Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [178]
After almost four decades, Mabel Todd argued, the legend had assumed a shape unrecognisable to anyone who actually knew Emily Dickinson. It was advisable, she said, to return to sources, and here they were in this expanded re-issue: ‘It is the source of material since reworked in various forms by various authors.’
She emphasised Wadsworth by printing letters about him after his death. At the same time, she declared that speculation had no place in this book that had ‘in fact one purpose: to allow Emily Dickinson to speak for herself’. In this way, Todd disclaimed possession in a publication whose prime motive was, in actuality, an act of possession. Without referring to Mattie, it shot Mattie’s version of her aunt’s life to pieces with well-aimed rhetorical questions: who can know what Dickinson felt for others? Who can know what was momentous? Adept at graceful gestures of compliance, Todd said that she was driven to issuing this edition of the letters for the sake of others, students of Emily’s life who, sensing something wrong, had begged her to tell what she knows of the ‘real’ Emily. Biographies ‘have not lessened the confusion’. Todd found it gratifying ‘to find how many people care for my Emily Dickinson’.
Only when her rival was flattened did Todd put forward her own strongest claim, to having done so much of the editorial toil. In the early 1890s it had been hard to get hold of letters and date them, and would have been impossible without her closeness to Austin and Lavinia. Here, at last, Todd made a comeback, pressing the case she had made at the trial. And of course there’s truth to what she terms her ‘fascinating, exhausting labor’.
Not satisfied with a comeback, Todd intended to wipe Susan from the record. Todd reports this omission as though it were not her initiative. It was Austin’s wish. ‘Such reference [to Sue] was frequent in the early letters particularly in those before his marriage. To make doubly sure, in Emily’s letters to himself he erased most of such passages before the letters were given to me to edit.’ In this way Todd covers herself against any future imputation that she had tampered with the letters or colluded in doing so. Austin, she insists, did this alone, even though, if we go back to the mid- 1880s, we see that Mabel Todd was the active party in her campaign to have Susan out of the way. In 1931 Todd is all passivity, a model of obedience. ‘In so far as the present volume is concerned, I shall continue to abide by his wishes in this particular.’
One thing Todd doesn’t say is that she had ignored his wishes (and those of Lavinia and Mattie) in the matter of the daguerreotype, the sole authenticated photograph of Dickinson, taken as a schoolgirl in 1847. Todd prepared to bare the undoctored face and plain, scoop-necked dress for the first time, an act consistent with her readiness to accept the poet’s arresting oddity: the pale kangaroo face with the slanted, staring eyes; the flat red hair drawn back without a curl; and the long, long neck through which words pulsed like bursts of fire. And yet—Existence—some way back—/ Stopped—struck—my ticking—through— At a stroke Todd cut the girl free from the ‘furbelows’ imposed by the family. And, as always, she ignored Austin’s lack of interest in his sister’s genius. Her aim was to reclaim the authorised ground, and that ground was won.
Privately, Mabel Todd launched a parallel offensive. The tactical calm of her public apologia contrasts with private vituperations, mostly to Millicent who took notes and typed them for the record. One set of statements is signed in Mabel’s shaky, post-stroke hand. Vinnie ‘had an enormous mouth & false teeth, a crazy coot with dirty hands and never took a bath’. She had ‘greatly enjoyed all her financial success from Emily during all those years before her death’. ‘Vinnie ought to have given me a thousand dollars for what I had done for her. If I’d had 100 I’d have had the maple tree [on the plot of land at