• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 750 0

of her Boston Brahmin family would serve to outshine Mattie the minor novelist. Mabel moved as quickly as ever. She needed no introduction because Amy Lowell was familiar with her name as Dickinson’s editor, and understood the impressiveness of that achievement. Mabel, with her Harvard daughter in tow, was soon on visiting terms and both wrote to Amy Lowell with customary civility. By January 1923 Lowell was turning over the idea of a literary biography, rereading Mabel Todd’s volumes and admiring Dickinson more than ever. The poet’s dramas, she remarked to Mrs Todd, are ‘of course’ contained in her heart and mind, which makes the life all the more interesting.

When Miss Lowell was disappointed to hear of the prospective Life and Letters, Mabel reassured her that Mrs Bianchi ‘will perform a life which may satisfy some persons, while the real essence of [Dickinson’s] elusive life must escape all except the elect. I wanted to have you do it!’ She spoke familiarly of ‘my dear mis-read Emily’. Mabel gave ‘dear Miss Lowell’ a manuscript poem, as though it were hers to dispose of.

Then, early in 1924, Mabel made a mistake. She was far from indiscreet, yet accustomed to talk over plans with her husband. At this time she mentioned to David Todd her wish for Amy Lowell to take up the Dickinson project and David, fired up, planned legal action against Houghton Mifflin to prevent their publishing Mattie’s biography. Amy Lowell was aghast. Houghton Mifflin happened to be her publisher. She feared David would write directly to the press and begged a rather helpless Millicent to put a stop to this. In the end, though Amy Lowell remained tempted, she had to honour a contract for a biography of Keats.

No biography, then, was to challenge Mattie’s highly coloured story of her aunt, which took up the opening quarter (about a hundred pages) of Life and Letters. Mattie burst into purple prose to promote her story of renunciation and single-minded love for the Revd Charles Wadsworth. He’s not named but it’s easy enough to identify the preacher whom Emily heard during her visit to Philadelphia in 1855. As a result, for the rest of the century Wadsworth remained a prime candidate for ‘Master’, a candidacy owing little to verifiable evidence and much to the legend Mattie published in 1924. The rumour of disappointed love had long been in circulation, but Mattie made it plausible by announcing that she alone, as the last of the Dickinsons, had entrée to a family secret. The identity of the lifelong lover was the secret, not discussed but taken for granted in the family. She entertained readers with a scene of Lavinia running next door to call Sue because ‘that man is here’ and Emily might run away with him. In the mid-1850s, the alleged date for this crisis, Sue was still unmarried and there was as yet no house next door. In fact, the Dickinsons had not as yet moved back into the Homestead. Such facts do not deter Mattie’s fantasy; her pen races on, at ease with popular fiction.

‘But the one word he [Wadsworth] implored, Emily would not say.’ So he moves his family a continent away, and dies prematurely.

All that can be proved is that Emily respected the Revd Wadsworth, who did not die prematurely. After his death in 1883 she gave out that he had been ‘my Shepherd from Little Girlhood’ (a re-enactment of her little-girl role after her married mentor, Ben Newton, died) and famously called him ‘my best earthly friend’. Since she was a master of extravagant declarations and made a good many over the course of her life, these are less telling than they might seem on their own. ‘It’s easy to invent a Life’, Dickinson once said, ‘God does it—every Day—’. But Mattie is too overcome by the dramatic intensity of the poet’s confessional voice to consider inconvenient counter-statements. Here is Mattie in full flood:

Certainly in that first witchery of an undreamed Southern springtime Emily was overtaken - doomed once and forever by her own heart. It was instantaneous overwhelming, impossible. There is no doubt that two predestined souls were kept apart