Where does Emily Dickinson stand when the feud breaks out? With her sister a go-between for their brother and his mistress, is it possible for the poet to maintain a neutral or unknowing position?
From the consummation of her brother’s romance at the end of 1883, and through 1884 and 1885, most assignations take place in the poet’s house: about twelve a month, usually between two and four-thirty in the afternoon, often followed by a call in the evening — Austin calling on the Todds. It’s not explicit, but these calls would be attentions to David as well as to Mabel, reassuring David that Austin has no intention of detaching his wife. On the contrary, he reaches out to David with friendliness and favour. There’s a singular atmosphere of propriety and graciousness in the conduct of this three-way attachment, but, more than that, the calls are affirmations of an unfailing after-sex glow noted in both Austin’s and Mabel’s diaries. ‘Never eaqualled [sic]’, Austin comments, and another time, ‘the most perfect = = = =’.
The lovers are both keeping records: Austin’s parallel lines in his diary, Mabel’s single line in hers. On Sunday 3 January 1886 Austin reports, ‘at the other house 3 to 5 and + = = = = = XXX’.* Mabel’s diary adds the fact that they’d made love before the fire in the dining room. ‘A most exquisitely happy and satisfactory two hours’.
All the while Mabel continues to sleep regularly with her husband, and until late in 1884 she sustains a practice of numbering these occasions, starting with number 1 in the new year and leaving off at 75 at the end of August. David’s diary excludes his own love life. It’s a record of work, reading (Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Thoreau’s Walden and George Eliot’s Letters) and church (he loved the organ, especially Bach). As an experienced womaniser he’s discreet, but it’s also likely that sex, much as he enjoys it, is peripheral to ambition — common in those who use the chase and conquest as fuel for political or intellectual power. David was not lying to Mabel when he said that sex on the side didn’t matter.
Lovemaking with both men quickens over a few days each month, which must be the safe days of Mabel’s cycle. The precision of Austin’s records allows him to remind Mabel of the time as well as date of one scene, the early afternoon of 7 August 1884: ‘we met at the other house just after two, and had two sweet hours there = = = = = … How simple the great things of life are! and with the right conditions, how easy to be had.’ Recalling this a year later, he’s moved to call her ‘my sweet wife’. She wore his ring on her wedding finger, having moved her wedding ring to her right hand. Mabel’s diary adds another assignation at the Homestead in the evening: ‘Went to see Lavinia after dinner —. Took some jelly & some Indian pipes for Emily.’ And that’s not all, for her diary on that 7 August records number 69 with her husband.
How did Mabel Todd bring off the feat of keeping two husbands happy at the same time, as well as the even more difficult feat of fending off public opinion? As the affair went on, Mrs Todd did incur suspicion and snubs, but conspicuous hymn-singing and wifely devotion gave these the lie. Then, too, Austin’s unassailable public standing protected her along with him. So, although her reputation felt precarious, she managed to avoid exposure, unlike New England’s most famous adulteress. In the seventeenth-century setting of The Scarlet Letter an A marks the bodice of Hester Prynne, exposed on the public scaffold. What Mabel shared with Hester Prynne was secret defiance: ‘What we did had a consecration of its own,’ Hester assures her lover, as Mabel assured Austin. No stab of guilt comes off the page in Mabel’s letters and journal. She had no sympathy for Sue once her hold tightened on Sue’s husband; on the contrary, she considered that a woman of Sue’s ‘low’ background had no business with so fine a husband. It remained a continued annoyance that Mrs Austin Dickinson had the right to ride out in the Dickinson carriages, while she, Mabel, the wife without the sign, had no carriage of her own nor was like to have. When Austin took her for drives it had to be along back roads.
Once, when Austin had told Sue that there was no time to drive her, she and Ned, in the Dickinson sleigh, came upon the lovers strolling along a back road. (It was 20 December 1883, the day after they’d made love for the third time.) Austin had brushed off the awkwardness as amusing — too amused to notice the consternation of his son when he could not protect his mother. His mother did observe Ned’s distress, and packed him off on holiday, saying ‘all will be well’ and Papa would write to him.
So long as nothing was said to disturb Austin at home — and nothing was said — he felt content. His comforts were seen to and he observed with satisfaction a little air of discouragement that this would make the slightest difference to his detachment. He was teaching his family a lesson. They had not got him ‘under’ and this assertiveness, which Mabel had urged, he brought her as an offering. She called him her ‘God’, her King, the granter of her ‘nobility’, the transformer of her soul — so she claimed, adapting the local script of spiritual drama. Austin had promoted her to a higher platform not open to the masses who were suitably policed by law and religion. ‘Conventionalism is for those not strong enough to be laws for themselves, or to conform themselves to the great higher law where all harmonies meet,’ this lawyer decreed in private, determined to justify adultery as heaven-sent in his own case.
This was no ordinary affair, the pair assured each other; they were amongst the world’s great lovers: Antony and Cleopatra, Abelard and Héloise, Chateaubriand and Madame de Récamier. Mabel’s ‘dream of a perfect manhood / That I realize in you’ never failed to enchant Austin; while Austin declared himself already ‘through the shining gates’. As the pair polished their self-styled roles as king and queen of ‘pure’ love, it never occurred to them that they were leaning on a servant. For the assignations at the other house relied on the service, the fires and discretion of Maggie Maher, whose Catholic confessor would have condemned the adultery. Maggie’s witness to what was taking place, and for how many hours, would not be forgotten.
Meanwhile, Mr and Mrs Dickinson lived on in the festering silence of The Evergreens. Separation was not an option for a wife with no income of her own and Austin would not have agreed to a visible split. Ned longed to assuage what she bore. ‘Such superhuman efforts to keep up & cheerful, for those around her, mortal eye never witnessed,’ he reported to Mattie, away at boarding school. ‘I would willingly lay down my life for her.’ He too was ill and suffering in the winter of 1885, at the limit of endurance.
What remains unknown is whether there was any link between the stress at The Evergreens and the poet’s insufficiently explained collapses into long periods in bed. Was the tie between Emily and Susan strained by the newcomer in their lives, knocking and knocking at the door of the Homestead in order to make love to Susan’s husband in the safety of his sisters’ home? The Dickinson sisters were dependent on Austin. How dependent they were, and in what ways, remains in question — it’s a question pertinent to Emily Dickinson’s position. Austin paid their considerable bills (almost as much as those of The Evergreens) and took care of their finances as their father had done. It was customary for Austin to have tea at the other house after his day at the office. At this time, he took to visiting ‘Em’ and ‘Vin’ two or three times a day, and told a gratified Mabel that he and his sisters would ‘talk you over — always … you are the constant theme’. He did speak of sisters in the plural. If so, Emily could hardly have been blind to the affair. To what extent did she cooperate or, like Lavinia, condone? She and Lavinia certainly took in Austin’s emotional shift from The Evergreens back to the Homestead: as though their brother had never left home, they agreed.
The facts of Vinnie’s complicity and the acts of adultery in the Homestead have been available since the correspondence of Austin and Mabel was finally published in 1984, a century after the affair began. Yet the question of the poet’s stance has remained unasked. This happened because Dickinson legend has kept the poet untouched, oblivious to her brother’s affair. The time has come to recognise her inevitable part in the family feud. What did it mean to an experienced fender-off of intrusion to find Mabel Todd occupying the dining room in the Homestead? To add to the intrusion, this happened to be the room where the poet had a second writing table, at a corner window shaded by honeysuckle.
Downstairs at the Homestead, and Emily’s conservatory: the layout at the time when adultery made itself at home.
