Part Three
SEVENTEEN
The wheels of Austin Dickinson’s gleaming carriage screeched to a halt in front of the main gate of the Evergreens, and hearing the racket, Harriet Jameson bounded from her desk to the window. “I have no doubt he had a delightful drive with charming company,” she caustically remarked, settling herself back down and continuing her letter. “The gossips say the intimacy existing between him and Mrs. Todd is as great as ever.” To think that Mrs. Todd, utterly unrelated to the poet, had stood at poor Emily’s grave shedding copious tears. “Many people are leaving Mrs. T ‘alone’—,” Mrs. Jameson delivered the town’s verdict with smug satisfaction. For this was unimpeachable New England, where emotional displays were insupportable and, if ventured by an outsider, outrageous.
Ignorant of the village scuttlebutt, Wentworth Higginson returned to Amherst a few months after Dickinson’s funeral as the guest of Sue and Austin. Austin ushered the Colonel about town: two men of the world, or so Austin liked to believe, riding through the bucolic scenery in which Austin took almost boyish pride. Wicker baskets on back porches were filled with ripe apples, and the nearby hills decked in crimson and gold. Chatting away, Austin likely did not speak of Mabel except in a most general way, and one assumes that instead of town tattle the men talked of Emily’s poetry, which Lavinia was determined to see published.
Lavinia: alone in the now cavernous Homestead, surrounded by her cats, she was fretful and thin, the flesh having dropped from her bones in those last agonizing months before Emily died. And why had she been robbed of her one companion on earth, she indignantly wondered, until, that is, she discovered her sister’s poetry. She had known, of course, that her sister wrote poetry, but she was unprepared for the hundreds and hundreds of poems in Emily’s room, in the small bureau, some sewn together in booklets, others scribbled on the backs of envelopes, and she decided there and then that these poems would be published, preserved, respected. She would have her sister back.
It would not be an easy job. Vinnie knew that. Not only had Emily often written in a crabbed hand—as Higginson reminisced, it seemed she took her “first lessons by studying the famous fossil bird-tracks in the museum of that college town”—but the poems themselves looked to be in a state of confusion. Though Emily had collected some of them in small packets (Mrs. Todd called them fascicles, and the technical term has stuck) and grouped others in sets, many poems seemed incomplete. But literature was improvisation, much like Emily’s concoctions at the piano, remembered by all who heard them, and her poems were always in progress, meant to be revised, reevaluated, and reconceived, especially when dispatched to different readers, as her editors would soon discover. (As the poet Richard Howard has pointed out, finishing poems may not have interested her: “her true Flaubert was Penelope, to invert a famous allusion, forever unraveling what she had figured on the loom the day before.”) She kept variants and appears not to have chosen among them, sometimes toying with as many as eight possibilities for words, line arrangement, rhyme, enjambment; nor did she choose among alternative endings. And frequently she composed on scraps of paper—newspaper clippings, brown paper sacks—or around the edges of thin sheets, the writing almost illegible. Or she incorporated parts of poems into the letters, which themselves were acts of poetry.
Nor had she left instructions about how she might want her poems to appear in print, or whether they should appear in print at all. Nor did she tell us if the physical and visual properties of her manuscripts were as semantically important to her as contemporary critics contend.
From an editorial point of view, the situation was a mess.
Sue would have been the person most capable of sorting through Emily’s manuscripts, readying them for publication, but Vinnie mistrusted her. (“I was to have compiled the poems—,” Sue stretched the truth a bit, writing to the editor of The Independent in 1891, “but as I moved slowly, dreading publicity for us all, she [Vinnie] was angry and a year ago took them from me.”) Months passed, and though Sue had a boxful, she did nothing with them, or so Vinnie decided even though Sue had mailed a few poems, much as she had in the past, to men well situated in the literary world. To The Century’s editor, Richard Watson Gilder, she mailed, perhaps at Higginson’s request, a poem she titled “Wind” (“The Wind begun to rock the Grass”), noting that “Col. Higginson, Dr. Holland, ‘H.H.’ and many other of her literary friends have long urged her [Emily] to allow her poems to be printed, but she was never willing to face the world.” Gilder turned her down flat. The result from other magazines was equally discouraging.
