Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [192]
As one brought up on Emily Dickinson’s poems I rejoice with all my heart that they have gone to a safe place - Harvard - and will be held as sacred papers for future generations to study and revere.
I congratulate you upon your magnificent gift.
Sincerely yours,
Elizabeth C. Morrow.
Montague answered all congratulations with a statement dictated to his secretary. He noted with annoyance one or two Harvard dignitaries who had neglected to grovel in gratitude. Temperate William Jackson was usually at hand to calm the lashing tail, but in the summer of 1950 he went to Europe, and in his absence Montague turned ugly, determined to wrest the goods from Mrs Bingham before (he feared) she sold her collection elsewhere. If another library paid upwards of $100,000 it could cut short the attention and praise feeding Montague’s self-esteem. He blamed Jackson to Harvard’s administrators: Jackson’s policy of compromise with Mrs Bingham had been, he declared, an error. Confrontation, immediate legal confrontation before Labor Day, was the way forward. It must be brought home to Mrs Bingham that if she did not hand over the papers Harvard would sue, and her mother’s shame would be publicised in court. And if Harvard declined to sue, Montague would sue Harvard itself.
To Millicent too the name of the donor came as a surprise, but she wrote to Montague expressing ‘relief, for I have long feared that the Amherst collection [at The Evergreens] might be lost - or scattered!’ Now ‘what is, perhaps, the greatest treasure in American literature’ would be safe. Montague circulated copies of this gracious letter even as he planned to do her down. Unaware of an imminent attack, she and her husband accepted an invitation to dine again at Montague’s house. Part of his plan was to stop her new book. Over the last five years she had produced a picture of Dickinson in her local setting, based on family manuscripts in her mother’s chest.
She had delivered Emily Dickinson’s Home: Letters of Edward Dickinson and his Family to Harper on 1 March 1950. But by the terms of Hampson’s sale to Montague, framed just over a week later on 9 March, the buyer could claim (as Mattie had done in the past, and Lavinia Dickinson before her) ownership of all Dickinson papers, and this meant control of all future publications of manuscript material. The sale specified that ‘neither Millicent Todd Bingham nor George F. Whicher is ever to have any part in the editing of any of the manuscripts acquired by this agreement’.
This clause perpetuated the feud. The Dickinson camp, represented by the Hampsons, demanded no mention of enemy names in any Dickinson publication. No acknowledgement ever of the work done by the Todd side. Millicent Todd Bingham was to be blocked for good. More than that, she and her mother were to be erased, vindicating Susan Dickinson’s failed attempt in 1901 to erase Mabel Todd’s name from the title pages of the pioneering publications she had edited, co-edited, and promoted in the 1890s. Where Hampson, on his own, could exert no force, his cause was now empowered by joining his interests to those of Harvard.
Victory at last for the Dickinson camp?
In Millicent’s new book she follows her mother’s model of painstaking research, which was skewed whenever it came to Susan Dickinson. Susan’s character is assassinated and the part she played minimised or obliterated. What looks like scrupulous research persuades us to accept the slander so that it works its will: a campaign to doctor the record for all time. If it succeeds, the ultimate victory will go to the Todd camp because the followers of the Todds (often unaware they are followers) will repeat the vilification or obliteration of the woman who had been, from youth to the end of Dickinson’s days, her foremost reader. In this way the hatred of two generations will continue to influence those who are not in a position to see the want of evidence for Todd allegations.
Scholars are even more vulnerable than casual readers because those who spend years on research may be