After Emily
Page 14
Sometime after Emily’s funeral, her sister Lavinia discovered hundreds of poems Emily had written and saved. In an unpublished paper called “Emily Dickinson, Poet and Woman,” Mabel suggested it was just “a day or two after her death her sister came upon a sad yet delightful surprise in finding a locked drawer filled to the brim with manuscript poems.”9 Some of the poems were gathered in close to sixty small collections Emily had hand-sewn together with twine. Vinnie referred to these as “volumes,” while Mabel would coin the term “fascicles” to describe them. (Literary theorist Virginia Jackson suggests that Mabel preferred “the botanical term for a bundle of stems or leaves to Lavinia’s image of a series of bound books.” Perhaps it was Vinnie’s image of the poems as books, a valued commodity in the Dickinson home, that convinced her they were not part of Emily’s private papers, which she had promised to burn.)10
Lavinia would continue to find poems for several years after Emily’s death, some written in the margins of saved newspapers, some on scraps of paper or the backs of envelopes and shopping lists and even on brown paper bags from the grocers’. Poet, visual artist and Dickinson researcher Jen Bervin writes, “Dickinson’s writings might best be described as epistolary. Everything she wrote—poems, letters, in drafts, in fascicles, on folios, individual sheets, envelopes, and fragments—was predominantly composed on plain, machine-made stationery.” In the catalog publication paired with a 2017 exhibit at the Morgan Library of Dickinson’s manuscripts, scholar Marta Werner utilizes a map metaphor for explaining how one can assess the poet’s various manuscripts: “They are aids to our navigation of the world; they give meaning to the ideas of near and far . . . form a kind of poetic atlas, her many unbound poems on single sheets or partial sheets seem like close-ups or bright fragments torn from an infinite but now vanished map.”11
Vinnie sought to preserve each poem or partial poem she found. Though Mabel quipped many years later, “Vinnie went away to school, though there was no inspiration of intellect to take her,”12 Lavinia nevertheless knew enough to recognize her sister’s genius, and it was of utmost importance to her that others should also acknowledge Emily’s gift. She quickly determined that she would not destroy the poetry, but instead would share it widely with the world.
Lavinia’s staunch belief in the significance of her sister’s poetry came from her experience in the role of Dickinson family facilitator. Born in 1833, the youngest of Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson’s children, Vinnie, who once wrote of herself, “I had the family to keep track of,” grew up to play a pivotal role in the lives of her parents, her siblings, her sister-in-law and her brother’s lover. Richard Sewall’s multifaceted assessment of Vinnie suggests that while Emily considered her sister to be “the uncomplicated Dickinson,” Lavinia had greater depth. Her quirky humor, dedication to household tasks and above all, her devotion to her family reveal her to have been the glue in a set of complex family relations. “As Emily’s closest associate for more than fifty years,” writes Sewall, “she became indispensable to her in many ways.” Vinnie became Austin’s confederate once he began bringing Mabel to The Homestead, enabling their relationship. Vinnie also developed an independent relationship with Mabel, who came to call on her frequently, and also with David. After Gib and Emily Norcross’s deaths and during her sister’s increasing illnesses, “Vinnie’s life was not a happy one . . . about the only solid pleasure in her life during these years seems to have come from her friendship with Mrs. Mabel Todd.”13 So it is not surprising that when Vinnie discovered the treasure trove of Emily’s poems, she felt compelled to do something with it.