Mabel Todd knew all of this. Austin told her everything: of Sue’s failures—a source of pleasure for Mabel—and of Vinnie’s manic determination. And Mabel had already decided that she alone was Emily’s special companion—though one the poet had refused to see—for even if no one else did, Mabel believed in the sincerity of her own feelings. And gripped by Emily’s spectral reputation, she identified with this wisp of a woman, who, though an Amherst insider by birthright, had quietly rejected its mores and earned admiration from the well-known likes, as Sue put it, of Josiah Holland, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Colonel Higginson. There was a lesson here.
If Mabel’s neighbors these days deemed her an adulteress less sympathetic than Hester Prynne, she resolved to be just as famous. “I know I have the gift of expression,” she reasoned. “But if I were to become sufficiently well-known, to be asked for articles and stories, that sort of stimulus would be very sweet to me. I do long for a little real, tangible success…. It is so beautiful to be appreciated!…after six years of being pressed down, & sat upon, & throttled!” She published reviews in The Nation, just as Higginson had once advised Helen Hunt Jackson to do—since 1877 he himself had been writing its “Recent Poetry” column—and Austin presented her with a hand-carved oak writing desk. He also sent one of her stories to George William Curtis at Harper’s, who rejected it. But the ever-buoyant Mabel did not quit or wait; with energy to burn, she wrote up her recent trip to Japan, where her husband, David, had been appointed the chief of the United States Eclipse Expedition. “Ten Weeks in Japan” soon appeared in St. Nicholas magazine, and over the next five years, as Mabel noted in her diary, her reviews and articles flooded the Illustrated Christian Weekly, the New York Evening Post, St. Nicholas, and The Nation. Eventually there was, as she crowed, “a notice of me in Woman’s Journal” and, far better, an invitation from the Boston literary doyenne Annie Fields, asking Mabel to tea at her famous Charles Street home on the bank of the river. Writing was the best revenge.
Mabel Loomis Todd in 1885, at 29, Austin Dickinson’s lover and soon to be Emily Dickinson’s champion and co-editor, with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, of the first three volumes of Dickinson’s poetry.
Emboldened by success, she wanted to publish her and Austin’s love letters, anonymously of course, their names discreetly omitted. Doubtless Austin scuttled the project. Yet he remained her secular religion, their love sacred, its grandeur her moral shield against guilt or infamy—or Sue, whom she transformed into a monster of cruelty and sloth. Mabel would rise above them all, she knew, as the advocate of the sublime, and if she could not articulate the sublime in a book of her lover’s letters, then why not in a book of poetry? By associating herself with the mythic Emily, Mabel could infuriate Sue and trump the entire town.
The timing was right. Mabel knew that Vinnie wanted above all else to see her sister’s poems in print, and Vinnie, exasperated by Sue and aware of Mabel’s Dickinson fixation, craftily showed her several of the poems. To be published, they would have to be copied, of course, the originals kept safe. Soon Mabel was transcribing them. Years later Vinnie would insist Mabel had begged for the privilege in order to enhance her own reputation, not Emily’s, and Mabel would claim Vinnie had solicited her unpaid and loyal assistance, which she freely gave.
Vinnie also enlisted Higginson when he again stayed at the Evergreens during the summer of 1888, while attending a meeting of the American Philological Society. Agreeing that a private printing of Emily’s poems would not circulate her work widely enough, he pledged his assistance—editing the poems, finding a publisher—even though he had recently been ill. And he promised to write a preface to the volume; his imprimatur would help get it noticed.
