by Julie Dobrow
Mabel received the galleys of Poems, Second Series in mid-August. The plate proofs she received after that had more errors to correct, but the book was finally published on November 9, 1891. Within days of its publication, David received a letter from Roberts Brothers informing him that “the book seems to go like ‘Hot Cakes,’” and that the publisher had already put a new printing to press. (Why this letter was sent to David rather than Mabel is not clear.) Sales were almost as brisk as they had been with the first volume of poems, only this time Roberts Brothers printed 960 copies in its first run. The first volume went through eleven printings in just two years; the second volume ran five printings in the same time period.
The reaction to Poems, Second Series in some ways mirrored critical reception of the first volume: reviewers were divided in their praise for Emily’s genius and originality and their criticism of her form. The public seemed more intrigued than anything else. Millicent wrote in Ancestors’ Brocades that “the editors were deluged with letters,” which, Mabel told her, demanded further information about Emily’s life and composition process, as well as requests to reprint poems and “some letters [that] were just outpourings of the heart in admiration.”93
Vinnie was pleased that Emily’s work was being shared with the world, but became indignant at every review that was less than fully favorable. Though she was delighted to have received some royalties from Roberts Brothers, she was loath to split them with Mabel and Higginson, who had done all of the work. Mabel wrote, “Vinnie has reaped a harvest and she will have another large check on July first.”94 In all, Lavinia paid Mabel and Higginson each just one hundred dollars for their work. The fact that there were never any contracts explicitly spelling out compensation for the editors would later become the heart of an issue that ensnared the Dickinson and Todd families for years, and would erupt in volcanic fashion a few years later.
The other issue simmering just below the surface was the ongoing tension between Vinnie and Sue. In addition to the years of building resentment over her perceptions of Sue’s treatment of all three Dickinson siblings, Vinnie was still seething over Sue’s having sent one of Emily’s poems to Scribner’s. Sue, for her part, felt completely justified. Emily had sent her the poem, after all. In fact, just after the publication of the first volume of Poems, Sue wrote a letter to Colonel Higginson, in which she expressed both her surprise and her outrage that the volume had come out at all: “I was so dazed by the announcement of Emily’s poems in the Xtian Union that I do not rally easily. It was my first intimation that stranger hands were preparing them for publication. I planned to give my winter, with my daughter’s aid, to the arrangement of a vol. to be printed at my own expense sometime during the year subject to your approval of course, with an introduction also by yourself.” She went on to state, “I am told Miss Lavinia is saying that I refuse to arrange them. Emily knows that is not true.”95
Lavinia wrote to Higginson around the same time, “I had naturally looked to her first (with you) for help, supposing ’twould be her highest pleasure, but I found my mistake. She wished the box of poems there constantly & was unwilling for me to borrow them for a day, as she was fond of reading them (the verses) to passing friends. Mrs. Dickinson has fine ability but lacks mental energy to complete. She has many ideal plans for work worthy of her talent, but the world will (probably) not see any finished.”96 The stage was set for a pitched battle between Sue and Vinnie.
Not surprisingly, Mabel’s rendering of the situation placed the blame squarely on Sue: “With all her delight and satisfaction in the success and appreciation of the book, Vinnie has had a great deal of pain through Susan. Neither she nor Mattie has spoken to her since last September when they first learned of the cousin volume. And Susan sent two poems of Emily’s that she had to the Independent, and kept the money for them. That is illegal, for the right to publish the poems rests wholly with Vinnie.”97
The dynamic among Sue, Mabel and Lavinia seemed clear in 1891, with Mabel taking Vinnie’s side. But this dynamic turned out to be unstable, with alliances shifting in the years to come.
Publicity during the 1890s consisted of a two-pronged approach: go out on the lecture circuit and release a book of letters. Mabel believed creating a brand meant not just excitement but consistency in the form of a memorable image. And that’s just what she created for Emily Dickinson.
Mabel knew that the success of the second volume of poetry meant capitalizing on the success of the first volume—emphasizing in talks not only the strange beauty and brilliance of the poetry but also the quirky life of the reclusive poet. So Dickinson would become widely known as the mysterious, poetic genius dressed in white. Her intrigue would generate more readers—and more sales.
Mabel was “fortunate that Higginson was well regarded but overextended,” writes Elizabeth Horan, “for his need to attend to other projects gave Todd free rein, especially in identifying the market and creating demand for the books.”98 Indeed, Mabel had many ideas about just how to do this.
