By the late twenties the daughters of the feud were ready to surrender their independence as geographer and novelist. The battle for Emily Dickinson absorbed both from now on. They were evenly matched.
Mattie had the advantage of the Dickinson name and never stopped wielding it. ‘My aunt, Emily Dickinson’ was the refrain of her letters to her publisher, Houghton Mifflin. She was determined to preserve her legitimacy as sole Dickinson authority.
Millicent’s advantage was her eloquent mother who opened the floodgates of memory to her daughter. But Mabel Todd still said nothing of adultery, so what Millicent took in of Dickinson hate and ingratitude appeared monstrous and Mamma, by contrast, sanitised. Millicent did know that her mother and Austin were bonded forever in their elevated terms, but perhaps surprisingly Millicent did not know, even now, that there was more to it than emotion.
Though she was too intelligent not to be aware that her mother’s vehemence did not relay all the nuances of truth, the obfuscations left Millicent somewhat divided: not as to the Todd cause, but in her ambivalence towards what was spellbinding in her mother. Unlike Mattie’s single-mindedness, Millicent remained uncertain as to how she might deploy her considerable powers. What displaced geography was a search for truth through typed private reminiscences in parallel with psychotherapy, starting in the spring and summer of 1927. What poor Millicent was trying to understand was the truth of her childhood, in which something illicit was covered up in secrecy and illusion — illusion conjured up by Mamma’s social performance. This included the elaborate manners and dressiness of the 1890s. By 1927, when Mabel was in her seventies, she still wore headgear with aplomb and clothed herself in exquisitely delicate materials. Her white shoes were immaculate. She looked straight into the camera with a performer’s pleasure in being photographed. Millicent, plainly dressed in tweeds (in deliberate contrast to Mamma) or in overalls at home, would later count fifteen white dresses, twenty-eight white ‘waists’ and nineteen white skirts in her mother’s closet, and innumerable velvet bands to hide her throat.
Looking back, Millicent pictured herself as unlovely beside her mother, easy to ignore or leave behind, as Alden and Joe Thomas had done. Here, once again, Mamma’s looming admirer looks down at her child whose round, black eyes look back rather wonderingly at Mamma’s closeness to her ‘King’ with a creased face. As an adult, Millicent longed to expose their imposition on a child’s innocence. Ideally, she would have liked to publish a work of literature she variously calls ‘a study of the growth of my own soul’ or ‘another Comédie humaine [Balzac’s realist novel] in ten volumes’.
By 1927 this private ambition mattered more than to publish another geographical book, but to tell the truth would take more courage than she had; it would also, of course, betray Mamma whom, increasingly, she saw as pathetically dependent on her inferior companion Hilder. In Mabel’s blue-sky youth she’d never have considered such a man; now she inflated him. Millicent loved her mother most when she felt a call to defend her.
As for her father, she marvelled at his accepting Austin’s claim on her mother. She saw this as an emotional droit de seigneur, for no one in those days crossed Austin’s right to do as he pleased. Millicent cast Austin as the villain of the parental drama now consuming her attention.
One mystery she would have liked to solve was Sue Dickinson’s origins. Was Mrs Dickinson, as Mabel alleged, a stable-keeper’s daughter? Mattie had described her mother as her father’s equal and the rock to whom the Dickinsons had turned in their hours of need.
‘Actually — I hesitate to ask Mamma anything whatever,’ Millicent reflected. ‘The cloud of mystery which surrounded my childhood is its natural habitat — the air it breathed.’ If she were to question Mamma it would open ‘the blast-furnace door’.
Her many typescript reminiscences stress her divergence from her mother: a daughter who was honest, puritanical, loathing her mother’s flair for performance. As a child this had made her approach Mamma’s piano lessons wanting to scream and smother her own musicality. Even now her body felt ‘tense and rigid’, resistant to passion, she told her therapist Dr MacPherson. ‘Though I respect, admire and profoundly love my wonderful husband, he does not arouse passion, nor ever has.’
Mattie, divorced finally in 1920, met in that year a young tenor called Alfred Leete Hampson at the National Arts Club in New York. She was then fifty-four; Hampson was thirty-one. He was impressed with Madame Bianchi, and became a devoted companion at The Evergreens. Mattie began to speak of ‘we’, of ‘Alfred and I’, no longer quite alone in the stripped aftermath of her marriage.
Amherst tolerated Mattie’s bad-boy dependants. The town had not been averse to the foreign polish of Bianchi, and now it put up with Hampson’s drinking. He was eager to help Mattie with her work. Her condition for collaboration was not accuracy; it was unquestioning loyalty. Hampson was more than happy to oblige.
Mattie’s career as poet and novelist had faltered of late. Houghton Mifflin turned down her poems; taste had changed, they told her. Les jeunes demanded Modernism. Following the two Dickinson books in 1924, Mattie had a desert romance ready in 1925 and when that was rejected for lack of reality she whipped out a Russian novel by 1926. The press had to tell her that the second half fell off. Fortunately there was a rising public appetite for Emily Dickinson. Houghton Mifflin enquired if Mrs Bianchi had more to offer about her aunt. Encouraged to hunt amongst the leavings of the Homestead, Mattie came upon the trove of Dickinson poems that Aunt Lavinia had hidden before she died in 1899. So it was that in 1929 Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson brought out Further Poems of Emily Dickinson Withheld from Publication by Her Sister Lavinia.
In actual fact Lavinia had had these poems copied twice (first by Todd, then by Mary Lee Hall) with a view to a fourth volume. But Mattie meant to reinforce the sentimental legend she had promoted in the Life and Letters and gave out that these rediscovered poems ‘tell the love [Emily] glorified in so direct and intimate a way that this may have been the reason they were withheld’. As it happened, the greatest poems in this volume — amongst the greatest in the whole oeuvre — are not about love. ‘I cannot dance upon my toes’, ‘This was a Poet’, ‘My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun —’, and ‘I tie my Hat’ define genius and affirm their own immortality.