With Higginson on board and Vinnie an unrelenting overseer, Mabel worked harder and harder. Transcribing poems first by hand and then on her new Hammond typewriter, by the winter of 1889 Mabel was copying two or three a day out of the “wilderness” of them all: “they are almost endless in number,” she moaned. By her own admission she was also altering a large number of the poems as she copied, substituting words where she thought fit or choosing among the alternates Dickinson had written in the margins. “I felt their genius and I knew the book would succeed,” she said. “At the same time, their carelessness of form exasperated me. I could always find the gist & meaning, and I admired her strange words and ways of using them, but the simplest laws of verse-making she ignored, and what she called rhymes grated on me.” So she improved them.
And she continued to bang out her own compositions, articles for The Youth’s Companion, Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, The Century, and the Christian Union (mostly nonfiction), until, exhausted, she hired an assistant, Harriet Graves, to help her with the hundreds of poems still left. When Miss Graves proved a disappointment, Mabel copied more poems herself on her brand-new World typewriting machine before switching back to copying them by hand; it actually took less time and helped her commit the poems to memory, which she liked to do. Devoting three or four hours a day to the poems, she later remembered their mesmerizing effect. “They seemed to open the door into a wider universe than the little sphere surrounding me which so often hurt and compressed me,” she said, “and they helped me nobly through a very trying time.”
Temporarily finished, in the fall of 1889 Mabel finally met Colonel Higginson. In Boston with her daughter (David was on another eclipse expedition, this time in Angola), the ardent Mrs. Todd greeted the courtly Colonel on November 6, 1889, at her cousin’s Beacon Street home—far plusher than her own sparse rooms—and the unlikely collaboration commenced. Together they sifted through the huge stash of poems Mabel had brought: 634 by Mabel’s count, 600 copied personally by her.
“He staid an hour or more,” Mabel recorded in her diary, “and we examined the poems and discussed the best way of editing them.” Already writing for posterity in mythopoeic journal entries—these were distinct from her jottings in a daily diary—Mabel enhanced her role as Dickinson’s perspicacious sponsor. According to her, Higginson fretted that the poems, despite their fine ideas, were rough, mystical, and far too difficult to elucidate. “But I read him nearly a dozen from my favorites,” she claimed, “and he was greatly astonished.”
Of course he had been astonished for more than twenty years, and he had already promised his support, which he never withdrew even after Vinnie and Mabel, jealous of each other, publicly vied for center stage, disputing who loved the poems better, who grasped them more, who flagged and who never faltered or whose motives were clear and clean—and why Mabel had copied them in the first place. Through all of this, Higginson said little. Steadfast and unflappable, this booster of women writers and envoi of the literary establishment (an epithet that made him grimace), despite all—despite aesthetic orthodoxies and the peculiar stock he placed in them—despite this, he believed, as he always had, in Emily Dickinson.
IN THE FALL OF 1889, Thomas Wentworth Higginson was sixty-five years old. Though his hair grew thinner still, and whiter, and his health was dicey, he had run for United States Congress the year before and had been defeated, he said, without regret. The equanimity was feigned. His platform of civil service reform may have seemed irrelevant to many voters—that much was understandable—but a substantial number in the black community, as it turned out, were against him, and his conciliatory attitude toward the South inflamed Frederick Douglass, who accused Higginson and all the mugwumps of disloyalty “not only to that political organization [the Republican party], but to the cause of liberty itself.”
He did not ignore the criticism and, in his next collection of essays, Travellers and Outlaws: Episodes in American History, issued an implicit rejoinder to his detractors, for though the book included an antiquarian article on Salem sea captains, it also featured Higginson’s essays on Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, the Maroons of Jamaica, and the insurgent slave Gabriel, all reprinted as if to remind readers two decades after the Civil War that relations between black and white were as vexed, contradictory, and racked by prejudice as they’d been in 1831, when Turner’s rebellion unleashed a white Reign of Terror (Higginson’s term). The book didn’t sell and received few reviews.
