Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [139]
What came to be called the War between the Houses took off with Lavinia’s discovery of the poems in the Homestead. This made her the sole legatee of a treasure, the value of which she immediately perceived - value, that is, to literature. Only gradually did she realise it was potentially an asset of untold proportions. The clearer this became with the publication of successive volumes, the sourer Austin turned towards Lavinia. Despite all she had risked for him and Mabel, all it had cost her in the affections of her niece and nephew (for, like Emily, Vinnie was very fond of Ned) Austin disparaged her limitations. He declared that she knew nothing beyond what callers could tell her.
‘My sister Vin,’ he thought fit to inform Higginson, ‘had no comprehension of her sister, yet believed her a shining genius.’
Happily, Emily’s posthumous voice testifies against this: her sister’s ‘inciting voice’ was part of her own courage, Emily had said. Without Vinnie, ‘life was fear and paradise a cowardice’. Their bond was ‘early, earnest and indissoluble’.
The more Austin failed to dent Lavinia’s allegiance, the more he let loose against her. For Lavinia held her own when it came to the papers. She became what she felt herself to be, a warrior as fierce and fervent as ‘Joan of Arc’.
Meanwhile, next door, Susan held on to her separate collection of poems and letters, amongst them some of the poet’s most daring works. The lines were now re-drawn for the battles to come: Lavinia versus Mabel Loomis Todd who had the ear of Austin Dickinson. Although Austin had no interest in Emily’s poetry he was Mabel’s man and determined to control Lavinia.
In the 1880s the focus of the feud had been adultery; in the 1890s the focus shifted to the divided treasure the poet had left behind. Who had the right to possess her? Who had the right to say what she was?
IV: THE WAR BETWEEN THE HOUSES
12
LAVINIA’S STAND
So long as Austin Dickinson lived he continued to control Vinnie - up to a point. In 1894, when she refused to hand his mistress half the copyright in Emily Dickinson’s letters, Austin let fly. Following that first stand Lavinia hesitated not at all in refusing Austin’s next diktat, that she will her rights, away from the family, to Mabel Todd. From the start, Lavinia had found herself tugged into the lovers’ camp, to the detriment of her bonds with Austin’s wife and children. What could she have done? Lavinia’s friend Miss Buffam, a schoolmistress accustomed to independence, noticed that not a cent in Lavinia’s pocket was not meted out by her brother. As brother and co-heir of the Homestead, Austin could come and go as he pleased and his ‘friend’ (Mabel) came too, and the truth of their tie Austin did not offer to explain.
So it was that the affair was known - and not known. There was no evidence, not in legal terms. As a lawyer, Austin Dickinson was adept when it came to evidence. Love letters were locked in a safe-box in the vault of the bank, and the letters themselves took care to omit clues and names.
For a long time Lavinia had been more compliant than Emily. Where Emily had retained her closeness to Sue and Ned, Lavinia was positioned with her brother, and the more that position strained her ties with The Evergreens, the more dependent on Austin she became; and then, after Emily died, the purpose of her life was the joint venture with Mabel Todd. Their faith in the greatness of Emily Dickinson ensured a bond with Mabel, reinforced by kisses and David Todd’s particular affection. He came to fix her clock and once, in 1894, when she’d been ill, he gave her ‘a lovely warm bath while her bed was changed’. It was a practical, hands-on act of kindness by a man at ease with