During Emily’s last year Vinnie had heard her muttering worriedly, ‘Oh, Vinnie, my work, my work!’ When Helen Hunt Jackson offered herself as literary executor, Dickinson’s reply avoids the subject. Unfortunately, Helen Jackson died in August 1885, nine months before Dickinson. Her efforts on her friend’s behalf (with doubting Mr Higginson, the supposed celebrity volume and Thomas Niles, head of the Boston publishing firm of Roberts Brothers) had all failed through no fault of her own. Dickinson had every reason to have no confidence in that or any other route to publication.
This left Sue, Dickinson’s prime reader, as the likely person to transmit the poems to posterity. Vinnie lent her the forty booklets threaded with string — ‘the little volumes’ — which came to light within a week of Dickinson’s death. These contained about eight hundred poems. Other poems were copied on separate sheets and assorted fragments were scribbled on the backs of envelopes, bits of wrapping paper and suchlike scraps. Much of this went to The Evergreens. Together with Sue’s own hoard of two hundred and fifty, she had in hand more than a thousand poems. A large part of a lifetime’s oeuvre sat there, at The Evergreens, awaiting attention.
Sue had no doubt of the poet’s genius. ‘A Damascus blade gleaming and glancing in the sun was her wit’, she said in her eloquent obituary for the Republican. ‘Her swift poetic rapture was like the long glistening note of a bird one hears in the June woods at high noon, but can never see.’ Sue had stood with her on the brink of ‘Infinity’ but, turning with Emily to face the public, Sue was daunted. In 1886 she sent a poem by Emily Dickinson to the finest New York editor of the day, Richard Watson Gilder. He had the taste to serialise The Bostonians by Henry James in Century magazine. Dickinson he rejected.
A professional writer like Mabel Todd would have been used to rejections; Susan was not. The impact of rejection for a novice can be incalculable. It’s common for the rejected never to try again, particularly women on their own or housewives or provincials who venture without support. It’s not that Susan would have thought a jot less of the poems themselves, but the great world out there in which men made their uncomprehending judgements would have appeared to close the door. Higginson feared the poems were ‘unpresentable’ to readers attuned to smooth rhythms and chiming rhymes. (‘Alcohol’ does not rhyme with ‘pearl’, a critic complained of Dickinson’s ecstatic ‘I taste a liquor never brewed’.) None had an ear for the silence of dashes that defy the march of standard meanings in order to open up a space for vision and veto — for all that lies beyond the frontiers of language. No critic had an ear for dissonance. It never occurs to them that dissonance could be deliberate, in accord with playful or disruptive thoughts. This was three decades before Eliot burst upon the public ear with the jolts and stops of The Waste Land, he, too, bent on transgressing aural frontiers in tandem with ‘the frontiers of consciousness’. If the fellows of All Souls College, Oxford, declined to elect Eliot to a fellowship in 1926 because they thought his poetry peculiar, how could the guardians of convention in the 1880s lend themselves to originality in a woman who was ‘wayward’? Dickinson had not seen fit to follow the advice Higginson, with patient kindliness, had laid out for her over the course of twenty-five years. The label ‘wayward’ stuck to her well into the years of her fame.
Dickinson herself had said nothing to anyone when Mr Niles could not ‘consume’ her poems. In 1883 she’d had the sense to submit only three (instead of the requested collection) to an editor who had participated in the celebrity scam of the No Name series. She had survived by keeping her poems apart from the marketplace, and Susan would have felt for the mode of transmission the poet had chosen.
Lavinia, alone in her father’s house, was ‘sometimes weary, always full of longings’. In her time she had been a demonstrative woman, ready to touch hands and lips, and, like Emily, keen to express and receive love. So Lavinia welcomed visits from Mabel and the expressiveness Mabel offered when she swept around Austin’s vegetable garden between The Dell and the Homestead. Here, once more, is the young woman whose desire Lavinia has facilitated. One day Mabel remarks that she’s teaching herself to typewrite (a new word in 1887) on a borrowed Hammond machine that turns out print. Would Vinnie like a preview of her heart’s desire, to see her sister in print? Vinnie would. She reads a few of Emily’s poems aloud to Mabel and then on a bright, cold Sunday, 13 February 1887, Mabel returns to hear a few more. On that day Vinnie must have entrusted Mabel with some poems because the following Thursday Mabel records typing Emily Dickinson’s poems for the first time. This fact is tossed off amid the other activities of that day, but it marks the start of Mabel’s role as authorised editor of Emily Dickinson:
17 February 1887: Finished attic curtains in the morning & made David put them up. In the afternoon a few of Emily’s poems copied on the typewriter … Lovely sunny day. Lay on the bed & rested after. Call [from Austin] at 7.30. Choir rehearsal at 8.30.
18 February 1887: Heavy snow storm. At five went over to Vinnie’s with some copied poems.
Closeness to Vinnie is part of this venture and Mabel does feel it. When Vinnie feels sick and blue, Mabel takes care to visit every day at two for the best part of a month. Her understanding of Vinnie’s impatience with Sue, and of Vinnie’s wish for publication, is irresistible. This is not to suggest a deliberate campaign. Early in 1887, other campaigns claim the forefront of Mabel’s mind: to induce Austin to wither the remains of his marriage or, failing that, to escape out west, leaving Sue and the children behind.
On the very day of Austin’s disgruntled return from his Western journey, Mabel picked up the poems and from then on her commitment grew, as her diary indicates.
30 November 1887: Copied two or three more of Emily’s poems, & took them over to Vinnie’s.
22 January 1888: Vinnie gave me more poems.
15 February 1888: Wrote a number of Emily’s poems on the type-writer. At two went to Vinnie’s, & had a lovely visit until 3.30.
11 March 1888: Typed a lot of Emily’s poems.
‘No publisher will attempt to read poems in Emily’s own peculiar handwriting, much less judge them,’ Mabel advised Vinnie. ‘I should have to copy them all.’
Her know-how, her commercial approach to publication, was more to Vinnie’s mind than Susan’s leaning towards private publication. The latter option would cost a lot, and Austin was unlikely to contribute.
Susan continued to read the poems to guests at The Evergreens. Since Vinnie had never participated in her sister-in-law’s salon, Susan did not invite her now. Alone in the Homestead, Vinnie felt excluded. Why should Susan have the privilege of selecting what poems to read, without consulting the legal heir to the manuscripts?
