Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [121]
In Mabel’s fantasy the threesome would then make a triumphal arm-in-arm progress towards their Amherst kingdom. When the obstacle remained in place, she was almost incredulous. Three times Austin held out against Mabel’s call to action. First, in the summer of 1885, he had refused to attack his marriage with written evidence. Then, in the summer of 1886, he had refused Mabel’s plea not to help his family at Ashford. Lastly, in the summer of 1887, Austin did nothing to undermine his wife’s existence when Mabel, far away in Shirakawa, awaited developments. She had made it as clear as she could that if she is to flourish Austin must freeze or wither Sue’s spirit to the point where health and hold on life give way.
Did Austin get the message? Was he stirred by Mabel’s threat of her own death? Or was he reluctant to seize the dagger before him, the handle towards his hand? These are crucial questions, even if they leave us guessing. Austin’s eruptive nature made him suggestible if deflected from his groove - he accepted, for instance, the novelty of group sex - but, unlike Macbeth, he was not susceptible to evil or injustice. To call Mabel ‘my angel wife’ placed a block of sorts on active malice. Yet during the two years of rehearsal for Susan’s demise, Mabel did succeed up to a point: if she could not screw Austin’s courage to the sticking place, she did narrow the scope of his emotional attachments until he could see only her. That summer, he tells her how far he has ‘grown away from everything else; I have grown so entirely to you’. While Mabel is in Tokyo he repeats it. This is the message he’s absorbed: ‘There is nothing else. You transform, transmute, translate everything . . . you have made me yours . . .’
All other ties felt hollow. This may explain his curtailed visits to Emily when she was dying. The summer following her death, when Austin sits in her room, he doesn’t think of her, as someone who has lost a sister might. It’s just a room, not too familiar, an emptied place where he can write to Mabel. All the time she was away he felt ‘the power’ of her love, ‘its overwhelming, overmastering strength in and over me’.
David Todd’s expedition to Japan failed in its main purpose, to photograph the sun’s corona during a total eclipse on 19 August 1887. He had invented a forerunner of the motion picture machine to capture the event but unfortunately Mount Fuji erupted at just that time, filling the atmosphere with obscuring fumes. Nor could any amount of planning or money avert clouds, and this happened time after time. He travelled to California, Japan and, later, Angola in the vain expectation of a fine day. It always eluded him. He remained hopeful of future expeditions but President Seelye of Amherst College was not impressed with his habit of chasing eclipses. Inconvenienced by his absence, the college was not inclined to cover his salary. David Todd therefore needed Austin Dickinson’s backing on the Board of Trustees. Thwarted ambition lies behind David’s agreement to Mabel’s plans for new campaigns. Though he didn’t fathom his wife’s need for the fidelity Austin offered, he had reason to believe that she was backing him. Their marriage was true after its own fashion, true to the ambitious partnership on which it was founded. Their manner towards each other was rather chummy. With David, Mabel calls herself ‘May-bill’, a billing coo unlike the high-toned speeches she reserved for Austin. Mabel, meanwhile, was increasingly disconcerted to have no news of an act of God. ‘I am pitifully helpless in His hands, & dare not even reproach Him.’ There’s a desperate note in her voice when she asks Austin - in his Almighty character - for a sign. No luck. Sue walked about Amherst with her usual vigour.
Failing this campaign, Mabel interested herself in Austin Dickinson