Amherst (21 page)

“My dear Mrs. Todd—”

“Permit me to read you one or two of my favorites aloud. Do me that kindness before you make up your mind.”

“Very well,” he said with a sigh.

Mabel picked out some poems from the sheaf and rose to her feet to read. She was a good speaker, and she understood the poems well, and she chose carefully.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind—

Higginson listened and inclined his head, understanding why she had begun with this poem.

“So I am the blind man. You must dazzle me gradually, Mrs. Todd.”

Next she read him a poem to flatter his literary bent.

There is no Frigate like a Book

To take us Lands away

Nor any Coursers like a Page

Of prancing Poetry—

This Traverse may the poorest take

Without oppress of Toll—

How frugal is the Chariot

That bears the Human soul.

“Now surely, Mr. Higginson, there’s nothing obscure here.”

“No, no. I grant you, when I hear the lines aloud, the effect is very different.”

“Then hear just one more. Even a gentleman of your distinction will have experienced times of suffering, I daresay. Miss Dickinson understands suffering better than any poet I know.”

After great pain, a formal feeling comes—

The Nerves sits ceremonious, like Tombs—

“Have you ever experienced such a sensation, Mr. Higginson?”

The man of letters once more silently inclined his head.

“Listen to this and tell me the public will never accept it.”

This is the Hour of Lead—

Remembered, if outlived,

As Freezing persons recollect the Snow—

First Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—

Higginson remained silent for a moment longer. Then he nodded his head again.

“I surrender,” he said. “You amaze me. I feel as if I hadn’t read these poems at all before.”

“And there are so many more! We’ve only just begun!”

He waved a hand in front of his face.

“Too many. I’m a busy man, Mrs. Todd.”

“Then let me pick out the best for you.”

“I think that would be a good way to proceed. Divide them up for me, if you will, into the best, and the next best, and the rest. Not too many of the best, please. Be rigorous. Then come back to me, and I’ll see what I can do.”

“You’ll take them to a publisher?”

“I’m a reader at Houghton Mifflin. They’re a good firm. They respect my opinion.”

Mabel returned to Amherst and worked steadily for twelve days on the task of classifying the poems. In the end she selected six hundred and thirty-four poems, divided into categories A, B, and C. She had pored over these poems for so long now, transcribing them with her own hand, typing them letter by letter, that she felt almost as if she had composed them herself. The completed package was then sent off to Higginson in Boston, and Mabel and Vinnie settled down to wait.

•  •  •

The sudden cessation of activity threw Mabel back on the frustrations of her situation. She wrote miserably to Austin:

The first leisure shows me unpityingly the horror of my life, which goes on without the slightest interest from the Almighty, a life absolutely deserted by Him and left to swing for itself in space, unhelped and uncared for. Prayers are no more than so much extra breath wasted, or as Emily says, no more than if a bird stamped its foot on the air.

Higginson moved with agonizing slowness. He was too busy; then he was too ill; then it was Christmas. In the New Year, 1890, he settled to the task at last and picked out two hundred of the poems and gave them titles of his own invention to help the reading public understand them: “Almost,” “In a Library,” “Love’s Baptism,” “Troubled about Many Things,” “The First Lesson,” and so forth. He also divided them into four sections, headed
Life
,
Love
,
Nature
, and
Time and Eternity
. Mabel was horrified by the titles but felt she couldn’t afford to antagonize her coeditor, as he now classed himself.

Higginson took the collection to Houghton Mifflin. There he suffered the embarrassment of outright rejection. The poems were far too queer, he was told, and many of the rhymes simply didn’t work. Humiliated, Higginson told Mabel he had been wrong to give her hope. The poems were not publishable.

Mabel refused to give up. They must approach another publisher. What about Roberts Brothers, also in Boston? Higginson was not prepared for a second humiliation.

“Then I will take the poems myself,” said Mabel.

She called on Thomas Niles of Roberts Brothers. Niles was no more encouraging than the directors of Houghton Mifflin.

“In my personal opinion,” he told her, “Miss Dickinson’s verses are devoid of true poetical qualities.”

But by now Mabel was battle-hardened.

“And yet you take time to see me, Mr. Niles.”

“I say, in my opinion. I have also asked one of our readers, Mr. Arlo Bates, for his appraisal.” He read aloud to Mabel from the report written by his reader. “ ‘These poems have the real stuff, in no unstinted quantities.’ So there you are. One contra, and one pro.”

“The real stuff, Mr. Niles.”

“I can’t see it myself. But Arlo Bates is a poet in his own right. Perhaps he sees something I fail to see.”

Mabel understood that victory was within her grasp.

“You could test the water, perhaps?”

“That is what I’ve been considering. A small edition. A small number of the poems. No more than fifty or so.”

“Two hundred and fifty, Mr. Niles.”

“No, no. A hundred at the most. And I would have to ask the family of the author to contribute to the making of the plates.”

“Agreed.”

Vinnie paid for the plates. Higginson consented to write a preface. Mabel offered the flower painting she had given Emily, to be used as a cover design. Higginson’s preface was designed to prepare readers for the clumsiness of the poems, and to hint that the coeditor was far from convinced himself.

This selection from her poems is published to meet the desire of her personal friends, and especially of her surviving sister. It is believed that the thoughtful reader will find in these pages a quality more suggestive of the poetry of William Blake than anything to be elsewhere found—flashes of wholly original and profound insight into nature and life; words and phrases exhibiting an extraordinary vividness of descriptive and imaginative power, yet often set in a seemingly whimsical or even rugged frame . . . The main quality of these poems is that of extraordinary grasp and insight, uttered with an uneven vigor sometimes exasperating, seemingly wayward, but really unsought and inevitable.

