Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [196]
The Evergreens collection of 958 manuscript poems, 200 letters, 900 selected books, and items of clothing and furniture came to the Houghton in instalments, all but McCarthy’s hoard in his New York apartment. Having bonded with Dickinson, he delayed to hand her over to Harvard until Mary - taking responsibility for what McCarthy should have yielded to the buyer - had to prise manuscripts from his hold. Courteous though Mary was, she no longer trusted McCarthy.
Some time later he explained to Mary how costly it was for Harvard to publish Dickinson’s poems. Harvard University Press could give her no more than a royalty of 8¾ per cent. By this stage McCarthy had less time for his dear friend at The Evergreens: these days he’s ‘weary’. There’s an undertone of impatience to his hope that she was satisfied with the outcome. She should be. ‘You know I am deeply devoted to you and your interests.’ A further 8¾ per cent royalty for the three volumes of Dickinson letters was, McCarthy said, ‘most liberal’. ‘These funds will allow you to do what you can to keep The Evergreens as you and Martha would like. I am therefore happy and hope that you are.’ He hoped further: in years to come, Mary might get a 20 per cent royalty on a paperback edition - an unlikely figure, as it proved. Harvard University Press offered a $1500 advance against 10 per cent royalties (with deductions for a co-publisher and the Houghton). ‘A fine proposal’, McCarthy urged.
In time Mary came to see how McCarthy had driven the sale. In her quietly stoic manner she reflected that he had not been quite as transparent and disinterested as he’d appeared in the forties.
Jackson came to fear that a continued policy of aggression might lead Mrs Bingham to close off their editor’s access to her papers. He feared too that stress compounded by her husband’s illness could bring on a breakdown, which would not be in Harvard’s interests: if that happened, she and her papers could be incommunicado for as much as a year. Jackson was not in favour of Montague’s ferocity and foresaw the damage he could do. Yet he could not find a way to extract himself from the course Montague continued to impose. That promise of the Todd papers in Jackson’s initial overture to Montague had granted him a hold over Harvard that he never let go.
Jackson, armed with a lawyer, made a second visit to Washington. The Binghams did not yield. Jackson left saying, ‘The wheels of the law grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.’
This threat lodged like a bullet in the Binghams and became infected as their position weakened. For in 1952 Lavinia’s signed copy of the final contract of 1894 came to light at The Evergreens (filed by mistake with Mattie’s contracts).48 Here was incontrovertible evidence that Vinnie had not allowed Mabel Todd a share in the copyright of Emily Dickinson’s letters. Mabel had been due to have only a third-to-half share in royalties. This fact went unmentioned in her daughter’s statements. She offered in its place a different fact, a claim based on the many years she and her mother had given to the transcription and dating of Dickinson manuscripts. It’s the same case her mother had made at the trial half a century earlier.
Washington, June 1952. The Binghams’ doctor urged Millicent to go away because her ‘aura of frustration’ was not conducive to Walter’s recovery. She did go, to Hog Island. Sadly after three weeks, on 7 July, Walter died in her absence. His words, when Millicent took on the feud, now appeared prophetic: ‘it may get us before it is finished’.
In her record of her husband’s battles, Millicent had to ask herself if she sacrificed her husband on the altar of Mamma.
Inevitably, in a typescript reminiscence, Millicent fixed instead on the usual scapegoat: Susan Dickinson was the true cause of Walter’s death. ‘His anguish over the