Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [159]
Miss Hall entertained no doubts. Sue was behind the trial, manipulating Miss Vinnie, who regretted the break with Mabel. ‘Millicent, you never will know what an evil-minded person Sue was. You cannot imagine such a fiend.’ Sue drove Austin away by flirting with Samuel Bowles - so said Miss Hall in the 1930s, still chewing on a morsel of Amherst gossip. Emily’s life was shortened by Sue’s cruel treatment.
Such poisonous spume jetted from the lips of Mary Lee Hall when a target offered itself to her notice. As a young woman at the time of the trial, she had fed her fill on Lavinia’s troubles, and what remained in later years was voluble distortion. As Mary Lee Hall had been on the scene her memories were canvassed. She was not a sensible woman. Hers was the kind of stupidity that is busy and full of itself. If there’s anything to be retained, it’s what spite does to elusive truth.
It suited Miss Hall to picture Lavinia as pathetic, since that enhanced her own role as comforter. This sorry view comes down to us as a banal contrast of brilliant poet and humdrum sister,33 even though Emily herself thought Lavinia as ‘spectacular as Disraeli’.
One way to think of the Dickinsons, one reason to approach them as a family, is because they had so much in common. Like her brother and sister, Lavinia was proud, passionate and caustic on occasion. A stillborn baby, she said, ‘decided not to breathe when it entered this world’. It amused her to imagine a ‘runaway corpse’. This was the grim humour of the Dickinsons, with an added drop of acid when it came to the minister’s ‘cancerous sermons’. Lavinia sniffed so much ‘sewer’ in these sermons it might be ‘well to have a little chloral of lime sprinkled down the aisles’. Where Emily’s acumen lit up abstractions, Lavinia’s fixed on individuals: one acquaintance had ‘shoulders high as gallows’; another was ‘poulticed from head to foot’; and a certain female voice was so sharp ‘it needed filing’.
Lavinia’s sayings and mimicry were part of what Austin meant when he boasted how ‘queer’ the Dickinsons were. Emily had once directed a house-hunting old woman to the graveyard ‘to spare expense of moving’. She’d relished Austin’s cutting comments on his pupils and hoped he’d flog them to death - it had the brutal hilarity of a cartoon.34
Saddened though she was by Ned’s death and shut off by Sue’s continued distance, Lavinia retained enough spirit to attempt a new venture in 1898. Soaked in her sister’s poems, she wrote seventeen poems of her own. ‘As noiseless as the snow’, the pines let drop their needles, which ‘light the darkest paths’. Like Emily, she knows nature can be cruel: ‘The ingenuity of pain / Groping for the tenderest nooks / Then plants its fangs . . .’. A tart, prosaic voice talks of wrong, disappointment and moral failure.
She often starts with a promising line - ‘Indifference is as sure to kill / As smokeless powder’s mark,’ - and then trails off into homily. There’s the Dickinson secrecy, but without the excitement of her sister’s play on the frontier of confession: Emily’s on-the-brink urgency of intimate communication. Occasionally, there’s a burst of confidence: ‘Circumstances shatter vows’. Is she thinking of broken promises to Austin and Mabel Todd?
Mary Lee Hall kept Emily Dickinson’s poems for about six months, until the end of May 1899. When she returned the manuscripts to the Homestead she advised Miss Vinnie to put them in a safe place. Some went into a box where Vinnie kept deeds and mortgages; others were hidden between the pages of a large book. So now a second treasure slept, untouched, unseen, as years, then decades passed.
This was Lavinia’s last effort for her sister. That summer, aged sixty-six, she took to her bed. Attended to the last by Maggie, she died on 31 August 1899.
‘Lavinia Dickinson died at six o’clock tonight’, Mabel Todd noted. ‘I have no feeling about it, one way or the other. Only I am glad