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Redeeming Todd: How Emily Dickinson's work SURVIVED torturous odds & made it to print

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C C Offline
Bitchy Little Spinster
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n11/...e-spinster

INTRO: Nobody​ has a good word to say about Mabel Loomis Todd. When she’s remembered at all, it’s as a homewrecker: the vamp who seduced Emily Dickinson’s brother, Austin, 27 years her senior, and destroyed his marriage to Susan Gilbert, Emily’s closest confidante. Like any good seductress, Todd was an opportunist. She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily Dickinson was hardly cold in the grave when Todd made a bid to edit her poems and ride to literary notoriety on Emily’s white apron strings. So the story goes – or a version of it.

Dickinson’s work first appeared in 1890 in a volume co-edited by Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Julie Dobrow’s "After Emily" attempts to rescue Todd’s reputation by offsetting her bad behaviour against the extraordinary labour she devoted to transcribing, editing and promoting Dickinson’s work. It also chronicles the trials of her daughter, Millicent Bingham. The first woman to receive a doctorate in geography from Harvard, she sacrificed her academic career to finish the editorial work her mother began. Readers may not agree with the version of Emily Dickinson they presented, or approve of the changes they made to her work, but if it hadn’t been for these two women, we might not have any Emily Dickinson at all.

[...] To Higginson, Dickinson was a ‘virgin recluse’; Todd ‘inevitably’ thought ‘of Miss Havisham in speaking of her’. It’s true that these early editors perpetuated the misleading image of the ‘solitary spinster’, which provoked the ire of later feminist critics such as Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith. ... But it’s equally true that Dickinson played that role well enough when it suited her. ... Her letters to Higginson feign a desire to be instructed...

[...] Austin remarked, late in life, that Dickinson ‘posed’ in her letters. He might have had in mind an exchange from 1851. He had suggested to his sister that she write more plainly. ‘You say you don’t comprehend me, you want a simpler style,’ she responded. ‘Gratitude indeed for all my fine philosophy! ... I’ll be a little ninny – a little pussy catty, a little Red Riding Hood, I’ll wear a Bee in my Bonnet, and a Rose bud in my hair.’

It rankled that their father had thought Austin the writer among his children. In 1853, Dickinson scoffed at her brother’s attempts at verse-making: ‘Austin is a Poet, Austin writes a psalm. Out of the way, Pegasus ... I’ll tell you what it is – I’ve been in the habit myself of writing some few things, and it rather appears to me that you’re getting away my patent ... you’d better be somewhat careful.’

As her relationship with Higginson progressed, Dickinson’s ego showed through the childlike veneer...

[...] But even those who admired Dickinson’s work have been put off by the demands she places on the reader. Denise Levertov found something chilling about her command on the page, an ugliness in her aristocratic self-assurance: ‘You know, actually those dashes bother me,’ she wrote to Robert Duncan in 1961. ‘There’s something cold and perversely smug about E.D. that has always rebuffed my feeling for individual poems ... She wrote some great things – saw strangely – makes one shudder with new truths – but ever and again one feels (or I do) – “Jesus, what a bitchy little spinster.”’

The idea that there’s something ‘smug’, ‘cold’ and ‘perverse’ about the dashes is intriguing. These visual markers often represent points at which meaning vanishes. Dickinson has elfed it and – like Lavinia landed with her sister’s chores – we’re left to supply a meaning the poet hasn’t; or else to occupy a typographical void where sense evades us. The poems require an intensity of engagement that can make the reading experience border on masochism. The effect is physical: to use Levertov’s phrase, the poems ‘make one shudder’.

[...] Dickinson was selfish, nasty and emotionally impaired, but took pride in it: ‘I love to be surly – and muggy – and cross.’ In 1850, when her uncle Joel Norcross broke his promise to write to her, Dickinson sent him a vicious letter: ‘I shall kill you – and you may dispose of your affairs with that end in view. You can take Chloroform if you like – and I will put you beyond the reach of pain in a twinkling.’ Lavinia said her sister could be ‘savage’. Samuel Bowles came to see her as ‘half angel, half demon’. His wife, Mary, found her manner ‘alarming’.

