Memories

Memories of Emily

BOLTS OF MELODY--Emily Dickinson--edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham -- Harper ($3).

ANCESTORS' BROCADES --Millicent Todd Bingham--Harper ($3.75).

Emily Dickinson died almost 60 years ago, but last week more than 650 of her poems were published for the first time. They are wonderful: some of them are as good as her best. On an old scrap of paper (not large enough, so she had to write around the edges), in her curious hand writing, half-print and half-script, she noted:

The Bobolink

is gone--the

Rowdy of the

meadow--

And no one

swaggers now

but me--

The Presbyterian

Birds can now

resume the meeting

He gaily interrupted

that overflowing

Day . . .

He bowed to

Heaven instead

of Earth--

And shouted

Let us pray.

New England Family. Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Mass., in the days when Amherst, with 260 students, was a bigger college than Harvard. Her father was Edward Dickinson, a leading lawyer and the college treasurer. He was a narrow-eyed, frozen-faced, unbending New Englander, who ran the town, the college, and his family with unconscious mastery. It was not that he was obviously domineering: it just never occurred to people to oppose him. When a photographer, alarmed at his stern expression, timidly asked him to smile, the squire thundered: "I am smiling!"

Daughter Emily was thin, graceful, with a wide mouth, an upturned nose and large, haunting eyes -- a goblin face. Her sister Lavinia was a village spinster, in her later years became cross, sharp-tongued, quarrelsome and grasping, with long black hair, broken, irregular teeth (mostly false) and dirty hands and fingernails. Their brother Austin married Susan, their school girl friend, a tavernkeeper's daughter. Susan soon became involved in a lifelong feud with sister-in-law Lavinia.

They fought over Austin and Emily. After Emily's death they fought 'over her poetry. When her poetry was published they fought over her letters. When her letters were at last published they fought over her biography. When Lavinia and her sister-in-law died, the fight was carried on by their supporters.

Most of the books about Emily Dickinson are stories of their battles. Ancestors' Brocades, the most recent and one of the best, is a 464-page record of the exact circumstances of the first book publication of Emily's poems, after her death. It is a valuable book, rich in detail, illustrated with 16 fine photographs and sketches. Its careful report of intellectual brutality, spite, frauds, lawsuits, jealousies, of poems and letters destroyed, attempted blackmail fabrications and hoarded literary wealth, would be almost unbearable if it were not for the glimpses of Emily one gets beyond the foreground quarrels, as the townspeople of Amherst used to see her in the garden of Squire Dickinson's big house.

Republic of Delight. She was, and is, enchanting. The poet of birds and mornings--A day! Help! Help! Another day!--lived in a world of fancy so vivid and unexpected, filled with such hummingbird twists of phrase and thought, that she never seemed a citizen of anything but her own republic of delight. Everyone loved her. She lived through a quiet, popular girlhood in Amherst, and flowered into a brief social triumph as a young woman.

Some time during the winter of 1862--no one knows exactly when, for Emily dated neither her letters nor her poems--she began to write poetry. She wrote on the backs of receipts and advertisements, on the margins of newspapers and on the brown paper bags from the grocer. She was particularly fond of the insides of envelopes. She hid her poems like a squirrel hiding acorns. During the Civil War she published a few, anonymously. Then she took the advice of Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Boston's famed, upright, literary busybody, not to publish, and imperceptibly sank out of sight. For years she rarely left the Dickinson house.

Dressed always in white, eager and affectionate, Emily sat in the hall, in the shadows, when she received her own few visitors. (The visitor sat in the parlor and the two, out of each other's sight, talked through the open door.) She thought herself ugly and old, though when she died in 1886, at 56, she seemed no more than 30.

Hammered Sunbeams. One day in 1886, Lavinia tremblingly brought her friend Mabel Todd a box full of Emily's poems. There were 60 little books made up of four or five sheets of note paper tied together with twine. They contained eight or nine hundred poems.

Mabel Todd and Colonel Higginson worked like puzzled beavers over the insubstantial substance of Emily's poems. They wrote titles for them, washed their faces, combed their hair, changed lines, words, and made them rhyme. Nothing in the poems themselves was as mysterious as these two sensible, kindly people hammering and sawing on Emily's sunbeams. In 1890 Roberts Brothers of Boston printed 480 copies of their manuscript, charging Miss Lavinia $122.65 for the plates, and sold the books for $1.50 apiece. (A first edition now sells for $75.) They were an immediate success. Six editions were published in five months; within two years there were eleven.

Mabel Todd had copied over a thousand of Emily's poems. Lavinia had several hundred more. Susan had others. (Martha Bianchi, Susan's daughter, published a selection of these in 1914, a year after her mother's death.) In 1917 the Todds moved to Coconut Grove, Fla., taking Emily's poems wrapped in a bundle. The storehouse caught fire, but the poems were saved. Thereafter they were kept in the house. It was wrecked in a hurricane, but again the poems were saved. In 1932 Mrs. Todd gave them to her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham.

They were kept in a camphorwood box. When the key was turned, the lock played a tune. As her mother had requested, and with a thumping heart, Millicent turned the key, heard "that little tune" for the first time, and drew from the camphorwood box the poems, letters, diaries and documents which were the material for these two books on Emily Dickinson.

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