Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [126]
A professional writer like Mabel Todd would have been used to rejections; Susan was not. The impact of rejection for a novice can be incalculable. It’s common for the rejected never to try again, particularly women on their own or housewives or provincials who venture without support. It’s not that Susan would have thought a jot less of the poems themselves, but the great world out there in which men made their uncomprehending judgements would have appeared to close the door. Higginson feared the poems were ‘un-presentable’ to readers attuned to smooth rhythms and chiming rhymes. (‘Alcohol’ does not rhyme with ‘pearl’, a critic complained of Dickinson’s ecstatic ‘I taste a liquor never brewed’.) None had an ear for the silence of dashes that defy the march of standard meanings in order to open up a space for vision and veto - for all that lies beyond the frontiers of language. No critic had an ear for dissonance. It never occurs to them that dissonance could be deliberate, in accord with playful or disruptive thoughts. This was three decades before Eliot burst upon the public ear with the jolts and stops of The Waste Land, he, too, bent on transgressing aural frontiers in tandem with ‘the frontiers of consciousness’. If the fellows of All Souls College, Oxford, declined to elect Eliot to a fellowship in 1926 because they thought his poetry peculiar, how could the guardians of convention in the 1880s lend themselves to originality in a woman who was ‘wayward’? Dickinson had not seen fit to follow the advice Higginson, with patient kindliness, had laid out for her over the course of twenty-five years. The label ‘wayward’ stuck to her well into the years of her fame.
Dickinson herself had said nothing to anyone when Mr Niles could not ‘consume’ her poems. In 1883 she’d had the sense to submit only three (instead of the requested collection) to an editor who had participated in the celebrity scam of the No Name series. She had survived by keeping her poems apart from the marketplace, and Susan would have felt for the mode of transmission the poet had chosen.
Lavinia, alone in her father’s house, was ‘sometimes weary, always full of longings’. In her time she had been a demonstrative woman, ready to touch hands and lips, and, like Emily, keen to express and receive love. So Lavinia welcomed visits from Mabel and the expressiveness Mabel offered when she swept around Austin’s vegetable garden between The Dell and the Homestead. Here, once more, is the young woman whose desire Lavinia has facilitated. One day Mabel remarks that she’s teaching herself to typewrite (a new word in 1887) on a borrowed Hammond machine that turns out print. Would Vinnie like a preview of her heart’s desire, to see her sister in print? Vinnie would. She reads a few of Emily’s poems aloud to Mabel and then on a bright, cold Sunday, 13 February 1887, Mabel returns to hear a few more. On that day Vinnie must have entrusted Mabel with some poems because the following Thursday Mabel records typing Emily Dickinson’s poems for the first time. This fact is tossed off amid the other activities of that day, but it marks the start of Mabel’s role as authorised editor of Emily Dickinson:
17 February 1887: Finished attic curtains in the morning & made David put them up. In the afternoon a few of Emily’s poems copied on the typewriter . . . Lovely sunny day. Lay on the bed & rested after. Call [from Austin] at 7.30. Choir rehearsal at 8.30.
18 February 1887: Heavy snow storm. At five went over to Vinnie’s with some copied poems.
Closeness to Vinnie is part of this venture and Mabel does feel it. When Vinnie feels sick and blue, Mabel takes care to visit every day at two for the best part of a month. Her understanding of Vinnie’s impatience with Sue, and of Vinnie’s wish for publication, is irresistible. This is not to suggest a deliberate campaign. Early in 1887, other campaigns claim the