Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [181]
The inaccurate editing went on. Mattie’s so-called Complete Poems of 1924, followed by Further Poems in 1929, was then followed by Unpublished Poems in 1935, again co-edited by the none too sober Hampson. After each new volume Houghton Mifflin brought out a new collected edition. Yet another appeared in 1937. It exasperated scholars, and in 1937 the influential critic R. P. Blackmur deplored the ‘disarray of Emily Dickinson’s poems’.
Mattie kept at it, encouraged by signs of public and private support. In 1933 a Dickinson exhibit at the World’s Fair in Chicago had included Mattie’s Life and Letters amongst a century’s hundred best books by American women. Mattie was grateful to have Gilbert Montague’s moral support against ‘alien biographers of our Emily’. She was sad to live without kith or kin ‘save such as we of the heart’, she wrote to her old friend Amy Montague, who was Cousin Gilbert’s wife. Mattie raided the poet’s words to Susan Dickinson, hoping to recreate the intensity of that tie: ‘Be Amy while I am Martha -’ but, unlike Susan and Emily, Amy Montague showed no enthusiasm for Mattie’s writings.
Millicent’s husband urged her to face what she’d contrived not to know. She was nearly fifty-five years old towards the end of 1934, when reluctantly she opened Mamma’s journals.
‘Whatever she did would have sacrificed somebody,’ Millicent thought as she read.
How much she read and how much she learnt of the sexual side of Mamma’s affair she could never bring herself to say, except that Mamma’s unblemished love for Austin Dickinson did mitigate Millicent’s sense of sin in so far as it left her less able to judge the passion. The eloquence of the journals bound her to Mamma more than ever. Suffused by her mother’s voice coming at her through all the years, Millicent was finally conjoined with Mamma as her posthumous instrument. She notes on a stray sheet: ‘In the early days E.D. seemed less important and Mamma’s connection with her - than my own work. Always I was subconsciously trying to get away from it all. But always brought straight back under irresistible compulsion.’
By 1935 Millicent had finished a first draft of her mother’s story, the triumphant narrative of Emily Dickinson’s debut, the betrayal by Lavinia Dickinson and the trial. This book would gestate another ten years while the groundswell of Millicent’s distress heaved. There came a day when her mother’s hate flooded through her with unprecedented power.
She dated her record of what happened 4 February 1938. That day it was snowing so fast that to Millicent’s half-closed eyes it looked like a thick fog over a white world, and through that fog Mamma came towards her with her air of expectant youth. She came until she stood clear, for good and ill, to her daughter’s gaze. This woman ‘had an unfailing eye for the dramatic - particularly where her own person was concerned’. She had a ‘superficial ebullience’; she could ‘startle and delight the senses’; and all the time worked so industriously - that remarkable industry that had been ‘the best foundation for a glittering superstructure’.
If Millicent’s severity has an element of envy it’s because Mamma had taken more pleasure in her talents than her daughter did. Mamma had lost her teeth, her right side was paralysed and she was somewhat deaf, yet she had found new forms of expression. Painting and