This did not deter Mattie from introducing the volume as ‘an almost unbroken narrative’ of the poet’s tragic love for the married Revd Wadsworth ‘from first sight of the man she heard as a stranger preaching in Philadelphia, on through their mutual bewilderment, certainty, and renunciation’. Mattie had no new facts to offer, so here once again is Aunt Emily withstanding passion in the face of the minister’s plea to run away. ‘Emily was the one who resisted — when his own ties of home and pulpit were mentally lost down the winds.’
This volume did most to promote the cult image of Dickinson, detaching her from unfeminine ambition. Her poetry is seen to be a sweet diversion sprung from ‘the shy character of her girlish habit’. It’s really the minister who’s responsible for her notions of immortality; she depends on him for the big idea. A model of becoming modesty, she ‘trembles beneath her little dimity apron’.
The popular critic Louis Untermeyer endorsed an image short on fact in the Saturday Review of Literature: ‘Emily tells the whole story of her love’, he enthused. ‘There is nothing more to add except unimportant names and irrelevant street numbers.’ So too the Bryn Mawr academic Katherine Fullerton Gerald,* who spoke of ‘the veils we have no right nor wish to have torn away’ when Mattie lectured at Princeton. Mattie covered herself by the simple expedient of taking up the role of scrupulous protector of her aunt’s privacy. It was a dangerous line to take because its reward was temporary. Her tantalising hints were bound to provoke a public appetite to know more.
In the run-up to the centenary celebrations of Dickinson’s birth, curiosity flared. In 1929, Mabel Todd returned once more to open her chest and once more invited Millicent to peek at the treasure. Hundreds of unseen poems and piles of unpublished letters lay waiting for the Todds to mine them.
At the same time Mabel bolstered her armoury. She supported a new biography by Genevieve Taggard, bent on shooting down Mattie’s mistakes. Revenge was so to the fore that Mabel welcomed Taggard’s absurd fancy as to the identity of Emily’s one and only lover.
Taggard’s candidate was George Gould, a young man with a blandly elongated face who had been a classmate of Austin and the probable recipient of a valentine composed by Emily in 1850. Spoofing Gould’s ministerial intentions (‘we will ride up the hill of glory — Hallelujah, all hail!’), her verse is hardly a basis for deathless love.
Taggard’s source was Vinnie’s one-time copyist Mary Lee Hall, a gossip protected by anonymity. (Taggard’s documentation amounts to a series of dashes to indicate the informant.) Just as Mattie claimed to have had it direct from Aunt Lavinia and Sue Dickinson that Wadsworth was the one, so Miss Hall claims, on the basis of hearsay, that it must be the Revd Gould because Miss Vinnie had told this to someone in strictest confidence.
Here another myth was imposed on the poet: this time, a tyrannical father. According to Miss Hall, Mr Dickinson was opposed to either daughter marrying, and particularly opposed to Gould because he was poor.
Taggard favoured Gould because her demurely virtuous Emily ‘would never have allowed herself to fall more than a little in love with an already married man’. No, Emily gloried in married love and loved the Bowleses because they loved each other.
Taggard’s fancy can’t let go a rapturous encounter in Philadelphia, even though in the mid-1850s Gould happened to be three thousand miles away in California. An unobtrusive footnote admits this inconvenient fact.
Meanwhile another centenary biographer, Josephine Pollitt, came up with a new candidate for Emily’s love: none other than Major Hunt, the first husband of Helen Hunt Jackson. Pollitt plumps for Hunt on the basis of Emily’s remark to Higginson that Lieutenant Hunt (as he was when he and his wife visited the Homestead in 1860) had interested her more than any other man she ever saw. What had appealed to her at the time had been a joke: there had been food on the table, with Carlo, Emily’s dog, in wait for a morsel to fall. ‘Your dog understands gravitation,’ Hunt had said with mock sagacity.
Pollitt’s husband Frederick A. Pohl, who had helped with ‘tedious’ research, contrived to turn a silly book into an even sillier play called Brittle Heaven. On stage in New York and Boston the ‘tempery’ wife Helen Hunt vies with the poet as to who will own the man. Helen doesn’t deserve him because she’s a shallow creature of the flesh; her husband prefers a chaste poet. The two women glare at each other through a dialogue of banal spats. Costumed in puffed sleeves and covered in ribbons and bows, ‘Emily’ was photographed as she gives Hunt a wan look while Helen fumes in the background.
In the absence of facts about the poet, banal fancies multiplied. Desperate to get Hunt away from ‘Emily’, Helen persuades Hunt’s boss to transfer him to service in the Civil War while Helen’s plea of childhood friendship prevents ‘Emily’ from keeping a tryst with Hunt before he leaves for the South. Two years elapse (the years, incidentally, of Dickinson’s greatest fertility as a poet). Renunciation has driven the poet into a nervous decline. Then Helen reappears in Amherst to own that Emily’s renunciation has won Hunt’s love forever. Exalted, ‘Emily’ decides to go to him. She and Sister Sue are planning a secret jaunt to the battlefields when Sam Bowles arrives with the news of Hunt’s death. ‘Emily’ sinks. Curtain.
On 10 May of the centenary year Mattie opened The Evergreens to fifty invited guests, including Mrs Dwight Morrow (whose husband, an Amherst graduate, was US ambassador to Mexico — appointed by President Coolidge, another Amherst graduate), representing Smith College. Mattie had more invitations to speak than she could manage. At Columbia’s summer school she lectured on ‘The Real Emily Dickinson’ and the chair responded: ‘We can safely leave our Emily Dickinson in your hands.’ In October, a hundred and fifty women made a ‘pilgrimage’ to The Evergreens. Then Yale University held a ‘birthday party’ in December. It was accompanied by a Dickinson exhibition with Mattie’s Life and Letters in pride of place.