As ever, though, his writing about politics reflected but one side of him. In the same year, 1889, that Travellers and Outlaws appeared, Higginson fulfilled a private dream, publishing his very first book of verse, The Afternoon Landscape: Poems and Translations, which he dedicated to his old schoolmate the poet James Russell Lowell. Before the Civil War and after, Higginson never stopped writing poetry, and while he recognized the boundaries of his talent, he nonetheless sought a form in which he could express “internal difference—/ ,” as Dickinson had put it, “Where the Meanings, are.” Such were the twin poles of his commitment to the life of the mind and the life of the activist, each tugging at the other. “No Man can be a Poet & a Book-Keeper at the same time,” Nathaniel Hawthorne had cried while just a boy. This was not just the plaint of an adolescent fed on the Romantic poets; this had become the unwritten law of American culture.
Since Higginson’s poetry was inhibited by its own kind of bookkeeping, particularly in its predictable prosody, it is hard to imagine him delighted by the heap of Dickinson verse delivered by Mrs. Todd. But he was. “There are many new to me which take my breath away,” he exulted, “& which also have form beyond most of those I have seen before.” Form: its conventions were his nemesis, for in his own work he could not heed his Emerson and remember that poetry is not meters but a meter-making argument.
Reviewers, generally as orthodox as he, found his work congenial. And much of it is; take the sonnet “The Snowing of the Pines,” for example:
Softer than silence, stiller than still air,
Float down from high pine-boughs the slender leaves.
The forest floor its annual boon receives
That comes like snowfall, tireless, tranquil, fair.
Gently they glide, gently they clothe the bare
Old rocks with grace. Their fall a mantle weaves
Of paler yellow than autumnal sheaves
Or those strange blossoms the witch-hazels wear.
Athwart long aisles the sunbeams pierce their way;
High up, the crows are gathering for the night;
The delicate needles fill the air; the jay
Takes through their golden mist his radiant flight;
They fall and fall, till at November’s close
The snow-flakes drop as lightly—snows on snows.
Despite archaisms (“athwart”) and the awkward inversions (“The forest floor its annual boon receives”), the poem’s final sestet vividly re-creates the coming stillness (the descending alliteration of “fill,” “flight,” “fall, “fall,” and “flakes”), and its last line recalls one of the very first poems Dickinson showed him, “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—,” with its striking “Soundless as Dots, / On a Disc of Snow.”
But the comparison ends there. For if we put Higginson’s poetry next to Dickinson’s, we automatically traduce it and overlook the lyric poignancy of a poem like his “Sea-Gulls at Fresh Pond,” which strikingly anticipates Yeats’s far grander “Wild Swans at Coole”:
O lake of boyish dreams! I linger round
Thy calm, clear waters and thine altered shores
Till thought brings back the plash of childhood’s oars,—
Long hid in memory’s depths, a vanished sound.
Alone unchanged, the sea-birds yet are found
Far floating on thy wave by threes and fours,
Or grouped in hundreds, while a white gull soars,
Safe, beyond gunshot of the hostile ground.
I am no nearer to those joyous birds
Than when, long since, I watched them as a child;
Nor am I nearer to that flock more wild,
Most shy and vague of all elusive things,
My unattainable thoughts, unreached by words.
I see the flight, but never touch the wings.
To see the flight, but never touch the wings: Higginson could be writing of Dickinson, for he had in fact said almost that same thing to her when he admitted, as he said, that it would be so easy to miss her. “I cannot reach you,” he had cried, “but only rejoice in the rare sparkles of light.” And Dickinson hovers over his poems “The Dying House” and “Astra Castra,” the latter dedicated to free spirit ironically held in check by the sonnet form itself—that is, by the conventional versifier, Colonel Higginson. Yet the nascent poet in him recognizes, without envy, that this spirit dwells “beyond all worlds, all space, all thought, /…transformed.”
