Interior: A revealing portrait of a poet

Emily Dickinson biography by Alfred Habegger praised for its “archival blitz” by The New York Times

My Wars are Laid Away in Books (Random House: New York, 2001), by Bethel alumnus Alfred Habegger, has been called the new, “definitive biography” of the 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson. Since its publication last year, Habegger’s 764-page work has been widely reviewed in newspapers such as The L.A. Times and The Boston Globe. The Emily Dickinson International Society characterizes Habegger’s book as “incontestably the best informed and most reliable biography of Dickinson yet written.”

If biography is a “narrative that integrates everything ... into a single life’s forward-moving braid,” as Habegger suggests in his book’s introduction, then the story of his own life and work as an English professor, literary scholar and prize-winning biographer must include the strand of his undergraduate study at Bethel.

Habegger arrived on the North Newton campus in 1958, having chosen Bethel over the California Institute of Technology, the university much closer to his hometown of Reedley, Calif. Bringing his interests in mathematics and science to Bethel, he appreciated and excelled in professor Arnold Wedel’s calculus courses. During his first year he won the Outstanding Freshman Math Student Award and placed second in a state-wide intercollegiate math contest.

In his sophomore year, however, a British literature survey course taught by professor Honora Becker redirected his interests. “My imagination was really caught by that course,” he recalls. The literature “appealed to me tremendously.”

After graduating from Bethel in 1962 with a bachelor’s degree in English, Habegger attended Stanford (Calif.) University where, as a Danforth Graduate Fellow, he completed his Ph.D. in English. He then served for 30 years as an English professor at the University of Kansas in Lawrence before choosing to become an independent scholar and writer. He now lives in northeastern Oregon in a log house he and his wife, Nellie, built together.

Begun in 1994, the biography became a full-time pursuit for Habegger when he left his university position in 1996. The first step was to conduct the “broad archival investigation” necessary for such a project—what The Wall Street Journal praises as the “good detective” work of the book. “In doing the research, I was helped hugely by my wife, Nellie,” Habegger explains. He and Nellie would return to New England each spring and fall—”like Dickinson’s birds or crickets”—and visit library after library to collect material for the book.

“Stuff such as property transaction records, census schedules, insolvency files and lots of other kinds of documents proved surprisingly helpful and even illuminating,” Habegger elaborates, “partly because Emily Dickinson’s father was an attorney who was heavily involved in political and business affairs.”

An example of such documentary material is the photograph of an 1883 Dickinson family reunion, which Habegger discusses in the opening pages of the book. The photograph depicts a stage on which the portraits of family patriarchs are displayed, and next to them stands a slender gun said to have been used “in killing Indians and wolves.” As Habegger notes, Dickinson was “very much a member of the tribe”—very much influenced by the militant Puritanism and ancestral zealotry that had characterized the clan. She was “as martial a Dickinson as any of them,” Habegger writes. For her, “hard battle resulting in victory or defeat was a central, lifelong metaphor.”

And yet as his title indicates, this is a biography that reveals how strenuously creative was Dickinson’s lifelong act of transforming her embattled private life into art. When late in life she wrote the line, “My Wars are laid away in Books,” she meant that she had transmuted the skirmishes of her private life into poems. As Habegger writes, “Love—its pain, its play—had been completed, turned into art, and laid away in the poet’s secret homemade manuscript books.”

One example of the poet’s creative transformation of potentially destructive limitations was her response to her father’s fiercely held beliefs about women. Faced with his vehement opposition to female suffrage and careers for women, and his belief that women who published their writing automatically excluded themselves from marriage and conventional society, she chose an “unusual path,” as Habegger puts it. She basically “accepted the limitations her father believed in and carved out a private realm of creative alternatives.”

Habegger’s insight into this dynamic of the Dickinson household is informed by his previous scholarship. His long-held interest in feminist issues in 19th-century American writers led to his book Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature (Columbia University Press, 1982), which demonstrated the centrality of popular “women’s fiction” to American literature’s development. Strong fathers and their literary children had also been topics of Habegger’s earlier work, most notably in his award-winning biography of Henry James, Sr., entitled The Father (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994).

Uniquely equipped to interpret the relationship between Dickinson and her father, Habegger avoids predictable, broad-brush strokes in his presentation and instead illuminates their interplay more carefully than have previous biographers. For instance, while detailing how the father’s domineering attitudes narrowed Dickinson’s prospects, Habegger demonstrates that the father’s stalwart, fierce independence also provided his daughter with a model for her own creative autonomy.

Combining unsurpassed research with wide-ranging discussions of the literary, cultural and even theological contexts of her life and craft, Habegger has given to Dickinson’s life his complete mindfulness, his full attention. In demonstrating how she laid away her wars through poetic expression, he demonstrates as well that artful and perceptive scholarship is itself a creative act.