Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [195]
On reflection, it seemed to her correct to send the photostats, so as not to obstruct scholarship, but from now on she refused to hand over her collection to Harvard.
Her parcel was returned unopened. Once confrontation was bared, only the manuscripts themselves were acceptable.
The confrontation hit Walter hard because it was not his way to say an angry word. He believed in goodness, prayed to keep himself ‘unspotted from the world’ and marked in his Bible ‘be ye steadfast, unmovable’. To lose out to a person whose word he had trusted came as a blow with the force to undermine his existence. To the Binghams it was betrayal: they saw their intentions as decent and responsible. The pain was intensified by the fact that the betrayer, ‘Harvard’, happened to be their university.
Walter felt obliged to go on defending his wife. Over a lunch at the Century Club in New York, he had it out with Jackson. No luck.
One night Millicent woke at three to hear her husband pacing up and down, as she recalled four years later in her account of her husband’s battles on her behalf. ‘What is it, Walter?’
‘I was trying to think what I could say to Jackson.’
The more Walter entered into the feud, the harder he breathed. In the summer of 1951, when he had to address an international psychological congress in Gothenburg, he found himself unable to stand, and returned to America in a state of collapse. With a pain in his side and needing an oxygen tent, his problem was diagnosed as a heart condition. Rheumatic fever in childhood had left his heart with a leaky valve, but what Millicent perceived was ‘an agony of spirit’ that he could not protect her.
Montague’s threats to sue Harvard did not deter the university from granting him an honorary degree at Commencement in 1951, the fifty-year reunion of his class of 1901. When he died ten years later the most prominent accolade in the New York Times obituary was for donating his Dickinson collection to his alma mater, as though Montague, ‘an authority’ on the writings of Dickinson, had amassed the manuscripts himself.
If Montague’s vanity was salved by the panoply of the degree, it was not for long. He returned to the attack by November of that year. His voice switched easily from the cultivated tone of a bibliophile turning over a rare book to the harshness of a bully: ‘bring to terms’; ‘compel’, ‘suit’, ‘condemnation’. He used threats to break the will of those he perceived as opponents. They might not have been opponents had Montague not positioned them as such - one of the limited categories he assigned to public relations. Faced with a battering of legal threats, Harvard had to take legal advice that defended their right not to sue Mrs Bingham as the way to win her papers. Early in 1952, when the next instalment of $5000 would soon be due, Montague resolved on a ‘stand still’ policy: to force Harvard to take action against Mrs Bingham, he would suspend payment of the remaining $20,000, and he would continue to suspend the sum until such a time as Mrs Bingham was beaten.
After Alfred died in May 1952 Mary Hampson inherited the Dickinson rights together with The Evergreens, but she lived as though she remained poor - too poor to repair the house or heat it in winter. Each winter she boarded in Reid Hall, an American club for women graduates in Paris where for $105 a month she was provided with a room, heating and food. Why did the sale do little or nothing - or so it appears - to improve her situation in life? While Montague paraded his largesse Mary Hampson made do and did without. In particular, she went in fear of losing her home and quailed at the prospect of a depressing end in a nursing home down the street. In vain did she appeal to Montague for advice on how to protect The Evergreens from the threat of demolition, as though he were a recruit to the Dickinson-Hampson camp, but Montague had no time for her beyond the occasional invitation to admire his garden in Maine or to