After Emily

by Julie Dobrow

  In March of 1889, after she had already copied and typed over 300 poems, Mabel hired a young woman named Harriet Graves to assist her in copying the poems. Though Harriet copied almost 150 of them, Mabel soon realized that her assistant could not read Emily’s handwriting properly and consequently transcribed words incorrectly. “I could not stand it. The absolute lack of any approach to understand or sympathy in what she was copying, although she did mechanically well enough, made poor Miss Graves seem to me a shade more than an insensitive machine—and some of her mistakes in Emily’s mad words were so ludicrous as to be pathetic. Besides, it took more time to put her copies into fit shape than to do it myself.”37 Mabel also later suggested that Harriet’s lack of understanding of the poems “seemed irreverent to the helpless poet to allow her verses to be so mangled. Loyalty to Emily’s patient ghost swept over me and I permanently gave up hope of any mechanical assistance.”38

  By the end of the summer of 1889, Mabel had completed the copying of the seven hundred poems. She had to give up her Hammond typewriter and instead continued her work, either writing poems out by hand or typing them on a slower World machine. As literary analyst Ralph Franklin has written, “The World, a more primitive machine than the Hammond, had only capitals and was operated by rotating a letter into place and pressing down—slow and tedious work indeed—yet the ‘few’ Mrs. Todd did on this machine totaled nearly ninety. All forty of those extant have purple ink,” whereas the ones typed earlier on the Hammond were done with a black ribbon. This has proven significant for later literary scholars trying to better and more authentically understand Emily’s use of capitalization. In his doctoral dissertation, Franklin suggested, “Mrs. Todd revered accuracy, and she tried to be faithful at the time of copying, only introducing changes later.” He observed that when Mabel worked on the Hammond machine (“one of the earliest to have small letters as well as capitals”), she could adhere to Emily’s “capricious” use of capitals; the World machine was not capable of this “literal rendering.”39 In any case, after an initial version, either typed or handwritten, had been copied, then further editing could commence.

  NEWSPAPER AD FOR A WORLD TYPEWRITER, SIMILAR TO THE ONE MABEL HAD.

  Mabel was savvy enough about the publishing industry to know that Emily’s poems would need more than simple transcription to receive any kind of publication contract. They needed editing to make them less idiosyncratic, and they needed a credentialed literary champion.

  Mabel certainly not only knew of Thomas Wentworth Higginson by reputation but had actually met him on at least a couple of occasions prior to any of their collaborative work. Mabel had spoken with him at Emily’s funeral; her mentions of Higginson’s contributions to the event are found in both her journals and in letters she wrote to her mother. Mabel recalled Vinnie reported Higginson’s refusal but also his stipulation that “if this tangle of literary wheat and chaff could be put in easy shape for consideration, he would be glad to go over it carefully.”40 In her 1930 Harper’s article, Mabel wrote that Vinnie told her of Colonel Higginson’s “quaint friendship” with Emily and asked that Mabel “have him co-operate in launching the poems.”41

  In the fall of 1889, after Mabel thought she would accompany David on an astronomical expedition to Angola only to discover at the last minute that no women were to be allowed on board the U.S. Navy ship, Mabel, who had already packed three trunks’ worth of clothing and gotten the house in Amherst ready to be left for several months, decided to spend the time in Boston, instead. Along with her mother, grandmother and Millicent, Mabel rented some rooms for the winter. Once in town, Mabel arranged for a meeting with Colonel Higginson, determined to show him a large pile of copied poems. She brought with her the “immense file” that “weighed many pounds.”

  “He did not think a volume advisable,” Mabel wrote in 1890. “They were crude in form, he said, and the public would not accept even fine ideas in such rough and mystical dress—so hard to elucidate.” But certain of the poems’ worth and determined to convince Higginson to sign onto the project, Mabel “read him nearly a dozen of my favorites—and he was greatly astonished—said he had no idea there were so many in passably conventional form.” Emily’s “strange cadences” came alive when Mabel read them aloud.

  Higginson asked Mabel if she would classify the poems into three groups (A, B and C), organized by her own judgment of which were the best ones (“not only those of most original thought, but expressed in the best form”), a second group of poems “with striking ideas, but with too many of her peculiarities of construction to be used unaltered for the public” and a third group that she “considered too obscure or too irregular in form for public use, however brilliant and suggestive.”42 If she did that, Higginson said that he would look more carefully at the categorized poems during the winter months. Mabel was thrilled, though from the distance of many years later, noted she believed Higginson had not initially exuded confidence: “he indicated to me my herculean task, and I began alone.”43

  After Higginson agreed to assist with the project, Mabel stepped up her efforts to get the rest of the poems classified. She worked quickly and sent Higginson her selections on November 18. He responded a week later, saying, “I can’t tell you how much I am enjoying the poems. There are many new to me which take my breath away & which also have form beyond most of those I have ever seen before. . . . 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.”44 He suggested that among the poems Mabel selected in her first category, some were more worthy of publication than others. Further, he posited arranging the subset of poems thematically: those about life, those about nature, and those about time, death and eternity.