This adversarial thought, dropping into Vinnie’s mind, did its bit to change her plan.
In 1888 she retrieved the manuscripts she had placed in The Evergreens and turned them over to Mabel Todd, who proceeded to transcribe hundreds of poems. Mabel worked at first on the borrowed Hammond typewriter, then on a more primitive ‘World’ machine that cost her $15. She had to turn a pointer manually to each letter, and then stamp the letter (capitals only) on to paper through an inked rubber sheet. It was laborious, exhausting. In the spring of 1888 Vinnie sent trusty Maggie Maher to stand in for the untrained and sometimes absent servant at The Dell. For Maggie it was thankless work. Where the Dickinson sisters had been accustomed to work alongside Maggie — Emily baking, Vinnie house-keeping — Mrs Todd did not value domestic work and offered Maggie nothing for her efforts. And again it did not occur to Mabel that signs of adultery — the closed door to the bedroom upstairs — would jar on a servant, in the same way as it never occurred to her how that door, with Austin Dickinson behind it, jarred on Millicent, aged eight, when she came home from school.
During October 1888 Grandma Wilder came to stay, making assignations at The Dell impossible. On 16th Mabel’s diary, careful as ever to avoid Austin’s name in any intimate context, mentions two assignations on the same Tuesday at the Homestead: a ‘call’ at twelve, at Vinnie’s, and ‘and one at five, up stairs’.
What never ceased to worry Mabel was Susan’s power to damage her reputation. During 1888 Mabel, it will be recalled, looked rather wasted, none too fertile for a woman trying to conceive. Yet however much snubs preyed on her spirits, however unfair it was that Austin’s gender and social pre-eminence should exempt him from blame, and however frustrating that Austin did nothing further to squash his wife, Mabel was never tempted to end the affair. It meant more than sexual loyalty, much as she wanted that; its hold on her had to do with a dream derived from her father who cared for poetry and the life of the mind. The word ‘presentiment’, and the aspirational resonance it carried for her, had lacked a focus until she encountered the Dickinsons. At the heart of that family beat a destiny she had to grasp — she’d heard it instantly in the voice of Susan Dickinson reading the poetry aloud, as though she were its legitimate channel. Todd ventured to become the legitimate channel when she decided to copy hundreds of poems.
She had the staying power and energy to carry through a challenge of this magnitude. It required exceptional patience to pore over a difficult hand and unfamiliar usage where nouns, say, might appear as verbs. Mabel refused to be damped by Higginson’s warnings to Vinnie and by Austin’s resistance. For Austin’s family pride shrank from exposure and the failure he anticipated.
Pause. Pause for what lies between the scenes, the unseen space where so much happens. No facts come down to us from 1888 and 1889 as Emily Dickinson is hauled to the surface — the great lines swimming into focus as Mabel Todd types ‘My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun —’ … ‘Mine — in Vision and in Veto’ … ‘Vesuvius at Home’ … ‘My life closed twice before its close’. For Mabel to have kept going, day after day for two or more years was an extraordinary feat. It was fuelled by a sure response to the poems. Mabel Todd’s venture was completely under wraps because, of course, Vinnie was deceiving Susan, compounding her betrayal in the matter of adultery. Throughout these years, Vinnie feared Susan, and her master plan was not to reveal Mabel’s part. In the end, the poems would be published, and no one was to know how they had come to be presentable to editors.
Here, Lavinia erred: she took Mabel’s enthusiasm, genuine as it was, for granted. The relationship was unequal in that Lavinia owned the manuscripts; Mabel did not. Lavinia did witness Mabel’s effort, she saw how long it took, but as an old-fashioned gentlewoman Lavinia had no idea that Mabel Todd, as a New Woman contributing two to three years of her professional time, might expect recognition.
The mistake was not entirely Lavinia’s fault. It was Mabel’s habit to project a ladylike passivity. Others approach her, others ask her to do things, and when they don’t it’s destiny taking a hand, like the impulse that compelled Austin to take her warm, waiting hand that rainy evening at the gate of The Evergreens on 11 September 1882 — that Rubicon moment that changed the Dickinsons’ lives. Far off in the future people would say that Lavinia Dickinson approached her brother’s mistress and asked her to take over the editing — in secret — from her sister-in-law. Mabel Todd complied as a favour to Lavinia, a huge favour, people would say. This was the Todd story in retrospect. Afterwards she reassured Higginson that Sue ‘gave it up definitely. Then Lavinia came to me … So you see Mrs. Dickinson can have no real cause for complaint.’
Mabel Todd is a plausible propagandist for her story because she sticks close to the truth, deviating, often, with one word. Apart from ‘definitely’ in this case, it’s the apparently insignificant word ‘then’ that shifts the sequence in favour of innocent passivity. Look like the innocent flower. To us in the future, the manoeuvre can look like the merest slip of memory. Only it’s there too often to be a slip. It’s an almost automatic untruthfulness, the insignificant cog driving the wheel of a plot Mabel sets in motion.
At the time, Mabel told Vinnie that she was copying hundreds of poems for the love of what she was doing. This statement was largely true. And Lavinia believed it, and took pleasure in conferring on Mabel this privilege. But, well below the surface, there was a darker motive to these earliest transcriptions of Emily Dickinson: a pattern of campaigns on the part of Mabel Loomis Todd who wanted to be ‘Mabel Loomis Dickinson’ or linked in some indissoluble way to the Dickinson family, to the extent of trying to conceive a Dickinson child throughout these years when she was transcribing the poems. Later she’d claim that the poet herself asked her to do this. A lie like this stands close to some sort of truth, for the years she gave to Emily Dickinson convinced Mabel Todd that she was indeed — in literal deed — the true poetic heir.
This co-exists with Mabel Todd’s confident response to the poems themselves. From the start she had envied Susan’s intimacy with Dickinson’s poetry. If it’s correct that Mabel wished to be Susan, she was now on course. Mabel had what it took to pursue this through the dark, depressed, uncertain years from 1888 to 1890. It remained as secret as her other campaigns but, unlike them, this was creative, fertile, healing. She felt, she said, the poems’ greatness; she was ‘uplifted’.
