Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [197]
The next scene opens at a professional women’s club, the Cosmopolitan Club in New York. It’s September 1952, and along comes Thomas H. Johnson, the new editor of the Dickinson papers. Could Mrs Bingham give him her photostats, even though she will not hand over the manuscripts to Harvard? Without her hundreds of photostats he cannot complete the task ahead. It’s a personal plea, and she agrees.
Another scene amongst Millicent’s reminiscences: Washington. Johnson and Millicent are in a car travelling from the Folger Library on Capitol Hill to her apartment in the North-West sector of the city. Johnson is sweating. Millicent sees the spots of perspiration on his forehead as he beseeches her to hand over her manuscripts to Harvard.
No, she can’t. She has lost her husband and her book is banned from publication.
In 1953 Montague steps in to try his hand with obdurate Mrs Bingham. Mrs Bingham is invited to view his latest acquisition, an 1840 Webster dictionary belonging to Edward Dickinson. He would like to consult her about it.
Millicent does not take to Montague’s use of a pretext for seeing her. She has no plan to visit New York, she replies.
Montague is not to be deterred, for he wants at least to know what papers still lie in the Chinese chest. Mary Hampson has been unable to tell him what is missing from the collection he bought. If he knew more precisely what Mrs Bingham retains, he might have a surer basis for legal proceedings. So he calls Mrs Bingham long-distance to announce a visit to Washington: again, there’s the pretext of the dictionary. And again, politely but firmly, Mrs Bingham shuts the door: she can tell him nothing about his acquisition.
The next try is by Jackson’s wife. At Christmas 1953 she will be staying with a friend in Mrs Bingham’s apartment block. Would Mrs Bingham come for tea? Regretfully, Mrs Bingham cannot make it.
At length, in 1954, lawyers were brought in on both sides to knock through the impasse. Harvard was prepared to lift the ban on Home if Mrs Bingham would print an assent to Harvard’s ownership of the rights to all Dickinson papers. Since there was no other way to publish her work, she had to agree. In November of that year Harper brought out the smaller and more exciting of the two books Millicent Bingham had by now prepared. During this period of defeat and loss she had taken out the last bundle from the chest. It contained Dickinson’s drafts of letters to Judge Lord. Mabel Todd had endorsed the Wadsworth myth and kept the letters to Lord under wraps. These letters must not interfere with the cult figure who renounced the warm nearness of a lover. ‘She was a creature too ethereal for marriage,’ Mabel had said, ‘too holy for commonplace life.’
The Emily who liked the Judge’s touch does not bear out this image. She was not, after all, invariably withdrawn; not a flitting, bodiless phantom of delight; she was a physical being, confessing a physical love with extraordinary freedom to a particular man. Millicent opened a letter Emily wrote to Judge Lord after one of his visits.
‘My lovely Salem smiles at me,’ Millicent read. ‘I seek his face so often - but I have done with guises. I confess that I love him - I rejoice that I love him - I thank the Maker of Heaven and Earth that gave him me to love - the Exaltation floods me - I cannot find my channel. The Creek turns Sea - at thought of thee . . . Incarcerate me in yourself.’
This nineteenth-century woman had felt a touch so keenly that it lingered into the night when she lay alone in bed. She could not bring herself to wash. Water would have calmed her, but she did not want calm. This is the woman of ‘wild nights’. Whether it was the wildness of flesh or spirit, it’s consistent with the intensity of her response to all experience, as Dorothy Wordsworth observed in her brother, the poet: ‘a violence of Affection’ that never sleeps. The biographer Frances Wilson, writing of wildness and desire in Dorothy