In 1891, during the preparation of the second grouping of poems, Mabel recorded that Colonel Higginson gave a talk where he read from some of Emily’s letters to him—a talk Austin attended. The general audience—and more importantly, Austin—felt that Emily’s letters offered the personal insights into the poet that the public craved. This confirmed what Mabel had written in her journal during the preparation of the first volume of poetry: that a collection of Emily’s letters, “startlingly fine” as they were, would help to build interest in the poet’s life. An entry in Mabel’s diary from the month after Poems’ publication, December 1890, shows that Austin had already started to bring her packets of Emily’s letters.99 Mabel was well aware, as she would later write, that “the chronicle of her life is to be found elsewhere . . . in only one way—by reading her own words. They alone can give an authentic account of her strange life.”100
Following a talk Mabel gave in December 1891 in Westfield, Massachusetts, a woman approached her. Forty years later Mabel recounted, she “told me she had been a schoolmate of Emily’s at Amherst Academy, that she never forgot her extraordinary compositions, and where might she read some of Emily’s prose?” When Mabel responded that Emily had not kept a diary but that she was hoping to find some of her letters, the woman told her she had kept many girlhood letters from Emily and would send them to Mabel. This woman, Mrs. A. P. Strong, had been Emily’s childhood friend Abiah Root. “So a chance meeting was the spark which touched off a long train of events culminating in the publication of those two volumes of letters in 1894,” Mabel wrote.101
In her journal Mabel recounted a conversation with Amherst College president Julius Seelye, in which he purportedly told her that it seemed to him a horrible idea “to publish the letters of that innocent and confiding child.” (A later reviewer of the published volume of letters agreed, noting, “to take over little wayside, woodland Emily Dickinson, who really did shun publicity or at least never thought of such a thing, and print her prattlings, is unkind.”) But, Mabel argued, though Emily believed that “her verse might see the light of print, only by hands other than hers,” she had relinquished control of her letters by sending them to other people. Besides, Mabel reflected, “Austin smiles. He says Emily definitely posed in her letters—he knows her thoroughly, through and through, as no one else soon did. He tells me many things quite unsuspected by others”—and Austin approved of collecting and publishing his sister’s letters.102
For the next three years, Mabel worked on the considerable task of finding, arranging and editing Emily’s letters for publication. This work required both detective skills and diplomacy. Because Lavinia had destroyed almost all the letters Emily had received, as per her request, Mabel had no idea to whom Emily had written. Austin and Vinnie helped her identify and approach likely letter recipients, including family members and friends. In Ancestors’ Brocades, Millicent quotes her mother as saying, “In this arduous task, Austin Dickinson was an indispensable help, a
s he was an encyclopaedia of information. He had kept for many years articles relating to early Amherst days, as well as a mass of historical material which he had inherited.”103 Austin’s materials proved invaluable both in identifying potential recipients, and also in ascertaining the approximate dates of the letters (the majority of which were undated) through their context and references.
Vinnie assisted too, at least initially. She helped to brainstorm possible correspondents and aided Mabel by writing to them and requesting their letters from Emily. But as the project went on, Vinnie became impatient, as she had been with the work on the volumes of poems. Millicent suggested, “Miss Vinnie’s impatience was steadily increasing. She wrote to Mr. Niles at shorter and shorter intervals,” about when a volume of Emily’s letters could be published. She could not understand why Mabel’s editing process took so long. In addition, midway through the collection of letters, Vinnie came up with another project for Mabel to do: “At Miss Vinnie’s request my mother soon embarked on another venture for the ‘magnification’ of Emily. This time it was a ‘Birthday Book,’ a type of daily reminder then in vogue containing a quotation for each day in the year. It is hard to think of any writer whose work would lend itself better than Emily’s to a selection of epigrams.” Mabel launched into this project and soon gathered two hundred quotations. Many of these were lines from poems that she and Higginson had deemed too flawed for publication, but which had “occasional bolts of melody” that could be used well in this type of project.104
Mabel obtained Thomas Niles’s approval to go ahead with the project; he concurred with Mabel that it would sell. But in the story that Mabel told Millicent and that Millicent subsequently recorded, Vinnie changed her mind. “She may have discovered that its preparation would take time and would interrupt work on the letters.”105 Mabel wrote in her diary of Vinnie’s volatility: “She is edgy about everything . . . the letters, that I don’t come over enough, that she never sees Austin, that her garden isn’t attended to every minute, that she doesn’t want a ‘Year Book’ & a dozen other woes.”106
While the idea that Vinnie lost interest in the project might have had some truth to it, there is another reason the idea of an “Emily Dickinson Year Book” never came to pass: E. D. Hardy, who succeeded Thomas Niles at Roberts Brothers, wanted to wait to see how sales of the volume of Letters would be before going ahead with the other project.107 Mabel wrote to him that she thought the “birthday book” would “make the most brilliant year-book ever issued” and “daintily bound for Christmas” would be a big seller. Furthermore, “if I do not do it, some one else will want to, because E.D. abounds in epigrams.”108 But Hardy did not agree. And so Mabel turned her full attention and energies back to working on Emily’s letters.
In total, close to fifty different people ultimately contributed letters to the project, though by some estimates, this probably represents only about a tenth of the letters that Emily would have written to various correspondents throughout her lifetime.109 Some recipients of Emily’s letters were loath to part with them. As Millicent explained, “Publishing private letters was considered a sacrilege. They were a sacred trust. But though never shown, neither were they destroyed . . . letters were hoarded irrespective of whether or not they had intrinsic value. Indeed, that had nothing to do with the case, since a moral code was involved.” This is where Mabel’s charm came into play. Mabel was more diplomatic than Vinnie, and far more able to woo recalcitrant letter hoarders into releasing them for publication. Mabel also believed that “it was fortunate that our efforts to collect the letters came so soon after Emily’s death that many of her correspondents were still alive, and in consequence, their little bundles of letters from her still intact.”110 Mabel used this point for leverage in convincing Emily’s correspondents that it was important to gather and publish the letters while those to whom they had been sent were still alive to share in this glory.
