Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [177]
Excluded from all this, Mabel Todd was not to be outdone. She threw a vast party on Dickinson’s birthday, 10 December, attended by the notables of Coconut Grove. These days she covered her arms in the sheerest net and piled her white hair in an elegant chignon. Yet nothing Mabel did in the way of celebration could match Mattie’s pre-eminence at this moment.
Six months later Martha Dickinson Bianchi received the first degree that Amherst conferred on a woman. At the 110th Commencement she was honoured as niece of ‘that rare and original spirit, Emily Dickinson, whose poems you have brought into renewed and deserved admiration’. The occasion was reported in the press, together with a photo of Mattie in a close-fitting hat like a helmet over her eyes and a fox-fur draped over one shoulder, brushing her cheek. Her mouth has the moody look of Austin when young.
Millicent urged Mamma to challenge Mattie’s prominence with an article on the literary debut of Dickinson. Millicent, in fact, wrote this, and as she put her mother’s case together she felt a ‘driving force’.
‘Perhaps I exist only to do this,’ she mused. ‘I am involved without question, and I am glad to be.’ Her intelligence was intrigued by the complexity of the feud, a situation ‘worthy of a Henry James’.
Mother and daughter selected fifty of Dickinson’s unseen letters. These they prepared to add to a revised edition of the Letters, to be published by Harper in 1931. It was necessary, Millicent said, ‘to be supplied with ammunition’, and this was Mabel Todd’s claim that she owned the copyright to the Dickinson letters. She based this claim on the draft contract of 1894, still in her possession.
‘Much against her will Lavinia allowed me to share the copyright,’ she declared to Mr Green of Jones Library in Amherst. She repeated this to her daughter: Lavinia ‘did consent, reluctantly . . . that the copyright of the Letters should be registered in both our names. So it was done.’
This claim should have been negated by the final, signed contract of 1894 (in which Lavinia cancelled Mabel Todd’s half-copyright in the letters in the draft contract). But this final version, adverse to Mabel’s interests, happened to disappear after she bought the publisher’s copy39 from the New York dealer Maurice Firuski. It can’t be proved that she did away with it, but the publisher’s copy never re-surfaced, and its non-existence freed Mabel to flourish the draft contract in her favour. It would be like her to convince herself that this draft document was the true one; that what came after, in the rising confrontation of September 1894, had been nothing but a fit of meanness on Lavinia’s part that Austin, accustomed to control his sister, intended to overrule. Mabel’s memory often turned Austin’s intentions into actions on her behalf.
But what about the duplicate of the final contract, the one Roberts Brothers had sent to Lavinia in a big envelope that caused Austin to say its size would inflate Lavinia’s self-importance?
Thirty-seven years later, when Mabel Todd’s publisher, Harper, announced her expanded edition of the letters, Mattie did not come forward with Lavinia’s copy of the contract. Convenient for Mabel, but did it worry her? Mattie continued to assert her claims as Aunt Lavinia’s heir, citing the fraudulence of the Todds as proven in court, but Mattie did not produce Lavinia’s contract - the simplest way to disqualify Todd from further publication of Dickinson letters. Was this document lost? Mabel Todd’s thinking in such a situation would be to accept this as providential. God was always on her side, or should be.
After the centenary had honoured Mattie together with her aunt, Mabel Todd took the offensive with her expanded edition of the Dickinson letters. Her preface presented it as the first book ever issued about Emily Dickinson, prepared at the requests of the poet’s brother and sister: Austin Dickinson, Lavinia Dickinson ‘and I’ collected letters ‘which they entrusted