Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [167]
A puzzling fact has been buried in an unpublished letter Mattie wrote to Frothingham in 1914. Mattie says that her mother had smiled on her in the days before her death, when Mattie had put a copy of The Single Hound into her hands. How could this be? Susan died in May 1913. The volume did not appear until 1914. What Mattie gave her mother must have been a manuscript completed by the spring of 1913 at the latest. During Susan’s last year, from 1912 to 1913, she’d reread the poems and letters of Emily Dickinson ‘with increasing indecision as to the final deposition of her treasury’. Should she burn those too intimate to share? Sue could not abandon them to strangers to edit.
An obvious solution would have been to bring in her daughter. Though Susan’s part in this publication has to remain speculative, it’s just possible that Susan smiled on a collaborative venture. If so, this neglected but choice selection with perceptive groupings of the poems, the first selection not to impose titles, could be the sole volume sanctioned by the poet’s authorised reader. ‘Dear Sue’, the poet had said, ‘Your praise is good - to me - because I know it knows’.
An opening group of poems on the life of the soul attended by its mortal incarnation tells us immediately who Emily Dickinson was. We glimpse here the sufficiency of the world within:
Adventure most unto itself
The soul condemned to be—
Attended by a single Hound
Its own identity.
The contents of this volume tell us too that Dickinson entrusted ‘I fit for them—I seek the Dark / Till I am thorough fit’ to Susan who ‘knows’. The explosions of sickness open up the route through death’s divide to what beckons the speaker beyond a mortal life. That other place will light up the panels of her grave.
Another group of poems has to do with darkness as the route to vision: the darkness before day or the dark of the mine. The mine puts the speaker through hellish but purposeful pain. This transformation underground, Dickinson could share with Susan, as well as an alertness to its opposite: the unchanging perfidy of the Devil who visits all who traffic in the world:
The Devil—had he fidelity,
Would be the finest friend—
Because he has ability—
But Devils cannot mend—
Mattie sent a copy to her mother’s old schoolmate Kate Scott (now Mrs Anthon and living in the Lake District). She replied with heartfelt memories of early times at The Evergreens: Emily with a lantern coming through the glass door of the library and improvising strange music on the piano.
Two years after The Single Hound, Mattie had to sell the Homestead. In 1916 the Parke family moved in and the poet’s things were carried across the grass to what Mattie designated the ‘Emily Room’ downstairs, behind the library. In this dark room with its black floorboards and blackish wallpaper, once the marital bedroom and then the ‘dying room’, the relics of the poet’s genius commingled with the tragedies of The Evergreens. Here Mattie set out her aunt’s writing table, her square piano from the parlour, the grey and white cameo brooch she pinned at her throat and the light blue crocheted cape she wore when she met Mr Higginson, the blue china that Emily Norcross brought from Monson at the time of her marriage to Mr Dickinson and the chest of drawers where Emily Dickinson had kept her poems. From 1916 until 1950 the Emily Room was the shrine for ‘pilgrims’. A poet who had honed her narrative as ‘Vesuvius at Home’ foresaw her relics, buried like Pompeii, uncovered in time by ‘some loving Antiquary’ of the future. It was Mattie’s fate to survive the volcano and live on in the interim as lone, aloof guardian of what remained.
She had to work hard if she was to remain in ‘the beloved old spot’, the home ‘where the family were once with me’. She herself felt a relic of the past, fighting a death wish (‘some of the days are harder alone than others’), yet there was a certain relief in solitude. ‘Just the changing lights and shadows are complete companionship.’ Sometimes she read Aunt Emily’s letters to her mother, which Mattie thought of