Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [198]
Millicent understood the tenacity of legend. Ahead of others, she saw that ‘by the dint of much repetition the [Wadsworth] legend has become firmly rooted’. She tried to alert readers to something genuinely startling with her title, A Revelation, for her book would prove that Dickinson’s withdrawal from the world cannot be explained by dedication to one love for ever. Yet this book went more or less unnoticed, and curiously this persisted twenty years later when an influential Dickinson biographer said that she gave her heart ‘vainly’ to Judge Lord.
In May 1955 Home finally came out, five years after delivery. Here Millicent repeats what Austin had told her mother: at different times Emily had been devoted to different men. She’d been in love several times ‘in her own way’. His sister, Austin said, had reached out toward anyone who kindled her. Again, Millicent Bingham ridicules ‘the legend that Emily Dickinson became a recluse because of a broken heart’. According to Austin, the poet’s seclusion had been gradual, not a reaction to parting.
Home, too, had little attention. Millicent believed it eclipsed by Johnson’s three-volume edition of the poems, even though the latter came out six months later. In accord with the Hampsons’ stipulations in 1950, Johnson printed no acknowledgement to Millicent Todd Bingham for abundant help, nor for Bolts of Melody, though her toil over six hundred poems was absorbed into this edition. Montague, ever vigilant against the Todd camp, had seen fit to enforce this two years earlier, in October 1953: Johnson’s edition (still current in England as the standard edition) was ‘to contain no mention whatever of Mrs. Bingham, and no expression of appreciation or thanks to her for anything she has done for [Johnson]’.
Millicent believed that the publication of Home was permitted because Johnson required its information for an Interpretative Biography of Dickinson. She took a poor view of this biography on the grounds that Johnson was a ‘compiler’ rather than a writer, rehashing what others thought, including the Wadsworth myth.
After fulfilling her promise to Mamma with her two last books, Millicent could do no more with her collection. Alert as ever, Montague tried one more approach in December 1955. Shameless over his role in her injuries, he wrote to her in the ‘unctuous’ manner she remembered. He wished Mrs Bingham to know that he could not approach Christmas without recalling the loss of her husband. He himself had borne similar loss and loneliness for many years. ‘Time does not lessen either the loneliness or the grief,’ she replied gravely, refusing to be drawn. Soon after, in 1956, she presented her collection of Dickinson manuscripts to Amherst College. The following year the college awarded her an honorary degree.
‘As recognition of Emily Dickinson has grown apace,’ said President Cole, ‘it has brought with it an increasing realization of the debt owed to your mother and to you . . . by all whose minds are touched or whose hearts are quickened by that eternal and penetrating beauty of the lines written by America’s greatest poet here on Main Street in Amherst Town.’
Nothing was said of the papers, to Millicent’s regret (as she records in her reminiscences). She did understand that Amherst had to exercise tact in view of Harvard, and not imply that the papers had been in her gift. Amherst did not intend to fight a legal battle on behalf of the Todd camp, as Millicent continued to urge. In October 1957 she stayed at the Dickinson Homestead as a guest of Priscilla Parke, whose family had bought the house in 1916. Mary Hampson was aware of Millicent’s presence next door, but there was no move towards reconciliation