My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

Alfred Habegger

Alfred Habegger's painstaking biography of Emily Dickinson, "My Wars Are Laid Away in Books", was greeted with awards and high praise, but for the casual reader who simply wants to learn a bit more about this reclusive poet, it's heavy going indeed.

Most of the first half of the 629 pages of text (and I'm not counting the bibliography, references, or genealogical charts!) deals not with Dickinson, but with the social standing and financial affairs of her grandparents and parents, with the political climate of the day, and with other background material that could have well been mentioned only in passing.

Granted, Habegger's task was enormous. Dickinson published only 10 poems in her lifetime, most appearing anonymously and some even against her express desires. She left instructions with her surviving sister to destroy all her writings, both correspondence and poems, and it is by the narrowest chance that the instructions were not followed completely. The biographer is left with the faintest of trails, and points out that some earlier works on the poet's life have been tainted by inadequate source material, poor scholarship, or editorial spin.

Still, the casual reader can only wish Habegger had edited himself more severely, and included more of Dickinson's works. His references to her poems often include just one or two lines, which tasks the reader to chase down the complete works in order to fully understand what is being implied.

The subject of Dickinson's sexuality cannot help but intrude. Habegger handles this with great delicacy and as much honesty as the extant material allows. Dickinson's supposed lesbianism is roundly smacked down, yet in the same breath, he quotes notes the poet wrote to her sister-in-law or other women friends using language that the modern reader has no choice but to interpret as intensely erotic. Habegger also makes a strong circumstantial case that Dickinson had two great loves in her life, although it appears unlikely that either affair was physically consummated. In both cases, the loved one was male.

Habegger also stringently avoids playing amateur psychologist. Whether this is seen as enviable self-restraint or unforgivable neglect of vital insights into his subject is probably a matter of the reader's areas of interest.

Dickinson's behavior was at the very least odd, and on more than one occasion, Habegger quotes contemporaries who referred to her as "mad". This is the area in which the author's painstaking framework of family history and social milieu could have come into play, yet Habegger resolutely refuses to draw a line between Dickinson's behavior and its apparent causative factors. For instance, he spends thousands of words describing the controlling behavior of the poet's father, who made it clear to everyone that the only safe place for a woman was within the walls of her own home - but leaves it to the reader to determine how much of Dickinson's famous reclusiveness was directly attributable to this. Similarly, he presents the bare facts regarding the various religious manias that swept New England in the mid-nineteenth century, discusses the emerging role of women writers of that time, and delves deeply into the marital rift between Dickinson's brother Austin and his wife, Sue, who was the recipient and/or subject of many of Dickinson's early works.

Habegger's inability or unwillingness to follow through on these tidbits is supremely frustrating, and ultimately limits the book's value as a biography. In the final analysis, its value is limited to the serious student of women writers of nineteenth-century America.