Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [174]
Though she was too intelligent not to be aware that her mother’s vehemence did not relay all the nuances of truth, the obfuscations left Millicent somewhat divided: not as to the Todd cause, but in her ambivalence towards what was spellbinding in her mother. Unlike Mattie’s single-mindedness, Millicent remained uncertain as to how she might deploy her considerable powers. What displaced geography was a search for truth through typed private reminiscences in parallel with psychotherapy, starting in the spring and summer of 1927. What poor Millicent was trying to understand was the truth of her childhood, in which something illicit was covered up in secrecy and illusion - illusion conjured up by Mamma’s social performance. This included the elaborate manners and dressiness of the 1890s. By 1927, when Mabel was in her seventies, she still wore headgear with aplomb and clothed herself in exquisitely delicate materials. Her white shoes were immaculate. She looked straight into the camera with a performer’s pleasure in being photographed. Millicent, plainly dressed in tweeds (in deliberate contrast to Mamma) or in overalls at home, would later count fifteen white dresses, twenty-eight white ‘waists’ and nineteen white skirts in her mother’s closet, and innumerable velvet bands to hide her throat.
Looking back, Millicent pictured herself as unlovely beside her mother, easy to ignore or leave behind, as Alden and Joe Thomas had done. Here, once again, Mamma’s looming admirer looks down at her child whose round, black eyes look back rather wonderingly at Mamma’s closeness to her ‘King’ with a creased face. As an adult, Millicent longed to expose their imposition on a child’s innocence. Ideally, she would have liked to publish a work of literature she variously calls ‘a study of the growth of my own soul’ or ‘another Comédie humaine [Balzac’s realist novel] in ten volumes’.
By 1927 this private ambition mattered more than to publish another geographical book, but to tell the truth would take more courage than she had; it would also, of course, betray Mamma whom, increasingly, she saw as pathetically dependent on her inferior companion Hilder. In Mabel’s blue-sky youth she’d never have considered such a man; now she inflated him. Millicent loved her mother most when she felt a call to defend her.
As for her father, she marvelled at his accepting Austin’s claim on her mother. She saw this as an emotional droit de seigneur, for no one in those days crossed Austin’s right to do as he pleased. Millicent cast Austin as the villain of the parental drama now consuming her attention.
One mystery she would have liked to solve was Sue Dickinson’s origins. Was Mrs Dickinson, as Mabel alleged, a stable-keeper’s daughter? Mattie had described her mother as her father’s equal and the rock to whom the Dickinsons had turned in their hours of need.
‘Actually - I hesitate to ask Mamma anything whatever,’ Millicent reflected. ‘The cloud of mystery which surrounded my childhood is its natural habitat - the air it breathed.’ If she were to question Mamma it would open ‘the blast-furnace door’.
Her many typescript reminiscences stress her divergence from her mother: a daughter who was honest, puritanical, loathing her mother’s flair for performance. As a child this had made her approach Mamma’s piano lessons wanting to scream and smother her own musicality. Even now her body felt ‘tense and rigid’, resistant to passion, she told her therapist Dr MacPherson. ‘Though I respect, admire and profoundly love my wonderful husband, he does not arouse passion, nor ever has.’
Mattie, divorced finally in 1920, met in that year a young tenor called Alfred Leete Hampson at the National Arts Club in New York. She was then fifty-four; Hampson was