Back in the mid-to-late 19th century, the period that these two widely praised volumes explore, books sported modest titles. At mid-century, Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter and gave it the subtitle, A Romance, which referred not to its protagonists’ passions but to its fictional form. In like manner, the words Great Expectations stand alone atop the cover of Charles Dickens’ masterpiece, while George Eliot’s greatest novel, Middlemarch, has a discreet, understated subtitle, A Study in Provincial Life. And at the century’s end, Thomas Hardy finished his novel-writing career with the bleak and blunt Jude the Obscure.
A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain , Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade
Random House Books for Young Readers
304 pages
$14.39
Yet times and tastes have changed on the title front. Simplicity is out, obscurity is in, and the unapologetic earnestness of then has given way to the allusive irony of now. Today, titles tease and subtitles reveal. Without their subtitles, for example, what would we make of Christopher Benfey’s A Summer of Hummingbirds and Brenda Wineapple’s White Heat? Is Benfey writing about the migratory patterns of this smallest of birds, or is this perhaps a memoir about a poignant season in his life? And what is Wineapple offering us? A biography of Jimmy Cagney, or perhaps a primer on one of his greatest films?
From their titles alone, we could never surmise that Christopher Benfey’s interests are in Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade. Nor could we imagine that in White Heat, Brenda Wineapple is setting out to plumb the depths of The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.The titles tease us with an image but leave it to their subtitles to reveal the connections that bind together each book.
For both Benfey and Wineapple, the binding ties are of the kind that literary modernism has long prized. Indeed, one of the central premises underlying these two books was put forward a little less than a century ago by E. M. Forster in Howards End.”Only connect!” the narrator in that novel cries out. “Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.” Through a series of “quiet indications,” Forster assures us, the bridge may thus at last be built that can “span [our] lives with beauty” and reconnect us one to another.
Christopher Benfey and Brenda Wineapple have written bridge-building books in the Forster line. As he did, they take it as a given that Christian belief no longer provides a span adequate to handle the traffic of our lives. Almost all of the artists these two treat in their works—from Higginson to Dickinson, from Heade to Twain—lived through a dramatic cultural eclipse of Christianity in the final decades of the 19th century. Within a matter of years, a broadly based communal experience of belief, grounded in ritual and steeped in the language of the King James Bible, gave way to the isolating particularities of personal perception and private memory. According to Benfey and Wineapple, it fell to the artists of America to overcome this isolating solitude and forge what connections they could in the desolate decades after the Civil War.
The specific link that absorbs the attention of Wineapple was grounded in the extraordinary friendship between Emily Dickinson, the reclusive poet of Amherst, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the public man of Boston. In documenting their complex relationship, Wineapple says her purpose is not to write “a biography of Emily Dickinson, of whom biography gets us nowhere,” nor does she intend to offer an exercise in “conventional literary criticism.” Instead, she says of her own narrative, “here Dickinson’s poetry largely speaks for itself, as it did to Higginson.” What Wineapple seeks to do is “to throw a small, considered beam onto the lifework of these two unusual, seemingly incompatible friends.” Her goal is to suggest how “this activist and recluse bear a fraught, collaborative, unbalanced and impossible relation to each other,” a relation “as symbolic and real in our culture as it was special to them” in the 19th century.
With the enduring relationship between Dickinson and Higginson providing the backdrop, Wineapple paints upon a broad canvas that stretches the length and breadth of American history, from the presidency of George Washington to the divisions of our red-and-blue-state nation. She seeks to make her political points “lightly,” but the implications are obvious: “After all, who they [Dickinson and Higginson] were—the issues they grappled with—shapes the rhetoric of our art and our politics: a country alone, exceptional, at least in its own romantic mythology—even warned by its first president to steer clear of permanent alliances—that regularly intervenes on behalf, or at the expense, of others. The fantasy of isolation, the fantasy of intervention: they create recluses and activists, sometimes both, in us all.”
The Dickinson-Higginson friendship began in 1862, when the introverted poet introduced herself to the established critic by way of a letter. She had read his article, “Letter to a Young Contributor,” in the Atlantic Monthly and was eager to learn what this arbiter of taste might think of her own work. She opened with a question—”Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”—and included four of her poems to serve as his basis for judgment. Dickinson labored as she lived, in private, and she craved an independent appraisal of the poetry that was pouring out of her: “The Mind is so near itself—it cannot see distinctly—and I have no one to ask—.”
