Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [172]
Without stopping to look back, she fled to her own home for refuge - as a wild thing running . . .
Mattie’s inaccuracies extended to shifting ‘Title divine—is mine! / The Wife—without the Sign!’ back in time to the Philadelphia spring when Emily, allegedly, was in ‘the first ecstasy of renunciation’, although this poem was composed some ten years later and sent to Bowles.
Millicent penned ‘Bosh!’ and ‘ugh’ down the margins of her copy. ‘Oh, yeah?’ she said to Mattie’s gush over Emily’s supposed childhood ‘intimacy’ with Helen Fiske (Helen Hunt Jackson), who ‘would be driven into town with a pair of smashing grey horses which were dramatically walked up and down before the house [the Homestead], while the two charmers visited together behind the closed blinds’. Millicent retorts ‘just the opposite’ to Mattie’s fancy that ‘Niles could never induce [Dickinson] to publish’. And when it comes to Judge Lord, Mattie presents the poet as no more than ‘his little friend’. This modest little friend would ‘flit’ about watering her ‘frail’ plants ‘in the twilights’.
So wedded is Mattie to her phantom that she romances the poet’s attempt to name the newborn son of Mr and Mrs Bowles. ‘Only once is there any evidence of her breaking a silence like that of dead lips.’ Not knowing the name in question, Mattie assumes it must be that of Aunt Emily’s secret love. According to Mattie, a lovelorn Emily urges Samuel Bowles to name the boy ‘by the name never like any other to her ears’. In fact, as we know, the poet asked Bowles to call his son Robert, after Browning, at the time of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s death in 1861, a time when Emily menaced the babe of poor Mrs Bowles if she refused to condone the way that Emily’s letters - one in particular, not meant for wifely eyes - came whirling into her domestic fastness, determined to lasso her husband.
Mattie’s Emily is a model of restraint. Too scrupulous to wound a wife, Emily remains true to Wadsworth’s memory, flitting about in the ‘tender shadows’ of the old house. Her little form never walks, always ‘flits’ as she performs ‘the sunny small industries of her day’. Philadelphia is a ‘fatal sally’ into the great world ‘beyond the purple rim of the home horizon’.
The legend ballooned and floated.36 Reviews were ‘astonishingly good’, Mattie exulted to her old friend Amy Montague. She was particularly gratified when a review of her own new collection of poems pointed to her kinship with her famous aunt. It had become a matter of pride that poetry in the Dickinson family had to do with ‘fine breeding’, as if breeding were a pre-condition for art. Her ‘Emily book’ was due out in England. Admiral Samuel Eliot Morrison,37 Mattie heard from her editor, had stayed awake nearly all one night, reading Dickinson’s letters, the only writing the editor had heard him praise unreservedly. In June, Mattie would be addressing members of Ned’s class of 1884 at their fortieth Commencement reunion. She had been invited to give other talks about Aunt Emily, in effect taking over Mabel Todd’s role.
But nothing in 1924 could touch Mattie’s triumph as the one and only authoritative recorder. As one reviewer said: ‘It remains for the last living member of her own family to submit Emily’s . . . life . . . as a beautiful inspiration.’
Mamma had never spoken of the Dickinsons to her daughter. She broke this silence on 6 June 1924 when Mabel told Millicent that there were actually two men in Emily Dickinson’s life, and no distinct tragedy, ‘and it scarcely influenced her life in any detail’.
‘She enjoyed writing her love poems more than she enjoyed the man, I sh[oul]d be willing to say.’
Mabel spoke with the assurance of her intimacy with the poet’s brother and sister. The time had come to inform Millicent on the subject of Emily Dickinson and to fire her daughter with the history of the feud. As Mabel opened her lips to talk about the past she found Millicent was already