Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [105]
‘I thank you heartily,’ Niles replied on 31 March, ‘but in doing so I must add that I would not for the world rob you of this very rare book . . . If I may presume to say so, I will take instead a M.S. collection of your poems, that is, if you want to give them to the world through the medium of a publisher.’ Again she offered only more samples, including another bird poem - a great one - ‘A Route of Evanescence’. The editor replied with formal courtesy:
23 April 1883
My dear Miss Dickinson
. . . I am very much obliged to you for the three poems which I have read and re-read with great pleasure, but which I have not consumed. I shall keep them unless you order me to do otherwise, in that case I shall as in duty bound obey.
Yrs very truly
T. Niles
Thomas Niles had a mulish face with a slightly protruding lower lip, concealed at the corners with a walrus moustache, its hair rather prickly in contrast to the straight hair combed neatly across his crown. In 1868, when Louisa May Alcott had sent him the first dozen chapters of what became Little Women, he had thought them dull. Fortunately he showed the chapters to his niece, Lillie Almy, who laughed and cried. Niles revised his opinion and Alcott went on with the book. In 1881, Helen Hunt Jackson submitted a book exposing ill-treatment of Native Americans. She showed how they had been displaced from their lands; how this contravened the international law of prior occupancy; and a chapter on ‘Massacres of Indians by Whites’ revealed how often Native-American violence had been provoked. Roberts Brothers rejected A Century of Dishonor as too controversial. Published by Harper & Brothers, the book established Helen Hunt Jackson as an authority on Native Americans. She was then appointed as the first female commissioner for Native Americans in Southern California, where she extended her domestic values of compassion and listening in a political arena. Here she found material for her bestselling novel Ramona (1884), which Dickinson read.
Up to the age of fifty-two, Dickinson had managed not to expose herself to outright rejection. She was silent on the subject, but the encounter with Niles had to be destructive, in the same way as public disparagement of Wuthering Heights had to have been destructive of Emily Brontë - publication (resisted at first) hastening her course towards death in 1848. Dickinson’s long-held affinity for this predecessor mounted in her own last years, when she liked to quote the final stanza from ‘No coward soul is mine’. The self-satisfied bore with dead eyes who looks out of Niles’s photograph had no idea of damage to so fine an instrument. For genius is no protection against its denial, especially for those writing in their bedrooms and diminished by nineteenth-century notions of ‘little’ women. It’s not that Dickinson would have doubted her gift, but she had put herself in a false position: a supplicant with an unwanted offering.
She made no further attempt at publication. What is clear, though, from the abortive encounter with Niles is the poet’s willingness to speak to a wider public and to us far off in the future. Emily Dickinson was not shut away from publishing; she was in touch through her initiative with Niles, through sustained ties with leading editors and men of letters, Higginson, Bowles and Dr Holland, and in her last decade through a professional friendship with Helen Hunt Jackson.
To Helen’s credit, she never stopped trying. In September 1884, after