Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [86]
8
SPLIT IN THE FAMILY
Susan and Emily had remained keen readers of George Eliot. For Emily only one word could do justice to Middlemarch: ‘glory’. She cast George Eliot as ‘the Lane to the Indes, Columbus was looking for’. The great novelist died in December 1880 and Emily watched for her biography with such intentness - ‘like a vulture’ - that she wrote to a Boston editor, Thomas Niles of Roberts Brothers, to ask when it was due. It was during this watching time that Mabel Todd, an unashamedly ambitious young woman publishing scenes and stories, burst upon Amherst. Her trained voice broke upon the stiff parlours of the New England country town. Her solos soared above the church choir. Mabel’s full-bodied sails made straight for the Indies.
To come from Washington, to bear a cultivated air of the capital, may have caused a stir in a quiet provincial town, but this brightness faded out a tough reality: Mabel had no money and, for all her ambition to rise in the world, she had married an unmoneyed man. Her parents had always lived on the verge of indigence. Throughout her childhood, Eben and Mary Loomis could not afford to buy a home of their own, nor could they afford to rent an apartment. Mabel grew up in the cramped space of a boarding-house room - one boarding house after another.
Eben Jenks Loomis had been a farm boy held back by lack of opportunity. He’d craved education and why it had not been available to him at a suitable level remains unknown. The gaps in what Mabel writes about his background suggest some misfortune that she kept under wraps. Eben’s father, Nathan Loomis, had been no ordinary farmer; he wrote about agriculture and may have felt obliged to experiment. He was also a mathematician and one of the original (human) computers19 of the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac20 after Congress authorised this in 1849. Eben’s sister Collette had been amongst the first women to go to college. So the Loomises valued education, and in the past it seems there had been the means to pursue it.
Eben did manage one or two mathematics classes at Harvard’s Lawrence School, but these were external classes designed for practical use, not the theoretical learning reserved for Harvard undergraduates. Then, too, external students had to pay, and Eben couldn’t. During that time in Cambridge he heard lectures by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Louis Agassiz, celebrities of poetry and science who spoke so closely to him that afterwards he recalled them as his companions. After that, he was employed as a clerk in the Nautical Almanac Office in Washington and there he remained for fifty years, calculating planetary movements and minding the records. He didn’t have the education to rise beyond a senior clerkship, though his family called him ‘Professor Loomis’ and he didn’t object. He did feel professorial in his attachment to astronomy; he had a nature that yearned to lift up his eyes to see more than might meet the ordinary eye; he quoted and wrote verses; and had a Whitman-like air of the unworldly seer. He was that kind of American, a seeker and dreamer, and though he once took a walk with Whitman (during Whitman’s stay in Washington in the 1860s), Eben was not footloose and not one of the roughs, which is to say that he had a tidy wife.
Mary Alden Wilder Loomis came from a prouder family. Her mother, Grandma Wilder, a widow who lived with her daughter, was wheeled out as a descendant of John Alden, one of the Mayflower pilgrims. Grandma’s husband had been the Revd John Wilder, the minister in Concord, Massachusetts