By night, under cover of darkness, Vinnie crept over to The Dell to inspect progress and urge Mabel on. Though Vinnie had colluded in the love affair, this was closeness of a rarer kind: two women, one middle-aged, one young, joined in an enterprise that was to burst on an unknowing public. In their secret intentness both were in a way closer to the poet than in life, as readers are when they live from day to day with a writer who speaks to them: in this instance, a writer who speaks — blasts — directly to the soul.
*
In July 1888 Higginson visited Lavinia to discuss an edition. He was too busy to take this on himself, but agreed to reconsider the possibility if someone undertook the labour of copying the poems. Since no one knew what might be there until it was transcribed, Mabel realised that she would have to commit herself to Dickinson’s whole oeuvre, or at least that large part of it in her hands.
Vinnie would bring baskets of poems to The Dell and dump them on the floor in front of the fireplace in the back parlour. David would then compare Mabel’s transcription with the original; if there were errors Mabel would do it again. Certain poems Vinnie would not let out of her house, and Mabel transcribed them there under Vinnie’s eye. If they spied Susan coming the poems were hustled out of sight.
During the first six months of 1889 Mabel hired a copyist, but Harriet Graves had no sympathy for ‘Emily’s mad words’, and seemed to Mabel a shade worse than an insentient machine. So Mabel dismissed Miss Graves and pressed on. Millicent, aged nine, helped with the copying and there was help too from David Todd, consistent with their pact to promote each other’s careers. He helped to sort hundreds of scraps of paper. This wasn’t only helpfulness; this astronomer had fixed on what his wife called Dickinson’s ‘comets of thought’. At this time he was drawn to another boldly original woman, Olive Schreiner, a semi-invalid who lived in isolation on the South African veld. From that lone spot her feminist fables spoke to avant-garde thinkers. David Todd wished to write to her and asked Roberts Brothers for her address. They obliged, apologising that they did not know her street. In fact, Matjesfontein was only one street behind a railway stopping in the midst of thorn bush stretching to the horizon. Such solitude had proved no bar to addressing the world through her pen.
In October 1889 David left for Angola. It was yet another expedition to photograph the sun’s corona in the course of an eclipse. David expected Mabel’s help, as in Japan, but this time he sailed in a naval vessel that refused to have a woman aboard a man-of-war. (Her father, Eben Loomis, was allowed to join the expedition in the capacity of instrument maker.) This was when Mabel was oppressed by Amherst snubs and took herself off to Boston for the winter.
There, on 6 November, Higginson came for an hour to discuss the transcripts with Mabel at the opulent Beacon Hill house of her cousin, Caro Andrews. He warned once more, ‘The public will not accept even fine ideas in such rough and mystical dress, so hard to elucidate.’
Mrs Todd rose with graceful aplomb. Moulded in a corset perfectly judged between womanly yield and ladylike tightness, she leant a little for-ward in performance mode, picked up the poems and began to read a dozen of her favourites aloud. Addressing the ear, not the eye, the rhythmic glide of a trained voice smoothed out the jolts of the Dickinson line and protected Higginson from the sight of the experimental punctuation Dickinson had neglected to alter. Mabel was in her element as performer. Her voice was persuasive, her accents soothing, unlike the startling questions the poet had put to Higginson until he felt drained.
He was astonished. He had no idea, he said, ‘there were so many poems in passably conventional form’. He asked her to classify them as A, B and C, and on that basis would look them over.
Held up by illness for much of the winter, he eventually did this in April 1890 while Mabel was Chicago. Higginson’s initial selections were not all in agreement with hers. At this point, with David still abroad, it was six months since Mabel had left Amherst. Austin urged her return. On 24 April he brushed off her need to confer with Higginson in Boston: ‘I don’t know what you mean about “the poems” and their possibly delaying you. That is of no consequence.’
Austin was impatient to repeat the ‘experiment’ and thought publication a whim of Vinnie’s, to inflate herself. In fact Vinnie participated discerningly in the editors’ selections. By May a volume of about two hundred poems was ready for submission and Higginson chose the prestigious publishing firm of Houghton Mifflin, where he acted as a reader. They said no. Next Todd tried Roberts Brothers, who had published Dickinson’s ‘Success’ and then could not ‘consume’ her other poems.
Mr Niles reaffirmed his adverse opinion. He had always thought it ‘unwise to perpetuate Miss Dickinson’s poems. They are quite as remarkable for defects as for beauties & are generally devoid of the true poetical qualities.’ The reader’s report by Arlo Bates, a poet favoured by the firm, noted Dickinson’s ‘crudity of workmanship’. He foresaw no possibility of making a stir but did concede that this was the real thing, a power near to genius. Had she published — had she learnt the conventions of punctuation and rhyme — ‘she would have stood at the head of American singers’. In a grudging tone, Mr Niles offered to bring out a small edition on condition that the sister paid for the typographical electroplates and agreed to forgo royalties on the first five hundred copies. Bates halved the number of poems to be included in a collection, rejecting some of the best including ‘I died for Beauty’. Mabel, exasperated, restored a few with the help of Vinnie, bringing the final number to 116. Mabel handled the negotiation for Vinnie, who had ‘about as much knowledge of business as a Maltese pussycat’.
That summer Mabel remained in Amherst, toiling over five proof stages which, she insisted, were necessary, since the typesetters kept correcting the poet’s inventions. Even though the editors themselves had deviated from the manuscripts to bring Dickinson more into line with their own tastes and those of the day, Mabel Todd was rigorous when it came to printing.
Sue, still in the dark about the volume nearing publication, sent ‘There came a Day at Summer’s full’ to Scribner’s. It was published in August, and Sue was paid $15, which she kept, even though this sum should have gone to Vinnie as legal owner of the papers, and Vinnie’s rights acknowledged. As this poem happened to be in the forthcoming volume, Mabel Todd had to seek permission from Scribner’s for its inclusion.
When the final proofs came in September the editors were jubilant. Higginson now wrote a diplomatic preface asking readers to excuse the grammatical oddities for the sake of daring thoughts. Candour compels him to point out the ‘rugged’ frame of the poems and to regret that lyric flights are not smoother. Yet he assents generously to the poet’s persistent refusal to hear his advice: here is a recluse who is true to herself.
The first volume of Dickinson poems, bound in white leather and published on 12 November 1890, was handled in just the way that had put the poet off publication during her lifetime: the editors had tampered with the inventive punctuation and off-rhymes of the volcano speaking through ‘buckled lips’. Words were changed ‘to make them smoother’ (as Mabel Todd put it) and dashes eliminated. There were trivialising titles like ‘With a Flower’, ‘Playmates’ and ‘Troubled about many things’.