Could we but reach and touch that wayward will
On earth so hard to touch, would she be found
Controlled or yet impetuous, free or bound,
Tameless as ocean, or serene and still?
If in her heart one eager impulse stirs,
Could heaven itself calm that wild mood of hers?
A man of limits, to be sure, Higginson was gifted enough to sense what lay beyond him.
The volume was handsome, its tan covers decorated with gilt lettering. Overall, though, the book spoke of resignation even in its title, The Afternoon Landscape, for the fresh morning of transcendentalism and abolition had yielded at last to that “certain Slant of light, / ,” as Dickinson had written, of “Winter Afternoons—.”
BUSY WITH HIS VARIOUS PROJECTS and stricken by a stomach ailment of unknown origin, Higginson initially could not devote much time to the Dickinson poems. But he had promised Vinnie that once the poems were divided into three categories (A, B, and C), he would carefully look them over. Likely that task had fallen to Vinnie as well as Mrs. Todd, but Mabel remembered only her own work: “A contained those of most original thought expressed in as nearly good form as ED ever used,” she explained. “B those of striking ideas, but showing too much of her peculiarities of construction to be used unaltered for the public; & C those impossible for such use, however brilliant & suggestive.”
It was hard work. “My brain fairly reels,” she cried to Austin. But on November 18, not two weeks after meeting with Higginson, she dispatched the poems, all labeled, to the Colonel, who scrawled “Emily Dickinson’s poems” in his diary in uncharacteristically bold letters. In less than a week he contacted Mrs. Todd. “My confidence in their availability is greatly increased. It is fortunate there are so many because it is obviously impossible to print all & this leaves the way open for careful selection.”
Reading through half of Mabel’s A list, Higginson grouped the poems thematically under headings such as “Life,” “Nature,” and “Time / Death / Eternity.” “Perhaps you can suggest more subdivisions,” he proposed. “The plates will cost rather less than $1 per page and there can often be two poems on a page—rarely more than one; say $230 for 250 pp including 300 poems.” Three weeks later he again reported that “I am at work with many interruptions on the poems; have gone through ‘B’ and transferred about twenty to ‘A’ (we must have that burglar—the most nearly objective thing she wrote.) ‘C’ I have not touched.”
With Higginson so fully committed, Vinnie grew impatient with Mabel, who was heading for Chicago. Why hadn’t she contacted Higginson again? “You are acting for me & not yourself,” Vinnie scolded. “I can’t believe he has gotten any word from you. I wrote him you would call upon him & maybe he expects you whenever you are ready to do so. It is a great disappointment & surprise that this delay must be. I now regret the poems are in his hands.” Mrs. Todd must see the Colonel immediately, Vinnie commanded, to urge him forward, and when Mabel did not comply, Vinnie picked up a pen and wrote him herself. He answered with good news: he had “selected and arranged” about two hundred of Dickinson’s poems “to begin with. Then, if you wish, others may follow:
|
Life |
44 |
|
Love |
23 |
|
Nature |
60 |
|
Time & Eternity |
72 |
|
_____________________ |
|
|
199 |
Vinnie liked the headings, and when Higginson recommended someone write an article about the poems to prepare the public—he seems to have forgotten that he had volunteered—Vinnie asked him to do it. Miffed, Mabel said nothing.
Aware of the exceptional character of Dickinson’s genius, Higginson also suspected that readers and publishers might dismiss the poetry out of hand. Gingerly, he contacted acquaintances in the business. Houghton Mifflin thought he had lost his mind, and at Roberts Brothers, Thomas Niles stiffly reminded the Colonel that he always thought it “unwise to perpetuate Miss Dickinson’s poems,” which, as he pompously concluded, he regarded as notable chiefly for their defects.
Out of respect for Higginson, however, Niles took a slight risk. If Lavinia Dickinson would pay for the plates of a small edition—“which shall be exempt from copyright, all future issues to be subject to 15% copyright on the retail price of all sold”—he would print a limited run of the poems.
