Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [137]
To invite peace, Roberts Brothers was compelled to bring out more or less concurrent editions of the same book for the sake of this one sentence. The alteration appears negligible, but not so to the principals. Beneath these statements there rumbled adversarial claims of some importance: Lavinia resented the way Todd underplayed Lavinia’s role in favour of her own. Money was not the main issue, nor even the prestige of association with strangely brilliant letters unlike any other. The crux was Mabel Todd’s advance, a step further on to Dickinson territory: her first step had won Susan; her second step had won Ned; her third, Austin, with Lavinia’s assent; a fourth step had failed to win over the poet herself, but Emily’s death had opened the way for a takeover of her papers. From 1886 until 1894 Lavinia had seen herself in command of the papers, but in the summer of 1894 she detected danger signs: the challenge to exclusive copyright; the potential loss of family royalties at her death; the obliteration of the crusader role she had conceived and carried through since Emily died. Lavinia’s stand in holding on to copyright in the late summer of 1894 was, in this context, shoulder to shoulder with Emily’s last stand at ‘Thermopylae’.
Roberts Brothers printed one thousand copies of the Letters: two small grey-green volumes, stamped once more with Todd’s painting of Indian Pipes, this time tooled in gilt and even more prominent, centred on an otherwise empty front cover. (The name of the author appears only on the spine.) One volume carried a portrait of Emily; the other, a photograph of the well-kept Homestead on its rise above Main Street. Although copies sold quickly there was no continued demand, and this left Roberts Brothers a little in the red. Lavinia owed them $231.30. Years passed, and on 20 March 1899 the firm pressed Lavinia to settle the debt. At this point the firm was taken over by Little, Brown, and an alternative offered to Lavinia was ‘transfer of copyright’ to the publisher. Again Lavinia held on to copyright and the debt remained unpaid. When, later in 1899, she died intestate, copyright passed to her next of kin, the family at The Evergreens.
In her lifetime, Emily Dickinson had been called ‘the myth’; when she died, Todd saw her disappear more deeply into her ‘mystery’. Higginson introduced her to the public as a nunnish recluse who never thought of publication. He characterised her as ‘whimsical’, ‘wayward’, ‘uneven’ and ‘exasperating’. Actually, the blueprint for this character goes back to the poet herself: the coy Daisy of the Master letters and the untaught-Little-Me who writes to Higginson.
Austin smiled at Emily’s display of an ‘innocent and confiding nature’ in her letters to Higginson. He said, ‘Emily definitely posed in those letters.’
The same posture directs ‘This is my Letter to the World / That never wrote to me’. In 1863 the poet begs her ‘sweet countrymen’ to be kind to unassuming nonentity. Did she really think her countrymen sweet in 1863, at the height of the Civil War, biographer Alfred Habegger asks, adding, ‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’ Though the poet had placed this poem in the middle of a booklet, Higginson and Todd gave it the status of an authorial preface to their first volume, as though it were Dickinson’s authentic voice. Habegger rightly points out that it’s a disarming but ‘unreliable’ construct of feminine modesty, devised at a time when she is supremely confident of poetic immortality.
Austin insisted on his sister’s normality. Todd’s preface to Poems: Second Series, her essay on Dickinson’s letters, her review column (‘Bright Bits from Bright Books’) in the Home Magazine and her many public talks all publicised Austin’s message that his sister was neither disappointed nor an invalid. He was right to deny disappointment as a reason for seclusion, but his assertions that seclusion was a ‘normal’ development do not ring true. Mabel Todd offers no explanation beyond this assertion