The lovers’ alternative venue was the library. This was the room Emily had to pass through en route to her conservatory. Next to her room upstairs, this was her space, central to her daily life. But for two to three hours of a morning or afternoon the lovers might be there. The door would be closed. This means that during these hours the three women who lived in the house could not walk freely downstairs, particularly Emily, who was determined never to meet Mabel. It’s one thing to flee the ‘donkeys’ of the town; quite another to evade a person who frequents the main rooms of the house, coming through the front door into the hallway, opening and closing doors at any moment. In one or other of those rooms to the right of the hallway a fire would be lit.
The lovers did not make use of the parlour, running the length of the house, to left of the hallway. That was Emily’s domain when the Judge came. Occasionally Mabel entered the parlour to play the square piano that Mr Dickinson had bought for Emily. She played Bach, Scarlatti and Beethoven, and sometimes she lifted her voice and sang. The trained voice, resonant with the vigour of a fulfilled life, reached into every cranny of the house. She sang, she said, for Emily, whom she pictured seated, all attention, on a step of the staircase. Afterwards the poet sent in a glass of wine, and with it either a piece of cake or a rose, and sometimes also a few lines of verse. Mabel liked to think the verse impromptu, called out by her own voice.
There were, then, these non-encounters. Emily’s successful avoidance of Mabel means that she could not have been uninformed of her visits. For her policy to work as it did, there had to be some sort of understanding. To Mabel, the fact that Austin discussed her in the Homestead implied that his sisters accepted the affair. Or did it? Vinnie certainly, at this stage, was charmed by Mabel and bent on obliging her brother. If Vinnie felt compunction about Sue, her conduct as go-between gives no hint. Her letters to Mabel are partisan, recruited to the power base Mabel was building up against the wife she meant to replace more completely.
What Emily thought is less certain. If Mabel was telling the truth (always questionable), Emily too was charmed. Mabel watched people fall under her ‘spell’, women as spellbound as men. Up to a point it’s fair to assume the poet’s response to Mabel’s songs and eagerness to read her poems. But Emily’s letters — to Susan, to Ned, to Mabel herself and, surprisingly, also to Mabel’s parents — suggest a different story.
Can it be that Emily Dickinson was the first target of Mabel Todd’s takeover? With writing ambitions of her own, she was gripped by the poems Sue shared soon after Mabel’s arrival in Amherst. She began to put herself in the way of the recluse. That first autumn of 1881, when Mabel was about to depart on a visit to Washington, she ventured to send the poet a message of farewell. The reply was a rebuff to any delusion of intimacy Mabel might cultivate. ‘The parting of those that never met, shall it be delusion, or rather an unfolding of a snare whose fruitage is later?’
This is well before the men in her family fall for Mabel. Such prescience seems uncanny, but there’s no mystery here: supremely alert, the poet is a decoder of signs — a lurking intention. Ignoring the snub, Mabel persists in believing that Emily Dickinson pined for her when she went away. What Dickinson called ‘delusion’ was actually something Mabel had in common with the poet: invention. The situations Mabel invents carry artistic conviction — enough, almost always, to see them through — though there’s all the difference in the use of words. The poet’s words stab us awake; Mabel’s words are imitations of others’ scripts, just as her manners imitate society ladies’. Refinement and courtesy are manifest, but not always that care for others that marks real manners. Mabel could be impervious to what did not impinge on her self-making, while the poet, secluded though she was, took in everything.
This was apparent on 10 September 1882, when Mabel entered the Homestead for the first time. The poet hears fateful footsteps coming through the door and foresees the necessity for ‘fortitude’. It’s as though Dickinson scents Mabel’s appropriation of herself and conveys what she can, within the bounds of politeness, to ward her off.
Later that month, Mabel sent her a painting of Indian Pipes. She would have gleaned from Austin or Vinnie that this was the poet’s favourite flower, a white woodland plant native to New England. As a child Emily had pressed and labelled it monotropa, uniflora. Hers are ghostly white in the shadow of their bold, dark stalk, unlike Mabel’s painted, full-bodied Pipes (below). The gift obliged Emily to thank her: ‘I know not how to thank you. We do not thank the Rainbow, although its Trophy is a snare.’ Again, a snare. Dickinson warns the many-hued Mabel that she spots it.
When the adultery was underway Mabel tried a second gift, a yellow jug painted with red trumpet-vine blossoms. Dickinson’s acknowledgement is once more a coded rebuff: it characterises Mabel as ‘Egypt’, as Cleopatra, mistress of ‘the entangled Antony’. Antony’s sister could hardly be more explicit in pointing the blame. Cleopatra is, of course, no mean power: to a poet who characterises herself repeatedly as ‘Queen’, ruler of her private realm, here is a rival queen positioning herself on her territory, first as a family friend, then the chosen of her brother, then stepping some twelve times a month through the Homestead door.
Once Austin entered into his affair it was impossible to be direct. Austin was head of the family. His wife and children, who opposed Mabel openly, had found themselves in the poor position of rejected dependants. The poet encased her rebukes in riddles. It’s Hamlet’s ploy, bound as he is by ties of nature to the family a usurper has destroyed. Like Hamlet, she puts on an antic disposition, her words so opaque and apparently incoherent the speaker appears to be deranged. This absolves her of responsibility for what she says. It’s in this Hamlet sense that the poet appears to be outside the action. Not unknowing, as legend had it; on the contrary, words are a form of action. Her verbal antics, like Hamlet’s, oppose the usurper.
Dear friend —
Nature forgot — The Circus reminded her —
Thanks for the Ethiopian Face.
The Orient is in the West.
‘You knew, Oh Egypt’ said the entangled Antony —
There’s no certain solution to this riddle but what is unmistakable is the curtness, unlike Dickinson’s warmth to other correspondents. A possible decoding could be that the poet had forgotten this ‘friend’ (with her ‘circus’ of show-piece accomplishments) until nudged by a gift. Her reply calls up the (‘Ethiopian’) Queen of Sheba bearing gifts to a king renowned for wisdom. This alien seductress with the Oriental wiles of a Cleopatra (‘Egypt’) has come ‘in’ — intruded into — the poet’s home in her native West. The verbal combat returns Mabel’s blackening of Sue as ‘great Black Moghul’. Here, Sue’s defender exposes Mabel’s ‘Ethiopian Face’: the real foreign potentate who, through sexual conquest, has an unnatural sway in the Dickinson family. The poet’s ‘thanks’, though obligatory, is shot through with sarcasm.
When other overtures from Mabel compelled replies, Dickinson wrote acidly, ‘Will Brother and Sister’s dear friend accept my tardy devotion?’ and again, in 1885, she addressed Mabel as ‘Brother and Sister’s Friend!’ Not her own friend (after Mabel had been haunting the Homestead for three years). Dickinson’s signature on this letter is unprecedented: she signs herself ‘America’, ostensibly because Mabel was abroad at the time, but ‘America’ implies independence. In this sense the signature seals the warning: Mabel, as ‘Egypt’, may have disarmed ‘Antony’, representative of Rome, but she can’t take over ‘America’.
This is the only drama in Dickinson’s life that’s not of her making, ever since Miss Lyon’s attempt to command her soul in 1848. As a girl, Emily had been free to turn her back on Miss Lyon, but this conflict of mature people with a lot to lose — ‘Sister’, wife, children, reputation, peace of mind, privacy — has worked its way inside her home.
