The timing was right. Mabel knew that Vinnie wanted above all else to see her sister’s poems in print, and Vinnie, exasperated by Sue and aware of Mabel’s Dickinson fixation, craftily showed her several of the poems. To be published, they would have to be copied, of course, the originals kept safe. Soon Mabel was transcribing them. Years later Vinnie would insist Mabel had begged for the privilege in order to enhance her own reputation, not Emily’s, and Mabel would claim Vinnie had solicited her unpaid and loyal assistance, which she freely gave.
Vinnie also enlisted Higginson when he again stayed at the Evergreens during the summer of 1888, while attending a meeting of the American Philological Society. Agreeing that a private printing of Emily’s poems would not circulate her work widely enough, he pledged his assistance—editing the poems, finding a publisher—even though he had recently been ill. And he promised to write a preface to the volume; his imprimatur would help get it noticed.
With Higginson on board and Vinnie an unrelenting overseer, Mabel worked harder and harder. Transcribing poems first by hand and then on her new Hammond typewriter, by the winter of 1889 Mabel was copying two or three a day out of the “wilderness” of them all: “they are almost endless in number,” she moaned. By her own admission she was also altering a large number of the poems as she copied, substituting words where she thought fit or choosing among the alternates Dickinson had written in the margins. “I felt their genius and I knew the book would succeed,” she said. “At the same time, their carelessness of form exasperated me. I could always find the gist & meaning, and I admired her strange words and ways of using them, but the simplest laws of verse-making she ignored, and what she called rhymes grated on me.” So she improved them.
And she continued to bang out her own compositions, articles for The Youth’s Companion, Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, The Century, and the Christian Union (mostly nonfiction), until, exhausted, she hired an assistant, Harriet Graves, to help her with the hundreds of poems still left. When Miss Graves proved a disappointment, Mabel copied more poems herself on her brand-new World typewriting machine before switching back to copying them by hand; it actually took less time and helped her commit the poems to memory, which she liked to do. Devoting three or four hours a day to the poems, she later remembered their mesmerizing effect. “They seemed to open the door into a wider universe than the little sphere surrounding me which so often hurt and compressed me,” she said, “and they helped me nobly through a very trying time.”
Temporarily finished, in the fall of 1889 Mabel finally met Colonel Higginson. In Boston with her daughter (David was on another eclipse expedition, this time in Angola), the ardent Mrs. Todd greeted the courtly Colonel on November 6, 1889, at her cousin’s Beacon Street home—far plusher than her own sparse rooms—and the unlikely collaboration commenced. Together they sifted through the huge stash of poems Mabel had brought: 634 by Mabel’s count, 600 copied personally by her.
“He staid an hour or more,” Mabel recorded in her diary, “and we examined the poems and discussed the best way of editing them.” Already writing for posterity in mythopoeic journal entries—these were distinct from her jottings in a daily diary—Mabel enhanced her role as Dickinson’s perspicacious sponsor. According to her, Higginson fretted that the poems, despite their fine ideas, were rough, mystical, and far too difficult to elucidate. “But I read him nearly a dozen from my favorites,” she claimed, “and he was greatly astonished.”
Of course he had been astonished for more than twenty years, and he had already promised his support, which he never withdrew even after Vinnie and Mabel, jealous of each other, publicly vied for center stage, disputing who loved the poems better, who grasped them more, who flagged and who never faltered or whose motives were clear and clean—and why Mabel had copied them in the first place. Through all of this, Higginson said little. Steadfast and unflappable, this booster of women writers and envoi of the literary establishment (an epithet that made him grimace), despite all—despite aesthetic orthodoxies and the peculiar stock he placed in them—despite this, he believed, as he always had, in Emily Dickinson.
IN THE FALL OF 1889, Thomas Wentworth Higginson was sixty-five years old. Though his hair grew thinner still, and whiter, and his health was dicey, he had run for United States Congress the year before and had been defeated, he said, without regret. The equanimity was feigned. His platform of civil service reform may have seemed irrelevant to many voters—that much was understandable—but a substantial number in the black community, as it turned out, were against him, and his conciliatory attitude toward the South inflamed Frederick Douglass, who accused Higginson and all the mugwumps of disloyalty “not only to that political organization [the Republican party], but to the cause of liberty itself.”