For all this, Dickinson spoke to readers. Her sudden revelation, as one reader put it, was like ‘a shaft of light sunk instantaneously into the dark abysm’. ‘Much madness is divinest sense’, people read, ‘A wounded deer leaps highest’ and one of the exultant poems sparked by the Master letters: ‘I’m wife … I’m Czar, I’m woman now’. Other ‘Exultation is the going / Of an inland soul to sea’, or there’s the fight to the death of ‘Two Swimmers on a Spar’. ‘Men do not sham convulsion / Nor simulate a throe’ when the brain swerves from its ‘groove’. And, always, oncoming mortality and certain immortality: ‘Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me’. Death does have the power to halt the speaker whose immortal powers are all the sharper for her vulnerability to human attachment:
I never lost as much but twice —
And that was in the sod.
Twice have I stood a beggar
Before the door of God!
Angels — twice descending
Reimbursed my store —
Burglar! Banker — Father!
I am poor once more!
The volume was a huge success, to the surprise of Houghton Mifflin who had rejected the poems, Niles who had grudgingly published them and the still rather offhand Austin. Five hundred copies of Poems were sold on the day of publication; the volume was reprinted eleven times in the first year; and the total sale, astonishing for a poet publishing a first collection, was almost eleven thousand copies. Public interest was fanned by Higginson’s modest account of his correspondence and contact with a naively gifted recluse who had a ‘quaint and nun-like look’. This was published in the Atlantic Monthly in October 1891, to promote a forthcoming second volume. Public interest was fanned further by Mabel Todd’s talks and articles. A Boston reporter who attended one of her talks noted the sympathetic keenness and wit with which she explained Dickinson’s elusive genius to her audience. ‘As she stood there — an almost girlish figure in her black lace dress whose sole adornment was a small bunch of her favorite jonquils — every tone and gesture revealed not only the intelligent critic but the loving friend.’
The name of Mabel Loomis Todd will always be linked with that of Emily Dickinson. Vinnie, apprehensive of Sue’s reaction to the secret undertaking (Sue, she thought, would want to ‘kill’ her), had tried to keep Mabel Todd’s name off the title page. Higginson had insisted it must be there, putting Todd’s name first. Her painting of Indian Pipes, tooled in silver, took pride of place on the cover. For the next few years Mabel promoted the poems together with the image of a shy creature, reclusive, eccentric, asexual, whose ‘friend’ she had been. Dickinson had indeed been reclusive with Mabel, though not with Helen Hunt Jackson and Lord.
Only when pressed did Mabel admit that they’d never met face to face. At most, she’d ‘once’ glimpsed her object ‘flitting’ away. ‘Flitting’ fits the legend of shyness, a shrinking creature, but the cutting edge of the Dickinson voice conveys the opposite: it’s bared, at the ready.
William Dean Howells, the well-known American novelist, recognised a lasting voice. He was the first to see her improvising manner as intentional and masterly. ‘If nothing else had come out of our life but this strange poetry we should feel that in the work of Emily Dickinson, America, or New England, rather, had made a distinctive addition to the literature of the world.’
This influential review had been prompted by Mabel. In the summer of 1890 she’d met Howells, who was staying at the same boarding house as Mrs Loomis and Millicent. Howells and his wife, who had lost a beloved daughter aged ten, befriended Millicent, also ten. Mabel had found Howells genial and willing to lend an ear to the forthcoming Dickinson phenomenon.
In a letter to Vinnie from Rome, the painter and illustrator of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Elihu Vedder, declared ‘love at first sight’ of the poems. ‘They are barbed things these poems and strike and remain — not like some snowballs of poems that … break and melt and are gone[,] leaving you cold.’ Niles had the happy idea of sending a copy to the English poet Christina Rossetti who, single and rather solitary, dramatising a lone, confessional voice, had much in common with Dickinson. She praised ‘a very remarkable work of genius, — though I cannot but deplore some of the religious, or rather irreligious pieces’.
Vinnie bristled at the reservation. ‘I’m sorry Miss “Rossetti” fails to comprehend “Emily” faithfully.’
Early in 1892 the brilliant invalid Alice James delighted in ‘I’m Nobody! Who are you’. No tome of philosophy, she said, could match Nobody’s antithesis:
How dreary — to be — Somebody!
How public — like a Frog—
To tell one’s name — the livelong June —
To an admiring Bog!
The sureness of this farce from the ‘highest point of view of the aspiring soul’ was beyond the grasp of Somebodies, as Alice James saw, and she feared only for Dickinson’s not being the flawless miracle a James was qualified to appreciate. She saw too a poet who must be rescued from editorial intervention.
‘Her being sicklied o’er* with T. W. Higginson makes one quake lest there be a latent flaw which escapes one’s vision.’
Though Alice James was then close to death, no one could relish more the bafflement of Dickinson’s critics. In England, reviews followed the London publication late in 1891. ‘It is reassuring to hear the English pronouncement that Emily Dickinson is fifth-rate,’ Alice James said. ‘They have such a capacity for missing quality; the robust evades them equally with the subtle.’ The London Daily News, groping condescendingly in the right direction, thought Dickinson ‘a kind of unfinished, rudimentary Bronte’.
The American papers, on the other hand, and particularly the Boston ones, sided with the common reader in their praise. Higginson told Mabel Todd, ‘You are the only person who can feel as I do about this extraordinary thing we have done in revealing this rare genius. I feel as if we had climbed to a cloud, pulled it away, and revealed a new star behind it.’
For Susan, Poems came as a shock. Here was Emily wrenched away and twisted into shape for publication. She and Mattie stopped speaking to Lavinia, who held up her head but was not impervious to the pain.
With Higginson, Sue restrained her shock. As the poet’s old friend, she took it upon herself to thank him ‘for her’ — for leading her in front of the curtain. Her criticism of the volume was measured and her claim undeniable.
‘I think this much is due myself — my life long intimacy with Emily — my equally long deep appreciation of her genius. I am told that Lavinia is saying that I refused to arrange [the poems]. Emily knows that is not true. You are generous enough to be patient with my exegesis even if tedious to you. “The Poems” will ever be to me marvellous whether in manuscript or type.’