Some of Dickinson’s readers, like Sue, were admitted to intimacy; to others, like Mabel and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dickinson wrote in her most riddling manner. Where Higginson was willing to own his bewilderment, Mabel did not. It was part of her script to act the favourite. Impossible to know to what extent Mabel could decode Dickinson’s stabs and sarcasms in every instance, but one diary entry records the receipt of ‘some adder’s tongue sent over by Lavinia’. Adder’s tongue is a plant, but I think Mabel is referring to a pencilled poem. If so, Lavinia would have been an innocent pawn in this war of words, with no idea what the poem was saying, but Mabel did, it seems, detect the venom of the following riddle:
Their dappled importunity
Disparage or dismiss —
The Obloquies of Etiquette
Are obsolete to Bliss —
Again there’s no certain reading, but we may surmise that when it comes to ‘them’ [Mabel and her lover] there are only two possible responses for the poet: she can ‘disparage’ or ‘dismiss’ their devious [‘dappled’] and persistent intrusion [‘importunity’]. The slanders [‘Obloquies’] — presumably Mabel’s detraction of Austin’s family — that are part of Mabel’s manners [a sardonic take on her taste for ‘Etiquette’], have nothing to do with the soul’s superior instants [‘Bliss’] the poet enjoys, however insistently the lovers claim theirs to be a higher love. The poet, therefore, scorns the lovers’ project.
Even so, Mabel was not to be put off. She meant to gain access to the poet in one way or another. It was simply a matter of waiting.
Meanwhile, there was another determined woman with an eye to Emily. Helen Hunt Jackson, as we know, recognised Dickinson’s stature. ‘You are a great poet’, she wrote on 28 March 1876, ‘— and it is wrong to the day you live in, that you will not sing aloud. When you are what men call dead, you will be sorry you were so stingy.’
Dickinson sent her some poems, and Helen was one of the few she would see. On 10 October of the same year Helen sat face to face with Dickinson, who looked so pale that her fellow poet felt ‘like a great ox talking to a white moth, and begging it to come and eat grass with me to see if it could not turn itself into beef!’ Stupid, she admitted, and also ‘very impertinent’ to have accused the moth of living away from the sunlight. Yet Helen couldn’t resist another try: ‘You say you find great pleasure in reading my verses. Let somebody somewhere whom you do not know have the same pleasure in reading yours.’
When Helen returned to Amherst in October 1878 she called on Dickinson once more, this time with her husband. It was not Dickinson’s habit to see a stranger, yet she enjoyed ‘a lovely hour’ when the winter strands in Helen’s hair seemed banished by the warmth of her undiminished summer. Helen came as a professional writer — she brought Dickinson her latest book, Bits of Travel at Home (1878), and there was a professional purpose to this visit.
By 1878, Dickinson had written over fourteen hundred poems. Helen had been urging her to publish a poem or two anonymously in a collection called A Masque of Poets. ‘I will copy them — sending them in my own handwriting — and promise never to tell any one, not even the publishers, whose the poems are. Could you not bear this much publicity? Only you and I would recognize the poems.’ A candidate for publication was ‘Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne’er succeed’. It looks as though this poem came up during a visit from Helen on the morning of 24 October, because the following day she redoubled her plea.
‘Now — will you send me the poem? No — will you let me send the “Success” — which I know by heart — to Roberts Bros … I ask it as a personal favor to myself — Can you refuse the only thing I perhaps shall ever ask at your hands?’
Dickinson finally agreed — with reluctant waves in Higginson’s direction — and she did, after all, make her identity known to the editor Thomas Niles, a partner in the Boston publishing firm of Roberts Brothers. The collection, selling at one dollar, came out at the end of 1878. It was part of a ‘No Name Series’, advertised as anonymous poems by the great of Britain and America. Its epigraph came from the recently published Daniel Deronda: ‘Is the Gentleman anonymous? Is he a great Unknown?’ Sadly the poems collected fell foul of greatness. One preceding Dickinson’s, ‘Avallon’, is fake medieval, hopelessly sub-Tennyson; other poems are absurdly trite, along these lines:
Oh! To-day is too delicious,
Fill’d with little winds and birds
And the far-off hum of herds,
[…]
Oh! Today is too delicious,
[…]
Let to-morrow be malicious.
As a sample of the editor’s taste, it’s only fair to add that he wasn’t alone. Nor was Niles alone in seeing fit to change Dickinson’s phrasing. When she wrote to thank him for a copy of this volume he was polite enough to speak of her ‘valuable’ contribution. Reviewers thought it by Emerson, and Helen Hunt Jackson singled out ‘Success’ for praise in an anonymous Colorado review that reprinted the poem. Privately she owned to Dickinson that she was unable to recognise greatness in most of the others.
She went on praising her friend to Niles, who wrote to Miss Dickinson on 24 April 1882: ‘she wished you could be induced to publish a volume of poems … I wish also that you could.’ Surprisingly, Dickinson followed this up.
‘The kind but incredible opinion of “H.H.” and yourself I would like to deserve — Would you accept a Pebble [her poem, “How happy is the little Stone”] I think I gave to her, though I am not sure.’
The editor apparently expressed no interest and a year later, in mid-March 1883, Dickinson initiated another approach when she wrote to ask once more for news of the forthcoming life of George Eliot by her husband John Cross. In reply, Niles sent a different biography of the novelist which Roberts Brothers was about to publish. Her thanks enclosed two more poems ‘Further in Summer than the Birds’ and one of her great works, which she entitled ‘Snow’ [‘It sifts from Leaden Sieves’]. Niles preferred the minor bird poem. Hoping to elicit a keener response, she asked him to ‘efface’ the others and then, trying her hardest to please, she sent Niles the same treasure she had offered to her first editor, Samuel Bowles: the first edition of the Bronte sisters’ Poems (1846), whose greatness at the time had gone unrecognised. The covert message would have been the same: an editor should not fail to recognise another poet of the Bronte calibre.
‘I thank you heartily,’ Niles replied on 31 March, ‘but in doing so I must add that I would not for the world rob you of this very rare book … If I may presume to say so, I will take instead a M.S. collection of your poems, that is, if you want to give them to the world through the medium of a publisher.’ Again she offered only more samples, including another bird poem — a great one — ‘A Route of Evanescence’. The editor replied with formal courtesy:
23 April 1883
My dear Miss Dickinson
… I am very much obliged to you for the three poems which I have read and re-read with great pleasure, but which I have not consumed. I shall keep them unless you order me to do otherwise, in that case I shall as in duty bound obey.
Yrs very truly
T. Niles
Thomas Niles had a mulish face with a slightly protruding lower lip, concealed at the corners with a walrus moustache, its hair rather prickly in contrast to the straight hair combed neatly across his crown. In 1868, when Louisa May Alcott had sent him the first dozen chapters of what became Little Women, he had thought them dull. Fortunately he showed the chapters to his niece, Lillie Almy, who laughed and cried. Niles revised his opinion and Alcott went on with the book. In 1881, Helen Hunt Jackson submitted a book exposing ill-treatment of Native Americans. She showed how they had been displaced from their lands; how this contravened the international law of prior occupancy; and a chapter on ‘Massacres of Indians by Whites’ revealed how often Native-American violence had been provoked. Roberts Brothers rejected A Century of Dishonor as too controversial. Published by Harper & Brothers, the book established Helen Hunt Jackson as an authority on Native Americans. She was then appointed as the first female commissioner for Native Americans in Southern California, where she extended her domestic values of compassion and listening in a political arena. Here she found material for her bestselling novel Ramona (1884), which Dickinson read.
Up to the age of fifty-two, Dickinson had managed not to expose herself to outright rejection. She was silent on the subject, but the encounter with Niles had to be destructive, in the same way as public disparagement of Wuthering Heights had to have been destructive of Emily Bronte — publication (resisted at first) hastening her course towards death in 1848. Dickinson’s long-held affinity for this predecessor mounted in her own last years, when she liked to quote the final stanza from ‘No coward soul is mine’. The self-satisfied bore with dead eyes who looks out of Niles’s photograph had no idea of damage to so fine an instrument. For genius is no protection against its denial, especially for those writing in their bedrooms and diminished by nineteenth-century notions of ‘little’ women. It’s not that Dickinson would have doubted her gift, but she had put herself in a false position: a supplicant with an unwanted offering.