It was prudent for Dickinson to ask whether Higginson was “too deeply occupied” to assess the poems of a stranger, for he was in the midst of a wrenching transition. After a decade of essay-writing in support of literature and in opposition to slavery, he had concluded in the spring of 1862 that the time had come for him to join the battle raging across the land. That summer he enlisted, became the captain of a Massachusetts regiment, and by fall had assumed command of the First South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment of freed slaves.Despite the press of personal and public concerns, however, Higginson did reply to this curious letter and its poems, and one of the central friendships in American literary history was launched. He and Dickinson were to meet only twice over the next two decades, but letters flowed freely between them until days before her death in 1886. The relationship outlived her, as Higginson diligently served as co-editor for the first, posthumously published editions of her poems, and as he assiduously promoted her work on the lecture circuit and in print.
In the history of Dickinson criticism, Higginson has long been a stick figure of sorts—the timid, genteel man who failed to tame a woman he couldn’t fathom. There is a hint of truth to this caricature, as Higginson himself admitted after she died: “It would seem that at first I tried a little, —a very little—to lead her in the direction of rules and traditions, but I fear it was only perfunctory, and that she interested me more in her—so to speak—unregenerate condition.”
Wineapple breathes life into this stick figure and gives him a real heft. In her narrative, Higginson compellingly emerges as a bold and engaging man, and she rightly acknowledges the profound debt that the demure woman of contemplation owed to the dynamic man of action. “This radical and, in later years, this apostle of moderation was,” she concludes, “the man Emily Dickinson trusted, for there was something of the radical and conservative, activist and recluse, in her nature, too.” In a friendship sustained through letters, “they invented themselves and each other, performing for each other in the words that filled, maintained, and created the space between them.” And “somehow these two people created out of words a nearness we today do not entirely grasp.”
History may have bequeathed the Dickinson-Higginson relationship for Wineapple to explore, but it did not hand on to Christopher Benfey the connections he traces. The ties he describes are often ones of his own invention, and they do not always seem convincing. “This book is about a cluster of American artists and writers adrift during the seismic upheaval of the Civil War and its wrenching aftermath,” he begins. “It is about a pre-Civil War mind-set and a post-Civil War need,” and that need coalesces for him in the image and ideal of a single bird.
To tell his story, Benfey assembles a cast of “actors … on my little stage”—including Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade—and reports that as he was bringing them together, he discovered they “were fanatical about hummingbirds.” They wrote poems and stories about them, painted pictures of them, composed tunes to mimic their songs, and, in some cases, tamed them and stuffed them. A passion for this bird lies behind “the often dizzying relationships that connect the figures” in Benfey’s book, and his efforts “to trace the origins of this informal cult of hummingbirds kept leading back to the Civil War.”
Why did hummingbirds “elicit such a powerful attraction, rising at times to the level of an obsession?” The answer to that question is “the string on which the ten chapters” of Benfey’s book are strung: “Americans during and after the Civil War gradually left behind a static view of existence, a trust in fixed arrangements and hierarchies.” That is, the characters in his book are bound together in a story of religious loss and artistic gain. “In science and in art, in religion and in love,” this “new dynamism and movement” recharged the lives of Dickinson, Higginson, Stowe, and company and imparted to them a vision of “a brave new world of instability and evanescence. This dynamism, in all aspects of life, found perfect expression in the hummingbird.”
That bird, however, often seems hidden somewhere within or behind the web of vignettes and biographical sketches Benfey offers of late 19th-century artists. And whether the hummingbird is present or absent at any particular point in the story, the note repeatedly sounded in A Summer of Hummingbirds is one of rigid securities lost and fleeting illuminations found. We are told, for example, that Dickinson was “someone who couldn’t stand—who had a visceral shudder in the presence of—the flatulent rhetoric of church and state around her.” Her poetic career was marked by a strong “resistance to high rhetoric,” as she went about “quietly demolishing myths of heroic pomposity.”
The poet’s resistance was driven by the “dangerous power” she felt “inside her.” In addition to experiencing “a special intimacy with birds and flowers,” she had “an almost hallucinatory awareness of the power of individual words; and she discerned, behind the curtain of custom, the palpable nearness of the great facts of life and death.” But when the falsehoods of faith were set aside—when the “flatulent rhetoric” of sin and grace, providence and redemption, salvation and damnation, was laid away—what remained to sustain Emily Dickinson? In Benfey’s words, it was the gospel of the hummingbird, with its proclamation of “the fleeting nature of all life.” For “human life, all life, is a route of evanescence.”
According to Brenda Wineapple, Dickinson was forced to set out on the “route of evanescence” because she, Higginson, and others in their cultural cohort had suddenly found themselves thrust into “a climate where old pieties no longer sufficed, the piers of faith were brittle, and God was hard to find.” Like Benfey’s hunters of the hummingbird, the Dickinson and Higginson of White Heat each fabricated an ersatz creed for a post-Christian world. To Higginson, “the Bible was a book” like any other, and Christianity was but one form of religion among countless others; to serve his ethical needs, he patched together a personal credo that affirmed “the goodness of people” and celebrated Jesus as the great “brother.” Dickinson meanwhile fashioned a “personal, pantheistic, and paradoxical” faith that found its center in “birds, flowers, the shifting quality of light and of mind.” This is not quite the hummingbird’s “brave new world of instability and evanescence,” but it is close.