Excluded from all this, Mabel Todd was not to be outdone. She threw a vast party on Dickinson’s birthday, 10 December, attended by the notables of Coconut Grove. These days she covered her arms in the sheerest net and piled her white hair in an elegant chignon. Yet nothing Mabel did in the way of celebration could match Mattie’s pre-eminence at this moment.
Six months later Martha Dickinson Bianchi received the first degree that Amherst conferred on a woman. At the 110th Commencement she was honoured as niece of ‘that rare and original spirit, Emily Dickinson, whose poems you have brought into renewed and deserved admiration’. The occasion was reported in the press, together with a photo of Mattie in a close-fitting hat like a helmet over her eyes and a fox-fur draped over one shoulder, brushing her cheek. Her mouth has the moody look of Austin when young.
Millicent urged Mamma to challenge Mattie’s prominence with an article on the literary debut of Dickinson. Millicent, in fact, wrote this, and as she put her mother’s case together she felt a ‘driving force’.
‘Perhaps I exist only to do this,’ she mused. ‘I am involved without question, and I am glad to be.’ Her intelligence was intrigued by the complexity of the feud, a situation ‘worthy of a Henry James’.
Mother and daughter selected fifty of Dickinson’s unseen letters. These they prepared to add to a revised edition of the Letters, to be published by Harper in 1931. It was necessary, Millicent said, ‘to be supplied with ammunition’, and this was Mabel Todd’s claim that she owned the copyright to the Dickinson letters. She based this claim on the draft contract of 1894, still in her possession.
‘Much against her will Lavinia allowed me to share the copyright,’ she declared to Mr Green of Jones Library in Amherst. She repeated this to her daughter: Lavinia ‘did consent, reluctantly … that the copyright of the Letters should be registered in both our names. So it was done.’
This claim should have been negated by the final, signed contract of 1894 (in which Lavinia cancelled Mabel Todd’s half-copyright in the letters in the draft contract). But this final version, adverse to Mabel’s interests, happened to disappear after she bought the publisher’s copy* from the New York dealer Maurice Firuski. It can’t be proved that she did away with it, but the publisher’s copy never re-surfaced, and its non-existence freed Mabel to flourish the draft contract in her favour. It would be like her to convince herself that this draft document was the true one; that what came after, in the rising confrontation of September 1894, had been nothing but a fit of meanness on Lavinia’s part that Austin, accustomed to control his sister, intended to overrule. Mabel’s memory often turned Austin’s intentions into actions on her behalf.
But what about the duplicate of the final contract, the one Roberts Brothers had sent to Lavinia in a big envelope that caused Austin to say its size would inflate Lavinia’s self-importance?
Thirty-seven years later, when Mabel Todd’s publisher, Harper, announced her expanded edition of the letters, Mattie did not come forward with Lavinia’s copy of the contract. Convenient for Mabel, but did it worry her? Mattie continued to assert her claims as Aunt Lavinia’s heir, citing the fraudulence of the Todds as proven in court, but Mattie did not produce Lavinia’s contract — the simplest way to disqualify Todd from further publication of Dickinson letters. Was this document lost? Mabel Todd’s thinking in such a situation would be to accept this as providential. God was always on her side, or should be.
After the centenary had honoured Mattie together with her aunt, Mabel Todd took the offensive with her expanded edition of the Dickinson letters. Her preface presented it as the first book ever issued about Emily Dickinson, prepared at the requests of the poet’s brother and sister: Austin Dickinson, Lavinia Dickinson ‘and I’ collected letters ‘which they entrusted to me’ to edit and publish. At a stroke, this authorised editor displaced an unauthorised niece.
After almost four decades, Mabel Todd argued, the legend had assumed a shape unrecognisable to anyone who actually knew Emily Dickinson. It was advisable, she said, to return to sources, and here they were in this expanded re-issue: ‘It is the source of material since reworked in various forms by various authors.’
She emphasised Wadsworth by printing letters about him after his death. At the same time, she declared that speculation had no place in this book that had ‘in fact one purpose: to allow Emily Dickinson to speak for herself’. In this way, Todd disclaimed possession in a publication whose prime motive was, in actuality, an act of possession. Without referring to Mattie, it shot Mattie’s version of her aunt’s life to pieces with well-aimed rhetorical questions: who can know what Dickinson felt for others? Who can know what was momentous? Adept at graceful gestures of compliance, Todd said that she was driven to issuing this edition of the letters for the sake of others, students of Emily’s life who, sensing something wrong, had begged her to tell what she knows of the ‘real’ Emily. Biographies ‘have not lessened the confusion’. Todd found it gratifying ‘to find how many people care for my Emily Dickinson’.
Only when her rival was flattened did Todd put forward her own strongest claim, to having done so much of the editorial toil. In the early 1890s it had been hard to get hold of letters and date them, and would have been impossible without her closeness to Austin and Lavinia. Here, at last, Todd made a comeback, pressing the case she had made at the trial. And of course there’s truth to what she terms her ‘fascinating, exhausting labor’.
Not satisfied with a comeback, Todd intended to wipe Susan from the record. Todd reports this omission as though it were not her initiative. It was Austin’s wish. ‘Such reference [to Sue] was frequent in the early letters particularly in those before his marriage. To make doubly sure, in Emily’s letters to himself he erased most of such passages before the letters were given to me to edit.’ In this way Todd covers herself against any future imputation that she had tampered with the letters or colluded in doing so. Austin, she insists, did this alone, even though, if we go back to the mid-1880s, we see that Mabel Todd was the active party in her campaign to have Susan out of the way. In 1931 Todd is all passivity, a model of obedience. ‘In so far as the present volume is concerned, I shall continue to abide by his wishes in this particular.’
