Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [170]
In 1922 Mabel Todd’s editions of Emily Dickinson came out of copyright after twenty-eight years. This left the way open to Mattie Dickinson Bianchi to retrieve what she considered her right as sole heir to the Dickinson possessions. Part of these possessions were the poet’s papers and Aunt Lavinia’s copyrights to the four posthumous publications in the 1890s.
Mattie was now poised to right the wrongs she believed were done to her mother when (she thought) Mrs Todd, in secret, took over the editing from Susan Dickinson. Mattie’s claim as the Dickinson heir, overtly a legal issue about rights, was backed by her sense of responsibility. As niece of the poet it was her responsibility to rescue ‘my aunt, Emily Dickinson’ from the clutches of Mabel Todd. Dickinson had left no instructions about her poems, yet three people - Vinnie, Susan and Mabel - each believed and declared herself the intended heir. This contest, quiescent from the time of Lavinia’s death in 1899 until 1922, flared up when Mattie fired a double shot aimed to eliminate that interloper Mabel Todd.
In the course of 1922-3 word got round that Madame Bianchi was preparing a Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson for Houghton Mifflin, together with an edition of her Complete Poems. Unaccustomed to the demands of accuracy in non-fiction, Mattie rushed out the two books by 1924, and she managed to accomplish this by appropriating Mabel Todd’s carefully researched editions.35 The supposedly ‘complete’ poems were hopelessly incomplete. Content to do the job at second hand, Mattie bunged together Todd’s three selections of the nineties with the addition of The Single Hound. Most of the Life and Letters turned out to be a reprint of the letters Mabel had gathered, dated and published in 1894. Out of 381 pages, 272 were taken from Mabel Todd’s editions.
Both books were published under the name of Martha Dickinson Bianchi, as though she had done the editorial work. There was no acknowledgement to Mabel Loomis Todd. From Mattie’s point of view, none was due. Since Emily Dickinson had been invisible and unpublished in her life-time, after her death whoever controlled the poet’s papers felt empowered to say who she was. The problem for Mattie is that the vivid portrait in The Single Hound had more or less distilled all she knew at first hand. No one in Nazareth thought much of Jesus, which is not peculiarly stupid of the Nazarenes; it’s human nature. In a similar way, Mattie, as a girl, hadn’t paid that much attention to an invalid aunt behind their hedge. What was strange and intriguing to those on the other side of the hedge was, to Mattie, ordinary in the sense of what had always been. When Aunt Emily was sick in the summer of 1884 Mattie had carried over suppers devised by Susan to tempt the invalid’s appetite. Aunt’s comment that she had ‘scarcely seen’ Mattie since her birth has to be an exaggeration, but it does suggest that Mattie hardly visited her aunt of her own accord. When Emily gave thanks for the suppers, what she didn’t say is telling: if Mattie had stayed to talk, if there had been more in the way of closeness, it would not have gone unnoticed.
So when Mattie made her advance on Todd territory between 1922 and 1924 she was acting largely at a remove, as her mother’s agent. What she thought she knew, she knew to some extent from the gossip that had always swirled around the recluse. This hearsay, suffused with Mattie’s strongest inheritance, the legacy of hate, could now be conjoined with legal claims and it’s this combination that re-ignited the feud in the second generation.
Mabel had never lacked initiatives and now, nearing seventy, she prepared to fight. The first big gun she moved into position was the poet Amy Lowell, an outspoken fan of Emily Dickinson. Mabel’s plan was to co-opt Amy Lowell as her ally and stir her to undertake a rival biography. Miss Lowell’s celebrity and the social cachet