He did not ignore the criticism and, in his next collection of essays, Travellers and Outlaws: Episodes in American History, issued an implicit rejoinder to his detractors, for though the book included an antiquarian article on Salem sea captains, it also featured Higginson’s essays on Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, the Maroons of Jamaica, and the insurgent slave Gabriel, all reprinted as if to remind readers two decades after the Civil War that relations between black and white were as vexed, contradictory, and racked by prejudice as they’d been in 1831, when Turner’s rebellion unleashed a white Reign of Terror (Higginson’s term). The book didn’t sell and received few reviews.
As ever, though, his writing about politics reflected but one side of him. In the same year, 1889, that Travellers and Outlaws appeared, Higginson fulfilled a private dream, publishing his very first book of verse, The Afternoon Landscape: Poems and Translations, which he dedicated to his old schoolmate the poet James Russell Lowell. Before the Civil War and after, Higginson never stopped writing poetry, and while he recognized the boundaries of his talent, he nonetheless sought a form in which he could express “internal difference—/ ,” as Dickinson had put it, “Where the Meanings, are.” Such were the twin poles of his commitment to the life of the mind and the life of the activist, each tugging at the other. “No Man can be a Poet & a Book-Keeper at the same time,” Nathaniel Hawthorne had cried while just a boy. This was not just the plaint of an adolescent fed on the Romantic poets; this had become the unwritten law of American culture.
Since Higginson’s poetry was inhibited by its own kind of bookkeeping, particularly in its predictable prosody, it is hard to imagine him delighted by the heap of Dickinson verse delivered by Mrs. Todd. But he was. “There are many new to me which take my breath away,” he exulted, “& which also have form beyond most of those I have seen before.” Form: its conventions were his nemesis, for in his own work he could not heed his Emerson and remember that poetry is not meters but a meter-making argument.
Reviewers, generally as orthodox as he, found his work congenial. And much of it is; take the sonnet “The Snowing of the Pines,” for example:
Softer than silence, stiller than still air,
Float down from high pine-boughs the slender leaves.
The forest floor its annual boon receives
That comes like snowfall, tireless, tranquil, fair.
Gently they glide, gently they clothe the bare
Old rocks with grace. Their fall a mantle weaves
Of paler yellow than autumnal sheaves
Or those strange blossoms the witch-hazels wear.
Athwart long aisles the sunbeams pierce their way;
High up, the crows are gathering for the night;
The delicate needles fill the air; the jay
Takes through their golden mist his radiant flight;
They fall and fall, till at November’s close
The snow-flakes drop as lightly—snows on snows.
Despite archaisms (“athwart”) and the awkward inversions (“The forest floor its annual boon receives”), the poem’s final sestet vividly re-creates the coming stillness (the descending alliteration of “fill,” “flight,” “fall, “fall,” and “flakes”), and its la
st line recalls one of the very first poems Dickinson showed him, “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—,” with its striking “Soundless as Dots, / On a Disc of Snow.”
But the comparison ends there. For if we put Higginson’s poetry next to Dickinson’s, we automatically traduce it and overlook the lyric poignancy of a poem like his “Sea-Gulls at Fresh Pond,” which strikingly anticipates Yeats’s far grander “Wild Swans at Coole”:
O lake of boyish dreams! I linger round
Thy calm, clear waters and thine altered shores
Till thought brings back the plash of childhood’s oars,—
Long hid in memory’s depths, a vanished sound.
Alone unchanged, the sea-birds yet are found
Far floating on thy wave by threes and fours,
Or grouped in hundreds, while a white gull soars,
Safe, beyond gunshot of the hostile ground.
I am no nearer to those joyous birds
Than when, long since, I watched them as a child;
Nor am I nearer to that flock more wild,
Most shy and vague of all elusive things,
My unattainable thoughts, unreached by words.
I see the flight, but never touch the wings.