One thing Todd doesn’t say is that she had ignored his wishes (and those of Lavinia and Mattie) in the matter of the daguerreotype, the sole authenticated photograph of Dickinson, taken as a schoolgirl in 1847. Todd prepared to bare the undoctored face and plain, scoop-necked dress for the first time, an act consistent with her readiness to accept the poet’s arresting oddity: the pale kangaroo face with the slanted, staring eyes; the flat red hair drawn back without a curl; and the long, long neck through which words pulsed like bursts of fire. And yet — Existence — some way back — / Stopped — struck — my ticking — through — At a stroke Todd cut the girl free from the ‘furbelows’ imposed by the family. And, as always, she ignored Austin’s lack of interest in his sister’s genius. Her aim was to reclaim the authorised ground, and that ground was won.
Privately, Mabel Todd launched a parallel offensive. The tactical calm of her public apologia contrasts with private vituperations, mostly to Millicent who took notes and typed them for the record. One set of statements is signed in Mabel’s shaky, post-stroke hand. Vinnie ‘had an enormous mouth & false teeth, a crazy coot with dirty hands and never took a bath’. She had ‘greatly enjoyed all her financial success from Emily during all those years before her death’. ‘Vinnie ought to have given me a thousand dollars for what I had done for her. If I’d had 100 I’d have had the maple tree [on the plot of land at issue in the trial]. It was little enough to ask her.’ Maggie Maher ‘lied in every particular’.
It’s startling to hear what she had to say about Gib Dickinson. They had appeared in the same studio photograph recreating a summer picnic in 1882. The young Mabel, buttoned to the neck in demure white tucks, her white hat shading her face, had been invited to join the Dickinsons. Gib, aged seven, stands in the circle of his mother’s arm. This fine-faced boy, who was to die a year later in a disrupted home, Mabel calls ‘hideous’, though she concedes he was sweet and adored by his father.
In the last month of Mabel’s life, September 1932, she dictated her final statement about the feud: Susan was a drunkard like her father who had ‘died in the gutter’. What Sue resented was not infidelity, ‘for that she practised herself’ [with Bowles]. It was that Austin fell in love. Morose, wrathful, settled in her power to make Austin unhappy, Sue was therefore furious to find love open for him. Mabel presents herself as a victim of Sue’s irrational fury. That fury was handed on to Sue’s daughter and it became the driving force of her life as well.
‘It is hard for anyone who has not come in contact with it to imagine the force, the inexhaustible energy, the almost superhuman vitality of hate,’ Mabel declared. ‘It seems at times almost creative, so that the person in its grip is capable of accomplishment beyond his powers. But the trouble is that such accomplishment is neither beautiful nor true. It is a storm of destructiveness.’
Mabel died suddenly of apoplexy on 14 October 1932. Her grave in Wildwood Cemetery is within fifty yards of Austin and Susan Dickinson. A stanza from Emily Dickinson is cut into the tombstone, appropriate to her shadowing of the poet for the best part of Mabel Todd’s life:
That such have died enables us
The tranquiller to die:
That such have lived, certificate
For immortality.
Hog Island, off the coast of Maine, was a little wilderness where Mabel and Millicent had spent their summers. There, the summer before she died, Mabel had asked her daughter for a promise. Millicent must undertake to rectify the wrong done to her mother by publishing the substantial residue of Dickinson papers in the chest. For Millicent this was the ‘point of no return’. Her husband Walter Bingham warned about taking on the feud.
‘You must realize that if you do it, it may get us both before it is finished.’
There were other warnings. ‘Budgie, don’t you touch it!’ urged Elizabeth Sawyer, her oldest friend going back to Amherst schooldays.
It was as if they had not spoken. As Millicent would say later, there was ‘nothing else but to do what I could to right a grievous wrong — to my mother and to Emily Dickinson. I did not then know that I was doing a greater wrong, by getting involved in it, to Walter, and to myself.’ Even Mamma had warned her not to publish anything more in Mattie’s lifetime. Millicent, fired by indignation, believed that Mamma wished to protect her from Mattie, and for some time to come did not suspect the flaws in the Todd case. What she did take in was that she was in it for the long haul.
Her first venture was to complete a book Mamma had conceived before she died: a history of her efforts to bring Dickinson before the public. Ancestors’ Brocades: The Début of Emily Dickinson was a partisan project, furthering the Todd offensive. For a start, in January 1933, Millicent delivered an address in Miami, hailing her mother as the co-discoverer as well as first editor of Dickinson’s poems and letters.
Mattie contemplated a lawsuit over Mabel Todd’s ‘objectionable book’ (the expanded edition of Dickinson’s letters) which had appeared without her knowledge or consent. To her lawyers, Henry Field (who had been Aunt Lavinia’s junior counsel in the lawsuit of 1898, and was now a judge) and Theodore Frothingham in New York, Mattie argued that Aunt Lavinia gave no permission to the Todds to quote one line after the publication of the original selection of letters in 1894.
There was no evidence of this, Field warned. Lavinia and Austin had turned over material to Mabel; nor was there evidence as to what happened to this material afterwards. Frothingham agreed with Field that Mattie had scant basis for a case.
Mattie also pressed her publisher Houghton Mifflin to sue Todd’s publisher, Harper. Houghton Mifflin too backed off. ‘I am afraid the sympathy of the literary world would be against you,’ her editor Ferris Greenslet advised, ‘so that the final result might be damaging to the sale of your books.’ Mrs Todd was in a strong position because Lavinia’s original permission to use her cache of manuscripts had not been legally revoked.