But there remained those correspondents who refused to part with their letters, others who were not approached and some who could not be found. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, for example, sent Mabel all of the letters he had received from Emily “except for a few letters which he thought too personal to print.” Austin declined to have all of Emily’s letters to him published. Sue, though certainly a key correspondent of Emily’s for many years, was probably not approached to contribute the letters in her possession for obvious reasons.
As Millicent recounted in her 1954 book, Emily Dickinson: A Revelation, Austin had also given Mabel an envelope filled with letters to Emily and indicated “that it was something very special and personal. A glance was enough to show her that the drafts it contained were indeed different. Obviously love letters, my mother did not ask Mr. Dickinson how they came to be in his possession, wondering though she did how they could have escaped destruction, for Emily had tried to erase every vestige of her feeling toward those she cared for most. . . . My mother did not even consider the group in question.”111 None of these letters from Judge Otis Lord, a friend of Edward Dickinson’s and possible love interest of Emily’s in later life, made it into the volume. Similarly, some draft letters Emily had written, today referred to as “the Master letters,” were not printed. These passionate letters to an unknown recipient or recipients, have been a source of intrigue since their discovery after Emily’s death. Mabel and Austin, and perhaps Vinnie, concluded that these were too personal and revealing to be printed.112
And then there were the letters that could not be found. Mabel and Higginson were convinced that Emily’s childhood friend, the poet Helen Hunt Jackson, had also been one of Emily’s correspondents. After a trip to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, Mabel traveled on to Colorado Springs, where she met with the deceased poet’s husband, William Sharpless Jackson. Though he was certain that Emily’s letters to his wife existed somewhere and had not been destroyed, he was never able to locate them.
Once in possession of the letters, Mabel followed the same editorial process she used with the poems. First she copied them, often noting in her diary the difficulties in dealing with the different styles of Emily’s handwriting. Sometimes, she observed, the letters “are immensely wordy—one letter often uses fifteen pages in copying, although it is usually but three foolscap pages in the original, or rather, octavo. The writing is microscopic.”113
Next, Mabel worked to regularize Emily’s use of capital letters and punctuation, as she had in her editing of the poems. And then she attempted to order the letters. She decided to arrange them by correspondent and then within that, to attempt to put them in chronological order—not an easy task, because Emily rarely dated her letters. Sometimes the recipient had noted a date on the envelope (postmarks at the time did not include dates). Sometimes Mabel relied on references to contemporaneous events, or cross-referenced mentions of people, places and events with Austin and Vinnie. Occasionally, she wrote to the letters’ recipients, and other times she employed the variations in Emily’s handwriting as a way of dating the letters.
Mabel discovered there were a number of poems embedded within some letters and observed that Emily’s epistolary writing style evolved over the years, whereas in the poems, she had seen “no advance in style.” In an unpublished essay, written sometime in the mid-1890s, entitled “The Evolution of Style: Reading Emily Dickinson,” Mabel wrote:
A great many letters have been found, all unusual, many more beautiful and striking than the verses and their publication has seemed the more desirable in that the poems, often but the reflection of a passing mood, do not always truthfully represent herself—rarely, indeed, showing the dainty humor, the frolicsome gayety, which continually bubbled over in her daily life. The somber and even gruewsome [sic] outlook upon life, characteristic of many of the verses, was by no means a prevailing condition of mind; for while apprehending to the full all the tragic elements of life, enthusiasms & bright joyousness were yet her normal qualities, and stimulating moral heights her native dwelling place. All th
is may be glimpsed, often satisfactorily, in her letters.114
Another measure of how important a poet’s letters could be in building her reputation, as well as evidence of how popular Emily’s poetry was at the time it was published, came in a letter Vinnie received offering a most peculiar potential addition to the collection in progress. Gardner Fuller claimed to possess a number of letters Emily had written to him and threatened to publish them, himself, unless Lavinia paid him a large sum of money. While Vinnie was “outraged and angered out of all proportion as to the importance of the affair,” Austin’s cooler head prevailed. He had Fuller investigated and discovered that he attempted to sell these letters to the Nation and to Roberts Brothers, claiming to have “twenty odd letters and some verses (about 19,000 words, more or less) written by this talented authoress during the war (1861 to 1864) which are probably the only letters in existence giving a clear insight into that beautiful and secluded life. These letters are worth their weight in diamonds.”115 Austin, however, was convinced that this was all a hoax. He wrote in a note, “I take no stock in Gardner Fuller. I don’t believe he has any of Emily’s letters,” and felt this was an extortion attempt. Austin was right to call his bluff: Gardner Fuller was never heard from again.