Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [128]
Pause. Pause for what lies between the scenes, the unseen space where so much happens. No facts come down to us from 1888 and 1889 as Emily Dickinson is hauled to the surface - the great lines swimming into focus as Mabel Todd types ‘My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—’ . . . ‘Mine - in Vision and in Veto’ . . . ‘Vesuvius at Home’ . . . ‘My life closed twice before its close’. For Mabel to have kept going, day after day for two or more years was an extraordinary feat. It was fuelled by a sure response to the poems. Mabel Todd’s venture was completely under wraps because, of course, Vinnie was deceiving Susan, compounding her betrayal in the matter of adultery. Throughout these years, Vinnie feared Susan, and her master plan was not to reveal Mabel’s part. In the end, the poems would be published, and no one was to know how they had come to be presentable to editors.
Here, Lavinia erred: she took Mabel’s enthusiasm, genuine as it was, for granted. The relationship was unequal in that Lavinia owned the manuscripts; Mabel did not. Lavinia did witness Mabel’s effort, she saw how long it took, but as an old-fashioned gentlewoman Lavinia had no idea that Mabel Todd, as a New Woman contributing two to three years of her professional time, might expect recognition.
The mistake was not entirely Lavinia’s fault. It was Mabel’s habit to project a ladylike passivity. Others approach her, others ask her to do things, and when they don’t it’s destiny taking a hand, like the impulse that compelled Austin to take her warm, waiting hand that rainy evening at the gate of The Evergreens on 11 September 1882 - that Rubicon moment that changed the Dickinsons’ lives. Far off in the future people would say that Lavinia Dickinson approached her brother’s mistress and asked her to take over the editing - in secret - from her sister-in-law. Mabel Todd complied as a favour to Lavinia, a huge favour, people would say. This was the Todd story in retrospect. Afterwards she reassured Higginson that Sue ‘gave it up definitely. Then Lavinia came to me . . . So you see Mrs. Dickinson can have no real cause for complaint.’
Mabel Todd is a plausible propagandist for her story because she sticks close to the truth, deviating, often, with one word. Apart from ‘definitely’ in this case, it’s the apparently insignificant word ‘then’ that shifts the sequence in favour of innocent passivity. Look like the innocent flower. To us in the future, the manoeuvre can look like the merest slip of memory. Only it’s there too often to be a slip. It’s an almost automatic untruthfulness, the insignificant cog driving the wheel of a plot Mabel sets in motion.
At the time, Mabel told Vinnie that she was copying hundreds of poems for the love of what she was doing. This statement was largely true. And Lavinia believed it, and took pleasure in conferring on Mabel this privilege. But, well below the surface, there was a darker motive to these earliest transcriptions of Emily Dickinson: a pattern of campaigns on the part of Mabel Loomis Todd who wanted to be ‘Mabel Loomis Dickinson’ or linked in some indissoluble way to the Dickinson family, to the extent of trying to conceive a Dickinson child throughout these years when she was transcribing the poems. Later she’d claim that the poet herself asked her to do this. A lie like this stands close to some sort of truth, for the years she gave to Emily Dickinson convinced Mabel Todd that she was indeed - in literal deed - the true poetic heir.
This co-exists with Mabel Todd’s confident response to the poems themselves. From the start she had envied Susan’s intimacy with Dickinson’s poetry. If it’s correct that Mabel wished to be Susan, she was now on course. Mabel had what it took to pursue this through the dark, depressed, uncertain years from 1888 to 1890. It remained as secret as her other campaigns but, unlike them, this was creative, fertile, healing. She felt, she said, the poems’ greatness; she was ‘uplifted