Vinnie accepted with pleasure.
NILES HANDED THE DICKINSON manuscript over to the writer Arlo Bates, his outside reader, and though Bates admitted that the author of this rude verse “came very near to that indefinable quality which we call genius,” he recommended publishing only half the poems, and those rigorously edited. Some of the ones Bates omitted—and we cannot be entirely sure which they were—Higginson regarded as Dickinson’s finest, but Mabel began editing the selections, crossing out Dickinson’s dashes, correcting her punctuation and spelling, omitting capitals, and regularizing rhyme at will.
Forever after, Higginson would be remembered as the graceless editor who shamelessly cut Dickinson down to Victorian size. But which editor, Todd or Higginson, changed what? Who was the more obtuse? Even Ralph Franklin, in an excellent study of extant Dickinson manuscripts and their copies, cannot definitively say whether Higginson or Mabel Todd bore the chief responsibility for tailoring Dickinson to fit prevailing norms. Mrs. Todd, who cropped poems when first transcribing them, herself later conceded, “I changed words here and there in the two hundred to make them smoother—he changed a very few.” But Higginson went along.
Enamored of Dickinson’s poetry but convinced it contained faults, Mabel had decided to prepare the poet to meet the public in as respectable a garb as possible; her torrid affair with the poet’s brother did not imply that she would throw all convention to the wind, far from it. Higginson, on the other hand, considered the poems a rarity but knew he had to spoon-feed a palatable version to that selfsame and ponderous public he had upbraided and cajoled and fought against for many years. He thus occasionally objected to Mabel’s interference. “I find with dismay that the beautiful ‘I shall know why, when time is over’ has been left out,” he protested in July of 1890, after he saw the completed manuscript and restored the poem from memory. And when Mrs. Todd wanted to correct Dickinson’s grammar in the poem “I died for Beauty—,” substituting “laid” for the ungrammatical “lain” (“When One who died for Truth was lain”), he protested and won.
During the summer, Higginson and Mrs. Todd corresponded, making the final alterations for which they have been blamed ever after—as if any of us, had we lived over one hundred years ago, might not have floundered in similar ways. For language like this had never been seen before; nothing like it, really, ever appeared again. Still, both editors erred on the side of what they thought was caution. In the poem “These are the days when Birds come back—,” Mabel wished to change the fourth line, “These are the days when skies resume,” to the more prosaic, unlyrical “These are the days when skies put on.” Higginson again went along. And over Mabel’s own protest, he himself demanded that the last line of “The Grass so little has to do” be changed from “I wish I were a Hay—” to “I wish I were the hay.” “It cannot go in so,” he presumably said, “everybody would say that hay is a collective noun requiring the definite article. Nobody can call it a hay!” As a result the last lines were printed “And then to dwell in sovereign barns / And dream the days away,—/ The grass so little has to do, / I wish I were the hay!” Strict grammar here makes no sense.
Then there was the matter of titles. Dickinson did not use them. On occasion when writing to a correspondent, she might identify her poems with something like them; for instance, she had labeled the poems “Further in Summer than the Birds” and “It sifts from Leaden Sieves—” “My Cricket and the Snow” when writing to Thomas Niles. And when printed in newspapers, her poems were titled, but whether by her or an editor, we don’t know. That’s it. But Higginson wanted titles, and Mrs. Todd agreed, even though, as she said, she did “not believe, myself, in naming them; and although I admire Mr. Higginson very much, I do not think many of his titles good.” In later years she again claimed Higginson had been more addicted to titles than she, or, as she defended herself, she “was exceedingly loath to assign titles to any of them which might not be unmistakably indicated in the poem itself.”
