After Emily

by Julie Dobrow

  She tried to rationalize, to convince herself that the robbery was a sign that she was meant to break with the past and move on. At least the things most precious to her—the Dickinson manuscripts, her mother’s letters, all the diaries and journals—were safe in a bank vault. She even attempted to justify it by thinking that the robbery had freed her from the burden of dealing with some of the detritus of three generations that she had been accumulating. Perhaps the robbery had actually helped her in this enormous task? But try as she might, she could not make herself believe this. She never got over the theft.

  With all that continued to burden her—her mother’s death, her father’s mental illness, the pneumonia, the robbery—Millicent felt the need to seek additional counsel. In the fall of 1938 she began to see Dr. Alfred Ehrenclou. She would see him consistently for two years, and then sporadically between 1940 and 1952. A neurologist by training, Ehrenclou was one of the first doctors to practice psychotherapy with patients in private sessions outside an institutional setting. He was a Southern gentleman, raised on a horse farm in South Carolina to which he frequently returned and which he regularly referred to in his sessions with Millicent. She kept a special journal of their meetings, which often consisted of Ehrenclou relating parables from which she was supposed to extract life lessons. He frequently used the analogy of his farm or quasi-biblical stories to impart how Millicent might differently interpret her world.

  In her sessions, she discussed her insomnia, her struggles to understand her father’s illness and her efforts to justify institutionalizing him, as well as Walter’s inability to hold down a job, his tendency to do things at the last minute versus her need to plan ahead and the difference in their levels of ambition. She discussed how the robbery left her feeling vulnerable, how her illnesses took an emotional toll on her. She related her fears about being a dilettante in switching her life’s work from geography to Emily Dickinson. She acknowledged that her burning desire to be “productive” often paralyzed her. It is not at all clear from her notes whether she felt that her many sessions with Dr. Ehrenclou (which sometimes went on for hours at a time) significantly helped her to cope with all of her troubles.

  As the 1930s drew to a close and many countries in Europe entered into World War II, marking “the end of an era,” Millicent knew that the decade had been “a very profound one” for her. “I had a realization of my own capacity for emotion for which there was no outlet at all. So I turned to an effort to focus my knowledge into a tool.”54 And at the end of the decade, with both of her parents dead, Millicent knew she still needed to utilize this “tool,” both as a wedge between herself and her own unsettled emotions, and in the service of the promise she had made to Mabel to “set it right.”

  As she later wrote in the preface to the last of her four books about Emily Dickinson, Emily Dickinson’s Home, “My obligation I construed to be this: to publish all the documents in the chest, whatever they might be—to make them all available. For this was the living material of history.” Though Millicent felt that “of first importance of course were the poems, hundreds of them,” she also “promptly discovered that even to decipher them would be a fantastically difficult undertaking.”55

  It was an undertaking that would take Millicent years, especially given that she was simultaneously working on four books. Millicent was researching and writing Ancestors’ Brocades at the same time as Emily Dickinson: A Revelation (about Emily’s relationship with Judge Otis Phillips Lord) and Emily Dickinson’s Home (more of Emily’s story as told through family letters). But there were still many unpublished Dickinson poems remaining. Mabel had warned Millicent not to attempt to publish any of these poems until after Mattie Dickinson Bianchi died. Mabel and Millicent knew all too well that the battle over the rights to Emily’s poetry and Emily’s image would not end until the last surviving member of the immediate Dickinson family was gone. Millicent knew that when that milestone occurred, the final path to fulfill her promise to Mabel to “set it right” would be clear.

  CHAPTER 13

  DEALING WITH “DICKINSONIANA” (1940–1955)

  “The epic Greek drama”

  In 1940, Millicent and Walter were in New York and living off of their savings, Millicent’s salary from teaching and translating, and Walter’s “driblets” of income, as Millicent called them. However, with the United States ramping up its prewar efforts, the Army suddenly became interested in using Walter’s work on identifying psychological markers of leadership to determine rank and thereby strengthen military effectiveness. Walter accepted a job with the War Department, and in the fall, they left New York for Washington, D.C. For Millicent, the Second World War and the war over the Emily Dickinson manuscripts began to converge and significantly affect her life.

