Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [245]
389 ‘His anguish . . .’: MTB, TS ‘25 May 1959’. Yale: box 46, f.8.
391 ‘My lovely Salem’: (c. 1878). L559.
391 ‘a violence of Affection’: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal, cited by Frances Wilson, The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth (Faber, 2008), 36.
391 MTB attacks romantic legend: Revelation, 3, 8, 58.
391 ‘vainly’: Sewall, i, 184.
391 ‘in her own way’; reached out: Home, 374-5.
392 ‘the legend . . .’: Ibid., 373.
392 Montague enforced MTB’s erasure: Montague files: Jackson’s memorandum (14 Oct 1953); Montague to Boston lawyer, Ames (14 Oct 1953); Montague letter (22 Oct 1953) with ‘to contain no mention . . .’. It was authorised by the Harvard Corporation at this time.
392 ‘compiler’: ‘16 May 1959’. Yale: box 47, f.16.
392 ‘unctuous’: MTB, ‘Veterans Day, 1955’, op. cit.
392 final exchange of Montague and MTB: NYPL: Montague Papers, box 1: Bingham correspondence (14 and 17 Dec 1955).
393 ‘Did Vinnie . . .’: Yale: box 47, f.14.
393 ‘No’: MTB’s ‘Notes for talk with my father’. DPT died in 1939. MTB died in 1968. Notes typed up with the date Oct 1967. ‘No’ was therefore added during the last year of MTB’s life. Yale: box 47, f.14.
393 ‘that’s where she belongs’: TS memoir, ‘25 May 1959’, op. cit.
393 to probe their grievances: See Clara Pearl to MTB (15 Sept 1932). Yale: box 84, f.258a. Clara was Mrs George E. Pearl, and her mother, the former Anna Newton, was Mrs George H. Carleton. Much of Mrs Pearl’s information came from a memoir of ED and family by Anna’s elder sister Clara Newman (Mrs Sidney Turner). See also Kate Dickinson Sweetser, below.
393 ‘curse on her lips’: MTB, ‘Veterans Day, 1955’, op. cit.
394 taped interviews: Historical Sound Recordings, music section of Sterling Library, Yale. TS transcription of the 1963 interview. Yale: 496D, box 46, f.13.
394 appointed Sewall her literary executor: See ‘the care of Richard Sewall’: MTB, ‘28 July 1964’. Yale: box 46, f.9.
394 ‘set the whole . . .’: MTB, ‘4-6 Jan 1960’ and ‘7 Feb 1960’. Yale: box 46, f.9.
395 Sewall’s Life of ED: The second volume follows Mabel Todd’s approach in her edition of Dickinson’s letters: they were organised on the basis of assorted recipients (with the earlier correspondences preceding later ones). To see the poet as an amalgam of separate relationships and correspondences was appropriate in 1892-4, at a time when batches of letters were in the process of being collected from Dickinson’s living correspondents who loomed large: their willingness and information were making the edition possible. Eighty years later this approach leaves the poet more elusive than ever.
395 ‘magnetism concealed vindictiveness’: A&M, 67-8.
395 Peter Gay on WAD’s obedience: Senses, 106.
395 SHD cruel and spiteful; ‘hating’: Kaufmann, 109, 226.
395 ‘Borgia Palace’: Afternoons, 98, 103, 105.
396 ‘black velvet; ‘micemeat pie . . .’: Ibid.
396 false attribution of ‘Her breast is fit for pearls’: Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 1998), 9. The copy sent to Sue remained incorrectly placed in the Bowles section in MLT’s 1931 edition of ED’s Letters, 202-3. J84/Fr121.
V: OUTLIVING THE LEGEND
401 The Evergreens in June 2003: I visited the house with a collector of women’s books, Lisa Baskin, and biographers Frances Spaulding and Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina who spoke of ‘a stain seeping through twelve layers of wallpaper’. We were unaware that this was the last month to see the house in its original state.
401 ‘Eternity’s disclosure . . .’: ‘The Soul’s Superior instants’ (c. 1863). Sent to SHD. J306/Fr630.
401 ‘I’ not herself: (July 1862). L268. ‘When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse - it does not mean - me - but a supposed person.’
401 ‘The Soul that hath a Guest’: (c. 1863). J674/Fr592. Quoted in Part I, above.
401 ‘Immortality as a guest is sacred’: (c. June 1880). L644.
402 ‘The Spirit never twice alike . . .’: (30 Apr 1882). L750. ED seems