She made no further attempt at publication. What is clear, though, from the abortive encounter with Niles is the poet’s willingness to speak to a wider public and to us far off in the future. Emily Dickinson was not shut away from publishing; she was in touch through her initiative with Niles, through sustained ties with leading editors and men of letters, Higginson, Bowles and Dr Holland, and in her last decade through a professional friendship with Helen Hunt Jackson.
To Helen’s credit, she never stopped trying. In September 1884, after falling down the stairs and breaking a leg, she could still put her mind to her friend. ‘What portfolios of verses you must have,’ she guessed correctly. ‘It is a cruel wrong to your “day & generation” that you will not give them light.’ She offered to be Emily Dickinson’s executor. ‘Surely, after you are what is called “dead,” you will be willing that the poor ghosts you have left behind, should be cheered and pleased by your verses, will you not? — You ought to be.’ The poet did not take this up, nor in the same month did she consent to see Bleecker Van Wagenen, from the publishing firm of Dodd, Mead and Company, who turned up at the Homestead with his wife, Mrs Holland’s daughter. Emily teased Vinnie for being over-impressed by the gentleman of the vast name.
There was one other editor who could have published Dickinson during her lifetime. Maria Whitney, the cousin of Mrs Bowles who had nursed her dutifully and adored Sam Bowles, was often in touch with Dickinson from the time of Bowles’s death in 1878.
‘I hope you may remember me, as I shall always mingle you with our Mr Bowles,’ Dickinson said. ‘Affection gropes through drifts of Awe, for his tropic Door —’.
Maria suggested that those who had loved Mr Bowles be more closely each other’s.
‘Your touching suggestion is a tender permission,’ Dickinson agreed. ‘You will be with us while he is with us and that will be while we are our-selves — for Consciousness is the only Home of which we now know.’ To be at home with Bowles was to recall how one glance of his could ‘light a world’.
Tacitly she acknowledged Maria’s superior right to grieve. In truth, Dickinson had more than adequate consolation in Judge Lord, while Maria was bereft for the rest of her life. Hers was a self-contained scholar’s life directed towards Old High German, studiousness alleviated by a flash of red petticoat brought back from fashionable Europe to the disapproval of old-fashioned Northampton. When Bowles had been failing, Maria Whitney had gone to see him in Springfield three times a week. It had been a tragic time whilst she’d kept going at Smith College.
After she resigned this post in 1880 she edited the literary pages of the Springfield Republican where, two decades before, Bowles had published a few of Dickinson’s most daring poems from the early 1860s, a time when she deluged him with offerings. Whitney had been close enough to Bowles, as well as to the Norcross cousins, to have known of Dickinson’s poetry; the fact that Dickinson wrote was not secret. Although Whitney and the poet were intimate correspondents in the early 1880s, Whitney never included her poems in the newspaper. Her taste was probably too correct, in the light of Dickinson’s comment on an unnamed female scholar (and Whitney was the only one she knew): this scholar ‘had the facts but not the phosphorescence’ of books. That phosphorescence illumines every letter Dickinson sent to Whitney. So here was another editor whose door failed to open to a great poet. Only three readers fully recognised her greatness during her lifetime: Sue Dickinson, Mabel Loomis Todd and Helen Hunt Jackson.
After the Springfield murder trial hit the news in April 1882, Judge Lord collapsed unconscious on 1 May following his return to Salem. On 3 May the Republican had reported little hope for his recovery. Vinnie heard this from Austin en route to catch a train (as Emily Dickinson reported this scene in a letter). Vinnie came indoors and stood in front of her sister who was smiling as she read a letter from the Judge, delivered with that morning’s post.
‘Emily, did you see anything in the paper that concerned us?’ ‘Why no, Vinnie, what?’ ‘Mr Lord is very sick.’
She grasped at a chair that seemed to be passing, for her sight seemed to slip. Her smile froze and then slowly faded. Tom Kelley, Maggie’s brother-in-law, came in at that moment, and she ran to his blue jacket, as she put it, ‘and let my Heart break there …’.
‘Don’t cry, Miss Emily.’ He had never seen her like this. ‘I could not see you cry.’
At that moment the doorbell rang and she heard a stranger’s voice saying, ‘I thought first of you.’ It was Professor Chickering from the English Department at Amherst College, who had made several unsuccessful attempts to see the poet. This time he came with an offer to telegraph Abbie Farley in Salem. Mechanically, she ‘asked the Wires’ how the Judge did, and attached her name.
Abbie’s reply gave cautious grounds for hope. Emily searched the paper for news each day, hoping silence boded well. Then, on 8 May, Austin read aloud to his sisters a report on the Judge: he had survived the crisis. At once, Emily dashed off a letter:
Monday
Dear Abby —
…Were our sweet Salem safe, it would be ‘May’ indeed — I shall never forget ‘May Day.’
All our flowers were draped [in mourning] —
Is he able to speak or to hear voices or to say ‘Come in,’ when his Amherst knocks?
Fill his Hand with Love as sweet as Orchard Blossoms, which he will share with each of you — I know his boundless ways —
As it was too much sorrow, so it is almost too much joy —
Lovingly,
Emily
By the 14th, Lord had recovered enough to hear from her directly: her ‘rapture’ at his ‘return’. ‘The fear that your life had ceased, came, fresh, yet dim, like the horrid Monsters fled from a Dream.’ At the age of seventy it seemed sensible to retire. His health deteriorated during 1883 and, aware that he was slipping away, Emily Dickinson — cut off in Amherst — longed for a last opportunity to break through his reserve. In a rare poem addressing him, she fights like a biographer against the ‘reportless Grave’: it’s a matter of urgency to find the right question that will ‘still’ — ‘still’ she repeats — ‘wrest’ from him what she needs to know:
Still own thee — still thou art
What Surgeons call alive —
Though slipping — slipping — I perceive
To thy reportless Grave —
Which question shall I clutch —
What answer wrest from thee
Before thou dost exude away
In the recallless sea?
Lord died in Salem on 13 March 1884. His last words to Emily were ‘A caller comes’. She inferred it to be ‘Eternity, as he never returned’. At the first ‘dart’ of grief she ‘hardly dared to know’ her loss, ‘but anguish finds it out’. She was in a ‘place of shafts’.
If the sun came out after rain, it barbed her loss afresh. There was no escaping the heartless renewals of nature. Outside the robins sang, but the poet, writing to Mrs Holland, can summon only ‘a drooping syllable’. In the past ecstasy had come as though it pervaded all existence, but now she realised ‘he [Judge Lord] was the cup from which we drank it’. To be an ecstatic with no access to ecstasy was to feel deprived of life. ‘Abyss has no Biographer —’, she called across the years to Sue’s sister, Martha Gilbert Smith, who had suffered in silence when they were young. No words were adequate, only Mark Antony’s cry, ‘My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar.’ She comments, ‘I never knew a broken heart break itself so sweet — ‘.
There was no consolation in formal religion. The ‘waylaying Light’ of her visions had removed her from doctrine and official versions of the supernatural. ‘When Jesus tells us about his Father, we distrust him,’ she said. ‘When he shows us his Home, we turn away, but when he confides to us that he is “acquainted with Grief,” we listen, for that also is an Acquaintance of our own.’