In her 1945 recounting of the “literary debut of Emily Dickinson” in Ancestors’ Brocades, Millicent recalled her mother had said, “shortly after Emily’s death her sister Lavinia came to me actually trembling with excitement. She had discovered a veritable treasure—a box full of Emily’s poems that she had no instructions to destroy. She had already burned without examination hundreds of manuscripts and letters to Emily, many of them from nationally known persons, thus, she believed, carrying out her sister’s wishes. . . . Later, she bitterly regretted such inordinate haste. But these poems, she told me, must be printed at once. Would I send them to some printer—as she innocently called them—which was the best one, and how quickly could the poems appear?”14
Apparently, Mabel was Vinnie’s third choice. She first brought the poems to the attention of Sue Dickinson, with whom Vinnie had had a difficult and complicated relationship. Richard Sewall and other Dickinson biographers have pointed to Vinnie’s loyalty to Emily and consequent distrust of Sue for the many times she had disappointed Emily. Sewall suggests that Emily’s relations with Sue were “uneven”: on the one hand, the two had been extremely good friends prior to Sue and Austin’s marriage, they exchanged many letters and poems over many years, but on the other, Emily ceased visiting her sister-in-law sometime in the late 1860s and there appeared to be a breach in their friendship. Sewall also posits that in her role as observer of family tensions Emily saw too many examples of Sue’s “deceptions”—actions that Sewall never spelled out fully—and that Vinnie was well aware of Emily’s ambivalence. Vinnie was also fiercely loyal to Austin, and she knew that Sue made him unhappy. Sewall mentions letters from other Dickinson neighbors and friends suggesting Vinnie was “Curiously in fear of Sue; Vinnie’s charge that Sue shortened Emily’s life with her cruelties . . . and treated them [Emily and Vinnie] as strangers or worse.” He quotes Vinnie’s friend, Mary Lee Hall’s 1935 comment: “Sue was relentlessly cruel to Miss Vinnie in every possible way. . . . I was called to Miss Vinnie’s many times to quiet her nerves and help her recover from Sue’s verbal blows.” Sewall admits that while “it is almost impossible to determine the acts here,” that anecdotal evidence, such as Vinnie’s suggestion that Sue had “set her dogs on Vinnie’s cats” might show why Vinnie would have had her own ambivalence about her sister-in-law.15
But whatever her feelings for Sue might have been, Vinnie knew that Emily had given Sue some of her poems. In fact, some sources suggest Emily sent Sue hundreds of poems over the years.16 While Vinnie knew that Sue “professed great admiration of Emily’s work,” and Vinnie believed Sue a knowledgeable advocate for great art, Sue envisioned only a small private printing of the poems, hardly the grand circulation Vinnie imagined. When Sue did not move with alacrity to organize and prepare the poems for publication, Vinnie grew impatient. She later wrote in a letter, “Mrs. Dickinson was enthusiastic for a while, then indifferent & later utterly discouraging.”17
Mabel’s rendering of this story was more pointedly accusatory. After the first volume of poetry was published in 1890, Mabel reflected in her journal, “Susan and her progeny are still outraged at me. . . . Why is still a mystery to me, for they had the entire box of Emily’s manuscripts over there for nearly two years after she died, and Vinnie urging them all the time, with fierce insistence, to do something about getting them published.” She went on to write, “Susan is afflicted with an unconquerable laziness, and kept saying she would, and would perhaps, until Vinnie was wild. At last she announced that she thought nothing had better be done, they would never sell, they had not enough money to get them out, the public would not care for them . . . in short, she gave it up.”18 (Mabel’s recollection was skewed, or exaggerated—in fact, Mabel began copying the poems in 1887, just nine months after Emily’s death, not two years.)
Vinnie next turned to Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson. During her lifetime, Emily had sent him many letters and nearly one hundred poems, over a period spanning almost two decades. Emily initially wrote to Higginson, who was known for his work in many of the social reform movements of the day but also widely known as an author and respected literary critic, following the publication in 1862 of his inspirational “Letter to a Young Contributor” encouraging would-be authors. Emily’s letter asked him if her verse was “alive,” and enclosed four poems; he was intrigued enough to write her back immediately and find
out more about the mysterious “E Dickinson.” Through their subsequent correspondence about her work, Emily came to refer to herself as his “scholar” and called Higginson her “preceptor.” Higginson offered his thoughts and advice but never suggested she publish her poetry. “Higginson had always admired Emily’s dazzling thoughts,” suggests Sewall, “but had consistently deplored the form of her poems.”19
When Vinnie wrote to Higginson about the project to publish her sister’s poetry, he replied “that he was extremely busy, and that the confused manuscripts presented a nearly insuperable obstacle to reading and judging such quantities of poems. Though he admired the singular talent of Emily Dickinson, he hardly thought enough could be found to make an even semi-conventional volume.”20
And so, twice discouraged, Vinnie turned to Mabel.
