Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [141]
Grief accompanied her on a second journey to Japan the following year. En route Austin seemed as near ‘on a volcano in Hawaii as in our own meadow in Amherst’. No other soul would ever meet her ‘real, innermost self’ as this man had with his ‘exquisite sympathy’.
‘If only I could die this night!’ she whispered to herself.
On the return crossing, more than a year after Austin died, she parted her hair and saw a few white threads under the brown, and peering closer into the small cabin mirror detected a line ‘of pain’ on her forehead. She would like to die, she thought again, ‘but as long as I do live I must stay young. Youth is my role.’
Back in Amherst she plunged into thirty-five public talks over the following winter of 1896-7. Marking even now the stabs of pain, she saw them as ‘signet royal of my closeness to my dear master’.
For all that Mabel suffered at the loss of a man who had loved her exclusively and with all his being for twelve years, it can’t provide a reliable answer as to whether her prime attachment was to lover or husband. The abundance and fervour of her love letters to Austin declare to him (and to the readers she hoped one day to have28) that he was the love of her life. There are two reasons to question this.
One is that Mabel adapted her voice to her role. Austin’s rampant emotion required arias of unconditional love tuned to the highest pitch of soulfulness. The operatic vehemence Mabel delivered day after day would not be realistic in domestic life. It’s sustainable because the lovers could not cohabit, and sustained too by the vibrato of fantasy that separation invites. As recently as 1893, there had been Austin’s renewed fantasy of escape out west when he welcomed an offer of a post in Omaha, Nebraska. At the age of sixty-four he’d been prepared to start a new life with Mabel. Then there was the lovers’ fantasy of building a house on a hilltop near Amherst; and Mabel’s failed fantasy of Susan’s death. ‘A deaf God’, Mabel cried at the close of a letter to Austin near the end of his life.
A more serious reason to question Austin’s pre-eminence with Mabel is her continued devotion to her husband. Though this did serve as a cover for her affair, it was more than that. At the outset, Mabel chose David as a husband who would back her sense of destiny. Their commitment to promote each other’s work was as much a pact as a marriage. David’s adventures in romance and conquest were diverting, but stable attachment was reserved for his wife.
‘And if my life is the success I hope it may yet be, I shall not rest until my ambition is gratified by seeing you in the highest degree honoured & appreciated for your full worth,’ he assured Mabel.
Success. Honour. Worth. The language of aspiration is unremarkable; it’s the reciprocity that’s rare. In the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century many a woman had to choose between marriage and career. Not Mabel. On his return journey from Angola in 1890, David mailed a letter from Barbados reaffirming a marriage of mounting ambition on both sides. ‘My advancements and the little successes of my life so far have all come of you. Eleven years more will, I venture, see us more thoroughly in love than now.’
David had reason to welcome his wife’s liaison. To win the ear of the college treasurer was Mabel’s effort for David’s advance. As a young astronomer he had been lured back to Amherst by a mirage: a new observatory of his own. This had not materialised. Then, in the early nineties, President Seelye fell ill; there was an interregnum and Austin Dickinson took over. It’s likely that he was behind an initial move to build an up-to-date observatory at the college. By 1894 Mabel was writing letters on stationery with an observatory letterhead, even though the