Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [183]
Whicher was Mabel Todd’s man: he treats her deferentially, with careful acknowledgement of what she’d achieved. The feud is never mentioned but his cover declares his allegiance, stamped with the same painting of Indian Pipes as Todd had used on her covers for the Dickinson volumes of the 1890s.
That same year, 1938, Mattie made a will that shows the pain Whicher had inflicted, both in his own capacity and as a representative of Amherst College. Her will stipulates that Whicher is never to edit Emily Dickinson. Amherst College is never to own or use The Evergreens. If the property should be sold the house is to be razed to its foundations. She leaves all its contents and manuscripts to Alfred Leete Hampson, together with ‘all my copyrights’, the income due from them and the sole right to publication of letters written by the Dickinsons ‘to which I am the sole legal heir’.
By 1940 more ‘pilgrims’ were finding their way to The Evergreens, many from the West and South. There was no sign to attract the curious, but she welcomed those who liked the poems. They were shown the memorabilia in the Emily Room. The lawn was immaculate and the old creeper still overhung the porch. Mattie brought out the grey and white cameo brooch, saying it was Aunt Emily’s only adornment, fastened in the dainty ruching at the neck of her white dress. She pointed to the image of a ruched and curled poet titivated for Mattie’s Life and Letters. Even though Todd had published the authentic image Mattie clung to this travesty.
One visitor, Pearl Strachan from England, was charmed to meet the poet’s niece and repeated her words in an article: ‘Madame Bianchi had the privilege of close friendship with her Aunt Emily.’ Mattie related the story of the Dickinsons’ descent from the Norman noble, de Caen, who came to England with William the Conqueror. Obviously Mattie’s faith in this myth had remained undimmed by Whicher’s ridicule. She was making a pathetic effort to recover ground with an autobiography and worked with Alfred Hampson for several hours a day. In the course of this last-ditch effort Mattie died at the age of seventy-seven, in 1943.
The death of her mother’s enemy freed Millicent Todd Bingham to proceed with a double publication. In Ancestor’s Brocades (published by Harper in 1945) Millicent repeats her mother’s slanders against Sue Dickinson. She brings out the proposed division of copyright in the Letters of 1894, yet says nothing about the excision of this paragraph in the signed contract. Quite possibly, Mabel had destroyed that contract without telling her daughter.
With the second of the two books Millicent did something she could not risk in Mattie’s lifetime: she ignored the rights to Dickinson’s poetry that Alfred Leete Hampson had inherited, and in the face of Hampson’s protest (backed by Mattie’s old friend and lawyer Theodore Frothingham) Millicent prepared to publish her mother’s cache of Dickinson’s poems.
Over time Mabel had settled into certain beliefs that she had passed on to her daughter and to a new generation of readers. One of these was that a more just Lavinia had meant to reward her in the end: ‘both [Austin and Lavinia] told me she left the copyright of Emily’s poems to me as financial recompense for my many years labor without pay’.
Lavinia’s will, supposedly drawn up by Austin in Mabel’s favour, had mysteriously disappeared. This was what Mabel alleged: the will ‘was never found’. The implication was that Susan Dickinson had destroyed it. But we know that Lavinia would not have willed her copyright away from her family. Lavinia consistently rejected every move of this kind.
Millicent’s publisher asked her to scour her mother’s private papers and correspondence with Austin Dickinson to find authorisation in writing for Mamma’s right to edit the poems