The little volume of one hundred and fifteen poems finally appeared on November 12, 1890:
Poems by Emily Dickinson, Edited by two of her friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson
. The first reviews were puzzled and guarded. What had gone wrong with her rhythms? Why could she not rhyme? Austin remained skeptical, secretly regarding the publication as a vanity project of Vinnie’s.

Mabel alone never wavered. She was Emily’s first and greatest champion. She fought back against all attempts to soften the poems’ bite, convinced of the truth and the power of Emily’s perceptions. She wrote to Austin about his sister:

It all seemed to her so cheap and thin and hollow as she saw it, with the solemn realities of life staring her in the face, but she wanted none of it. Never made any difference what sort of day it was—every day was a red-letter day. The greatness, mystery, and depth of life was so great and overwhelming to her that she could not see how people could go into all this littleness.

This of a woman she had never known, who had become her other self. She and Emily were now arm in arm against the world, battling the uncomprehending littleness.

Then something unexpected happened. The poems began to sell. By the end of November that timid first edition of five hundred was gone. In mid-December Roberts Brothers reprinted, and again at the end of December. Into 1891, edition followed edition, reaching an unprecedented sale by the year’s end of almost eleven thousand.

Emily Dickinson had become famous.

18

Alice has thought of Mabel’s story from the beginning as a love story. Now she begins to ask herself if this has been a mistake. What if there’s no such thing as a love story, only life stories? In a love story you watch with a kind of anticipatory hunger as the lovers meet, you see how they’re filled with longing and fear, you tremble with them until the day dawns when they discover, as you’ve always known they will, that their love is returned. Then comes tragedy, or perhaps marriage, and the story is over. Such things can happen in the real world—it’s not entirely wish fulfillment—but what a little space of time it covers! What of the long years that follow, the knocking about the world together, the struggle to make a career, the raising of children, the growing old? Falling in love becomes a memory, a snapshot, slips into the past. But the hunger never dies. The greedy self clamors just as loudly for a narrative of recognition and fulfillment. Are we to be forever falling in love? Are there no other stories to be told?

There are so many journeys in a life. Each new road leads to a
destination that becomes, in turn, a new beginning. No final arrival, no resting place. We are born wanderers.

So what’s the big deal about love?

Alice sits at her laptop, failing to draft a treatment for her screenplay, interrogating her own shameful dreams.

Why do I feel there’s only one true achievement in life? Why am I waiting for a man who loves me as I am, and promises to stay with me for the rest of my life? Everywhere I go I look for him. Until I find him I believe my life will not have begun.

Am I so seduced by cheap music? Can’t I see the stage sets, the makeup, the shoddy artifice, the false promises of a culture that wants only my unending dissatisfaction? The fairy story is with us still, but in new guises: images in a commercial break, pictures on a Facebook wall, characters on a phone screen. We all know how the trick is done, but still it gets us every time. They feed us lies, and we suck them up, and ask for more.

Did love bring Mabel Todd happiness? For a time, yes. And then for a longer time, no.

Am I in love with Nick Crocker?

The very question makes her laugh. How could that be possible? This is a game, a passing fancy; in a few days she’ll be gone. For now she indulges him, and indulges in him, and why not? He’s adorable and funny and wise and a little lost in a way that touches her more than she cares to admit. His body pleases hers so easily; he knows what he wants, which turns out to be what she wants. This is a gift to be gratefully received, is it not?

So a passionate interlude, not a love story.

“How would you describe it?” she asks him. “Whatever it is we’re doing together.”

“Playing,” he says.

She likes that. Like children absorbed in a world of their own creation, pretending to be doctors and nurses, or mummies and daddies. Children aren’t stupid. They know playtime comes to an end, and then there’s supper, and bath, and being put to bed.

“What game are we playing?” she says.

He smiles at her, with that expression on his face that makes her feel he’s really looking at her.

“I don’t know, Alice. Let’s not think about it too much.”

“I can’t help myself,” she says. “I can’t switch the thinking off.”

They’re in a national forest, walking down a trail on one side of Chesterfield Gorge. All round them the blaze of foliage in the fall. Slender trunks of ash and hemlock, bars against the sky. Underfoot a carpet of bronze leaves. To their right, beyond a chain-link fence, rock walls drop down to a tumbling river.

A sign declares it to be a National Wild and Scenic River.

“Nature tamed for our pleasure,” says Nick. “Safe in its cage.”

“I don’t care,” says Alice. “I think it’s beautiful. Don’t you love the sound of the river?”

She takes his hand and he swings her arm with his as they walk between the trees. The trail rounds a bend. They come to a stop and kiss.

“Have you ever made love in a national park?” he says.

“No,” says Alice. “Isn’t it against the law?”

“As it happens,” says Nick, “this is something I’ve looked up. According to National Parks Regulations, the section on Disorderly Conduct prohibits fighting, addressing offensive remarks, and making unreasonably loud noise. Nothing at all about making love.”

“You seriously have looked it up.”

“Yes.”

“Have you done it?”

“Yes.”

“Weren’t you scared someone would come along and see you at it?”

“No.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Want to find out?”

“No way!” She backs away from him, as if he’s going to ravish her there and then. “There is no way I’m doing it in public, in the middle of the day, in a forest, in October! Are you crazy? I’d get scratches all over my bum!”

“Okay,” he says, smiling at her consternation.

“You didn’t really mean it?”

“Yes,” he says. “But that’s okay.”