Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [186]
Millicent sent Wallace Keep a copy of the book with a note: ‘I wish to say before you read it, that I have been filled with compassion for them all, it was a devilish situation for everybody concerned. But chiefly I pity Miss Vinnie. I have tried to show that pity. But her own behavior was so incriminating that I am afraid the impression left in the reader’s mind is of a treacherous old woman, nothing more. My one and only effort is to convey things as they were.’
Another reader, Mrs Franklin Harris, wrote to Millicent. The address in Coconut Grove suggests someone who had known Mamma, and so it proved, but the reason for the letter was not Mabel Loomis Todd, but to thank Millicent for her portrait of Ned Dickinson. Who now thought of Ned Dickinson, forty-seven years after his heart attack? Mrs Harris turned out to be Alice Hill, who’d been engaged to Ned at the time of the trial.
Yet another voice sounds from the past, this one rather muffled. The Norcross sisters, we recall, had refused to hand over the poet’s private letters, to the annoyance of Mabel Todd who had called them ‘stupid’. Her daughter calls them ‘crotchety’ and waves them off as unimportant. Not so: Emily Dickinson confided in her Little Cousins. Loo, who outlived her sister, did not die until 1919. When, later, Millicent called at her nursing home, she heard that Loo Norcross had kept her cousin’s letters with her to the end; then had them burnt. Where Millicent deplores the folly of a ‘cantankerous’ old woman, it’s possible to discern, through that obscuring noise, the fading voice of a tie the poet had trusted.
17
POSTHUMOUS CAMPAIGNS
Lexington Avenue, New York. Late September, 1948. In the shadows before dawn a man turns over Dickinson’s papers. He has changed jobs, and his reason for doing this is ‘to take care of Emily’. How do you take care of someone who has been dead for sixty years? And how does this stranger come by her papers, whatever letters he chooses to have in his apartment two floors above the narrow, store-filled avenue?
Sometimes he is up all night.
When it’s time to leave for work, William (Bill) McCarthy locks his fireproof filing cabinet and waits all day for night, when he will light his lamp and unlock his trove.
At the same time as Mattie’s death gave the advantage to the Todd camp, it roused a new force. During the forties, collectors, dealers and American libraries cast their eyes on The Evergreens, for there, in disarray under flaking ceilings, lay a national treasure. Certain players in the literary marketplace quietly rolled up their sleeves. And now new players enter the stage: McCarthy and Mattie’s rich cousin Gilbert Holland Montague. The rights to the papers of Emily Dickinson had changed hands and the heir, Alfred Leete Hampson, is not by temperament a fighter: he’s an alcoholic in poor health and long accustomed to acquiescence. As editor he had been subordinate to Mattie - ‘Madame Bianchi’ as he’d called her.
Before Mattie died Cousin Gilbert had let her know that he was reading her books on Emily. As his thin lips stretched to a self-satisfied smile, the long slits of his eyes narrowed.
The effect was not altogether pleasant; his smile held an element of menace. His wife had recently died and he was inclined to public gestures in her memory, proclaiming their happiness. He wished it known that he was, after all, a man of feeling. For he was clever, vain, ambitious - a scoring ambition, intent on gain. At Harvard he’d graduated summa cum laude in political science (class of 1901, along with Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens). For a while he’d taught economics at Harvard; Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been one of his pupils. During these years he’d attended Harvard Law School and, in time, amassed $5 million as a top New York lawyer promoting private enterprise over government controls. Standard Oil was one of his clients.
It’s a measure of the growing fame of Emily Dickinson that