The editors were unaware of letters containing letter-poems as great as any. Susan had intended to set poems in the biographical context of the prose, a plan informed by insider knowledge. Higginson proposed that Mrs Dickinson be at least consulted on future volumes. Todd had no such intention. Her rival had lost her chance to ‘unconquerable laziness’.
Susan fought back. Three months after Poems appeared, Susan selected a fair copy of a visionary poem, ‘Just lost, when I was saved’, from her private trove. On 8 February 1891 she sent it to William Hayes Ward of the New York Independent, with a further inducement: the manuscript might be kept by the editor’s sister for her autograph collection. Written at the start of Dickinson’s anni mirabiles, in the summer of 1860, it soars into a timeless region as later T. S. Eliot would speak of the wind from ‘beyond the world’. Eliot and Dickinson were both soaked in the Bible, where wind and breath are the same. Dickinson recalls how the ‘breath blew back’. She’s ‘as one returned’ to report the vision. Unlike poets bereft of vision (as Eliot feels in the aftermath of his ‘moment’), Dickinson is heartened by her proximity to Eternity, like a sailor on a voyage of discovery who comes back exulting in her proximity to the ‘secrets of “the Line”’. A metaphoric venture beyond the equator floats her towards lines she is to write as ‘Reporter’ of unknown modes of being. She speaks from the brink of immortality:
… Therefore, as one returned, I feel,
Odd secrets of ‘the Line’ to tell!
Some sailor skirting novel shores!
Some pale ‘Reporter’ from the awful doors
Before the Seal!
Far from feeling, as Eliot, cast off by the timeless into a ‘waste’ of time-bound routines, Dickinson looked to renewed proximity to the timeless realm:
Next time to stay!
Next time, the things to see
By ear unheard —
Unscrutinized by eye!
Next time to tarry
While Ages steal —
Tramp the slow Centuries
And the Cycles wheel!
It’s to Susan and no one else that the poet ‘reports’ this crossing of the ‘Line’: the ultimate frontier. So when Susan offered this poem for publication early in 1891 it was not only for others to read, but also a validation of her tie with the poet.
She identified herself to Ward in her twofold capacity as wife to Dickinson’s brother and a chosen reader who had been at one with Dickinson’s gift ‘as I have known and felt it since our early girlhood intimacy’, poems ‘clear and crisp as soul’s crystal to me’.
Susan protested more freely to Ward: ‘All the more am I indignant at the silly fear of the public or lack of ability to recognize the power of many [poems] that were ruled out of the volume just printed.’ Her hope was to establish a rival relationship with a powerful editor. ‘I have many manuscript letter-poems from which I mean to make up into a unique volume as I can command the time.’
Todd, of course, could always command the time. Her advantage over Susan was not time or understanding, but the initiative to press on. Susan was not ‘lazy’; her home, anyone could see, was a model of domestic industry. She did transcribe about eighty poems (eliminating the dashes and capitalisations) and selected another fifty-nine for typing, since her own difficult hand was unlikely to engage editors. Sadly this effort, coming from the source closest to the poet, could not surface. Susan Dickinson found herself silenced.
If Susan had expected Lavinia to be gratified by the timely publication from her private hoard on 12 March 1891, the spirit of strife proved stronger. It is hard to like a person you have knowingly injured, who then stops speaking to you. Lavinia assuaged her guilt by liking Sue less. Then, too, the triumphant outcome of co-opting Todd hardened her partisan position. At the time Mabel Todd undertook to edit a second volume of the poems and contemplated a volume of letters, Lavinia turned against Susan, the primacy of whose tie with Emily was ever more evident as letters came to light. Why had Emily confided in Sue and concealed this hoard from the sister who had protected her so faithfully?
So it was that Lavinia fired a shot against Sue’s publication. Her protest to Ward laid out the law of ownership. A writer might give a manuscript to someone else, but the possessor is not the owner. Legally, the copyright on the writing remains with writer, and upon death transfers to the writer’s heir. On the basis of Emily’s will, which left Lavinia ‘everything’, Lavinia claimed (pushing the point) that Emily had granted her exclusive rights to her papers, and though Emily gave copies of poems to others they were given simply for private reading ‘and not to pass the property in them, which is mine’.
Unsurprisingly Susan challenged this. She had lost her husband to Mabel. Her friendship with Lavinia was being destroyed and now the thing she held most dear, her private relationship with Emily, was being ripped from her. She sounds a little desperate as she writes to Ward: ‘the sister is quite jealous of my treasure … All[?] [the poems and letters] I have are mine — given me by my dear Emily while living[,] so I can in honor do with them as I please.’
Ward, caught in the crossfire of these claims, politely declined further poems from the Dickinson papers. Sue apologised ‘that I so innocently have drawn you into a hornets’ nest. I beg that you will not be drawn into any correspondence with Miss Lavinia over the poems or allow yourself to be troubled by her foolish fits of temper … She feels a little baffled by my possession of so many mss. of Emily’s and is very foolish in her talk of law. I am quite used to her vagaries, and while I pity her, I shall never yield a line in my possession to her … I have a little article in my mind, with illustrations of Emily’s own, showing her witty humorous side which has all been left out of the book.’
Avoiding the ‘hornets’ nest’, Mr Ward did not take up this offer. There were two consequences: Lavinia’s principle of exclusive rights effectively blocked Susan’s attempt to open up an independent route to publication. At the same time, the hornets began to sting outside the family.
Higginson’s suggested title for the next volume, ‘Indian Pipes and Witch Hazel’, limits Dickinson as nature-poet. Fortunately the simple title Poems: Second Series prevailed. It was Todd’s turn at a preface. As well as eloquent testimony to the poet’s greatness, she offers facts about the five or six pages of notepaper Dickinson sewed together to make booklets for fair copies in the early 1860s. Todd called them ‘fascicules’. It’s not a word the Dickinsons used, but it has stuck.
Fired by success, Todd looked forward to ten volumes — there was an abundance of great poems. She also planned a selection of Dickinson letters. In a New England in which personal letters were looked on as ‘a private trust never to be made public’, this would have been impossible without the backing of Vinnie. In making the first attempts to date the letters Todd asked help from Dickinson’s circle, almost all of whom were alive when she went to work in 1891. She took care to enter into relationship with certain correspondents such as Emily’s schoolfriends Abiah Root (now Mrs Strong, and living in the Berkshires) and Emily Fowler (Mrs Ford), who could recall Emily as a girl in the 1840s.