  Millicent had few regrets about leaving New York. She had never felt comfortable there, a feeling that was exacerbated by her near-fatal pneumonia and by the robbery of their apartment. Though relieved that Walter would be receiving a regular income and recognition for his work, she had always assumed that when they left New York, they would return to New England. Ironically, just as Mabel had worried about leaving Washington behind for Amherst in 1881, Millicent now worried about giving up her dream of returning to New England for Washington.

  Walter worked long hours, six days a week, at the War Department. Millicent kept busy managing her family’s real estate, papers and other possessions now in her care, which resided in four different states. Millicent had foreseen how problematic this would be. In 1934 she reflected:

  Things, things, things. From the time when grandma bequeathed to me, in addition to books, furniture and other household effects, 28 trunks full of clothes, embroideries, laces . . . I have received accretion after accretion of the ages. I should have taken stringent measures at the outset, but I didn’t. For the past 20 odd years I have been hoping for a “permanent” home where I could sort and after seeing what was in a systematic way, dispose of them, also in a systematic way. Meanwhile things that are not “permanent” have continued to accumulate . . . and mamma, the key to the situation, has gone—about the only thing which is permanent, after all.1

  Millicent managed to sell Matsuba in 1936, but could not sell or rent the other properties because they were still storing items she hadn’t yet sorted. “I felt that there must be things that were extremely important because both my mother and my father had insisted that none of these things should ever be thrown away and that I must go through them all.”2 These duties preoccupied Millicent, taking up vast amounts of her time.

  But there was still the Dickinson work to “set right”: publishing the yet-unpublished poems in the camphorwood chest, correcting the inaccuracies of Mattie Dickinson’s publication of Emily’s poems and letters and rehabilitating Mabel’s image as a Dickinson authority. “That was my task,” Millicent recalled. She also called it her “compulsion” to “try to inject some integrity into the Dickinson controversy.”3

  Once she agreed to assist Mabel with the Dickinson work and recognized that this would in all likelihood mean the end of her career as a geographer, Millicent was able to rationalize this decision: “All my study of geography has done is to enrich and clarify my life,” she wrote in 1934, but “in it, it seems, I shall have no career. . . . For the first time in my life, duty, and desire, enthusiasm even, coincide and all I want is the time to get at it and see what I can do.”4

  Millicent’s plan accounted for the many complexities surrounding the Dickinson work. She knew it was too risky to publish the work she and Mabel had done on Emily’s poems from the camphorwood chest while Mattie Dickinson Bianchi was still alive, so she simultaneously worked on other manuscripts. By 1934, Millicent had drafted a “book on the editing,” which eventually became Ancestors’ Brocades, but continued to work on it for more than a decade before its publication in 1945. Next, she wanted to write the story of her mother’s life, “possibly getting Austin’s letters in condition to print also though they should not
be printed in my lifetime.” Millicent knew that Mabel had wanted to present the story of her relationship with Austin to the world, and suspected there was a beauty and power in the letters that would make a compelling narrative. But it was one thing for Millicent to be aware of her mother’s relationship with Austin, and altogether different to read the letters, herself. She decided to hold off on that project.

  Millicent also planned to write “a vast psychological document” about her own development, which is what she believed her own autobiography would be, and another book on the early Dickinson family letters, which would help to explain the context of Emily’s life. And finally, Millicent thought, she would write “the book about her [Emily’s] love affairs, culminating with Judge Lord . . . which, if I can do it right, ought to sell like hot cakes.”5

  The topic of Emily Dickinson’s love life has long been another one of the intensively debated issues among scholars and fans alike. Because her poetry contained such “magnificent love poems,” as the Emily Dickinson Museum website suggests, and such passionate—even erotic—language, as scholars Martha Nell Smith and Ellen Louise Hart write, speculation abounds concerning the nature of Emily’s relationships with a variety of people in her life. Regardless of the men or women who might have been the objects of Emily Dickinson’s ardor, it seems clear from poems such as poem VII in Mabel and Higginson’s version of the Poems, Second Series (249 in Johnson’s numbering) that the poet knew something of love and desire:

  Wild nights! Wild nights!

