Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [191]
To this end he devised a far-reaching claim on rights in the forthcoming agreement: Harvard was to have not only present and future rights to the Dickinson papers, the university was to own, in addition, past rights. This would prepare the way for attacks on the Todd camp, who would then find themselves in unlawful possession of the Dickinson papers they had held undisturbed for more than fifty years.
In the initial negotiations Montague showed the civilised face of the collector, as Jackson had known him in their dealings thus far. In fact, a piranha was swimming into the quiet Houghton pond. Montague, lashing his tail, was not abashed to own that he cared nothing for a prospective scholarly edition that mattered to Harvard and also to the poet’s future. Nor in the end did money prove to have been the prime issue, as Jackson discerned; it was vanity, the beginning and end of Montague’s character. In Dickinson terms, he epitomised the absurd ‘Somebody’, the anti-type to a ‘Nobody’ like the poet herself. Ironic that a creature so incapable of effacement should contrive to link his name to hers. Above all, Montague was bent on the glory of the grand public gesture. He wanted the kudos he was bound to have as sole donor of a collection remarkable for the fact that a poet of her stature had been unpublished in her lifetime. Her manuscripts had never been seen; her reclusive life tantalised the public; and many mysteries waited to be uncovered.
On 3 March 1950 Montague agreed to pay $25,000 down, and then annual $5000 instalments from the spring of 1951 to the spring of 1955. If we deduct the Hampsons’ advance of $5000 and another $5000 due to Rosenbach, it appears that in the spring of 1950 the seller was due to receive only $15,000. It’s not known what Hampson thought of this sum, but it’s clear enough that he postponed the deal due for announcement in mid-March and then in mid-April. Hampson began acting on his own behalf in holding back on certain items. (He may have judged that he could get a better price for items sold individually.)
Montague masterminded ‘a war of nerves on Hampson’. Threats were the lawyer’s tactic to bring adversaries to heel, so Hampson was advised that resistance on his part would expose him to national ‘disgust’ in a court of law, while Rosenbach threatened to dispatch the Dickinson papers direct to the Library. Since Hampson had yielded them up to Rosenbach (through his trust in McCarthy) it was presented to Hampson as a situation beyond his control. All of this was bluff. Montague admitted in private that the legal weaponry brandished in the ‘war of nerves’ was ‘corny’. Hampson had not yet signed an agreement; it should have been within his rights to withdraw from the terms of a sale that didn’t suit him. Yet Hampson was in poor shape and apprehensive of predators (one still invisible) closing in on him from two sides.
At this point he had a haemorrhage.46 An ambulance rushed him to hospital, where he struggled to go on in intensive care. Seven transfusions were needed over the next few days, from late April to early May. Bleeding, his life in danger, he gave in and signed the agreement on 6 May.
By 9 May the war was won: ‘V-Emily Day’, Jackson headed a letter informing Montague that the agreement was ‘safely’ in Rosenbach’s hands. At that date Hampson was still in the dark as to the donor. The secrecy of the sale meant there was no bidding to drive up the price.
When the press release eventually went out, on 31 May 1950, there was national acclaim for Montague who received a hundred messages (he counted) of congratulation, including one from General Eisenhower and a reader’s letter from Mrs Morrow, who had represented Smith College at The Evergreens in 1930. She wrote:
Next Day Hill
Englewood, New Jersey
May 31st ’50
My