Magic Hours Read Online Free Page A

gifts. Sometimes Todd would sing in the Dickinson house for Emily, who listened upstairs, composing poems on the spot. Thus Dickinson and the woman who eventually edited the first volume of her work never met face-to-face. An odder relationship in the history of American letters would be hard to fathom.
    After Dickinson died in 1886,Vinnie pressured anyone possessing an ounce of literary acumen to do something about her sister’s orphaned poems. Susan initially agreed to edit them, then backed out, claiming the poems would never sell. Vinnie turned, among others, to the same Thomas Wentworth Higginson who had assailed Walt Whitman. As Vinnie was aware, her sister’s correspondence with Higginson began in 1862, after the appearance of a Higginson essay in The Atlantic called “Letter to a Young Contributor,” which assured that editors are “always hungering and thirsting after novelties.” Dickinson was thirty-one when she sent along a short letter and four poems, asking Higginson, famously, if her “Verse is alive.” Although he offered Dickinson some guarded praise, Higginson said to The Atlantic ’s editor, “I
foresee that ‘Young Contributors’ [sic] will send me worse things than ever now.” In the following epistolary exchanges, a strange friendship formed. In time, Higginson came to see Dickinson as a remarkable, if not publishable, talent, and despite occasional reluctance served her as a valuable friend. Although he spoke at Dickinson’s funeral, Higginson declined Vinnie’s plea to edit her poetry.
    In desperation, Vinnie approached Mabel Todd. Todd had many reasons for turning Vinnie down, her own literary ambitions among them. But she was deeply depressed with Amherst and her battles with Susan. Dickinson’s troubled, eerie poems seemed, as she later wrote, “to open the door into a wider universe than the little sphere surrounding me.” Actually faced with transcribing the poems—sheer illegibility and Dickinson’s grammatical peculiarities making it immensely difficult—soon convinced her she could not manage the job alone. She contacted Higginson herself, who told Todd that, while he admired Dickinson’s verse, he deplored its undisciplined form. Only after listening to Todd read some poems aloud did Higginson, at long last, assent to involvement. The growing toxicity between Austin, Susan, Vinnie, and Todd complicated the editing process, as did Higginson’s stuffy insistence on titling Dickinson’s poems. “Because I could not stop for Death” appeared in 1890’s Poems under the Higginsonian title of “The Chariot.”
    Their task completed, Higginson sent the poems to Houghton Mifflin, where they were quickly rejected as “queer.” Humiliated, Higginson more or less bowed out from the publishing process, and after months of failure and negotiation, the firm Roberts and Brothers agreed to publish Dickinson’s poems, requiring that Vinnie pay for the printer’s plates. After an ordeal whose vicissitudes could have derailed the project any number of times, the poems were published in 1890. Public reception was immediate. Poems would go through eleven printings within the next two years.

    What, then, do we have to thank for the survival of American literature’s three greatest figures? Remaindered copies bought from book peddlers. A man, sitting at his desk, an oxidized copy of a forgotten novel beside him, cobbling together an essay with no idea of what it would accomplish. The lovely devotion of solitary women and men. Essays published at the right time, in the right journals or books, noticed by the right people. Clearly, these are not the props of fate. They are, rather, the stagecraft of chance.
    The comfort we take in these writers’ survival is undercut by some quietly nagging questions: How many novels did Carl Van Doren’s hand pass over to find Moby-Dick ? How