Mourning provided an excuse for the Homestead to close the door to Mabel. The lovers had to go elsewhere — but where? The Todds’ room in their boarding house was out of the question. Austin’s law office was out of bounds to Mabel (though at the start of the affair she’d found reasons to drop by, compelled by the drama of risk). In the spring of 1884 Mabel cast her eye on the Lessey estate, graced by columns, trees and two acres on the far side of Lessey Street, curving behind the Homestead. Mrs Lessey was ill, and in late May Mabel’s expectations were met: Mrs Lessey was no more. Acting swiftly, the Todds took possession of the Lessey house in June. The lease was for a year. Mabel borrowed from the bank in order to revamp the property, requested her furniture from her parents and when they could not bear to part with certain items sold them to her parents for six hundred dollars — deaf to their pleas, for they could not afford this.
Mabel’s interiors had curtains from woven wall-hangings and rather tired ostrich feathers in vases. An upright piano stood in a corner of the parlour with a cover laid loosely over the stool. Rush mats, gathering dust, covered the floor; bits of crocheted lace adorned the mantel. Though Mabel was dainty about her own clothes she despised housekeeping, and so pleased was she to have a servant — and so inexperienced as an employer — that she did not inspect too closely. She informed her mother proudly that the servant had all cleaning finished by the time the Todds sat down to breakfast. The effect was a mite tatty in contrast to the spotlessness of The Evergreens (where, David Todd used to complain, he’d felt obliged to wipe his feet all the way up the garden path) or the crisp whites of the Homestead. In the Todds’ bedroom tacky curtains drooped from conspicuous rails. More ostrich plumes, ragged with age, were tucked behind a nondescript painting of the seashore.
One Saturday in mid-June, while Emily was baking a loaf cake with Maggie, she saw ‘a great darkness coming’. She blacked out for many hours until, late at night, she woke to find Vinnie and Austin bending over her, together with an unfamiliar physician, Dr Fish. Emily gave out that this was the first time in her life that she ‘had fainted and lain unconscious’. She had certainly never lost consciousness for that alarming length of time. The doctor called it a revenge of the nerves. Her sister was sick differently, Lavinia told their cousin Clara Newman Turner, the elder of the two orphans who had lived at The Evergreens and who was therefore familiar with family ills. There were headaches, vomiting and convulsions — signs of more than one disease. Some have suggested hypertension; kidney failure, known as Bright’s disease, was the diagnosis at the time but new evidence — drugstore prescriptions from 1883 until 1885 — suggests that the invalid was treated also for epilepsy. A chronic sickness would have complicated whatever ‘different’ disease she had contracted.*
From childhood, Dickinson had contemplated mortality. During the next weeks of faintness and weakness — sometimes in bed, sometimes in a chair — mortality now became her companion, as attached as Gib: ‘The little boy we laid away never fluctuates, and his dim society is companion still.’ As for the future, it remained the mystery on the other side of death. She kept an open mind:
The going from a world we know
To one a wonder still
Is like the child’s adversity
Whose vista is a hill,
Behind the hill is sorcery,
And everything unknown,
But will the secret compensate
For climbing it alone?
After eight weeks she could reassure her Norcross cousins that she was ‘now staying’. At this time she told Susan all she’d meant to her:
Show me Eternity, and I will show you Memory —
Both in one package lain
And lifted back again —
Be Sue — while I am Emily —
Be next — what you have ever been, Infinity —
From a formative age they had shared a language untrammelled by falsehood: ‘No Words ripple like Sister’s —’, she’d written to Sue. ‘Their Silver genealogy is very sweet to trace — / Amalgams are abundant, but the lone student of the Mines [the poet] adores Alloyless things —’.
When Sue sent a cardinal flower to the recuperating invalid, Emily flashed back: ‘Except for usurping your Copyright — I should regive the Message, but each Voice is its own —’.
Would Emily join her, Sue asked, in supplying material for a forthcoming biography of Sam Bowles?
Emily agreed. ‘Go to Mine as to your own, only more unsparingly —’. She foresaw the result would be ‘like a Memoir of the Sun, when the Noon is gone’ (exactly what the biographer, George Merriam, produced: a faded composite of fact). In private Emily shared the living memory with Sue: ‘You remember his swift way of wringing and flinging away a Theme, and others picking it up and gazing bewildered after him, and the prance that crossed his Eye …
… No vacillating God
Ignited this Abode
To put it out —
This feeling letter to Sue ends,
Remember, Dear, an unfaltering Yes is my only reply to your utmost question —
With constancy —
Emily —
Given the clash of interest between Sue Dickinson and Mabel Todd, it’s telling to compare Emily’s assents to Sue with the emphatic negations of her latest riddle for Mabel.
While in danger, and almost too weak to write, Emily had roused herself on 19 July to confront Mabel. This was the only letter she managed to write during her dark passage when death stood by. Defiance was on her mind. It consists of two sentences and four lines of verse about the last stand of the Greeks at Thermopylae. A lone group of Spartans [the Dickinsons] who are about to die at the hands of the Persian invader [Mabel Todd], and whose stand will make them ‘the Deathless’, declare their purity of purpose: nothing now can stain their spirit, not the ‘Dart’ of an enemy spear, nor the uncertainty of the afterlife. The stain comes from ‘an adjourning Heart’ [Austin’s withdrawal from his family]. Again, there’s no sure answer to this riddle, but the fact that Dickinson sent this message to Mabel alone suggests the speaker’s distress over a brother whose heart is removed from his family. It’s there the damage will be found: not her own sickness, not the advance of mortality, but estrangement. Her accompanying verse points to emotional betrayal:
Not Sickness stains the Brave,
Nor any Dart,
Nor Doubt of Scene to come,
But an adjourning Heart —
During Dickinson’s bout of sickness she was healed by the opposite: the fellow-feeling of her Norcross cousins and a neighbour, Nellie Sweetser, who offered ‘precisely the tenderness most craved’.
In October 1884 the Todds threw open their new residence to seventy-five inhabitants of Amherst, who were offered a lunch of chicken salad. Mrs Loomis came for this event and was as amazed as Mabel could have hoped, yet worried. To a mother who had scrimped all her life, the grandeur of the Lessey house and grounds was disturbing. How could Mabel afford this on her husband’s salary? Who had funded it?
It didn’t take Mrs Loomis long to deduce that Mabel had acquired a protector. At once she summoned Mabel’s father from Washington. Appalled questions drew in Austin Dickinson, who gave Mr Loomis his lofty assurance that nothing was amiss. It’s inconceivable, he protested, that a gentleman of his standing and probity could corrupt their daughter. The problem lay with the Loomises, who had fixed on adultery where there was nothing but friendship.
Meanwhile, Emily Dickinson signalled in her own way with warm notes to the Loomises. Careful not to mention Mabel, she expressed her ‘trust’ in their sense of ‘Right’. These are not riddling letters. Her warmth to these strangers signals how firmly she sides with them in their battle for their daughter’s virtue.
At least twice Eben Loomis confronted Austin, who was taken aback to be considered ‘a sneak, and an improper person, given to mischief, and treachery’. To Mabel, Austin confided his distaste for ‘vulgar minded people’ who think too much of the body. Outwardly he practised the accommodating politeness of one whose patience is tried:
My dear Mrs Loomis
If it may afford you the least satisfaction to supplement our Sunday afternoon talk by any word unspoken, any question unasked, or unanswered then, any new thought — you may command me for such time as you will, after 5 o’clock this or tomorrow ev[en]ing.
Very sincerely,
Wm A Dickinson
In truth, Austin was somewhat put out to hear of an informant (probably Grandma Wilder, who had been staying with the Todds before the Loomises arrived). He used a lawyer’s tactics, requiring the kind of evidence that could prove an allegation in court, unpicking evidence and continuing to manoeuvre Mr Loomis into a defensive position. If Austin is spied late at night with Mrs Todd on the porch, if he comes back day after day through an inconspicuous door, it is because they like each other — what harm in that? David Todd, after all, condones it, and sometimes joins them. It offends Mr Dickinson that a friendship so pure and elevating should be maligned by little minds.
