crucial and often misdated and ignored Civil War letter to Frances and Louisa Norcross (L298, “Every day life feels mightier, and what we have the power to be, more stupendous”). For any account of Dickinson that focuses on her relationship with a brave freedom fighter like Higginson, this must be a central document. Wineapple is the first, I believe, to discern the congruity between “Let Us play Yesterday - “ (Fr754), Dickinson’s circa 1863 expression of relief at breaking out of her eggshell, and Higginson’s declaration a couple of years later that “You can make a soldier out of a slave . . . but you can no more make a slave out of a soldier than you can replace a bird in the egg” (131).

There is much to enjoy and learn from in this book, and yet, as the rest of this review will maintain, it leaves one hungry and dissatisfied. Too often old errors get reinstated (such as that the poet’s Dickinson ancestors reached New England in 1630), and significant findings get ignored (how the man-of-noon letter [L93] recycled Ovid’s story of Clytie). As in so many other accounts, the fact that the Main Street Mansion was not the site of the poet’s formative years slips through the cracks, so that we follow her growing attachment to home without fully realizing that home was on West (North Pleasant) Street. The sketch of her early illnesses, schooling, reading, friendships, and visits to Boston seems scattered and idiosyncratic, without a sense of chronology, sequence, growth. Much is said about Benjamin F. Newton but George Henry Gould is a mere name mentioned once. We hear of Emily’s participation in Catharine Scott Turner’s visits to the Evergreens (in 1859in 1861, and 1863), but the narration sandwiches it between events of the 1880s, thus giving the impression the poet attended Sue’s later soirées. This, however, jars with an earlier assertion that she “typically hid from everyone except children and Higginson” (210)—another overstatement. At times popular stereotypes are reinforced, as when we read that “Emily might tiptoe across the grass” (66).

Wineapple’s colorful succinctness (“those flying, febrile visits from Judge Lord” [236]) comes at the cost of what may justly be termed chronic imprecision and glib summation. In Washington she...