Mary Hampson lived to her nineties. Faithful to the last, she preserved everything left at The Evergreens. When she died in 1988 the door shut on a time capsule. The melancholy house remained much as it was in the 1880s. By June 2003 it had been uninhabited for fifteen years. When the key turned and the door opened on the shuttered hall its reds crept out of the shadow: faded red wallpaper in tatters and a worn carpet of the same colour leading the way upstairs. A relic of the Homestead was the first to emerge from the murk: a sofa that Sue had covered in dark red velvet, once the black horsehair sofa where Austin and Mabel had held together throughout 1884, defying the rows next door.
All the while, the fame of Emily Dickinson spread throughout the world. This was both sure and gradual, like an invisible path through a thicket that opens into a series of clearings. We glimpse her here and there until the poet emerges, as she foresaw a century and a half ago, one of the ‘favorites’ amongst the all-time few:
Eternity’s disclosure
To favorites — a few —
Of the Colossal substance
Of Immortality
Unanswered and unanswerable questions resonate in the wake of lives, and no one more elusive than Emily Dickinson. She warned Higginson not to take the ‘I’ of her poems to be herself. Was this a cover? ‘I’ speaks of inward event with singular assurance: the divine Guest who keeps her company. ‘The Soul that hath a Guest / Doth seldom go abroad —’, she wrote at about the age of thirty-two, and then again at forty-nine: ‘Immortality as a guest is sacred’. How much was genuine confession, how much dramatic monologue? The theatricality of her confessions was, at origin, a mode of rebellion against the sober, heartfelt declarations of faith expected of her milieu — the sole public drama open to a woman of her time and place. Behind her door behind the hedge a flagrant voice burst into alternative confessions: visions, ‘Master’, forbidden passion, wild nights.
There is no doubt of the prime drama of Dickinson’s life: the incursions of ‘The Spirit’. She confided to [Judge Lord?]: ‘The Spirit never twice alike, but every time another — the other more divine.’ As readers of the ‘priceless’ future — the poet’s intimates — we are allowed a glimpse (the little we can take) of the Guest from beyond our world. What happened, she tells us, is a ‘Flash — / And Click — and Suddenness’, as though lightning opened up a sacred place. To this place she feels a ‘distinct connection’.
The ‘waylaying Light’ removed her from official versions of the supernatural. In this the visionary Emily Brontë was her familiar. Neither she nor Dickinson fits the pious mould because they are fearless — anything but meek. ‘Life is so strong a vision’ for Dickinson that nothing she sees ‘can fail’. Were it not for ‘partings’ with those she loved, living was ‘too divine’. ‘Partings’, she says. Not loss. The dead are near as the divine is near in the way Emily Brontë felt and affirmed: even if creation itself came to an end, ‘Every existence would exist in Thee’. Others who wait on the spirit are daunted by failure when they find themselves sealed off. George Herbert protests against protracted waiting: ‘I struck the board and cried / No more, I will abroad’; Hopkins cries, ‘No worst, there is none’; and Eliot is depressed by the evanescence of the infinite ‘thing’. He regrets the ‘waste sad time / Stretching before and after’. Unlike them, Dickinson does not feel abandoned. She is an ecstatic. ‘Take all away from me, but leave me Ecstasy’, she said during her last illness.
Obscuring the drama of Emily Dickinson’s legacy have been the dustheaps of slander and sentimental conjecture that fortified the battlers in the war between the houses. When Mabel Todd visited the Homestead for the first time in September 1882, she imagined Emily Dickinson a Miss Havisham, a disappointed bride turned eccentric recluse. I suspect that behind Todd’s conjectures and slanders lurks the real Miss Havisham of this story: a proud beauty betrayed by her chosen bridegroom, not at the altar but soon after, when David Todd resumed his philandering. Millicent stood by her mother as, in Dickens, Estella stands by Miss Havisham, becoming her creature. All the same no one formed Mabel more than Susan Dickinson during their idyll of 1881–2, when Susan invited Mabel into the family and introduced her to the poems of Emily Dickinson. There was a future in wait for Mabel Todd. If she appears to shadow the poet, angling for the poet’s attention, and sets up her editorial workshop as Susan’s rival, there was more to it: Mabel had qualities in common with the poet, a basis for identification. Both were founts of eloquence; both felt like queens; both were strong-willed, controlling; and, above all, both were workers with terrific application. Both amassed vast archives with an eye to the future.
These similarities had to be less compelling for the poet, if not irrelevant, beside her affinity for Susan who mirrored the poet as ‘Nobody’ in the unseen space of lives destined to be distorted. While Sue became a dependent wife, Emily held to the rare thing she was. This shadow life was as far as can be from the visibility of Mabel Todd. In appropriating Emily Dickinson for the public spotlight in which Mabel moved and had her being, Mabel did all she could to negate Sue’s tie with the poet.
This has been a story of the buried life after all: Emily and Austin and Vinnie firing up at the spark Mabel touched off when she flirted with Austin’s buried passions and intruded on the Homestead and coveted the shadow-world of Sue and Emily. But to touch off that spark was Austin’s doing as well as Mabel’s. The feud was not wholly something that was done to the Dickinsons but was in some sense a sequel to what they were.
Fifteen years after Mary Hampson’s death, her dream came true. In June 2003 the house appeared sunk in gloom; the following month, it opened its door to the public as a museum. The two family houses are once again conjoined, The Evergreens an extension of the museum next door to commemorate the great poet. It is fitting to see her in relation to the intimacies and dramas of this two-house family. Visitors walk between the houses. The deep reds of The Evergreens’ hall gleam in contrast to the whites of the Homestead. The gloom, though, has vanished together with the dust and papers.
The poet foresaw us visitors of the future, viewing what’s left: how gullible we could be as we turn over clues to the modest littleness of her person and the quaint little ambition that took its own way. A poem mocks our attempts to track her steps. That she struck out alone we do see, little tracks ‘close prest’. Then her tracks disappear. Is she lost to sight? But no: her ‘little Book’, hat and worn shoe are found.
Relics do indeed remain: the poet’s white dress on display in her room at the Homestead; her square piano, her chest of drawers and the books in the Dickinson Room at the Houghton Library; and there too the oval brooch she pinned at her throat, the brown velvet snood that held back her red hair and the crocheted wrap she wore when Mr Higginson came to call in 1870.
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 stationery* 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 ‘old-fashioned’ 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:
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
* The embossed queen appears above the ‘M’ of ‘Master’ in the final Master letter and also in the booklets.
† Scarlet dye.
‡ Royal blue.