To see the flight, but never touch the wings: Higginson could be writing of Dickinson, for he had in fact said almost that same thing to her when he admitted, as he said, that it would be so easy to miss her. “I cannot reach you,” he had cried, “but only rejoice in the rare sparkles of light.” And Dickinson hovers over his poems “The Dying House” and “Astra Castra,” the latter dedicated to free spirit ironically held in check by the sonnet form itself—that is, by the conventional versifier, Colonel Higginson. Yet the nascent poet in him recognizes, without envy, that this spirit dwells “beyond all worlds, all space, all thought, /…transformed.”
Could we but reach and touch that wayward will
On earth so hard to touch, would she be found
Controlled or yet impetuous, free or bound,
Tameless as ocean, or serene and still?
If in her heart one eager impulse stirs,
Could heaven itself calm that wild mood of hers?
A man of limits, to be sure, Higginson was gifted enough to sense what lay beyond him.
The volume was handsome, its tan covers decorated with gilt lettering. Overall, though, the book spoke of resignation even in its title, The Afternoon Landscape, for the fresh morning of transcendentalism and abolition had yielded at last to that “certain Slant of light, / ,” as Dickinson had written, of “Winter Afternoons—.”
BUSY WITH HIS VARIOUS PROJECTS and stricken by a stomach ailment of unknown origin, Higginson initially could not devote much time to the Dickinson poems. But he had promised Vinnie that once the poems were divided into three categories (A, B, and C), he would carefully look them over. Likely that task had fallen to Vinnie as well as Mrs. Todd, but Mabel remembered only her own work: “A contained those of most original thought expressed in as nearly good form as ED ever used,” she explained. “B those of striking ideas, but showing too much of her peculiarities of construction to be used unaltered for the public; & C those impossible for such use, however brilliant & suggestive.”
It was hard work. “My brain fairly reels,” she cried to Austin. But on November 18, not two weeks after meeting with Higginson, she dispatched the poems, all labeled, to the Colonel, who scrawled “Emily Dickinson’s poems” in his diary in uncharacteristically bold letters. In less than a week he contacted Mrs. Todd. “My confidence in their availability is greatly increased. It is fortunate there are so many because it is obviously impossible to print all & this leaves the way open for careful selection.”
Reading through half of Mabel’s A list, Higginson grouped the poems thematically under headings such as “Life,” “Nature,” and “Time / Death / Eternity.” “Perhaps you can suggest more subdivisions,” he proposed. “The plates will cost rather less than $1 per page and there can often be two poems on a page—rarely more than one; say $230 for 250 pp including 300 poems.” Three weeks later he again reported that “I am at work with many interruptions on the poems; have gone through ‘B’ and transferred about twenty to ‘A’ (we must have that burglar—the most nearly objective thing she wrote.) ‘C’ I have not touched.”
With Higginson so fully committed, Vinnie grew impatient with Mabel, who was heading for Chicago. Why hadn’t she contacted Higginson again? “You are acting for me & not yourself,” Vinnie scolded. “I can’t believe he has gotten any word from you. I wrote him you would call upon him & maybe he expects you whenever you are ready to do so. It is a great disappointment & surprise that this delay must be. I now regret the poems are in his hands.” Mrs. Todd must see the Colonel immediately, Vinnie commanded, to urge him forward, and when Mabel did not comply, Vinnie picked up a pen and wrote him herself. He answered with good news: he had “selected and arranged” about two hundred of Dickinson’s poems “to begin with. Then, if you wish, others may follow:
Life
44
Love
23
Nature
60
Time & Eternity
72
_____________________
199
Vinnie liked the headings, and when Higginson recommended someone write an article about the poems to prepare the public—he seems to have forgotten that he had volunteered—Vinnie asked him to do it. Miffed, Mabel said nothing.
Aware of the exceptional character of Dickinson’s genius, Higginson also suspected that readers and publishers might dismiss the poetry out of hand. Gingerly, he contacted acquaintances in the business. Houghton Mifflin thought he had lost his mind, and at Roberts Brothers, Thomas Niles stiffly reminded the Colonel that he always thought it “unwise to perpetuate Miss Dickinson’s poems,” which, as he pompously concluded, he regarded as notable chiefly for their defects.
