Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [184]
‘We’ll lick it yet,’ her husband comforted her.
‘I think I should have collapsed if it had not been for Walter,’ she said. ‘The thing was so mighty, and it was so wrong! And it had spawned such primitive feelings - hatred and revenge and a curse which had reached even down to me!’
Shaken though she was, Millicent did not give up. On the contrary, she and Harper gained the support of Alexander Lindey, an authority on copyright law for the Library of Congress. He argued that to publish these poems was in the public interest. He also considered it questionable for Mattie to pass on rights to a non-member of family. Hampson continued to threaten but had not the means or will to fight a legal battle.
Bolts of Melody, with more than six hundred unknown poems by Emily Dickinson, took the public by surprise in 1945. Millicent Todd Bingham explained the delay over these poems in terms that ignored the claims of the Dickinson camp: she had been painstaking in her scholarship, re-copying from manuscript instead of relying on her mother’s transcriptions, but in the many instances of poems jotted illegibly on cast-off scraps (on the inside of used envelopes - a favourite source of paper - on tiny bits of stationery pinned together, on discarded bills, on invitations and programmes, on leaves torn from old notebooks, on brown paper bags, on soiled, mildewed subscription blanks, on drugstore bargain flyers, on a wrapper of Chocolat Menier, on the reverse of recipes, on shopping lists and on the cut-off margins of newspapers), the editor had been daunted for a long time and it was only in the last three years that she had brought herself to decipher these. But what a reward, as great poems sprang into view for the first time. Mabel Todd’s daughter presented herself as the prime Dickinson expert, and certainly by this time no one knew more than Millicent Todd Bingham. Her edition, though, did make two errors, acceptable at that time: as her mother had done before her, she imposed titles on untitled poems and she standardised punctuation, not grasping how vital Dickinson’s punctuation may be to the way we read her.
Millicent believed that her double publication would terminate the feud. ‘These feuds are now dissolved in death,’ she said, the Dickinson line is ‘extinct’ and the task of editing what remains ‘has finally reached me - the last of both their houses’. But this apparent readiness to lay down arms was a condition of victory. The distancing title of Ancestors’ Brocades disguised an attack in the present. Millicent prints a photograph of a $505 cheque that Lavinia received as royalty. Dickinson ingratitude to Mamma still rankled. An appendix prints Lavinia’s signature to the deed of Dickinson land to the Todds on 7 February 1896. Early in the book Millicent positions herself as passive under attack from an active enemy: ‘I accepted’, she says, the ‘blight’ cast on her from Mrs Dickinson and her children. But Millicent is shooting back again and again, not omitting a tedious final chapter on Mattie’s errors in The Single Hound.
Citing her mother as co-author and acting in concert with her wishes, Millicent Todd Bingham turns out to be as adept at innuendo as Mamma, with that mastery of a sharp or flat off the true note which alters the tune. The reason given for Dickinson’s solitude is the personality of members of her family. Stop. Re-play that flat. The authors, it seems, are actually suggesting that Susan drove Emily to escape her by shutting herself away for life.
A masterstroke is the authors’ subtle contradiction of Mattie’s allegation that the poet did not permit Mabel to see her, as her family did, ‘face to face’. Millicent re-claims the intimacy with a caption to a photograph of her sweetly smiling