A strange scene takes place in the middle of 1891, when the biographical project has barely begun. Mabel, with Austin’s collusion, begins to tamper* with the overwhelming evidence of Emily’s bond with Susan. A booklet containing ‘One sister have I in the house / And one a hedge away’ is taken apart so as to remove the poem. Emily’s sewing holes are cut to disguise the poem’s place in the booklet, but though the page is thus mutilated, and torn in two places, it’s not destroyed for the sake of another poem on the verso. Using black ink the mutilator scores out all the lines and, most heavily, the climax ‘Sue — forevermore!’
The text survives only because Susan retained the copy sent across the grass in the late 1850s. There are similar mutilations of many letters, especially Emily’s early letters to Austin, written when he was in love with Sue, and letters to Sue filled with Emily’s parallel, more entrancing ardour. All the mutilations are designed to obliterate the poet’s attachment to ‘Sister’.
In this adversarial atmosphere, the Lady Macbeth imperatives revived. Austin reported a ‘trying talk’ with his wife. ‘I must entreat you not to let it accomplish nothing,’ Mabel replied on 15 September 1891. ‘It is certainly true that you have the power in your own hands if you will only use it — you must use it — you must bring out some of your weapons and make them of use … I expect you to — I know you will.’
More than five hundred letters passed through Mabel Todd’s hands. She organised her selection on the basis of correspondents, arranged chronologically according to the date a correspondence began. Two formidable difficulties at once presented themselves: half the correspondence — the letters Dickinson received — had been destroyed and her own letters are undated after 1855. Todd had to determine dates, where possible, by way of postmarks or stamps, or on the basis of handwriting that changed three times, from the running hand of an older generation of gentlewomen to the curvy, hard-to-read hand of the 1860s and then, for the last twelve years of Dickinson’s life, a spare hand with each letter detached as in print. Other clues to dating were events that are mentioned (the 1851 visit to Northampton to hear Jenny Lind, or the 1855 visit to Washington). But in some cases it took Todd as long as a month to date a letter.
Given the array of correspondents — Abiah Root, Mrs Holland, Sam Bowles, Maria Whitney, Mabel Todd herself and many minor figures — a distorting omission is the correspondence with Susan. Nowhere is she mentioned. It’s a common temptation to editorial power to contrive a bias, sometimes in covert ways. Here the agenda is all too plain.
Another intense relationship was kept under wraps. No letters to Judge Lord were published for half a century, and by that time the renunciatory legend was so firmly established that Emily’s delight in the Judge’s visits and her candour about desire have been underplayed.
Austin required all reference to sickness be cut. Consistent with secrecy was the refusal of the Norcross sisters to let Todd see the letters in their possession. These remaining witnesses to Emily’s ills in her teenage years, and to the treatment she endured in Boston in 1864 and 1865, shielded their cousin from biographical intrusion. Fanny Norcross was distant and scrupulous: she offered to read aloud from the extracts and letters she had copied so that Todd could check the proofs for the forthcoming volumes, but no eyes, she insists, will ever fall on the censored content. The following letter makes it plain that a huge batch of Dickinson’s letters — the originals — are to disappear:
Concord [Massachusetts]
Aug. 1, 1894
My dear Mrs. Todd,
… I cannot send the letters, not because I fear they will be lost, but because my sister and I are not willing that any one even Vinnie should have the free reading of them; many of them have whole sentences which were intended for no eyes but ours, and on our own account as well as Emily’s no one else will ever read them. This we consider our right, and we must insist upon it.
I shall bring the letters which I copied almost as they are, and also those from which I made extracts, but I must retain the privilege of reading them to you. Of course the handwriting of the several periods of time will be open for your inspection …
Yours very truly
Fanny L. Norcross.
A week later, a tantalising scene ensued: Fanny Norcross holding Dickinson’s letters in front of Todd, cutting out the confidences as she reads.
For all the omissions, Todd again performed a remarkable feat, not only of retrieval and ordering but also understanding. Her unpublished essay (or talk) on the letters points to the suggestiveness of a letter to Bowles where the women he attracts (Emily, Susan and Vinnie, all of them jumpy with expectation as they await his knock at the Homestead door in the spring of 1862, before he goes to Europe for his health) offer flower-cups for his relief and delectation. This offering shows once again how Dickinson’s poetry is sparked by English women writers of her time. ‘We offer you our cups’ takes off from Christina Rossetti’s most recent and celebrated poem, ‘Goblin Market’ (1862). But where Rossetti’s beguiling sellers, all male, are sinister as drug dealers, Dickinson’s sellers, all female, offer what a sick man craves — unconditional love:
We offer you our cups, stintless as to the bee the lily, her new liquors.
Todd’s essay brings out the humorousness of Dickinson’s home nature, and her way of playing with darker moods. ‘With her, pathos lay very near to raillery and badinage, pain very near to delight.’ Todd does not deny that Dickinson bared her soul but seldom, and offers this explanation: ‘It was not so much that she was always on spiritual guard, as that she sported with her varying moods, testing them upon her friends.’
The essay was one of Todd’s efforts to promote the Letters. She travelled in a snowstorm to Brooklyn to lecture to an enraptured audience; she sent out leaflets to women’s clubs, with the help of fourteen-year-old Millicent who copied them out in a mature hand; and she made an imaginative proposal to Roberts Brothers: an ‘Emily Dickinson Year Book’, with ‘comets of thought’ appropriate to each day or season. ‘Think of reading against some day in March “House is being cleaned: I prefer pestilence.”’ Todd stood ready to collect ‘my 365 flashes’. Disappointingly, her publisher did not take up this idea.
Mabel Todd edited the Letters on her own. It was ‘a peculiarly delicate piece of literary work’ demanding ‘an endless amount of thought and tact’. As she typed, she noticed how ‘startling’ the prose looked ‘in the cold impartiality of print’. By the time she delivered the typescript to Roberts Brothers in August 1894, Todd had given the better part of seven years to the Dickinson papers. For all this work she had received, so far, $200 out of the $300 Lavinia had gained in royalties. Todd, as a professional writer who had to earn a living, quite reasonably felt that more was due to her, this time, in the way of copyright. The result of her claim was two versions of the contract with Roberts Brothers, arranged by E. D. Hardy who, that year, succeeded Mr Niles. One is the draft, sharing copyright and royalties with Todd. The other is the final version, in which Lavinia Dickinson retains exclusive copyright. The existence of two contracts was to provide ammunition for renewed battle in time to come. Mabel retained her copy of the draft contract which granted what she wanted. Lavinia retained her copy of the final contract which, in effect, deprived Mabel of what she wanted.