He formulated Mabel’s denial: ‘There is nothing to the whole of it, beyond the fact that we are earnestly interested in each other … if he [her father] has heard differently, he has heard wrongly.’
Eben Loomis, not taken in, sent Mabel a ‘terrible letter’, which she probably destroyed. It left her gloomy for weeks. For all that, Mabel kept up her hymn to Austin as her God; his love a sign God loved her. Defiantly, the lovers assured each other of their purity.
Mr and Mrs Loomis left Amherst on 5 November. Dickinson wrote to them: ‘Parting with Thee reluctantly, / That we have never met …’. How different had been her parting words to an un-met Mabel as an intruder laying a ‘snare’.
Grandma Wilder remained behind at the Lessey house and reported on Mabel to her parents. Restricted by surveillance, the lovers were forced to return to the Homestead. Again this shift took place while Emily Dickinson had another bad spell, from October 1884 to January 1885.
‘The Dyings have been too deep for me,’ she explained, ‘and before I could raise my Heart from one, another has come.’
Death had always been a mystery the poet longed to solve, the undiscovered country she’d seen Sam Bowles and her father enter. She had wondered where they were, and had coursed to the verge of ‘boundlessness’ when Gib died. Wanting to take Sue with her, she was unable to do so at a time when Gib’s father, isolated by grief, slid finally and irretrievably into Mabel’s waiting arms. The quarrels of the last year deepened into a permanent rift: on one side, Susan, Ned and Mattie; on the other, Austin, served by Vinnie. The rift manifested as rows between Sue and Vinnie, and in late January Sue’s confrontation with her husband, when she had ripped the wallpaper of the hall in The Evergreens.
‘NO NEWS’, Ned reported the following morning to his sister Mattie at boarding school. The ironic heading is in decorated capitals. Ned conveyed his news with joking discretion: he had been called in to assist at ‘the fall of the old reigeime [regime] — A reluctant consent was obtained by Father’. Ned’s spelling is erratic, his hand unformed with a childish roundness belied by his sardonic ironies. He had what would now be recognised as a kind of dyslexia that becomes more pronounced under stress. Word formation and spelling were wildly disrupted by the rows Ned was too discreet to specify. It was an ‘unpleasant’ day, damp and moist. Joking platitudes issued from Ned’s nib: ‘What can’t be cured must be endured. No use crying over spilt milk. Ha Ha never say die.’
Close to midnight he wrote to his sister once more, unable to conceal his wretchedness any longer. Their parents had turned ‘wild’ at a troubled letter from Mattie delivered to The Evergreens during the day. Ned begs her to stop wailing (in her letters from school) because their mother can bear no more. ‘When you see the Dearest thing in all the Earth slowly being destroyed by cruelty & no way in God[’s] world to prevent it, & have to wear a smooth front all the time, then you know what it is to endure.’ Would that he could take what Mother had to bear upon his shoulders, he would be ‘more than thankful’.
Three days later, Ned saw the hall ‘in that most forlorn of all conditions’. On 28 January he had spent the day stripping the last of the marital decor. The new wallpaper did not signal a genuine revolution, more an obligation to paper over the split in the household. ‘As for news the same applies as has applied heretofore. We’re out. Very out.’
As Ned sickened that winter there was little comfort in a note from next door where Aunt Emily ‘gasps out’ that she has managed to get up. They are ‘the Cripples’. His father ignored the deteriorating health around him. His was god-given love, on a par with Dante and Beatrice. He was proud to side with them.
David Todd’s tolerance puzzled Susan. Knowing nothing of his sexual marksmanship, she dismissed him as ineffectual. ‘Little dud David’ was her taunt. He never forgot it.
Mabel took care to keep her husband in play. Her next move was to bring in a Boston cousin: plump, well-kept Caroline (Caro) Andrews, her rump encased in a striped black taffeta skirt. It rustled as she walked. Glossy black braids crowned her head and a wide collar of lace, edged with a frill, covered her shoulders. Caro was the daughter of a Congregational minister of Cambridgeport, and before her marriage had been on the editorial staff of a magazine. Bored with marriage to a wealthy merchant, she was typical David Todd prey. He immediately took up with Caro, whose apt middle name was Lovejoy. She came to stay on 16 April 1885 and that very evening David invited her to his observatory, while Mabel ‘fixed the furnace’ and entertained Austin. Caro and David, she notes, ‘came back very late’. The following day, her diary goes on, ‘David & Mrs. Andrews, Mr. Dickinson & I had a lovely drive all morning. Windy & fresh.’ In the evening Mabel had a ‘tremendous’ little conversation with her husband and then the following day, while David took Caro away until five in the afternoon, Mabel had another conversation with Austin in the Todds’ parlour. This involved ‘Revelations’ she does not reveal, but it appears that a ‘strange relation’ with Caro ensued, which Mabel dared not write out except to say (in her more reflective journal) it was ‘more remarkable & almost unbelievable than any novel I ever read or dreamed of’. Mabel’s excitement was such that she hardly ate. The editor of the lovers’ letters has suggested a four-way relationship, and it looks as though attraction developed between the two women. Caro’s visit, Mabel goes on, activated ‘the whole beautiful rounding-out of some halves of things’. Caro then invited Mabel to accompany her and her husband when they sailed for Europe in June 1885.
Before leaving Mabel handed over Millicent and Grandma Wilder to Mrs Loomis, who passed through Boston en route to New Hampshire for the summer. The quayside saw a bitter exchange between Mabel and her mother, followed by a ‘dreadful’ fifteen-page letter in which Mrs Loomis reproached her daughter for selfishness, stubbornness, vanity and meanness to her child in cheap boots while Mabel sailed out in customary style. Mrs Loomis deplored not only Austin but also Lavinia as ‘cynical, carping, irreligious people’. Mabel told Austin that since the letter every breath was an agony. She decided to pretend it never came. All Austin could offer was ardour: ‘I kiss you all over.’ Then, a longer letter than usual from Emily Dickinson reinforced the Loomis accusations with warnings to ‘Egypt’ from ‘America’. It was written on 31 July and boldly enclosed in a letter from Austin. He’d hoped, he told Mabel, to prove the worth of her character by showing Emily her farewell letter: ‘I shall let Emily read it sometime, when it comes right.’ It never did come right.
That summer, while Mabel toured Europe, the Lessey lease came to an end and Austin supervised the transfer and storage of Mabel’s sofa, chairs, dresses and pictures in his sisters’ home. Austin assured Mabel that Emily liked to see her oil paintings of flowers and grasses.
When Mabel steamed towards Boston harbour on her return from Europe she had to choose which man was to meet her first. She gave priority to her husband, and it wasn’t only a gesture of wifely correctness: ‘How I will kiss you & caress you when I once more get you within reach!’ Mabel stirred his anticipation. ‘How you shall feel all that I think now about you from afar.’
To Austin, nine days later, she was a little apologetic: ‘policy considered’, she must put her husband first. She sent Austin, too, his boost. She will write twice more ‘— and then — oh! then!’
Accordingly, when the ship docked in Boston on Sunday 13 September she spent the night with David Todd, who left at dawn to be on time for a Monday morning class at Amherst, while Austin’s dawn train from Amherst to Boston sped in the opposite direction. Austin’s train got in at 9.40 a.m., in time for a few hours with Mabel before she left later that day to join her mother and Millicent in New Hampshire. So, a blissful reunion at night for one man; and bliss next morning for the other.
Austin was considerate towards David Todd, as David to him — no sign of friction where it might be expected. The Todds moved into the Lincoln house near the bottom of Lessey Street, the neighbouring house to the west of The Evergreens that Austin calls in his diary the third house or ‘3dh’ (as distinct from the ‘other house’ to the east of The Evergreens). Convenient, of course, for Austin’s assignations, yet the proximity to his family would have provided further scenes for observation.
