Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [125]
Paranoia reached a maddening level when she visited her prosperous cousin Lydia Coonley in Chicago in March 1890. Mrs Coonley was President of the Chicago Women’s Club, one of the first to be established. Although the cousins shared an interest in women’s rights and Mabel was fêted for lectures on Japan to her cousin’s circle, she fancied a snub on the part of one Mrs Ray, who’d met Mattie Dickinson. Mabel sent off another frantic plea to Austin to intervene on her behalf - she wanted him to pressure Mattie’s acquaintance to invite Mabel to her house. Austin told her this would not do and assured her that Mattie had not the slightest idea of Mabel’s whereabouts. He did not believe his daughter was orchestrating snubs from afar. As it turned out, Austin was right and Mrs Ray proved hospitable after all. Yet depression remained. It seemed to Mabel, in her early thirties, that she had wasted her youth and got nowhere. Austin, in his sixties, was puzzled about her limitation of life to youth: it seemed to him a female thing that life should depend on looks. He tried to reassure her but Mabel ‘abominated’ the middle-aged woman.
Her campaigns appeared to come to nought and her future looked bleak. Forced out of town, it was an act of endurance to return to Amherst in May 1890. Strangely, though, it was during this dark passage in her life from 1888 to 1890 that Mabel undertook a new task that would link her legitimately to the Dickinsons, and for all time: she began to decipher, date and type Emily Dickinson’s poems, at first one or two, then a few, then hundreds. The poems themselves drove and sustained her ‘mentally and spiritually. They seemed to open the door to a wider universe’ and had ‘a wonderful effect’ of release from her depression. In place of her failure to produce a baby with Austin Dickinson, she could bring forth the creative offspring of Emily Dickinson. This venture was different from the succession of campaigns conceived at a distance from Amherst. In her own Amherst house, in sight of the Homestead, in easy reach of the poet’s sister and brother, she began in a small way with a borrowed typewriter, a new invention for the office and newer still for domestic use. It was the unlooked-for answer to her ‘presentiment’. For it was not as Dickinson consort but as Dickinson editor that Mabel Todd was to thrive.
11
MABEL IN EXCELSIS
During Emily’s last year Vinnie had heard her muttering worriedly, ‘Oh, Vinnie, my work, my work!’ When Helen Hunt Jackson offered herself as literary executor, Dickinson’s reply avoids the subject. Unfortunately, Helen Jackson died in August 1885, nine months before Dickinson. Her efforts on her friend’s behalf (with doubting Mr Higginson, the supposed celebrity volume and Thomas Niles, head of the Boston publishing firm of Roberts Brothers) had all failed through no fault of her own. Dickinson had every reason to have no confidence in that or any other route to publication.
This left Sue, Dickinson’s prime reader, as the likely person to transmit the poems to posterity. Vinnie lent her the forty booklets threaded with string - ‘the little volumes’ - which came to light within a week of Dickinson’s death. These contained about eight hundred poems. Other poems were copied on separate sheets and assorted fragments were scribbled on the backs of envelopes, bits of wrapping paper and suchlike scraps. Much of this went to The Evergreens. Together with Sue’s own hoard of two hundred and fifty, she had in hand more than a thousand poems. A large part of a lifetime’s oeuvre sat there, at The Evergreens, awaiting attention.
Sue had no doubt of the poet’s genius. ‘A Damascus blade gleaming and glancing in the sun was her wit’, she said in her eloquent obituary for the Republican. ‘Her swift poetic rapture was like the long glistening note of a bird one hears in the June woods at high noon, but can never see.’ Sue had stood with her on the brink of ‘Infinity’ but, turning with Emily to face the public, Sue was daunted. In 1886 she sent a poem by Emily Dickinson