Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [185]
A more blatant spin is Millicent’s version of Austin’s supposed request that Mabel Todd should wipe Susan from the record. After Mamma’s visitation swept away resistance, Millicent seems more willing to lie on her mother’s behalf: ‘Family feuds were, in my mother’s opinion, irrelevant.’ It’s made to appear as though the feud was between husband and wife, with Mabel as bystander, blameless, obedient to instructions. Millicent appears even more the bystander, with ‘only the haziest idea’ why her mother’s work on the manuscripts had been interrupted for many years.
Puzzlingly, though, Millicent extends her unknowing - or her mother’s discretion - with an incorrect recollection that the treasure chest ‘was not opened until 1929’, though Millicent’s report to Amy Lowell reveals that it was first opened in 1924. It’s simply not in character for Millicent’s retentive memory to play such a trick. It has to be a fudge, but why? A possible answer lurks in a typescript reminiscence later, in 1955, where Millicent repeats the fudge: ‘For twelve years [since the Todds had left Amherst in 1917] a camphorwood chest containing my mother’s most precious papers had been reposing in a Springfield Storage Warehouse. I had placed it there . . . in 1917 when I packed the contents of Observatory House, Amherst, and built a little house to store them in (not finished inside).’ The latter was the unfinished ‘barn’, and Millicent is covering up for Mamma’s negligence in abandoning Dickinson’s manuscripts in such an unsuitable place, unchecked, for seven years. Mabel’s questionable safety net had been the transcripts she took with her to Florida, where they narrowly survived fire and flood. It would have been Millicent who realised that the originals must go into a safe form of storage.
For all Millicent’s commitment to fact, loyalty to her mother took precedence. Her whole book is biased in Mamma’s favour by a major omission: the fact of adultery.
The eruptive force of what must not come out left Millicent pale and strained, clutching the arm of her kindly husband. Her reminiscences, delivered in her rational voice and typed in her orderly way every few years, always dissociate her character from that of her mother: a sensitive daughter deploring all that was devious in her parents. So Millicent’s untrue public statements, with no Dickinson left to oppose them, are as startling in their way as the sudden appearance of so many unknown poems. How did Millicent explain this to herself? If a daughter as intelligent as Millicent had come to believe in what she published in Ancestors’ Brocades, the afterlife of her mother’s ‘spell’ can’t be overrated.
Millicent had been corresponding with Wallace Keep, a Dickinson relative in his seventies. While a student at Amherst College, class of 1894, he had visited Vinnie weekly. Forty years later he offered a quotable memory of her mobile face with a mimic’s repertoire of expressions - the facial acrobatics of a person who is so much the performer she can’t be known. This might have made her formidable if she weren’t so amusing. On Keep’s arrival in Amherst (in the fall of 1890, when the first volume of Dickinson poems was due) she had sidelined the youth while she fed his mother. Maggie had laid the table for two and the young Wallace had watched their lunch from a hungry distance. He recalled the next four years of supper-less Saturday evenings at the Homestead when Lavinia would grimace ‘with horror and despair’ to hear of poor food at his lodgings and then, holding up a candle, and followed by a train of cats, she would descend to the cellar to fetch up some apples. Coated in humour, it’s a caricature that Millicent used as her opening for Ancestors’ Brocades, an attack on her mother’s enemy, touched up with Millicent’s childhood recollections of a witchlike Miss Vinnie in black with knife pleats, knobbly fingers holding out an apple and huge