In the final contract it’s agreed that the proceeds [the royalties] and not the copyright itself would be shared equally with Mabel Loomis Todd ‘in consideration of the service rendered in preparing the manuscript and editing the said work’. Austin signed, as well as Lavinia.
For the first time in the succession of early contracts Austin took part in the negotiations, weighing in on Mabel’s side. His presence is apparent in a query from Roberts Brothers on 21 August as to whether they should insert a clause to the effect that when Miss Dickinson dies ‘the whole royalty is to go to Mrs. Todd’?
Lavinia refused. On 22 September she informed Mr Hardy of her final decision. The copyright for the letters was to be ‘the same as the Poems’: that is, in her name alone. ‘I have talked with Mrs Todd,’ Lavinia went on, ‘she is satisfied with my wish.’
Mr Hardy did not believe Mrs Todd was satisfied. That very day he informed Austin that Miss Dickinson ‘does not agree with your idea nor with Mrs Todd’s’.
Austin, infuriated, apologised to Mr Hardy for Lavinia’s change of mind. ‘This may all seem very queer to you, and it is. We are a queer lot.’
His revenge was to cast Lavinia not as staunch promoter of their sister’s greatness but as a rural dimwit thrilled to receive a publishing contract addressed to herself in a big envelope from Boston. Lavinia, he said, was ‘disturbed by the feeling that somehow her glory and magnificence are dimmed by any other than her supreme self being recognized’.
In fact, Vinnie had been fending off what she saw as another encroachment on the treasure she’d inherited from Emily, and this by a couple with whom she had always sided, to the detriment of the family next door who now avoided her.
Austin, in backing Mabel, complained with some justice that Lavinia saw her as a flunky. The demeaning connotation of ‘service’ in the final contract does bear this out. Lavinia had no idea what editing entailed, Austin raged to Mr Hardy. She thought it merely a matter of copying from manuscript and carrying the copies ‘in a heap’ to the publisher.
Lavinia was not quite so uninformed. The real problem was Todd’s failure to acknowledge Lavinia’s participation as prime mover in collecting letters. Her status as sister would naturally have been more persuasive to Emily’s circle than any number of winning approaches on the part of a stranger. (Todd’s own approaches were effective in part because they had Lavinia’s support.) Lavinia insisted that Todd’s preface should include a statement that Emily Dickinson’s sister had collected the letters. Todd, unaccustomed to submit on demand, persuaded Roberts Brothers to reprint the letters with a different version of that sentence. It was to say that Emily Dickinson’s sister had asked Mabel Loomis Todd to collect her letters, implying Todd alone had done the job.
To invite peace, Roberts Brothers was compelled to bring out more or less concurrent editions of the same book for the sake of this one sentence. The alteration appears negligible, but not so to the principals. Beneath these statements there rumbled adversarial claims of some importance: Lavinia resented the way Todd underplayed Lavinia’s role in favour of her own. Money was not the main issue, nor even the prestige of association with strangely brilliant letters unlike any other. The crux was Mabel Todd’s advance, a step further on to Dickinson territory: her first step had won Susan; her second step had won Ned; her third, Austin, with Lavinia’s assent; a fourth step had failed to win over the poet herself, but Emily’s death had opened the way for a takeover of her papers. From 1886 until 1894 Lavinia had seen herself in command of the papers, but in the summer of 1894 she detected danger signs: the challenge to exclusive copyright; the potential loss of family royalties at her death; the obliteration of the crusader role she had conceived and carried through since Emily died. Lavinia’s stand in holding on to copyright in the late summer of 1894 was, in this context, shoulder to shoulder with Emily’s last stand at ‘Thermopylae’.
Roberts Brothers printed one thousand copies of the Letters: two small grey-green volumes, stamped once more with Todd’s painting of Indian Pipes, this time tooled in gilt and even more prominent, centred on an otherwise empty front cover. (The name of the author appears only on the spine.) One volume carried a portrait of Emily; the other, a photograph of the well-kept Homestead on its rise above Main Street. Although copies sold quickly there was no continued demand, and this left Roberts Brothers a little in the red. Lavinia owed them $231.30. Years passed, and on 20 March 1899 the firm pressed Lavinia to settle the debt. At this point the firm was taken over by Little, Brown, and an alternative offered to Lavinia was ‘transfer of copyright’ to the publisher. Again Lavinia held on to copyright and the debt remained unpaid. When, later in 1899, she died intestate, copyright passed to her next of kin, the family at The Evergreens.
In her lifetime, Emily Dickinson had been called ‘the myth’; when she died, Todd saw her disappear more deeply into her ‘mystery’. Higginson introduced her to the public as a nunnish recluse who never thought of publication. He characterised her as ‘whimsical’, ‘wayward’, ‘uneven’ and ‘exasperating’. Actually, the blueprint for this character goes back to the poet herself: the coy Daisy of the Master letters and the untaught-Little-Me who writes to Higginson.
Austin smiled at Emily’s display of an ‘innocent and confiding nature’ in her letters to Higginson. He said, ‘Emily definitely posed in those letters.’
The same posture directs ‘This is my Letter to the World / That never wrote to me’. In 1863 the poet begs her ‘sweet countrymen’ to be kind to unassuming nonentity. Did she really think her countrymen sweet in 1863, at the height of the Civil War, biographer Alfred Habegger asks, adding, ‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’ Though the poet had placed this poem in the middle of a booklet, Higginson and Todd gave it the status of an authorial preface to their first volume, as though it were Dickinson’s authentic voice. Habegger rightly points out that it’s a disarming but ‘unreliable’ construct of feminine modesty, devised at a time when she is supremely confident of poetic immortality.
