Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [175]
Amherst tolerated Mattie’s bad-boy dependants. The town had not been averse to the foreign polish of Bianchi, and now it put up with Hampson’s drinking. He was eager to help Mattie with her work. Her condition for collaboration was not accuracy; it was unquestioning loyalty. Hampson was more than happy to oblige.
Mattie’s career as poet and novelist had faltered of late. Houghton Mifflin turned down her poems; taste had changed, they told her. Les jeunes demanded Modernism. Following the two Dickinson books in 1924, Mattie had a desert romance ready in 1925 and when that was rejected for lack of reality she whipped out a Russian novel by 1926. The press had to tell her that the second half fell off. Fortunately there was a rising public appetite for Emily Dickinson. Houghton Mifflin enquired if Mrs Bianchi had more to offer about her aunt. Encouraged to hunt amongst the leavings of the Homestead, Mattie came upon the trove of Dickinson poems that Aunt Lavinia had hidden before she died in 1899. So it was that in 1929 Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson brought out Further Poems of Emily Dickinson Withheld from Publication by Her Sister Lavinia.
In actual fact Lavinia had had these poems copied twice (first by Todd, then by Mary Lee Hall) with a view to a fourth volume. But Mattie meant to reinforce the sentimental legend she had promoted in the Life and Letters and gave out that these rediscovered poems ‘tell the love [Emily] glorified in so direct and intimate a way that this may have been the reason they were withheld’. As it happened, the greatest poems in this volume - amongst the greatest in the whole oeuvre - are not about love. ‘I cannot dance upon my toes’, ‘This was a Poet’, ‘My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—’, and ‘I tie my Hat’ define genius and affirm their own immortality.
This did not deter Mattie from introducing the volume as ‘an almost unbroken narrative’ of the poet’s tragic love for the married Revd Wadsworth ‘from first sight of the man she heard as a stranger preaching in Philadelphia, on through their mutual bewilderment, certainty, and renunciation’. Mattie had no new facts to offer, so here once again is Aunt Emily withstanding passion in the face of the minister’s plea to run away. ‘Emily was the one who resisted - when his own ties of home and pulpit were mentally lost down the winds.’
This volume did most to promote the cult image of Dickinson, detaching her from unfeminine ambition. Her poetry is seen to be a sweet diversion sprung from ‘the shy character of her girlish habit’. It’s really the minister who’s responsible for her notions of immortality; she depends on him for the big idea. A model of becoming modesty, she ‘trembles beneath her little dimity apron’.
The popular critic Louis Untermeyer endorsed an image short on fact in the Saturday Review of Literature: ‘Emily tells the whole story of her love’, he enthused. ‘There is nothing more to add except unimportant names and irrelevant street numbers.’ So too the Bryn Mawr academic Katherine Fullerton Gerald,38 who spoke of ‘the veils we have no right nor wish to have torn away’ when Mattie lectured at Princeton. Mattie covered herself by the simple expedient of taking up the role of scrupulous protector of her aunt’s privacy. It was a dangerous line to take because its reward was temporary. Her tantalising hints were bound to provoke a public appetite to know more.
In the run-up to the centenary celebrations of Dickinson’s birth, curiosity flared. In 1929, Mabel Todd returned once more to open her chest and once more invited Millicent to peek at the treasure. Hundreds of unseen poems and piles of unpublished letters lay waiting for the Todds to mine them.
At the same time Mabel bolstered her armoury. She supported a new biography by Genevieve Taggard, bent on shooting down Mattie’s mistakes. Revenge was