Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [104]
Dickinson sent her some poems, and Helen was one of the few she would see. On 10 October of the same year Helen sat face to face with Dickinson, who looked so pale that her fellow poet felt ‘like a great ox talking to a white moth, and begging it to come and eat grass with me to see if it could not turn itself into beef!’ Stupid, she admitted, and also ‘very impertinent’ to have accused the moth of living away from the sunlight. Yet Helen couldn’t resist another try: ‘You say you find great pleasure in reading my verses. Let somebody somewhere whom you do not know have the same pleasure in reading yours.’
When Helen returned to Amherst in October 1878 she called on Dickinson once more, this time with her husband. It was not Dickinson’s habit to see a stranger, yet she enjoyed ‘a lovely hour’ when the winter strands in Helen’s hair seemed banished by the warmth of her undiminished summer. Helen came as a professional writer - she brought Dickinson her latest book, Bits of Travel at Home (1878), and there was a professional purpose to this visit.
By 1878, Dickinson had written over fourteen hundred poems. Helen had been urging her to publish a poem or two anonymously in a collection called A Masque of Poets. ‘I will copy them - sending them in my own handwriting - and promise never to tell any one, not even the publishers, whose the poems are. Could you not bear this much publicity? Only you and I would recognize the poems.’ A candidate for publication was ‘Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne’er succeed’. It looks as though this poem came up during a visit from Helen on the morning of 24 October, because the following day she redoubled her plea.
‘Now - will you send me the poem? No - will you let me send the “Success” - which I know by heart - to Roberts Bros . . . I ask it as a personal favor to myself - Can you refuse the only thing I perhaps shall ever ask at your hands?’
Dickinson finally agreed - with reluctant waves in Higginson’s direction - and she did, after all, make her identity known to the editor Thomas Niles, a partner in the Boston publishing firm of Roberts Brothers. The collection, selling at one dollar, came out at the end of 1878. It was part of a ‘No Name Series’, advertised as anonymous poems by the great of Britain and America. Its epigraph came from the recently published Daniel Deronda: ‘Is the Gentleman anonymous? Is he a great Unknown?’ Sadly the poems collected fell foul of greatness. One preceding Dickinson’s, ‘Avallon’, is fake medieval, hopelessly sub-Tennyson; other poems are absurdly trite, along these lines:
Oh! To-day is too delicious,
Fill’d with little winds and birds
And the far-off hum of herds,
[. . .]
Oh! Today is too delicious,
[. . .]
Let to-morrow be malicious.
As a sample of the editor’s taste, it’s only fair to add that he wasn’t alone. Nor was Niles alone in seeing fit to change Dickinson’s phrasing. When she wrote to thank him for a copy of this volume he was polite enough to speak of her ‘valuable’ contribution. Reviewers thought it by Emerson, and Helen Hunt Jackson singled out ‘Success’ for praise in an anonymous Colorado review that reprinted the poem. Privately she owned to Dickinson that she was unable to recognise greatness in most of the others.
She went on praising her friend to Niles, who wrote to Miss Dickinson on 24 April 1882: ‘she wished you could be induced to publish a volume of poems . . . I wish also that you could.’ Surprisingly, Dickinson followed this up.
‘The kind but incredible opinion of “H.H.” and yourself I would like to deserve - Would you accept a Pebble [her poem, “How happy is the little Stone”] I think I gave to her, though I am not sure.’
The editor apparently expressed no interest and a year later, in mid-March 1883, Dickinson initiated another approach when she wrote to ask once more for news of the forthcoming life of George Eliot by her husband John Cross. In reply, Niles sent a different biography of the novelist which Roberts Brothers was about to publish. Her thanks enclosed two