Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [200]
A biographer tempted by exclusive access to an archive of such eloquence and intelligence is bound to be influenced. Future readers will be able to judge where Sewall succumbed to the vast trove of Todd untruths: that Emily Dickinson favoured Mabel; that the poet’s withdrawal into seclusion and the violence in her poems was the result of a family split preceding Mabel’s appearance; and that Austin himself ‘deeded’ to the Todds the strip of land that became the basis of the court case. The biographer even outdoes the Todds when he suggests that Dickinson’s ‘failure’ to publish was a result of the family quarrel. This is consistent with the Todd campaign: an ‘alien’, ambitious intruder into the family - Susan Dickinson - had to be at the bottom of whatever appeared weird or wrong. As the standard biography it was a long-term victory for the Todd camp, shaping opinion for decades to come.
In 1972 Sewall appointed Polly Longsworth to edit the letters of Austin and Mabel, under his supervision. Austin and Mabel, published in 1984, is meticulously researched, with well-judged commentaries, but it does introduce Susan Dickinson ‘as a woman whose magnetism concealed vindictiveness’ and ‘whose intellect was self-serving and sometimes cruel’.
Inevitably, as the Todds’ bias infiltrated commentaries it spread to other genres: cultural history and fiction. Peter Gay’s Education of the Senses (1984), drawing on Mabel Todd’s sexual candour, repeats the Todd untruths that Austin Dickinson married Susan in obedience to his family and that Emily Dickinson condoned Austin’s affair. The Todd bias remains active, echoed by Sewall’s readers and the students they teach, many unaware of the virus of hate and their role as carriers. Amongst these are recent practitioners of bio-fiction. In The Sister by Paula Kaufmann (2006), a cruel and spiteful Sue ends up ‘hating’ Emily. In Afternoons with Emily by Rose MacMurray (2007), Sue has mutated from Black Moghul to death-dealing Lucrezia Borgia. The Evergreens is Sue’s ‘Borgia Palace’, an estranged ‘Emily’ warns the young narrator of the tale. ‘That is where Sue will hatch her plots and do her poisonings.’ She awaits her victims in the hall, a vamp in décolleté black velvet waving her fan. Can evil go further? It can. Sue ‘could make mincemeat pie of the Dickinson sisters and eat it for Christmas dinner’.
In support of Susan, a ‘Sister’ camp came into force towards the end of the century. In 1998, when Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith examined an ardent poem Dickinson wrote in about 1859, ‘Her breast is fit for pearls’, they saw the word ‘Sue’ erased from the verso of the pencilled draft that the poet sent to Sue, who then passed it on to Samuel and Mary Bowles. This erasure (one of many, as we know) allowed Mabel Todd to place this poem with letters to Bowles in the 1894 edition of the Letters, with an absurd suggestion that it was written in honour of miserable Mrs Bowles:
Her breast is fit for pearls,
But I was not a ‘Diver’—
Her brow is fit for thrones
But I have not a crest,
Her heart is fit for home—
I—a Sparrow—build there
Sweet of twigs and twine
My perennial nest.
Emily—
The important correctives of the Sister camp extend to a stand against print culture, arguing that print is liable to distort the lineation and punctuation in the vast oeuvre of manuscripts unpublished in the poet’s lifetime. These scholars, led by Martha Nell Smith, make the case for posting scans of Dickinson manuscripts on the internet as the only form of publication free from editorial intervention.
This is a courageous group, and necessarily partisan. A 1998 dedication of Open Me Carefully, a