Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [203]
The only secret people keep is ‘Immortality’, Dickinson once said. Immortality is the mystery at the core of her story.
Impregnable we are—
The whole of Immortality
Secreted in a Star
The ‘Queen of Amherst’ (as Mabel dubbed herself) and Dickinson’s queen of immortality: where Mabel Todd’s eminence resides in her editorial feat, the queen’s head embossed on the poet’s stationery49 rules by divine right. The crown is so tall it doubles the length of the face and is surmounted by a ring of gems like stars, an emblem of power so radiant that this queen must shield our eyes with the façades she assumed: an ‘oldfashioned’ spinster, a shy recluse, a vulnerable mistress to a ‘Master’ whose bullet hits a Bird. Her secret self was other, a Noon blaze rising from the dark, and so rare that no word, no colour can convey who she is:
Can Blaze be shown in Cochineal50—
Or Noon—in Mazarin51?
Dickinson found love, a quickened spirit and freedom, her ‘Mortal Abolition’, all on her own terms. She was in many ways a moral being, a product of upright New England. In her thirties she grasped the potential disruption - to her sanity for a start - of a hidden life like a ‘Bomb’ in her bosom. The poetry it fuelled must be seen in terms of New England individualism, the Emersonian ethos of self-reliance which in its fullest bloom eludes classification. It’s more radical and quirky than anything in Europe, more awkward and less lovable than English eccentricity; in fact, dangerous. Control was a constant necessity, reasserted through the strictures of the hymnbook verse. Though, on occasion, the gun turned on others, most of the time it went off in the poet’s own head, a repeat annihilation built into her body by a Maker she called ‘Master’ - her real Master.
‘God made me’, she said in self-defence to a masked earthy Master, ‘I did’nt be - myself.’
She could not be responsible for her intensity nor for the ‘sickness’ that determined a homebound life. Yet, of course, it was a life that made for the full-scale production of the ‘Opera’. Her voice soars and the scenes of life pass and recede en route to the grave: schoolchildren at recess in a ring; the path through the grass to Sister next door; the Master drama; the loss of her father and her turn to Judge Lord; and then the setting sun and swift onset of poetic immortality. The claims of warring camps - their tampering, excisions, myth-making - can’t blur the integrity of words kept as long as possible in her own hands. No other poet can speak so intimately of life after death when she calls back to us that her journey is unfinished, even now. A dash at the end of her last line leads us on. She is centuries ahead as we read, and still her voice is coming:
Since then—’tis Centuries—and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity—
SOURCES
PRIMARY SOURCES
The main repository of Dickinson family papers, as well as Dickinson’s poems, letters, books, memorabilia and furniture, is the Houghton Library, Harvard University. There is another major Dickinson collection in the Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College. The main repository for Mabel Loomis Todd papers is the archives of Sterling Library at Yale University. This includes papers of William Austin Dickinson and of Mabel Todd’s daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, as well as the typescript record of the court case that Lavinia Dickinson brought against Mabel Loomis Todd in 1898. An off-the-record but influential deposition in the run-up to the trial, by Maggie Maher, servant to the Dickinson sisters, is in the legal archives in Worcester, Massachusetts. Jones Library in Amherst specialises in the history of the town. Susan Dickinson’s papers, and those of her surviving children, Ned Dickinson and Martha Dickinson Bianchi, are at the John Hay Library of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Bianchi’s revealing correspondence