Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [179]
It’s startling to hear what she had to say about Gib Dickinson. They had appeared in the same studio photograph recreating a summer picnic in 1882. The young Mabel, buttoned to the neck in demure white tucks, her white hat shading her face, had been invited to join the Dickinsons. Gib, aged seven, stands in the circle of his mother’s arm. This fine-faced boy, who was to die a year later in a disrupted home, Mabel calls ‘hideous’, though she concedes he was sweet and adored by his father.
In the last month of Mabel’s life, September 1932, she dictated her final statement about the feud: Susan was a drunkard like her father who had ‘died in the gutter’. What Sue resented was not infidelity, ‘for that she practised herself’ [with Bowles]. It was that Austin fell in love. Morose, wrathful, settled in her power to make Austin unhappy, Sue was therefore furious to find love open for him. Mabel presents herself as a victim of Sue’s irrational fury. That fury was handed on to Sue’s daughter and it became the driving force of her life as well.
‘It is hard for anyone who has not come in contact with it to imagine the force, the inexhaustible energy, the almost superhuman vitality of hate,’ Mabel declared. ‘It seems at times almost creative, so that the person in its grip is capable of accomplishment beyond his powers. But the trouble is that such accomplishment is neither beautiful nor true. It is a storm of destructiveness.’
Mabel died suddenly of apoplexy on 14 October 1932. Her grave in Wildwood Cemetery is within fifty yards of Austin and Susan Dickinson. A stanza from Emily Dickinson is cut into the tombstone, appropriate to her shadowing of the poet for the best part of Mabel Todd’s life:
That such have died enables us
The tranquiller to die:
That such have lived, certificate
For immortality.
Hog Island, off the coast of Maine, was a little wilderness where Mabel and Millicent had spent their summers. There, the summer before she died, Mabel had asked her daughter for a promise. Millicent must undertake to rectify the wrong done to her mother by publishing the substantial residue of Dickinson papers in the chest. For Millicent this was the ‘point of no return’.
Her husband Walter Bingham warned about taking on the feud.
‘You must realize that if you do it, it may get us both before it is finished.’
There were other warnings. ‘Budgie, don’t you touch it!’ urged Elizabeth Sawyer, her oldest friend going back to Amherst schooldays.
It was as if they had not spoken. As Millicent would say later, there was ‘nothing else but to do what I could to right a grievous wrong - to my mother and to Emily Dickinson. I did not then know that I was doing a greater wrong, by getting involved in it, to Walter, and to myself.’ Even Mamma had warned her not to publish anything more in Mattie’s life-time. Millicent, fired by indignation, believed that Mamma wished to protect her from Mattie, and for some time to come did not suspect the flaws in the Todd case. What she did take in was that she was in it for the long haul.
Her first venture was to complete a book Mamma had conceived before she died: a history of her efforts to bring Dickinson before the public. Ancestors’ Brocades: The Début of Emily Dickinson was a partisan project, furthering the Todd offensive. For a start, in January 1933, Millicent delivered an address in Miami, hailing her mother as the co-discoverer as well as first editor of Dickinson’s poems and letters.
Mattie contemplated a lawsuit over Mabel Todd’s ‘objectionable book’ (the expanded edition of Dickinson’s letters) which had appeared without her knowledge or consent. To her lawyers, Henry Field (who had been Aunt Lavinia’s junior counsel in the lawsuit of 1898, and was now a judge) and Theodore Frothingham in New York, Mattie argued that Aunt Lavinia gave no permission to the Todds to quote one line after the publication of the original selection of letters in 1894.
There was no evidence of this, Field warned.