While Mabel was abroad she’d turned over the idea of building a house of her own.
‘Dear heart, sweet-heart,’ she appealed to Austin. ‘Oh! I do so hope things will be arranged for me … I am really thinking a good deal about a house — one or two requirements being so necessary.’ It’s a hint about their need for a permanent place to meet.
Austin agreed to deed a plot of Dickinson land to the Todds, but to do so he required signatures from his sisters. Since his father had died intestate in a country where there is no law of primogeniture, these were co-heirs. Austin wished his sisters to oblige his mistress and could count on compliance from Vinnie. Emily alone held out, as she’d promised her nephew in a staunch letter of August 1885 while he was away at Lake Placid, in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York.
‘Dear Boy,’ she started, ‘I dared not trust my own Voice among your speechless Mountains, and so I took your Mother’s, which mars no Majesty — So you find no treason in Earth or Heaven.’ Emily is at one with Ned’s mother in wanting to protect his future inheritance. ‘No treason’ must be allowed to mar his fragile peace of mind, for Ned had suffered another seizure on 9 June. Emily repeats the assurance that he will not encounter treason from her: ‘You never will, My Ned’. And then, a third time, she promises to hold the fort, positioned as she is to defend his interests:
And ever be sure of me, Lad —
Fondly,
Aunt Emily.
Emily’s refusal to sign the deed was not known outside the family and this act remained unnoticed by biographers. But it’s vital to see her great moral courage, like her acts of moral courage at college, as she took a stand against her brother. The necessity for this stand means that her brother had urged her to give the land to his mistress. We can’t know the degree of pressure she felt, but she did not yield even when her health declined. Her sympathy with Sue, known to her nephew at least, is evident in a request he made before he went away.
‘You will look after Mother?’ he asked.
Emily shared this with Sue. Nothing so sweet, she said, ‘as the last words of your Boy’.
At the same time she maintained her loyalty to Austin in her Shakespearean riddles. They cast him as a man of power whose passionate nature makes him susceptible to manipulation. Antony came to mind, then her favourite, Othello, ‘who loved not wisely but too well’. The next month, September 1885, Emily pencilled one line to Mabel: ‘Why should we censure Othello [for strangling his wife], when the … Lover says, “Thou shalt have no other Gods before Me”?’
It’s hard to believe that Emily sent this solely for her own satisfaction. Her riddles go beyond verbal ingenuity. Their emotional energy goes beyond a game. She meant Mabel to feel the hit, assuming an adversary with the intelligence to do so. To enter into a duel implies a compliment of sorts to an opponent who is in on the code, and up to it. Mabel, alert to attention from the recluse, kept every letter.
As Emily sank over the next ten months, Austin’s visits were rather infrequent. According to his diary, he sat with Emily every ten days or two weeks during the last months of her life. This is oddly sparse for a brother living next door, and we may wonder if Austin was displeased by Emily’s refusal to sign the deed or see his mistress face to face as she wished. Contrast the two or three visits a day back in 1883 (before the poet’s home became the venue for adultery), when Austin spoke of Mabel to his sisters.
Meanwhile, the lovers again took advantage of Emily’s increasing sickness to settle in once more downstairs. In January 1886 Austin arranged an assignation in a note to Mabel, careful as ever not to mention her name: he asks if his ‘client’ would accept an appointment for 2.15 p.m. in his sisters’ library? Vin, he says, consents, though the wording leans to the negative: ‘there is nothing in her case to interfere with my seeing my client in the Library after Lunch if our business seems to require it’. He has satisfied himself that Emily is not too sick for this to happen.
Mabel replied with an unsigned note, dated 14 January. ‘I will come at 2 & risk it. I think I can arrange it well. At any rate I’ll come.’
A follow-up note from Austin to Mabel conveys a measure of coolness on Vinnie’s part. ‘Vin is sort [of?] nervous — Things are edgy [?] over there.’
A daytime assignation would not have been invisible from The Evergreens, and could have contributed to Ned’s outrage. On 17 January 1886 he had another seizure.
The next month, as Emily worsened, Mabel offered Austin a return to youth. She spoke of spring, buds, blossoms. Renewal would come, she promised, if they could be permanently together, if there were no one to ‘say us nay’.
Even now, Mabel tried to soften Emily with yet another gift. On 11 February she painted a bronze plaque with thistles and dispatched it to the Homestead four days later. Emily’s first answer, from her sickbed, was a hyacinth, but ten days later she rallied to her most brilliant rebuff. It was only half a line: ‘Or Figs of Thistles?’ The clue to this riddle is the complete line from the New Testament: ‘Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?’ No nourishment, then, from thorns or thistles forced down her throat. This is Emily Dickinson’s last and most cutting thrust at Mabel Loomis Todd. She dealt her pretty words like blades. Did Mabel get it? She certainly noted the adder’s tongue sent over from the Homestead, though she was politic enough to claim an unblemished friendship with the poet. Dickinson herself foresaw a doomed stand, yet to make the stand in the face of death was a Thermopylae of her own.
If Emily cultivated adulterous emotions for a forbidden ‘Master’, did this affect her response to her brother’s outbreak into active adultery? An answer lies in her Shakespearean retorts to Mabel. Here, there is sympathy for the ‘entangled’ Antony, the susceptible Roman whose command is tarnished by his affair with the enemy queen, Cleopatra. There is sympathy too for the worked-up Othello.
Another question: how did the ensuing clash strike the poet, whose collapse during 1884 coincided with the height of its impact on her family? She did live long enough to know that what had happened could not heal. All the same, loyalty to her brother did not stop her reaching out to Sue: ‘The tie between us is very fine, but a Hair never dissolves.’
There were short breaths of empathy in her messages to Sue: ‘Emerging from an Abyss, and re[-]entering it — that is Life, is it not, Dear?’, and then the last pencilled notes to Sue made their way across the grass: ‘How lovely every solace! … Thank you, dear Sue — for every solace —’. Her health gave out with the break-up of the family, compounded by a succession of deaths that cut too deep. ‘Because I would not stop for Death — / He kindly stopped for me —’, so she’d set the scene when she was young, undercutting irony with triumph: ‘The Carriage held but just ourselves — / And Immortality.’ In her last illness she spoke differently of ‘the great intrusion of Death’. Some gardens, she observed, were willing to die in autumn: ‘I do not think that mine was — it perished with beautiful reluctance, like an evening star —’. She died on 15 May 1886, when she was fifty-five.*
The next day was a Sunday; Mabel appeared all in black in the church choir, and so grieved that she found it hard to sing. On Tuesday, the day before the funeral, she cried herself ‘sick’, and that evening, when Austin came to call, she ‘let go utterly’ and ‘cried frantically’. The grief may seem excessive for one who had never laid eyes on the poet, yet Mabel was perceptive and prescient too, when she writes in her journal: ‘Rare Emily Dickinson died — went back into a little deeper mystery than that she has always lived in.’
Susan prepared the grave with fragrant boughs but did not attend the funeral, aware that Mabel would be there. Higginson, who came, sensed something ‘pure and strange’ in the atmosphere of the Homestead as a more elevated House of Usher. (In Poe’s ominous tale, the House holds a dead sister and living brother who are conjoined in overwrought family affinities in a home poised on the edge of ruin.)
Mabel saw Emily Dickinson for the first time in the open coffin at the funeral. There were violets at her throat and Vinnie put two heliotropes by her hand ‘to take to Judge Lord’. The poet looked young for her years, her red hair untouched by grey and no wrinkle on her beautiful brow. Mabel, costumed again in black, looked haggard in her role as prime griever for so dear a friend.
