Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [106]
There was one other editor who could have published Dickinson during her lifetime. Maria Whitney, the cousin of Mrs Bowles who had nursed her dutifully and adored Sam Bowles, was often in touch with Dickinson from the time of Bowles’s death in 1878.
‘I hope you may remember me, as I shall always mingle you with our Mr Bowles,’ Dickinson said. ‘Affection gropes through drifts of Awe, for his tropic Door -’.
Maria suggested that those who had loved Mr Bowles be more closely each other’s.
‘Your touching suggestion is a tender permission,’ Dickinson agreed. ‘You will be with us while he is with us and that will be while we are ourselves - for Consciousness is the only Home of which we now know.’ To be at home with Bowles was to recall how one glance of his could ‘light a world’.
Tacitly she acknowledged Maria’s superior right to grieve. In truth, Dickinson had more than adequate consolation in Judge Lord, while Maria was bereft for the rest of her life. Hers was a self-contained scholar’s life directed towards Old High German, studiousness alleviated by a flash of red petticoat brought back from fashionable Europe to the disapproval of old-fashioned Northampton. When Bowles had been failing, Maria Whitney had gone to see him in Springfield three times a week. It had been a tragic time whilst she’d kept going at Smith College.
After she resigned this post in 1880 she edited the literary pages of the Springfield Republican where, two decades before, Bowles had published a few of Dickinson’s most daring poems from the early 1860s, a time when she deluged him with offerings. Whitney had been close enough to Bowles, as well as to the Norcross cousins, to have known of Dickinson’s poetry; the fact that Dickinson wrote was not secret. Although Whitney and the poet were intimate correspondents in the early 1880s, Whitney never included her poems in the newspaper. Her taste was probably too correct, in the light of Dickinson’s comment on an unnamed female scholar (and Whitney was the only one she knew): this scholar ‘had the facts but not the phosphorescence ’ of books. That phosphorescence illumines every letter Dickinson sent to Whitney. So here was another editor whose door failed to open to a great poet. Only three readers fully recognised her greatness during her lifetime: Sue Dickinson, Mabel Loomis Todd and Helen Hunt Jackson.
After the Springfield murder trial hit the news in April 1882, Judge Lord collapsed unconscious on 1 May following his return to Salem. On 3 May the Republican had reported little hope for his recovery. Vinnie heard this from Austin en route to catch a train (as Emily Dickinson reported this scene in a letter). Vinnie came indoors and stood in front of her sister who was smiling as she read a letter from the Judge, delivered with that morning’s post.
‘Emily, did you see anything in the paper that concerned us?’
‘Why no, Vinnie, what?’
‘Mr Lord is very sick.’
She grasped at a chair that seemed to be passing, for her sight seemed to slip. Her smile froze and then slowly faded. Tom Kelley, Maggie’s brother-in-law, came in at that moment, and she ran to his blue jacket, as she put it, ‘and let my Heart break there . . .’.
‘Don’t cry, Miss Emily.’ He had never seen her like this. ‘I could not see you cry.’
At that moment the doorbell