Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [134]
Avoiding the ‘hornets’ nest’, Mr Ward did not take up this offer. There were two consequences: Lavinia’s principle of exclusive rights effectively blocked Susan’s attempt to open up an independent route to publication. At the same time, the hornets began to sting outside the family.
Higginson’s suggested title for the next volume, ‘Indian Pipes and Witch Hazel’, limits Dickinson as nature-poet. Fortunately the simple title Poems: Second Series prevailed. It was Todd’s turn at a preface. As well as eloquent testimony to the poet’s greatness, she offers facts about the five or six pages of notepaper Dickinson sewed together to make booklets for fair copies in the early 1860s. Todd called them ‘fascicules’. It’s not a word the Dickinsons used, but it has stuck.
Fired by success, Todd looked forward to ten volumes - there was an abundance of great poems. She also planned a selection of Dickinson letters. In a New England in which personal letters were looked on as ‘a private trust never to be made public’, this would have been impossible without the backing of Vinnie. In making the first attempts to date the letters Todd asked help from Dickinson’s circle, almost all of whom were alive when she went to work in 1891. She took care to enter into relationship with certain correspondents such as Emily’s schoolfriends Abiah Root (now Mrs Strong, and living in the Berkshires) and Emily Fowler (Mrs Ford), who could recall Emily as a girl in the 1840s.
A strange scene takes place in the middle of 1891, when the biographical project has barely begun. Mabel, with Austin’s collusion, begins to tamper27 with the overwhelming evidence of Emily’s bond with Susan. A booklet containing ‘One sister have I in the house / And one a hedge away’ is taken apart so as to remove the poem. Emily’s sewing holes are cut to disguise the poem’s place in the booklet, but though the page is thus mutilated, and torn in two places, it’s not destroyed for the sake of another poem on the verso. Using black ink the mutilator scores out all the lines and, most heavily, the climax ‘Sue—forevermore!’
The text survives only because Susan retained the copy sent across the grass in the late 1850s. There are similar mutilations of many letters, especially Emily’s early letters to Austin, written when he was in love with Sue, and letters to Sue filled with Emily’s parallel, more entrancing ardour. All the mutilations are designed to obliterate the poet’s attachment to ‘Sister’.
In this adversarial atmosphere, the Lady Macbeth imperatives revived. Austin reported a ‘trying talk’ with his wife. ‘I must entreat you not to let it accomplish nothing,’ Mabel replied on 15 September 1891. ‘It is certainly true that you have the power in your own hands if you will only use it - you must use it - you must bring out some of your weapons and make them of use . . . I expect you to - I know you will.’
More than five hundred letters passed through Mabel Todd’s hands. She organised her selection on the basis of correspondents, arranged chronologically according to the date a correspondence began. Two formidable difficulties at once presented themselves: half the correspondence - the letters Dickinson received - had been destroyed and her own letters are undated after 1855. Todd had to determine dates, where possible, by way of postmarks or stamps, or on the basis of handwriting that changed three times, from the running hand of an older generation of gentlewomen to the curvy, hard-to-read hand of the 1860s and then, for the last twelve years of Dickinson’s life, a spare hand with each letter detached as in print. Other clues to dating were events that are mentioned (the 1851 visit to Northampton to hear Jenny Lind, or the 1855 visit to Washington). But in some cases it took Todd as long as a month to date a letter.
Given the array of correspondents - Abiah Root, Mrs Holland, Sam Bowles, Maria Whitney, Mabel Todd herself and many minor figures - a distorting omission is the correspondence with Susan. Nowhere is she mentioned.