Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [199]
How long can a feud persist? Endlessly, it seems, given the rarity of the prize. Millicent was the sole contender to experience doubt.
‘Did Vinnie ask to have the manuscripts returned?’ She had asked herself this question long before, in notes for a talk with her father dated 29 September-2 October 1933. ‘Did Vinnie make a will leaving copyrights to Mamma?’ To the second question the answer had to be a reluctant ‘No’, added in pencil at the time she typed up these notes in old age.
She never got over Walter’s premature death. In a typescript of 1959 she remembers his arms around her at night and how he would draw her head towards his chest saying, ‘that’s where she belongs’. Doubts and sadness, though, did not make her less determined when she pursued descendants of the Dickinson family to probe their grievances against Cousin Mattie. In her late eighties Millicent did not neglect to preserve her record for the benefit of future biographers.
Emily Dickinson had once sent a poem to her father’s sister, Catherine Sweetser, and in 1931 Mrs Sweetser’s granddaughter Kate Dickinson Sweetser printed this poem in a chapter on Emily Dickinson as ‘A Girl of Genius’ in Sweetser’s book, Great American Girls. Millicent came up with a sorry tale: Kate, who was lame, received a rebuke from Cousin Mattie, ordering Cousin Kate never to write about Emily again and demanding $25 due to Mattie as owner of the rights. Millicent adds a coda to the effect that when she contacted Kate a few years later, Kate was ‘in much pain’ and barely able to pay doctor’s bills. Charitable, indignant Millicent then steps in to help Kate raise money on her jewels. Millicent is therefore in a position to report how Cousin Kate died ‘with a curse on her lips’ for Mattie.
Part of the cumulative force of the Todd-Bingham archive that Millicent would leave to Yale included the huge array of her mother’s papers, the memoir-essays of the enfeebled octopus she had felt herself to be and a set of taped interviews in the late fifties and early sixties, the last of them, on 17 June 1963 and 31 May 1964, with Yale professor Richard Sewall.
Well before she died, Millicent set up a posthumous campaign in a way that could not fail. Her plan was to co-opt an authoritative writer of impeccable credentials for a book she had in mind. It was a venture Mamma had nearly brought off with Amy Lowell in the early twenties. In 1960 Millicent was far from accepting defeat when she appointed Sewall her literary executor. On the eve of her eightieth birthday she was devising a comeback for her camp when she granted Sewall exclusive rights to her mother’s papers, Austin Dickinson’s diaries and the letters of Austin and Mabel.
Her partisan agenda was clear: this executor was to ‘set the whole network of Dickinson tensions in proper perspective. Eventually Mrs. Austin Dickinson’s desire for revenge will appear as the drive back of (1) her husband’s death, (2) Lavinia’s death, (3) the malignant enmity of her daughter.’ Millicent intended her executor or his appointee to unbury the truth she could never expose: ‘My life . . . should have my reading of those letters [by Austin and Mabel] as its climax.’
So it came about that Sewall revived the Todd position in a full-scale biography of Emily Dickinson, published in 1974, six years after Millicent’s death. In one of the two volumes Sewall fills in the family and Amherst contexts pioneered by Millicent Bingham in Emily Dickinson’s Home, and summarises the Austin-Mabel affair from the lovers’ point of view. What appears as corroborating evidence is the archive that mother and daughter had constructed and preserved over the course of ninety years.
The Todds’ most effective weapon in the long term turned out to be their daughter. Mabel’s persuasive grace in presenting her point of view was reinforced by the educated rigour of Millicent’s voice on tape. In a tense voice, searching her memory, she took Professor Sewall through the legal history of the feud, bristling with facts and dates. These she laid out in the orderly