Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [9]
Within a year of Mrs Todd’s advent in Amherst she was on course to an unassailable position as Austin’s mistress. His sisters could not help knowing that Austin turned against his wife, and then against his children when they sided with their mother. Emily tried to soothe Susan with messages. ‘Will my great Sister accept the minutae of Devotion, with timidity that it is no more?’ she offered. And again, as the first reverberations of what was to come shook the ground, ‘Your little mental gallantries are sweet as Chivalry . . .’. This could not mend matters.
How was it possible to blow apart a family who lived in its set ways as upright citizens in a New England town?
Mabel was no fictional femme fatale. Not the veiled and sometimes dangerous lady in decorative distress who glides into the sanctum of Sherlock Holmes. Not even the subtle Madame Merle whom James brought into his Portrait of a Lady, playing the piano with such startling bravura in 1881. Madame Merle wins the friendship of the innocent American girl; without this move, Madame Merle would not have been close enough to set her plot ticking. But Mabel enchanted a living family, and real life can be in its way more extraordinary than fiction. For the temperament to devise high drama did not reside with Mabel alone. There’s so much of performance in what followed, such roles to be played before a wondering public - the eccentric poet, the dressy adventuress, the top man in town, his vulnerable son, his outraged wife - we must not start by taking sides. These actors and the companies they gathered around them will tug us to do so, for they are - all - adepts at stories. Although Mabel’s adventuress aspect does stand out, the success of her narrative depends upon the nature of the family on whom she intrudes.
As Mabel inserts herself between husband and wife, and then between poet and ‘Sister’, and as a fissure in the family cracks and then breaks open early in 1885, it’s puzzling how this could have happened from the Dickinson side. Instinct is only the commonest part of it, an autumnal flush in a middle-aged man, and yet Austin, like all the Dickinsons, prided himself on rising above the common. They were close-knit, introspective people who exercised immense control in all they did; Austin himself, a cautious lawyer like his father before him, was the opposite of rash. He was a sticker, one of those who, by nature, mate for life: such creatures are closed to alternatives, so loyal are they to their attachments. Austin would have considered before he acted on a passing impulse, so what scenarios took over his mind? The deeper cause of the fissure in the family lies in their past.
II: ‘A STILL—VOLCANO—LIFE’
1
THE FIRST FAMILY
In the mid-nineteenth century Amherst held out against the metropolitan tolerance of Boston. As Amherst’s first family, the Dickinsons were true to the Puritan rigour of provincial New England. Her father’s heart was ‘pure and terrible’, his daughter Emily said. ‘I do not expect or wish for a life of pleasure’, Edward Dickinson told his wife-to-be before their marriage. He was never seen to smile. When she was old, Lavinia mimicked for Mabel how her father sat for a photograph: head held in an invisible brace, eye unflinching. ‘Could you - smile a little?’ the photographer asked. ‘I yam smiling,’ Mr Dickinson replied through set jaw. Later, when a man of letters came all the way from Boston to visit the poet, Mr Dickinson gave him a grim, almost wordless welcome. He ruled the household - after he died, when Emily was forty-four, she still spoke of living in ‘my father’s house’ - but did he