COLONEL THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON ALREADY HAD ACCOLADES IN MANY FIELDS BEFORE TAKING ON THE TASK OF CO-EDITING THE EARLY VOLUMES OF EMILY DICKINSON’S POETRY.
From Mabel’s diaries and journals, the letters between Lavinia and Mabel and some of the Dickinson biographies, it is clear that Lavinia greatly admired Mabel’s social graces, energy and ambition. She knew that Mabel was well connected and could get the poems published. Lavinia also knew that her brother loved Mabel passionately, and she did all she could to enable the relationship: allowing their assignations to occur in her house while ensuring that Sue would not be there, delivering messages from Austin to Mabel and vice versa and at times even addressing envelopes for her brother to throw off suspicion. Mabel, for her part, seemed to welcome the connection with Vinnie. Her diaries note many times when she went to “call on Miss Vinnie” or “went to Vinnie’s at two—a very sweet and lovely hour.” Mabel would often shop for Vinnie (Millicent recalled, “my mother seldom went to Boston without making some purchase for Miss Vinnie”21) and brought her items from her trips abroad. She tolerated Vinnie’s many eccentricities (her multiple cats and her extreme devotion to them, her peculiar modes of discourse and dress, her general paranoia) and she put up with Vinnie’s visits to The Dell, made late at night because, as Millicent observed, “[Vinnie] merely disliked having her movements known to her neighbors and so made her calls after dark.”22
Vinnie knew that Mabel would share her own aspirations for a wide printing and circulation of the poetry, as well as her conviction that the poems were brilliant, and prevailed upon Mabel to get them published. Historian Sharon Nancy White suggests “Mabel’s immediate and steadfast admiration for Dickinson’s poetry,” from the time Sue first shared one of Emily’s poems, “underscores Mabel’s readiness to respect her as an artist.” As Mabel noted in her journal, Vinnie “always knew that I had faith in the poems.”23
Upon looking through the materials Vinnie brought her, however, Mabel saw the enormity of the task. “I told her that no one would attempt to read the poems in Emily’s own peculiar handwriting, much less judge them; that they would all have to be copied, and then be passed upon like any other production, from the commercial standpoint of the publishing business, and that certainly not less than a year must elapse before they could possibly be brought out. Her despair was pathetic. ‘But they are Emily’s poems,’ she urged piteously, as if that explained everything.” Mabel later recalled that Vinnie had no clue of how many poems there were, nor that Emily’s handwriting—always somewhat difficult to read—shifted in three different styles. Nor did Vinnie realize that many poems were “written on both sides of the paper, interlined, altered and the number of suggested changes was baffling.” Mabel estimated that “the mere copying . . . if pursued for four hours each morning, would occupy two or three years,” and if one attempted to understand and incorporate Emily’s own edits, that the task “might take much longer.”24
Mabel didn’t initially commit, recording in her journals that both David and Austin urged her not to take on the poems, suggesting that the project was likely to eat up years of her time. In 1930, Mabel stated that she had “tried at first to persuade Lavinia to place the poems with someone else. I hesitated to take on so much work and study, as well as to assume the responsibility necessary for the successful launching of a new poet on the sea of literary criticism. But she was unalterably determined that mine should be the hand which should help Emily sail.”25 Scholar R. W. Franklin suggests that Mabel’s hesitation also came from “her own literary aspirations. . . . Editing Emily’s poetry could interfere with her own work, for, as she knew, she had more ideas than time in which to realize them.”26 Though Mabel was incredibly industrious—she sensed that she could work on the poems and still pursue her own projects—she was still reluctant.
Vinnie persisted, making frequent late-night visits to Mabel’s home urging her to undertake the work. “She . . . begged me vehemently to begin, only begin on the poems. One winter evening she arrived just before midnight. She was more than ever certain that I must undertake it. . . . Lavinia almost went on her knees to me that night, and it hurt me to see her so intensely in earnest over what might prove disappointing. But at last I did promise to put the poems in shape, try to find a publisher, and to begin the very next day.”27
The first clear indication that Mabel decided to take on the task of copying Emily’s poetry is a brief mention in a February 1887 journal entry. Mabel knew that she would be accompanying David on the first astronomical expedition to Japan from June to October. But starting in November 1887, after she returned from Japan, there are more frequent entries in her diary about spending several hours per day copying the poems; she sometimes noted bringing them over to The Homestead to share with Vinnie.