Keen to retaliate, Mattie scrambled together a rival book of letters with reminiscences. It was to be ‘a personal book about Emily’ and Mattie hoped to regain her authority by quashing Mabel’s claim to have been the poet’s ‘friend’. The new book was titled Face to Face: as Mattie pointed out to Houghton Mifflin, however persistently Mabel had made her way into the poet’s home she had never managed to see Emily Dickinson to her face.
‘My Aunt Lavinia Dickinson declared Mrs Todd has never seen Emily. So that disposes of that,’ said Mattie, as though victory were near.
Far from it. Ever since the adversarial biographies of 1930, Ferris Greenslet had warned Madame Bianchi not to rush out another temporary book thin on fact. ‘Now that the story of Emily Dickinson’s life has become a battleground, which is very regrettable but can’t be helped, the critics both friendly and unfriendly will be sure to … judge by much higher standards of taste than would have been applied a decade ago.’
Mattie was impervious, locked in the past amid the family memorabilia and unsifted papers piled up in The Evergreens. When she offered a firsthand memory — her aunt wielding an imaginary key to a room of her own — Mattie was indeed the invaluable conduit she believed herself to be, but too often she had only hearsay to offer, like a cousin’s opinion that Emily’s wearing white was ‘a sort of memorial to the man she loved’.
Louis Untermeyer, who had upheld Mattie’s reticence, now attacked it in a front-page article in the Saturday Review of Literature. ‘Readers waited for Emily Dickinson’s niece … to say six definite sentences that would clarify the situation … Sinae rumbled, but not even a mouse of fact issued from the mountain of rumor.’
At Houghton Mifflin, Ferris Greenslet and fellow editor Mr Linscott began to doubt Mattie’s story. Mr Linscott sent Greenslet an in-house memorandum:
Myself, I am convinced that the love affair is merely a family legend; that Emily had tremendous admiration and respect for Wadsworth — but nothing more.
In vain did they urge Mattie to verify her fancies. They pointed out that her hint about Aunt Emily’s wish to give the name of her secret love to baby Bowles had been discredited.* Politely, the editors reined in their irritation.
Dickinson habits of reserve had meant that nothing was discussed. And around this silence there swirled a babble of romantic hearsay. What Mattie required were readers who were too civil or too enchanted to ask awkward questions. Many reviewers did indeed continue to back the legend for its feminine appeal: the ‘quaint’ ways of a poet who was ‘the center of a peculiarly beautiful home life’. So said the Boston Transcript, as did the New York Herald Tribune: ‘It was a warm, intimate New England family, bound by ties of even more than ordinary New England affection.’
Others in the thirties were less delicate. Mattie was disconcerted by a review in American Literature pointing to all manner of editorial sloppiness: the incorrect use of Dickinson’s middle name as ‘Norcross’; the neglect to signal the approximate element in the dating; and the failure to check transcriptions against Todd’s recent edition and to acknowledge it. To Mattie it was pedantic fuss, but it did not go unnoticed. The reviewer too complains of arbitrary and sometimes damaging cuts in letters, as in Mattie’s fiddling with Emily’s youthful boast, ‘I am growing handsome very fast indeed. I expect I shall be the belle of Amherst.’ Mattie had cut ‘very fast indeed’, blunting the over-the-top humour because she hoped to prove that Emily was saying this straight, as a ‘natural, silly, happy girl’. It’s a point about normality in line with the feminised daguerreotype, the curls to soften the face and the overdone ruff to hide the neck. Mattie was exercised over a black and white photograph for Face to Face: the portrait of the Dickinson children. She thought this image of Emily too sturdy. Contrary to the image on canvas, Emily should appear ‘quaint’ and ‘wistful’, with a pointed chin. ‘This elfin quality has been entirely lost in the photograph because of the heavy, thick, middle-aged mouth.’
The inaccurate editing went on. Mattie’s so-called Complete Poems of 1924, followed by Further Poems in 1929, was then followed by Unpublished Poems in 1935, again co-edited by the none too sober Hampson. After each new volume Houghton Mifflin brought out a new collected edition. Yet another appeared in 1937. It exasperated scholars, and in 1937 the influential critic R. P. Blackmur deplored the ‘disarray of Emily Dickinson’s poems’.
Mattie kept at it, encouraged by signs of public and private support. In 1933 a Dickinson exhibit at the World’s Fair in Chicago had included Mattie’s Life and Letters amongst a century’s hundred best books by American women. Mattie was grateful to have Gilbert Montague’s moral support against ‘alien biographers of our Emily’. She was sad to live without kith or kin ‘save such as we of the heart’, she wrote to her old friend Amy Montague, who was Cousin Gilbert’s wife. Mattie raided the poet’s words to Susan Dickinson, hoping to recreate the intensity of that tie: ‘Be Amy while I am Martha —’ but, unlike Susan and Emily, Amy Montague showed no enthusiasm for Mattie’s writings.
Millicent’s husband urged her to face what she’d contrived not to know. She was nearly fifty-five years old towards the end of 1934, when reluctantly she opened Mamma’s journals.
‘Whatever she did would have sacrificed somebody,’ Millicent thought as she read.
How much she read and how much she learnt of the sexual side of Mamma’s affair she could never bring herself to say, except that Mamma’s unblemished love for Austin Dickinson did mitigate Millicent’s sense of sin in so far as it left her less able to judge the passion. The eloquence of the journals bound her to Mamma more than ever. Suffused by her mother’s voice coming at her through all the years, Millicent was finally conjoined with Mamma as her posthumous instrument. She notes on a stray sheet: ‘In the early days E.D. seemed less important and Mamma’s connection with her — than my own work. Always I was subconsciously trying to get away from it all. But always brought straight back under irresistible compulsion.’
