Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [190]
On 24 February 1950 McCarthy called the Hampsons to report that Mr Jackson of the Houghton Library would like to buy their collection. It’s possible that this library was always in McCarthy’s sights as an appropriate repository for Dickinson. Obviously he retained some tie. This is an emotional man, and his allegiance could be loyalty combined with devotion to the great poet. Conceivably, McCarthy was so obsessed with Emily Dickinson that he wrapped himself in the grandeur of acting for her. Are we looking at a Jamesian scenario of a rare inner life? Yet it turns out that, at this persuasive moment for the Hampsons, McCarthy was cycling in silent tandem with an unseen figure behind Mr Jackson.
McCarthy did not tell the Hampsons that Mr Jackson was negotiating with a Harvard donor - none other than Gilbert Montague. Ten days earlier, on 13 February, Jackson had sent a letter to Montague reminding him of their common interest in Emily Dickinson and their discussions about her. Each year it had been Montague’s custom to donate acquisitions worth about $1000. How was Jackson to persuade him to take on a ‘considerable’ donation of $50,000?45 Jackson did so by holding out a tempting prospect: he assured Montague that Mrs Bingham had promised to yield up her own collection if the Library acquired Hampson’s. If all went to plan, Jackson explained, the combined collection would amount to about 95 per cent of Dickinson’s papers. Montague did want this, but as legal consultant to the super-rich he was accustomed to bring off a favourable deal. It appealed to him that the Todd collection would swell his benefaction at no further cost to himself, and this was linked in his mind with the triumph of a larger bargain.
Montague’s motives are revealed gradually in his letters to Jackson and in the memoranda Jackson made following their conversations and phone calls. In the summer of 1950 Montague gave his opinion that the Todd hoard was worth ‘in excess of $100,000’, though it was only about a third as large as Hampson’s collection, for which Montague was due to pay half that amount. Montague repeated this same estimate at a Boston dinner in 1953. It was not, then, an idle estimate but a considered view, one that turned on gain undeterred by morality. For if Montague believed in this figure - and it appears that he did - he intended to make a killing. By Montague’s reckoning, Hampson’s treasure was worth $200,000, which means that Montague thought to get it at a quarter of its market value.
Unknown to Montague, Jackson made a memorandum of what was said at this Boston dinner in 1953. Jackson had put to Montague the following corollary: in the donor’s view, the two collections together were worth as much as $300,000. In other words, Montague’s incentive had been to acquire both collections for what he believed to be a sixth of their combined value. To what extent he inflated his triumph is a matter for sale-room experts, but whatever the actual value of the collections in 1950, it was really Montague’s perhaps inflated estimates and his expectation of bettering his initial acquisition by a third as much - a buyer’s fancy, shall we say - that led to subsequent attacks on Millicent Todd Bingham. For Montague intended to hold Harvard accountable for her promise to surrender her collection. Since Jackson had indicated an expectation that her treasure