  Were I with thee,

  Wild nights should be

  Our luxury!6

  Millicent was determined to address the subject of Emily’s passion in the books she knew she must write.

  As she conceptualized these projects, Millicent was painfully aware of Mabel’s influence. “It reminds me pitiably of dear, precious little mamma, who was always talking about what she would do after Bianchi died. She never once said, nor, I think, thought that perhaps it might be she who died first.” Moreover, Millicent ruefully observed, “If I put in all my time for the next twenty years I could hardly more than get through.”7 Time, Millicent realized, was already starting to run out.

  To fulfill part of her promise to her mother, Millicent felt she must tell the story of how Emily’s poems came to be published in the first place. In an interview she did with Richard Sewall in 1963, Millicent speculated about what might have occurred had Emily sent her poetry to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau or Walt Whitman. “If she had sent her poems to a genius instead of to dear Mr. Higginson,” then, she mused, maybe Emily’s unique brilliance would have been recognized earlier and the poems’ long and peculiar path to publication would have been swifter and more direct.8

  Millicent wrote in the prologue to Ancestors’ Brocades, “An account of the literary labors preceding the publication of the poetry and letters has historic value. It gives to the readers a glimpse of the task of editing troublesome manuscripts—glimpses also of a poet’s workshop. But the story would be a mere collector’s item were it not for the fact that inter-woven with it is a drama of elemental intensity—a clash of conflicting personalities so insistent and so prolonged that no account of the literary activity can be extricated from the emotional strain in the midst of which it took place.”9 Millicent continually referred to the “epic Greek drama” of the Todd/Dickinson feud, both blatantly in her private writings and in more subtle ways in her public ones.

  Indeed, Ancestors’ Brocades, as several reviewers were quick to point out, was part an impressively documented account of how Mabel came into possession of Emily’s poems and letters, part a meticulous report of her editorial processes and decisions and part an attempt by Millicent to vindicate her mother. Writer and Mount Holyoke professor Sydney McLean wrote in the journal American Literature that the book was “a painstaking unfolding of a situation which has taken place over half a century to reach an outcome; the explanation of Mabel Loomis Todd’s role in the Dickinson melodrama and the defense of her sudden retirement from the stage. Mrs. Bingham, a trained scholar in nonliterary fields, should be commended for her valiant attempt to be dispassionate in her presentation of a story which has influenced her own life.” A reviewer in the journal Poetry was somewhat harsher: “It is a complicated tale, and tedious for the reader to unravel, as Mrs. Bingham unfortunately has organized her material very badly. But the emotional involvements and the difficulties in elucidating the intricate details were alike so great that, as Dr. Johnson observed in another connection, ‘it is not done well but you are surprised to find it done at all.’”10

  In her journal Millicent responded to one review: “Robert Hillyer (in the New York Times) says that I have ‘handled this heavily charged material with delicacy, with tact—one might almost say, with mercy.’” Millicent seemed to ignore the part of the review in which Hillyer had written, “One is much in doubt at times, whether Emily is the heroine of the story or Mrs. Bingham’s mercilessly executive mother, the first foreign woman to climb Fugi [sic], and no less eager to stand on the heights of Emily Dickinson.”11

  As Millicent was gathering information for Ancestors’ Brocades, she simultaneously began preparing the previously unpublished Dickinson poems from the camphorwood chest for publication. But she knew she had to wait until Mattie died so that she could not launch a proprietary claim on the poetry or a lawsuit against Millicent. When Mattie passed away in 1943, Millicent knew it was time to act.