  But then Higginson fell ill. Mabel noted, “for weeks nothing was heard from him except bulletins as to his illness. Vinnie was cast down, nearly wild in fact, and said the fates seemed in sorry shape against her.” Undeterred, Mabel went to visit Higginson at his home in Cambridge “and he said if I would have patience enough to let him keep them until I returned from Chicago he would look them over and see what he thought of a volume.” When she returned from a visit to her cousin, Mabel found Higginson had read through her selections, selected about two hundred poems and “in almost every case had chosen my A’s.”45 Having arrived at their selection of poems for the volume, Mabel and Higginson would then launch what was perhaps the most daunting task of all, as well as their most controversial act: their editing of the poems.

  After the first volume of poetry had been published, Mabel admitted in her journal that the poems’ “carelessness of form exasperated me. I could always find the gist of 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. But she could not hide her wonderful power, and I knew she had genius.”46 Mabel also may have thought at the time, and certainly knew upon consideration years later, that the poems’ “unconventionality might repel publishers.”47

  Higginson also felt that the poems defied too many conventions of nineteenth-century verse. Biographer Brenda Wineapple notes that some of Higginson’s initial thoughts about the poetry Emily sent him are lost, for while he “preserved a large number of Dickinson’s letters to him, most of his to her have mysteriously vanished. . . . Because those letters are missing, one has to infer a good deal.”48 Vinnie, however, destroyed much of Emily’s saved correspondence, and did not catalog what she burned. In an essay published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1891, Higginson recalled that the first few poems Emily sent him left a powerful impact. He wrote that “The impression of a wholly new and original poetic genius was as distinct on my mind at the first reading of these four poems as it is now, after thirty years of further knowledge; and with it came the problem never yet solved, what place ought to be assigned in literature to what is so remarkable, yet so elusive of criticism.”4
9 Higginson noted from her very first correspondence Emily’s sparse and idiosyncratic use of punctuation and capitalization—even when he looked over Mabel’s copies of the poems that rendered them more readable, Higginson still had concerns about the form in which many of them appeared.

  In her journals, Mabel suggested that while Higginson concurred with most of her selections, they “changed words here and there in the two hundred to make them smoother.”50 Sometimes Emily’s variant word selections were used—for example, in “The Humming Bird” (one of the few poems she actually titled), Emily had offered four alternates to the word “revolving”: “delusive, dissembling, dissolving, renewing.”

  “In this case,” wrote Mabel, “as in many others I retained the word she evidently preferred by using it in her own final copy.” But in other poems, Mabel clearly substituted words she felt better conveyed meaning (though these changes have often reverted to Emily’s original choices in more recent publications). For example, in poem XXXI in Poems (poem 258 in Johnson’s later rendering), Mabel substituted the word “weight” for “heft”:

  There’s a certain slant of light,

  On winter afternoons,

  That oppresses, like the weight

  Of cathedral tunes.

  R. W. Franklin’s exhaustive analysis of Mabel’s and Higginson’s editing demonstrates many other instances in which they altered Emily’s word choice. Other scholars have suggested that in so doing, they might also have altered her poetic intent.51

  Millicent’s later interpretation of this work wavered between staunchly defending the editorial practice and taking a more contemporary critical view. “Emily placed a great responsibility upon her editors by leaving to them so often the choice of a key word. For it authorized them to color her thought with their taste. Obliged so often to make a choice, they might be tempted to go further, to change a word to fit their own preference—a dangerous leeway, for the thought is timeless while taste may change,”52 she wrote in Ancestors’ Brocades. Millicent also made clear that even when her mother altered Emily’s word choice, these were decisions not made easily. According to Millicent, her mother seemed aware that in compromising with Higginson’s view of what might be acceptable, she might also have undermined Emily’s poetic intent.

  In addition to altering words, Mabel and Higginson made other textual changes. Among other things, they sometimes altered words to make lines rhyme and conform to a more typical a-b-c-b rhyming pattern. Franklin writes, “By the editors’ conventional standards, Emily Dickinson’s poetry frequently had no rhyme or rhythm, and much of the editorial surgery was directed toward giving it some.”53 They altered her spellings, too. Millicent’s explanation for this was that only “habitual mistakes in spelling were corrected,” though other critics more recently have suggested that some spelling alterations “which seem[ed] innocuous enough . . . sometimes involved removing a New England pronunciation that she might have been trying to indicate.”54

  They also changed what Millicent deemed “grammatical vagaries” or “Emily’s grammatical irresponsibility”—including swapping out “he” for “him” and “she” for “her” in some poems. Several more recent scholars suggested that Emily’s grammar might have reflected spoken usage of the day rather than written usage, though this is not certain. Others posit that Emily’s pronoun use might have been deliberate and its suggestiveness in tying “she” with sensual imagery rather than “he” was something Mabel and Higginson purposively sought to change to make the poems more acceptable to potential readers.

