by Julie Dobrow
Elsewhere, Millicent reported that at the time of Mattie’s publication of Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson in 1924, it was David who urged his daughter to intervene:
My father, who was by that time in a mental hospital, said to me, “Are you going to sit by and do nothing while the work on which your mother spent years is pirated and her name erased from the title page?” I was indignant, of course, but at that time I felt that if Mrs. Bianchi wished to appropriate the work of another as her own it was not for me to object nor to try to do anything about, but five years later in 1929 when a volume of poems appeared I changed my mind. The title-page reads as follows: “Further poems of Emily Dickinson withheld from publication by her sister Lavinia, edited by her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, and Alfred Leete Hampson.” I was shocked, for I knew that the poems had not been withheld by Lavinia Dickinson. On the contrary, her wish, her transcendent wish, had been to have all of Emily’s poems published as quickly as possible.38
This point also irked Mabel greatly. She wrote in her journal, “the Emily Dickinson revival has given me much reason for thought. . . . Of course Mattie has now posed as the only authority upon her aunt, and she evidently thinks I am out of the running, but decidedly I am not.”39
When Millicent read the introduction to Further Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1929, she wrote, “I am absolutely trembling in every limb. My heart thumps as with a great fear.” The cause of Millicent’s consternation was a paranoid worry that Mattie had somehow gotten into Mabel’s papers, which were locked in a warehouse in Springfield, and stolen not only the poems but “perhaps Austin’s letters to Mamma or hers to him.” (This statement also provides evidence that even at this point, Millicent was aware of Mabel’s and Austin’s love letters, something she would deny in later years.) Millicent did not realize at the time that Sue Dickinson had also been in possession of a number of Emily’s poems. Millicent worried, “something must be done about this thing. Mamma is absolutely fixed in her determination to do nothing as long as Bianchi lives. But with Mamma’s characteristic refusal to face facts she thinks she will outlive Bianchi and then do something! Not realizing that she is ten years older than Bianchi.”40
Mattie continued to publish books containing Emily’s poetry and her own interpretations of Emily’s life: Further Poems of Emily Dickinson (1929), The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Centenary Edition (1930), Emily Dickinson Face to Face (1932) and Unpublished Poems of Emily Dickinson (1935). Dickinson biographer Richard Sewall comments, “The poems came out piecemeal, unprofessionally edited, with Mabel’s holdings, of course, still in the camphorwood chest.”41 In fairness, other contemporary Dickinson scholars (including Ralph Franklin, Martha Nell Smith and Ellen Louise Hart) have stated that Mattie’s editing is worthy of “serious study” or had a “serious mission” and should not be dismissed out of hand.
Mattie, it seemed, was responsible for a resurgence of interest in Emily’s life and poetry in the years leading up to the centenary of her birth. It also seemed as if she would be considered the authoritative voice on the poetry, and that her interpretations of Emily’s life, family, and relationships would prevail. Emily, Mattie wrote, “was not daily-bread. She was star-dust. Her solitude made her and was part of her. Taken from her distant sky she must have become a creature as different as fallen meteor from pulsing star.”42
At the same time, the poet Genevieve Taggard was working on The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson, a book that would be published in 1930. In the late 1920s she got in touch with some of the surviving people who had known Emily and Vinnie—including Mabel, to whom she wrote that she was “most anxious to be of any service to you, if any occasion arises.”43 Taggard also contacted Vinnie’s friend Mary Lee Hall, living at the time in Tennessee. Taggard’s research had the effect of stimulating a correspondence between Mary Lee and Mabel, much of which is reprinted in Sewall’s biography of Emily Dickinson. Sewall points to Hall’s clear bias against Sue and Mattie, evidenced by phrases such as “the awful spirit rises in me whenever Sue and Mattie are in my thoughts,” and he suggests these comments reveal Hall’s position that both Dickinson sisters were wronged by Sue and her daughter. This position, of course, was very much in line with Mabel’s own.
Perhaps it was the confluence of many issues that made Mabel decide, finally, that it was time to act. There had been the publication of Mattie’s versions of Emily’s poems and letters, with their mistakes and deliberate erasure of Mabel’s named work. There was Mabel’s belief that Mattie had deliberately understated Austin’s presence in Emily’s life. There were Mary Lee Hall’s letters, with their vituperative accusations of Sue and Mattie, Millicent’s indignation at the whole situation and the knowledge of the upcoming centenary of Emily’s birth—all of these things made Mabel, with her instinctive sense of timing, know that the moment was right.
In November of 1929, Mabel accepted an invitation to speak about Emily Dickinson on Founder’s Day at Mount Holyoke College. As soon as Mattie got wind of this upcoming event, she fired off a letter of protest to Mary Woolley, president of the college, citing Mabel’s loss at the 1898 trial as evidence that she was “a cheat and a fraud” and should be disinvited. Woolley responded, “Mrs. Todd, I am sure, will not wish to introduce any controversial material and Mount Holyoke College has no desire to enter into the controversy.”44 In the end, Mabel’s stellar legacy of civic engagement in and around Amherst, as well as her publication record, offset Mattie’s insinuations. Woolley did not rescind the invitation. Mabel’s address at the college, reported in newspapers, reaf-firmed her status as an authority on Emily’s life. And significantly, she stated that she was in possession of many unpublished poems, piquing public interest.
