Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [182]
In contrast to her mother, Millicent pictures herself as a failing creature, an octopus with limp tentacles. The acute senses of its tentacles had been capable of reaching out to anything it might desire, ‘but because of injury to its central mechanism, the arms hung limp, their function reduced to swinging in a restricted arc . . . It goes on living . . . but grows old without ever being the vital creature, using all its faculties to the utmost, alive to the end of the farthest tentacle, which its natural endowments enabled it to be.’
This creature can only revitalise herself, it seems, if she yields to Mamma’s hate - lets it fill her being to the furthest tentacle. Alive to hate, her tentacles rear and coil in curious kinship with the enemy who is to be eliminated.
Hatred implies similarity, that is, lasting hatred does. The kind of hatred that implies incentive enough to enable it to last a life-time - strength enough to propel it beyond the grave and loop it in the hearts of a succeeding generation. The kind of congenital hatred means a feud - and a feud does not flourish among aliens . . . The most virulent kind seems to get its start in stealing of affections, and affections usually do not exist between aliens . . . Real hate is focussed . . . and focussing on a negative purpose may be carried out with as much or more determination. It’s not iniquity which the hater hates; he’s hating during an interval while waiting till the opportunity comes for vengeance. This waiting through a life-time does not destroy the carrier; on the contrary it seems to add the vitality to prolong life. The emotion, the hatred, keeps the hater alive and vigorous. The affection which starts a feud may be between aliens, but the hates it engenders does not continue unless between kindred souls and the closer the likeness perhaps, the more virulent the hatred.
I sympathize with Sue in so far as losing her husband is
concerned. It must have been bitter.
But then, on top of that, to have that very vixen who stole your husband complete a task which you have imagined yourself the one to perform, to reap from so doing . . . a measure of permanence in the literary future - that was bitterer still. And to even have one’s name left out altogether! There was real injustice.
Millicent still sees Sue through Mamma’s eyes as a wife who didn’t love her husband yet persecuted the woman who did love him and who released his capacity for love. ‘What I wonder is - where did [Sue’s] drive originate?’ Was it hurt pride, or envy of the successful outcome of Mabel Todd’s effort to launch Dickinson’s poems, or both together? To tell this story of the poems from the time they were discovered until the present of 1938 was to become aware that ‘the facts are not explained by any reasonable cause’. The cause for each separate step in the feud was hate and desire for revenge: to discredit the other side. ‘Sublime, detached Emily - whose preoccupation was with eternal sentries - how purified she will sometime emerge from such a mirey slough as now holds her down!’ In a war, the calibre of recruitment is all-important. Mabel Todd had understood this. When she could not persuade Amy Lowell to take on a rival biography of Emily Dickinson, Mabel had to fall back on Taggard to get at Mattie. After Mabel’s death this partisan task fell to George Frisbie Whicher, professor of English at Amherst. Together with Mabel he had helped to arm Taggard. In This Was a Poet (1938) he went in for the kill, bashing Mattie for factual slips, the wrong date for Mr Dickinson, Sr’s death and for what Whicher calls the ‘grotesque’ legend. It emerges that the Wadsworth legend was grotesque only in Mattie’s telling, since Whicher appropriates the legend for his own purpose, encasing it in a scaffolding of academic credibility. The strategy of the takeover required him to discredit his rival, the last of the Dickinsons whose very