Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [145]
Mr Hills, as angry as Lavinia foresaw, told her there was but one way out: she could contest the deed if she had not understood what she was doing. This meant accusing Mabel Todd of misrepresentation or worse.
There was something Lavinia could not mention to Mr Hills: the fissure in the family, known to two or three editors who’d felt the sharp edge of conflicting interests but otherwise concealed. The Dickinsons had contrived to preserve an unblemished front. After the advent of Mabel they had lived outwardly as before. For thirteen years, ever since 1883, no one had attempted to cross the fissure between Austin and Lavinia on one side and, on the other, Susan, Ned and Mattie. To abandon Mabel and rejoin her family would be to cross that fissure. Looking across to the other side, Lavinia stood for a space alone.
Lavinia took this leap. That May she drew up a Bill of Complaint with the help of her lawyers, Hammond & Field. Here she invented a plausible story: she’d merely agreed to allow no building on the meadow adjacent to the Todds’ house. She’d been willing to do so because she would never permit a building where there were ‘sacred’ shrubs (planted by her brother). Then Mrs Todd had come with an argument that Miss Dickinson might die, so it would help to have this agreement in writing. Under repeated pressure Miss Dickinson had agreed to sign a paper. She denied that she had ever agreed to deed the land; she did not recall hearing the word ‘deed’. Mrs Todd had called it a ‘paper’. She also alleged that Mrs Todd had prepared the deed secretly; it was in Mrs Todd’s hand. The value of the land, for which nothing had been paid, was said to be $2000 (though actually worth, at the time, about $600). Miss Dickinson had not herself employed Timothy Spaulding to witness the signature. There had been a deceptively casual air to the business. She had no foreknowledge of the signing and had thought Mr Spaulding was coming, at his request, to discuss her sister’s poems.
Far off in Japan, Mabel Todd worked away at the proofs of Poems: Third Series. She was scrupulous about checking against Dickinson’s original manuscripts and it’s likely that she took these with her to the other side of the world. By August the proofs were back in Boston, Todd ever prompt and professional. On 10 August 1896 Roberts Brothers drew up a contract with no reference to Mrs Todd. This, the fourth contract with the firm, was the simplest: all rights and royalties were lodged with Lavinia Dickinson alone.
That August, Poems: Third Series was announced for the autumn. This was the first volume of poems to be edited solely by Mabel Todd; it was, then, the first to go out minus the protection of Higginson’s name, and now, at last, even before it was published, what Emily Dickinson had feared did happen. A lash from a newspaper was bound to chasten a woman immodest enough to enter the public arena. ‘That singular anomaly, the Lady novelist,’ sang the Lord High Executioner in The Mikado.31 ‘I don’t think she’d be missed, I’m sure she’d not be missed.’ The New York Tribune complained of Emily Dickinson in August 1896: why must the public be imposed upon yet again with ‘mere trifles or experiments’ from this ‘minor’ poet?
Ned, on holiday in Maine with his ‘girls’ (as he called his mother and sister), shuddered for Aunt Emily. As the man in the family, Ned was all too aware that he was not manly in the expected way. At thirty-five, a need to act for his family’s protection reproached his long retreat from conflict. Throughout his twenties he’d been sunk, helpless, in a ‘witchesmare’. Roused now to action by this slight to his aunt, Ned cut Lavinia to the heart with an accusation that she had brought