Mattie, Elizabeth Horan suggests, was “caught off guard. She probably did not realize that she was not in possession of all of Emily’s poetry. Wanting to counter Todd, [but] uncertain as to how,” she was “absolutely unprepared”45 for the attack Mabel and Millicent were about to launch in the battle over the right to publish and define Emily Dickinson.
Then Mabel struck again. In 1930 she published an article in Harper’s Magazine entitled “Emily Dickinson’s Literary Debut,” in which she retold the story of how Lavinia had approached her and asked her to get Emily’s poetry published, and how she had worked with Thomas Wentworth Higginson to get the first two volumes of poetry out. She delineated how she had edited the third book of poems and the double volume of Emily’s letters. Mabel concluded the article suggestively: “Emily’s debut had been a triumphant entry into the life of that public which she ‘never saw’ but to which, nevertheless, she had sent her message. . . . And now . . . her place [is] secure for all time not only in the hearts of those who understand her unique ways, and in the love of those who may not criticize but [place her] in the front rank of American poets.”46 Mabel noted in her journal that the article “aroused much favourable comment” and that she was already being urged to write another book. “Everybody else in the literary world seems to already [have] written a book about her, although nobody knew her at all as I did.”47 The article had laid the groundwork. But there was more work to be done, more perceived wrongs to be righted.
That summer on Hog Island, as she lay in a hammock, Mabel looked up at Millicent and said, “It is all wrong, Millicent, everything that has happened. Will you set it right?” Millicent later wrote in her book Emily Dickinson’s Home, “I said I would try. A simple question and a simple answer. I did not know what I was promising.”48
CHAPTER 12
BRINGING LOST POEMS TO LIGHT (1930–1939)
“Will you set it right?”
Millicent’s promise to “set it right” turned out to be a very complicated one, one that would eventually upend her professional trajectories, lead her to publish four books and create even more complexities in her relationship with Mabel. “I did not know what I was promising. . . . And I realized that if I were to keep the promise it would take a good deal of time,” she refle
cted in 1954. “It was not for me an easy decision, because I was deep in professional activities in another field which I should be obliged to give up.”1
Keenly aware of the centenary of Emily Dickinson’s birth in 1930, Martha Dickinson Bianchi preemptively published Further Poems of Emily Dickinson, even though she had published the “complete” poems just five years earlier. Millicent recalled, “I said to my mother, ‘What about this? Where did she get these? Where were they?’. . . I’d never mentioned the Dickinsons to my mother before but, of course, the poems were another thing—that was something quite objective with no personal implications, I thought. I said, ‘Are these spurious or are they real?’ Then my mother said, ‘They’re real.’ I said, ‘How do you know?’ She said, “I copied them all.’”2
Mabel went on to tell Millicent where all the poems she had copied were hidden. “‘You know that camphorwood chest that you have carried about from Amherst to Springfield to New York?’ She said, ‘I would like you to open it.’ I had supervised its transfer from place to place all these years without asking what was in it. I knew instinctively that it had something to do with the Dickinsons and the Dickinsons I didn’t talk about.”
It hardly seems credible that Millicent never spoke of the Dickinsons, but she consistently maintained this story. In the late 1950s, during a taped interview, she suggested, “I had never in my whole life talked with my mother about the Dickinsons. I had been willing to know nothing about it. Although I had grown up from babyhood in the midst of weird tensions I never asked a question . . . after the lawsuit in 1898 the Iron Curtain descended. Until 1929 down it remained, but something sinister—something I did not understand—was always behind it.” And in 1963, Millicent wrote that when she was discussing the Emily Dickinson work with a literary scholar:
he could not understand how it was possible for me, with my universal curiosity, and my intelligence, never to have talked with my mother about the camphorwood chest and its contents—from 1898 to 1929. “How was it possible for you not to ask what was in it? Did no one ever talk to you about the Dickinson situation? Did you never read a newspaper at the time of the trial? How could you have remained unaware?” How, indeed. The Berlin wall is no more effective than the Dickinson taboo was for me.3
It wasn’t that Millicent was totally unaware of Mabel’s relationship with Austin and how it had poisoned all relations with the Dickinson family. She had certainly suspected ever since she was a child riding with her mother and Austin in the carriage, and wouldn’t turn around to look at what was happening behind her back. She clearly understood from the many hours that “Squire Dickinson” spent at their house, from his commandeering of their hearth, from his hat that hung on a hook in their home years after his death, that he played a significant role in her mother’s life. She was aware of the many times her mother sequestered herself with Austin behind locked doors at the Todds’ home, and mindful of her mother’s extreme reaction to Austin’s death, which Millicent documented in her diary at the time. And she acknowledged that people in Amherst whispered about her mother and shunned the Todd family, writing about it on several occasions over the years and discussing it with her psychiatrist in 1927. She’d written in 1929 about her unfounded fears that Mattie Dickinson had somehow unearthed Mabel’s and Austin’s love letters. Millicent certainly had her suspicions—she just didn’t want them confirmed.
