Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [180]
Mattie also pressed her publisher Houghton Mifflin to sue Todd’s publisher, Harper. Houghton Mifflin too backed off. ‘I am afraid the sympathy of the literary world would be against you,’ her editor Ferris Greenslet advised, ‘so that the final result might be damaging to the sale of your books.’ Mrs Todd was in a strong position because Lavinia’s original permission to use her cache of manuscripts had not been legally revoked.
Keen to retaliate, Mattie scrambled together a rival book of letters with reminiscences. It was to be ‘a personal book about Emily’ and Mattie hoped to regain her authority by quashing Mabel’s claim to have been the poet’s ‘friend’. The new book was titled Face to Face: as Mattie pointed out to Houghton Mifflin, however persistently Mabel had made her way into the poet’s home she had never managed to see Emily Dickinson to her face.
‘My Aunt Lavinia Dickinson declared Mrs Todd has never seen Emily. So that disposes of that,’ said Mattie, as though victory were near.
Far from it. Ever since the adversarial biographies of 1930, Ferris Greenslet had warned Madame Bianchi not to rush out another temporary book thin on fact. ‘Now that the story of Emily Dickinson’s life has become a battleground, which is very regrettable but can’t be helped, the critics both friendly and unfriendly will be sure to . . . judge by much higher standards of taste than would have been applied a decade ago.’
Mattie was impervious, locked in the past amid the family memorabilia and unsifted papers piled up in The Evergreens. When she offered a first-hand memory - her aunt wielding an imaginary key to a room of her own - Mattie was indeed the invaluable conduit she believed herself to be, but too often she had only hearsay to offer, like a cousin’s opinion that Emily’s wearing white was ‘a sort of memorial to the man she loved’.
Louis Untermeyer, who had upheld Mattie’s reticence, now attacked it in a front-page article in the Saturday Review of Literature. ‘Readers waited for Emily Dickinson’s niece . . . to say six definite sentences that would clarify the situation . . . Sinae rumbled, but not even a mouse of fact issued from the mountain of rumor.’
At Houghton Mifflin, Ferris Greenslet and fellow editor Mr Linscott began to doubt Mattie’s story. Mr Linscott sent Greenslet an in-house memorandum:
Myself, I am convinced that the love affair is merely a family legend; that Emily had tremendous admiration and respect for Wadsworth - but nothing more.
In vain did they urge Mattie to verify her fancies. They pointed out that her hint about Aunt Emily’s wish to give the name of her secret love to baby Bowles had been discredited.40 Politely, the editors reined in their irritation.
Dickinson habits of reserve had meant that nothing was discussed. And around this silence there swirled a babble of romantic hearsay. What Mattie required were readers who were too civil or too enchanted to ask awkward questions. Many reviewers did indeed continue to back the legend for its feminine appeal: the ‘quaint’ ways of a poet who was ‘the center of a peculiarly beautiful home life’. So said the Boston Transcript, as did the New York Herald Tribune: ‘It was a warm, intimate New England family, bound by ties of even more than ordinary New England affection.’
Others in the thirties were less delicate. Mattie was disconcerted by a review in American Literature pointing to all manner of editorial sloppiness: the incorrect use of Dickinson’s middle name as ‘Norcross’; the neglect to signal the approximate element in the dating; and the failure to check transcriptions against Todd’s recent edition and to acknowledge it. To Mattie it was pedantic fuss, but it did not go unnoticed. The reviewer too complains of arbitrary and sometimes damaging cuts in letters, as in Mattie’s fiddling with Emily’s youthful boast, ‘I am growing handsome very fast indeed.