Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [135]
Another intense relationship was kept under wraps. No letters to Judge Lord were published for half a century, and by that time the renunciatory legend was so firmly established that Emily’s delight in the Judge’s visits and her candour about desire have been underplayed.
Austin required all reference to sickness be cut. Consistent with secrecy was the refusal of the Norcross sisters to let Todd see the letters in their possession. These remaining witnesses to Emily’s ills in her teenage years, and to the treatment she endured in Boston in 1864 and 1865, shielded their cousin from biographical intrusion. Fanny Norcross was distant and scrupulous: she offered to read aloud from the extracts and letters she had copied so that Todd could check the proofs for the forthcoming volumes, but no eyes, she insists, will ever fall on the censored content. The following letter makes it plain that a huge batch of Dickinson’s letters - the originals - are to disappear:
Concord [Massachusetts]
Aug.1, 1894
My dear Mrs.Todd,
. . . I cannot send the letters, not because I fear they will be lost, but because my sister and I are not willing that any one even Vinnie should have the free reading of them; many of them have whole sentences which were intended for no eyes but ours, and on our own account as well as Emily’s no one else will ever read them. This we consider our right, and we must insist upon it.
I shall bring the letters which I copied almost as they are, and also those from which I made extracts, but I must retain the privilege of reading them to you. Of course the handwriting of the several periods of time will be open for your inspection . . .
Yours very truly
Fanny L. Norcross.
A week later, a tantalising scene ensued: Fanny Norcross holding Dickinson’s letters in front of Todd, cutting out the confidences as she reads.
For all the omissions, Todd again performed a remarkable feat, not only of retrieval and ordering but also understanding. Her unpublished essay (or talk) on the letters points to the suggestiveness of a letter to Bowles where the women he attracts (Emily, Susan and Vinnie, all of them jumpy with expectation as they await his knock at the Homestead door in the spring of 1862, before he goes to Europe for his health) offer flower-cups for his relief and delectation. This offering shows once again how Dickinson’s poetry is sparked by English women writers of her time. ‘We offer you our cups’ takes off from Christina Rossetti’s most recent and celebrated poem, ‘Goblin Market’ (1862). But where Rossetti’s beguiling sellers, all male, are sinister as drug dealers, Dickinson’s sellers, all female, offer what a sick man craves - unconditional love:
We offer you our cups, stintless as to the bee the lily, her new liquors.
Would you like summer?
Taste of ours.
Spices?
Buy here.
Ill? We have berries for the parching!
Weary? Furloughs of down.
Perplexed? Estates of violet trouble ne’er looked on!
Captive? We bring reprieve of roses!
Fainting? Flasks of air.
Even for death, a fairy medicine.
But which is it, Sir?
Todd’s essay brings out the humorousness of Dickinson’s home nature, and her way of playing with darker moods. ‘With her, pathos lay very near to raillery and badinage, pain very near to delight.’ Todd does not deny that Dickinson bared her soul but seldom, and offers this explanation: ‘It was not so much that she was always on spiritual guard, as that she sported with her varying moods, testing them upon her friends.’
The essay was one of Todd’s efforts to promote the Letters. She travelled in a snowstorm to Brooklyn to lecture to an enraptured audience; she sent out leaflets to women’s clubs, with the help of fourteen-year-old Millicent who copied them out in a mature hand; and she made an imaginative proposal to Roberts Brothers: an ‘Emily Dickinson Year Book’, with ‘comets of thought’ appropriate to each day or season. ‘Think of reading against some day in March “House