Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [131]
I never lost as much but twice—
And that was in the sod.
Twice have I stood a beggar
Before the door of God!
Angels—twice descending
Reimbursed my store—
Burglar! Banker—Father!
I am poor once more!
The volume was a huge success, to the surprise of Houghton Mifflin who had rejected the poems, Niles who had grudgingly published them and the still rather offhand Austin. Five hundred copies of Poems were sold on the day of publication; the volume was reprinted eleven times in the first year; and the total sale, astonishing for a poet publishing a first collection, was almost eleven thousand copies. Public interest was fanned by Higginson’s modest account of his correspondence and contact with a naively gifted recluse who had a ‘quaint and nun-like look’. This was published in the Atlantic Monthly in October 1891, to promote a forthcoming second volume. Public interest was fanned further by Mabel Todd’s talks and articles. A Boston reporter who attended one of her talks noted the sympathetic keenness and wit with which she explained Dickinson’s elusive genius to her audience. ‘As she stood there - an almost girlish figure in her black lace dress whose sole adornment was a small bunch of her favorite jonquils - every tone and gesture revealed not only the intelligent critic but the loving friend.’
The name of Mabel Loomis Todd will always be linked with that of Emily Dickinson. Vinnie, apprehensive of Sue’s reaction to the secret undertaking (Sue, she thought, would want to ‘kill’ her), had tried to keep Mabel Todd’s name off the title page. Higginson had insisted it must be there, putting Todd’s name first. Her painting of Indian Pipes, tooled in silver, took pride of place on the cover. For the next few years Mabel promoted the poems together with the image of a shy creature, reclusive, eccentric, asexual, whose ‘friend’ she had been. Dickinson had indeed been reclusive with Mabel, though not with Helen Hunt Jackson and Lord.
Only when pressed did Mabel admit that they’d never met face to face. At most, she’d ‘once’ glimpsed her object ‘flitting’ away. ‘Flitting’ fits the legend of shyness, a shrinking creature, but the cutting edge of the Dickinson voice conveys the opposite: it’s bared, at the ready.
William Dean Howells, the well-known American novelist, recognised a lasting voice. He was the first to see her improvising manner as intentional and masterly. ‘If nothing else had come out of our life but this strange poetry we should feel that in the work of Emily Dickinson, America, or New England, rather, had made a distinctive addition to the literature of the world.’
This influential review had been prompted by Mabel. In the summer of 1890 she’d met Howells, who was staying at the same boarding house as Mrs Loomis and Millicent. Howells and his wife, who had lost a beloved daughter aged ten, befriended Millicent, also ten. Mabel had found Howells genial and willing to lend an ear to the forthcoming Dickinson phenomenon.
In a letter to Vinnie from Rome, the painter and illustrator of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Elihu Vedder, declared ‘love at first sight’ of the poems. ‘They are barbed things these poems and strike and remain - not like some snowballs of poems that . . . break and melt and are gone[,] leaving you cold.’ Niles had the happy idea of sending a copy to the English poet Christina Rossetti who, single and rather solitary, dramatising a lone, confessional voice, had much in common with Dickinson. She praised ‘a very remarkable work of genius, - though I cannot but deplore some of the religious, or rather irreligious pieces’.
Vinnie bristled at the reservation. ‘I’m sorry Miss “Rossetti” fails to comprehend “Emily” faithfully.’
Early in 1892 the brilliant