  Harper, which would print Bolts of Melody in 1945, wanted to establish beyond reasonable doubt Millicent’s right to publish the Dickinson poetry she had inherited from Mabel. The publisher insisted she go through all the letters in her possession about Emily’s writings, “including all of those from Austin Dickinson . . . because they wanted to find out the authorization given me in writing for publication of Dickinson material,” she related in a late 1950s interview. In the same interview, Millicent admitted that in the quest to find written authorization to publish Emily’s poetry, she not only read Mabel’s and Austin’s letters to each other but also Mabel’s diaries and journals. While she didn’t find explicit written permission, she did find evidence of the love affair she had for so many years suspected—ever since she was a child knowing there was something odd going on when her mother and Mr. Dickinson locked themselves behind closed doors:

  I met head on a 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. . . . The thing was so mighty and it was so wrong—it had spawned such primitive savage emotions—hatred and revenge embodied in a curse so full of power that it had reached even down to me . . . I could not handle it. I was not fit to handle it. . . . Anyway, I did not have to tackle it yet. I had other things to do first. So until the end of the decade this smoldered beneath the surface.12

  Although Millicent’s mining of Mabel’s materials yielded no conclusive written verification, ultimately Harper attorney Cass Canfield concluded that Millicent “had a strong claim, ‘based on physical possession—a claim which dated back many years.’” Millicent wrote years later that after Mattie died, “Harpers began to weigh the conditions of her will which seemed restrictive and contrary to public interest . . . they consulted the foremost authority on copyrights, Alexander Lindey . . . who agreed with Harpers’ counsel that my two books should be published. So did [poet] Mark Van Doren, who wrote a foreword to the poems in Bolts of Melody.”13 In the end, neither Alfred Leete Hampson (the executor of Mattie’s estate) nor Little, Brown (Mattie’s publisher) filed a lawsuit. For Millicent, and for Harper, the path to publishing the remainder of the Emily Dickinson poems seemed clear.

  When Mabel spoke at Mount Holyoke College’s Founder’s Day in 1929, she announced that she was in possession of hundreds of unpublished Emily Dickinson poems. At the time, Mattie was busily publishing all the poems her aunt had given to her mother as well as reprinting poems previously published by Mabel, to which Mattie laid claim a
nd subsequently, copyright. But as literary scholar Elizabeth Horan writes, Mattie clearly saw Mabel’s assertion that she had many unpublished poems as a threat to her own control over Emily’s work. This control had given Mattie a source of badly needed income and a way to oversee and define the Dickinson brand.

  Later that year Mabel had taken additional steps to ensure her claims on the unpublished poems would be seen as legitimate, including a return to the lecture circuit and the publication of articles about her own work on editing Emily’s poetry. She reached out to influential literary critics with the intent that they would recognize her editing of the poems as more authoritative than Mattie’s. It worked: as Mattie continued to publish books of her aunt’s poetry and letters, reviewers increasingly took her to task for sloppy mistakes and referred to Mabel as having produced more accurate renditions. But Mattie persisted, impervious to criticism, continuing to lay claim to copyright, unwilling and unable to satisfactorily answer the publisher’s questions about the existence of unpublished poems. In addition, since Mattie and her newly named collaborator, Alfred Leete Hampson, “had never managed a systematic inventory of their own holdings,” Elizabeth Horan suggests, “they could hardly begin to answer Todd’s charges.”14 This gave Mabel the upper hand.

  Mabel had prevailed upon Charles Green, at the Jones Library in Amherst (which would later acquire a sizable collection of Dickinson materials), to assemble and publish a detailed set of figures about the number of copies sold of each edition of Emily’s poetry. Green, who already knew from previous correspondence with Mabel that she held a number of unpublished Dickinson manuscripts that he had his eye on, was busily cultivating a good relationship with her. At the same time Green was compiling his list, as Elizabeth Horan points out, Mattie Dickinson Bianchi urged Little, Brown and others “not to print the figures that were most valuable to the Todds”—in other words, to suppress sales data that would allow anyone to “figure precisely the immense profits that the Dickinsons had realized from the former editors’ work.” But Green was persistent; he obtained the data he sought and published them. Green, an ostensibly impartial arbiter and someone with impeccable credentials, clearly demonstrated where profits from Emily’s poetry had gone. Green’s analysis indicated that while the Todds had done the lion’s share of the work, the Dickinsons (Lavinia, then Mattie) had yielded the lion’s share of the profits. Mabel and Millicent “gained further advantage by appearing to be more generous than Bianchi, such as by showing unpublished manuscripts to writers Genevieve Taggard, Josephine Pollitt and Frederik Pohl, who further publicized Mrs. Todd’s expertise.”15