By 1935 Millicent had finished a first draft of her mother’s story, the triumphant narrative of Emily Dickinson’s debut, the betrayal by Lavinia Dickinson and the trial. This book would gestate another ten years while the groundswell of Millicent’s distress heaved. There came a day when her mother’s hate flooded through her with unprecedented power.
She dated her record of what happened 4 February 1938. That day it was snowing so fast that to Millicent’s half-closed eyes it looked like a thick fog over a white world, and through that fog Mamma came towards her with her air of expectant youth. She came until she stood clear, for good and ill, to her daughter’s gaze. This woman ‘had an unfailing eye for the dramatic — particularly where her own person was concerned’. She had a ‘superficial ebullience’; she could ‘startle and delight the senses’; and all the time worked so industriously — that remarkable industry that had been ‘the best foundation for a glittering superstructure’.
If Millicent’s severity has an element of envy it’s because Mamma had taken more pleasure in her talents than her daughter did. Mamma had lost her teeth, her right side was paralysed and she was somewhat deaf, yet she had found new forms of expression. Painting and piano cut off, she had set up a salon for conversation. ‘The glow never disappeared. It scarcely dimmed at all. Her arch glances continued to the end.’
In contrast to her mother, Millicent pictures herself as a failing creature, an octopus with limp tentacles. The acute senses of its tentacles had been capable of reaching out to anything it might desire, ‘but because of injury to its central mechanism, the arms hung limp, their function reduced to swinging in a restricted arc … It goes on living … but grows old without ever being the vital creature, using all its faculties to the utmost, alive to the end of the farthest tentacle, which its natural endowments enabled it to be.’
This creature can only revitalise herself, it seems, if she yields to Mamma’s hate — lets it fill her being to the furthest tentacle. Alive to hate, her tentacles rear and coil in curious kinship with the enemy who is to be eliminated.
Hatred implies similarity, that is, lasting hatred does. The kind of hatred that implies incentive enough to enable it to last a lifetime — strength enough to propel it beyond the grave and loop it in the hearts of a succeeding generation. The kind of congenital hatred means a feud — and a feud does not flourish among aliens … The most virulent kind seems to get its start in stealing of affections, and affections usually do not exist between aliens … Real hate is focussed … and focussing on a negative purpose may be carried out with as much or more determination. It’s not iniquity which the hater hates; he’s hating during an interval while waiting till the opportunity comes for vengeance. This waiting through a life-time does not destroy the carrier; on the contrary it seems to add the vitality to prolong life. The emotion, the hatred, keeps the hater alive and vigorous. The affection which starts a feud may be between aliens, but the hates it engenders does not continue unless between kindred souls and the closer the likeness perhaps, the more virulent the hatred.
I sympathize with Sue in so far as losing her husband is concerned. It must have been bitter.
But then, on top of that, to have that very vixen who stole your husband complete a task which you have imagined yourself the one to perform, to reap from so doing … a measure of permanence in the literary future — that was bitterer still. And to even have one’s name left out altogether! There was real injustice.
Millicent still sees Sue through Mamma’s eyes as a wife who didn’t love her husband yet persecuted the woman who did love him and who released his capacity for love. ‘What I wonder is — where did [Sue’s] drive originate?’ Was it hurt pride, or envy of the successful outcome of Mabel Todd’s effort to launch Dickinson’s poems, or both together? To tell this story of the poems from the time they were discovered until the present of 1938 was to become aware that ‘the facts are not explained by any reasonable cause’. The cause for each separate step in the feud was hate and desire for revenge: to discredit the other side. ‘Sublime, detached Emily — whose preoccupation was with eternal sentries — how purified she will sometime emerge from such a mirey slough as now holds her down!’
In a war, the calibre of recruitment is all-important. Mabel Todd had understood this. When she could not persuade Amy Lowell to take on a rival biography of Emily Dickinson, Mabel had to fall back on Taggard to get at Mattie. After Mabel’s death this partisan task fell to George Frisbie Whicher, professor of English at Amherst. Together with Mabel he had helped to arm Taggard. In This Was a Poet (1938) he went in for the kill, bashing Mattie for factual slips, the wrong date for Mr Dickinson, Sr’s death and for what Whicher calls the ‘grotesque’ legend. It emerges that the Wadsworth legend was grotesque only in Mattie’s telling, since Whicher appropriates the legend for his own purpose, encasing it in a scaffolding of academic credibility. The strategy of the takeover required him to discredit his rival, the last of the Dickinsons whose very name authenticated her possession of the poet. Never taking his eye off Mattie as he knifed her, he seized her story. Many since Whicher have repeated the Wadsworth story for a fact, but to go back to Whicher is to see the flimsiness of its construction.
Whicher was Mabel Todd’s man: he treats her deferentially, with careful acknowledgement of what she’d achieved. The feud is never mentioned but his cover declares his allegiance, stamped with the same painting of Indian Pipes as Todd had used on her covers for the Dickinson volumes of the 1890s.
That same year, 1938, Mattie made a will that shows the pain Whicher had inflicted, both in his own capacity and as a representative of Amherst College. Her will stipulates that Whicher is never to edit Emily Dickinson. Amherst College is never to own or use The Evergreens. If the property should be sold the house is to be razed to its foundations. She leaves all its contents and manuscripts to Alfred Leete Hampson, together with ‘all my copyrights’, the income due from them and the sole right to publication of letters written by the Dickinsons ‘to which I am the sole legal heir’.
*
By 1940 more ‘pilgrims’ were finding their way to The Evergreens, many from the West and South. There was no sign to attract the curious, but she welcomed those who liked the poems. They were shown the memorabilia in the Emily Room. The lawn was immaculate and the old creeper still overhung the porch. Mattie brought out the grey and white cameo brooch, saying it was Aunt Emily’s only adornment, fastened in the dainty ruching at the neck of her white dress. She pointed to the image of a ruched and curled poet titivated for Mattie’s Life and Letters. Even though Todd had published the authentic image Mattie clung to this travesty.
