Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [187]
When Millicent’s books publicised the collection she held, approaches came her way. First in line, in November 1945, Montague invited her to dine in his Manhattan house at 15 East 37th Street. There he praised her history of Dickinson’s debut and displayed books and manuscripts so rare that they left her, she told him, ‘a-quiver’ as though she had been all at once in the great libraries of the world. The following year he came to hear her speak at the Grolier Club in New York. She, in turn, introduced him to what her mother had done for Amherst, in the hope of recruiting him for the Todd camp. ‘Your understanding of my efforts is, I should like you to know, one of the sturdiest supports I have,’ she wrote at first.
Meanwhile the poet Archibald MacLeish and the critic Robert Penn Warren contacted her on behalf of the Library of Congress; so too did William A. Jackson of the Houghton Library, Harvard, a repository of choice manuscripts, amongst them the Keats papers and those of Melville, the James family and the Eliots. As a Harvard alumna, Millicent was not impervious to Jackson’s interest in her Dickinson papers but explained her promise to publish the residue in the Chinese chest. This must come first. Yet for the sake of future scholarship she did want the papers in her possession to join eventually with those at The Evergreens as one comprehensive collection. Privately, Millicent favoured Amherst College as its appropriate home.
The Houghton Library was extending feelers also to the other camp. Bill McCarthy, in charge of cataloguing, had been the enthusiast who had put on the Yale exhibition in 1930. At that time he had offered his allegiance to ‘the real Emily Dickinson’, Mattie’s code for the anti-Todd loyalty she demanded of her recruits. He had gone so far as to declare himself Madame Bianchi’s ‘slave for life’.
McCarthy therefore approached Mattie’s heir with the right credentials. He told Hampson he’d never been so fulfilled as when he’d put together the centenary exhibition, and that his New Year resolution for 1931 had been to see more of him.
He said, ‘even though our face-to-face meetings had been so few, I always felt that a renewed hand-clasp would erase the intervening time’.
Soon after, in February 1944, McCarthy and Hampson dined together to discuss plans for a ‘shrine’. McCarthy’s worship of Emily Dickinson did him no harm with Alfred Hampson, whose feelings were quite the same. Within two months of Mattie’s death they were ‘dear A’ and ‘Bill’.
Mattie’s reputation reached an all-time low after Millicent’s tribute to Mabel’s editing. In 1946 McCarthy let Hampson know how fervently he was defending Mattie’s reputation (not just for ramshackle editing but resistance, as well, to any other publication of Dickinson’s works). At a literary dinner McCarthy spoke up for Mattie’s ‘charm, humanity, and wonder’. A partisan stance - crucial to relations with Hampson - came easily to McCarthy, who made no contact with the enemy: Millicent. Her name and her mother’s remained unmentionable, as they had been in Mattie’s lifetime.
Hampson, like Millicent, was not yet ready to part with manuscripts. He first wished to publish a completed version of Mattie