Wineapple and Benfey do uncover some enticing connections among late 19th-century artists, but perhaps the most intriguing ties these books reveal are those that run between the writers of that era and the critics of our day. They write of sensitive spirits forced to cast off “old pieties” as they climbed down from the “brittle” bridge of faith and began a long journey across a barren landscape ruled by a silent God. But these books also make it clear that the critics we encounter at the end of that trek are more ironic and less earnest than were the artists who first set out well over a century ago.
To borrow from Benfey’s own earthquake metaphor (“seismic upheaval”), the poets and painters of the 19th century were dazed survivors struggling to regain their tenuous balance even as the aftershocks continued to ripple beneath their feet. They were startled by what they saw in the land of unbelief, and they stood in awe of nameless forces greater than anything they could master or muster. In the world of their 21st-century chroniclers, however, the ground has settled and the fluid forms have become fixed and familiar. The cultural élites now cling to their own “old pieties,” which consist of a set of reflexive judgments about the hollowness of the Christian faith and the homelessness of the human condition.
It was not so for Dickinson and Twain and others in their day: the loss of belief left them riddled with phantom pain. In a poem she composed shortly before her death, Dickinson wrote that those who died in earlier generations “Knew where they went—/ They went to God’s Right Hand—.” Yet “That Hand is amputated now / And God cannot be found—.” For modern criticism, unbelief often seems to serve as a tranquilizer for the spirit. As a case in point, two decades ago Richard Rorty published a book—Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity—that opens with a devastatingly beguiling sentence: “About two hundred years ago, the idea that truth was made rather than found began to take hold of the imagination of Europe.” Rorty’s book appeared in 1989, the 200th anniversary of the start of the French Revolution, and according to him, that revolution had shown how the “whole vocabulary of social relations,” and “the whole spectrum of social institutions, could be replaced overnight.” At the same time, “the romantic poets were showing what happened when art is thought of no longer as imitation but, rather, as the artist’s self-creation.”[1]
In the contemporary world, as a consequence of the shift that Rorty has outlined, the default position has become one of believing that everything of value is made rather than found, and metaphors of construction have supplanted those of discovery when we speak of the good, the true, and the beautiful. In their own way, Dickinson, Higginson, and company were among the first to discover and declare that there is in the end nothing to be found or received, and for more than a century, the humanist tradition has been transforming that startling assertion into an unquestioned assumption.
This brings us back to our opening question about the titles. In describing the titles and subtitles of these two books and other books of our day, I spoke of a pattern of tease and revelation. In terms of older epistemologies, such as those that governed Protestantism for centuries and Roman Catholicism for almost two millennia, the alternate terms might have been annunciation and revelation, or incarnation and proclamation. At the center of those theologies, we find a drama of revelation and discovery, in which men and women hear of a divine love that came to dwell in a broken world so that we might “have life and have it more abundantly.” In this vision of the truth, to know is first to receive and to discover, and then to make of our lives what we can by means of the gifts we have been given.
Now, however, when we study ourselves and our world, we find only a record of our own making, and the connections we trace in the past are simply signs of our Forster-like efforts to “only connect.” For a moment, White Heat and A Summer of Hummingbirds tease us with the illusion of discovery, but the books themselves uncover a world in which there is nothing to be found. That they do so, especially in Wineapple’s case, in prose that often proves to be heartbreakingly beautiful is a pleasure indeed. But this is a pleasure tinged with irony, and the irony is haunted by the shadow of that emptiness which the ancient Christians called acedia—a “state of restlessness and inability either to work or pray”—and which many in our post-Christian world have come to know as a spirit of ennui without end.
Several decades ago, one of the 20th century’s most melancholy and world-weary men, Malcolm Muggeridge, wrote at the close of the second volume of his luminous autobiography: “For me, the story that began on those walks with my father through Park Hill Recreation Ground to East Croydon station, was now, once and for all, over. Another Way had to be found and explored.”[2] And so it is today, long after the summer of hummingbirds has passed and its white heat has left only sodden ashes behind. Like that curious crowd that gathered on Mars Hill two thousand years ago, in the midst of our collective ennui, many still wonder and wait to hear of Another Way that might still be found and explored, glorified and enjoyed, forever.
Roger Lundin is Blanchard Professor of English at Wheaton College. He is the author most recently of Believing Again: Doubt and Faith in a Secular Age (Eerdmans).
1. Richard Rorty,Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), p. 3.
2. Malcolm Muggeridge,Chronicles of Wasted Time: An Autobiography (1973; repr. Regnery Gateway, 1989), p. 546.
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