Polly Longsworth suggests that Mabel might have interpreted Vinnie’s request to copy Emily’s poems and get them published as a task “tangential” to Mabel’s own literary aspirations. Longsworth believes that because Mabel’s letters to Austin in 1887–1889 do not reflect much about her work on the poetry and because there are only scattered and rote entries in Mabel’s diaries about working on this project, it was one Mabel undertook “principally as a favor—an enormous favor as it evolved—to Vinnie.”28
However, Mabel’s reflections from just a few years later suggest another interpretation. “The poems were having a wonderful effect on me, mentally and spiritually,” she recalled. “They seemed to open the door into a wider universe than the little sphere surrounding me which so often hurt and compressed me—and they helped me nobly through a very trying time. Their sadness and hopelessness was so much bitterer than mine.” Notes for lectures Mabel gave a couple of years later support the idea that she came to see her work on Emily’s poetry as an activity that freed her from other more depressing aspects of her life and inspired her to persevere.29
It is clear from Mabel’s journals, diaries and letters that the years during which she copied the poems were trying ones. Austin neither left his home nor his marriage, and Mabel’s parents continued to write her letters implying her “activities” with Austin were wearing her down. Mabel periodically admitted to herself that she wanted to be more central in Austin’s life. She tried to change things in the late 1880s by attempting to become pregnant. That truly might have altered everyone’s life, but, as Mabel wrote to Austin in March of 1888, “I am more and more disappointed with the failure of the experiment.”30
Mabel’s journals evidence her growing bitterness and the ongoing tensions associated with having her relationship with Austin in shadow rather than in sunlight. But copying Emily’s poetry offered her a new and productive outlet for her frustrations: “The winter was very trying for me from a new cause—or a new manifestation of the old cause—but on the whole I got through it pretty bravely and accepted a very great deal of work.”31 Work, for Mabel, was a salve. And she found that her musical and artistic training, her love for literature and for nature and her passion for Austin aligned with Emily’s poetry, making her appreciate it all the more.
Mabel recalled that when she first took the box of poems, “The outlook was appalling. Emily wrote in the
strangest hand ever seen, which I had to absolutely incorporate into my innermost consciousness before I could be certain of anything she reflected.” Mabel also noted the difficulties she had because Emily often wrote “six or eight” different words she was considering using in a particular point in a poem, with additional choices that “would run around the margins.”32 In her 1930 Harper’s Magazine article, Mabel wrote, “In the so-called ‘copied poems,’ tiny crosses written beside a word which might be changed ultimately and which referred to scores of possible words at the bottom of the page were all exactly alike, so that only the most sympathetic and at-one-with-the-author could determine where each word belonged.”33
Mabel might not have been Vinnie’s first choice of an editor, but it turned out that she was an inspired one. Mabel worked diligently and methodically on the poems, sometimes for hours each day to decipher, interpret and transcribe them. She called David and even seven-year-old Millicent into service to help. (Looking back, Millicent reflected, “Initiation into the vagaries of Emily’s handwriting is one of the earliest rites I can recall.”)34 After laboriously copying different versions of each poem by hand, Mabel would type them up on her new borrowed Hammond typewriter. When she was more comfortable with the machine, Mabel sometimes typed poems without first copying them by hand. She worked fairly consistently from the time she returned from Japan in 1887 for the next two years, decoding, copying and typing hundreds of poems.
But Vinnie was impatient. Mabel wrote that when her other activities took her away from the copying, it often resulted in late-night visits from Vinnie. “She could not see why it took so much time. And I knew I was doing it as fast as a mortal could accomplish it, unless one devoted all one’s time to it—and frequently I gave three or four hours a day to it.”35 Yet Vinnie continued to press Mabel, even admonishing her when she took a brief vacation in 1888 that she should stay on holiday only if “you fatten in strength & then be ready for poems!”36