Austin insisted on his sister’s normality. Todd’s preface to Poems: Second Series, her essay on Dickinson’s letters, her review column (‘Bright Bits from Bright Books’) in the Home Magazine and her many public talks all publicised Austin’s message that his sister was neither disappointed nor an invalid. He was right to deny disappointment as a reason for seclusion, but his assertions that seclusion was a ‘normal’ development do not ring true. Mabel Todd offers no explanation beyond this assertion of normality. She was probably in the dark. It’s likely that little was disclosed, much less discussed, even in the family.
One small clue to seclusion was Austin’s uneasiness about his sister’s eyes. When Roberts Brothers wished to include a picture of Dickinson with the Letters, Austin ruled out the now famous daguerreotype taken when Emily was sixteen. Austin told Mabel it didn’t resemble her and Lavinia concurred. In that image her eyes are large, wide, dramatically alert, rather like the spare facial structure of a kangaroo, the creature to which she likened herself at the time. There was an attempt to doctor the daguerreotype with a tint, and in 1894 an artist, Laura Hills, was asked to introduce curls on Emily’s forehead in place of hair drawn straight back from a centre parting in a way that bares her face. Emily’s brother and sister would have remembered her hair as curly — not evident in the daguerreotype — and they would have been aware that curly hair had come into fashion. Now, in the nineties, a curly fringe overlaid the bared brow of the 1840s, yet the family aim is less fashion than a wish to revamp Dickinson’s image in the direction of tameness and femininity. The artist filled in the neck with a lace fichu. The girl’s level gaze and sensuous, almost swollen lips are toned down to a faintly smiling sweetness.
In the end, the daguerreotype did not appear in Austin’s lifetime. He insisted that a likeness to Emily was ‘far better’ in an oil portrait painted of her as a child, looking much like her red-haired brother and unlike their small dark sister. The child has a less distinctive look — she might be any ‘normal’, neatly turned out and reasonably placid little girl with short hair and a white frill about her neck — and this was the first image to be published, even though the unformed face of a child consorts oddly with the sophisticated verbal play of the letters. Curiously, even here, Austin expressed uneasiness. Todd, he said, must ask the artist at Roberts Brothers to ‘soften the eye in some way’. It must be ‘altogether softened’.
Lavinia remained dissatisfied with the ‘revised’ daguerreotype after she fell in love with a portrait that appeared in the pages of Century magazine in April 1897. It’s a miniature of Mrs Lloyd Rogers, a beauty with propped-up rounded bosoms and curls tumbling over her forehead. Lavinia detected, she thought, a likeness to Emily, though the beauty’s nose is narrower and her mouth small, set off by a stiff, upstanding ruff behind Mrs Rogers’ head. Lavinia decided to have a miniature painted, prettying the daguerreotype further on the model of Mrs Rogers and her outfit. The bogus miniature of Emily Dickinson perpetrated in May 1897 was beyond Lavinia’s ‘highest expectations. It really seems as if Emily were here’, she rejoiced. ‘I think the artist can create some fluffy finish for the neck. Perhaps a ruffle half as high and not quite so full as Mrs. Rogers’ would be the thing.’ In time this became a ruff to cover up the exposed funnel of the poet’s throat (and presumably the abnormalities coming out of it, what one reviewer called ‘the neuralgic darts of feeling’ voiced in ‘curiously farfetched’ words spaced out by ‘the hardly human dumbness’).
From the first, Todd too concocted a ‘picturesque’ image — the white legend — speaking as one who had witnessed it. ‘Dressed always in white, her graceful passing about the house seemed rather the coming and going of some gentle spirit than any mere earthly presence.’ Housekeeper’s Magazine picked this up and spread it further: Mabel Loomis Todd was one of the few privileged ones who were admitted to intimacy with the poet, ‘a dear ghost, seen but scarcely tangible’. Hardly the Emily who welcomed Lord’s touch.
At the same time, Todd did bring out the explosive character of the ‘startling little poetic bombs’, as though earthquakes, bolts, the revolver pointed at an unwanted self, and a life that stood a loaded gun had no connection with the ghostly writer. This blend of truth and evasion was to characterise future legend. Todd did encounter words like blades but, as mouthpiece for the family, never mentions this, any more than Jane Austen’s family saw fit to mention her sarcasms. Nineteenth-century families project an image of an authoress as retiring lady whose gift shades into an uneventful life. Nothing could be said of sickness, love, adultery or the rising fire of the feud.
What came to be called the War between the Houses took off with Lavinia’s discovery of the poems in the Homestead. This made her the sole legatee of a treasure, the value of which she immediately perceived — value, that is, to literature. Only gradually did she realise it was potentially an asset of untold proportions. The clearer this became with the publication of successive volumes, the sourer Austin turned towards Lavinia. Despite all she had risked for him and Mabel, all it had cost her in the affections of her niece and nephew (for, like Emily, Vinnie was very fond of Ned) Austin disparaged her limitations. He declared that she knew nothing beyond what callers could tell her.
‘My sister Vin,’ he thought fit to inform Higginson, ‘had no comprehension of her sister, yet believed her a shining genius.’
Happily, Emily’s posthumous voice testifies against this: her sister’s ‘inciting voice’ was part of her own courage, Emily had said. Without Vinnie, ‘life was fear and paradise a cowardice’. Their bond was ‘early, earnest and indissoluble’.
The more Austin failed to dent Lavinia’s allegiance, the more he let loose against her. For Lavinia held her own when it came to the papers. She became what she felt herself to be, a warrior as fierce and fervent as ‘Joan of Arc’.
Meanwhile, next door, Susan held on to her separate collection of poems and letters, amongst them some of the poet’s most daring works. The lines were now re-drawn for the battles to come: Lavinia versus Mabel Loomis Todd who had the ear of Austin Dickinson. Although Austin had no interest in Emily’s poetry he was Mabel’s man and determined to control Lavinia.
In the 1880s the focus of the feud had been adultery; in the 1890s the focus shifted to the divided treasure the poet had left behind. Who had the right to possess her? Who had the right to say what she was?
* Hamlet is ‘Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’.
* 1891 is the date given by R. W. Franklin in his 1967 pamphlet on editing ED. He assumed that the mutilation was done by Austin because, he argued, Mabel Todd had too much respect for manuscripts to do so. This view (current in 1967, when Mabel’s daughter was still alive and amassing scholarly support for her mother) underplays Mabel Todd’s initiatives. Her persistent project was to replace Susan as the poet’s intimate. It would be out of character for Austin to do this of his own accord; he was generally cautious about documents, as with his will.