One visitor, Pearl Strachan from England, was charmed to meet the poet’s niece and repeated her words in an article: ‘Madame Bianchi had the privilege of close friendship with her Aunt Emily.’ Mattie related the story of the Dickinsons’ descent from the Norman noble, de Caen, who came to England with William the Conqueror. Obviously Mattie’s faith in this myth had remained undimmed by Whicher’s ridicule. She was making a pathetic effort to recover ground with an autobiography and worked with Alfred Hampson for several hours a day. In the course of this last-ditch effort Mattie died at the age of seventy-seven, in 1943.
The death of her mother’s enemy freed Millicent Todd Bingham to proceed with a double publication. In Ancestor’s Brocades (published by Harper in 1945) Millicent repeats her mother’s slanders against Sue Dickinson. She brings out the proposed division of copyright in the Letters of 1894, yet says nothing about the excision of this paragraph in the signed contract. Quite possibly, Mabel had destroyed that contract without telling her daughter.
With the second of the two books Millicent did something she could not risk in Mattie’s lifetime: she ignored the rights to Dickinson’s poetry that Alfred Leete Hampson had inherited, and in the face of Hampson’s protest (backed by Mattie’s old friend and lawyer Theodore Frothingham) Millicent prepared to publish her mother’s cache of Dickinson’s poems.
Over time Mabel had settled into certain beliefs that she had passed on to her daughter and to a new generation of readers. One of these was that a more just Lavinia had meant to reward her in the end: ‘both [Austin and Lavinia] told me she left the copyright of Emily’s poems to me as financial recompense for my many years labor without pay’.
Lavinia’s will, supposedly drawn up by Austin in Mabel’s favour, had mysteriously disappeared. This was what Mabel alleged: the will ‘was never found’. The implication was that Susan Dickinson had destroyed it. But we know that Lavinia would not have willed her copyright away from her family. Lavinia consistently rejected every move of this kind.
Millicent’s publisher asked her to scour her mother’s private papers and correspondence with Austin Dickinson to find authorisation in writing for Mamma’s right to edit the poems of Emily Dickinson. One journal was in an envelope marked ‘Private, keep out!’ Millicent opened it and was nauseated: ‘I found no authorization’, Millicent notes. ‘Instead, I met, head on, a mighty passion, so overwhelming that my knees shook and I felt as if I could not breathe. Walter read one or two letters and fell silent.’
‘We’ll lick it yet,’ her husband comforted her.
‘I think I should have collapsed if it had not been for Walter,’ she said. ‘The thing was so mighty, and it was so wrong! And it had spawned such primitive feelings — hatred and revenge and a curse which had reached even down to me!’
Shaken though she was, Millicent did not give up. On the contrary, she and Harper gained the support of Alexander Lindey, an authority on copyright law for the Library of Congress. He argued that to publish these poems was in the public interest. He also considered it questionable for Mattie to pass on rights to a non-member of family. Hampson continued to threaten but had not the means or will to fight a legal battle.
Bolts of Melody, with more than six hundred unknown poems by Emily Dickinson, took the public by surprise in 1945. Millicent Todd Bingham explained the delay over these poems in terms that ignored the claims of the Dickinson camp: she had been painstaking in her scholarship, re-copying from manuscript instead of relying on her mother’s transcriptions, but in the many instances of poems jotted illegibly on cast-off scraps (on the inside of used envelopes — a favourite source of paper — on tiny bits of stationery pinned together, on discarded bills, on invitations and programmes, on leaves torn from old notebooks, on brown paper bags, on soiled, mildewed subscription blanks, on drugstore bargain flyers, on a wrapper of Chocolat Menier, on the reverse of recipes, on shopping lists and on the cut-off margins of newspapers), the editor had been daunted for a long time and it was only in the last three years that she had brought herself to decipher these. But what a reward, as great poems sprang into view for the first time. Mabel Todd’s daughter presented herself as the prime Dickinson expert, and certainly by this time no one knew more than Millicent Todd Bingham. Her edition, though, did make two errors, acceptable at that time: as her mother had done before her, she imposed titles on untitled poems and she standardised punctuation, not grasping how vital Dickinson’s punctuation may be to the way we read her.
Millicent believed that her double publication would terminate the feud. ‘These feuds are now dissolved in death,’ she said, the Dickinson line is ‘extinct’ and the task of editing what remains ‘has finally reached me — the last of both their houses’. But this apparent readiness to lay down arms was a condition of victory. The distancing title of Ancestors’ Brocades disguised an attack in the present. Millicent prints a photograph of a $505 cheque that Lavinia received as royalty. Dickinson ingratitude to Mamma still rankled. An appendix prints Lavinia’s signature to the deed of Dickinson land to the Todds on 7 February 1896. Early in the book Millicent positions herself as passive under attack from an active enemy: ‘I accepted’, she says, the ‘blight’ cast on her from Mrs Dickinson and her children. But Millicent is shooting back again and again, not omitting a tedious final chapter on Mattie’s errors in The Single Hound.
Citing her mother as co-author and acting in concert with her wishes, Millicent Todd Bingham turns out to be as adept at innuendo as Mamma, with that mastery of a sharp or flat off the true note which alters the tune. The reason given for Dickinson’s solitude is the personality of members of her family. Stop. Re-play that flat. The authors, it seems, are actually suggesting that Susan drove Emily to escape her by shutting herself away for life.
