Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [124]
From the vantage of his own security, Austin thought Mabel should look upon the world as too large and fascinating to trouble herself with the gossip of gnats and carrion birds. He suggested she control herself.
Mabel replied that he had no idea of ‘the almost iron hold’ which she kept on herself all the time. Her impatience, she added, was only ‘the superficial froth’ of a struggle ‘too deep for words’.
Her problem, in fact, was not that she lacked the words. It had to do with Mabel’s struggle to subject her eloquence to a concubine code: never reproach the King. This time she risked it.
‘I have continually put down the suggestion in my own mind that much of this pain was unnecessarily given me by your reluctance to step in and relieve it in the one place which caused it all. I have never admitted a thing into my consciousness which could seem like a disloyal thought toward you. But oh! how gladly shall I see you do what you can in this line!’
The letter warns that if he does not act now, she will have to go away. She meant it.
Driven from town by ‘heart-breaking discourtesies’, Mabel spent an unhappy winter in Boston in 1889-90. There she lodged in a boarding house at 124 Boylston Street. It was not in her to do nothing. Austin bought her a season ticket to the Boston Symphony, she took weekly voice lessons at the Conservatory and she sang with the Handel and Haydn Society.25 Mabel was keen to take on Bach’s Christmas Oratorio and Gounod’s Redemption, and she sang in Handel’s Messiah during the festive season. Inspired by the music and by her long immersion in Dickinson’s mystical love poems, she was moved to hand over her soul and its afterlife to Austin. ‘What Austin stirred was unappropriated; it was there . . . and it recognized him and went with a rush to its master.’ She imagined that in ‘the great spaces of the universe where souls live, his will find me and stay forever more with me’. Although she did miss her husband (away in Angola on another expedition), David Todd was not a monogamous animal and as such could not engage her spirit. At a distance from her ‘dear men’, she reflected on her need for both: ‘I know what one is - I know what the other is, and two entirely separate sides of my nature go to them.’
In February 1890 she gave a public talk on her experience of climbing Mount Fuji. Mrs Loomis, who was present, told her daughter that she had ‘found her genius’, and it did prove to be the start of a twenty-three-year career in public speaking all over the country. Austin’s response to her speaking was distinctly cool. ‘I like it, and I don’t know that I do.’
If she weren’t so womanly, he went on, it would detract from her womanhood, for a woman should be inconspicuous, under the shade of a boulder or by her fireside with her husband-lover. He ruled out her mother’s encouragement. Mrs Loomis didn’t know her as he did. Mrs Loomis was too ‘shallow’ to tell a duck from a hen. ‘Shallow’ was shorthand for the Loomis inability to appreciate the loftiness of their daughter’s affair. Clearly Austin had not forgotten the Loomis opposition, their refusal to believe in his denials of the affair in the tone of a social superior who condescends to explain himself to the dismayed parents of his mistress.
For all Mabel’s activity in Boston, nothing could assuage her apprehension about the power of her enemies to ruin her. Susan visited Boston that winter and Mabel, seeing her as ‘the one person who has driven me away from my house and home’, feared Susan would spread the damage. They visited some of the same people and Mabel dreaded to come ‘face to face with