Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [2]
Watchful eyes in a New England town of only four thousand meant that assignations had to happen in strictest secret. The only safe place was the irreproachable Homestead, next door to The Evergreens, where the Dickinson sisters continued to live. Even there, nothing was said to acknowledge the romantic and then adulterous nature of Austin’s attachment to Mrs Todd. A fiction was maintained that Mrs Todd was no more than a special friend to all the Dickinsons. But one member of the family refused to collude: Austin’s distraught wife. When protest, then humouring, proved useless, rows exploded in the privacy of The Evergreens.
The rows came to a head in the winter of 1885. On the night of 25 January, Susan Dickinson’s nails gashed the wallpaper in the hallway, the rents gaping for any caller or servant to see. Her husband, being the pink of propriety, had to capitulate. Ostensibly it was an issue of refurbishment, but really about silence: a husband’s refusal to speak to a protesting wife. Three days later, the last of the marital decor had been stripped from the walls. Dark-red wallpaper with a fashionable William Morris design was brought in from Galloway & Fitch to cover the damage.
Susan’s breakout hardened her husband. Their son, prone to seizures, sided with her but was helpless against his father and nothing could stop the course of havoc Austin Dickinson was cutting through his family. Following the wallpaper incident, Susan and her son sank into poor health in the course of that winter.
There was no paving on the Dickinsons’ side of Main Street. Townsfolk had to walk farther off on the other side of the road. A hemlock hedge, planted in the sixties, linked the two houses and protected their privacy. Behind the hedge, and invisible to curious eyes, was a home-trod path between The Evergreens and Austin’s sisters next door in ‘the paternal mansion’. Cross this path and enter the Homestead, an older house built of brown brick in the handsome Federal style. Climb its well-swept stairs and along the top landing turn right into a bright room with four windows. The front two look out across hedge and street at the snowy sweep of the Dickinson meadow and the Pelham hills in the distance. The side windows look at The Evergreens. Here is another, and sicker, invalid who has lain in her bed since October. Her hair flames against the pillow, for though she is fifty-four there’s no sign of grey. This is Emily Dickinson, reclusive, unknown to the reading public in 1885 but soon to burst into fame as a poet. She expects fame and more: nothing less than immortality, and sometimes she can’t sleep at night for thinking of immortality. ‘Exterior—to Time—’, she shuns intruders. Shutting her door on distractions, for thirty years she has honed her genius in the privacy of this room:
The Soul selects her own Society—
Then—shuts the Door—
To her divine Majority—
Present no more—
Unmoved—she notes the Chariots—pausing—
At her low Gate—
Unmoved—an Emperor be kneeling
Opon2 her Mat—
I’ve known her—from an ample nation—
Choose One—
Then—close the Valves of her attention—
Like Stone—
Who is the One with her? Another poem, addressed to ‘Sue’ (Susan next door) and signed ‘Emily’, confides the answer in no uncertain terms. A divine ‘Guest’ keeps her company. She wants no other:
The Soul that hath a Guest
Doth seldom go abroad—
Diviner Crowd at Home—
Obliterate the need—
Against the wall stands a locked cherrywood chest, two of its drawers packed with forty handmade booklets into which she has copied many of her earlier poems, together with a huge assortment of loose manuscripts, a lifetime’s unpublished oeuvre. Here is her secret ‘Fortune’. Nearby is a small cherrywood table where she writes poems and letters. This year, though increasingly weak, she will write often to Susan Dickinson, her long-time neighbour and friend