Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [129]
By night, under cover of darkness, Vinnie crept over to The Dell to inspect progress and urge Mabel on. Though Vinnie had colluded in the love affair, this was closeness of a rarer kind: two women, one middle-aged, one young, joined in an enterprise that was to burst on an unknowing public. In their secret intentness both were in a way closer to the poet than in life, as readers are when they live from day to day with a writer who speaks to them: in this instance, a writer who speaks - blasts - directly to the soul.
In July 1888 Higginson visited Lavinia to discuss an edition. He was too busy to take this on himself, but agreed to reconsider the possibility if someone undertook the labour of copying the poems. Since no one knew what might be there until it was transcribed, Mabel realised that she would have to commit herself to Dickinson’s whole oeuvre, or at least that large part of it in her hands.
Vinnie would bring baskets of poems to The Dell and dump them on the floor in front of the fireplace in the back parlour. David would then compare Mabel’s transcription with the original; if there were errors Mabel would do it again. Certain poems Vinnie would not let out of her house, and Mabel transcribed them there under Vinnie’s eye. If they spied Susan coming the poems were hustled out of sight.
During the first six months of 1889 Mabel hired a copyist, but Harriet Graves had no sympathy for ‘Emily’s mad words’, and seemed to Mabel a shade worse than an insentient machine. So Mabel dismissed Miss Graves and pressed on. Millicent, aged nine, helped with the copying and there was help too from David Todd, consistent with their pact to promote each other’s careers. He helped to sort hundreds of scraps of paper. This wasn’t only helpfulness; this astronomer had fixed on what his wife called Dickinson’s ‘comets of thought’. At this time he was drawn to another boldly original woman, Olive Schreiner, a semi-invalid who lived in isolation on the South African veld. From that lone spot her feminist fables spoke to avant-garde thinkers. David Todd wished to write to her and asked Roberts Brothers for her address. They obliged, apologising that they did not know her street. In fact, Matjesfontein was only one street behind a railway stopping in the midst of thorn bush stretching to the horizon. Such solitude had proved no bar to addressing the world through her pen.
In October 1889 David left for Angola. It was yet another expedition to photograph the sun’s corona in the course of an eclipse. David expected Mabel’s help, as in Japan, but this time he sailed in a naval vessel that refused to have a woman aboard a man-of-war. (Her father, Eben Loomis, was allowed to join the expedition in the capacity of instrument maker.) This was when Mabel was oppressed by Amherst snubs and took herself off to Boston for the winter.
There, on 6 November, Higginson came for an hour to discuss the transcripts with Mabel at the opulent Beacon Hill house of her cousin, Caro Andrews. He warned once more, ‘The public will not accept even fine ideas in such rough and mystical dress, so hard to elucidate.’
Mrs Todd rose with graceful aplomb. Moulded in a corset perfectly judged between womanly yield and ladylike tightness, she leant a little forward in performance mode, picked up the poems and began to read a dozen of her favourites aloud. Addressing the ear, not the eye, the rhythmic glide of a trained voice smoothed out the jolts of the Dickinson line and protected Higginson from the sight of the experimental punctuation Dickinson had neglected to alter. Mabel was in her element as performer. Her voice was persuasive, her accents soothing, unlike the startling questions the poet had put to Higginson until he felt drained.
He was astonished. He had no idea, he said, ‘there were so many poems in passably conventional form’. He asked her to classify them as A, B and C, and on that basis would look them over.
Held up by illness for much of the winter, he eventually did this in April 1890 while Mabel was Chicago. Higginson’s initial selections