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"Will the "New" Emily Dickinson's Letter to the World Ever Be Read? by Pete Nicely Her obituaries are being written late. But, when Nelly Kane Watson died in the Fall of 1999 only a few friends and family mourned her passing. It was the mourning of a life wasted, a girl who lived among them for thirty-two years but wasnšt really known by anyone. Oceanside, California, where Nelly spent her entire life, was as unchanged by her death as it had been by her life. Nelly just died quietly and unassumingly one Tuesday afternoon. It broke some hearts but no more than seeing her live her life absent of even quiet desperation. Like millions must every year, Nelly Kane Watson slipped out of life and life forgot about her. Just three years later her quiet death is being reclassified as one of the great literary tragedies of American History. Today she is being hailed as the new Emily Dickinson; to the world of letters Nelly Watson is the new savior of American verse. Even more unknown in her life as Dickinson was, Watson's sudden legacy is now engaged in a bizarre probate battle that pits her own dying wishes against her closest living survivor, her brother Terry. "SUCCESS is counted sweetest/ By those who nešer succeed" Terry Watson is not a literary man. He is still reading the same Louis Lamour book he started in his sophomore year of college. Terry is an extremely successful engineer living miles south of Oceanside in El Cajon, California. He feels that the artistic divide between his only sibling and himself is the product of his two extremely polarized and incompatible parents. "My Dad, Lawrence Watson, was a drug buddy of John Coltrane in the fifties." Terry remembers, "He was a musical genius. He could play anything. He read morning noon and night. He read French newspaper and a German newspaper every morning." The great Jazz critic Nat Hentoff wrote in 1974, long after Lawrence Watson retired from playing music professionally, that, "We all know the name of the greatest modal saxophone soloist in the world. His name is John Coltrane. The second greatest is only known his customers at his repair shop in Oceanside." Why did Lawrence Watson quit music? Terry knows, "It was my mom. My mom hated music. I don't know why she married him. She made him quit playing in groups. He couldn't play at home when she was there." Laura Epsel, later Laura Watson, just wanted a stable home. For her indulging in music may have represented everything that was corrupt about men. Lawrence Watson was a gifted musician and intellectual but he wasn't very good at earning money. "We barely eat sometimes. My mother had to do neighbor's laundry to keep up." When Laura's father, another deadbeat, died in the mid seventies leaving her with the burden of paying for his funeral, Laura's anger took her over. "She was beautiful when she was young I've seen pictures. But she was ugly by the time I remember. Ugly from working so hard and resenting my father so much." According to Terry, she would visit his store and he would be playing sax with friends. It infuriated her. Terry believes that it even lead her to commit arson. "My dad's last regular music gig was playing every Friday at a local pool hall. One Thursday it burned down. I never saw my mom smile as she did in the aftermath of that tragedy. I swear I can remember seeing ash on her hands." That ended Lawrence's musical career for good. Lawrence Watson's only creative outlet for the rest of his life was the education of his daughter Nelly. "He taught her everything," Terry recalls. "She knew Latin when she was eight. She could play the violin beautifully but only when my mother was at church or visiting her mom. Her and my Dad would play together. It was amazing." But that ended too when Nelly was around twelve. "In a rage, my mom destroyed every musical instrument in the house. We could never afford to replace them." The financial strain turned everyday life in the Watson house into a nightmare. Laura Watson hated her fate and blamed everyone around her. The only pleasure she got was from Terry's constant success in math and science. "She told me I was an engineer when I was nine. I believed her." The lack of money led Lawrence and Nelly to their final classroom, the local library. "He called it their church. He always said they were going to church." They would read together for hours. Nelly would copy Shakespeare like a monk transcribing the bible. Terry remembers how happy his sister was when she discovered the work of Emily Dickinson. "She called Dickinson her real sister." This disturbed Terry because he knew his Mom's reaction to their joint fascination with literature brought terror to the house. "The shit hit the fan," Terry said, "when my Dad spent several hundred dollars buying Nelly an Encyclopedia Britannica for Christmas. He said it was for both of us, but that was mostly a lie. I would read about scientists and theories but Nelly lived in those books. Everyday after that Christmas my mother would verbally assault my dad for the purchase. She accused him of wanting to have sex with Nelly. It was killing all of us." The next summer Lawrence died. Nelly was thirteen and Terry was sixteen. "We weren't allowed to cry," Terry said. "If Nelly cried my mom would beat her. My dad couldnšt protect her anymore." Nelly, who was always a bookish introvert, became almost incommunicative in the years after Lawrence's death. Her behavior also became bizarre. She basically lived in her room and only Terry was welcome. "She cut the encyclopedia up word by word. She has all the words in the box." From those words she created her first poetry. Over the next almost twenty years she wrote 613 poems, even in the last ones a pasted word from that encyclopedia is included as the last word. The last word is "Father". "AFRAID? Of whom am I afraid?/ Not death; for who is he?" Terry wasn't sure why Nelly's estate needed an executor. She lived alone in their childhood home inherited when her mother died just six years after Lawrence's death. Terry didn't understand that becoming the executor of the will would change his life and the destiny of American literature. He didn't even understand the will. "She wrote it herself. She gave me the house, which I wanted to sell immediately. It all seemed simple until I read the part about intellectual property. She had a four-page section detailing the protection of her written works. She states in her will that nothing she wrote can be published on any planet of the universe until one hundred years after her death or until all of my children's children are aged eighteen, whatever came first." To Terry it seemed insane. Who would care about the writings of a housebound, agoraphobic who never married or even dated? He had never seen the poems in a finished form. He saw her making them and felt in a way they were part of her illness. Terry brought the will to his cousin who is a probate lawyer. She was amazed at the accuracy and foresight of the document. Her husband, a professor of English at the University of California, San Diego, was intrigued by the writings. "He wanted to see them and since that wasn't against the will, I agreed." Things happened fast after that. Terry's cousin, Michael Dandle, was overwhelmed by what he read. He, without Terry's permission, sent copies to friends across the world including the editor of The Paris Review who wanted to publish whatever he could immediately. Terry was upset and disturbed by the developments. He was mostly shocked by how right his sister had been. She had left him a goldmine. If he would allow it to be published he could begin to pay himself back for the over decade he had spent supporting his sister as she sat writing. Dandle told Terry it was his obligation to publish the work as soon as possible. Dandle admitted that it addressed some very difficult issues about the Watson's family life, but everyone was dead except Terry. Dandle said, "Terry you can handle it." Terry wasn't sure. "I've never discussed anything about my family before my sister's death. I'm in therapy now and I'm beginning to process it all. I can't help but feel that this is a certain way what Nelly wanted to happen. I've read every poem now. I can't believe that this was our life." Critics can't believe it either. "In some pieces the meter borders on new intricate forms, in others she sounds like a modern free verse Shakespeare," Dandle said. "The reaction to all this is overwhelming. I've even heard that someone at the University of Washington is preparing a paper in which he argues no one person could have written all these poems. This is before they have been published. Several people are going to make their careers on this." And Terry is torn. He has filed a lawsuit in an effort to break his sister's own will. Dandle is encouraging him just to go ahead and publish since the only person who might sue him is the executor of his will, himself. "Now Death usurps my premium/ And gets the look at Thee" "I was raised to be my mother. My sister was raised to be my father. But really we are both," Terry said. "In Nelly's death she's killed off the part of me that I knew, the Engineer. Only my mother would ever do something like that." Viking Press is sending a representative to sit in at the trail next month. If it looks good for publication, Nelly Kane Watson's collected poems will hit stores by Christmas. There's nothing her mother would have hated more. |
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