[...] Solitude allows us to inhabit any number of imaginary selves; society demands a single, recognisable identity, to hold our character constant. This, Dickinson feared, would render her negatively incapable, killing off her capacity to call forth the shudder. ‘If I stopped to think of the figure I was cutting,’ she wrote to Sue, ‘it would be the last of me.’

[...] Shortly​ after Emily died in 1886, Lavinia Dickinson began to sort through her sister’s effects. She had, at Emily’s request, already burned hundreds of letters when she opened a locked bureau drawer and found what she recognised to be poems: hundreds of sheets of stationery paper stitched into booklets. She soon uncovered more writing: on loose leaves of paper, on torn envelopes, clustered around a postage stamp of a steam engine securing magazine clippings about George Sand. Were these fragments of poems too? Lavinia recognised that she lacked the expertise to sort through the papers, but was determined that her sister’s work should be published...

[...] Todd was frustrated by Lavinia’s ignorance: she had no idea how many poems there were, or any sense of the difficulty involved in deciphering Dickinson’s handwriting. Many of the poems were ‘written on both sides of the paper, interlined, altered and the number of suggested changes was baffling’. There were ‘tiny crosses written beside a word which might be changed ... and which referred to scores of possible words at the bottom of the page’. The crosses ‘were all exactly alike, so that only the most sympathetic and at-one-with-the-author could determine where each word belonged’. Todd endeavoured to remain true to Dickinson’s manuscripts in her original transcription: the editing could come later. She copied the poems by hand, then typed them up on a borrowed Hammond typewriter. This machine, as Ralph Franklin explained in The Editing of Emily Dickinson (1967), was ‘one of the earliest to have small letters as well as capitals’ and allowed Todd to remain faithful to Dickinson’s idiosyncratic capitalisation. When she was forced to return the Hammond she purchased her own typewriter, for $15. This was ‘a more primitive machine than the Hammond’ and ‘had only capitals’, making it incapable of a ‘literal rendering’ of Dickinson’s work.

Todd worked on the poems consistently between 1887 and 1889. (Lavinia made several late-night visits to admonish her for her slow progress.) [....] editors agreed that Dickinson’s punctuation should reflect ‘typographical convention’. Her underscores, quotation marks, unorthodox use of capitalisation and, most significantly, her dashes were abolished...

[...] No modern​ reader of Dickinson will be satisfied with the Todd-Higginson edition, but the scorn directed at their editorial practices has often been disproportionate. Was there any editor in the 1880s who could somehow have persuaded a publishing house to print unedited transcriptions of Dickinson’s manuscripts?

[...] Todd was right to worry that Dickinson’s ‘unconventionality might repel publishers’. Despite their attempts to render her work ‘accessible’, Houghton Mifflin, the first publisher they approached, rejected the manuscript. The poems ‘were much too queer – the rhymes were all wrong.’ David reported that ‘they thought Higginson must be losing his mind to recommend such stuff.’ Next, they approached Thomas Niles at Roberts Brothers. He told Higginson that he thought it ‘unwise to perpetuate Miss Dickinson’s poems’, which were ‘quite as remarkable for defects as for beauties’. But he agreed to send the manuscript to the critic Arlo Bates, who acted as a reader for the firm. ‘There is hardly one of these poems which does not bear marks of unusual and remarkable talent,’ Bates responded.

[...] In spite of this, Bates recommended that Roberts Brothers publish the poems. Niles agreed to a small print run if Lavinia paid for the plates. She was initially ‘inarticulate with rage’, but Todd talked her round. She had, Todd declared, ‘as much knowledge about business as a Maltese cat’... (MORE - details)
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