And so it was perhaps with more than a touch of trepidation that Millicent left Hog Island for New York, and set off to retrieve the much-moved and long-locked camphorwood chest.
“I put the key in the lock and when I turned the lock it rang a little bell like all the Chinese camphorwood chests with brass corners which are so equipped that if anybody is a thief the owner may be forewarned,” she wrote. “My heart went so fast I thought I should perish on the spot.” Millicent looked inside and began removing piles of papers.
Millicent found scores of manuscripts in brown envelopes. There were the poems that Mabel had laboriously copied and published in the first three volumes of Emily’s poetry. There were several of the poems Mattie had published in her volumes of her aunt’s poetry, copied in Mabel’s writing from Emily’s manuscripts. But there were also many original poems in Emily’s hand that had never been published anywhere—“six fascicles, numbered 80 to 85, containing unpublished poems as well as . . . quantities of her rough drafts and practice pieces—‘scraps,’ my mother called them. Some of these were perfect poems. Many, though complete, were interlined with alternative readings. Others were mere fragments; jumbled together as they were, they looked ‘hopeless,’ she thought, and had laid them aside for later consideration.” Millicent soon noted, “she [Mabel] had progressed far enough with the work to indicate the lead poem for a fourth series and to select the valedictory for a final volume.”4 Included in this treasure trove Millicent published in Bolts of Melody were some of the poems now among the most often cited of the Dickinson oeurve, including “The Soul has Bandaged moments,” “Shall I take thee, the Poet said” and “A great hope fell.” (It’s also worth noting that a significant number of the poems in Bolts were included in scholar Helen Vendler’s 2010 selection of some of Dickinson’s most important works.)5
That was not all. “Also preserved in the chest were Austin Dickinson’s packets of family letters,” many of which had never appeared in print. There was also “extensive correspondence” between members of the Dickinson family and Mabel, as well as bundles of Mabel’s and Austin’s love letters, which Mabel had painstakingly preserved.6
Millicent put aside her shock to focus on the task at hand. “I looked and beheld these quantities of Emily Dickinson manuscripts and I caught my breath because I realized that here was a dilemma.” With both her training in geography and fluency in French, Millicent knew she was in an unusual and marketable position both in and outside of the academy. She enjoyed teaching and worried that were she to leave it, she would be abandoning a fulfilling career in which she had invested years of education. No doubt her growing fears about Walter’s sporadic employment and the need to provide financially for her parents also played into her concerns.
Though she couldn’t express it in writing at the time, her old fears about being a dilettante, about aligning herself too closely with the mother about whom she had such complicated feelings and her own aversion to anything Dickinson all played into her profound ambivalence about the promise she had made to Mabel.
She and Walter left New York for the weekend, to discuss what she should do. Years later Millicent recalled that Walter had finally concluded, “You know, other people can do geography. They can even do French Geography; but there is nobody who has been in this other situation all their life who knew all the members of the family, who understands the situation as you do and who began at the age of seven to read Emily’s handwriting—there’s nobody so centrally located as you are.” And then, Millicent recounted, Walter, “being a psychologist with an uncanny understanding, said, ‘I want you to realize just one thing—there is enough power in this situation . . . to get us both before you finish.’” She sardonically added, “Well, that I have thought of many times in recent years.”7
Millicent’s continued reflections on her complicated promise seemed only to have strengthened her resolve: “The decision was made that I should try and set the record straight and put an end to the stifling of a field of literature. It was an obligation, a trust, a compulsion so strong that I had no alternative but to drop geography, take it on and try to inject some integrity into the Dickinson controversy. . . . For me there was nothing else but to do what I could to right a grievous wrong—not only to my mother but even more to Emily Dickinson.”8 Millicent returned to this theme again and again in her private and public writings—clearly this promise to “set it right” was something that went straight to Millicent’s core.
As Millicent began to discuss the idea of reissuing and expanding Mabel’s Letters of Emily Dickinson, she learned that Mabel felt strongl
y that all of Emily Dickinson’s work needed to be published. “Even more did my mother deplore the restrictions placed by Emily’s niece on her literary output. . . . I knew my mother deplored the assertion by that niece as last of the family, of her right to say which if any of Emily’s writings should be published, now in 1930, nearly a half century after her death. . . . This stranglehold, maintained by virtue of consanguinity alone, for Emily left no will, nor did her sister Lavinia, to whom her literary remains went . . . was what my mother resented most of all.”9 Millicent came to embrace this belief in the virtue of publishing the unexpurgated content of Emily Dickinson’s writings. True scholarship, believed Millicent, who was trained in the methodical rigors of science, is possible only when all of the known data are considered. She felt it was her duty to future scholars of Emily Dickinson’s work that its full corpus be accessible and made it her mission to publish all of Emily Dickinson’s known writings. In her introduction to Emily Dickinson’s Home in 1954, Millicent wrote of her decision to include all the family letters, no matter how trivial or personal. A wise historian, she said, told her, “Individual experiences are the essence of history. For a documentary volume about Emily Dickinson there are no trivia.”10