Yet when editing Poems, Third Series, without Higginson, Mabel encumbered the poems with as many titles as she and Higginson together used previously. Both of them, then, were guilty of saddling Dickinson’s complex, subtle, and tricky work with unwieldy headings that read like monosyllabic penny dreadfuls: “Almost!” “The Secret,” “Dawn,” “Real,” “Setting Sail,” “Too Late,” “Why?” and “In Vain.” Regardless, the editors left more than a quarter of the poems untitled, affording the room for interpretation that a Dickinson poem demands: “Presentiment—is that long shadow—on the Lawn—,” “A wounded deer leaps highest,” “The Brain within its groove,” “I’ve seen a Dying Eye,” and “I reason, earth is short.”
And sometimes they omitted whole stanzas, as is the case with “Because I could not stop for Death—,” where they left out the lines “Or rather—He passed Us—/ The Dews drew quivering and Chill—/ For only Gossamer, my Gown—/ My Tippet—only Tulle—.” Other times they removed punctuation and in so doing cut terror from the heart of a poem. Compare, for instance, these two versions of “Two swimmers wrestled on the spar.” The following is Dickinson’s original:
Two swimmers wrestled on the spar—
Until the morning sun—
When One—turned smiling to the land—
Oh God! the Other One!
The stray ships—passing—
Spied a face—
Opon the waters borne—
With eyes in death—still begging raised—
And hands—beseeching—thrown!
This is the handiwork of Higginson and Todd:
Two swimmers wrestled on the spar
Until the morning sun,
When one turned smiling to the land.
O God, the other one!
The stray ships passing spied a face
Upon the waters borne,
With eyes in death still begging raised,
And hands beseeching thrown.
In each version the words are the same, but by omitting dashes and smoothing line breaks, the editors blunted the poem’s edge with a quiet if disconsolate picture of prayer.
Despite the editorial heavy-footedness and in some instances outright butchery, Dickinson’s poems remarkably retain their meaning, their power to reach beyond what can be seen, heard, or felt. Consider the poem ineptly titled “Death and Life.” The dashes have been removed, the punctuation regularized, and yet the images of amputation, beheading, and assassination concoct a world—or a God—cruel in its murderous indifference to life:
Apparently with no surprise
To any happy flower,
The frost beheads it at its play
In accidental power.
The blond assassin passes on,
The sun proceeds unmoved
To measure off another day
For an approving God.
If the strategies of Todd and Higginson differed slightly, the result was the same, and both editors were eventually pilloried for bowdlerizing the poet’s work. But they did not suppress or occlude it; rather, they presented it to an audience like them that, after many years of saccharine poetasting and propaganda, hungrily devoured the fresh, intricate, and dramatically novel verse.
LAVINIA DID NOT WISH Mabel to receive any credit for the Dickinson book. None. “I dare say you are aware our ‘co-worker’ is to be ‘sub rosa,’” Vinnie wrote to Higginson, “for reasons you may understand.” Not only was he confused, but he was barely able to read Vinnie’s swerving cursive, which he naively asked Mabel to decipher. “I have her letter to Mr. Higginson,” Mabel seethed in her diary, “& I am trying not to be furious.”
Mabel assumed Vinnie wanted to avoid a fight with Sue, who, as it happened, by having submitted Emily’s poems to magazines, made copyright a problem. Though Lavinia insisted the poems belonged entirely to her—that Emily had left them solely to her—Todd and Higginson now needed permission to use “There came a Day—at Summer’s full” because Sue had sold it to Scribner’s Magazine three months before the book was scheduled to appear. Higginson thought Sue could be enlisted as part of the forthcoming volume; surely her tender obituary of Emily in the Springfield Republican would beautifully introduce the book. Lavinia—and Mabel of course—recoiled. Higginson’s essay would preface the volume, as promised; discussion over.
And there was, too, the issue of Mrs. Todd’s name on the book’s title page. “Your name should appear somewhere”: Higginson ignored Vinnie’s objection, suggesting that the title page contain both their names, if that did not seem too awkward for so small a book. When Mabel expressed delight, he placed hers prominently: “It is proper that yr name shld come first as you did the hardest part of the work.”