A masterstroke is the authors’ subtle contradiction of Mattie’s allegation that the poet did not permit Mabel to see her, as her family did, ‘face to face’. Millicent re-claims the intimacy with a caption to a photograph of her sweetly smiling young mother: here is Mabel ‘as Emily Dickinson knew her in 1882’. Millicent doesn’t actually say ‘saw her’, but face-to-face would be assumed by most readers.
A more blatant spin is Millicent’s version of Austin’s supposed request that Mabel Todd should wipe Susan from the record. After Mamma’s visitation swept away resistance, Millicent seems more willing to lie on her mother’s behalf: ‘Family feuds were, in my mother’s opinion, irrelevant.’ It’s made to appear as though the feud was between husband and wife, with Mabel as bystander, blameless, obedient to instructions. Millicent appears even more the bystander, with ‘only the haziest idea’ why her mother’s work on the manuscripts had been interrupted for many years.
Puzzlingly, though, Millicent extends her unknowing — or her mother’s discretion — with an incorrect recollection that the treasure chest ‘was not opened until 1929’, though Millicent’s report to Amy Lowell reveals that it was first opened in 1924. It’s simply not in character for Millicent’s retentive memory to play such a trick. It has to be a fudge, but why? A possible answer lurks in a typescript reminiscence later, in 1955, where Millicent repeats the fudge: ‘For twelve years [since the Todds had left Amherst in 1917] a camphorwood chest containing my mother’s most precious papers had been reposing in a Springfield Storage Warehouse. I had placed it there … in 1917 when I packed the contents of Observatory House, Amherst, and built a little house to store them in (not finished inside).’ The latter was the unfinished ‘barn’, and Millicent is covering up for Mamma’s negligence in abandoning Dickinson’s manuscripts in such an unsuitable place, unchecked, for seven years. Mabel’s questionable safety net had been the transcripts she took with her to Florida, where they narrowly survived fire and flood. It would have been Millicent who realised that the originals must go into a safe form of storage.
For all Millicent’s commitment to fact, loyalty to her mother took precedence. Her whole book is biased in Mamma’s favour by a major omission: the fact of adultery.
The eruptive force of what must not come out left Millicent pale and strained, clutching the arm of her kindly husband. Her reminiscences, delivered in her rational voice and typed in her orderly way every few years, always dissociate her character from that of her mother: a sensitive daughter deploring all that was devious in her parents. So Millicent’s untrue public statements, with no Dickinson left to oppose them, are as startling in their way as the sudden appearance of so many unknown poems. How did Millicent explain this to herself? If a daughter as intelligent as Millicent had come to believe in what she published in Ancestors’ Brocades, the afterlife of her mother’s ‘spell’ can’t be overrated.
Millicent had been corresponding with Wallace Keep, a Dickinson relative in his seventies. While a student at Amherst College, class of 1894, he had visited Vinnie weekly. Forty years later he offered a quotable memory of her mobile face with a mimic’s repertoire of expressions — the facial acrobatics of a person who is so much the performer she can’t be known. This might have made her formidable if she weren’t so amusing. On Keep’s arrival in Amherst (in the fall of 1890, when the first volume of Dickinson poems was due) she had sidelined the youth while she fed his mother. Maggie had laid the table for two and the young Wallace had watched their lunch from a hungry distance. He recalled the next four years of supper-less Saturday evenings at the Homestead when Lavinia would grimace ‘with horror and despair’ to hear of poor food at his lodgings and then, holding up a candle, and followed by a train of cats, she would descend to the cellar to fetch up some apples. Coated in humour, it’s a caricature that Millicent used as her opening for Ancestors’ Brocades, an attack on her mother’s enemy, touched up with Millicent’s childhood recollections of a witchlike Miss Vinnie in black with knife pleats, knobbly fingers holding out an apple and huge coils of grey-streaked hair, as though all the juices of her shrivelled body had gone into that sprouting head.
Millicent sent Wallace Keep a copy of the book with a note: ‘I wish to say before you read it, that I have been filled with compassion for them all, it was a devilish situation for everybody concerned. But chiefly I pity Miss Vinnie. I have tried to show that pity. But her own behavior was so incriminating that I am afraid the impression left in the reader’s mind is of a treacherous old woman, nothing more. My one and only effort is to convey things as they were.’
Another reader, Mrs Franklin Harris, wrote to Millicent. The address in Coconut Grove suggests someone who had known Mamma, and so it proved, but the reason for the letter was not Mabel Loomis Todd, but to thank Millicent for her portrait of Ned Dickinson. Who now thought of Ned Dickinson, forty-seven years after his heart attack? Mrs Harris turned out to be Alice Hill, who’d been engaged to Ned at the time of the trial.
Yet another voice sounds from the past, this one rather muffled. The Norcross sisters, we recall, had refused to hand over the poet’s private letters, to the annoyance of Mabel Todd who had called them ‘stupid’. Her daughter calls them ‘crotchety’ and waves them off as unimportant. Not so: Emily Dickinson confided in her Little Cousins. Loo, who outlived her sister, did not die until 1919. When, later, Millicent called at her nursing home, she heard that Loo Norcross had kept her cousin’s letters with her to the end; then had them burnt. Where Millicent deplores the folly of a ‘cantankerous’ old woman, it’s possible to discern, through that obscuring noise, the fading voice of a tie the poet had trusted.
* A cousin of Morton Fullerton, the lover of Edith Wharton and friend of Henry James. Mrs Gerald had been at one time engaged to the philandering Fullerton.
* In 1931 Mabel bought a carton of Roberts Brothers archives, which had been thrown out as waste paper for the mills but salvaged by a book hunter. The carton contained the whole of the Dickinson publishing papers, including the draft and final contracts in 1894.
* Baby Bowles was named Charles, which coincidentally was Wadsworth’s name. In fact, as we know, ED had wished the baby to be called Robert.