  At the same time there was some difference of opinion between Mabel and Higginson about whether to correct Emily’s grammar. The often-cited example is Higginson’s apparent insistence on altering the final line, “I wish I were a Hay” to “I wish I were hay.” Mabel reflected, “The quaintness of the article really appealed to me, but my trusted collaborator was decided on that line. ‘It cannot go in so,’ he exclaimed, ‘everybody would say that hay is a collective noun requiring the definite article. Nobody can call it a hay!’ So I retired, feeling that of course he was right with regard to the public. But I have always had a sneaking desire to see a change back to the original version!”55 (Contemporary publications of this poem have restored the article; Mabel would be pleased.)

  In a few cases, these first editors decided to omit a stanza of a poem. Writing about this practice in Ancestors’ Brocades, Millicent stated, “while omitting a stanza might sometime improve a poem, it was more often a mistake.”56 At times Mabel and Higginson left off a stanza because Emily, herself, had used it in slightly different form as a stand-alone poem; in other cases, they made a decision to delete a stanza because they found different versions of the same poem without the stanza in question.

  Mabel and Higginson also made editorial decisions that, according to Millicent, “were not so much matters of taste as of typographical convention.” These had to do with Emily’s idiosyncratic, seemingly random capitalization of words and her use of punctuation, including underscores, quotation marks and especially dashes. Each of these issues has been the subject of considerable academic debate. Franklin points out that while Higginson believed that Emily capitalized every noun, that is not correct and, while Mabel explained that “all important words begin with capitals,” that seems not to be consistently the case, either. The debate over whether Emily truly had a system for when she chose to use capital letters continued well into the twentieth century.57

  Similarly, several theories have been posited about whether Emily used punctuation consistently, with any particular reason or for any particular effect. Millicent wrote, “As Emily grew older, she dispensed with punctuation more and more until at last she was using dashes for the most part, with an occasional comma or period. What should be done about those dashes? To what conventional forms did they most closely correspond?”58 More recent theories include dashes being “merely a habit of handwriting” that Emily used inconsistently, conventions of informal writing of the nineteenth century and simple habit that is “usually not consciously controlled.”59Another contemporary idea is that Emily’s use of the dash is more akin to musical phrasing, suggesting pauses of different lengths that she intended readers to make between different words or phrases.60

  Apart from editing the poems to put them into a palatable form for the late nineteenth-century reading audience, Mabel and Higginson also ordered and titled the poems, practices that later Dickinson scholars and literary analysts have mostly decried.

  To suggest that there is confusion and debate about how Mabel ordered and numbered the poems, whether her system was accurate, and if it was she or David who decided on the ordering and numbering, is an understatement. Millicent intimated that decisions about how to number the poems were David’s. Perhaps the title of Franklin’s meticulously researched chapter on this issue best summarizes his conclusions: “Manuscript Order and Disorder.” Other scholars have suggested that Mabel put the poems “in no particular order,” which left to future researchers the task of figuring out their chronology and an appropriate ordering. In 1955, Thomas H. Johnson published a three-volume “variorum” of Emily’s poetry that not only brought together all of the poems for the first time but also attempted to place them in an approximate chronological order. In 1981, Franklin utilized clues from the original papers—marks, punctures and other pieces of physical evidence—to reorder the poems in a different chronology. Since then, some scholars have advocated for thematic groupings of poems, more like what Mabel and Higginson originally devised.

  Few of Mabel’s and Higginson’s decisions have drawn more ire than the decision to title poems that originally bore no name. Emily herself gave titles to only a few of what proved to be nearly eighteen hundred poems. Scholar John Mulvihill suggests that Emily left the vast majority of her poetry untitled both because she did not publish it, and thus had no need to yield to this convention, and also because titling poems tends to draw a reader’s attention to a particular image or
interpretation. “Left untitled, one can argue, a poem can more simply be, or seem to be.”61

  Mabel had reservations about titling the poems. In 1890 she wrote that while Higginson wanted to put titles on the poems, “I do not believe, myself, in naming them; and although I admire Mr. Higginson very much, I do not think many of his titles good.”62 Mabel thought that Higginson was often off base with his titles, and that a title such as “A World Well Lost” for the poem that began “I lost a world the other day. / Has anybody found?” completely misrepresented Emily’s thought.

  Contemporary practice for the identification of Emily’s poetry is to utilize the numerical system devised by Johnson in the 1950s, along with the poem’s first line rather than use a particular title, or to use the numerical system Franklin established in the late 1990s in his chronologically arranged three-volume edition of the complete poems utilizing newer methods of dating the poems. This is a decision Mabel probably would have embraced. But Mabel yielded to Higginson on the titling of the poetry, as she did on other editorial decisions. As Millicent explained, “My mother was ready to accept as final Colonel Higginson’s judgment regarding the poems. Though a lesser figure he had been coeval with the greatest and that sufficed.”63 For Mabel, his judgment trumped her own, even though she often retained and recorded her own opinions. As literary scholar Elizabeth Horan points out, while Mabel “maintained all her prerogatives as a ‘lady,’ she got her way because she willingly deferred to men. . . . She was careful not to appear pushy and to take others’ interests into account when she proposed new lines of action.”64