By then he had finished a long essay on Dickinson, introducing her and her strange verse to the public. Published in the Christian Union in September 1890—slated for the Century, it would appear there too late—the essay is the longer, more relaxed form of what would become Higginson’s preface to the poems. Far less defensive than the brief preface, the essay begins in Higginson’s conversational style:
Emerson said, many years since, in the “Dial,” that the most interesting department of poetry would hereafter be found in what might be called “The Poetry of the Portfolio,” the work, that is, of persons who wrote for the relief of their own minds, and without thought of publication. Such poetry, when accumulated for years, will have at least the merit of perfect freedom; accompanied, of course, by whatever drawback follows from the habitual absence of criticism. Thought will have its full strength and uplifting, but without the proper control and chastening of literary expression; there will be wonderful strokes and felicities, and yet an incomplete and unsatisfactory whole. If we believe, with Ruskin, that “no beauty of execution can outweigh one grain or fragment of thought,” then we may often gain by the seclusion of the portfolio, which rests content with a first stroke and does not over-refine and prune away afterwards.
With the metaphor of “Poetry of the Portfolio,” Higginson intended to nip in the bud any criticism of Dickinson’s unusual form, for the Higginson who had been Dickinson’s ally—sometime muse, sometime guardian, sometime epistolary inamorato—had always insisted that form serves thought, and Dickinson’s poems wonderfully “delineate, by a few touches, the very crises of physical or mental struggle.”
He went on to praise enthusiastically such poems as “Glee—The great storm is over,” “I never saw a moor,” and “Soul, wilt thou toss again?”:
Soul, wilt thou toss again?
By just such a hazard
Hundreds have lost, indeed,
But tens have won an all.
Angels’ breathless ballot
Lingers to record thee;
Imps in eager caucus
Raffle for my soul!
“Was ever the concentrated contest of a lifetime, the very issue between good and evil, put into few words?” he marveled. And when reproducing “I died for beauty,” he compared it for weirdness—a good quality—with the work of William Blake, and no one, he cagily added, would dare criticize Blake for defects in draftsmanship. “When a thought takes one’s breath away, who cares to count the syllables?” With a courage that shrank from nothing, Dickinson looked straight into the heart of darkness, he concluded, again recalling the unforgettable stanzas of “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—” sent him so many years ago, those daringly condensed lines that, he said, struck a note much too fine to be lost or excised:
Grand go the years in the crescent above them;
Worlds scoop their arcs, and firmaments row,
Diadems drop and Doges surrender,
Soundless as dots on a disk of snow.
THE BOOK WAS DONE. Bound in white, framed in gold and stamped in the same color, it was slim, handsome, understated. On the front was a picture of silver Indian pipes. Its title was simply Poems.
“I am astounded,” Higginson cried, holding the book in his hands. “How could we ever have doubted about these?”
How could he have doubted anything? He suddenly realized, in dismay, that Dickinson’s letters to him had contained poems as good as the ones just printed: “No Brigadier throughout the Year,” for instance, and “A Route of Evanescence” and “Dare you see a Soul at the ‘White Heat’?” and “The nearest Dream recedes—unrealized—” and “When I hoped I feared—” and “Before I got my eye put out—” and “It sifts from Leaden Sieves” and “A Bird, came down the Walk”—so many of the poems she had sent to him over the years.
Your riches taught me poverty.
“This shows we must have another volume by and by,” he cried, “& this must include prose from her letters, often quite as marvellous as her poetry.”
The floodgates were open. Higginson turned in relief to the cunning and unsinkable Mrs. Todd, “the only person who can feel as I do about this extraordinary thing we have done in recording this rare genius.”
“I feel,” he burst out, “as if we had climbed to a cloud, pulled it away, and revealed a new star behind it.”