In fact, this death opened the way for Mabel to acquire her plot of land. The handover went ahead after the funeral on 19 May. The deed is dated 8 June 1886. It’s made out as though the Todds were buying the plot for $1200, but it was a gift. By 14 June contractors were standing by, and the following month Austin sent Mabel $100 ‘as per request’, assuring her (on college treasurer stationery) that she could request more as needed. This followed a wail from Mabel that building was held up because the cost had climbed to $300 more than the original estimate. At some point Austin gave her a further $1500 from the Dickinson coffers, waving gratitude away: ‘Don’t say a word.’ He’d already cut a private road through his father’s meadow, an eastern extension of Fowler Place (named in honour of his grandfather; now Spring Street), bisecting what had been an open stretch in front of the Homestead. There, in the second half of 1886, the Todds’ house sprang up. Painted red, it stood out on the meadow. Austin had pictured a modest cottage but Mabel had other ideas. She called it ‘a little house of thirteen rooms’ and gave it a cottagey name, The Dell, as though it were tucked away in the small ravine (known as ‘the dell’) at the bottom of its garden. In fact, the house was three storeys, with a striking geometric design: a wide half-moon window beneath the roof echoed in the curve of its wide entrance. Mabel’s desk, a gift from Austin, stood at a big south window looking towards the Holyoke hills.
A back stair had been planned to provide outside access to the second storey. Polly Longsworth, who edited the lovers’ letters, saw that ‘some kind of ménage à trois arrangement was contemplated’ when Austin, Mabel and David spent Sunday evenings together at the Lincoln house. There are ten occasions during 1886 when Austin adds ‘with the witness’ to the parallel lines in his diary, and the witness — it can only have been David — reappears in Austin’s diary of 1888 (the diary for 1887 has not survived). Like ‘client’ as cover for mistress, ‘witness’ uses a familiar legal word as cover for their experiments with voyeurism. Mabel’s diary corroborates these Sunday evenings in her own code. She leaves the church choir between eight and eight-thirty, goes home and ‘up to bed at once’.
David often said that he loved Austin ‘more than any other man’, and Austin said more or less the same when he described ‘a sort of unspoken sympathy’ that seemed to grow up between them: ‘He has seemed to lean upon me — and confide in me beyond anything I have known among men, and I make a point of looking after him.’ Reciprocal benefits — Austin improving David’s position without being asked; David yielding up his wife to what he persisted in seeing as light diversion — underpinned a deepening tie between the men. There’s no knowing whether their bond was a by-product of the allure Mabel exuded, or her contrivance, or whether it grew of itself as the men came into closer contact. David would ‘clear the track’ when Austin asked. Sometimes Austin stayed the night while David was at work. At daybreak David would hum an aria before entering the house, a signal to the couple upstairs.
An outside stair could have allowed a lover to avoid the inconvenient child at The Dell, but Austin was all too evident. Afternoon assignations meant the silent presence of Millicent Todd, home from school. ‘Hello, Child,’ Austin would say, and then he would lead Mamma upstairs while she murmured ‘my King!’ Then they would close the door. Millicent felt his ‘awful omni-presence’ as much upstairs as when he was visible. Her later fragments of autobiography recall Austin’s spare, erect figure, tall and awesome with his red side-whiskers and wig of coppery hair standing out like a halo around his austere face. He wore a long gold chain about his neck and soft kid shoes cut to fit his narrow feet. On his head was a brown velvet cap that he left at The Dell; Mamma kept it in her music case in the back parlour. His lofty manner meant less to Millicent than her sense of him as ‘the somewhat terrible center of the universe’. This was not to be questioned, Millicent said, ‘but I felt the weight of him and carried it throughout my childhood’. All that time, he hardly acknowledged her existence. This is what she told herself, discounting Austin’s attempt at a tease when he would return her ‘straight look’. A smile from him was unthinkable. Yet the active contempt came from the opposing camp when Millicent encountered the other inhabitants of The Evergreens.
Mrs Dickinson and her daughter would pass the child with heads high. Millicent sensed the snub had something to do with Mamma. She tried to avoid them, and if her way lay along their part of Main Street, she walked — stiff-faced, with solemn eyes — on the opposite side to The Evergreens (the paved side for public use). Nothing was explained to the child who longed to protect Mamma and rescue her from the hate seething about them.
Only the recluse had reached out to Millicent. Though adamant about Mabel, she did see the child and once, in a letter to Mabel, pointed to her familiarity with ‘the quaint little girl with the deep Eyes, every day more fathomless’. was welcome to enter a side gate and trot through the back door to the apple-green kitchen. There, a cookie or flower was put in her hand. She was only six when the poet died, and later, when Millicent became her mother’s champion in the ongoing feud, all she could recall was the fiery hair in a brown chenille snood, with tassels swinging behind each ear, as Emily Dickinson bent towards her.
* Not all the code signs can be interpreted.
* Dickinson prescriptions (amongst others from the period 1882–5) are pasted into a record book belonging to the Adams drugstore in Amherst. This was not the only drugstore in town but it served the Dickinson family, and it’s possible to list, with dates, certain drugs prescribed for Emily Dickinson. These tally with contemporary treatments for epilepsy. The drugstore records during the last years of her life show that Amherst’s Dr Bigelow, who often treated the Dickinsons, prescribed glycerine (the same medicine Dr Jackson had given her in 1851) on 28 June 1884 — that is, during her prolonged fainting sickness that summer.
On 15 October 1884, when she began a second long-term spell of sickness, lasting until January 1885, Dr Fish prescribed two drugs then in use for epilepsy: hyoscyamus (an anti-spasmodic recommended since 1858 by London authority Sir Edward Sieveking in his treatise On Epilepsy) and ‘extract ustilago’, a compound of ergotine and bromide (used also for headaches). A Dictionary of Medicine published in 1883 (Dr Bigelow owned a copy) recommends three to six grains of ‘ergotine’ for epilepsy in an article by a respected French neurologist, C. E. Brown-Séquard. One of the Amherst doctors prescribed glycerine once more on 23 January 1885.
Other prescriptions given in this period also correspond to drugs then used for epilepsy, though these were common medicines used for a variety of ills. The extracts were crude; treatments look dangerously hit and miss, especially the use of poisons, and we might well wonder what effect these poisons had on Dickinson’s premature death.
Arsenic (used also in tonics) is recommended for epilepsy in the Dictionary of Medicine: ‘arsenic alone can do much against any form of epilepsy’. Dickinson was prescribed ‘Fowler’s arsenical solution’ on 9 October 1883 when she collapsed after Gib’s death.
The same applied to strychnine (recommended in On Epilepsy, though used also in tonics). Strychnine is an ingredient in Nux vomica (from an ulcerated nut). Dickinson was given ‘Nux vomica’ on 12 October 1883, three days after the arsenic. This prescription was for ‘L Dickinson’, obviously Lavinia, who would have obtained medicine on her sister’s behalf. Strychnine was prescribed on two other occasions in this period: 9 January 1883, when the first scenes of the family feud broke out, confirming Dickinson’s apprehensions; and 17 August 1885, when she was shocked by news of Helen Hunt Jackson’s unexpected death.
Digitalis was prescribed on 30 January 1885. Digitalis is usually prescribed for the heart and also for kidney failure, which Dr Bigelow isolated as the cause of death.
* The final prescription, from Dr Bigelow, was ‘chloroform olive oil’ [Leyda, ii, 470] two days before Dickinson’s death, when she was breathing in a way that horrified her family. Chloroform, according to Bigelow’s Dictionary of Medicine, might serve to rectify the jagged, partially asphyxiated breathing that warns of an oncoming fit.