Out of respect for Higginson, however, Niles took a slight risk. If Lavinia Dickinson would pay for the plates of a small edition—“which shall be exempt from copyright, all future issues to be subject to 15% copyright on the retail price of all sold”—he would print a limited run of the poems.
Vinnie accepted with pleasure.
NILES HANDED THE DICKINSON manuscript over to the writer Arlo Bates, his outside reader, and though Bates admitted that the author of this rude verse “came very near to that indefinable quality which we call genius,” he recommended publishing only half the poems, and those rigorously edited. Some of the ones Bates omitted—and we cannot be entirely sure which they were—Higginson regarded as Dickinson’s finest, but Mabel began editing the selections, crossing out Dickinson’s dashes, correcting her punctuation and spelling, omitting capitals, and regularizing rhyme at will.
Forever after, Higginson would be remembered as the graceless editor who shamelessly cut Dickinson down to Victorian size. But which editor, Todd or Higginson, changed what? Who was the more obtuse? Even Ralph Franklin, in an excellent study of extant Dickinson manuscripts and their copies, cannot definitively say whether Higginson or Mabel Todd bore the chief responsibility for tailoring Dickinson to fit prevailing norms. Mrs. Todd, who cropped poems when first transcribing them, herself later conceded, “I changed words here and there in the two hundred to make them smoother—he changed a very few.” But Higginson went along.
Enamored of Dickinson’s poetry but convinced it contained faults, Mabel had decided to prepare the poet to meet the public in as respectable a garb as possible; her torrid affair with the poet’s brother did not imply that she would throw all convention to the wind, far from it. Higginson, on the other hand, considered the poems a rarity but knew he had to spoon-feed a palatable version to that selfsame and ponderous public he had upbraided and cajoled and fought against for many years. He thus occasionally objected to Mabel’s interference. “I find with dismay that the beautiful ‘I shall know why, when time is over’ has been left out,” he protested in July of
1890, after he saw the completed manuscript and restored the poem from memory. And when Mrs. Todd wanted to correct Dickinson’s grammar in the poem “I died for Beauty—,” substituting “laid” for the ungrammatical “lain” (“When One who died for Truth was lain”), he protested and won.
During the summer, Higginson and Mrs. Todd corresponded, making the final alterations for which they have been blamed ever after—as if any of us, had we lived over one hundred years ago, might not have floundered in similar ways. For language like this had never been seen before; nothing like it, really, ever appeared again. Still, both editors erred on the side of what they thought was caution. In the poem “These are the days when Birds come back—,” Mabel wished to change the fourth line, “These are the days when skies resume,” to the more prosaic, unlyrical “These are the days when skies put on.” Higginson again went along. And over Mabel’s own protest, he himself demanded that the last line of “The Grass so little has to do” be changed from “I wish I were a Hay—” to “I wish I were the hay.” “It cannot go in so,” he presumably said, “everybody would say that hay is a collective noun requiring the definite article. Nobody can call it a hay!” As a result the last lines were printed “And then to dwell in sovereign barns / And dream the days away,—/ The grass so little has to do, / I wish I were the hay!” Strict grammar here makes no sense.
Then there was the matter of titles. Dickinson did not use them. On occasion when writing to a correspondent, she might identify her poems with something like them; for instance, she had labeled the poems “Further in Summer than the Birds” and “It sifts from Leaden Sieves—” “My Cricket and the Snow” when writing to Thomas Niles. And when printed in newspapers, her poems were titled, but whether by her or an editor, we don’t know. That’s it. But Higginson wanted titles, and Mrs. Todd agreed, even though, as she said, she did “not believe, myself, in naming them; and although I admire Mr. Higginson very much, I do not think many of his titles good.” In later years she again claimed Higginson had been more addicted to titles than she, or, as she defended herself, she “was exceedingly loath to assign titles to any of them which might not be unmistakably indicated in the poem itself.”
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